May as well start putting my armor to use, the sooner I start building up a charge the better. Breaking through the rhythmic, monotonous sounds filling the air as the great machine ground on, Li declared, “Reinforcement Armor.”

As he spoke, the first thing he felt was a slight fogginess in his mind. He assumed this was the side effect of expending mana and that it would get worse as he approached zero. It wasn’t bad right now, but casting a large number of spells in a row would slowly push him to the point where everything around him was just a blur of motions and colors with no meaning. The next thing he felt was a surge of power flowing through his body. While the energy itself was physically invigorating, every bit of it was paid for as the feeling of fuzziness slowly started to expand. Like the feeling you have after an especially long meeting that you had to pay close attention to, where you just wanted to stare into space for a few moments to regather yourself.

The process of actually casting the spell was intense. Every spell felt slightly different but they all had one thing in common, they required you to control a sudden rush of the power attempting to burst its way out of you. Thanks to learning the spell through the shop, there was a flow his Mana naturally wanted to follow, but the power continuously tried to slosh out of these engrained routes. The best comparison he could think of was a sudden turn on a water slide. If you let the water flow too fast or didn’t build the walls up high enough, the water would just fling itself out due to momentum. When casting the spell, he would metaphorically use his will to build each wall up and slow the flow at appropriate junctions so that spillage would not happen. If he let the power just swell as it wished, the spell would fizzle out. This at best resulted in a small light show around him. At worst the failure was more explosive in nature. As far as he could tell, controlling the spell took intent to tell the power what to do and will to keep it controlled.

While experimenting with his magic in the strange void, he had discovered that while speaking out loud was not required for a spell to activate it made the casting significantly easier. It helped him focus his will and define his intent by acting as a sort of mnemonic tool. The benefits to his control weren’t particularly noticeable for his instantaneous or continuous control spells (Giant’s Punch and Telekinesis). The more perpetual effect spells, the ones he stopped thinking about after the initial cast, had a far more tangible benefit to having the spell name spoken out loud. It seemed like the more complex the magic, the more concentration he needed while casting and the more of a benefit this verbal addition would give. He was also willing to bet that more advanced spells, especially ones that took a while to cast, would require speaking out loud simply to properly focus his will and keep his mind from wandering.

Once he had properly wrestled the power into the proper pattern, the first external sign of the magic appeared. A set of two concentric circles with esoteric symbols in between appeared in the air above his head, glowing a pale blue-white. The color was so soft it wouldn’t normally be visible in a bright area, but something about the glow drew the eye. It was like the color existed outside the normal spectrum for humans and enhanced the coloration to the point where it would always be visible regardless of the situation. It was an unfortunate side effect that would prevent someone from casting a spell stealthily in most situation. He bet an ability or skill existed to hide or eliminate the glow and maybe even the entire visible ring, but it was pretty obvious that casting a spell without this theoretical ability would never be a subtle thing.

As he continued to push power into the spell, the paired rings grew until the inner circle was wide enough to encircle him. Then it began to drop. As it passed over him a slight glow was left on his skin. If seen in passing, the spell almost looked like a blue-white jumpsuit. The kind of skin tight suit you’d see on a superhero, though if you looked closely the suit was covered in sigils taken from the spell’s ring. From more than a foot or two away, these sigils faded and the armor spell was simply a diffuse glow surrounding his body. Wearing the suit, which defaulted to Charge Mode, instantly made his movements just a little more sluggish. Like he was running in ankle deep water. While experimenting he had discovered he could increase or decrease the resistance, ranging from almost nothing to feeling like he was trying to move while submerged in mud.

Immediately, he decreased the drain on the armor. He wanted to be able to react quickly to any threats that appeared, even if it greatly slowed the rate he charged the armor at. He didn’t entirely remove the resistance though, as he wanted to have something up his sleeve to deal with this theoretical threat. As he moved, brief pulses of light would flow from the source of movement toward a glowing circle in the center of his chest piece. Each time his feet hit the ground, and on the occasions when he used his arms or hands to push vines or branches out of the way, the points of contact with the armor would briefly flair a brighter blue. This resulting light would also work its way across the armor in swift flashes to join the glow of stored power on his chest.

