Most notably, Gileon the Bulwark created a host of Barrier spells that he cast using his artifact the Three Fold Breastplate. While Gileon had a weak affinity for the Font of Barriers, the strong connection of the breastplate he Bonded allowed him to specialize in the area of magic he’d otherwise had little talent in.
-Deckard’s Compendium of Ensouled Artifacts
—
The week continued as it began for Kole. He spent every spare moment studying, only stopping when he ran out of Will or Zale physically took the book out of his hands to force him to eat or sleep. There was one notable time that she gave him back the spellbook, and told him to take notes on all the lectures he zoned out through, and he spent an hour doing that, realizing in the process that she was right. He’d missed the assignment of a few essays on top of the one for Underbrook, and he knocked those out quickly—to Zale’s frustration
“That’s not fair,” she sighed as he did the work far faster than she could hope to. “You didn’t even pay attention!”
“I think it’s pretty fair,” Kole said. “Nothing is stopping anyone else from randomly stumbling on an ensouled spellbook.”
In his duel on Friday, Kole refrained from showing off his ability Mirror Image. He didn’t need it to defeat the student he was facing and wanted to save it as a surprise for the next day’s hardball match. Similarly, his Silent Image spell still secret, and he was hoping to save his illusory magic for critical moments in a match.
Growing up, he’d partially blamed it for his mother’s failure to escape the pocket realm that held her. But he’d softened his stance on Illusion magic over the past few months. He’d always thought if she’d been a “real mage” she’d have been able to escape. That had influenced a lot of his decisions to avoid training as a Mirage Knight, but looking back without that bias, he was still happy with his choice.
Even without his spellbook, he now knew he’d made the right decision. Even before his recent discovery of its abilities, he’d largely resolved his bottle neck, finding a workaround to learn spells from traditional spellbooks and avoid the gate based spells he couldn’t cast.
The accelerated rate was, frankly in Kole’s opinion, absurd. He expected that before the semester was over, he would know more spells than anyone else in his age group, the notable downside being they’d all be of the Light, Sound, or Mind Font—though, there was nothing stopping him from learning spells outside that if he chose to accept the restrictive costs. The reason his learning outstripped his peers wasn’t just because of the spellbook. Kole had spent the last five years of his life using all his Will solely for the purpose of learning spells. While his peers were practicing with spells, squandering their Will to improve their proficiency, Kole was at work, day and night, learning more and more spell components using his extra-large Will capacity.
When learning a new spell from a spell, it usually took wizards weeks of work to practice and internalize each component of the spellform. After a wizard learned the spell, they could rebuild it much faster. Kole’s endless toil of learning without fruit was now paying off as each spellform he create was filled with familiar intent he could rapidly relearn.
His spellbook’s benefits for rapid learning could even be applied to traditional spells from Fonts other than those he had an affinity for, he’d just have to copy the gate component from a modern spell, and then path it from there. The spell would cost would still be large, but he expected he could improve on his previous lower limit of 18 he’d hit for Magic Missile and Shield.
Per Underbrook’s request, he’d been thinking over what spells to learn next in his free time but hadn’t settled on many. The limiting factor was his mental vault’s capacity. Currently he could store four spells in his mind, which was slightly above average for his age.
His vault contained Radiant Bolt, Thunderwave, and Mirror Image, the rune intent for Amara’s shield bracer taking up the fourth slot. Invisibility and Silent Image being sorcery spells didn’t take up any slots, and neither did his primal ability Fade. Any other spells he learned, if he wished to cast them, he’d have to replace one of the above four, and he was struggling to find anything worth a spot.
By Friday, Kole had reached the limits on the improvements he could make to Radiant Bolt and Thunderwave—and as he’d yet to determine what spells to learn next, he’d decided to learn a Light spell to replace his dependency on runic likes. Looking through the spell indexes, he’d found one that lacked concentration and allowed him to cause an object to emit bright light for an hour. While he didn’t have room for it when going into potential battle, it was a far more useful spell for his day-to-day life as a student than, say, Thunderwave, so he’d kept it prepared in place of that destructive spell, planning to switch it out before duels, hardball matches, or trips in search of Amara’s sister.
Stolen story; please report.
He still debated what spells to learn next. But any time he had to spend thinking—not fervently optimizing spells—Zale occupied, preparing them for their next hardball match.
They didn’t know for certain who they’d be facing, but the options were more limited now that half the class had been relegated to a loser’s bracket.
