Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“I’m still fine.”

I nodded and withdrew the bell from my pouch. “I’m going to swap out for a minute for Jin. He has some divination abilities; have him look at the runes and the box.”

“You’re leaving?” Patrick’s expression sank.

“You or Jin can swap out and bring me back in just as soon as you’ve picked up more info,” I assured him. “Keep your eyes on the walls, too, and be ready to kill that thing with fire.”

With that, I rang the bell. My stomach lurched as my vision went white.

I was in a waiting room. There were two large couches. The older student who’d brought us in was lounging across one of them. Jin sat stoically on the other, hands folded in his lap.

Odd. I’d expected him to swap places with me instantly, but I guess that wasn’t how this worked.

The female student sat up. “Oh, hey! You actually did the bell thing? Huh. Guess you’re up, then!” She pointed at Jin.

Jin turned his head to look at me quizzically.

I nodded a greeting to him. “Got some stuff in there that we need Divination for. Feel free to switch back out for me after you identify things, but you can stay in there if you think you can solve it.”

His mouth twisted as his eyes flicked from my face to my disarrayed uniform, lingering on my unresponsive arm. “You look like you got hit by a carriage.” He sounded irritated.

I raised my good arm self-consciously, trying to smooth out a wrinkle with a gauntleted hand. “Uh, yeah. Don’t let the room get dark. Patrick will explain the rest.”

The student supervising us pointed at the single door at the far side of the lounge. “That’ll take you back to the entrance room, then head toward the door his team went into when they started. You can ring the bell again if you need to.”

Jin nodded, heading that way with haste.

I sat down on the couch carefully, inspecting my arm now that I had sufficient light. No visible damage, but it still felt numb. I looked at the older student. “Why does my arm still feel weird? I figured any illusory damage from in there would fade as soon as I got out.”

“You won’t get any answers about the test from me, kid.” She smirked.

I rubbed the arm, grimacing. “Can I do whatever I want in here, at least?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Sure, I guess. You’re technically still taking the test.”

Okay, then. How can I game that?

I didn’t have any way of healing my arm. Even if I had conventional healing, I wasn’t sure it would work on what was probably fake damage.

If it was a mental effect, which seemed possible, I might be able to get rid of it if I had something designed for purging mind control, but I didn’t have that either. Sleep might have fixed it, but I’d never been good at falling asleep on command.

I settled for doing something I knew I could do. I started recharging my shield sigil. The process was relatively simple: I just touched the sigil and gradually pushed gray mana into it. As long as I was making contact with the device, it would accept the mana and slowly begin to recharge. I’d gone through the process enough times now that I could tell when it had reached capacity.

A full recharge still took me a few minutes. Teft’s ability to recharge the sigils in a few moments was pretty impressive. Most people, even experts, didn’t have that kind of mana control. I was getting faster at it, but I had a long way before I reached Teft’s level of proficiency.

I was still in the process of recharging when Patrick appeared in front of me.

On the floor.

More alarmingly, he wasn’t moving.

I rushed to his side, kneeling and gingerly rolling him over. Unconscious. It took me a moment to confirm that his chest was still rising and falling.

I heard a laugh from the other couch. “Looks like you lost one.”

I whipped my head up to glare at her. “What’s wrong with him?” I demanded.

She rolled her eyes. “Relax, kid. He’s just asleep. He’ll wake up when the test is over.”

I let out a low growl, which actually drew an expression of concern from her. Reaching down with both arms, I lifted Patrick from the cold stone of the floor and set him down on the couch I’d vacated.

I didn’t realize that the numbness in my arm was gone until after I’d finished moving him. Anger had burned away the chill in my mind.

I stomped my way toward the exit door.

“Where are you going?” The other student asked.

“To finish this.”

I pushed into the main room, then back to the door where I’d first entered the challenge. I didn’t know what the rules were for re-entering when someone was knocked out, but she had said that I was still technically taking the test.

I opened the door and saw the swirl of darkness within. This time, I was ready.

The sound of muffled gunfire reached me before sight took hold.

The room was moderately lit this time, three torches burning different colors on the walls. Jin was backpedaling rapidly, twin revolvers in his hands.

The creature, now fully visible, lashed out at him with vicious speed, four tendrils striking downward with whip-like motions, piercing the floor as Jin jumped and fired his guns. Both shots hit home, joining other bullet holes in the creature’s scaly hide. The wounds dripped green ichor that sizzled as it splattered against the room’s floor.

Jin had the creature’s attention, but his attacks seemed to be having a minimal effect. It retracted the tendrils and lunged, jaws outstretched. Jin stepped to the side, brushing a corner of his coat into the creature’s mouth. It snapped down on the cloth, fangs piercing into the uniform as Jin twisted and pressed a revolver against the top of its head, firing straight into the skull.

The beast recoiled at the impact, tearing a ragged section out of Jin’s coat and shaking its head as if to rid itself of an insect. Then it surged again, too close now for Jin to dodge.

So he didn’t. He kicked it in the face once, twice, and thrice before bringing his gun down to smash it in the face.

By this point, I had my sword drawn, and I was slowly advancing. I really didn’t want to get into melee range of that thing, but the sword was undoubtedly the most effective weapon in my possession. If bullets were barely slowing the thing down, I had little chance of killing it with the gauntlet or the cane sitting on my opposite hip.

A tendril snapped forward, forcing Jin to duck to avoid being impaled, and the creature took that opportunity to ram him with its horns. Jin tried to shift to the right, but one of the horns caught him as the beast charged. I saw his barrier flicker into existence, then begin to splinter and crack as the creature pushed, slamming Jin into the wall.

Jin gasped as the move knocked the air out of his lungs, then began pounding on the creature’s head ineffectively with his weapons. I didn’t know why he wasn’t firing the guns, but I couldn’t let this go on. The cracks spreading like spiderwebs across his barrier were a sign that it was at critical capacity. In a moment, he’d go from merely being crushed to having a three foot horn sticking through his chest.

Unacceptable.

I felt the wisps of frost gathering on my blade as I thrust it into the creature’s side, aiming for where I hoped a heart might be. I wasn’t exactly familiar with the anatomy of unidentifiable nightmare monsters, from the way it roared as the saber pierced through a soft-spot between scales I guessed I’d hit something important.

It tried to turn toward me, and I pushed the weapon deeper, letting out a roar of my own as I shoved. A visible layer of frost expanded outward from the wound, spreading across the creature’s flank.