Weaker spell shoots a hole in stone

I looked around at the disheveled warehouse and decided on a target, then took aim at a big chunk of what looked like roofing. I lifted my arm and pointed one finger at it as though it was a pistol or a cannon.

Start off small, I decided. No need to blast the entire warehouse down to the bedrock. Just…something that could give me an idea of how powerful Medea’s “magic” really was.

“Ερε Εκάτη.”

Something hot and powerful surged and gathered at my fingertip, then a bloom of bright, pink light appeared and shot forth as a ray. Through the glow, I could just barely make out the patterns of circles and lines that traced themselves around, in front, and behind the bloom as though they were the lenses through which the beam was being focused and condensed.

The aftermath was more than I expected. What I thought would happen was more like a small explosion, like the rubble would just be blown apart. What actually happened was something more like how sci-fi movies and popular Aleph games like Halo (for what little I knew of those things; I read more fantasy, myself) tended to treat laser weapons — the beam had bored straight through, carving out a perfectly circular cone that was charred and smoking, and it had continued going, searing its way through everything else, until it hit the far wall. Even from where I was standing, I could see the tiny, blackened hole that had not quite punched all the way through the brick and plaster.

I looked down at my hand; the black glove covering it was untouched. It wasn’t even singed.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

That was one of Medea’s weaker spells. Still meant for offense, still meant to do serious damage, but the upscaled version of that was firing beams like they were raindrops and reducing everything in the way to rubble. That was the nuclear option, as I’d seen it being called on PHO, or according to the much more crass version, “Fuck everything in that general direction.” This version was supposed to be more precise, more contained, and just less devastating, and it had still gone through both my target and almost everything behind it.

I glanced around.

If this was the kind of damage it could do, though, then maybe I shouldn’t be practicing with it in what was my “official” training grounds? Practicing my Celtic martial arts here would be a lot harder to pull off if I accidentally drew the attention of everyone in ten square miles by blowing the roof off of this building or turning the wall into melted slag.