“Still trying to see through things with magic?” Vaozey asked as we walked the next day.

“Mm,” I grunted noncommittally in response, not concealing my displeasure. While I was definitely doing something to the light as it passed between my fingers, it wasn’t what I was trying to do. There was one point where I thought the color of the ground redshifted slightly, but I couldn’t replicate it after it happened. The rest of the effects that manifested were considerably further off from my intention, many of them also so slight that I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I could feel magic being used in small amounts though, so at least some of them were real.

“You know, if it wasn’t you, I’d suspect you had less than honorable intentions with that, not that any sane man would use it when we’re all filthy from the road,” Vaozey snorted. It took me a few seconds to realize what she was insinuating. Would a creator human male really be so motivated to see a naked female? I wondered, I don’t know why they would bother.

“X-rays pass through flesh like normal light through glass,” I replied. “When used on a human, they would be more useful for seeing bone. Besides, metal armor would stop them as well unless they were so high-energy that they became gamma rays, and those would go right through a human with little deflection.”

“Those are still light though, right?” Vaozey asked.

“In a sense,” I shrugged.

“Would it hurt?” she asked, reaching under her helmet to scratch her face. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like for light to pass through me.”

“You’re being hit with them right now,” I said, giving up on my magic for the moment. “The sun emits them in small amounts at all times, along with other forms of high-energy… light. You don’t feel it at all, but it does cause very minor damage to you. Knowing healing magic, it probably fixes itself instantly.”

“That sounds like the kind of knowledge that’s interesting but utterly useless,” Vaozey mumbled. “Did you get your magic working though?”

“No,” I grumbled. “I know what I need to do, but I can’t seem to do it. I produced some kind of effect, but it wasn’t what I was trying to create and it didn’t seem consistent. It was almost like I was making a lens with the air, but improperly. I wasn’t affecting the right property of light.”

“Where did you even hear the word ‘lens’?” Vaozey scoffed. “I only know what those are because I heard Mawyeyz talking about them. Hideously expensive little things.”

“I don’t know exactly,” I admitted. “I must have heard it somewhere. Come to think of it, where would I need to go to buy a lens in Uwriy? We could make some telescopes for naval use with a few custom orders.”

“Jewelry artisans and engravers use them,” Vaozey said. “What’s a tehlahskowp?”

“Device for seeing long distances,” I said curtly, my mind suddenly flush with ideas. It isn’t what I was initially trying to create, but telescopic magic could also be useful, I thought, making a circle with my fingers again and trying out a few visualizations. I was getting better at giving indirect control to magic, but I still wasn’t perfect. Mentally, my process had almost become something of an internal lecture. Instead of asserting my will over the magic, I would instead try to “explain” what I wanted and provide energy to it. Doing so felt wrong to me, but the results were undeniable for my holograms and lasers.

Making magic slightly deflect light turned out to be easy, relatively speaking, and didn’t consume much energy. The higher the angle of deflection, the more power it used, but that was to be expected. What was harder was making something that actually approximated a lens instead of just a volume with a refractive index higher than air. Changing the shape of the magic effect didn’t cause the same kind of difference in diffraction that a lens of the same shape would produce, at least not on its own. Instead, I had to modulate the actual strength of the effect in a radial fashion to get something resembling a normal lensing effect, and could make it work with any shape.

“Now, two at once,” I muttered, making a second and much smaller circle with the fingers of my left hand. I didn’t need the gesture to make the magic work, but it made it easier for me to perform two effects simultaneously. Putting the first “lens” an arm’s length away from me, I set the second one near my eye, then looked through the pair as I adjusted the refractive index of the “eyepiece”. Two very disorienting minutes and a dozen minor adjustments to both hands later, and I could see up the road with remarkable clarity.

“If you keep doing that much longer I think some of the soldiers are going to start asking questions,” Vaozey chuckled. I slowly began bringing the magic closer to the front of my helmet, adjusting the refractive index of the front lens as I did so. The power usage shot up rather quickly, but even once the effect was close enough to my face that my hand was no longer necessary it didn’t consume more than cooking a brain did. Slowly, and deliberately, I let my hands fall away but kept the magic lenses in place, memorizing how they felt.

“This is going to take some practice,” I sighed.

“What did you do?” Vaozey asked.

“Magic telescope,” I replied with a single chuckle. “And if I just duplicate it across to my other eye…” With much effort I did so, feeling the power consumption rise accordingly, “…magic binoculars.” While Vaozey looked at me through her helmet, probably with an expression of confusion, I adjusted the sizes and distances of the lenses to optimize the power consumption. Making the “binoculars” as long as possible, with the eyepieces as small as possible, seemed to be the optimal configuration. It felt like it consumed about as much power as a complex hologram, which wasn’t overly taxing but not something I could keep up forever.

