The Far Side of Utopia

We are still in good shape with the buffer; though as I’m drawing them as full pages the patreon page might not go up till late today or tomorrow, when it comes up we’ll have a buffer of two, so that’s still progress.

The last panels are technically in sequence, it’s just a very rapid sequence. Running that many powerful (if fairly simple) calculations simultaneously would by simply impossible for most mages, but Ila is exceedingly good at rapid fire and repeated calculations. Even her primary acceleration magic is only really impressive in how many, how rapidly and how precisely she deploys them – there’s a fair number of mages that could a calculate a few acceleration calculations simultaneously, there is very few if any that could align them like Ila does – it just takes a superhuman degree of speed and precision, and put enormous strain on someone due to not being able to fully reset their calculation parameters, trying to calculate that fast results in each successive calculation being slightly more corrupted and harder to complete; each calculation in sequence without a pause is slightly harder, as is each simultaneous calculation. Not to mention a ridiculous consumption of mana.

Of course, many mages seem capable of somewhat superhuman feats, so it’s not entirely impossible for natural or particularly innate mage to achieve something similar in theory. Someone powerful enough can use one or two vastly more powerful and complicated calculations to do approximate the result (in total kinetic energy imparted to the target). Certain mages can try to exploit or leverage physics to do some of the work for them if they are both clever and powerful. But it’s unlikely that there is any currently living human mage on Palindra that can impart as much sheer acceleration on an physical object as rapidly as Ila can.