There were a thousand urgent tasks when it came to war, but Syl had finished everything he needed to do already. For now, he chose to do nothing.
Information about Cascadia was still filtering through several layers of Aurian censorship. Syl, of course, was a few days and multiple hundred bodies ahead of them. Even then, it was quickly becoming clear that the student body was aware that something was wrong.
Everyone who attended the Aurian Magical Institute had grown up in a world defined by the third world war. They were no stranger to loss. The academy itself was known to have a substantial attrition rate even though it was populated by some of the most influential young Aurians, so it wasn’t unusual to have a good chunk of students fail out or even die from accidents in the lab, training, or even actual fieldwork.
It was not, however, common for ten students to die in a single semester, let alone ones that were notoriously powerful in the Graduate Reserve. There was only so much that institutional propaganda could do when James Rokho, one of AMI’s shining stars, had been one of the names listed on the death announcement.
Syl only paid it enough mind to add it to his list of visible changes in this generation of young magicians compared to theones he’d fought alongside. The winds had been changing already, but during the war, there had been no shortage of magicians willing to die for their country. Even in a war as existentially threatening as the great one, patriotism and a willing to swallow lies to protect a home had prevailed. That no longer seemed to be the case.
Bianca was the one who would actually engage with what that meant, though. Syl had a passing interest in politics at best, and that only came into play when it came to affecting those he cared about. His counterpart in the special unit and life itself was the one who tended to deal with people.
“You seem lost in thought. Is something weighing on your mind, or should I expect a superweapon to appear from that pack?”
Speak of the devil, Syl signed, lips quirking upward. Nice to see you.
It hadn’t been long since Gluttony had made her appearance, sucking in all the ambient flux around the Santa Rosa Tower and destroying Syl’s throat-mounted FCD. That was one of the few pieces of technology he’d had that wasn’t one of his own designs—he had never viewed being able to speak as a priority when all the communication he needed could be achieved with his hands whether that was through signing or casting.
That did mean that he was still unable to speak. He’d gotten the most recent implant just under three years ago, and it had kept working for long enough that he hadn’t bothered to change it. Given how he’d dissolved it into his bloodstream, removing all the special surgical connections that had allowed the FCD to work without obstructing his natural flux flow, Syl had not had an opportunity to replace it.
For the time being, he was perfectly willing to accept an inability to speak. Back when he’d been regularly running missions, he had very rarely used this type of FCD to prevent exactly the scenario that Gluttony had triggered. Syl was familiar with lacking a voice.
“I must admit some element of surprise that you continue to attend class,” Bianca said. “Most of the leadership is gone.”
They sustained more injuries than we did, Syl signed. More losses as well. You continued attending, so I continued.
“That is sweet of you,” she said. “I come bearing good news.”
Syl raised an eyebrow, looking up from the lunch he’d ignored in favor of the modified FCD he’d been tinkering with for the last while.
Sensitive news? He signed. Only one camera and one sensor in this room.
“I know,” Bianca said. “I do have senses of my own, you know.”
She typed into her FCD, using C-class stealth-type spell Signal Obfuscation to prevent simple intranet hijackers like the ones hooked throughout the entire campus’ network from reading any output from her casting device. Bianca had also identified the hidden camera in here, of course, but since this was a room typically only used by Reserve leadership, it was more of a formality than an actual surveillance device. Angling her body was enough to keep the camera from seeing her screen.
srv GR nloy aur/gloy GR fac - nrum hrd us - sit k to prs det unk
Bianca’s message, of course, was a shortened version of a longer one. Syl read it with the same comfort as he would regular English.
The surviving Graduate Reserve either possess no loyalty to the Aurian kingdom or more to themselves because I haven’t heard any rumors about us. The situation is known to prismatics, but the exact details are still largely hidden.
They were well accustomed to using this kind of language. It wasn’t coded—a regular student would be able to sort this out after a bit. The two of them and the rest of the special unit did have a coded version that was slightly less character-efficient, but they didn’t need to use that given the circumstances. It was a much faster way for them to communicate without talking, an attribute that made shortened text absolutely indispensable when they weren’t able to speak to each other in the field.
