Yeah, thought so.
Anyway, I found a book early on in the test. “Trials of Judgment.”
When I opened said book, it started to give me advice. No, not verbally. That would have been even stranger, but possibly more hilarious.
Text started to appear on the pages. It wrote me “helpful” comments about each of the rooms I was going through, like, “This is the Room of Eternal Death. It’s like the Room of Normal Death, but somewhat more repetitive.”
That sort of thing.
For reasons beyond my recollection, I followed some of the book’s advice. And I found a secret passage.
That led me to your prison.
You and two others — Echion and Vera — were in different jail cells. At the time, I didn’t know if that was a part of the test or if it was real.
It did seem a little bit weird for me to find just enough keys on the way to open two cells, but not the third.
I opened the other two cells, and then you cut your way out with your ridiculous swordsmanship. Apparently you were waiting until the other two were free because cutting yourself out earlier would have triggered traps that would have incinerated the other two.
You started leading the way out.
Unfortunately, we were interrupted by one of the visages of the goddess — Katashi — and he wasn’t very happy to see us.
It was strange to see Katashi in the Serpent Spire, since that’s the territory of his brother, Tenjin. But we were a little too preoccupied to worry about that.
The rest of us ran like cowards while you fought him.
Good work on surviving that, by the way. Not sure how you managed that one, considering visages can wipe out cities with an angry glare.
Maybe he thought you were cute?
Okay, maybe that wasn’t it.
Right. Anyway, Vera stabbed me in the back just a little and ran off with Echion. As you might imagine, I was pretty disappointed by that.
I managed to make my way out with some more “advice” from the book, and I even picked up a magic sword along the way. That was nice. I’m glad the goddess seems to like leaving one-of-a-kind legendary artifacts lying around in towers.
Oh, and I even managed to get an attunement, like I’d entered the spire for in the first place.
The problem? I got the Enchanter one. No one likes the Enchanter attunement.
Least of all my father, Magnus Cadence.
I got a mild case of verbal lacerations when I got home.
Also, the girl who had been raised to be my retainer — Sera — got promoted to “family member that is presumably your sister”. This was probably because she got a much better attunement than I did, a Summoner mark.
It might have also been because of my father’s general disappointment in me, though. Or maybe it was just some kind of contrived plan to get Sera and me to compete with each other and excel.
My father underestimated us. After all, competing would have required actually talking to each other about the situation.
We were far too clever to talk out our differences and concerns ahead of time.
Infinite social skills. That’s me.
Right. So, after that, Sera and I got sent off to Lorian Heights to spend two years training there before our years of military service.
We were assigned to divisions, which weren’t really important, except for the fact that we’re eventually supposed to figure out who the members of Spider Division are. Spider Division has members infiltrating the other divisions, and probably sabotaging them.
I still haven’t worked on that, because I’ve had higher priorities, like not dying. I’ll probably work on it eventually.
At the academy, I learned all sorts of things about Enchanting. Like how to blow off my own hands by experimenting without asking the right questions first.
No, I didn’t literally blow off my own hands.
After that, Professor Vellum — who didn’t want to spend the money on buying me new hands — decided to teach me some things about enchanting in non-combustible ways.
So, yeah, we took some tests, I learned magic, that sort of thing.
Even made some friends, I guess. Or, reconnected with a old friend, in Patrick’s case.
Aside from Patrick, there was Marissa, a Guardian with impressive punching abilities. I suspect you’d like her.
Oh, almost everyone calls Marissa “Mara”. I’m terrible with nicknames, though, so I forget sometimes.
Aside from that, there was Jin. I made him a bunch of items. He helped me out with a few things, too. We got close.
He asked me to the winter ball.
That didn’t work out for reasons that will be clear later.
Anyway, during one of my tests, part of the school kind of exploded.
Turns out that Mizuchi, one of the children of the God Serpent, was on a rampage. And that rampage was because Katashi, the visage we’d run into earlier, was somewhat upset.
Long story short, his brother — the Visage Tenjin — was missing. Considering how much I wanted to get my own brother back, I could sympathize.
I talked to Katashi. Surprisingly, this sort of worked. Emphasis on the “sort of”. He put a weird brand on my hand that would supposedly explode if I didn’t find the person he wanted.
I don’t know why I have a pattern of running into hand-destroying situations, but that seems to be my lot in life.
Maybe I need to figure out how to make magical prosthetics.
I should research that later.
Hm? Do I have a list of things I need to get back to?
Nah. Why’d I need that? I have a great memory.
Anyway, where was I?
Um, something about the spire. I think.
Oh, Katashi. Thank you.
Anyway, I needed to find Vera.
I talked to Professor Orden, and she instructed me to put together a team. She also explained that she was a Whisper — a member of a secret organization dedicated to one of the visages.
I worked on putting together a team as she’d instructed.
Sera was an easy choice.
I would have brought Marissa and Patrick, but Marissa was recovering from a gift of power given to her by Katashi, and Patrick lost at a coin flip to Jin.
In retrospect, I should never have allowed Patrick to flip a coin against someone with illusion magic.
I was expecting to bring our dueling teacher, Lord Teft, but Orden overruled me and brought Derek Hartigan instead. Derek was one of the most powerful swordsmen on the continent, so the choice made sense, but I was suspicious of Derek because of his connections.
Anyway, we went and found Vera.
That wasn’t the hard part.
The hard part was that we had to go back into the spire, and for reasons that I will never understand, Katashi didn’t give us any sort of way to just tell him when we’d arrived. So we had to go look for him, and that meant trying to backtrack to where I’d seen him last.
Because my life can never be simple, it turned out that Professor Orden had manipulated us into going to a place where she could kidnap Vera for her own purposes. Mostly to help her with finishing a project related to artificial attunements.
Vera was apparently a big part of researching a new type of artificial attunements, designed to make humans as powerful as god beasts. Echion was one of the first test subjects.
Orden wanted to expedite the process of making more of these powerful artificial attuned in order to use them as weapons for Valia. That’s the nation we’re in right now, if you’re not familiar. I know you’re not from around here.
Oh, and Orden had been involved with kidnapping Tenjin, so there was that.