Syl could tell that Jennifer was holding herself back from asking questions throughout the rest of their time in the desert. That was concerning enough for him to wonder if he needed to take further preventative measures, but from the way her passive flux control fluctuated each time she looked in his general direction, he was pretty sure that would be a non-issue.
He decided he’d put some feelers out. Depending on how the next few days shook out, it was entirely possible that this would never be an issue for any number of reasons, not all of them necessarily involving Jennifer’s death.
They were, at least, eventually able to return to something like normal conversation. It was still mostly about engineering, of course, but they also spoke a bit about Jennifer’s own background.
Both of them were hiding secrets. Syl had more than her by a fairly significant amount, of course, but she wasn’t exactly an open book.
She was from the main branch of the Green family, the third child of two strategic-class magicians. Jennifer had taken an interest in FCD engineering young, slightly deviating from the family’s typical path of making and manning external artillery-type devices.
Even for a Green, she’d been abnormally good at what she did. Of course she had been—she was master-class now, after all, and it was rare that an engineer made it there on their own without significant combat experience.
There was a lot of detail missing from both of their accounts of their childhoods. Neither of them were being fully honest with each other, and they knew it. They skimmed over details; friends and family lost to war, involvement in conflicts, the timing and location of where they were raised, and so much more information that was needed to truly understand someone.
Syl couldn’t say that he’d gained a full understanding of the other engineer through their conversation, but he did gather enough context about her life to slot her profile into what he knew of the prismatic families and put together a reasonable explanation for why Jennifer had joined Uriel, Waylan, James, and a number of others in the Reserve and outside in their alienation against Auria despite operating in a family that could stay behind allied lines and largely avoid combat participation.
One critical issue that Auria had been suffering since the war was a lack of truly great magicians. They’d lost the bulk of their strategic-class magicians and their only two paragons to the war, facts that had both been obfuscated to the public. The prismatic families, who had produced the bulk of those magicians, were thus employed to repopulate. Jennifer was the third of at least ten children, most of whom had been born after the war.
The cold truth was that high-power magicians tended to produce high-power magicians at a higher rate than normal people. Thus, the prismatic families had all shifted towards establishing their own magician pairing and breeding programs—both artificial and organic—in a deliberate attempt to increase the number of viable children who could replenish Auria’s ranks.
Based on Jennifer’s mannerisms around the topic, Syl assumed she had been selected for the Green family’s program and hadn’t been given much of a choice. That would explain why she’d stuck to the Reserve for so long, at least. It was a good reason to not go back.
It would also explain why she wanted to burn this country to the ground.
The seams are splitting, he thought as they headed back. I don’t know how much longer Auria has.
Hopefully at least a little longer. His preparations weren’t complete yet.
#
“Welcome back,” Bianca said not half a second after Syl opened the door. “Did you have fun? ”
“You didn’t need to wait in the doorway for me,” Syl said. “It was fine. Jennifer has suspicions.”
Bianca frowned, sipping what he assumed was tea from a steaming mug. “I had thought this would be a private excursion of a different kind.”
“I did too,” Syl said. “It’s a bit of a shame. I didn’t get to say any of the lines I practiced.”
Bianca chuckled, then grew serious once more. “Was it resolved, then? If not…”
“Somewhat,” Syl said. “Even if she grows more suspicious, she’s not going to be able to find anything. I’ll have some of our people monitor her, but for the time being, I think she’s well aware of the risks of continuing to poke around.”
“It lightens my heart to hear that,” Bianca said. “I suppose much does ride on the results of the coming circuit.”
“Yeah. There are way too many variables to make any assumptions. We’ve prepared as well as we can for this. One way or another, we’re coming out the other side in one piece. Whether or not everyone else does depends on far too much.”
“You decided on bringing it, then?” Bianca asked, flicking towards a certain unmarked section of the floor.
“I will be,” Syl said.
