Having ended the day seeing what a Ben clone looked like after its outer surface had melted away and enjoying a long conversation that night with Myriad about not intentionally creating plainly unethical or otherwise psychotic spells, the following day had begun as planned, meeting up with Amy, Jake, and Yuzu to go around to the last handful of locations that held people who’d managed to gain their eighth levels of magics, doing what would be his second last awakening event before the next wave would come.

And allowed him to get a fair amount of other practice and testing in as he did, forcing bands on the arms of all four of them that he repeatedly cast enchantments on and replaced with new ones at a speed that made the magic on them look blurry to anyone with the mana sense to see them while Jake was subjected to spell practice any time he wasn’t teleporting them, with Thera presently handling transportation giving the perfect room for such, exhausting the man as he did.

Focusing on a tree Ben pointed out in the distance, Jake cast his currently assigned spell before watching as the tree itself vanished, leaving a smoothly cut-off stump but nothing else, leaving the others to try and guess what happened.

“Teleported without space magic?” Amy tried, instantly wrong for the attempt.

“Nope.”

“Some sort of invisibility spell then?” Yuzu guessed, getting the same result.

“Not even close.”

“Neither of you are guessing anything horrific enough,” Thera told them, being all too aware of the horrors of her boyfriend's mind and already having witnessed a few more in earlier spells he’d made Jake try. “It’s definitely been destroyed somehow, but there’s no way I’m getting the little details to it.”

“Well, point to Thera because ding ding ding, it’s been as destroyed as thoroughly as something can be destroyed. I’m lovingly calling this spell total erasure, and it destroys matter at an atomic level through non-affinitied magic while using the space affinity to subtly disperse the resulting release of energy for hundreds of kilometers around us so it doesn’t cause a big explosion. Considering what’s involved, it’s surprisingly not very costly either, though that is just relative to what goes into it. It takes both magics to be awakened and a few good thousand points of mana still.”

“And the drawback?” Thera wanted to know, already understanding fully well that there would in fact be one.

“Ah, well, it’s a complicated spell, but the most complicated part is the space aspect, which also means it’s the easiest to mess up. Screw up there and instead of the energy produced harmlessly dissipating around you, you’d get what we in the technical circles call ‘a big fucking explosion’. One that the caster probably isn’t going to survive.”

“... Jake, you’re never allowed to try to cast that again,” Amy told him once that subtle detail was dropped, getting no arguments for it.

“Agreed. Ben, buddy, come on. You know I’m not responsible enough for a spell like that. Even I know it.”

“Considering that I’m the one who taught you, you’d need to be really careless to screw it up… but yeah, fair. Well, if you don’t think you should, then don’t bother casting it, but for now, onto the next one and for it, we’ll be aiming at that tree right over there.”

Once more he gave his friend the necessary knowledge and once more Jake used it, showing an uncomfortable amount of excitement with that one that already put Amy on edge but before she could say anything, the tree was gone, replaced with a pillar of energy shooting directly into space with both a blinding light as well as level of heat they could still feel even as safely away from it as they were.

“A modified version of the last one,” Thera guessed before either of the other two could. “You said the other one disperses the energy? This one’s focusing and directing it.”

“Awe, Thera, you know me so well. I had him aim it at the sky for safety reasons, but if I get the chance, I’d love to see it aimed at a mountain, just to try and get a better idea of the destructive power we’re working with. In theory, it could also be possible to configure it in the next wave to use demons as the power source and direct the attack at the portal they would come through, though that creates the issue that if he misses by a bit then he’d hit anyone fighting on the other side so it might not be worth it and-”

“No,” Amy cut him off, a definitiveness in her voice that wasn’t addressing anything he was saying, instead focused entirely on the excitement she could see in her own partner’s eyes. “This falls under the same category as the last one, meaning it’s going to be just as easy to mess up. You are not doing it again.”

“Okay, but consider this,” Jake offered, desperately wanting to shoot more energy beams on that scale. “Ben knowledged me up real good so I already know how to do it perfectly, I just need a bit of practice to make sure I can keep doing it and if you’re worried about me messing up, I just need to put up some barriers around me when I do it-”

“Barriers around everything while you do it,” Amy clarified for him. “If you can cover everything but the area you’d be shooting at, at a safe enough distance to try and reduce how bad things will go for you if you mess up, and have the mana to cast all of that safely, then we can talk.”

“Interesting, interesting. Okay, Ben, any chance you could remake my mana and buff bracelets, now that you’ve had all of your awakenings and all?”

“I mean, I can and I will, but remember you have to practice without them for your growth rates. Don’t waste this time not improving your attributes.”

“I’ll only use them to get this spell down over the week and then once a day to practice, that’s not going to be a big hit to me.”