It was nice to know that the others hadn’t immediately gone back to inform their families about what had happened. It was inevitable that word would get out at some point, but the only critical points were Uriel, Waylan, and Jennifer. They were the first students Syl and Bianca had made contact with after they had come back, and they were also the most knowledgeable about their situation.
The two of them hadn’t just gone around telling people who they were, but Jennifer had recorded the burst of energy that Syl had created with the paragon-class transmutation-class spell Armaggedon and correctly deduced that the two of them had something to do with it. She wasn’t dumb, and neither were the other two master-class Reserve magicians.
Syl and Bianca hadn’t owed any of them an explanation, but the Cascadian incident had been a wake-up call with respect to their priorities.
Staying hidden had never been completely mandatory. As an active paragon-class magician, Sylvester Auria was known for a great deal of things. Subterfuge was not one of them.
There was a reason his sin was Pride.
He was still reasonably certain that his and Bianca’s identities were relatively hidden. They had minimized the amount of information they’d given to the Reserve leadership while still making it clear that they were both more powerful than they had initially seemed, but the one person who had successfully identified Bianca as the former Crown Princess had been master-class prismatic and Reserve duelist Drew Violet, who Syl had seen dead by his own hand.
Good to hear, he signed at Bianca. Anything from the Reserve?
ng rn - prv n100 - rvl ptl
Not a good time to discuss this. If we can’t be a hundred percent sure that there is absolutely nothing listening to us, there’s the chance we reveal sensitive information.
That was fair. Syl’s passive senses for detecting magic were very good, but he was no Jennifer with her flux hypersensitivity. When it came to finding sensors, he could cast spells that looked for specific common ones as well as more powerful general perception-type magic, but he was far too experienced with magic to set aside the possibility that he was being watched by something else.
Finding spy magic was a great deal more difficult than fortifying a specific location against it; Syl had once likened it to the difference between finding a needle in a haystack and keeping both hay and metal out of the farmhouse. Not that he had seen a farmhouse, but it was an old turn of phrase that had stuck around through flux integration.
While Aurian magic theory had its shortcomings in many parts, the kingdom was not a country with no power to its name. Disregarding the prismatics as non-threats was how you got yourself killed or worse. Just to take one example, Syl still had yet to see a school of magic as dangerously subversive as that of the Violets.
Then we can speak about it later, Syl signed.
The reasoning behind the higher-ups in the Reserve taking days off was ostensibly to mourn and recover from wounds from what had been explained away as a minor terrorist incident leading to a flux harvester detonating. To some extent, that was true—the reason, that was. The cover story was wholly fake. A good chunk of the succcess had been attributed to Wildcard and Drew Violet, both of whom had contributed less than a percentage point of what Syl had.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Apart from recovery, though, the group of circuit magicians Uriel had assembled was angry. They had swallowed lies and bore the weight of Auria’s sins, but they had just come into contact with reality and had found it lacking.
Angry magicians could do a lot.
That was a bridge to be burned later, though. For the time being, Syl was still engineering, Bianca was still forming human connections, and they were both still attending the academy.
“You should finish your lunch,” Bianca suggested. “The break period ends soon.”
Syl wanted to protest, but he hadn’t been nearing a breakthrough on his project. He’d been trying to adapt the principle of using the environment to pre-cast an activation process that the glasses he and Jennifer had worked on utilized to flux batteries, but it wasn’t quite working out. While he had found that he could create ideal casting conditions within the context of an FCD and therefore increase the efficiency of a pre-loaded spell, he still had to use a manual charge from his body to stimulate a flux battery to activate and start passing flux into the activation and formation processes. That wasn’t quite what he wanted out of this project, and he was still stumped on how to work with it.
It could wait.
Syl and Bianca ate in silence, communicating with their hands. The campus food had taken a slight but noticeable drop in quality. The meat was always synthetic, but the bread was coarser and more uniform than usual, indicating that it too had been replaced by a more flux-heavy substitute.
