Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“A gauntlet is something I can always have on me. It’s also not an obvious weapon. I would have preferred a ring, but I couldn’t afford a gem with a reasonable mana capacity.”

Vellum crinkled her lips. “At least you were thinking. That’s better than I can say for the majority of my students.” She shook her head. “But I can’t let you keep making disasters like this.”

I looked down. “I’ll make sure to draw boundaries next time, professor.”

“No, no, no. It’s more than that. This isn’t your first incident; don’t think I didn’t hear about you overcharging that war cane. You’re experimenting. And experimenting is always going to have risks.”

“What do you want me to do, then?” My palms stung, and I looked down to see my fists clenched tightly, nails digging into my skin. “Stop enchanting until my second year — assuming I can survive that long?”

“Goddess, no, boy. Of course not.” She handed the gauntlet back, and I had to unclench one of my hands to take it from her. “Never stop enchanting. Never stop creating. Never stop thinking . That is your greatest asset, even if it can also be your greatest weakness. No, I don’t want you to stop.”

She stood up, her eyes sharp and gleaming. “No, I want you to listen. Because I’m going to teach you some real enchantments.”

I left Professor Vellum’s office with my mind in a much better place. In spite of her gruff exterior, she provided me with the key information I needed to make my gauntlet work. Better yet, she promised to start private lessons on much more potent enchantments in the future. The kind I couldn’t find in textbooks, even the ones designed for graduates.

It put a bounce back in my step. I fixed the gauntlet almost immediately, and then found an older student to check it. He seemed “pretty sure” it would work.

It did work.

It worked beautifully .

The transference blasts were sufficient to hurl a person across a room with ease. I suspected the gray mana blasts would break ribs, or maybe kill a small monster like a slime outright.

It was about at that point that I remembered I had a team test coming up later in the week, and I still needed to recruit two people.

Getting Jin, as Sera had requested, was simple enough. He came by regularly to pick up the small items I was still working on enchanting for him. I only had a few items left that I thought I could make, and I hoped to finish those before the test if possible.

“Hey, team competitions coming up. Do you have a team yet?”

“Hmm,” Jin replied, projecting disinterest. He tossed the bracelet I’d handed him from his right hand into his left. “Do you?”

“I have Sera and Patrick so far. With you, we’d only need one more, and I have a strong candidate in mind.”

He unclasped the bracelet, and then slipped it around his left wrist and snapped it shut. “I’ll be unable to use the full capabilities of any attunement. Is that acceptable?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I think they’ll be fine with it. With all the things I’ve been making you, I suspect you’re better prepared than any regular attuned would be at this point, anyway.”

His lips stretched into a thin smile. “Better even than you think.”

It was so typical of Jin to play mysterious that I couldn’t help but laugh. He looked offended for a moment and opened his mouth, but closed it a second later without saying anything. Then he smiled again himself and huffed a soft laugh. This smile was smaller than the one before it, but he was still wearing it as he left my room.

My next candidate would be a tougher sell.

I headed to the women’s dorms. It took some asking around just to find the right room.

I thought I saw Cecily Lambert in the distance while I headed toward the Tortoise’s Heart. As with every time I’d seen her on campus, I did my best to pretend I hadn’t seen her. I still wasn’t ready for the conversations we needed to have.

The Tortoise’s Heart was a smaller facsimile of the Tortoise Spire, one of the six Shifting Spires. “Smaller” in this case meant a mere twelve stories in height.

The Heart’s defining features were the encircling walls, designed to resemble those of the tortoise’s shell. The wall was constructed from hundreds of green hexagonal panels, each etched with dozens of runes. I didn’t know if they were actually functional, but I was willing to bet that they were.

A second shell-like fixture hung over the top of the building, casting shade over the entire structure.

The only way into the building was a solitary ramp leading to the middle of the building. From there, I had to take a winding staircase to get to the appropriate floor.

All in all? The building felt less like student housing and more like a fortification.

I kind of loved it, but I wouldn’t ever be getting in.

At any given time, only the hundred and twenty best students in Tortoise Division were permitted to stay here. They retained their old rooms as well. That was necessary, given that they could be kicked out of the Tortoise’s Heart the day their points scores dropped below a competitor’s.

Every class had equivalent buildings; for Phoenix Division, we had the more simply named “Phoenix Hall” for men and the elegant “Phoenix’s Wings” for women. Ours were smaller, however, and only housed fifty students of each sex.

I was paying close attention to my own rankings. Graduating was a high priority, but I wasn’t anywhere close to qualifying for the Phoenix Hall… at least yet. When I’d checked at the Divinatory last, they’d told me I was #238 in my Division with a total of 112 points. We had about fifteen hundred students in Phoenix Division total, which made my rank respectable, but nowhere near the top.

I was nervous for what felt like an infinite number of reasons when I stood in front of the door to one of the rooms, preparing to knock. The main reason was agonizingly simple: in spite of confirming three times, I still worried I was at the wrong room.

The other reasons were a bit more personal, and involved embarrassing hypotheticals of being rejected.

I almost turned away. Instead, I just stared blankly at the door for a solid minute before I got frustrated enough to overwhelm my fear. Then I knocked.

“Just a minute.”

It was the right voice. That made things better and worse.

Marissa opened her door a moment later.

“…Corin? What are ye doing ‘ere?”

I gave a pathetic little wave. “Uh, hi. I was, um, wondering if you had a team for the tests this week?”

Her mouth twitched downward a fraction. “No. Why?”

“I was hoping you’d join my team. We’ve got a pretty good group, but we’re lacking front-line fighters.”

She leaned back on her heels and folded her arms across her chest. “Rupert isn’t on your team, is he?” Her eyes flicked behind me, scanning outside the door.

I followed her gaze, twisting to see the empty walkway behind me before turning back to her figure in the doorway, baffled. “Rupert?”

She blinked. “Kent,” she said, as though this were obvious. “Rupert Kent. From dueling class?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know his first name. And no, he’s not on the team. Why would that be a problem?”

“I… well…” Marissa slumped. Her head dipped for a moment, then lifted. She blew her hair out of her face, and her eyes had lost most of the wariness from before. “Do you want to come inside?”

I shrugged and gave her a closemouthed half-smile. “Sure?”

“C’mon.”

I followed her into to the room, closing the door behind me.

She sat down on her bed, waving to a seat near a writing desk. I took a seat and shifted in the chair, not sure how to dispel the awkward atmosphere. My eyes took in the room while I avoided her gaze.