“What did you do to your- what is- what?” Vaozey blurted when I turned toward her, forgetting to deactivate the effect. For a moment, my entire field of vision was a blur of steel gray and black, then everything snapped back into place once the magic lenses vanished. “What was that?”

“I was looking up the road,” I grunted, blinking a few times to clear my eyes. “There’s a sign that says we’re only half a day from Kuhtehsh.”

“Your eyes were… huge for a second,” Vaozey said. “They were sticking out of your helmet.”

“Oh, so the lenses work both ways,” I remarked, making a small lens between my fingers again and flipping it over. “I wonder if I can change that. Either way, it was just a trick of the light.”

“Were you reading that sign way over there?” Vaozey asked, pointing to the barely visible signpost in the distance.

“Yeah, that one,” I nodded. She was quiet for a moment, then grunted to herself.

“Can you show me how to do that?” she asked.

“How good are you with external force magic?” I asked back. This area looks familiar, I thought, looking around at the trees.

“Okay, guess not,” Vaozey sighed. “Maybe I can figure something else out.”

Just before we arrived in Kuhtehsh, Shahpao called everyone over to give us the basics of what we were going to be doing. In essence, the route we had taken was specifically plotted to make us emerge into the road between Muhryehv and Kuhtehsh because anyone coming from the direction of Awrehrehzha would be much more heavily vetted and we would be quickly found out. Bypassing Kuhtehsh was an option, but stopping there was a better one because Kuhtehsh was a small outpost that didn’t follow procedures as strictly as most Rehvite cities. By stopping there, we would be able to quickly replace some of our forged paperwork with legitimate paperwork that wouldn’t get to the point of being questioned until after we were on our way to Mehtsiyah.

So, after we covered up the guns and made sure to re-arrange anything else that might seem suspicious about our caravan, we all stayed up and walked the last two hours to Kuhtehsh as the sun set in the distance. Thanks to the binocular magic I had figured out earlier in the day I saw details of the settlement first, and I had to contain my shock. The once-idyllic forest village that had been in the area last time was gone, replaced with a clear-cut circle nearly a kilometer in radius and a stone first surrounded by not just one, but three wooden walls and a field of stakes that would impede movement towards it. There were four watchtowers, each with two guards armed with the same heavy-draw bows from the noypeyyoyjh site, and all entrances and exits were blocked by portcullis structures.

It took almost another hour for Shahpao to convince the outer ground guards, who appeared to be Rehvite warriors like the ones we killed earlier, to let us through the first portcullis, at which point a very angry woman stomped out of a door from further in the fort and began yelling at us, waving around the paper Shahpao had given to the gate guard.

“What the seyt are you doing here?” she snapped. “What kind of ngiyvdoym orders are these? I’ve been requesting, practically begging, for months to have Towrkah give us more provisions, and they send us almost forty more mouths to feed!?”

“I wasn’t made aware of any requests for supplemental provisions,” Shahpao said calmly. “We have a bit of food, but nothing substantial, only what was needed for the road.”

“We are nearly seytoydh starving in these eylshervao woods!” the commander yelled back at him. “We have hunted the area dry of any deer, monkeys, in the name of Rehv anything larger than a seytoydh rat! There are vegetables and fruits to forage, but this area has poor soil so we cannot even farm!”

“What am I to tell them?” Shahpao asked, deliberately egging her on with his tone.

“You useless mainland npoyt,” the commander spat. “I could kill every one of you myself and we could eat for weeks, don’t you dare speak to me like we are equals. Are those two in the armor even kehpveht? I doubt it, given how much they’re gawking at this meager fortification. I would sooner catch and train a pack of monkeys to fight for me than take on such feeble ‘assistance’.”

“Clearly someone thinks you need us,” Shahpao sneered.

“You would barely be fit to use as fodder for their ‘rifles’,” the commander sneered back, malice positively dripping from her final word. “You go back to Towrkah and you tell them they can either send me warriors or I’ll send the next caravan’s leader back to them in pieces, if at all. The detested may be weak of magic but they are not opponents to take lightly, and if Kuhtehsh falls Muhryehv will be next. You tell them to think about all the fat nobility of that rat hive of a town being torn to shreds by detested soldiers, because that’s what’ll happen if they keep seytoydh around like this.”