“Alright, sure,” he agreed, breaking the previous crystals on Jake’s arm to remake them with new souls materialized within. “But also remember to aim at the sky until you’ve got it figured out, to only shoot it in unpopulated areas, and not to aim it at anything you can shoot through without seeing what’s behind it. I don’t need you shooting at a wall and discovering there was a parade going on the other side.”

“No worries, I’ll be good and responsible.”

“I doubt that,” Amy sighed, regretting the fact that she’d allowed for any sort of leeway and made a mental note to make sure to mention everything she’d heard about this new spell to Jake’s teachers, if only to get a few more responsible adults around to share their pieces on it.

With nothing more from anyone else, before Ben could move on to get Jake to try whatever the next insane spell was bound to be, his eyes lit up and he gave a cheer, over the moon with what he’d accomplished.

“Success!”

“Oh lord, what did you get him to cast this time?” Amy wanted to know, seeing no change, which was somehow worse than anything else he’d gotten her boyfriend to do up to that point.

“Nothing from Jake, this is purely a Ben special. If you’ll all look at the bands on your arms that I’ve been lovingly enchanting on since we started today, you’ll see that I’ve finally managed to settle on a configuration that actually works.”

“After seeing the other spells you’ve invented, I’m kind of worried about whatever this does,” Amy muttered.

“You shouldn’t because this continues on the trend I have going of making everyone on this planet unfathomably stronger. I’ve officially figured out how to put the effects of my authorities onto items.”

With some discoveries being made along the way too. It seemed that his authorities did in fact manage to pull from both his mana as well as the faith he would naturally produce, both simply at such a low rate that the effect was completely negligible and as a result, he hadn’t been able to get the enchantment to work at all until he started pulling some of the aspects from the two ancient spells he knew that drew on both mana and faith to activate, finally making it possible.

Possible, yet still needing improvement. After those few hours of experimentation with a number of configurations that would have taken years for anyone else to test, he’d finally worked out an arrangement that allowed one to experience the same benefits as when he’d placed his zeroth leveled authority on them, without the need to come back to him to get them refreshed once the effect ended, leaving all of them to look at the new tool in curiosity.

“You know, if you keep this up then by the time the next wave rolls around, the entire planet’s going to be wearing as much jewellery as you,” Jake said offhand, the appearance of Ben’s fingers covered in rings and arms with bands making for quite the sight to any other human who saw him, even if fashion choices were fairly varied across that shared world. “So, how’s it work?”

“It feeds off some of your faith and the bit of mana in the mythril band. And I mean bit. I could make bands out of any normal metal instead so long as there were a couple of flecks of mythril in it, authorities are seriously mana efficient. It was interesting to make too. Despite some apparent similarities to soul magic, given the way both help a target grow, they don’t need to be specialized to a person, meaning unlike soul enchantments, I can set up a factory to pump these out. Meaning I’m going to have to go do that, ugh. I guess that means another long negotiation with the gods about how much these are worth.”

“With the only problem being that they raise evil and destructive skills,” Yuzu pointed out. “You don’t exactly want people training with that in mind.”

“Luckily for everyone, they don’t need to know. These are officially called growth bands, and as far as the world is concerned, they’ll just give some bonuses to help skills and attributes grow. They will give bonuses to skills the holder finds evil or destructive but also to what society at large will and ignoring destructive, if anyone has a skill they view as evil then they just shouldn’t be training it so it won’t grow-”

“Unless it’s passive,” Thera added.

“Okay, yes, unless it’s passive, but these things are going to be immediately handy. For example, Amy and Jake, my two friends with non-affinitied skills they need to level and maybe even awaken if they merge into your other options, destruction magic falls under the umbrella of non-affinitied magic and Amy, it should be included in your non-affinitied augmentation. That means that both skills will grow under my authority. Plus, what people are going to consider destructive and evil are both going to fall across a spectrum, meaning most skills a person holds are going to have the chance to grow. Are magics evil or destructive? Not inherently, but I’m sure most people would agree that they can be used in evil and destructive ways. Combat skills? Clearly the same thing, and oh, would you look at that? Two classes of skills that the world desperately wants to raise, now getting extra bonuses. These are simply too good not to use and spread and the only people who are going to be able to tell what they raise specifically are going to be awakened enchanters and analysis holders who look at them, both being groups the gods can talk to and explain the reasons behind them. These things are going to be great when they get out there.”

It meant the world was going to be able to benefit from the power of a third-tier skill, which brought him back to his desire to raise just one more to that level. As it was, he was able to get so much power out of his authorities when they were turned into enchantments because of all he knew about that field of magic but if he could awaken connect with enchanting like he so desperately wanted then based on how both had grown until that point, he would be able to do the same thing by combining aspects of all of the other awakened skills that world held.

But I still just need to figure out a way to get to that point.