Sufficiently Advanced Magic (Arcane Ascension, #1)

by Andrew Rowe

Now, at seventeen, I stood among hundreds of my peers. They were waiting to try their luck. But I didn’t trust luck. Luck wasn’t reliable. Instead of relying on the fickleness of chance, I’d taken everything with me that I thought might help.

Assuming this equipment was meant to be taken, what did I need the most? The key could be, well, a key to my success. Or totally worthless. The scroll was the same; it could easily be a map to the dungeon or some esoteric notes on mathematical theory. The book had the same degree of binary promise.

Seiryu, the God Serpent. Guardian of the Serpent Spire. It was looking right at me. I stepped away from the door, allowing it to close, and rushed into the chasm room. I never considered myself a coward. I didn’t think of myself as very brave, either. When seeing a god beast, though, my level of bravery was largely irrelevant. No sane mortal would have lingered another moment in that creature’s sight.

If a visage of the goddess said someone needed to die, conventional wisdom said that they needed to die. But conventional wisdom had also abandoned my brother in this same tower. Conventional wisdom and I hadn’t been on speaking terms since then.

People liked to say that Magnus Cadence was the type of man to think five moves ahead of his opponent, tracing a dozen paths of undoing his enemies before they could lift a hand. People were often wrong. Magnus Cadence didn’t plan five moves ahead. He didn’t need to. He would never let an opponent make five moves.

“I suppose you have some of my blood in you after all, then.” An unexpected concession on his part, giving ground. “Inadequate, unfortunately, to compensate for your failure to earn a combat attunement. You can come inside and meet your replacement.” There is no fencing term I’m aware of for drawing a pistol and shooting your opponent in the face, but that was what it felt like when I heard his final words.

Father probably expected me to fight back, to compete, to try to prove myself... and for Sera to have to try harder to measure up to that. He’d never understood. His approval had stopped being important to me the moment he’d written his elder son off as dead.

I spent much of the rest of the day reading through my rune book, not daring to brave the outside again and the prospect of seeing anyone else I was familiar with. My stomach would eventually drive me to the dining hall, but my paperwork indicated it was open late, and a later visit was more likely to help me dodge the horrors of social interaction. Social interaction, however, would not be so easily denied. It was a pesky creature, incessant in its hunt. A few knocks on my door, slower and more deliberate than the first set, signaled its next move.

The line was less inspiring than the smell. It took me at least half an hour of waiting in the throng of students to get inside the door. I’d say it added to the anticipation, but I still would have preferred instant gratification.

I did resent his adamant refusal to allow me to visit with my friends. Letters helped for a time, but within a year, most of my friendships had atrophied from disuse.

It was too early for me to interact with the living, and in spite of my general fondness for Sera, she still was another entity and thus a toll on my exhausted mind.

The next couple days went relatively smoothly by comparison. No other teachers threatened to annihilate me with overwhelming magic — just overwhelming homework.

“You will read — nay, study —” she actually said nay? I aspired to that level of pretension,

She folded her arms, leaning against the table. “I mention this lesson every year, and every year, I am disappointed. Nevertheless, in my weakness, I retain some hope that this class will be the one class to finally demonstrate a degree of basic competence. I look forward to being disappointed once again.”

I blame Sera for bringing out my urge to tease. Poor Jin was collateral damage in our normal dynamic.

Sometimes, victory is not about being able to defeat your opponent; it’s about making it too inefficient for your opponent to even try to win.

She shook her head. “No, not yet. Focus on improving your skills. You should make certain to get your attunement to Carnelian status before you visit the tower again. You’ll be much more likely to survive that way.” Yeah, fair enough, surviving is one of my favorite things to do.

I nodded in return. “And if Katashi does want me dead, I should be preparing to fight him when I go back to the tower?” “Oh, Goddess, no, child. If Katashi decides to attack us directly, you should be prepared to die.”

The fear that story instilled was a part of me, something bone-deep that no level of rational thought could simply dispel. And, while I told my mind that I would not let fear break me, I didn’t have to. All I had to do was bend — and the fear had won. The fear always won.

He pointed to the sky, as if I could have somehow missed the cluster of monsters that were making the sun work hard to do its job.

I’d always assumed some opposing mana types trumped others. I would have guessed that fire would evaporate water, but when I thought about it, I supposed that water was equally good at dousing fire. It probably came down to the magnitude of the effects themselves.

Is there something about this tower that attracts eccentric masked swordsmen?

He sucked a breath in through his teeth, nodding. “Put that away before you hurt yourself.” He himself was standing a cautious distance from its reach. I sheathed the sword carefully. “...What can you tell me about it?” I briefly entertained the idea that I was holding some sort of legendary sword that could only be wielded by a chosen hero. “That sword is marked with a terrible curse.” Yeah, that sounds more like my luck. Of course it is.

In terms of firepower, there were a lot of options. Mages, unsurprisingly, loved researching new and exciting ways to explode things just as much as anyone else.

I could see that she might be the type to attract attention. I liked her hair, fine and bright yellow, like corn. But I’d never been interested in people like that. I’d expected that to change as I’d gotten older, but those much-vaunted pubescent urges just never struck me the same way they seemed to hit other people. I didn’t mind. It meant I could focus on more important priorities, like not dying. That was one of my favorite hobbies.

The light was nearly as blinding as the darkness.

Professor Vellum wasn’t quite as friendly with her morning greeting. From her grimace when I walked into the office, I knew I was in for a lecture. “Ah, it’s the prodigy of idiots.”