“You’ll need to provide that in writing,” Shahpao said with a shrug, and one of the nearby guards slammed the wall behind him so hard that the wood nearly broke. “I’m not unsympathetic, but if I leave without your orders it’s desertion, you know that. I will thoroughly express your dissatisfaction with us to my superiors.” To my shock, the commander backhanded him, breaking several bones in his face and sending him to the ground in a heap. The silence that followed was incredibly tense.

“Pathetic,” she hissed. “You will wait here, silently, while I give you my orders, and you will pray that I have the patience to complete them and not simply order you killed for wasting my time.” Shahpao stumbled back to his feet, spat out blood and a broken tooth onto the ground, then bowed. The commander raised her hand to strike him again, then scoffed and stormed back into the depths of the fort.

“Seytoydh teylm,” Vaozey hissed. “I’d love to twist her head off and make these npoytz watch.”

“Quiet,” I whispered back. “Don’t give them an excuse to delay us, everything went to plan so far.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it,” Vaozey sighed, and I was glad that her helmet would hide her glaring at the Rehvite warriors around us.

When we finally left Kuhtehsh it was early morning, and I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. As soon as we were out of the line of sight of the fortress Shahpao set the caravan down and ordered a rest. After eating a bit of food, since we didn’t dare eat anything in the presence of the hungry soldiers at the fort, I collapsed into a dreamless sleep in one of the hammocks, utterly incapable of rising from fatigue. When I finally came to it was late afternoon and I was still tired, but unable to continue sleeping. At some point, we had started moving again, but I was so deeply asleep that I hadn’t noticed.

Making my way up to the front of the caravan, I found Shahpao and got his attention.

“Did we get what we needed?” I asked.

“Right here,” Shahpao yawned, holding up some orders from the Kuhtehsh fort commander. What little of them my eyes parsed in a hand so sharp that I could easily sense how angry the woman was while writing them. “Hardest part until Duwbkaav is done now, but I’d rather you wait a little while if you want to take your helmet off. We don’t know how well this area is patrolled.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, holding back a reciprocal yawn. “Are we going to be near any rivers soon? I think there’s one coming up, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying much attention last time I was on this route.”

“With Zownayveht Svaaloyweyl, right?” Shahpao asked, smiling. “There should be one tomorrow morning so we can all wash off then. Speaking of, it might be difficult but you’ll need to sleep at your regular time again. Changing the routine now would be disruptive.”

“Not as hard as you might think,” I sighed. “You should rest too.”

“I have a nap coming up in an hour,” he replied. “Perks of being the leader, we get to sleep less.” The sarcasm wasn’t lost on me, but I was surprised that the Uwrish knew about a multi-phasic sleep schedule. “Was that everything, ihlzheyv?” Shahpao asked.

“Ye-, no,” I said, interrupting myself as I remembered something else I wanted to ask. “So I have access to the magic fuel wax pills for personal use?” Shahpao’s brow furrowed as he thought about it, then he shrugged.

“How many do you plan to use?” he asked.

“One or two per day,” I replied. “I’ve been trying to expand my magic fuel capacity and they will greatly accelerate the process, as well as help me experiment with new magic techniques.”

“Is one per day so long as half remain acceptable?” Shahpao asked.

“More than acceptable,” I nodded.

“Then you have that level of access,” Shahpao smiled. “If you find that you need more, ask again and we can work something out. Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s it. Thank you,” I replied, falling out and taking up my position at the rear of the caravan again. I suppose I can get a few more hours of lensing magic practice in, I thought, if I can get the power consumption down it’ll be a lot more useful than it is right now. Hopping into the supply wagon, I cracked the barrel of wax pills and took one out, then stashed it in a pocket near my waist. We’ll count that as today’s pill, I thought with a smirk, I’ll grab another tomorrow morning.

“Given the provided mission parameters, suggest a list of gear that could be used to successfully complete the mission. Additional information will be provided after each suggestion. Final score will be determined by number of restrictions compensated for and total gear cost.”

Why do I need to do this? I’ll never be in charge of this, the gear will be assigned to me by my operator along with my body. Whatever, what’s the mission? Assassination of a target that has sortied from a nearby base and is surrounded by guards. Fine.

“Sniper rifle, any make. Standard humanoid body.”

“Target has infrared drone support and wide-range jamming.”

“Change standard humanoid body to variant of body that is hardened against electromagnetic disruption and heat-insulated.”

“Target’s party commands artillery support from nearby base.”

“No changes required.”

“Body must be retrieved at end of mission.” As if that matters when we manufacture these bodies by the thousands.

“Replace sniper rifle with non-visible laser weapon.”

