Re-Becoming a Nerd (2)

It was not simple.

“Channel harder!”

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

“More hmmmfgh and less haaah!”

Annabelle was unironically a good teacher. The issue is that patience can only go so far when you’re teaching the equivalent of a magic cripple (not the term I’d usually settle for, but I was chat restricted enough times) and before you know it, your instructions have quickly devolved into abuse and weird sounds.

“Are you even trying?! I don’t sense any quanta from you whatsoever!”

“Thanks. You’ve mentioned that multiple times.”

“Try harder! You can do it!”

At the moment, I was borrowing Annabelle’s holy book—her Codex—and was trying to “discover” my mark by attempting to cast 1-quanta spells from it. Well, the concept of quantifying quanta costs in this world didn’t exist, and the tiers of spells were instead ranked by their difficulty, but all the examples she gave me of spells that were dubbed “Intermediate” or “Advanced” corresponded to 2 or 3-cost cards in Quanta TCG—whereas the Basic spells she was trying to get me to cast were 1-cost so I figured this was essentially the same thing. At camp on nights two and three we worked through all the primordial elements, quickly concluding that my mark surely did not belong to any of them given how absolutely disgustingly dogshit I was, although it was becoming increasingly apparent that my incompetence had nothing to do with the element.

“I don’t understand,” Annabelle said, looking exasperated. “You can’t cast anything.”

“Are you sure I’m actually able to cast from someone else’s Codex?”

“Yes… This is the way it’s taught in Templar academies, and also how I discovered my mark. It absolutely works.”

“Okay, then are we sure that we tried the previous elements properly? We might have just skipped ahead too quickly.”

“No,” Annabelle said. “The entire process is wrong, so there’s no point. Here, let me show you.”

Again? I wanted to say, but I couldn’t fault her desperation. In the past, I’d also been approached by lower-ranked players looking for coaching, and no matter how many times I explained my thought process or gave them VODs of my gameplay, they wouldn’t “get” the strategy of certain decks, not to mention consistently ask stupid questions that were completely irrelevant in a bid to deflect personal responsibility. At some point, I’d just give up and basically just play for them through verbal instruction while watching them stream their gameplay to me in the hopes they’d never ask me for advice again, which was tantamount to what Annabelle was doing.

“Please watch closely.” Translation: Lose motivation and quit already, you talentless hack. Just like the comments I’d get on the web novels I used to post fresh into my shut-in phase, huh? Damn.

“Primot!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Closing her eyes, Annabelle focused intently.

First, the “card”—a rectangular prism of shimmering green energy—floated out of her Codex and into her palm.

“Hah!”

Then, crushing it with a flick of her wrist, the energy fractured, collapsing inward—and a colourless magic circle took its place.

“Hfwooah!”

Her fingers snapped into a fist, and the circle thrummed to life, veins of emerald pulsing through its once-empty lines. The glow intensified—a radiant, searing emerald—until, at its zenith...

“Hnnngrah!”

In an instant, the magic circle fractured into a storm of barbed projectiles. They ripped through the air violently in two distinct volleys, each strike hitting some poor tree that Annabelle had singled out with a deafening crack like a gunshot splitting wood.

Thornbolt
1 Life Quanta
Spell
Burst Speed

Deal 1 physical damage to a target. Echo.

Unsurprisingly, the tree toppled over. The sound of it was enough to cause birds to start flying away en masse. End scene.

“Goddamn.”

“Do you understand it now?” Annabelle asked.

“I have to grunt more, right?”

“Er, no… oh, come on. Okay, you don’t get it. Watch again closely, please.”

