Laurence stood for a long time with his eyes closed, feeling the new powers thrumming against his own internal mana, their potential screaming out to be used. Words rose to his lips, gestures through his mind, and he knew exactly how to activate each...

His arms didn't rise, his fingers didn't dance through the simple triggering motions that would twin a spell into Caustic Compounding. He whispered the meaningless words anyway, but without anything to draw out the mana into its correct patterns, the activation couldn't succeed.

It was unbearably frustrating. He felt trapped, somewhere between crying and screaming, between grief and rage, between hope and resignation.

The other ability, Destructive Aura, activated as soon as he fed mana into its power stone. While it was easier to use his hands to channel through, his entire body was covered in a thin layer of mana at all times, so simple activations could be done without a gesture.

He pushed more mana into the stone, trying to feel the mana shift around him. It reminded him of the caustic swamp in the first room, the thickening of the air, the way it burned your lungs. A moment later, he withdrew his mana, feeling both better and worse. It was a relief to know he could still do this much, at least. If only he could find another way to channel mana into the right patterns, he could do more...

A thought occurred to him, something so simple and obvious he wondered why he hadn't ever tried it before. His entire body was covered in mana. He could push it out from any spot, activating a power stone.

He could draw the patterns in the air with a finger. Why shouldn't he be able to draw them with something else?

Didn't he have two perfectly good feet? People learned to do things as complicated as writing and art with their feet.

Maybe Laurence wasn't so helpless as he'd thought.

"Laurence?"

Laurence's eyes shot open; he'd forgotten he wasn't alone. "I'm going to figure this out. Don't worry about me. I'm not done yet. Not by a long shot."

Bradley exhaled in relief. "I'll do everything I can," he promised. "How can I help?"

"I'm going to need more items. Anything you can find that's magic. I've got a lot of research to do."

Laurence lost himself in practice, ruthlessly burying everything else under his relentless drive to solve this puzzle. He'd never thought about his casting in such excruciating detail before. Before he simply called out the spells and trusted the system to take care of the rest. Closest was when he'd practiced his first spell, Gust, in order to unlock the mage class in the first place, but even then he'd been relying mostly on muscle memory.

The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. The tracings that accompanied power stones on all magical items were basically the same thing. Instead of tracing the power with a fingertip, it pushed the power through a pre-set channel, with the same effect.

It was with this in mind that he set out to solve the question of how to convert one to another.

Hand gestures would not be the same as power traced on the floor with a foot, which wouldn't be the same as an item's tracing. They weren't precise analogues... a cast spell and a power from a weapon or piece of armor were different.

The hardest part was that he couldn't physically perform his spells to ascertain their patterns, relying only on memory and instinct.

It would be enough.

It had to be enough.

Bradley returned with an item or two a few times, and a few times more to just check on Laurence, each time seeming satisfied to find his friend still fully engrossed in his research.

Ken came through twice, clearing out the goblin room to much shrill screeching, and Laurence felt grim satisfaction as he imagined the tribe that had inflicted such pain on his team being butchered again and again for their crimes.

He didn't linger on that satisfaction too long. He didn't want to become a dark, vengeful wizard. Even if he would probably make a good dark mage. Tame was already pretty close to mind control... maybe he could--

No, no. He would be a paragon of the Light, not fall into the trap of satisfying his darkest urges.

So he stayed focused on his experimentation and very deliberately did not walk out onto the clifftop to look down at the terrified goblins, to laugh in vengeful glee as they failed to escape the uncaring wrath of the dungeon's Lord.

Okay, so maybe he'd spent too much time in his own head. His imaginings were getting decidedly skewed.

He still hadn't seen Jeff and Podge, the survivors from the Frire contingent, and wasn't sure he wanted to. Bradley and Ken mostly stayed away too, off fighting and leveling, but that was fine. As long as he escaped drowning in his own mind, the quiet and stillness helped him focus on his research.

Laurence ran his awareness down his body to his foot, tracing out a pattern on the floor. Translating from three dimensions into two was hard, translating orientation from hand to foot was hard, and discerning whether he was getting closer or further away was an exercise in futility and frustration.

If Ken could win a boss fight against a shaman with nothing but his fists, Laurence could learn to cast spells with his toes. He was not going to be outdone by a receptionist!

The spell dissolved without activating.

He brought up his System notes, shoving the encroaching jumble of nonsense away before it could eat his diagrams. He really needed to get at his notebooks one of these days, but he never thought of it when Bradley was around. And he wasn't confident enough in the mechanics of a bag of holding to risk sticking his foot in to rummage around.

He made careful annotations of where the spell had fallen apart, compared it against his previous failures, and copied the diagram to a new section. Adjusting one of the angles by two degrees, he fixed the pattern in his mind and sketched it out on the floor.

This one lasted fractionally longer than the previous attempt before dissipating, which was a hopeful sign. Laurence made a note, then tried it again. Four more attempts all resulted in similar, but not identical, failure points.

Laurence's brow furrowed in concentration. He'd drawn the same diagram, why would some of them come a fraction of a second closer to full activation than others?

He repeated it again, more slowly this time, only for the spell to fail almost immediately.

"Speed of implementation?" he queried aloud, making a note and copying the current diagram to another new subsection. "Casting duration testing, baseline."

He drew the diagram at a steady pace, counting seconds under his breath until it failed. "Four seconds."

He drew it more quickly, counting under his breath. "Four seconds."

He drew it very slowly, counting. "Four seconds." And this time he saw why the spell was failing. The power at the start was coming apart before the final section was finished.

"Unsealed mana loses integrity after four seconds," he noted with a frown.

He couldn't draw an entire diagram in four seconds. He'd been getting about halfway through them so far.

But speed was something he could improve. Both physically, and with a bit of help from the system.

He drew on his stamina as he traced out the next diagram, this time making it a full two lines further before it failed. This time, he knew, the failure had been in the diagram, not the timing.

He made a notation, and adjusted the diagram before trying again.

"Your other friends are gone," Ken informed him. "The ranger and the fighter. I didn't see any bodies, so they probably left the dungeon entirely."

Laurence exhaled slowly. He shouldn't be relieved, but the need to confront the Frire contingent had been a deep-seated weight on his heart. The guilt remained, being responsible for their friends' deaths, but the tense anticipation over being forced to confront them eased somewhat.

"And Bradley? How's he doing?"

"Healer? He's coming along well. How about you? Will you be ready to join us soon?"

That was a question he hadn't been able to come to a decision on. He needed to be more sure of himself before he could commit to joining another raid. But he needed to raise his level somehow, and Ken represented a significant opportunity to do that in safety.

Laurence raised his marginally-less-damaged shoulder in the closest approximation of a shrug he could manage these days. "Not now. I'm still in no condition to fight. But if you find any more magic equipment you don't need, it would help to have more data points."

Ken rummaged in one of his bags - he had three of them strapped to his back with the belt he wore across his otherwise bare chest - transferring a few items to one of the other bags, then dumped the remainder of its contents out onto the floor.

Laurence's eyes widened at the treasure trove before him.

Ken smiled and shrugged. "Anything you want here, help yourself. What you don't need, kick over in the corner. I'll pick it up next time."