A good chunk of the organic material in it came from large-scale farms near the border. Through their connections, Syl and Bianca were aware that Cascadia was readying a large-scale offensive. Chances were high that Auria was starting to shut down or move critical infrastructure away from the border in preparation for that. If the agricultural map Syl had memorized two years ago for the purpose of a single mission was still correct, one of the most productive grain farm systems the country had was in that area.
A shame, but real bread wasn’t going to be the only thing people lost if this situation got significantly worse. Syl was prepared for it, of course, but he highly doubted most of the kingdom was.
At length, the period came to an end. They bid each other their respective farewells as they departed towards their next class.
Syl’s next one was Intro to Spell Theory with Alexis Lance, the same graduate student who’d been in charge of the class 3 version of this class since the start of the semester. She hadn’t bothered him much since he’d made some choice comments about her choice of magic work and demonstrated that he was laughably far above her level, let alone the introductory level this class demanded.
Lance looked noticeably disturbed today. Whether it was her mood pervading the class or just the general rumors percolating throughout campus, the atmosphere seemed subdued as well.
Syl noted that the seat next to him was empty. He’d been partnered with the boy there for most of the semester so far. The other class 3 had proven to be a diligent partner, capable in his casting fundamentals even if his flux pool wasn’t the largest.
The classroom door swung open with a crash two minutes into a stilted lecture about simultaneous process forming that Syl might have found interesting at the age of four, and the absent boy walked in.
Lance trailed off in the middle of a sentence, the entire class looking towards one Len Jeksen, a long-haired class 3 swordsman. His eyes were red and downcast, his hands balled into fists by his side. Len’s knuckles were bloody. The FCD he preferred, a sheathed fulminata sword, was scratched so heavily Syl thought he might have put it through a blender.
“Len,” Lance started. “I—“
“Stop,” Len hissed with such venom that the professor, a good six years more experienced than him, physically took a step back. His shoulders slumped. When he spoke again, his voice was defeated. “Just… stop. I’ve heard enough of sorry for a lifetime.”
Ah. Syl hadn’t had this class since the incident at the Santa Rosa Tower, so he’d forgotten. Lia Jeksen had been the first to die during what had ostensibly been a war game of an international circuit tournament, and she’d had a twin brother.
Len trudged his way to Syl’s seat and sat down.
Syl glanced at him, wondering if he’d understand him if he signed.
Something in Syl’s gaze must’ve tipped Len off, because he sighed deeply as Lance haltingly restarted the lecture.
“Lia would have wanted me to be here,” Len said, his voice barely a whisper.
Syl picked up a pen and a notepad from the table, then wrote a sentence.
She was a good magician.
“The best,” Len mumbled when he read it, trying and failing to keep composure. “She spoke highly of you.”
Syl hadn’t known that.
Len didn’t speak again until Lance decided to declare the groupwork for the day. Once people got themselves formed into their pairs, ready to try the exercise—simultaneous casting, which Syl was actually quite bad at given his power thanks to his lack of available spell processes—Len talked again, his voice almost entirely drowned out by the general volume of the class.
“Syl. This might be a sensitive question, but I’ve… I’ve been dying to know.” There was a frantic, nervous edge in his voice that Syl could sympathize with.
He gestured for the swordsman to go ahead.
“Were—were you with her when she, when she—“
Syl nodded, pointing at his throat before making an X over his lips.
It took Len a moment to realize what he meant, but once he did, the swordsman flinched.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry. And I know how little that means, but—”
Syl put a hand on Len’s shoulder, shaking his head. With his free hand, he wrote another note.
I don’t mind. Want to practice?
Len inhaled deeply, held it, and exhaled. Syl recognized it as a breathing exercise similar to the ones Lia had used shortly before her untimely death. They trained at the same facility and as part of the same family, so it made sense for them to use the same techniques.
Once he was calmer, the swordsman nodded.
“I suppose some silence would be welcome,” Len said. “No offense.”
Syl shrugged, signing back none taken.
Len looked at Syl’s fingers, confused, then shrugged as well.
