Andrew Rowe - On the Shoulders of Titans

I was reasonably confident that Jin didn’t have a high level Enchanter available, so it probably wasn’t him.

I patched up the carpet, took my school books, and left.

I abandoned the clothes. I didn’t trust that they didn’t have kind of detection enchantments built into them. They weren’t glowing, so it wasn’t likely, but I wasn’t going to take the risk.

School books wouldn’t have the enchantment capacity to handle any serious enchantments. Trials of Judgment had to be made of some kind of special material to be able to handle the magic it was capable of, and I was reasonably confident these books were the same ones I’d left behind. I checked each book with my attunement before packing it away, though, just to be safe.

I also took my few other enchanting supplies: an extra etching rod, clamps for holding the object steady, pens, parchment, and that sort of thing.

After a bit of consideration, I changed my mind about the etching rod and left that one behind. Any enchanted item had a risk of being modified. While I didn’t see any new runes on the rod, the stick that Derek had given me proved that there were ways of hiding enchantments.

After that, I locked my room and headed back to Derek’s place.

I dropped my stuff off there.

“Someone broke into my dorm,” I explained to the others. “Bring me with you if you plan to go back to your own rooms. I’ll check for enchantments.”

Derek looked concerned when he heard the news. “I’ll double-check the security of the mansion. We’re well-protected here, but I’ll take some extra precautions.”

I was glad for that. I also spent a bit of time checking the mansion for anything suspicious myself.

Each room had a standardized set of runes etched into a wall. In a couple specific places, like Derek’s room, there were redundancies for extra protection.

That’s a Citrine-level anti-Divination rune. A pretty standard precaution, and a powerful one.

Hm, I think that’s a teleportation rune linked to a shielding rune.

That would work a little differently from the anti-teleportation runes I use, since it doesn’t block teleportation from being used inside the manor. It just prevents teleportation spells that originate from outside the house from getting in. That makes a lot of sense, since it still allows people inside to escape via teleportation, but it prevents attackers from being able to teleport straight in.

I’ll write this combination down. Might need to use it myself eventually.

This last one is a reinforcement rune for protecting the walls. Kind of easy to forget these are here, since Keras and Derek always end up wrecking the rooftop anyway.

After that, there were sets of capacity and recharge runes for each of the mana types. Nothing out of the ordinary.

All of those enchantments seemed like reasonable precautions, and I didn’t find any rooms that had any extra runes that were out of place.

Considering how powerful some of those enchantments were, as well as the sheer number of them, Derek must have spent a fortune on defending his home. I’d sleep a little easier knowing that.

Who could have broken into my room?

The most likely option was someone connected to Orden and the Whispers. If that was the case, I didn’t think I’d be able to track them.

I looked up the set of runes I’d found on the floor and formulated a plan. I couldn’t act on it immediately, but I had some ideas.

I considered hiring a more powerful Enchanter or Diviner to look into it on my behalf, but I couldn’t afford it.

I also thought about reporting the incident to the school, but after what had happened to Orden, I didn’t really trust the academy’s administrators. Moreover, I didn’t really want to bring anyone else into this whole mess if I could avoid it.

For the moment, I’d just have to watch my back while I looked into other things.

The next major item on my agenda was to visit Professor Vellum. She was the closest thing I had to an Enchanting mentor, as eccentric as she was, and I needed her advice. But first, it was finally time to go back to class.

If I’d wanted to take it slowly, I probably could have skipped a few days of class without a tremendous risk to my grades.

My next class on the schedule happened to be one of Lord Teft’s: dueling class. That would have made it even easier to skip, since he knew about my situation.

But I wasn’t interested in a vacation. I’d seen how far behind I was in terms of raw power in the tower, and I needed all the fighting practice I could get.

More importantly, I needed every point I could earn.

Not only was I still worried about graduating, I also knew that with the growing chaos in my life, it was likely that my second year would be even harder.

The points I earned this year impacted my placement for the second year, if I graduated. That meant that getting as high of a score as physically possible was a priority, because I wanted to have a safety net for the second year.

Finishing my second year with a high score was also a must, because I wanted to be able to choose to be assigned to be a climber. The knowledge that Tristan was alive hadn’t changed that in the slightest.

If he’d already been stuck in the spire for five years, clearly there was something keeping him from leaving. Being assigned to a climber role would give me the best chance of figuring that out and getting him home.

I’d obviously get him out sooner if I could, but I couldn’t count on that.

Finally, I had one more reason to go to the class: I wanted to see how my new attunement worked in action.

That wasn’t going to be ideal, however, since today’s dueling class was dedicated to something we rarely seemed to discuss—

Dueling.

We were actually fighting duels.

That…still wasn’t exactly my area of strength, but I did have a much better chance than when I’d first started the semester.

Knowing Teft, there’d be some kind of spin on it, but I didn’t know exactly what that was going to be when I walked in.

Teft leaned up against the lectern, addressing the class. “While most classes will have final exams in the last two weeks of the school year, I’ve found that I get far better results when my students aren’t prepared. And thus, today, we begin the first stage of your final exams.”

He waved a hand. “Follow me to the dueling arena, class.”

I winced. I wasn’t ready for a final exam, but that wasn’t my primary concern.

Sera was sitting right next to me. She still couldn’t use her attunement.

But Teft knew that, didn’t he? Would he pair her with someone who wasn’t a good duelist, or maybe let her skip the test until she recovered?

We exchanged doubtful looks as we stood and followed Teft out of our usual open-air lecture area toward… I wasn’t really sure. I thought that classroom was considered the dueling arena, although we’d used different rooms for a few training exercises.

I should have known better than to expect a normal dueling arena out of Teft.