Corin. I will expect to see you here again next Wyddsday and each subsequent Wyddsday at ten o’clock. Until further notice, weekends will exist only in your fondest memories.” They say the mark of a true swordsman is a cut so swift you never feel the wound until you begin to fall. No weekends? The professor taking an undisclosed portion of the profits on items she taught me to make? It was only after exiting Professor Vellum’s office that I realized how thoroughly I’d been outplayed.

Apparently, my idea wasn’t revolutionary, but that was fine. As long as it worked, it didn’t need to be.

No amount of reassurance could completely neutralize an irrational fear.

I wanted to argue, but this wasn’t the time. “You’re hurt, so I’m not going to fight with you. But I’m not comfortable with you pushing yourself like that.” “You don’t have to be. That’s the great part about this being my body, Corin. I can do whatever I want with it.” She jabbed a piece of egg with her fork. “And I do appreciate your concern, I really do, but I’m not a child. And I’m not your retainer. You can’t give me orders.” I leaned back in my chair. “That’s fine. I know I can’t order you around. But you’re...my sister, so I was worried about you.” Sera’s eyes narrowed. “Sister, eh?” She took a bite of the egg, setting her fork down. “I think this might be the first time you’ve called me that without sounding sarcastic.” I ran a hand through my hair. “You’re probably right. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be twice as sarcastic next time to make up for the lapse.”

While Teft preferred direct confrontations for shock and awe, Meltlake liked to draw us in with little casual uses of magic that brought out our curiosity.

I’d just rather get stabbed than crushed to death.

I’d never seen the sky without a shield occluding it. It hadn’t been disabled during my lifetime. Without it, we were vulnerable. Not just to rain and snow, but to a far more terrifying prospect. Invasion. Keeping the elements off of us was the practical application of the barrier, but it served a more important function on the international scale. It blocked a vast variety of foreign spells from getting into the city. Scrying, teleportation, artillery spells — it was an effective tool against both reconnaissance and direct attacks. And it was gone.

I briefly contemplated how difficult it would be to safely remove my hand.

I chuckled. “I’ll get it fixed for you when this is all over. But we need to talk.” Sera tilted her head to the side. “I’d gathered that from the fact that you look like you just found a group of assassins in your breakfast.” I nodded sagely. “Delicious, but suspicious.” Sera’s lips twisted into a half-smirk. “That rhyme was a little weak, but I’ll give you credit for effort.” “Weak? I’d like to see you do better.” She raised a finger to her chin. “They were vicious and ambitious, but through a turn of fate capricious, one malicious assassin proved seditious, slaying the others in my dishes. Thereafter I discovered they were delicious, and moreover, nutritious.”

Vera lowered her arms and leaned up against a nearby wall. “How much do you know?” I rolled my eyes. “About seventeen years’ worth, aside from what I’ve forgotten. Can you be more specific?”

Derek chuckled. “And I’m hardly just E-ranked. Anyway, I’d normally never say this, but enough about me. We should focus on the task at hand.”

Derek waved for us to back off a bit, so we all stepped back while he approached the door. “Don’t see a lot of traps on the first floor, but I should always be the one to open the doors just in case.” I liked the idea of having Derek up front. It made it much harder for him to stab us in the back.

The room was filled with keys. Thousands of keys. We had to step onto a pile of keys just to get inside. It felt something like a legendary dragon’s hoard, only the dragon was either very misguided or extremely eccentric. Or maybe it just wanted to start a new, key-centric economy. Who knew?

As I flew through the air toward imminent death, my mind somehow managed to inform me, “There’s the hurricane you wanted, Corin.” Oh, the sharpness of my wit. Truly it cuts me more deeply than any other.

After a while of studying in that room, I came to the belated realization that Derek and Vera were flirting nearby. And by “I came to the realization”, I mean Derek eventually told me, “We’re flirting, can we please have some space?” Fair enough, Derek. Fair enough. So, I, Corin Cadence, master of understanding human mating rituals, left that room to the two of them and tried not to think about that too much.

“There’s no need to panic,” Orden began, immediately inducing my reflex to panic,

And, with all the resolve I could muster, I clenched my fists and said something unwise. “Leaving a trail of dead bodies in the wake of your schemes is not a manageable problem, Orden. If you truly want to protect Valia, you need to stop treating her civilians as acceptable losses.” Orden closed her eyes. “It’s a utility calculation, Corin. I can—” I put my hand on the hilt of my sword. “Let me stop you right there. We’ve all heard about stories of sacrificing a hundred to save a million. I get the concept. That’s not the core problem. The problem is that you’re taking a cascading series of greater risks — and several of them have the chance to wipe out the entire population of our country. If a group of freshly attuned students can figure out your plans, do you really think no one else will?”

We appeared next to a campfire. Sera and Derek were still unconscious, so they just sort of flopped on the ground. I was still kneeling with Katashi’s sword held awkwardly outward. This was probably somewhat alarming to the lone figure who had been sitting on the forest floor, eating a chicken leg. For that reason, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when he was on his feet in an instant, and suddenly he was armed and I wasn’t. Ceris landed blade-first in a nearby tree. And Keras Selyrian stood over me, a glimmering silver blade in his hands. Given the speed with which he moved, I was unclear on whether or not he’d just disarmed me with his sword or with the chicken leg.

“She’d probably use self-recharging rings. They could last indefinitely if that’s the case.” Derek sighed. “Can’t believe I let her give me a ring.” Keras snickered. “I’m sure a lot of people say that at some point in their lives.”