They got to the day’s practice, both of them quieter than they usually were. Syl was able to handle the low-class spells relatively easily, since most of those didn’t need more than two or three spell processes at a time, but he knew how difficult it would be once he cast more complex spells. For those, he would have to flicker his flux between two ongoing spells at the same time at such speed that one allocated process could serve the purpose of two, trusting in his preparations to be completely accurate since he wouldn’t be able to adjust any of them on the fly.
Since the class practice was relatively low-stakes and boring normally, Syl practiced that flickering. Despite years of experience doing so, it was still one of his weak suits. He rarely flickered his spells during combat, since using two subpar spells at the same time was a pretty poor tradeoff when compared to activating one very powerful spell with the finest control a human could manage.
Practice made better if not perfect, though, so he kept at it. It was clearly helping Len, who was throwing himself into a relatively basic exercise full-throttle. Syl recognized the manic desperation in those movements, the need for something—anything—to occupy the mind. He could sympathize.
There was anger too, an increasingly familiar kind.
Fifteen minutes into the exercise, Syl’s FCDs buzzed gently, notifying him of a message. Two minutes after that, it buzzed again, slightly more urgently this time.
With the second buzz, Syl saw the instructor’s FCD light up as well. He wouldn’t have paid much attention to it if he didn’t catch her expression go from mildly crestfallen to corpse-level ashened as she read the text on it.
“Attention,” Alexis Lance, seventh-year graduate student and interim professor for their class said half-heartedly.
The class didn’t react to her words, most of the students too wrapped up in their own magical worlds to bother listening to her.
Lance swore under her breath, then cast a burst of purposeless flux outwards, gaining the attention of most of the class. There were one or two hopeless cases who didn’t react—Syl assumed they had terrible flux perception, which wasn’t a skill tested on the practical exams.
“Class is canceled for today and the foreseeable future,” Lance said. “Or maybe they’ll get a substitute in. I don’t know. Feel free to keep practicing or whatever.”
With that less than half-backed announcement, she hurried out of the room, slamming the door into the wall with how hard she hit it.
“The hell was that about?” Len asked.
Similar conversation burst out around the class, thirty students talking at and over each other.
Syl took the opportunity to check the messages he’d received. Given the timing, he suspected that they would be very relevant.
The first one was from the one-star general who led the special unit. Rather than commanding the thousands of wartime magicians that role would usually entail, this general had initially been tasked with managing a number of special units, all of which Syl had learned were now deactivated.
With one exception, by technicality.
[RANK HIDDEN] [NAME HIDDEN]: Blood in the water. Activity at the border. Stand by for potential deploy.
Stand by for potential deployment meant no commitment to doing so. Syl was always ready for the situation to suddenly, drastically get worse. He could safely ignore that for the time being. If things got urgent, the general would contact him more directly.
The second one held the context he’d been looking for.
Mj. Uriel: Just got official word from the higher-ups. About 20% of Graduate Reserve in Auria is getting deployed. The other universities are contributing less than us. More than half of us are being sent to the border. They’re not being clear on who the inciting incident is from, but it’s pretty obvious.
As he was reading it, another message came from Bianca, once again in the shortened form.
[RANK HIDDEN] Bianca: km wr
That shortening was borrowed from another language and could be summed up to mean I have a bad feeling about this.
[RANK HIDDEN] Syl: My class is out. We should reconvene when you’re done.
He had known this would come, but he had thought they would hold off on an offensive for at least some time considering the losses they had suffered.
It would take some time for both sides to deploy their forces, so Syl whiled it away in the undergraduate lab. He would have used the replica he’d made of Jennifer’s authorization to enter the graduate ones, but it would be too much of a pain to ensure that none of the numerous sensors specifically aimed at the graduate labs caught him breaking regulations.
About an hour passed before his FCD buzzed again, more urgently this time.
[RANK HIDDEN] [NAME HIDDEN]: Change of plans. We just lost agents near the Santa Rosa Tower. The front is eighty klicks east and ten north. Deploy to Santa Rosa at your earliest convenience.
Less than two mintues later, Bianca arrived to the lab, already typing on her FCD.
“The storm is here,” she said.
Syl nodded, signing back. Then we’ll chase it.