The mixed group of Reserve, undergraduates, and fully graduated adult magicians in the room right now had little in common at first glance. Almost every single magician had a different type specialty, and there were a few who were specifically elementalists who would be nearly useless outside a very specific set of circumstances. Most were from First Academy, but there were a few that had come from others.

Syl had already realized the connection by now. They were all Circuit competitors of some kind—some on the collegiate level, others above. Despite the prevalence of Aurian graduates going directly into the military, whether as an assault mage or a researcher, not one of them was displaying military insignia beyond that of the Reserve.

There was a reason the Graduate Reserve had the latter half of their title. They dealt with internal Aurian problems and importantly were nearly never deployed onto an active front. Auria was theoretically not at war with anyone, but their territories and allies further east absolutely were. Add on their critical relationship with Oceania and Lingdao, both of which were perpetually fending off regional disputes, and the result was that a fair chunk of those who had been in the military had seen action. Even those who hadn’t were on constant vigilance for it.

The Reserve, on the other hand, rarely went further than training. That made them ideal for circuit tournaments, which were one of the few ways to use offensive magic without being drafted in Aurian society.

It had made more sense after Syl had heard it from Uriel and confirmed it with his special unit. This was a practice that had become more common since World War III, quietly done for the most part because parts of it would be inconvenient for Auria’s image as a proud, powerful military state to continue functioning.

Border disputes were extraordinarily common. Cascadia, Auria, and Soliland were very close neighbors and had had something of a rocky relationship in the decades since their establishment. Since all three countries recognized just how devastating all-out warfare could be for them, they had settled on a different way to mediate relatively minor border disputes.

Syl had been somewhat familiar with the circuit rules, but Uriel adding him to the team had convinced him to look a little more deeply into it. There were a few sets of games that Auria played against her fellow countries, using a handful of elite to represent themselves. By necessity, said elites couldn’t be the military officers that would so often be deployed in combat situations or otherwise assigned to critical positions.

One of the few problems, it seemed, was that typical circuit—the kind that was played for fun, profit, and propaganda—was regulated. There were official judges as well as artificial restrictions placed on FCDs that would prevent lethal incidents from occurring during regular competition. In land contests, those regulations weren’t there at all. Games were played to unconsciousness, surrender, or death. According to the data he’d gathered as well as Uriel’s word, Syl had surmised that typically there weren’t too many casualties due to both sides’ magicians being interested in their continued survival, but when someone pushed it too far, it escalated fast. Apparently, last year, that had happened.

Syl hadn’t been informed about much of this because it simply hadn’t been important to him. When he’d been active, he had been dealing with situations a lot bigger than border contests. This wouldn’t even have registered on his radar with how insignificant a few kilometers was.

That said, he had actually loosely heard of what had happened last year. There had been a brief period where a number of tactical and master-class magicians had been massacred near the border, including two prismatics. After confirming that there had been no further incursion and that the Cascadian government had quietly taken credit for it, Syl had decided it wasn’t worth breaking his cover to go for it.

“Some of you in this room are aware of what I am about to tell you,” Uriel said, eyes panning over the secured conference room. “Thank you for answering on such short notice.”

“Get to the point,” James “Wildcard” Rokho said brusquely. “There’s maybe three people in here that aren’t aware of what’s happening already. Trying to rip the bandage off slowly isn’t going to change anything.”

Earlier, Syl had evaluated James’ relationship with Uriel and assumed that the two of them either weren’t on good terms or weren’t in the same organization. From here, it looked like the answer was both.

Ostensibly, Syl should have been reporting the existence of splinter factions within the Graduate Reserve, but he hadn’t been explicitly ordered to, and he was reasonably sure that they weren’t going to take action in the same way that Sanguine or some similar extremist group. Add in the fact that they were largely prismatics or at least from branch families… this looked more like an option that Syl wanted to keep open. Besides, initiating a purge on some of the most powerful, promising young prospects in Auria was more likely to lead to a quick, messy collapse than not.

