Steel and Mana

Chapter 288 – Light Waves

I was sitting in my office with Sasha, Mikan, and Merlin, talking about my twins and their magic.

“So, they do it the same way as all three of you?” I asked, wanting to summarize everything.

“Should be the case.” Merlin nodded after a momentary pause, “None of us felt anything out of order, and they also described how they mentally formed the spell, describing it to us.”

“They did…” I muttered, looking at the drawing before me, replicating the spell my children came up with by themselves.

Studying it, it was, in short, a gravity spell. A gravity manipulation spell. Utilizing it, they could mark something and disable the effect of gravity on it, making it weightless. Then, they just create a magical gravity well, pulling it to themselves. It was ingenious in a way, and I felt proud of my kids, but it also scared me a little. Every time a spell is used, a formation is visible. Even the one they came up with, yet when they used it, there was nothing.

“There are two possibilities why,” Sasha spoke, reading my thoughts. "One is that the spell’s light is outside of what human eyes can see. Leon talked about light we can’t perceive with our eyes.”

“True.” Merling nodded, crossing his arms and scratching his chin.

“Like the X-ray thing?” Mikan asked, looking back and forth between us, seeing me nod. "But... we should have still felt its presence. I think..."

“The second option is that they are born with a special gift.”

“Or both,” Merlin added to my wife’s conjecture, but I also had a new idea the moment Mikan brought up X-rays.

“What if they have magic in their... blood. Or in their bones? No. On their bones?” I asked, making them shudder, and I saw Sasha’s face darken.

“Even if that is the case, we can’t tell!” She stated at once. Her voice was firm, and it told us that we should not even dream about trying to check it.

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“I am not going to cut up my own kids!” I answered with the same tone, making her soften her expression apologetically as she lowered her head. “We can check it without hurting anybody.”

“How– Oh!”

“Mikan gets it.” I leaned back with a sigh, “The question is, can you do it?”

“I don’t know," she muttered, while the other two already realized what we were talking about. "I need to know more to get an idea of it so I can start thinking about the hows. Maybe it would also help me understand the type of magic I am most familiar with."

“I am not a scientist, so I can’t tell you the details. I only know it in broad attributes.” I sighed again, furrowing my brows, trying to recall everything I knew about light. "Well," I started after about ten minutes of silent rumination, leaning back in my chair as I tried to explain the details swirling in my head, "X-rays... They're like light, but not light we can see. How should I say it? They're kind of... sharper, I guess? No, finer. Yes. Like threads thinner than hair, so thin that our eyes just don’t catch them, but they’re still there, doing their thing.”

“Doing their thing?” Sasha asked as she raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I nodded, gesturing with my hands, “light goes through stuff. Photons pass through matter, at least, to my knowledge.”

“Then why is it dark in a room with no windows?” Merlin asked, making me rub my temple.

“Because not all of it travels through matter? Part of it that we can perceive gets stuck? Look, I am a complete amateur when it comes to this, okay? I won’t be able to answer questions; let me continue! This passing through is what makes light, or in this case, this type of light different. Regular light—what we CAN see—bounces off things. Walls, clothes, skin. That’s why we see them and why we see them in color. But there is a part of light that goes on without bouncing.

“Like this X-rays?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure about myself. Half of this knowledge was information from my younger years of my past life. My biggest issue was that they were my memories, mostly from my childhood, before my enhancement. It was knowledge that I wasn’t sure was foolproof or even correct. Haah… “They don’t stop at the surface.” I continued, “They push through skin and muscles like it’s water, showing what’s underneath.”

“Bones! They bounce off the bones, no?” Mikan chimed in, her eyes lighting up. “That’s how we could see what’s inside people without hurting them, right?”

“Exactly,” I said, snapping my fingers. “They’re like the part of light that ignores everything except what’s dense enough to slow them down, like bones or metal. That’s why I was thinking... if with your magic we could do something similar, maybe we could create a device or a spell that allows us to see through solid objects. See-through our bodies and see what is inside.”

“Even if Mikan can do it,” Merlin hummed thoughtfully, tilting his head, “And she can produce it; how are we going to see the results?”

“We need to create a counter-spell that translates it.” Sasha chimed in, folding her arms. “Think about it—our enemies had a similar device with their spying cameras. They recorded light, capturing images, and there were colors on it that were more than what we could see. Then, they had a device that could decode it. If I recall, that thing should arrive soon; it has been weeks since Pion discovered it and sent it to us. We can dismantle it and use its principles.

"And if our magic could be used even more precisely than this natural X-ray light. If we manage to make it, we can focus it and manipulate it perfectly, allowing us to see things we can’t view otherwise.“ Mikan nodded, feeling enthusiastic.

“If we can work this out,” Merlin smiled, looking at us, “we can create something that would give us an edge over any other power. We could see through cities, find hiding enemies, and tell where people were without entering the buildings. More than that, we could reveal if some place was magically reinforced or designed and find their traps because we could peer through their castle walls.”

“Or we could use it to heal others.” Mikan added, approaching it from the opposite angle, “We could look into people and see why they are sick. No?”

“First,” I raised a hand, “Let us see if we can come up with anything! Mikan and I will try to devise a spell.” I looked at them, finalizing our next step: “Then, we can start refining it and implementing it. As for the twins…” I chuckled, “Let’s just be happy they are healthy~!”

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The following weeks reminded me of the days I’d had in my early teens, studying and trying to get my grades up. Of course, back then, I failed and ended up in the army, unable to skip out on my mandatory service as I never got into a college. Not until I got myself my current brain. Anyway… Mikan and I threw ourselves into the work with the kind of single-minded determination that any student would when they worked on a deadline. Not that we had one, but still. Every day, for six straight hours or sometimes more, the two of us huddled in either my office or on the testing fields, heads bent over formations and scribbled notes, testing and retesting concepts. We scrapped about a hundred, rewriting the formations multiple times.

