Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“It senses your thoughts? Isn’t that really advanced?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not sensing my thoughts exactly… it just waits for me to send a bit of mental mana into the rune, then it activates the other rune functions.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

I flashed her a quick smile, then refocused. “Going to have to be quiet for a second for this part, I need to concentrate while I engrave.”

I adjusted my clamps to make sure the gauntlet was going to stay where it was and picked up the engraving rod. It was one of the simplest Enchanter implements, and the first one I’d learned to use. It looked like an ink pen with a tiny gemstone on the tip and a few runes written on the side. I pressed the activation rune, which caused the tip of the rod to vibrate rapidly. When I pressed against the metal, the vibrating tip cut into the surface of the gauntlet.

Slowly, I traced the painted runes. It only took a few minutes, but I was sweating by the time I turned the engraver off.

“Okay, first step done.”

I set the engraver down and used a pair of wet and dry cloths to wipe off the remaining paint. After that, I reviewed the runes. The lengths and angles looked fine, as far as I could tell.

“Not bad. So, you can enchant it now?”

I chuckled. “That’s three runes out of twelve. Next, I put in the recharging runes. They’ll let it draw on ambient mana to refill each mana type up to the capacity over time. Then, I put in the function runes, the ones that actually make the item do anything. After that, it’s the activation runes, which tell it when to do it.”

Sera frowned. “Don’t you only need one activation rune? The mind one?”

I blinked. “I mean… I was going to make the mind rune activate the other two activation runes… but maybe I could skip that step?”

I paused for a minute, frowning as I considered. “I don’t actually know if one activation rune can trigger three functions or not. I could try—

“Wait,” I interrupted my own train of thought. “I’m doing this all wrong. I need two different mind runes either way, or I’m going to always activate the gray and the transference runes at the same time.”

Sera leaned forward, looking at the gauntlet. “Yeah, but I still don’t see why you’d need other activation runes. You’re only activating it one way, yeah? Can’t you connect one mind rune to each function rune?”

“I’m not sure. That’s never how they show it in the introductory book…but to be fair, I skipped the intermediate ones and most of this comes from a more advanced book.”

She side-eyed me. “Maybe you’re thinking too much about what the book says and not enough about what makes sense.”

“I could look it up, I suppose.” I shook my head. “But I’d never get back to it on time for the tests if I stop now. I’ll finish this one the way I was planning to, but that is an interesting idea. It’d save me time and materials if it works. I’ll look it up later.”

She grinned at me. “Maybe for when you make me one.”

I found myself smiling back. “Sure,” I said. That was the first indication she’d given me that she was interested in one of my items. It was kind of nice. I liked feeling like I could do something useful. “As soon as you can afford one.”

“Charging your family? You cut deep, Corin. Here I am, risking my life — my very existence — to help make sure you finish your first item properly…”

“It’s not my first item, it’s my first high risk item. But your point is taken, Sera. I’ll make you something.”

She made a gesture of victory and I grinned as I resumed my work.

“All right, time to test this thing out.”

Fortunately, there was a whole section of buildings dedicated to enchanting, and a number of “gray chambers” set aside for testing new equipment. I hadn’t bothered to use one before, since my previous enchantments were so simplistic, but this probably warranted a degree of caution. Even if the gauntlet worked correctly, it was going to fire a blast of mana that was more powerful than any weapon I’d used before. Firing off bursts of energy in random places wasn’t exactly wise.

I signed the paperwork to use one of the chambers, and Sera and I stepped inside. We were assured that the chambers were monitored and that Menders would be close by if anything went wrong.

We stepped inside the assigned room.

It was small, about the same size as a single dorm room. The walls were gray stone. I didn’t recognize the type of stone… maybe that was the source of the name of the rooms? I activated my attunement, noting that the stone had a soft glow, but I didn’t see any runes on the inside of the room. If it had them, they’d done the smart thing and put them outside of the chamber. Otherwise, I’d have to guess the stone had inherent magical properties. Possibly both.

I turned the attunement back off. I was starting to get headaches more often, and I suspected the bright lights I was picking up with the attunement active were a part of that.

“So, these walls are designed to handle magical blasts?” Sera tapped a finger against the stone. “Seems like they’d be a good place for any of us to practice, really.”

I made a broad gesture with my hand. “Yeah, but there aren’t enough of them for all the students to use them. I imagine they’re expensive to make. The dueling grounds serve a similar function, but allow for larger groups to practice at a lower cost.”

“So, why not just test enchantments in one of the dueling fields?”

My laugh was sharp. “Because an instructor can probably repair the damage from a careless Elementalist. If an Enchanter makes a big enough mistake? You could probably wipe out a small town.”

Sera paused her inspection of the room and turned to me with a quizzical look. “How’s that possible? Wouldn’t the detonation be based on how much mana you put in it?”

“Normally, yeah. But remember what I said about capacity runes? Now, imagine I got that wrong. This gauntlet could probably hold about ten times the mana I’m putting into it before it explodes. Now, that’s nowhere near a town-level explosion. Maybe a building, at best.” I lifted my chin to scratch my neck, just to do something with my hand.

“But let’s say,” I continued, “you’ve got some fancy climber who wants a full suit of enchanted armor. It has to be good, so it’s made of a material that can absorb several times more mana than usual… khyonite or something. Now, someone makes a mistake on the capacity rune on that. Let’s say it’s twenty times the material of my gauntlet and the material can hold ten times more per area. So, two hundred times more mana. Two hundred times bigger explosion. That’d be a small town, I’d say.”

“That’s… kind of horrifying, actually.” Sera folded her arms. “So, these rooms let you run tests to make sure each rune is working right?”

“Actually, from what I understand, they’re more about containing the explosion if I did something horribly wrong.”

“Oh.” She paused and glanced from side-to-side. “I’m going to go stand outside now.”

I laughed again. “I’ll see you in a minute.”

She had a good point about checking each individual rune’s function, but I didn’t have a good way of doing that. A Diviner could, maybe… and that meant that I could potentially build a tool to do it myself, given time.