Andrew was briefly awake to see the scouts off on their journey. Pretty much everyone in the camp got up to see them off, though there wasn't much fanfare. A few hugs from friends made and words of encouragement before they made their departure into the morning dew. They headed west across relatively open fields, following the river. By the time Andrew woke up from his early morning nap and really started the day, they were well out of sight.

For the first time since he found himself in this world Andrew had free time. There were no urgent objectives, no deadlines, no looming threats. They needed to prepare for the future yes, for the return of the scouts and their eventual departure, but today? Today there wasn't much of anything that needed urgent doing. Andrew met with the inscribing group first thing mid-morning. They took a look at the three reject grenades Andrew pulled from the pile the night before and went over the minor mistakes that rendered them inoperable, then set them to the task of creating more, slowly. They were still their most effective weapon in an emergency, and Andrew wanted to have a good stockpile on hand.

When they were squared away he spent the rest of the morning working with the smithing/smelting team. He pulled out his old set of damaged armor and walked them through how he created it, then set them loose to work on their own designs. His own smithing skills were a combination of instincts injected into him by the system and a whole lot of trial and error, he wasn't exactly a qualified teacher. They had a comfortable stockpile of materials to practice with though, and Andrew was sure they would come up with something better before the scouts got back. Besides, he had some experimentation of his own to do.

Andrew settled down at his workbench in the courtyard with a familiar plain wooden board. He placed his palm on the board and tried activating his [Auto mana inscription] skill, picturing a unmodified binding rune as he did so. He could feel mana pulsing out from his chest and into his palm, like cold lightning, but it stopped there, converging in a concentrated point in the direct center of his palm. After a moment of channeling the skill with nothing happening, Andrew focused on the dot of concentrated mana and tried to move it across his palm. It felt like a little ember rolling around under his hand as it shifted about. He took his time, carefully sketching out the binding rune with his mind, feeling the little ember under his palm replicating the movement of his thoughts. When he raised his hand from the board he could see that the binding rune was perfectly replicated.

"Not exactly automatic huh."

[Rune 1/5 Memorized]

Andrew moved his hand to another part of the board and activated the skill again, picturing the binding rune once again. This time the little ember of mana started to move instantly, slowly crawling it's way around his palm. It took Andrew a second to realize the skill was copying his previous movements exactly, right down to the slow, careful pace. Andrew tried to push more mana into the school, imagining the inscription speeding up, and it did, marginally. As soon as he stopped actively focusing on it the skill returned to its ponderous pace. Once it was finished Andrew removed his hand from the board to see a perfect replica of the first rune he carved, down to the slight irregularities in the depth of his carving.

Makes sense, it can only memorize something I've already done, so if I want a rapid rune carving skill, I'm going to have to crank one out just as fast, at least once. These lines are far finer though, A bit of practice and I think I could fit more runes on much smaller surfaces with this. Now for the next one.

Andrew placed his palm on the board again, directly over the first rune he carved, then activated [Mend]. A significantly large amount of mana poured into his palm, then after a moment, stopped. Andrew withdrew his palm, revealing the smooth surface below. When Andrew looked closely he could see that the filled in rune was still slightly visible. It interrupted the grain of the wood and was a slightly different shade, but was smooth to the touch. Andrew placed his hand over the other rune and repeated the process leaving the board smooth and whole.

Mending works as expected, though it does take a lot of mana. If I carved an earth accumulation mana and gave it half as much juice it would probably fill in the gaps just as well, though it would also change the properties and texture of the material as well.

Andrew set to work practicing with the new inscription skill, carving and re-carving his five most used runes. The fire, earth, water and air base runes, along with the binding connector rune. The battery, bridge and expulsion runes all required extensive modifications to function properly so he left those alone for now and focused on the most time consuming and relatively static runes.

[Rune 1/5 memorized]

[Rune 1/5 memorized]

[Rune 1/5 memorized]

……

[Rune 1/5 memorized]

[Auto Mana Inscription lvl 3 -> 4]

[Rune 1/5 memorized]

…..

[Rune 2/5 memorized]

[Rune 2/5 memorized]

[+ 1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

…..

[Rune 2/5 memorized]

[Rune 3/5 memorized]

[Rune 3/5 memorized]

…..

