“What a mage is, and what a mage can become very rarely bear much resemblance to one another. All of us began as nothing. All of us end at the upper limit of our capability. What shapes us is not nature. By our very nature, we are unnatural. Who we become is shaped by how we are taught, where we place focus, and what we choose to neglect.”
— Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Curgal Groenen
On the first day of Individual Improvement, Sylvas rose from his bed, deliberately went through his usual ablutions, then checked his slate for an update on where he was actually meant to be going and found nothing. He was nonplussed for a moment. Every moment of his day was usually occupied and scheduled, and he felt oddly adrift without knowing where he was meant to be and when. A white shield sprang into existence beside him, and he let out a little breath of relief.
“Report to Outbuilding Seven.” It was a succinct message with no room for interpretation, and he had no clue who had sent him it. The voice speaking into his mind was aggressively neutral, like it didn’t belong to a person at all, just something that knew what people sounded like.
The other recruits were all setting off for one classroom or another, some of them clustering into little groups, like Ironeyes and Kaya, and others setting off individually. Outside the Blackhall, there were more fully fledged Ardent around than Sylvas had seen since arriving on the planet. A quick glance around showed no familiar faces from the battle of Croesia, but the sudden presence of so many of them made him feel oddly nervous. As if something serious was finally happening, and the war against the relentless tides of Eidolons was finally at his doorstep once again, instead of being some distant dream.
He moved through them cautiously, aware of their power now in a way he hadn’t been when he first encountered them. He didn’t cast any scrying spells, in case it was taken as rude, but just from their presence in the floes of mana, he could tell that they were circles ahead of him and the other students. Most of them radiating power the way that only a few of the Instructors did. It was also his first time encountering other people with access to Cold Storage in any sort of decent numbers, and the sudden pull on his gravity sense of each individual’s self-contained pocket plane of existence distorted everything. He had to filter it out so he could focus on jogging briskly across to the outbuildings, pretending all the while that he couldn’t feel the weight of these strangers eyes on him as surely as he could have felt the weight of the things that they had stowed away in Cold Storage.
The outbuildings surrounding the central temple and tower that made up the campus were all in varying states of decay, with some having had whole sections replaced with the clean sharp metal of Ardent construction and others patched as little as possible to maintain the original architecture. Outbuilding Seven was actually one of the latter ones, which typically meant that it was one of the more disused of the lot. There wasn’t even one of the fancy white airlock-looking doors that the Ardent had fitted everywhere else, the door was made of wood, Sylvas chuckled as he touched it. It had been so long since he’d seen anything so normal.
What awaited him inside was anything but normal.
Instructors Vaelith and Fahred were standing beside a disused fireplace looking extremely unhappy to be in each other’s company, Instructor Vilmander was standing perfectly stock still in the middle of the room, staring at the doorway and awaiting Sylvas arrival with barely concealed contempt. The most incongruous of them all was Quartermaster Chul, who was sitting on a pile of rubble that had probably once been an internal wall and attempting to dig something out of her ear with a pinkie finger. By mass, Chul was the most impressive person in the room, but Fahred’s incredible arcane power washed that away as soon as Sylvas got close enough to feel it. All eyes were on him, and he found himself oddly taken aback. He knew that he was going to be on the receiving end of some special attention as a result of his affinity, but he hadn’t expected half the staff of the campus to be here.
Fahred offered something like a smile, “Nice of you to finally grace us with your presence.”
Vaelith scowled at her counterpart but gave Sylvas an encouraging nod. Chul didn’t even seem to notice that Sylvas had come into the room and Vilmander… there was an intensity to Vilmander’s interest that bordered on the uncomfortable. “You have presented something of a puzzle to me, Recruit.”
“Sorry?” Sylvas wasn’t sure if he was apologizing or simply confused, but Vilmander pressed on all the same, his golden eyes blazing all the while.
“The gyrokinetic effect that you manifest is potent, but self-destructive. Presumably a result of the inherent fragility inflicted on you through your first circle embodiment, coupled with its forced direction of mana through your system…”
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“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Vaelith cut him off.
Vilmander rolled his eyes, “Yes, of course, procedure.”
The elf took center stage, “Alright Vail, it works like this. We scry you at the start, we scry you at the end. In between, we do everything we can to improve you. Everything gets recorded. Everything is quantified.”
Sylvas glanced around at them all then held up his arms. “Scry away.”
Fahred was obviously itching for something to do and leapt forward to cast the scrying spell immediately, a somewhat tweaked version of the spell that displayed its results to everyone present, Sylvas included.
