“Of late, there has been some criticism of the training schedules and their intensity within the Ardent. Need I remind you all that the only way that it is possible for you all to live in moderate comfort is the constant sacrifices that the Corps Mageia make to ensure that our civilization is not utterly destroyed on a daily basis? The next time that you have a complaint about how much we push our soldiers, how much we demand nothing but excellence from them, hand deliver it to the nearest rampaging horror and see what they have to say about it.”

—Unplanned Retirement Speech, High General Ironfist

The others had the same schedule as him, more or less, so he could take some small comfort in knowing that they weren’t gaining ground on him, but he did notice that there were few of them around after dinner and classes were done. More than that, the dinner in the officer cadet mess within Blackhall was real food. Meat, vegetables, actually things that he could recognize. As much as Kaya may have complained to be bodily thrown onto the officer program against her will, it was just as likely that she was staying upon it for the opportunity to enjoy roast beef on the regular.

As he found his feet, Sylvas soon learned that the others weren’t simply vanishing into their rooms, but rather took advantage of their freedom to roam the whole of Strife. He had been told of that freedom on the first day, and it soon became clear as to the reason why, they were expected to use what little extra time they had to meet up with their teams and train. Which meant that however exhausted he and Kaya were after their lessons, he still had to seek out Bael, and cast sendings to everyone else to tell them where to meet.

As they had done so today, all of them gathering under the dawn sky of Strife as it was lit up with streaks of magic.

More than one of the teams was training out near the central ravine that had become a favorite spot, or possibly they all were, given the intensity of the radiating mana that Sylvas could see drifting up. He turned his back on it and headed for the cliff-face. The rest of his team were milling around outside the entrance to the complex, looking thoroughly perplexed about his orders to gather there. When he arrived, most of his old friends tried to flag him down, ask where they were going, but he cut them off.

“Training in plain sight of your enemy is handing away intelligence for free. We’re going to be going further inland.”

It took them all a moment to parse what he meant, before turning to look up at the towering cliff-face that stood between them and this promised land of invisible practice grounds. Kaya looked up at him with a wry smirk. “And how do you propose that we—”

Sylvas answered by casting his flight spell before she could finish. So many of the common spells that were learned by those without an affinity had descended from specific spells that had been. Kinesis and flight spells were practically twins with the serial numbers filed off, and both of them came from Gravity affinity school of magic. The flight spell that he’d struggled to use to keep himself afloat suddenly became able to lift all of them once the missing components were added back in.

Of course, even with those components added in Sylvas decided against telling them that this had been his first time in casting the repaired spell it once they landed at their destination atop the cliff. It simply wouldn’t be good for morale.

Atop the cliff, they suddenly had a far better view out over Strife’s surface. The elevation brought them above the level of the dust clouds, letting them see right across the ravine to the far side where the ruins of a city so vast it must have housed millions spread out in every direction. Turning back the other way, there was only the barren expanse of desert.

His core had been depleted a quarter thanks to their flight, and would be unpredictable until it stabilized. Too much of the mana he drew now was almost instantly, and occasionally painfully expelled from him, and even with that expulsion, far too much of what he held inside him was still a chaotic mixture that wouldn’t work with his affinity bound spells. Still, it had been worth it for the freedom it bought them. Freedom not only to practice out of sight, but to fail without anyone being around to judge them. It had always been Sylvas experience that failing was one of the steps on the way to innovation, and he intended on failing many times that day before exhaustion took them all.

While the others practiced, and he weighed in to help with their discussions of tactics, he thought through their overall grand strategy. The goal would be to win, obviously, but the best course to that was, unfortunately, going to be avoiding conflict for as long as possible. Hammerheart had painted a target on his own back with his antics, and even if he was as talented as he insisted, he’d have a hard time contending with every single group attacking him in turn. As much as Sylvas wanted to cut to the heart of the problem and be rid of him, the sad fact was that he really needed the dwarf and his team to be depleted before they crossed paths. Something that would be difficult to achieve, given how obvious it was that Hammerheart was going to come straight for Sylvas.

Two days was all that they had at this point, and Sylvas worked the others to exhaustion on both of them. His own focus was elsewhere. At present, with his mana-base in flux, he was no use to anyone. If he could finish his third circle by the time that they fought he would be able to turn the battle. If he couldn’t he was scarcely any more powerful than he’d been without his affinity.

He could feel it getting closer. The paradigm had, once again, turned out to be the easy part for him, a simple process of investing more and more gravity affinity mana into the relevant sensory centers in his brain. As soon as he had hit the proper threshold, it had him able to sense gravity and spatial magic in a way that nobody else on the planet could, even if he did briefly burn out his ability to taste and smell for a lot of the second day.

The dangers of rapid advancement, once again rearing their ugly head.

Given enough time, he could have allowed his mana core to filter out the irrelevant mana, saturated his mind and his body with it slowly, and formed the Embodiment and Paradigm without pain. But of course, he did not have time. He only had two more days remaining, during which he had to go through the motions of studying, and work on drilling his team until they could operate as a team instead of nine separate mages with their own plans and intentions.