----------------------------------------
Saturday morning Kole walked into the study hall room, paging through the frankly absurd number of spells he’d copied through the week.
“Any news?” Zale asked, and Kole looked up to see that Runt was waiting for them in the room.
“A couple leads,” Runt said, throwing a stack of paper onto a table.
Amara ran over to it, reading the first page and then flipped through the rest. After looking through half the stack she dropped it and looked at Runt.
“There's only writing on the first sheet,” she said, confused.
Runt shrugged.
“It's not dramatic throwing down a single sheet. It wasn’t a long list,” Runt said.
Zale sighed and said, “It's a thing my mom does.”
“It works really well with blackmail,” Runt added.
Zale looked over the single page and reviewed it.
“I think I can get a door to Rowen,” Zale said, pointing to a name on the list where another primal went missing in the region. “We can check it out tomorrow.”
“We really should move these meetings to Sunday,” Kole said, “With the hardball matches, we can’t do a lot of training, and if we get a lead, we can’t pursue it right away.”
Everyone agreed to the suggestion, and they got on with their low impact training.
“Before I forget,” Zale said, catching Kole’s attention and pulling out a small bag.
“What’s that?” Kole asked.
“A gift... sort of,” Zale answered.
Kole’s mine raced at what it could be or why she’d be giving him something at all but drew a blank.
Before he could get too carried away in his thoughts, she placed it in his hand, and he felt the familiar shape of a vial beneath the fabric of the bag.
“It’s a clarity potion,” Zale said.
Kole pulled it out to see a metallic vial.
Seeing the confusion on Kole’s face, she explained, “Its nerestet—dwarven steel that doesn’t react with, well, anything. It’s far more practical in battle.”
“This is really expensive,” Kole said, referring to both the vial itself and its contents.
“Mom had it lying around, and I figured we’d need it today.”
“Thank you,” Kole said, after realizing he’d not spoken for a while.
“Don’t mention it,” Zale said, and then more seriously added, “Really. Don’t. Mom will probably be okay with it, but she might seek repayment in some stupid pranking way.”
They moved onto their training after that.
Doug spent the time trying to force a connection to his Font. He was far from having a completed mental vault, but with the runed soul stone and months of practice, he felt he was close to a breakthrough.
“I think I can almost force a teleport,” he explained. “I don’t think I’ll be able to direct it, but it's a start.”
Rakin continued to work in the sand pit, sitting in the sand cross legged with his eyes closed, sand lifting around him into a dust cloud. The effort was causing strain on him, and he sweat as he worked. But slowly he was able to get the dust cloud to rotate around him, eventually obscuring himself completely.
Zale forced Kole to sit near the dust cloud as she sat between both him and Rakin, trying to find a connection to the Font of Earth, and whatever Kole was working on.
“What are you working on?” Zale asked after forcing Kole to sit uncomfortably close to the dust.
“I don’t know,” Kole said, flipping through his spellbook revealing a seemingly endless stream of copied spell forms. “I need to pick a new spell, but since my vault’s full, it's hard to decide which.”
“What are your choices between?” she asked.
“Shatter could be a good long-range area of effect spell,” he explained, counting off spell options on his fingers. “If I can get the cost down to 8 like I did Mirror Image, that could replace Thunderwave. But that’s already down to 3. Scorching Ray, similarly, could replace Radiant Bolt—if I can get the cost down low. Alternatively, I could learn some utility spells. I learned a new version of Light which is more useful in day-to-day. I could create a less lethal list of spells to keep prepared around campus. Mindspike would be a good non-lethal option to employ the next time someone in the city or on campus picks a fight.”
“Hmmm,” Zale said, considering, “I like the alternate spell list idea.”
“That’s the way I’m leaning as well,” Kole said, “Plus if I learn Mind Spike you can ‘listen’ for the Font of Mind.”
Zale perked up.
“‘Listen?’” she asked with a smile. “I like that. And after seeing what Esme did, I wouldn't mind being able to nullify Mind magic.”
“Was that an intentional pun?” Rakin asked from his meditation. “Because if it was, I’m gunna hit ye.”
Zale ignored the threat, and Kole could tell by her embarrassment that the pun hadn’t been intended.
Kole had been on the fence, but Zale’s agreement pushed him over and he opened his spellbook to the written-out copy of Mind Spike he’d taken from a traditional spellbook of a mentalist wizard long dead.
As he did so, he tried to convince himself the real reason he chose that option was that he knew it was objectively the best one, and not because it would mean Zale would be more incentivized to spend time close to him.