The Heptagon Mage

Gilliam had considered something small, an Imp in his mind. He did his best to visualise it before he activated the magic circle.
As he sent the magical pulse to the circle to activate it opened a small gash on his lower arm from where a stream of red mist was consumed by the circle. Since it was done as slowly as this, Gilliam could see that the black circle got a very, very vague red glow to it as it was nearing the charge it needed. Once it was done it stopped draining from Gilliam and imploded into the same electric thump and a weirdly dim flash. As the implosion was complete it pulsed outwards and started taking the form of an imp; two elongated horns in a slender S shape, large ears, pupil less blue glowing eyes, large wings on it’s back, a long slender tail, clawed fingers and a rough texture on its red-hued skin. It would be somewhat intimidating had it not been for its 1 metre (~3.2ft) in height.
There is a puff of smoke as it properly manifests, flapping its wings twice to land gracefully on the floor.

“YOU HAVE SUMMONED THE MIGHTY TELLASTRO!” It shouted at the top of its lungs in a high pitched shrieking voice reserved for munchkins or something of the sort.

Nolis looked at it with a weird mix of intense confusion but also a weird underlying sense of knowing what was actually going on.
Gilliam was just a large question mark in human form.

“BOW DOWN, PITIFUL CREATURES. BOW DOWN TO THE MIGHT THAT TELLASTRO COMMANDS!” Looking around for a second it identified Gilliam and pointed at him. “PREPARE TO FACE THE POWER OF TELLASTRO, COWER IN FEAR PETTY MORTAL!” Tellastro spawned a small golf-ball sized fireball in his hand.

The little imp was getting ready to fight, Nolis cracked up into hard laughter to the point that he had problems standing, forcing him to support himself against his chair before sitting down.
Between laughing fits he managed to state an explanation. “Sometimes if you don’t consider their personality, this... this can happen. The best is to show him who’s boss. Fight him!” Nolis gestured roughly towards the mighty Tellastro.

Gilliam was a bit unsure... He did aim to summon something small and weak.. and he got.. this thing...
Not being ready had Gilliam almost being hit by the fireball that the small Imp threw his way. He threw it, like if it was a rock, there was no magical flying in his fireball; just a lobbed orb of fire. As it hit the wooden door behind him it puffed into fire but not enough to ignite anything.
The dodging was clumsy but luckily enough to not get singed, however it had him off balance a second which the Imp planned to take advantage of. The little creature charged forwards with an almost ear piercing shriek.
Gilliam was surprisingly unsure what to do, his instincts wanted him to just cast an Aether dart at him or call on the sword, but... it was a small imp... right?
As the creature jumped towards Gilliam, claws out and ready to shred its target. Gilliam reacted by punting Tellastro, the simple kick landed hard and well sending him tumbling back further into the hallway, there was more than one bone breaking sound before the tumbling stopped.

Tellastro forced himself to his legs as Gilliam stood there confused, Nolis was a bit more interested at this point but he still had the tail-end of his laughing fit.
The Imp finally steadied itself and looked at Gilliam with a strange expression. “MIGHTY MORTAL, YOU HAVE BESTED THE AMAZING TELLASTRO! YOU MUST BE A GREAT WARRIOR OF YOUR PEOPLE! THE MIGHTY TELLASTRO BOWS!” The Imp made a deep bow.

Nolis broke down in another laughing fit, it got to the point that it brought him to tears. Gilliam couldn’t do anything but facepalm, it figures that the first thing he summons is this. He wanted to summon something weak, as it was his first attempt, but in the back of his head he probably wanted it to be powerful... This conflict summoned an imp that simply thought itself strong...
“Well... if nothing else, if I summon the Mighty Tellastro in the future... I’ll have his personality down, I guess.” Forcing himself to see the silver lining here felt like the best way of handling everything.

He noticed that summoning spells, or rather creation spells as Nolis originally defined them as, follow the same logic as the shield. You allocate the energy and feed it but once it has taken what it needs it just exists on its own until it is dismissed or fails. The same kind of mental link to the spell exists and almost to prove it to himself, as he cut the link to the creation spell Tellastro disappeared in a puff of smoke and an echoing shriek.

Shaking his head for a moment, Gilliam processed the events that just happened. Though the Creation magic was interesting, he could create sentient beings with it, he just needed to really get better at imagining what he was after, especially personality wise.
“If the magic circle has a control part, why didn't the Mighty Tellastro listen?” Gilliam had a taunting tone on the ‘Mighty Tellastro’ words.

Nolis had stopped laughing, but was still smiling widely as he replied. “That is partly your fault, since you imagined a random Imp, your imagination forced the spell circle to not work as intended. Since there is a mental link in the creation aspect it can override the next part. It can probably be improved but that’s how I got it working.”
Holding out his hand at the edge of this desk, the little caterpillar he created before came crawling out of its shadow into his hand.
“With some practice you can get interesting and weird creatures into the world. They won’t last forever, unless you feed them every now and then. And if you want them to actually eat something you need to consider their internal organs and digestive system... Often it’s just easier to feed them energy like when you created them.”