“Sortie area is flat and featureless.”

“Add active camouflage to body.” That’s going to hurt my score a lot. Actually, if it’s a sniping mission, there’s a better option. “Cancel active camouflage request, just give me a passive nanotech stealth sheet large enough to crouch behind.”

“Target is wearing laser-resistant armor.” Why would anyone be wearing that kind of armor in this scenario?

“Replace laser weapon with smart gun, silencer, and subsonic ammunition for smart gun.”

“Target is wearing bullet-resistant armor.”

“A poison dart launcher then.”

“Target is resistant to poison.”

“Concentrated acid dart launcher.”

“Target is resistant to acid.”

“Replace all equipment with EM hardened nanowire bola stealth suicide drone.”

“Target possesses armor that can resist nanowire weaponry.” Piss off, just use a missile. Why send an assassin for a target that hard?

“Missile strike.”

“Not valid input.”

“Gas weapon then, anything lethal.”

“Target has an air filter.”

“I don’t know, this doesn’t sound possible at this point. I give up.”

“Final score, seventy-one points.”

“What was the correct answer?”

“Highest scoring recorded choices received ninety-seven points, and ended with: A body that resembles the child of the target or one of the target’s party, information to allow the unit to fit such a role, and a monomolecular combat knife.”

Right, gain their trust and follow them back to base where I can kill them when their guard is down. I should have thought of that, but I didn’t understand psychology well enough at the time to form that plan. I wonder which copy of me did?

The dream I had been having, a somewhat exaggerated version of training I had once experienced, dissolved away as I slowly drifted back into consciousness. Once I remembered where I was and what I had been doing before going to bed, I tried to feel how much magic fuel I had, and was pleasantly surprised to find that my reserves felt almost full. During my testing the previous night I had almost emptied myself of magic entirely before taking the wax pill, which gave me back more than half of my reserves despite being made up of just one human core organ. The rest, apparently, had recovered during the night.

There was a useful idea in that dream, I thought, rolling out of the hammock and carefully avoiding bumping anyone as I exited the wagon. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet, but it was close, and I felt rested as I moved to grab some food and a second wax pill. It’ll probably take a good bit of power to pull off considering the refraction angles needed, but I think I might be able to manage it, I thought as I tried making a few magic lenses over my hand, Or, maybe I can do it an even simpler way to save power? How would that work? Can I approximate a fiber optic cable, maybe? I guess I’ll find out.

Making a magic fiber-optic cable wasn’t going to happen, at least not in the way that fiber optics worked physically. I had initially assumed that making a mirror would be less energy-intensive than a lens for some reason, but it turned out that wasn’t the case. The energy required to reflect a ray of light was equivalent to the energy required to create a series of lenses that turned the light in the desired direction, which was quite high for any decently large surface area. That meant that making a cylinder with total internal reflection was much more expensive, nearly by an order of magnitude in some cases, than making a similarly-sized magnifying tube; owing mainly to the fact that the energy was consumed per incidence of reflection.

It wasn’t all bad news though, because magic didn’t follow the same physical limitations that materials did when it came to manufacturing precision. Making a physical material that had a gradient refractive index wasn’t something I knew much about, but I assumed it would be expensive and difficult. With magic, on the other hand, the only limitation to doing so was how precise of a picture I could make in my mind about what I wanted. The true ability I was trying to create was still too complex for me to manage, but before we reached the river I successfully made a small tube that allowed me to see at an angle without technically reflecting any light, just refracting it in curved lines at reduced cost.

“We’re offroading,” Shahpao announced when we came to the bridge after sunrise. “Get everyone up.” There were mumbles of discontent as the sleepers still in the back of the barracks wagon staggered out, wiping their faces and blinking their eyes, but they quieted down once we started to walk north along the river. It seemed some of the soldiers recognized the area we were in and began whispering to their comrades about it. Vaozey silently joined me at the back of the caravan, and fifteen minutes later we saw what they were whispering about.

The trees around us opened up to reveal a bulge in the river where the water’s flow nearly slowed to a stop. Though it was cold, both from the season and the early morning, the soldiers barely even hesitated before ripping off their outer clothes and jumping into the water. Shahpao said nothing, apparently expecting the behavior, and Vaozey removed her helmet.

“Shouldn’t we be more cautious?” I asked, looking around at the trees. One of the advancements in lensing magic I had figured out allowed me to magnify my vision without having to use any obvious external magic by making the lenses near the surface of my eyes. It wasn’t as powerful as making a pair of binoculars, but it was barely more expensive than making a simple hologram and easier to control. I didn’t see anything trying to observe us besides a few squirrels, but I wasn’t overly confident of my results.

