He picked up the rifle, aimed, then squeezed the trigger, not knowing what to expect, and what he got was a small flash of light and then nothing. Huh? He ran over, and the jacket looked untouched. In fact, he didn’t think it had moved at all. Of the bullet, there was no sign. Hmm. He was mentally keeping the spell active despite the tiredness he was feeling already, so he trotted back to his mark and rapidly fired three more rounds at the jacket. Each time, there was a small flash of light or something, and then nothing. Neither the jacket nor the bush moved as much as an inch! Woohoo! He wondered how big and fast the shell would have to be for it to overcome whatever it was the spell was doing. Would it work with flying objects like, say, shrapnel? He had no way of testing those problems, at least not at this moment with the gear he had available. Still, he now had a bulletproof shield! Watch out, bad guys! Ha. He had a mental image of himself walking through a hail of bullets like the Terminator carrying that coffin! Woohoo!

But then he sobered as he felt dizzy. He started seeing stars and cut the spell, but he was so drained he nearly fell over. he staggered back to the truck for a drink while he considered things. How did you go about finding bad guys, and is that what he really wanted to do? And would the government be keen on him wandering around doing almost superhero stuff without wanting to study and use him themselves? No. Almost certainly not. Hmm. The last thing he wanted was notoriety. There would be no respite for him, his family, or even his friends. FBI, NSA, KGB, or whatever the current incarnation of them was, bloody Mossad, the Chinese, sheesh. They’d be all over him like the plague! Right. No public displays without a good cover! Damn, that meant no showing off for the girls! He realized that not showing off was going to be the hardest thing of all. Fuck!

Very well, so be it. He had recovered somewhat from holding the kinetic shield on the bush, so it was time to get back to the magic spells. He had thought about fireballs which should be doable in an oxygen atmosphere. He had even come up with a spell that he thought would work. He focused on a bush some distance away and cast the spell, which caused the atoms to vibrate and create heat. A few seconds and a sort of distortion appeared in the air, and then poof!

The whole bush and the air in the immediate area all exploded in a fireball! Which didn’t last very long nor spread to other nearby bushes, which was fortunate, he realized somewhat ruefully as he studied the smoldering remains. The sheer ferocity of the blaze that had engulfed the bush had surprised him. The bush kept smoldering for a while, even though the wood had to be green and full of sap. The surrounding bushes were not all that suitable for getting a brush fire going, which was lucky. He wouldn’t want to use it on any old brush, though! From his previous experience with the few spells he had come with already, he knew he would need to practice the spell to improve control and power, but well, now he was really starting to feel like a wizard from a fantasy novel! And it was all really just basic science, well, not the translocation perhaps, nor the bullet thing, he had to admit. Well, it was sort of, but the force punch thing he was using to push the roulette wheel ball around was, well, it wasn’t really standard physics either, he supposed. At least the fireball spell was basic physics, pretty much, except that he used mental abilities to cause it to happen. Damn. He realized he was still using real physics for the basis of his “magic,” just using it to do things real physics didn’t allow. He supposed he was a sorcerer now. Maybe. Bah, who cares! I can throw fireballs! He laughed out loud and kept smiling to himself all the way home.

Just a quick update:
Taroniah & Kyron Unite is with the editor and should be released around the end of the month – I was hoping for a late January release date but it appears to be slipping into the 1st week of February.
The next book will be The Mercenary – the first of the Count of the Western Marches series which is Princess Gizel’s second series. Probably early April
After that will be Taroniah at Home
Probably late June
Then Kyron the Conqueror
Maybe early September
Then the Kelad Conflict the 4th New Federation book
Probably in November.

release dates at provisional and not cast in stone!

For those interested I have another story set in Pam Uphoff’s universe – totally unrelated to the first that I am working on

I have submitted a short story about Bargan – when he is in his final year at the Academy – and has to deal with a snooty noble.
This may grow into a complete Bargan novel – not sure yet.
I have another vague idea for a Taroniah story set after Taroniah at Home but I have not real plot yet.
I do have an alt-history story about a yachtsman dropped back tot he Maine coast in like the 12th century and finds the survivors of Welsh Prince Madoc’s first expedition being overwhelmed by the natives.
And of course I have other stories – besides Jason who runs to 5 books at present – most just bits and pieces – 2 is 3/4 done and 5 is 1/2 done….

Anyway – I will press on with The Mercenary

He also found he was mentally exhausted from holding the spell on the two targets at such a distance. He considered trying a couple of other ideas he had thought of, but he was so exhausted mentally that in the end, he packed it in and headed home with lots to think about. The following two days, he read up on kinetic energy and energy transference, and then a crazy idea began to form regarding molecular structure. So, what about using the bullet’s energy to break down the molecular structure of the bullet and then any remaining energy being neutralized by incinerating the atoms? Is that going to work? He played around with the idea but could reach no firm conclusions because his understanding of molecular structure and energy transmutation simply wasn’t good enough. E=MC² was all well and good, but he was a historian, not a physicist!