#

The first twenty minutes or so of his journey passed without incident. He encountered no living creatures, the pathway did not branch, and none of the stones around him moved. In total honesty, it didn’t even feel to him like he had properly entered the Labyrinth yet. He would have expected monsters or traps. Something to threaten him during what had instead turned out to be a very peaceful walk on a beautiful day. Instead, the path down the hill and into the valley from the hidden glade was more like an entry hall into a king’s throne room. Something meant to impress the visitors and give a taste of the wonders housed further within. Every step of this idyllic path gave a view of the mountain before him and large sections of moving machinery, impressing upon him the grandeur and size of the place. If one looked closely, they could see smaller things moving within the Labyrinth. Things that appeared roughly human in size, probably monsters meant to destroy anyone impudent enough to attempt to enter the Labyrinth, roamed the numerous halls and vast corridors that dotted the mountain side creating a sense of danger and opportunity.

Li could feel his heart rate speed up as he approached the base of the hill, excitement growing as the atmosphere began to intensify. He began to lose sight of the overall layout of the maze as the sound of motion intensified to a deep, rumbling crescendo. It grew to become was more than just a simple sound, shaking the very ground beneath his feet. The force of it, the sheer nature of magic driving the movement of this vast place, seemed to almost physically overtake him. It produced a feeling of fear and…insignificance that he had never felt before. Something had mastered nature to a previously unimaginable degree here. Magic had achieved what modern science would deem impossible. He imagined this is what a man in a comma for decades would feel upon waking up and discovering the internet. A new possibility, previously unimaginable, that redefined day to day existence.

As he stared at the slowly rotating mountain, he once more reminded himself that this was possible now. He himself was not capable of it right now, but maybe one day. The idea that he could grow to have power like that scared him. The idea of others with that level of strength terrified him. If a normal person from his old reality had a bad day, they might crush a can or accidentally break a phone. A being capable of something like this might shatter cities. As an accident. A single moment of loss of control and…boom. His only option was to grow, to be able to protect what he cared about from people like that.

Despite this, the possibility of such power also encouraged him. Just like one might destroy a city in the day, with magic it might be possible to build a city in a day. Or fix hunger by growing crops from seeds in hours instead of months. If somebody could make a mountain float, what was the limit? What couldn’t magic accomplish?

One might argue that what he saw was the creation of an Alpha Tester. Beings that, based on the words of the System, had basically been gods going around this universe and creating wonders. Li would argue that, assuming this reality followed the same basic principle of deeper logic that the old reality did, everything in the world was a series of followable inputs and outputs dictated by natural laws. If that was true, humans would eventually be able to achieve something like this too. It might take centuries, but they would get there as they learned and grew to understand how magic worked. He doubted it would even take that long. If there was one thing humans were undisputable masters at, it was telling the natural world that they didn’t care what nature said should be possible for humans. Whether it be flight, instantaneous communication across vast distances, or even something as simple as crossing oceans, mankind had found their own way to achieve what their body did not have the natural ability to accomplish.

Soon, something emerged ahead of him that seemed to mark the beginning of this places dangers. His first obstacle in this new world. The object in question had revealed itself on his way down from the grove. In the beginning, the object in front of him was simply blocked by the trees as the path had slowly wound along the edge of the dungeon. After it eventually revealed itself, the great gear in front of him had been the most prominent object in his field of view besides the mountain. While he had initially been unable to tell exactly what purpose this giant mechanism had served, his approach had revealed a small hole in the gear. A gap that would occasionally appear at the gear turned that he could use as an entrance and slip through if he was fast enough. A trap that would crush him under tons of stone and metal if he was just a little to slow.

On his way down he had determined that this part was easily one of the largest moving pieces he had seen in the valley, and now it made sense. A great entrance gate reaching high into the sky above him. The entryway itself was only a small hole on the outer edge of the gear and appeared almost sluggish on the massive monolith of stone. He knew it was moving far faster than it appeared, however. Beyond the entrance way, the front of the gear was carved with various images and runes.

The carved images seemed to tell a story as the gear turned. At the beginning, right after the door had disappeared into the ground, the images showed a proud army with vast numbers of soldier. In the following scenes this army attacked what appeared to be the dungeon, only for the invading army to slowly be ground down. At the end, just before the door became accessible for use, all that was left was a single soldier collapsed and sobbing on his knees.

As far as he could tell, this gear was the only entrance. He would need to slip through as quickly as possible and hope he could make it through to the other side without being crushed. That wasn’t all of course, who knew what would be awaiting him there? He’d be trapped over there, unable to retreat. A dangerous situation for sure.