Replicating a spell after seeing it once was one thing. Syl had done it a handful of times, but it usually wasn’t very productive. Most spells weren’t worth copying since he already had something with a similar or better effect, and the ones that were worth replicating often had so many spell processes that he had to make significant modifications in order to even cast them.

Taking principles of a spell was another. Syl did that much more, but it was significantly harder to do. This was the first time he’d seen a real Cascadian spellcaster in some time. They had adapted their spellcraft to work in close quarters, it seemed. The last tiem he’d seen them, they’d been a terror when there was a great deal of fresh water lying around, but that had been at the scales of full reservoirs or lakes.

Though they had ultimately been ineffectual against him, he’d seen enough of their magic to be impressed. There was a level of efficiency to their spells that had stemmed from their activation processes, not just the general level of polish in the spell itself.

Syl didn’t have much to work with since he’d broken the FCDs enough to render their history unreadable. All he had as a base was the memory of what they’d cast from the outside, which meant he would be missing a few critical pieces.

“What are you working on?” Bianca asked.

Members of the Circuit team had been given two free days off class, ostensibly to mourn and recover. Syl knew at least some of that time was going to be spent ensuring information security, which left a bitter taste in his mouth, but it wasn’t something he could deal with short of inciting a revolution against Auria, which he didn’t particularly have plans for at the moment.

That was fine, though. School life was his break time. Since he wasn’t there, he would do what he always did.

“Trying to mimic an activation process from memory,” Syl said, typing and deleting another few lines in his FCD console before shutting it off for the time being. “The Cascadians had ridiculous response times on their spells, not all of which even used verbal magic.”

“Is that not because they are innate water casters?” Bianca asked, tilting her head. “I believed that was the scientifically accepted explanation.”

“It is,” Syl replied. “Yet I somehow doubt that Cascadia just happens to have the perfect combination of genetics and environment to make all of their mages such powerful innate casters. We were part of the same country not fifty years ago.”

“Not all of their mages are innate casters,” Bianca suggested.

“That would make innate casters elites, and they wouldn’t send elites to do a base job like this,” Syl said.

“Are you sure?” Bianca asked. “If they knew they were taking a shot at you and me, they probably would have sent stronger people.”

“True,” Syl allowed, “but the deployed magicians didn’t know who either you or I were, which tells me that we weren’t dealing with the best of the best. My best guess is that they knew they were going for a tertiary princess.”

“Bad luck for them,” Bianca said, nodding.

“And also not a reason to burn elites,” Syl said. “Especially not if they were false-flag operators trying to operate with an incompetent local terrorist group.”

“Then what do you think it was?”

“I think Cascadia might have found out how to integreate the principles of innate casting into their spells,” Syl said.

Innate magic and free casting were two sides of the same coin. Syl had made some significant process on the latter, which just entailed any process of using a spell without an FCD. Though his workaround wasn’t true free casting, it could pretty handily eliminate the need for an FCD under very specific circumstances.

Innates, on the other hand, were people born with a specific proficiency towards a type of magic. They could sometimes free cast basic spells, though this was considered less of an answer towards the great unsolved conjecture and more of an exception to it.

More important was how their affinity modified their relationship with their magic. While in their element or using it, innate casters were far more effective in speed, efficiency, and power with their spells. They were a terror to face on the battlefield for exactly that reason.

Syl had been told that he had once upon been an innate. His affinity had broken a long time ago, lost in the same incident that had severed his vocal cords, and if it had any effects on him now, he didn’t notice them.

He’d tried reopening that door once or twice, but the results had been disastrous, to say the least. As such, his time was better spent trying to replicate spells he’d seen already rather than trying to awaken any hidden potential.

“That’s a bold claim to make,” Bianca said. “Do you truly think so?”

“If nothing else, it’s worth testing,” Syl said. “I need more data, but I doubt we’ll find our Cascadian captive very cooperative for our purposes.”

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“You could always get into war with Cascadia.” The suggestion was joking, but the princess’ eyes were not.

“I like living in a country where most everyone is alive,” Syl said.

“I do too. Do you truly think you will live out your life without them making an attempt?”

“No, but I know what my interference will mean in any conflict,” Syl said. “I will do what I must when I must.”

“That is as much as I can ask out of you, I suppose. I will leave you to your work.”

Said work was not as productive as Syl had hoped it would be, though it bore more fruit than expected. He hadn’t expected to crack the secret of Cascadian magic after just closely examining one spell that had been cast towards him, though of course he’d hoped for that. What Syl got, ultimately, were a handful of insights.

Cascadians structured their magic differently, though the differences might not have been apparent to anyone not well versed in magical theory. That much, Syl knew—publicly available spells from both countries had minute differences.

