Charles awoke in a weird metal room, the walls were all irregular like a low poly modern art piece, Charles groaned it reminded him of his art high school. Directly above him was a crystal set into the irregular surface of the ceiling. Charles groaned again and rolled off of the hard surface he was lying on, from the temperature it was probably a metal of some kind, the floor was just as hard and cold and he regreted his choice of trying to get up. Getting up from the the floor he stumbled over to the only door in the room, it was locked surprisingly, he didn’t think anyone would lock the door to an infirmary but he could be assuming wrong.

The irregular wall of the room was just reflective enough for Charles to make out his new body, he was in full plate armour so Charles guessed he was a soldier of some kind. He was pretty muscular which he was happy about but his face left a lot to be desired, in short he looked like an asshole, someone who was constantly judging you. Charles messed around with facial expressions trying to look more approachable but they all looked creepy and unnatural, he only looked approachable when he gave of a light smille all other times he looked like a prick.

He sat back down on the metal bed thing and thought about what to do next, he couldn’t really predict what would come through that door so he decided his best bet would be to set up some way of magically attacking any enemies that came through. First up though he wanted to get Wanda’s recommendation out of the way.

She had said that to increase his magic capacity he needed to repeatedly empty it, but he didn’t want to just waste it by venting it out so he decided to try out an idea. It would be a magic circulatory system pumped by a heart like rune, the whole thing would constantly empty his capacity by circulating it throughout his body but it would also make it easier to set up runes all over him. In the end though the system wasn’t enough so he tried to also implement his second strategy, in novels magic users would sometimes put mana in their muscles to strengthen themselves so what if he stored mana in them strengthening them at the same time.

Charles started with his hand spinning the mana around the muscles before pushing it into them focusing on reinforcing them, it worked quite well the storage capacity wasn’t a lot but his muscles visibly strengthened even considering his already muscular body. Charles smilled, shed his armour by instinct and quickly got to work strengthening all the muscles in his body eventually he also got to his bones. Finally his tank was empty and he watched as it imperceptibly started filling again, he had no idea when he would be full but he decided to move on to methods of magical attack.

The were only a few methods of magical attack he could think of, the one he could probably implement right now was a sort of magical flamethrower, it would work just like a normal flamethrower just both the pilot and the fuel would be magic based. He would put a pilot rune (just a little circle infused with memories of fire) right on the surface of his skin, then using a cone shaped rune he could propel his mana through the fire rune lighting it up and creating a blast of super hot fire. When he turned the pilot on it glowed agrily on the surface of his skin which was mildly impressive, the flames were not until he created a rune to circulate some oxygen in with the fuel causing the flames to get a lot more impressive giving off a blue light and gaining quite a bit of range too.

The magic flamethrower was not a crazy consumer of his mana but when he tried to add a modifier to the flame with another rune it started to guzle up his mana very quickly, Charles guessed that that enhancement would have to wait until he grew stronger. His second idea for magical attack was even simpler a magical covering of concentrated force that would appear over anything he was holding. The appear over anything he was holding was the fun part as it meant he could go into battle using even a fish as a weapon, the runes required were actually quite simple. He based them off of fun little sci-fi looking graphics, there were sensors and deployment runes on the tips of his fingers and a central ‘processing’ rune in his arms. The sensors would send out a wave of mana from their position and then bring the wave back reading the surrounding like a magical radar, then the data would to the processing rune which would send instructions to the deployment runes to deploy the field of force mana. The whole thing was the most complicated rune system he had made so far and after weaving the processing rune together he was pretty tired mentally. Three complicated rune systems in a day before getting tired was not bad he decided.

Charles decided to take a short rest before trying to break down the door.