This situation reminded me fondly of something that actually happened to me in real life. Many years ago, my high school had lost a game in the group stage of our summer national qualifiers in my second year, and the coach decided to blame it on my indecisiveness regarding hitting long passes. “Just cunt it downfield,” he screamed, before proceeding to ping a pass to a practice cone 60 yards away that I had absolutely zero hope of recreating in a real game. It wasn’t helpful advice in the slightest, and if I had actually paid attention to him, all it would have done was discourage me from attempting a long pass, ever. In the end, the guy was fired, and the next coach our school brought in had actually brought us to spring nationals the year after, thanks to a tournament run where I won Prefectural MVP. Basically, what I was trying to say was that the moment I found a different teacher, I’d ditch Annabelle for them, and that’d probably awaken my latent magical powers.

But actually I was wrong.

This time, Annabelle picked a Water spell—I could tell due to the way the “card” glowed a deep navy. Once again, she got through the steps of shattering the card and forming the colourless magic circle no problem, but as she filled the card with quanta…

It glowed a horrible, repulsive shade of green, like an old school portrayal of radioactive material—and the circle never shattered apart. Eventually, it just fizzled away into the air like a dissipating cloud of mist.

That… looks nothing like my failures at all.

“Understand? You should still be able to start by forming the magic circle, and putting some form of energy into it, but you’re not… there’s no energy. It’s just… nothing. Even if you pick a spell you can’t cast because you don’t have enough quanta, or the type of quanta is wrong, you should still be able to put some into it. Then we should be able to pick apart what type of quanta it is…”

“Ugh. Fine. I see what you mean. Let me try one more time.”

Annabelle handed me back her Codex, and I looked at one of the spells I’d been interested in casting this entire time because it was part of the Death-Time Control list I’d used to beat SaintAliciasFeet69 with: [Deadly Poison].

Deadly Poison
1 Death Quanta
Spell
Burst Speed

Deal 1 damage to a target and apply 1 Poison counter.

If the animation in Quanta TCG was to be believed (their rendition of Thornbolt was rather accurate to this world’s), then I’d basically form a big ball of purple gloop and hurl it onto an unsuspecting target. Kind of underwhelming, but it seemed like it would be funny if I could teach Annabelle a lesson that little conniving bitch and so I started casting.

First, I form the card—a deep shade of amethyst.

Then I fracture, forming the colourless magic circle.

And then I channel, giving the magic circle colour while visualising the spell…

…Aaaaaand it’s grey. Nothing good ever happens to me.

“I don’t understand,” Annabelle said. “How is this possible?!”

“I dunno, you tell me.”

“...Sigh,” she sighed, literally saying “sigh” during a sigh. Cringe.

Seeing as nothing was happening, I decided to let the spell go. It disappeared with a very underwhelming poof, much like my motivation to try at this magic thing. Even in a hallucination, my brain wouldn’t allow me to have superpowers. The depression and self-hatred ran deep, like institutionalised anti-immigration sentiment.

At the very least, this meant I could go back and apologise to Aunt Sumire sooner…

Don’t forget. You’re having fun now, living in a dream, making silly jokes—but at some point, you’ll need to wake up and take responsibility for your life.

Yeah, I know.

“Is there a possibility your mark might be celestial..?” Annabelle mused.

I was surprised that the delusion was stemming from her instead of me. “Nah. I mean, it’s obvious. I’m not even getting any colour in. If I were actually celestial, I’d still be getting in a colour, just the wrong type.”

I understood that as much. Saint Alicia had an orange glow to her Gravity. I played enough to remember the deep yellow Time had to its animations. There was nothing associated with grey, which was all that happened whenever I tried to “pump” these circles with anything.

“Huh?”

Annabelle probably didn’t know what the colours associated with the celestial were, because those mages didn’t currently exist in her world. That was probably why she wasn’t able to reach the same conclusion I did. But they did exist in mine, and I knew what colours those elements were associated with as clearly as I remembered the day I died. Grey didn’t associate with anything—it didn’t belong to any element.

“My presence as an alien… otherworlder, whatever you want to call it—that’s probably why I can’t interact with magic at all.” I winced while saying it, but it was true. I was an ordinary person. Even my brain, as complicated as it was in order to create a hallucination as detailed and vivid as this one, probably understood that fact on an instinctual level.