The basics of constructing magical items had been conveyed at some point during Fahred’s lectures as a long laborious and boring process. A description that had immediately put almost every recruit off learning more, but given the immense power of the crests that they wore, Sylvas was not ready to discount the entire field of study so quickly. Neither were the Ardent, it seemed. In amidst his various strategy and navigation classes, he found his way to something like a forge deep underneath the Blackhall where Instructor Sagran held court.

A dwarf so ancient that her features had been submerged entirely in wrinkles, she spoke with the kind of soft intensity that was common among the insane and obsessed. Most of it was dry, blueprints and spellforms and the mechanics of marrying material to magic, but in the midst of that came her stories. Offhand comments.

“They forged the lance from the frozen core of a star.”

“They bound the Eidolon in a web of spellforged wire.”

These asides rarely seemed to match what she was talking about, and it was only with the benefit of perfect hindsight that Sylvas was able to puzzle them together. The basics that she was teaching them were the same that she’d been teaching the Ardent since time immemorial, and when all their magic failed them and all their hope was lost, those same students of hers had performed miracles based solely in her curmudgeonly lectures.

It would be useless for the Cull however. The length of time required to actually forge a magical item would stretch well past their deadline. Even then, Sylvas couldn’t start committing mana to materials until he had finished purging himself of the chaotic mana still clogging up his system and prevented him from cleanly accessing his affinity. If he poured mixed mana into a magical construct it would fall apart. Time was once again against him. Try as he might to force out more and more of the mixed mana, the more that he cast out, emptying his core, the longer it seemed to take for the gravity affinity mana at his heart – that little black hole at the core of his being – to refine the remainder.

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Something to do with the pressure. He thought every time that he faced the problem.

While they studied the basics, with Kaya mastering them with the kind of casual ease that made Sylvas jealous, it wouldn’t be until after the cull that he’d get good use of Sagran’s classes to begin forging equipment of his own to enhance his natural abilities. Let alone hone them to fill the gaps in his repertoire.

Then it was back to the scalding red sky and more training. Kaya complained relentlessly. Ironeye, Gharia and Bael spent as much time glaring at him as they did practicing. The humans followed orders like they were meant to. Nobody excelled. Nobody pushed themselves to breaking point every time, except for Sylvas and the fiend.

Enore’s brother was named Anak and he bore no resemblance to his sister whatsoever, beyond sharing the same species. Where she had been ample, he was emaciated, where she had been delightful, he was withdrawn, but despite having no affinity to show, the boy did have a fire in him. He pushed himself to the point of literal collapse on the second day, and it had taken a pair of other recruits to carry him back to the cliff-face and bed. He wasn’t strong, he lacked the power that would make him a pivotal player in the battle to come, but he had determination that put everyone else’s to shame.

More importantly, when Sylvas pulled him aside to talk about how he had been able to take down more powerful enemies using stealth, timing and positioning, Anak’s eyes had widened in slow realization. He wouldn’t be a match for the others, and he wouldn’t contribute greatly to their efforts in battle. But he might very well serve as the tipping point in their conflicts if he managed to snipe stray enemies on the periphery of the fight with the languid looking rays that he cast.

As the last of his days wore on, Sylvas himself was slowly coming face to face with the reality that he was not going to be able to cast any of the new spells that he was learning from his gravity affinity spellbook. His old spells still functioned, even if they were sluggish and ill-shaped by comparison to how they used to be, and far more costly now that he was working outside of his affinity to cast them. Allegedly there were methods of converting mana affinities in the air mid-spell that wizards had developed so that they could dip into adjacent spell-lists, but Sylvas was so far off from having the power or comprehension to perform such feats that they may as well have been mythical.

The unaspected mana inside of him was like a poison, slowing him down, turning perfect casts into fizzling failures. It was a normal part of the journey from circle two to circle three, and he had done all the groundwork that it was possible to do without the mana-pool surrounding his core being purified in spite of the pain it caused him. But until the mana itself made the switch, he couldn’t move forward. Any other time, he could have just accepted this as necessary. Waited it out. But not now. Not with the cull coming. I am not going to be a liability to the team that I forced together.

Then, as days inevitably always do, the day of the cull arrived.

Sylvas and his team were issued with arm-bands to wear over their jackets to signify their team as they readied themselves. Theirs was a rich red. The color of Enore’s skin. Sylvas did not believe in signs from the gods, not anymore. But it made him smile softly to himself all the same.

Vaelith had been working all night to raise not a cityscape, but a battlefield. It looked as though she had hauled up the remains of some of the tower blocks buried beneath the sand, casting them in a heap at the center of the usual field. Instead of blocks raised to look like buildings, there were practical emplacements of cover and fortification dotted around the rest of the field.

“The buildings in the center will be the real stage for the grand ballet of violence,” Bael stated from Sylvas side. “All those enclosed spaces will make splash spells a dream.”

