I smiled as the rabbit emerged from the portal, its body intact. It was evening, with most of the men resting after a hard day of marching, while I was standing by my tent, which was sparse but for my cot and the two small portals glowing on the ground.

  A success, but a trying one, utilising the Brotherhood’s methodology.

  I didn’t like it. Dimensional magic was complex, and the conventional way of creating portals seemed to be all about willpower and visualisation.

  Though this undeniably worked, I found it both inefficient and dangerous.

  Yet, describing the entire process with mathematics was beyond me.

  What I could do was to focus on parts, creating a hybrid spell, one utilising the principles of both numeromancy and the classical way of casting, which would eventually let me create a fully mathematical formula. I had done something similar with the optical formula of my past life, if in reverse. Unfortunately, the resulting spell was way too Power hungry. The only practical way to cast it was to draw enormous amounts of Power, which meant that I’d have to utilise fire if I wanted it to be effective. The source of Power was even naturally compatible with the heat beam-like spell, not that I’d use it.

  Having cast the portal spell successfully, I could begin. There were three obvious parts of the spell which could likely be adjusted without much trouble.

  The coordinates, the anchor point, and the transported matter.

  Coordinates were self-explanatory. Describing a spatial position mathematically was nothing new to me, though it would not allow me to completely circumvent the limitation of only being able to portal to places with which one is familiar.

  It’d work partially, though. Defining a hundred metres or a hundred kilometres along the x-axis was not a problem, even if the amount of Power necessary for the spell would be drastically different. Accounting for the world’s curvature made things a bit trickier, but not beyond me. I would, however, have no way to know where such a long-range portal would open, unless I had been in that place previously. It could be underground, it could be in a tree or dozens of metres up in the sky.

  Still, the poke-it-with-a-stick approach would be a viable testing method. Or tying a rat and throwing it through, then reeling it in.

  The anchor point served to establish the relativity of the portal. Essentially, a spell that merely transported matter a kilometre to the left would always be wildly off course thanks to the rotation and movement of the planet. An anchor point was necessary to avoid such mishaps. Mathematically defining it was new ground for me, but I did not think it would be much more difficult than the coordinates

  Unlike my third planned addition, defining the transported matter. This one was where most mishaps with portals came from.

  If your subject comes out in pieces, or not at all, you likely fucked it up.

  Unfortunately, while I believed my current knowledge was sufficient to describe it mathematically, it would be complicated. In the classical way, one had to firmly envision the subject, emphasising their integrity and coherence in their mind, and then… Hope for the best.

  While this sounded rather insane to me, mishaps for skilled practitioners were extremely rare, and the benefit was not insignificant compared to numeromancy, as I would have to do that and much more, manually.

  All this would be a decent amount of work, but doable. It would hopefully result in a much safer and less power-hungry spell.

  However, the core essence of the spell, that being the creation of a spatial connection where there should be none, was not something I was confident in tackling with mathematics.

  It was very likely possible, but I was not confident that even the top mathematicians of my first life could have managed it, and my knowledge was very much lacking compared to theirs. Sure, I was almost certainly better at performing complex calculations in my mind, but that was not a substitute for real depth of expertise.

  The days passed as we marched. Following my breakthrough, progress with portals was rapid.

  Eventually, during another evening, I found myself in front of a person-sized portal, supposedly leading to our previous campsite, with a rope leading into it, one end held in my hand, with only a nervous-looking Monck for company.

  I yanked, causing a rabbit to come flying out of it, much to its dismay. It was, however, intact.

  “Time for phase two,” I murmured, causing Monck’s eyes to snap to me from the rabbit.

  “Go through and back, Monck,” I told the man, who visibly gulped.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Hesitantly, he put his hand inside the swirling vortex, then pulled it out, examining it. It was fully intact.

  “Go on,” I encouraged him. The man looked at me before sighing and resolutely stepping through.

  Then I waited. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Just when I was beginning to think he had either died or made a run for it, the man stepped back inside my tent.

  My eyes roamed over his figure, examining him clinically for any defects, but finding none.

  “Very good,” I said, “Let us repeat the experiment.”

  This time, I would aim for the meadow where Ida Emean had sent me all that time ago.

  The portal winked out, leaving behind a simple stone arch I had made to better tie the spell down.

  I took a deep breath and began chanting. Words in the Elder tongue flowed out of my mouth as Power gathered. All the while, magical formulas streamed through my mind.