Every piece of the puzzle had to be methodically constructed. Each test brought its own frustrations: some formations fizzled out without a hint of producing light or even activating. In other cases, they nearly scorched the air around us with uncontrolled bursts of energy, shooting towards the sky. The latter ones… I shelved them because, who knows, maybe I could refine them into a beam weapon later. Still, I was nervous that there was a high possibility that they would cause cancer to their users. I remembered the dangers of playing with these types of experiments.

What kept us looking past our failures was the fundamental understanding that light acts as both a particle and a wave. Luckily, that discovery was famous enough for me to remember it in the form of a memory from my childhood. Part of snippets of knowledge I’d retained through sheer curiosity long before my memories were enhanced. Mikan, for all her talent with magic, wasn’t familiar with the science behind it, so I had to explain it to her—best to my abilities, of course, but it was enough to give her a framework from which to work off of.

“Think of it like water ripples,” I’d said one morning, my hands sketching invisible waves in the air. “Light moves in waves—up and down, side to side. The distance between the peaks of those waves determines their properties. Longer waves? That’s a red light. Shorter waves? Blue. Go even shorter, past what we can see, and you get ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays—things invisible to our eyes but still part of the same spectrum.”

“Hmmm… So… if we’re going to make light we can’t see, we need to control those… ripples?” Mikan asked as she frowned at me, her brow furrowed in thought.

“Exactly,” I’d said, feeling a flicker of pride at her quick grasp of the concept. She is just as bright as anybody else. If she one day starts doubting herself again, I will need to spank her. “But not just control them.” I continued before my mind began to wander, “We need to tune them. Like adjusting the strings on a guitar to play the exact note we want.”

It sounded simple enough in theory. In practice, it was a nightmare. The formations we built to generate light were temperamental, prone to flickering out or producing light so faint it barely illuminated the room. It wasn’t until the second week that we had a breakthrough: a simple formation etched into a polished sheet of silver that, when activated, emitted a steady beam of pure white light.

“Finally! I was starting to think we’d never get this far!” The moment it worked, Mikan let out a whoop of triumph, jumping a little.

“Don’t celebrate yet,” I muttered, though I couldn’t stop a grin appearing on my face. “This is just the first step. We’ve got light, but now we need control. But you were perfectly right! We should start using something that is reflective. We will need mirrors; maybe it helps us and the formation focus it…”

Not that long later, with our current influx of raw materials, we had an elaborate setup with a working spell that created light. We let it shoot its rays through mirrors, bouncing it so we could observe the changes happening to it as we began adding and subtracting from the base formation.

Her affinity for manipulating light-based spells proved invaluable as she began tweaking the formation, bending, and shaping the beam with a precision I could only marvel at. This could be only done by someone who could feel magic. I wouldn’t be able to do it. Slowly, painstakingly, she learned to adjust its wavelength, shifting it from the warm glow of visible light to the ultraviolet range and beyond. By the third week, she could produce X-rays—at least, that was my guess because she could feel the spell working and describe the feeling of its vibration in the magic originating from her body.

“Unbelievable,” Mikan murmured, looking at the working spell, “It is invisible like the twins' spell, but it is working. I can feel it being on."

"Which also tells us, that their formation was not invisible... It was not there..." I muttered, but she didn't hear me, half-confirming what I was thinking of. That my kids may have a gift... on their bones.

"Now we just need something to reverse it so we can see the results, too!”

“Before that,” I spoke again, a bit louder, remembering the stacks of papers I had in my office. "We need to be aware of the dangers it can also pose to life itself.”

I wasn’t joking because with progress came caution. The more we experimented, the more I remembered about the dangers of these invisible spectrums of light. X-rays were relatively mild if used sparingly, but gamma rays? If Mikan could produce those… Those were a different beast entirely, capable of tearing apart the very building blocks of life. The realization left me uneasy, and I spent the next few nights writing page after page of notes, documenting everything I knew—or thought I knew—about the electromagnetic spectrum.

I called it The Book of Light, though it was more a compendium of warnings than anything else. I outlined the potential uses of each type of light, from the harmless warmth of infrared to the deadly precision of gamma rays, stressing the importance of restraint and understanding. If not for the current people of Avalon, then to those who one day may be born here and be able to use it. I explained how prolonged exposure to high-energy waves could damage living tissue and how specific wavelengths could heat objects or even ignite them. Every word was a reminder to myself—and to anyone who might read it after I’m gone—that this was a tool, not a toy.

“Do you think it’s enough?” Mikan asked one evening, glancing over the neatly bound pages of the book.

“For us? Maybe,” I replied. “For anyone else? I don’t know. The moment this knowledge spreads, it’s out of our hands, so I will place this under some security clearance. This won’t go into public print. People could use it for healing… or for destruction. Best to keep this one close to ourselves.”

“You’re right,” she said softly. “At least this way, we can set the standard.”

What remained for us was to create its counterpart, which made it possible for us to see it in action. To peer into the invisible, so to speak. That came down to Sasha and Merlin. With our refined spells, they managed to work quite fast and put together a prototype in only a few weeks. By the end of the month, we’d refined the design enough to create a working prototype. Merlin was suitably impressed, wanting to do more with it, though Sasha’s concern was evident as she flipped through my notes.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked, her voice low. “This could be very dangerous, Leon.”

“I’m not sure about anything,” I admitted. “But we’ve come this far. Don’t worry; first, we will test it on animals.” I smiled at her, making her shrug and nod. She couldn’t lie. She was worried about our twins… What if we find out their bones are like the monsters that come through every year? What would that mean? And… how could that happen?

I had no answers to that, but at least we would know. Then, we can find the answers as life goes on.