He’d put in the order for the most up-to-date model of Horizon Breaker that Incarnate had a week ago, and he’d finally gotten it recently. It was more compact than it had been the last time he’d had to use it.
If all went well, it would return to Incarnate headquarters without firing a single spell. If it didn’t, a lot of other people would not be returning.
That was a problem for tomorrow and beyond, though. He could have asked Bianca if her own preparations were done. She was a prodigy in her own right, after all, but she was restricted by the size of her flux pool, which wasn’t much more impressive than your average A-class or tactical-class’. Picking and choosing the best spell for a given situation was equally important to both of them for entirely different reasons, but they both knew this already. There was no point in further badgering the point when they were some of the most experienced magicians in this field.
“You put on some tea,” Syl said instead. “Did you save me a cup?”
“Of course I did,” Bianca sniffed. “You must think me a savage to even ask.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Syl laughed, accepting a proffered cup. “Thank you.”
They settled on the couch in front of their monitor, Bianca curling up and resting her head on his shoulder in an entirely unladylike manner.
“You seem unnaturally sentimental today,” Syl said.
“I’m feeling unnaturally sentimental,” Bianca replied. “It’s been a while since the two of us went on a mission like this.”
“The last time we did, a city disintegrated,” Syl reminded her.
“Even so. It reminds me of simpler times. We knew where the enemy was. All we had to do was fight.”
“I’m sure this time around’ll be pretty similar,” Syl said.
“You say it yourself,” Bianca said. “Unknown variables.”
“Unknown variables,” Syl agreed. “Tomorrow’s work is tomorrow’s work, though.”
“So it is. For the time being… I’m in the mood for a mediocre romcom flick, tea, and some snacks. We have some real fruit, yes?”
“Bringing back some old classics, I see.” Syl grinned. “We do.”
This time, he didn’t have to dig at all to find the scant warmth he had left in his heart.
#
Jennifer’s mind burned with possibility as she arrived back at the academy. She had as good as confirmed that Syl wasn’t just a random prodigy. Whether he was using age manipulation magic—well, he would’ve had to invent that in order to use it, but every option here was preposterous—or had been a very young child soldier or any number of other possibilities, it was clear as day that he was something special.
The warning weighed heavy on her mind. She’d seen death in those eyes reflected a thousand times. That flux had been colorless and so very cold, anathema to her own sight in a way she’d never seen before.
But she was an engineer and an investigator, and knowing the stakes didn’t stop that spark of curiosity from burning.
She would never risk trying to share her hypotheses with the rest of the Reserve, which he suspected was what Syl wanted anyway. Still, she couldn’t help but want to know more.
Her investigations had dipped into her family’s resources, and those had proved fruitless, but it was possible the academy had more information on the strange supposedly C-class magician. The Aurian academy system was influenced by the prismatic families, but it was most directly controlled by the royals themselves. It was entirely possible they would have a more comprehensive file on this man.
It was getting late at night. Given the timing of when Cascadia wanted to start their games, Jennifer knew that she would best be served by going to sleep now so she could be well rested for their transport the next day, but she hadn’t reached her current position and power by not answering her questions.
There was every chance she would die before the year was out. Though her role in the games was supposed to be as an engineer only, there were too many possibilities that put her directly in harm’s way. She had accepted that, but she refused to die without learning this answer.
The academy archives were closed and behind several layers of automated security, but the prismatic families all had keys to get through that.
What differentiated Jennifer from some of the others was that she knew how to get into the next level down. Every academy was a military target for a reason, and part of that came from the fact that they were treated as secure sites to store certain classified pieces of information—like, for instance, the unredacted records of a certain Sylvester Auria.
That one was theoretically only accessible by a very select group of people, but Jennifer had spent a year reverse-engineering the lock to it based off of chance contacts with the door, never drawing suspicion to herself.
As she strode through the institute, she ran a pre-set program she’d installed half a year ago, looping the footage and sensor data on the security system in specific parts of the halls—the fastest possible way into the archives.