The same had crossed Sylvas’ mind. “Think everyone is going to be going for them?”

“Most will avoid them to minimize the danger they’re in initially, but I’d imagine that towards the end of the battle, everyone will be drawn in with a crushing inevitability by the potential. Risk aversion can only carry you so far.”

“Lot of open space around them.” Kaya was up on her tiptoes, trying to see past the crowd. “That’ll be killing ground too.”

“Our team has the best mobility.” Sylvas said as he worked the puzzle through before them. “It will be limited inside the buildings.”

“Not to mention, some might simply choose to bring the buildings down on us, as you did to poor unfortunate Abbas all those weeks ago.” Bael pointed out, finally giving Sylvas the name of the fiend with the water affinity. He’d survived the collapse of the tower that Sylvas had dropped on him thanks to his Crest, but it had taken him a long time to get back to normal, three days at least.

With a raised hand, Sylvas beckoned the team together. “We’re going straight for the ruins in the center.”

“What? Are you mad?” Ironeye growled in a near whisper.

“It is the best place to dig in and wait for the majority of the battle to play out. It’s the key strategic point. Our superior mobility can get us there ahead of everyone else, and we can hold it as a fortification.”

“Superior mobility?” Gharia questioned as her tail flicked in its trademarked, irritated fashion. “What good will that do us locked down inside a building?”

“Do any of the other teams know anything about our capabilities, beyond our mobility?”

Kaya easily answered that. “Doubt it, with all the sneaking you made us do.”

“So what would be the course of action that they least expect?”

Bael still looked like he was in shock at Sylvas’ idea, but he still answered. “They’re going to see us going in.”

“And they’re going to have no idea why we are doing it, what we are doing inside, and whether approaching the ruins is a death sentence. I’d say that lack of surety in our enemies is more than worth what we’re giving up.” Sylvas tried to look confident, but the truth was that committing to this plan had even odds of resulting in their immediate loss. He simply couldn’t think of anything more conventional that would produce the results that he needed.

Vaelith’s booming voice made them all flinch, reminding Sylvas that they’d have to cast wards to protect them from Hammerheart’s fiend’s sonic assault. “Go to your designated marker and prepare to enter the combat zone. The exercise begins in 5 minutes.”

There was a glow all around them as pinpoints of light appeared. Some of the teams were right across next to the drop-off, others were right here beside the outbuildings. Sylvas and his team were somewhere in the middle. As they marched over with all haste, he quickly scribbled out his orders on his slate, then grafted the words onto a sending to all his teammates and dropped the slate into cold storage again. The sendings sprung up all around him, a forest of black shields, rather than the usual white for official messages from the Ardent. He hadn’t chosen that symbol, it was just what his sending spells had become since his affinity started changing his magic. He didn’t know how to feel about it. Though he supposed it matched the black patches on his jacket now.

Everyone around him touched their shields, listening to their instructions, some of them with open dismay on their faces. Bael even fell into step beside him. “My good man, I know that we have treated you like the commander in chief of this whole exercise, as the unifying factor between our various groups it seemed like the most logical course of action. But do you not suppose that before deciding upon the stratagem we are employing on the field today you might have consulted with your dwarf companion and I?”

Sylvas didn’t miss a beat as he turned to look at him. “If you have a better plan, I’d be happy to hear it.”

“Well…” They continued marching soundlessly for a time, then Bael eventually conceded the point. “If a better idea comes to me, I shall share it post-haste.”

When they arrived at their marker around the periphery of the battlefield, which Sylvas now noticed had been outlined with a ward to keep anything too destructive from flying out, they were able to see that it was not only a pinpoint of light sharing the color of their armband, but also a countdown. A number hovering in the air, ticking down towards the beginning of the battle.

Sylvas startled when he felt Kaya take his hand and give it a squeeze. Then he remembered to squeeze back. He attempted to give her a smile, but he suspected that it looked a bit sickly. Gharia was at his other side, while Bael had chosen a more central position in their formation, the better to cast his wards over them all. Behind him, all the recruits radiated tension, but none of them was crying or running, so Sylvas considered it a victory for good morale.

As the final seconds ticked down in front of them, Sylvas retrieved his hand and began to cast. The gravity mana inside of him still felt uncomfortable and heavy compared to what he had worked with before, but he supposed that was because it was the literal representation of the concept of weight.

5.

With his near complete embodiment, Sylvas drained all of his own weight away. The flying spell should now lift him with the barest of effort. He’d be knocked around like a leaf on a breeze if anyone attacked him, but hopefully the mobility of his weightlessness would prevent that from happening at all.

4.

The flight spell was still going to drain him badly for the next minute or so, as they flitted across the sky to the center of the battlefield, out of reach of the slow plodding approach of the other teams. But he’d consider that mana well spent if it secured them the most important tactical position on the board without a single drop of blood spilled.

3.

“Ready?” Gharia asked, tail swishing with anticipation.

2.

Sylvas wet his lips, tasting iron. “We can do this.”

1.