When he tried to replicate the ones that had been thrown his way inside the Gate, however, he kept on getting the sensation that he was ever so slightly off. The timing between activation and the first process was just a little longer than it should have been.

Syl’s first conclusion was that the Cascadians had been simultaneously forming activation process and process one, which was a technique that a good deal of elite duelists used to hasten their spells at the cost of precision. He himself couldn’t properly mimic that just thanks to his lack of ability to simultaneously manage processes. Though Syl could form them extremely quickly one after the other, he didn’t have the extra cycles nor the vocal cords to spare to make two at once.

When he got Bianca to try it out, though, he realized that conclusion had been wrong. Even when she cast the conjuration-type Manipulate Water—a D-class spell that was elementary for both of them—with perfect simultaneous activation and opening processes, he could tell there was a difference between this and what he’d fought against.

Are they pre-casting their spell processes? That sounded… wrong. There was a reason the activation process was cast before the rest of the spell processes in most countries’ magic theory. Syl knew better than nearly anyone in the nation that Aurian spell theory wasn’t the only way to apply magic, but this was something that was almost universally accepted.

Without the activation process to direct the spell and create a container for it, forming a spell sequence caused the flux in the air to dissipate almost immediately. Even if the magician made an activation process immediately afterwards, there was no guarantee that they would be able to keep the spell’s form the same.

Syl was pretty sure he could do it, but that would be sloppy casting and more effort than it was worth. The Cascadian magicians had been casting seemingly effortlessly. How had they bridged that gap?

For the time being, he supposed that there was nothing to do but to experiment with it. Using a lower-class version of the same spells that the Cascadians had used against him, Syl spent a day trying various timings, formulating the spell process first before surrounding it with the activation one.

He could feel that this was closer to what his enemy had used against him than the simultaneous activation, but it still felt wrong. The spell wasn’t coming along any easier, and it was significantly less stable. Placing power into it an empty shell just wasn’t working to formulate a spell with any modicum of coherence.

Maybe he was coming at this with the wrong approach. Just because their activation process was triggering after their spell processes didn’t necessarily mean that was the only difference—in fact, given current results, it was almost necessary that there was something else.

Had Syl been wrong? Was Cascadia using innate magicians on a job as haphazard as this one?

That would have been pretty strange. Unless the neighboring country had figured out a way to breed innate magicians—theoretically not possible, though Syl could never discount the impossible becoming simply improbable—those should have still been too valuable a resource to use like this.

While it was possible that they had figured out how to breed innates, Syl highly doubted it. That was a decades-long program, and Cascadian information security was not tight enough to hide a plan like that from before the great magical war.

For the time being, he would continue assuming that he wasn’t going to have to abruptly develop an innate proficiency for water magic to make his spells marginally improve their efficiency.

It was possible that there had been something in their FCDs, but Syl had annihilated their casting devices in the process of taking them down. If his special unit found anything there, he was sure they’d let him know.

While taking them down… there was a thought. Syl thought back to the methods he’d employed himself during that brief stint of violence. His “free casting,” so to speak, had employed his technique of copying a spell pattern into his brain and activating it from memory. There was the possibility that they were doing something similar. Syl wasn’t so arrogant as to think he was the first to ever think of any given magical theory.

Except this also seemed to work in different ways from his implanted magic. If they were downloading magic into their brains, it wasn’t to activate a pre-prepped spell.

Syl kept experimenting, though he didn’t want to try anything too invasive at the moment. He ruled out possibilities one by one, trying various techniques he was reasonably sure the Cascadians had access to.

He hadn’t expected to reach success in the first few hours, but Syl had to admit to at least hoping that he would make some headway. Instead, he had a couple dozen false starts that he was fairly sure the Cascadians hadn’t used and a whole lot of excess flux lying around.

Syl was about to go and ask the people at Incarnate if they had any leads on it when his FCD buzzed.

It wasn’t someone he’d been expecting. He’d thought it would have been either Bianca asking him what he wanted to eat or someone from the special unit reporting back on something they’d gotten out of their new captives, but it was neither.

It was from Uriel, which was surprising. He had removed the software that Jennifer had downloaded onto everyone’s FCD before the Gate as well as anything the school had left on it. She shouldn’t have had his FCD identifier.

Mj. Uriel: We need to talk as soon as possible. Off campus. No cameras.

He raised his eyebrows.

Syl: This sounds like the least creative setup for an ambush I’ve ever seen.

Mj. Uriel: As if that’d stop you. Two hours from now. You can pick the location.

This was certainly an interesting development. Syl had noticed that Uriel had at least some pre-existing knowledge about Auria’s state of affairs. What business she wanted with him, though? That was a different question.

Syl: I’m at my house. I’ll send you the address.

Mj. Uriel: Copy that.