I’m not delusional. I’m just trying to give it all some meaning through bravado.

I don’t think I’m a god at all, Yui. I never did. And I can tell you’re a wonderful person. You aren’t horrible.

But I’m sorry—you’re wasted on me.

“Thanks for teaching me so far, Anna… but I guess you’re right. I am indeed powerless.”

Suddenly, her eyes appeared with that annoying glint again.

“Wait, ‘colour’. You mentioned ‘colour’ earlier. What do you mean, ‘colour’?”

“Like… Red, blue… pink? Are you being stupid again?”

“What colour is this?”

She held up a [Fireblast] card. “Red, obviously.”

“And this?”

Snap Freeze.

“Blue..?”

“This?”

Thornbolt.

“Green. Hey, just so you know, I’m not colourblind. We can stop now.”

“...Are you just making things up again, Mister Primot?”

Again with the Mister Primot. She only ever said that whenever she wanted to piss me off.

“Define, ‘making things up’.”

“Um. Well, you know what I mean.”

“I was definitely making them magic circles up earlier, yes. Actually, if you conjured us a line of coke, I think that would massively help with my training.”

“...Huh? Wait, focus. What colour is this?”

Form Rations.

“This card has no colour.”

“If you had to give it a colour, what would it be?”

I considered her question carefully. I wanted to say it was grey, and did describe it as grey earlier, but that wasn’t exactly right. Grey still looked vaguely like a colour and pretended to be one, whereas this felt… like it was missing something. A colour that describes a lack of colour? Does a word like that even exist?

“I don’t know, honestly. Maybe ‘monochrome’. ‘Achromatic’, perhaps?”

“…And what do those words mean?”

“Like… grey, basically.”

“Why not go as far to just say it’s grey, then?”

“Because my magic circles are grey. That thing you’re holding up literally has no colour.”

Wait a second.

My magic circles are grey.

That thing has no colour.

Grey does not equal colourless.

Grey is still a colour. The absence of colour, however, is not—even if this functionally results in the same phenomenon as seeing grey to my tiny Asian eyes. This might seem rather pedantic, but there’s a big difference.

Real eyes realise real lies, said a very famous poet.

“Give me that shit,” I said.

“Waitwaitwait— Kyaa! What are you doing, Primot?!”

Again with this Uwa! Kya! Nya! bullshit. Utter woke nonsense. I didn’t let her sudden Japanophile remark affect my newfound realisation, however, and I flipped to a random page in her Codex.

The spell didn’t matter, so I looked at the very first thing that caught my eye. Lightning Strike. If I wasn’t mistaken, this was a 2-quanta Air spell. Eh, whatever—if my hypothesis was correct, the cost or element didn’t matter….

Levitating a sky-blue prism into my hand, I fracture it, forming a colourless magic circle. Then, channeling quanta into it…

Slowly…

The magic circle fills with grey, and then…

This is it. Focus a bit more.

Ever so slightly, I see the colour growing within. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the ink slowly fills, enveloping the circle with a dull, matte finish. And at it’s zenith, I release…

And then nothing happens.

Nothing ever happens.

The magic circle simply dissipated into the aether with a sad poof.

“...Hm,” I said.

Annabelle seemed to be confused by my behaviour. “…You did the exact same thing again, so why would you be disappointed that the outcome wasn’t any different?”

“...It’s not that I thought anything different would happen. I just wanted to check something. It turned out I was right, but… since you’re not going Uwa, I don’t think it meant anything.”

So it turned out that what I thought was my magic circle not filling up was actually just it filling up with the wrong colour of quanta. Big deal. It didn’t mean jack shit if I couldn’t cast anything. But if that were the case, then why hadn’t Annabelle pointed that out to me instead of just constantly telling me she couldn’t “sense” any quanta? Use your big busty blue basically-blonde eyes? Was this girl stupid or—

“Primot, may I point out something to you?”

“...What?”

“Magic circles,” she began. “They’re not actually meant to be visible.”