It wasn’t only prismatics in here, though. As far as Syl could tell, there were two unifying factors. One was the aforementioned fact that everyone was a circuit competitor. The other was that they were all from backgrounds that lent themselves towards being aware of the reality behind Auria. It didn’t take much to realize that they’d been selected at least in part for that reason—Uriel had some level of discretion as to picking the participants from the Reserve side, and there was no reason she should have picked someone as inexperienced as Lia Jeksen, the class three swordswoman whose training center Syl had met with James on.

Uriel’s explanation was brief and was met with very little surprise, essentially confirming Syl’s suspicion. A few people seemed a bit concerned about the details, though.

“You said this could be life-threatening,” Lia said. “I’m noticing that we don’t exactly have strategic-class magicians.”

“Neither nation wants to waste strategics on a border dispute,” Uriel said with a tone that said she had gotten used to this. “And even a strategic is defeatable, especially within the confines of the circuit.”

There were a grand total of eighteen magicians in this room, twelve of which were still in the academy system—Syl and Bianca included, of course. Out of the sixteen magicians not named Bianca or Syl, he recognized eight master-class magicians, four of which were from the Reserve.

Said Reserve masters were Uriel, Jennifer, James, and Waylan, leaving out only Drew. That wasn’t terribly surprising, given how close the Violet seemed to be closely monitored by his mother, who’d tried to take the Cascadian prisoner from Syl and his group.

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“Just throw if you think you’re going to lose,” James said gruffly. “Your life’s worth more than a couple kilometers of Aurian land. Nobody important even lives on the border.”

One of the post-graduates, a master-class sabotage-type specialist by the name of Natalie “Mishap” Irving who’d made waves by winning the national solo duelist title in eight consecutive seasons, bristled at that. “Watch your damn tongue, kid. Don’t go thinking you’re hot shit just because of your name.”

Right. Syl was tangentially aware of her since she ranked somewhere in the top fifty most effective magicians in Auria. If memory served him correctly, she’d been born and raised in Knights Landing a small town northwest of Sacramento—and there was the connection. They’d taken that entire area in a major offensive that had ultimately resulted in the San Francisco incident.

Syl sometimes wished his memory wasn’t as effective as it was.

“What’d you say?” James replied, suddenly pissed. “I didn’t pick who I popped out of, Irving.”

“Neither did I, Rokho.”

“Quiet,” Uriel said evenly. Though she used no flux to augment her voice, the tone that she used got even the senior circuit champion to shut up. “Wildcard, Mishap, you should both know better. After the untimely demise of both the Indigo and Red scions as well as nearly the entire team usually dedicated to these games, we need all we can get to… serve our country with honor, so to speak. It is almost certain that Cascadia will be hungry for blood this year.”

It was also almost certain that she didn’t give a rat’s ass about honor for her country. Syl knew as well as anyone else did that despite the tragedy that had befallen the previous group—a group that would have included Uriel’s and Waylan’s blood siblings, he realized—this was an opportunity for certain prismatics to gain a new axis of power.

That said, it could have been the opposite—if the prismatics were already aware of their own splinter factions, they didn’t have that much to lose if all of them died fighting a relatively pointless fight.

Syl decided not to think about it too hard. As long as it wasn’t directly obstructing his and Bianca’s now-peaceful life, which it wouldn’t once he won, he didn’t particularly care.

When the storm came, he would be able to weather it.

“There’s also another point of concern this year,” Jennifer said, adjusting her glasses over tired eyes. “We’ve been pushed back far enough that the venue’s going to be next to the Santa Rosa Tower.”

There was a collective grumble at that. They all knew what being near a Tower meant. There was a reason so many of them had become de facto exclusion zones.

“There’s not much we can do about it.” Uriel’s expression was grim. “If you’re in this room, then you know that we are on the back foot against Cascadia. They have the power to pick their fights, and they have the liberty to choose when. We have four weeks.”

“You want us to walk into a bloodbath,” one of the tactical-class graduates said. Arrel Nebbins, apparently. “You’re asking us to lay down our lives?”

“It’s not going to be one,” Uriel said with a confidence clearly not shared by anyone else present. “The country was going to ask your life of you either way. Would you prefer to take a ceremonial fight for land or go overseas to the Lingdao front?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Would you like me to make it one?”