“You saw the fort,” Vaozey replied, putting her helmet off and starting to remove the clothing covering her breastplate. “Those idiots are practically starving, they wouldn’t be wasting time scouting their back lines in that state, at least not this far off the main road. Even the five of them we killed were probably just sent out to rob that village, not look for enemies. Come on, this is probably the only good bath we’re going to get before we’re past Muhryehv.” That’s a good point, I thought, pulling my helmet off as well and setting it on the ground. The armor we were wearing was thankfully simple enough that we could remove it without aid, so a few minutes later I was in nothing but underwear and swimming out into the water.

I’d be freezing to death if not for heat magic, I realized as I broke into a breaststroke: The water was probably ten degrees Celsius at most and threatened to lock up my muscles by sapping all of their heat away. Thankfully I could heat myself, so it didn’t bother me as much as it otherwise should have. The other humans were doing the same, even Vaozey, as they took turns diving underwater or splashing each other in between scrubbing their hair and bodies. I sank underwater to do the same, opening my eyes and adjusting their lenses with magic to see clearly.

This is almost like having a proper body again, I thought with some degree of amusement, swimming down and touching the sandy bottom of the river. Tiny scavenging fish picked away at the plants growing around me, mostly unperturbed by my presence, then some came over and started to eat the chunks of dirt as I wiped my body. The scene was so relaxing that when someone tapped my back I nearly gasped in surprise before remembering that I needed to breathe and ascending.

“Inhale any water?” Vaozey laughed.

“It’s quiet down there,” I replied, wiping my face again.

“Thought you’d want to see this,” she said, gesturing over to where some of the soldiers were gathered in the water. “The two yihzhae washouts are going to have a race.” I was about to ask why I’d want to see it, but then I remembered that yihzhae specifically meant “naval combat magic user”, so it was likely the pair had some kind of water-based magic technique that I hadn’t seen before.

The pair of racers walked up the bank until they were only knee-deep in water, then the other soldiers started to count down, and when they yelled “go” the racers both dove in at the same time. Then, nothing seemed to happen, and I was confused, only for one of the pair to emerge on the other end of the river some fifty meters away just seconds later, throwing her hands into the air victoriously. Her opponent popped out half a second later and tackled her, causing the audience to laugh as the pair broke into a scrap.

“What just happened?” I asked.

“Watch closely when they come back,” Vaozey said. “It’s a little bit blurry underwater, but I think you’ll figure it out.” Soon enough the two lined up again at the far edge of the water, and I submerged my head and adjusted my vision so I could see them clearly when they entered. A little bit of magnification helped too.

That’s genius, was the first thought I had when I saw what they were doing with the water around their bodies. Reaching both hands out above their heads, they used force magic to grab the water and not only force it past themselves to generate thrust but also compress and expel it behind their feet like a jet. That was how that one animal that struck the ship between Vehrehr and Pehrihnk attacked us, I recalled, I wonder if humans learned their technique by watching them. Once the racers were back with the rest of the group, I pushed my head above water again and saw Vaozey looking at me expectantly.

“Very interesting magic,” I said. “It’s a shame it’s not powerful enough to work with air.” Though, maybe with assistance...

“I’m sure they’d trade it in a heartbeat to see through walls with magic,” Vaozey replied flippantly, chuckling. “Does it work yet?”

“Not yet,” I replied, not bothering to conceal my amused smile. “but, I think I have created something even more useful. I can’t use it on my whole body just yet, but-” I held up my right hand and began making the geometry for a strange, impossible lens around it, “-watch this.” With a mental flex and a sudden rushing feeling, I felt the lens come online, and my hand blurred into something unrecognizable. Judging by the expression on her face, the effect was exactly as intended from Vaozey’s angle, since the effect only truly worked in a reasonably straight line.

“Where did your hand go?” she asked, and the effect sputtered and died. The feeling of pins and needles filled my hand as my magic-depleted blood refilled with energy. Definitely need to work on the consumption for that one if I’m going to use it in a real scenario, I thought. “I don’t understand,” Vaozey muttered.

“Remember when I told you that you see things because light reflects off of them?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Vaozey grunted.

“What do you think happens if, say, someone bends light completely around an object so that none reflects off of it?” I asked, now grinning widely. When did I start enjoying this so much? I wondered in the back of my mind, maybe it’s just another effect of my stronger human side.

“Gods,” Vaozey breathed. “It turns invisible. You can use magic to make things invisible.”