“The only new concept you have to understand to cast a curse is learning to reference another person’s soul or body,” Otto read the words from the book out-loud as the two travelled.

Abel was walking behind him listening and trying to understand the logic behind casting spells the way Otto did.

Technically Abel was able to learn the magic as well as Otto, though every time he tried to look at the pages of the book the Murlin pictures would appear and hide the contents of the pages, hence why Otto was reading out loud.

They were heading through a big field of tall grass; Abel proposed the idea to avoid the roads wherever possible since the mages would just set up checkpoints along them.

“This is done through a simple function, ‘Perlabhum’ which is followed by the person’s name or the keyword ‘Here’ to mark the person or object affected,”

“For example, a spell creating a ball of fire on your face could be moved to another person, though if you used the ‘Here’ keyword to mark coordinates nothing will change,”

“Perlabhum only changes the meaning of keywords like ‘Hand’ ‘Palm’ ‘Torso’ as well as using the target’s manapool instead of yours!”

“It’s important to keep in mind that casting the spell will still cost you the standard spell-casting price of 1β”

Otto turned to face Abel.

“You understand all that?” he asked.

Abel breathed a sigh.

“Not really…” he remarked.

Otto breathed a sigh, Abel’s lack of affinity for code was a bit of a let-down for Otto, though he would have certainly struggled as well if he didn’t have years of real coding experience.

“What part don’t you understand?” he asked hoping to tackle the issue one problem at a time.

“Uhm… The words… They sound like gibberish…” Abel replied looking visibly exhausted from just listening to them.

“And it makes no sense… how come the order doesn’t matter sometimes and does matter the at other times?” he asked.

Otto raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Abel crossed his arms.

“Like when you change the element the spell will work in, you have to use that first…”

“But changing its size can be done at any point?”

His shoulders drooped.

“It makes no sense…”

Otto scratched his chin.

“Well, it’s not that the order doesn’t matter, if you set the size of a spell to the size of a pebble, and then make its element fire that should still work!”

“The SetElement simply dictates what element everything from the point it was said forward should be, it there is no element mentioned before it will become the first element mentioned!”

Abel scratched his head.

“But how does that work?! Surely the spell should stop working as soon as you start since you defined a size or shape for example, before setting the element!”

“That’s because the code is compiled as a whole and the little bugs are fixed!” Otto explained.

“…”

Abel stood there, mouth agape.

“Y-you know what… I’ll leave the new magic to you… I’ll stick to my light spells…” Abel said waving the metaphorical white flag of surrender.

“Sorry, I’m not a great teacher…” Otto said apologetically before looking back to his book.

“Don’t worry about it!” Abel said giving Otto a thumbs-up.

“It’s not like I’d have time to become nearly as good with any new spells, especially since I had two-hundred years to practice my existing ones!”

Otto nodded and continued reading the book.

He also set the new keyword “Perlabhum” to “SetTarget”.

After another hour or two of walking, Otto and Abel finally saw the massive bridge in the distance.

From this distance their attempts to spot a hostile mage were hopeless.

Abel looked to the speeding river, thanks to the steep nature of the earth up here, the water was faster than almost any other point on the map.

Abel looked into the water.

“Usually it isn’t this bad…” he began.

“The rain really worsened the situation for us…”

Otto looked at the speeding water.

“Well, I’m certain the bridge is a trap…” Otto remarked.

“Agreed, this means we have to swim across or face whoever waits for us up there…” Abel said glancing over to the bridge.

Otto took a deep breath as he stuck his hand in the water, he felt the ungodly force of the speeding rapids, it was like dipping your hand in a waterfall, if there were any large rocks in the water they would most likely shatter their bones on the way.

“Alright…” Otto began.

“Given the two choices of fighting on the bridge or drowning I have made my decision…”

Abel awaited Otto’s verdict anxiously.

“I choose option three, wait for the water to slow down on our way to a shallower part of the river…” he said pointing back in the direction they came.

“…”

“…”

“Huh… I didn’t think of that…” Abel remarked more shocked that Otto came up with a solution than the anticlimactic journey back.

The two headed along the bank of the river for about forty minutes before Otto was once again able to see the rocks making up its bed.

“Perfect, we’ll wait for the rainwater to get washed away and we’ll be able to cross the river here,” he looked further down the river’s course.

“After all, the further towards the capital we go the more likely it is someone will catch up with us…” Otto said looking back towards the speeding water.

Even under optimal conditions the water here would go up to their chest meaning they could end up a few meters away from their goal at best and could be knocked out and drown, their bloated corpses washing up to the capital at worst.

That was when Otto got another brilliant Idea.

He turned towards Abel who was now sitting and patiently waiting for the river to become less wet.

Otto removed the sack from his back and started filling it with rocks from the nearby field, he would use the rope used to tie the sack closed and carry it around as a lifeline in the water.