Bianca poked Syl, then signed instead of speaking.

This movement is dead in the water.

Syl cracked a smile, signing back. Then it’s not our problem.

Jennifer, who was similarly ignoring the rising tensions in the room, flagged Syl down.

“I haven’t seen you around for a couple of days,” she said.

“Took the offered time off,” Syl replied. “Did you want to see me?”

“Didn’t think you were the type to take an off day.”

“I was working.”

“That’s just about what I was going to ask you about,” Jennifer said. “Working. I have an idea that I’ve been putting every waking hour into.”

“The flux sensitivity project?” Syl asked. They had been making slow but steady progress on that front ever since Jennifer had convinced him to work with her in exchange for not leaking his own developments.

Jennifer shook her head. “Related, but not quite. I have a lot of notes. I can show you them after this.”

“The service is not long after this,” Syl said. “Entire school’s being called to it.”

She clicked her tongue. “Right. Poor kids. Well, it was bound to happen at some point or another. After the funeral, then.”

“That works with me.”

Syl nodded, bidding her farewell.

His FCD buzzed. Bianca frowned beside him, her FCD doing the same.

From the captain, she signed.

It is. Syl sighed. I am going to go back on something I said earlier.

What is it? Bianca’s hand motions were careful, measured. Even after years of experience, she still took the time to double-check everything she said.

S-A-N-G-U-I-N-E, Syl spelled out. They want to interfere.

What are you going to do?

Cover for me, Syl signed. I’m going to burn them down.

#

Sanguine was not a group that had a proper headquarters, but they were open to co-opting a space to use as a staging ground from time to time. Few groups of their like had any permanent fixtures; doing so without being detected was a herculean task. Groups that sought separation from the Aurian kingdom and could also withstand the might of the country tended to just end up splitting off into sovereignties of their own.

This branch of Sanguine had been bolstered by recent successes, though. While they had lost a fair few operatives during their recent Gate subjugation, they had also confirmed the effectivity of the technique provided by their allies over the Aurian border and eliminated a handful of tactical-class academy students.

With their own tactical-classes and the two master-class magicians who had masterminded the previous assault, Sanguine’s Auria branch was riding the high of an operation well done. With the weaknesses they had exposed, it was only a matter of following through on it to twist the knife, ensuring that the public would see how little the academies could actually protect them.

Their current staging ground was the same one they’d used for their previous outing. Fifty kilometers from the capital, it was close enough to deploy forces out towards the necessary targets while also evading the dome of surveillance that permeated the academies.

They had expected to be discovered at some point, of course, but they’d taken precautionary steps to ensure that said point wouldn’t be too early. Right now, with some thirty-odd magicians ranging from A-class to both masters, that went double. Besides the standard stealth-type spells, the entire building was also fully subterranean, hidden at the bottom of a reservoir that had gone unused since the ground had been irradiated during World War III.

Their strike today was going to be quick and effective, using a limited-use teleportation device retrieved by their Cascadian allies from partway up one of the Towers. Said technology was yet a unknown by Auria officials—in fact, it was largely unknown to the world as a whole, where the consensus was still that true teleportation was flat-out impossible. Warp-type spells all involved space compression, which was defensible against, but there was no reason to worry about teleportation when that wasn’t supposed to be humanly possible.

This was a game changer, to put it lightly, and the Sanguine masters intended to use it to its fullest potential.

Even taking into consideration the possibility of inside interference, the plan was almost airtight.

Almost.

None of them accounted for a single-passenger aircraft screaming towards their reservoir at twice the speed of sound, nor had they thought said vehicle would come to a complete halt directly inside the lake, the heat of its landing vaporizing hundreds of thousands of litres in an instant.

External cameras flicked on throughout the Sanguine base, revealing a single uniformed figure emerging from the inside of the aircraft, which seemed to be completely unharmed by its massive deceleration. The remaining lakewater surged in to replace what had been destroyed, but the student held it back with a gesture.

The figure’s fingers moved. If any Sanguine member had been versed in the most popular English sign language variant, they would have been able to identify that he only expressed three words.

I warned you.

The roof of the base disintegrated.