This made a lot of sense to Gilliam, if you created something living it would burn energy, but if it’s created without the needed organs for consumption then it cannot eat on its own and would have to be recharged like a spell.
“Well, that’s the basics of creation, but how does the bastardization thing work?” Gilliam didn’t think this was the real word for it, but it was the word Nolis used when explaining things.

“The bastardization, or the Anima as it’s actually called, is to inject a mind or soul into something. This is different from what Aether or Telekinesis can do, as those spells only manipulate something without autonomy, Anima magic gives it a mind of its own. However it doesn’t always let it move. If you give a mind to a pen, a chair, a door, it will have ways to think and plan and such, but a mind doesn't give you the power to move. However if you merge Aether’s movement and Darkness’ Anima, you can create sentient objects that can move around and.. act.”
Nolis explained this as he moved his finger through the slender string-like tentacles of his little creation.
“Because of this corpses are very commonly used for it, as they used to have life they can be reanimated by darkness magic. Just as Aether can make a skeleton move through direct interaction, giving a skeleton enough darkness magic can allow it to move its bones like muscles were there. The past presence of life is the only reason this works, and it’s why people consider this an unholy bastardization of life.”
Nolis didn’t seem to have a problem with this, which kind of made sense.

Gilliam pondered this for a moment, and it somewhat made sense. He didn’t like the idea of the corpses of his loved ones being animated through necromancy, so he saw the reason for the stigma. And it sort of made sense to how it could be animated at all, if Darkness magic used life energy it could instil some life energy into things that once held life... Or something. It made a bit of sense but was somewhat hard to understand.
“How does that kind of magic work?”

Nolis explained the concept of that magic as well, which was surprisingly similar to creation magic, just rather than creating something physical the spell was sort of attached to something, not entirely different to the flight spell.
He couldn’t give exact and super detailed explanations of the raising of undead nor of the curse-like spells, he had general concepts and understanding but his speciality lay in the Creation type spells, in which he gave Gilliam some more insight. The extra information focused around the mindset of things and how combat can make that problematic. The optimal solution is to have a magic circle for each creature that uses a predefined set of explanations so there won’t be a need to try and remember all details during combat. Though it will complicate the magic circle considerably, Gilliam might be one of the few that can do this due to his understanding of the runes.
Gilliam took highly detailed notes about the runes and spell circles he was shown, since they were much more complicated than he was used to doing he didn’t trust himself to remember them properly. Nolis didn’t seem to mind but he did explain that if those went public it would mean a lot of problems for him.

After a few more hours of discussion and talks, examples, tests and the like, Gilliam left Nolis to his research. The strangest thing was almost that Savia managed to sleep through the whole ordeal, she was healing and would probably sleep a lot in the future as well.

Knowing that the girls were fighting in the dome he considered going over to them but instead decided to retire to his room, he had a few ideas that he needed to test. Until now he had been using very simple magic circles, but even so it took a second or two to create them, especially the ones with more runes. Though it was true that he could think of the runes just as easily as words or letters in English, he still had to think about it and in a life or death situation this could really make things problematic.
His idea was macros, coming from a heavy computing and coding background has helped him understand the logic in which the spells are set up, they were basically programming and codes following their own language and rules. But it still took time setting up even the simplest of spells. Things like the light spell which could be done with two runes didn’t take that long, about half a second. Same with things like the Aether dart, which took a bit over that. Those only really worked if he had the mental capacity to think of them. He could train and train and train to get the mastery of this, but before he put in that time he wondered if the process could be simplified.

Finding himself in his room fast enough he wanted to first test the idea, could a structured concept of an unstructured spell work as a ‘macro button’ to create the correct spell circle?
Since you could have spells do things based on concept, could spells be created to ‘remember’ spell circles?
The first thing he did was to make a test magic circle, this was using the light spell, many multiply runes as well as the Orb and Weak runes, the idea was that it created a bunch of tiny weak glowing orbs. It wouldn’t work well for illumination but that was not the point, it was supposed to be as complicated and safe as possible. The weak nature was also to allow repeatability without eating his mana reserves.
This didn’t take long, he even wrote it down to make sure he didn't have to keep it in mind, timing himself, because of the overcomplicated choice of runes and lines it took four seconds to get it right.

Now started the testing, how do you make a spell that projects a complete picture without you also remembering it clearly?
He tried a lot of things: having it reference a piece of paper and pointing towards it, failure. Having it based on just concepts like him wanting this spell to be cast, failure. He tried naming it and using the name as a concept, also a failure. He was able to have the whole magic circle projected at once but this needed such a clear mental image that he actually used much longer to prepare his mind before he was ready to project it.
However, he was able to instantly project it so the possibility was there. Though still failing he felt he was on the road to success. Considering for a moment to play with merging minds or altering his own was immediately ignored, someone as new to things like that as he was could render him braindead or worse... He didn’t want to even consider gambling on that.

There was a knock on his door, this broke him out of his concentration and testing, the room was incredibly bright with a large collection of the dimly glowing spots at the moment. Dismissing the active spell fixed that as he walked over to the door and opened it.
Outside stood Angela and Petal. Ohshit, he had kind of forgotten them...
“Err... Hi.” He forced a smile.

