Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“Thank you. One more question, since you were already familiar with the incident I mentioned. Was that before Tenjin stopped showing up to Council meetings?”

“Right before,” she confirmed. “If you’re thinking that Keras went after Tenjin after he escaped and attacked him, that would be the prevailing hypothesis.”

Resh. And I’m the one that let Keras go free.

That means I have an obligation to help stop him if I can.

“Thank you, Professor. That’s all I needed to know.”

My class the next day was Mana Manipulation, one of the two classes on my schedule that was only assigned to Enchanters. I was still distracted thinking about Keras and worrying about my mother, but the class was interesting enough to help get my mind off of it to some extent.

The best part was right at the beginning.

Professor Edlyn, the same teacher I’d signed my paperwork with right when I came out of the tower, was in charge of the class. She started us out with a simple instruction.

“Close your eyes and put your hand over wherever your attunement is located. Now, take a deep breath, and think about the passage of the mana within your body. If you’ve ever used a runic item, think about how that mana flows out of you into the object. If not, simply try to picture a flow of energy within your body, emanating from your attunement mark.”

I followed her instructions, envisioning the familiar sensation of the dueling cane leeching mana out of my hand. I felt a twinge of phantom pain just from remembering the sensation.

“Now, say the words, ‘Detect Aura.’”

I repeated the phrase.

“Open your eyes.”

I opened them. I immediately shut them again.

Everything had been glowing.

It was blinding. I blinked and blinked again, but the auras didn’t go away. From the murmurs of excitement and frustration around me, I wasn’t the only one experiencing it

“If you’re sensing auras now, you’ve just activated your attunement. Different Enchanters sense auras differently; this appears to mostly be tied to the location of the attunement mark, but there is some variation. If you haven’t activated your attunement yet, we’ll try another method…”

She ran through a few more exercises until all of the students indicated that they were able to sense the auras around them. During that time, I gradually acclimated to what I was seeing around me.

Brilliant nimbuses of power, shimmering around every student. They varied in intensity from person-to-person, and each student’s aura seemed to emanate from a different spot.

Most students had colorless auras, just distortions around them that looked like waves of heat. A few of them had a crimson tinge to that aura. One student’s was already completely red. I assumed that meant he’d already hit Carnelian level. Impressive, considering we’d just started the school year.

Professor Edlyn had a shifting, multi-colored aura, clearly brighter and broader than those of the students in the room.

Mana. I’m seeing mana.

I chuckled in delight at the thought. Lifting my hand, I could see my own mana, a translucent field that seemed thickest within my right hand. The lack of color made it difficult to discern, but it distorted everything beneath it, like looking at something immersed in water. Of course, my most important mana source was the attunement on my forehead, but I couldn’t exactly see that without a mirror.

I thought that I could feel it, though. Maybe just a little, like a pool of warmth beneath my skin. I briefly felt a surge of dysphoria at the concept of mana occupying the same space as my brain . Sure, it was supposed to be a normal part of my biology, and I knew that, but it was weird .

“Now that you can perceive your mana, you should be able to shift a portion of it to another part of your body. This is the simplest Mana Manipulation exercise and one that serves as the foundation for dozens of others. You will need to be able to shift the mana within yourself to learn to shift it out of your body, and thus to empower runes.”

I proceeded to spend the next two hours trying and failing to complete this utterly basic task.

Over the following week, I tried again and again, but I just couldn’t get my mana to change . I assumed it was some sort of mental block; I’d heard of people who could alter their heart rate just by thinking about it, for example, and I couldn’t do that either.

It was just before the next Mana Manipulation class that I realized I had a way to cheat.

I kept my attunement disabled most of the time. Activating and deactivating it was as simple as closing my eyes and thinking about it. The words “Detect Aura” were just a shortcut for tricking our minds into doing what we wanted them to do, and different shortcuts worked better for different people. I didn’t need that one.

Since it was easy for me to perceive my own aura, I realized that if I wanted to move it on my own, I should try focusing on it while it was being manipulated by something else . Namely, while practicing with my dueling cane.

My next two dueling classes didn’t actually put me on the stage. They were focused around tactics and technique, with a few other students bearing the brunt of Lord Teft’s antics. I did, however, get permission to use a dueling dummy for practicing with my cane.

I turned on my attunement before I focused on the rune, activating my dueling cane the same way I had so many times before.

This time, I saw it. The essence flowing from my arm into my thumb, which triggered the rune. A second surge of essence from my hand into the body of the cane, then flowing out from the cane in a burst of concussive force. I saw an unfamiliar aura around the dummy before the strike impacted, and then a different aura manifest as the dummy’s shield activated, blocking the burst.

I tried again, and this time as the cane drew mana out of my hand, I pushed .

More mana flowed out of my hand into the cane, charging it with power. The force of ensuing blast tore the weapon right out of my hand.

The mana burst missed the dummy entirely, but dissipated harmlessly in the air before it impacted anything.

I breathed a sigh of relief, even as my hand twitched in pain.

I’d done it. My mana had moved .

It took me two more days to reproduce the ability to move my mana without the use of my cane, and even then, it was much harder. But, challenging or not, it worked… and that was enough.

Immediately after my next Mana Manipulation class, which discussed the basics of transferring mana from an outside source from one place to another, I attempted my first enchantment.

…Or some facsimile thereof, at least.

Normally, Lord Teft recharged our protective sigils before the beginning of each dueling class. Studying the sigil, I realized it was more complicated than I had originally expected. It had three main runes, each with a different function.

One, it had a persistent aura that detected if it was in close proximity to a person. This seemed to have a range of a few inches, so it could be worn on a garment that was over a layer of armor.

Two, it had a second persistent aura for detecting incoming attacks.

Three, it would create a barrier around the person it was detecting if an attack was inbound.

This made it much more mana-efficient than something that just continuously generated a barrier around whoever was wearing it, since maintaining a barrier for a long period of time had a high mana cost.

This also meant that the barrier could potentially be circumvented by finding things the detection spell did not classify as an “attack”. I’d have to study that. I didn’t want to hurt the other students, of course. I just figured it would be good to know what tactics potential threats might use against me , since the pin was my only real defensive tool.