The Far Side of Utopia

Ah-ha, I bet you were just checking to see what excuse I came up with this time, but it’s a comic! Bet you weren’t expecting that!

The grenade was probably significantly more damage to the building structure than the thrower seems to have intended. The skyway is still intact, but a large part of the floor and walls blew out. In Panel 7, Arkady is trying to catch Naomi with his magic, but fails because she’s far to resistant to magic at the moment for it to work. Naomi is probably referring to Mium’s ability to do this. Some of you can probably guess what that’d work for Mium better than Naomi, as no matter how strong she is, she’d lack the leverage to just grab stab her fingers into a concrete building facing while falling. Not that would really really stop her. She has referenced running up a wall before which also doesn’t actually work with physics, it just makes it harder since there’s secondary magics needed, not just trying harder. Mium, however, can cheat that.

Fortunately we’ve seen Naomi fall a lot further than this. It’s not actually that clear from the panel I realize, but she only fell a few stories, not the ground. The explosion sent her slightly backwards, causing her to hit the wall well before the ground, and ultimately land on the ledge there after falling to grab the wall.

We’ve seen before that Arkady can sort of fly; while a lot of mages can do sort of an “infinite jump”, they just cannot really change directions more than once or twice (both Kally and Tyler can do that sort of “leap to the top of a building” flight if they really want), Arkady’s method is slightly better than that, as he modifies his own weight, and the controls the air pressure around himself to cause winds he can fly with; flying using wind would normally wouldn’t give enough lift, but if you fiddle with how much gravity is effecting you first, it can work; it’s not easy magic, but Arkady is pretty good at messing with air pressure to cause wind, and it’s a major part of how he can whip fire. It’s not really an innate magic, but more of a specialized magic of his family – the difference being innate magic would be something he was born with, specialized in this case more means it’s a family technique he knows, but wasn’t inherently born with. There’s a good case to be made that family lines tend have some affinity in their specialized magic, but it might just be because they tend to learn it from an early age. Some people in Arkady’s family are much better at control fire through a complicated set of magic involving heat, air pressure, and other things; it’s a bit different than Rovak’s explosion (and has different trade offs; while Rovak’s magic is brutally efficient at dealing with lesser enemies, we saw it’s weakness against Tyler where if he cannot make an explosion near a target, it’s harder for him damage them – preferably just exploding the target, but that won’t work vs. a powerful mage; the Family mages tend to favor magic that’s more effective against powerful mages – like we saw from Camilla’s magic, where they execute magic close to themselves and then unleash the result of it physically to stop magic interference from being as effective… as we saw with Elizabeth, it can be countered by just tanking the damage, but it cannot be stopped by magical interference as easily, as the effect, though caused by magic, is still a physical phenomena)…. that was a really long aside. Ah well, you guys are used to my rambling by now…

Similarly. Naomi probably could jump on a Eidos Construct without it breaking inherently, though we’ve seen if she starts unleashing a crazy amount of mana she can start breaking apart at least blue ones by brute force… but it’s something she’d have to be a little wary of, though I doubt she’d really consider that.