[Rune 4/5 memorized]

[Rune 4/5 memorized]

[Auto Mana Inscription lvl 4 -> 5]

…..

[Rune 5/5 memorized]

[+ 1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

By the time he was satisfied the sun was setting and his ass felt bruised. He practiced the skill all day, only taking brief breaks to answer inscription questions and eat. He half expected to see an imprint in the stool when he stood up. Still, he had cut each memorized rune down to a 30 second carve time, about a third of his usual carving time for these familiar runes. Andrew rose on stiff legs and headed over to the campfire where Kalan, Carter and Tyler were loitering in front of a small crowd. The crowd was passing one of the few bottles of hobgoblin swill they had left and as Andrew approached he could see Kalan accept a rough knife from one of the smiths, heft it in his hand, then throw it at a target carved into the wall of the palisade. The knife flew true, striking the target with a thunk and a cheer from the crowd. The bottle was passed to the smith he took a big swig before handing the bottle off to the crowd as another member of the smithing team walked up and handed Kalan another knife.

As Andrew approached he could see a number of other knives scattered in the dirt around the target. With a chuckle he joined them, taking a swig from the bottle as he arrived and booing along with the crowd as the next knife spun wildly through the air and struck the wall flat, falling to the ground in two pieces.

The next day passed in much the same fashion. Andrew spent most of his time experimenting with his newly learned runes. The metal mana accumulation circle worked much the same as the others, though when he examined it with Sense Mana he saw that it cost about twice as much pure mana to produce similar effects. The dirt inside of the circle started to solidify into one smooth sheet, then slowly start to gain a metallic sheen as the color of the dirt shifted from a light brown to a cloudy brass. When Andrew broke the circle and dug into the dirt, he found it was much harder than before, but it quickly collapsed into weird shiny dirt.

The light mana accumulation circle he carved into the dirt a healthy distance from the camp, and anything flammable. It looked like a mash up of fire and air accumulation circles and he wasn't taking any chances when it was very likely to explode. Andrew even dug out the ol' mana rope he used in his original explosive experiements to power it. He charged the circle from behind a boulder thirty feet off, sitting and waiting for the crack of an overloaded circle. When none came he poked his head out from around the rock and saw the circle sitting there, glowing merrily. He charged as much mana into this circle as the others, but didn't see much change, so he decided to leave it until the sun began to set.

In the meantime Andrew experiemented with expulsion runes. He started by finding a long length of wood and carving it up into four equal length cylindrical 'wands'. He expected to lose a wand or two in his experiments and he wanted each of them to be as similar as possible. Then he carved a very similar set of circles to what he put on the spearheads. Auto Inscription made the process of carving the earth accumulation, battery, trigger, expulsion and release runes significantly easier. The finer lines were much easier to inscribe into the cylindrical surface of the wand. Andrew headed over to the same bridge pillar he used for his metal mana tests, stopped about five feet off and raised the wand.

He pulsed fifty points of mana into the earth circle, then activated the trigger. A bolt of brown mana that looked solid as a rock lurched out of the wand, moving far slower than the silver streak of metal mana, and dropping about a foot before striking the pillar with a crack and shattering into pieces which scattered into the grass and quickly dissipated. The pillar itself had a small crack where it was struck and looked to have shifted slightly in the earth from the impact. He stepped back to ten feet and fired again, this time it dropped almost three feet and when the bolt struck it evaporated into a brown cloud that blew away with the wind. When he fired again from fifteen feet the bolt of mana struck the dirt just in front of the pillar and seemed to just, melt into it, without a mark.

Okay, metal is faster and has greater penetration, earth may hit with more overall force, but I'm not sure how to measure that accurately. Earth mana has projectile drop as well apperently, and it's pretty significant, at least compared to metal mana. Both are solidly dangerous at five feet, workable at ten, and effectively useless at fifteen. That might just be a property of mana in general. Needs more testing.

Andrew repeated the process with an identical water and air wand. The water mana bolt stretched into a bit of a stream as it fired, and moved significantly faster than the earth bolt, though still far from the blur of metallic silver. It also had a little bit of projectile drop and was far less destructive. The pillar was only lightly marked from five feet, and entirely unharmed at ten feet, at fifteen feet the water mana seemed to flow directly into the wooden pillar.