Name: Sylvas Vail
Species: Human
Health: 92%
Mana: 100%
First Circle Embodiment: Arterium Arcanum
First Circle Paradigm: Clearmind
Second Circle Embodiment: Arcane Bulwark
Second Circle Paradigm: Lockmind
Third Circle Embodiment: Tidal Shift
Third Circle Paradigm: Waveform
Affinity: Gravity
Strength: F1 – B20
Resilience: F2 – A1
Speed: F1
Potency: E7
Focus: E12
Regeneration: E14
There was a momentary pause as they all looked at the results with confusion. Vaelith cast something brief and flaring and the details were copied onto her slate. “I was under the impression that you were capable of a simple scrying, Fahred.”
“You can’t blame the painter if the model is ugly.” Was all that Fahred managed to get out before Vaelith’s scrying spell was completed and produced identical puzzling results.
Strength: F1 – B20
Resilience: F2 – A1
Fahred stared at the numbers. “What does that even mean?”
Vilmander, alone among them, didn’t seem at all surprised. “Tidal Shift allows our subject to adjust his density and weight through gyrokinetic manipulation. Hence the fields of variance in his physical measurements.”
Vaelith’s brows, the only hair on her head, drew down into a scowl. “But why are they different?”
“Raise the floor, raise the roof.” Chul grumbled from where she was still sitting.
Fahred snapped his fingers. “Scrying provides us with the maximum potential output, so if you had an A1 strength, it would simply report that, not that you were capable of exerting F through B. So…” He conjured Sylvas’ last scry from before he ascended to his third circle into the air as an illusion and pointed to the resilience there too. “It’s native state is higher than the strength. So the more developed any one category is, the higher the enhanced version will be.”
“Higher floor, higher roof.” Chul repeated.
Fahred forced a smile. “Quite.”
Vilmander was staring at Sylvas quite intently now, studying him. “The self-destructive properties of the Tidal Shift, have you experimented with them?”
“Have I experimented with shattering all of my own bones?” Sylvas repeated back, to clarify.
“The young, they do everything in extremes.” Vilmander sighed. “There is a breaking point, a point of no return, after which your own embodiment does you harm, but anywhere up to that breaking point, you can go safely.”
“And our first job is to get you there.” Vaelith never smiled exactly, but sometimes there was a gleam in her eyes that looked positively demonic. Gleeful hellish flames fluttering in her stare.
“Our first job, will be to devise a strategy of improvement.” Vilmander stopped the elf before she could start forcing Sylvas to break his own bones again. “Which is of course, why the four of us are gathered here.”
Sylvas looked between the three of his Instructors before his gaze finally fell on Quartermaster Chul, who had gone back to excavating her ear. “What exactly…”
Fahred cut him off before he could ask. “I will of course be focusing my instruction on the largely noncombat portions of your spellcraft, most specifically spatial magic, teleportation and the various related spells and techniques that will compose your duties in the fleet.”
“And I, if it wasn’t clear, will be focusing on the spellcraft that will keep you alive, teaching you how to survive and the best weaponize your affinity.” Vaelith’s proverbial hackles were raised.
“I will be turning my own focus to improvements to your Paradigm and replacing your mana cycling technique.”
“And my embodiment?”
Everyone turned to look at Chul. “You and me are going to lift some weights.”
Sylvas chuckled at the joke, only to realise nobody else was smiling. “Oh you’re serious.”
“Enhancement spells aren’t going to cut it.” Chul met his gaze.
“While it is certainly possible to increase your strength and resilience through magic, the effect tends to be multiplicative rather than additive.” Fahred began explaining, “And given how little the enhancement spells have to work with, you will, unfortunately need to improve your body at least a little, before your new embodiment is at its most effective and least… self-destructive.”
“In addition to your physical training, Quartemaster Chul is going to liaise with Instructor Sagran to help source you some equipment to work in harmony with your affinity.” Vilmander added, before Sylvas could object.
Until now, he’d been trying to puzzle through Hell Week, or Independent Improvement, or whatever they wanted to call it. Mostly, he had been trying to work out why it had come after the Cull instead of before, when they all would have most benefited from it. And increasingly, he came to suspect that it came down to resources. They were investing a significant amount of time and resources into his improvement right now. If he was just going to fail out at the next test, then all of that would have been wasted, whereas now that he’d made it through the cull, at the top of his class, no less, they could justify spending all that they wanted on him.
“Where do we start?”