  Then, for a single second, all was silent before the portal opened, a fracture in reality itself. Monck stared transfixed, though I had seen the sight many times before. Opening a portal was not where the true difficulty of the spell lay, though it certainly was not something a novice could accomplish either.

  In the following minutes, we repeated the previous experiment, both the rabbit and Monck once again coming out unscathed.

  I nodded in satisfaction. Though I would like to continue testing some more, portal magic was not easy on my stamina. We would have to continue another time.

  “You can go back to your tent, Monck. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.”

  Monck stared for a second at the portal before nodding to me and leaving with hurried steps.

  Twenty days later, over two-thirds of the way to Marnadal, I decided to put portals on the back burner once more. More practice would still benefit me, but I was proficient enough that dedicating the vast majority of my time to the pursuit would be counterproductive.

  My mind was thus turned back towards my new position as a Royal Provost.

  Theoretically, my scope of duties had been massively expanded. Practically, the situation was the same. Right now, the recently named Dreadhold was just a military camp, with me being the commander. In other words, I already had full control of the place, though now my authority was expanded to the handful of villages scattered around in the region.

  Still, though there’d be no changes in the immediate term, the future was another story entirely. Nothing immediate, but the early bird gets the worm.

  Firstly, Dreadhold was now mine for the long term. While I had already intended to do my best in the fort's construction, my new position changed things somewhat, as now it wasn’t just a fort, but my future home.

  Secondly, I had to prepare for Dreadhold being a proper fief. If I did not want to be bogged down with administration in the future, I’d have to secure or train professionals to help me, from clerks to judges. This was not especially pressing, as I doubted the fort’s population would rise into difficult territory for decades, but white-collar workers did not grow on trees. In the worst case, I could likely count on the Queen to help out, but that would not paint me in the best light.

  In any case, there was little for me to do now, bar some preliminary plans.

  I mulled it over, but couldn’t find fault in my logic. It really was a nice gesture from the Queen.

  With nothing else to do about my new position, I returned my attention to matters of magic.

  My next two projects were largely set in stone. Continued polishing of Alzur’s Double Cross and the re-creation of my past life’s flight spell.

  Unfortunately, while I desired little more in this life than to take to the skies again, the strategic advantage of creating monsters was hard to understate.

  The serpent had been merely an imperfect prototype, yet the benefits of its inclusion in the battle had been enormous.

  Flight, on the other hand, would merely enhance my own combat capability.

  Worse, the spell was problematic, to say the least. The Brotherhood had an equivalent, but… well, it was mostly a joke.

  There were two versions of the spell, an active and a passive one. Both were slow, finicky and extremely Power hungry, but the active one was not too difficult to cast. However, you had to maintain the effect, which meant that casting any other spells while flying was impossible. In other words, it made you a helpless target and had no real purpose except scaling a cliff or saving yourself from a high fall.

  The passive one had a short duration of a few minutes, and was unreasonably difficult to actually cast, with the spell chant being over thirty words long, the spell itself being some bizarre mishmash of aerokinesis and telekinesis.

  Both were fairly worthless for my purposes, likely not even usable as a foundation to build something new.

  It was not too surprising. There just wasn’t a good use for flight as it was commonly understood, especially as the sky was not mankind's domain. If one wanted to use flight as a means of travel, they had to consider the very real risk of attracting the attention of flying monsters. And of course, if their travel location was known to them, then portals were incredibly superior.

  In battle, being a lone person in the air would naturally make you a target, and the spell just wasn’t good enough to make that worth it. Those with the skills to create something worthwhile had little reason to, as short-range teleportation worked well enough.

  That didn’t mean that exceptions didn’t exist. In the north, Vilgefortz of Roggeven was said to be capable and fond of flight, and I somehow doubted he was using the commonly known variants. There were others, likely. I had heard rumours that Sheala de Tancarville used it, as well as some southern sorceress called Ironveil. Though rumours around sorceresses tended to not be the most reliable.

  Unfortunately, Tissaia de Vries, or any of the others I could easily contact, were not amongst their number.

  Needless to say, if I wanted something usable, I’d have to make it myself.

  Well, I had a lot of experience in translating spells from my past life to something usable here.

  While necessity forced me to focus on Alzur’s Double Cross, I would not give up flight either. It might take some time, but I was confident in my eventual success.