I swear to god it actually looks healthier after that one. I know water cutters are a thing, were a thing I guess, but I'm looking pretty far from that. I don't know if raw mana would work anything like a water cutter even if I managed to get it going fast enough.

The air bolt was by far the least effective. It was almost impossible to see due to it's speed and pale transparency. It barely shook the pillar from five feet, and when he fired it from ten feet it clearly drifted upwards as it traveled, and did about as much damage. At fifteen feet it rose so much that it overshot the pillar entirely, but was shockingly visible for nearly twice that distance as it disappeared into the sky. Curious, Andrew aimed the wand downwards so that the bolt would strike the pillar and fired again. This time the bolt struck and dispersed into a cloud of pale mana, the pillar shaking slightly as it struck.

That’s…. weird. Is it gaining power as it travels?

Andrew did it again, and again the pillar shook and a cloud of pale mana burst from the impact and dispersed up like steam.

That's definitely a harder hit at fifteen feet. Is it pulling in more air mana as it travels or accelerating?

Andrew activated Mana Sense and did it again. He could barely track the ball of pale white mana as it streaked towards the pillar but this time he could see little eddies of thin pale mana streaking along in it's wake as it traveled. When the ball hit and exploded the trailing air mana flowed out to follow it for a short time before the mana in the area calmed.

Definitely pulling in air mana as it travels, hell it might be accelerating too but it's moving far too quickly for me to track that to begin with. Either way at fifty mana it's definitely not a viable weapon. The mana's upward movement gives it a maximum range just as surely as the earth mana's drop off does, regardless of how much mana it drags in along the way. Could be compensated for by adjusting the expulsion runes, but it seems far more effective to just use metal mana instead.

Andrew repeated the tests with one hundred points of mana instead and found that while the size of each mana bolt increased, the speed did not, with the notable exception of the air mana bolt, which seemed to get marginally faster. It was hard to tell when it was already moving so quickly. Regardless, the impact of each bolt was significantly heavier. At fifteen feet the earth mana bounced up from the dirt and struck the pillar in one whole piece, bouncing off and landing near Andrew before rolling to a stop and melting into the dirt. The water mana splashed into a dozen streamers which flowed down and into the dirt, pooling for a moment before dissipating. The air mana just made a bigger cloud, go figure.

It was getting dark so Andrew looped around to check on his light accumulation circle before returning to camp. As he approached he saw that the circle itself was dim, out of mana. That was far quicker than any other accumulation circle, he would expect even the metal circle to stay charged for an afternoon. The dirt inside however had a soft glow to it. It didn't illuminate much, and when Andrew dug some of it up it retained its glow, though only the top inch or so of dirt actually glowed, and it was far from bright enough to be useful.

I guess light mana is the hungry type. Who knew. I bet if I juiced a piece of metal up with that much mana it would glow like a torch, even better if I could get some light affinity in there. Where the fuck would I even pull that from though, a lightbulb? Even if those existed I bet I'd get metal affinity first. I wonder if this dirt has some now? Same concept as the fire mana furnace right?

Andrew sat down next to the circle of glowing dirt and scooped some up in one hand, the holding on to a small stone. He closed his eyes as he activated the skill, extending his mana into the pile of dirt and feeling for the affinities within. Earth affinity overwhelmed everything else in the dirt, and Andrew tried to focus his senses, recognizing the earth affinity and doing his best to ignore it as he searched for the slightest hint of something more. A cascade of cracks, loud as a tree falling echoed out from ahead of him and he shot to his feet, eyes flying open and hand going straight to the hammer he still carried at his belt.

There it was. Standing just at the edge of the tall grasses, bald head scarred and pitted, on eye shut and sunk into it's socket, the other peering at him from just above the dense golden grasses. A giant. It stared at Andrew for a moment, frozen with one hand on his hammer, the other on the earth wand. It's one good eye drifted to the torchlit palisades behind him, then it sank, silently down into the tall grasses again. Andrew waited until he could no longer see the grass swaying in it's wake before sprinting back into the camp and raising the alarm.