She knew this place like the back of her hand now. It was where she’d spent the second most time as a student, only behind the lab. Jennifer found the gated door to the second level easily, passing by shelves of data cards with varying signs of use. She typed in a certain code and passed her flux signature in, hoping dearly that her bypass still worked.
It did. The door clicked open, notifying her that she was the first to enter this in… seventy minutes?
Suddenly on guard, Jennifer tapped her FCD and prepared the new item Syl had just gifted her, turning the blocking down slightly.
Flux was everywhere. Even in places where most would expect it to be less prevalent—say, in a dark, dry archive room intentionally kept stable to avoid data corruption—it still pervaded the place.
Here, however, there were clear signs that there had been a spell activated in the area. The brightness wasn’t intense enough to hurt her even with the blockers fully off, but it was still enough that she would have had to squint if not for the partial reduction in her sensitivity.
Someone else was here, and they’d cast. Hypersensitivity wasn’t so kind as to give an intuitive sense as to what kind of flux was visible. Jennifer could guess that this was a perception-type spell of some kind, but that came from context and years of experience guessing at the intricacies of the flux only her eyes could see.
Is it Syl? There was no way he would have been able to figure out how to enter this place without triggering an alarm, but then there was no way he should have been able to do a lot of things.
Jennifer cast a protective spell on herself silently, taking the full extra five seconds to wordlessly cast in case there was still someone here.
She crept along quietly, her eyes showing her the path even if this area was unlit. This second layer of archives went deeper than the rest of the area did. They were also organized in a way that Jennifer was unfamiliar with, but given context, she could guess that whoever else was down here was likely searching for the same thing she was.
There were perception-type spells to find this type of thing, of course, but they were all quite easy to spot even from someone who had a particular antipathy towards flux detection. If she had to guess, the previous person in here had used a similar type of spell.
The spell got brighter as Jennifer drew deeper into the archives, leading her towards a dark corner of the area. As she traveled, she started seeing physical evidence of someone being here—dust kicked into the air, slots where data cards had been taken out and replaced improperly, and the sort.
Before long, she heard the person who must have been checking these, the magic growing so bright she had to turn the blockers all the way up.
“Piece of shit,” a male voice said. “Fucking finally.”
That was a familiar voice. How the hell did he get into the archives?
Drew Violet was ostensibly on the same side as Jennifer, but she knew he wasn’t. He was the exact kind of pig that she wanted to avoid. He blindly put his full faith in the Aurian kingdom—and even worse, he was a damn good magician. When the dice were down and war was on the horizon, she knew where he’d be.
In this moment, though, they were still allies. If he was looking for the article she thought he was, then that was true in more than one sense.
“Violet?” Jennifer asked.
She heard a muffled curse, followed by the unfortunately familiar sound of someone tripping and crashing into a shelf of data cards.
“Jennifer?” Drew asked. “What the shit are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” Jennifer replied. “How do you even have a key?”
“Mother,” Drew said. “I’m here because there’s a fucking master-class mage pretending to be a class 3 shitter for some reason, and I want to know why.”
“You’re talking about Syl.”
“Syl? You have a pet name for that guy?”
“That’s… just his name, though?” Jennifer shook her head. “I was looking for information about him too.”
“You are?” Drew’s face appeared, illuminated by his FCD. “Why?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It’s plenty of my business when you’re in a top-secret part of the archives without permission.”
“Did you get permission?”
The silence that followed was deafening.
“Anyway,” Drew sighed. “You’re not going to find anything of use.”
That sent a strum of fear through Jennifer. “What makes you say that?”
The Violet tapped his FCD, projecting a file onto the dust in the air.
Sylvester “Syl” Auria
Birth Date: [removed]
[Removed]
The supermajority of the document was similarly blacked out.
There was, however, one line that wasn’t.
Death Date: March 14, 61 AFI.