Ajax wakes up the following morning almost as tired as he was when he went to sleep, despite going to bed relatively early and sleeping in; he still feels like his body is moving underwater as he gets out of bed. A quick look at his mana and the 1780/2510 tells him everything he needs to know.

Taking a small amount of mana Ajax quickly brings up a small flame on the top of his fingers, he sighs in relief as he feels the mana smoothly pass through his channels without causing any pain or discomfort. It seems like it may have taken most of the night for his body to recover and his mana rezerves haven’t had time to fill back up yet.

“You look dreadful.” Hatchet says as Ajax sits down at the breakfast table. “OW!”

Hatchet throws Luna an offended look as he moves to massage the leg she just kicked. “Is this to do with what happened yesterday?” Luna asks as she ignores her ex-teammate and focuses on Ajax. “Can I help?”

“It’s from yesterday.” Ajax confirms, and that has his mother drop the papers she was looking at and focused on him protectively. “But there is nothing you can do, the problem is already fixed. And it was self inflicted” he then quietly murmurs but everyone at the table hears him clearly.

“What did you do to yourself?” his brother asks him.

“I overtaxed my mana channels.” Ajax says and both Kate and Luna freeze for a moment before looking at him more intensely.

“How much mana did you put in one spell?” Kate asked.

“And how quickly did you channel it?” Luna follows up without giving him time to answer.

“About one thousand, in… a quarter of a second.” Ajax says slowly as he thinks back to the fight.

“What was the most you ever used in one spell before that?” While Luna seemed more hesitant to ask as this was very personal information Kate had no such filter and she was very concerned with the wellbeing of her extended family.

“Four hundred.” Ajax responded and Kate let out a sigh of relief. “In about one second.” Both Luna and Kate wince a little at the massive drop off in time-frame.

“Okay…” Kate says as her eyes unfocus and she starts thinking up the correct treatment. “Your channels should have repaired themselves with a good night’s rest but they are still fragile, for the next week don’t exceed the four hundred in one second.”

“Healers are the most prone to mana channel damage.” Luna fills in. “Lack of exact knowledge, need for improvisation and the sometimes instant application required means that we are often overloading spells with mana so we try and train our mana channels to support such efforts.”

“If you want I can work with you and set up a training schedule to safely increase your limits.” Kate offers. “But only after your week of rest.”

Ajax is quick to agree, happy that he has someone he can trust leading him down a known path instead of having to make it up along as he goes. Speaking of making things up as he goes, Ajax quickly finishes his food and with a polite, if rushed, farewell he makes for his alchemy lab.

Without any strain on his mana channels Ajax quickly goes through the exact same experiments as yesterday, the only difference today is that he is able to pay much more attention to the mana emitted.

Upon the electromagnets shattering Ajax now has a clear feel for the mana generated, much to his surprise at the moment of the shattering the shockwave is actually formed by a sudden release of Void mana. The small remaining piece of metal sucks up all the mana in its surrounding and turns it into two other types, one of them is pure space mana, and the second is of a type he does not recognise.

These revelations are all useful, first and foremost because he now has a source to exemplify Void mana should it ever come out that he has a new element and secondly he has a source of space mana that he can observe independent of the whims of Anna’s bond.

Despite all this Ajax clearly recognises that space is a much too complex mana type, it clearly deserves its Legendary rating and Ajax is forced to accept that the cost to truly study it by recreating the phenomenon is simply too exorbitant for now.

This doesn’t discourage him however as he focuses on his initial task of attaining magnetic mana. He now has a good feel for the mana, despite not having seen it be used in a spell he focuses on channeling it himself. The channel is two seconds long and Ajax only uses two hundred mana for it, easily staying within the parameters set by Kate.

Much to his surprise nothing happens as his mana gathers, at the end of the channel it simply changes into magnetic mana and Ajax quickly finds himself pelted by every single piece of metal that wasn’t tied down inside the lab.

A few things become clear following his first trial with magnetic mana, the first is that he gathers every piece of of metal and makes sure it is secured, he doesn’t want a repeat of the ineffective firing squad. Secondly, for the first time ever Ajax had used a mana type without possessing the skill for its affinity.

“Is this what it’s like to cast without having a skill for the affinity?” Ajax thinks aloud as he replays the trial in his mind. “No wonder chanted spells have all their intent transmitted during the chant itself and that runic spells have it preset by the runes.”

Trials two and three don’t work any better, in fact Ajax can’t see any improvement compared to his first attempt. He had thankfully reduced the mana used to one hundred in each but this clearly wasn’t working.

“If I can’t copy it outright, what if I can recreate it piece by piece.” Ajax mumbles as he brings out the metal samples once more.

Despite magnetic mana clearly only being a Rare mana type it was oddly enough created by two Epic mana types, Lightning and Metal. Not only that but Ajax had access to both.

Ajax quickly recreated the circuit but this time intentionally didn’t use a mana infused metal to act as the electromagnet, instead he gently infused his own metal affinity and felt it interact with the natural electric mana. Despite the magnetic mana still being produced Ajax could feel that the process wasn’t exactly the same, this was extremely obvious when the metal didn’t shatter once he withdrew his metal mana.

His next task was to recreate the other half of the fusion, using a mana infused piece of metal Ajax skipped the improvised battery completely and powered the circuit by directly generating Lightning mana. Unlike the first trial this one proved much trickier, whereas before all that mattered was that he provided mana, doing the battery half of the equation meant that he needed to maintain a steady and stable current in order for the experiment to be of any use.

It took up three hundred of his mana before he managed to get a handle on it but Ajax also noticed the biggest difference between the experiment when it used his mana and when it didn’t. The biggest difference was clearly the lack of explosion but a more subtle one was that when his mana took up one half of the creation process the mana released in the surroundings was barely a fifth of what mana infused metals could output.

Having gotten consistent results with both half Ajax then moved on to both providing the current and infusing regular metal with his metal attuned mana at the same time. This did result in some magnetic mana being generated but the amount was pitiful, barely a fifteenth of what the mana infused metals produced, though in hindsight this did make some sense, he was actually surprised at how high his efficiency was.

Once he got a handle at generating the magnetic mana through the intermediary the next step was to generate the mana without the help of the circuit. Much like when he experimented and gained his Ice and Magma affinities Ajax mixed his Metal and Lightning mana directly.

This direct fusion finally resulted in a source of magnetic mana that Ajax could actively mold, with a quick movement he brought out his shield and carefully infused the combination into it, after all what could be more useful than a shield that actively drew your opponent's weapon to it.

The initial augmentation was clearly inefficient, despite this Ajax kept going and tried to increase the power of the magnet only to then lower it in a controlled manner. His mana had run dry in ten minutes and Ajax all but collapsed onto a chair heaving out breaths of exhaustion. Despite all this a victorious smirk was etched on his face as his eyes unfocused at locked onto the text present in his Status screen [Magnetic Aspect Mana].