“There you are.” Angela stated somewhat disappointed. “I thought you were going to come find us after you were done talking to Nolis.”
She walked into the room without asking for permission, Petal followed only a short distance after her.

Their clothing was tattered and worn, no doubt from their fighting. It seemed that the Dome worked wonders on healing you and... stopping you from dying, but it didn’t do much for your attire.
“I had a lot to think of, and something to test afterwards.”

Angela stopped in her tracks for a moment. “You didn’t create something... slimy... did you?” She looked around in the room for a few seconds seemingly trying to find the slimy creature he had potentially created.

“No, I didn’t create anything, I mainly had some ideas about Macros, ways to instantly project an entire magic circle. It won’t do much for the smaller things but for the larger ones it should be good. I haven’t had much success yet, though.” He sounded deflated at the end, but he still had hope.
He will find a way to do this! He just needed to figure it out first.

Angela sighed. “You’re not the first one who thought of that idea. Speak to Jial, he teaches Speed casting classes.”

Gilliam felt stupid, the second she mentioned that he remembered seeing that Jial’s magic circles just flashed into existence for a split second before disappearing. And that was for semi complicated ones with several rules as well.
He’s been so focused the whole time on learning this that he didn’t even consider the fact that he was absolutely not the first mage who wanted to cast faster...
“I... feel a bit dumb now...” He couldn’t do anything but admit it, he needed to learn to stop and think, perhaps ask someone who knows more about things that he does.
Sure, he might be the Heptagon Mage and know the magical runes like a language, but the people here are still mages with god knows how many decades of experience and experimentation.

“Aaaaaanyway-” Angela took control over the conversation, snapping Gilliam out of his little bubble of thought. “-Petal is making tremendous progress!” Angela looked both happy and proud.

“Oh? That’s great!” Gilliam exclaimed, forgetting himself for a moment. This was indeed very good news!

“She learns perhaps a bit too fast.” Angela’s expression soured a little, this felt like a form of envy which made a lot of sense. Gilliam remembered this kind of thinking back at school in the modern world, when he helped a fellow student about something he found simple, only for said student to apparently have a super knack for it and surpass him in no time at all.
It’s always good, but there is some envy involved.

“I only learn this fast because I have a good teacher.” Petal replied.
Gilliam couldn’t remember Petal giving compliments before, this felt very good, she was really... to use the pun, blossoming into a proper person.

Her personality was a bit flat when she first came here, which made a lot of sense given her past life and the fact that everything was new. It seems that whatever metamorphosis she went through when he was gone had really done her good.
“That’s good to hear.” Gilliam decided to not speak further of the fact of abandoning them to their training and getting lost in his.
This was also a good hint that he needed to read more...
“Though, I wonder. I don’t know how this works but how will your hand to hand work against larger demons? Petal might be strong but the warriors of her people...”
He didn’t want to call her weak, but realistically speaking she might still be? He didn’t know but he wanted to paint a nasty picture.

“I think we might be fine, I learned some new things with my father the last few weeks, and I’ll teach Petal:” She smiled widely.
Given that she was a bit sad not being able to punch through a tree the first time they met, this felt very different.

“Oh, so you don’t have problems cutting down trees anymore?” Gilliam joked, wanting to start a bullshit discussion for amusement.

“Not at all.” She smirked back, not only ruining Gilliam’s joke but also hinting at the level of improvement.

“Oh, well that’s great! It should increase our chances quite a lot.” He was happy for this, not only for survival and the start of a demon slaying party, but also just for his friends starting to become part of this.
Though he hadn’t been entirely alone up until now, there were people helping out in the first gate event, but he had been alone through his demon realm kidnapping. Not being alone would aid quite a lot.
“I suppose I need to get into Jial’s class tomorrow, and do some testing later on.”

“And you need to join us for training, if we’re going to fight side by side, we need to at least get a rough feel for things.” Angela added as a command.

“Yes, yes. I’ll join you getting beat up.” He had a fake whining tone and amused smile.

Savia was still sleeping. She seemed to be resting quite a lot lately, since healing magic as people here knew it couldn’t regrow her feathers or complete her perfectly it seemed that she was compensating through sleeping.
The rest of the evening went to talking and planning. They ended up planning that Gilliam was ‘allowed’ to avoid training with them as long as he was training elsewhere, but when he went out to test spells they wanted to come with him. Though they wouldn’t be as protected as in the magic dome, Gilliam could heal, Angela could heal herself and they could always just take it a bit easy.

As Angela was getting ready to leave, she mentioned that they had already spoken to the reception about some more clothing for Petal, there should be some outside the door tomorrow morning.
This was great news, Petal absolutely needed more clothes, perhaps they should go shopping at some point once this whole invasion thing was done, for now they were tired and turned in.
Tomorrow was going to be a full day, trying to learn speed-casting and training. He hoped that he could get some magical training in tomorrow as there were a few spell ideas he had been considering, but he didn’t want to test them outside of the quarry; they would be somewhat dangerous.
There was also the sword, finding out how that acted with other elements, tomorrow could be a cool day!