He thought about that for a bit. Hmm. Did he need to follow normal physics? It wasn’t like you could do this shit according to ordinary physics anyway. He thought about the translocation spell, the force spell he used to control the roulette wheel ball, and the force field he’d used to stop the bullet. None of them were things you could do as far as regular physics was concerned. Yes, they were essentially obeying the laws of physics in the sense that they were doing real things. The translocate spell was simply relocating all the atoms of the transported item to a different location in the space-time continuum. The force spell he used on the roulette ball was something else, as was the force field thing, he guessed. No matter. He threw conventional physics out and concentrated on coming up with a spell that did what he wanted, regardless of whether it obeyed the laws of physics or not. It took a bit of time, but he came up with a spell design that essentially did a magic hand-wavy thing to solve the kinetic energy punching a dent in him problem. The spell took the bullet’s kinetic energy and used it to break down the bullet into stationary individual atoms, with any energy left over being radiated as light. The spell was complicated and would be hard to throw, and he rather thought it violated one or more laws of physics, but in terms of the magic spell system, or at least the magic spell system as far as he could work it out, the spell he came up with made perfect sense. Armed with this improvisation, he headed back out to the test ravine to try it out, although he was not really expecting much, given his dodgy treatment of physics! He returned to the same spot, and while he dressed the beat-up bush in the now unwearable jacket, he ran the spell through his head several times to ensure he had it right. Satisfied, he stepped back from the jacket-draped bush, threw the spell, and wandered back to his firing mark.

Sorry people. I went on holidays and forgot to update this while I was away. Double length does today to make up for it.

He looked up the web page she had sent him a link for where he could get some idea of what was involved and the costs of taking part. Right, so there was accommodation available at this hotel or that hotel while travel to and from the dig was included and all up it came to four and half thousand pounds. How much was that in dollars? Right. Plus, food and spending money. Airfares. Man! And in return, as a mere assistant, he would get to lug dirt and rubble away from the site! Ha! Alright, he had to admit it could be interesting to be on a real dig. But the cost! He sent back a reply that indicated he was interested but had to work out how to finance the trip, which gave him an out if he decided not to go. He told her he’d get back to her in a couple of weeks as he would have to talk to his folks about the money, and his dad was going interstate on work for a few days.

He went back to fiddling with magic ideas. Stopping bullets would be handy. But how. His dad owned an old Winchester that he never used anymore, which Jason decided he’d borrow to test his ideas. If he managed to come up with any, that was. Right. Down to brass tacks. So how far could he teleport or translocate, which he thought was a more accurate description of what he was doing. He would always associate Star Trek with the word teleport, breaking down the person or object and re-assembling it somewhere else. As far as he could determine, what Urasmian’s travel spell did was simply change the object’s location, and it could apparently do so across multiple universes! The limit seemed to be that the location had to be known.

What else? He could move objects with like kinetic energy or something. That was what he was doing with the roulette balls. Could he create some type of magic forcefield that would stop things? He spent the next three days trying various things before coming up with something that seemed to create a solid wall of force that was strong enough to stop things he threw at it. He had to limit his practice till after mum and dad had gone to work each day. His dad was back to working at a local site for the moment, and he was taking the truck to work, which made things difficult. Right. But his dad was going interstate shortly, which would mean he could take the truck and head out into the mountains and find a quiet spot away from everyone where he could see what a bullet would do.

His dad left on Monday, so he planned to head out Tuesday. The sky was overcast, with the occasional darker cloud producing about of drizzle to dampen things down as he left the house. It was the sort of light rain that would create slippery conditions on the roads without actually washing the muck off, so he made sure to drive carefully. He worked his way out of suburbia and drove up into the hills beyond Jamul. He had studied the area on Google Maps and found what he thought looked to be the ideal spot for his experiments. He had spotted a track that turned off a secondary road and then wandered along a small ravine that twisted and turned. It had to be some sort of access track for forestry people or maybe the local park rangers, as it led nowhere that he could see. Hopefully, the sound of the gunshots would be muffled by the terrain, and he would not attract any undue attention! There were no houses in the immediate area, and once there, he could see the track was probably only used very rarely as the few vehicle tire marks were very faint.

The track and the ravine appeared perfect for what he had in mind, he decided, as he drove in off the sealed road. After he had driven a bouncy mile or so along the somewhat narrow track, he found a small grove of trees and bushes growing beside what would be a small creek after any significant rain. The light drizzle that was intermittently falling from the grey skies had not been sufficiently heavy so far to get the stream running. He studied the site but decided there would be no flooding problem without the rain getting a whole lot heavier. The sandy soil appeared to be doing a good job of soaking the current wetness up! According to the weather website he liked to use, the rain would stay light for the rest of the day and clear away overnight. Good. He had no desire to be caught in some flash flood!

He found a small flattened area off to the left of the main track and parked the truck out of the way just in case someone did come along. Getting out, he wandered over to a gnarly-looking tree that he decided would be his first test victim. He closed his eyes for a second and brought up the kinetic shield spell in his mind, checking it over, and then opening his eyes, he cast it on the tree. He stepped back till he was a good fifty feet away, then raised the rifle and shot the tree. Nothing appeared to happen. Hmm. He came over to the tree and felt the force field. Yep. In place. He looked around the area at the foot of the bush, and there was the bullet. It was rather flattened and, ouch, hot! All right, that worked. But what about the energy transfer from the impact? All that energy had to go somewhere, some went into flattening and heating the bullet, but he guessed most had been absorbed by the tree, which, being anchored in the ground, must have simply absorbed it. Hmm.

Right. He needed something a bit less solid to use as a test dummy. He looked around and decided that the small, ragged bush over there would do. Snap off a few branches and then drape his jacket over the bush. He cast the spell and walked back to around fifty feet away again. A bang and the coat and bush went backward hard, the fabric tearing in the branches before coming to rest. Hmm. He ran over and found the force field still intact, but the force of the bullet had pushed the center of the jacket back through the bush for a yard or more, tearing the lining in places as the branches were punched backward by the force of the bullet. The part of the coat that had been pushed back was centered around the point of impact like he had shoved it with a stick, a really hard shove! Right. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the shield, but he could imagine his guts being splattered by the force of such a strike even though the bullet would never actually reach his skin. Eek.