Oh, good, all I have to worry about is brain damage or killing myself when I use my attunement.
Of the two costs, it was the former that made me shudder.
I was willing to sacrifice a great deal in the pursuit of the power I needed, but my mind…
Well, everyone had something they were afraid of losing.
“Your first assignment will be to head to the Divinatory before our next class on Tensday. There, you will be tested to learn your current mana values in your main mana pool locations: mind; heart; right hand; left hand; right leg; left leg; and lungs. You will also be tested to learn safe mana capacities for each location. If you are discovered exceeding your safe limits without explicit permission you will face severe punishments, potentially including expulsion.”
She gave another toothy grin after that line. “Class is dismissed.”
I escaped the lecture hall as swiftly as I could. I wasn’t quite ready for a reunion with Patrick or any other old friends that might have seen me.
It turns out that spending three years away from school made me less eager to socialize. Who would have guessed?
I figured I’d probably catch up with Patrick eventually and make some excuses; I couldn’t run away from old acquaintances forever. Not if I wanted to succeed, anyway.
Getting to graduation was one of my highest priorities. I needed to graduate and get a high enough score to ensure I could spend my years of military service as a climber rather than in some other branch of the service. To ensure that, I’d need to make sure I took my classes extremely seriously.
I needed allies if I was going to succeed in group tests, and I’d need people I could trust for when I eventually started climbing the tower. No sane person tried to climb one of the towers alone.
Once I’d gotten clear of sight from the lecture hall, my next objective was to figure out which elective I was going to pick. Five of my classes for the year were mandatory, but I had a single elective slot to choose. I should have picked it much sooner — possibly with some advice for the teacher responsible for overseeing Phoenix Division — but it hadn’t felt like a pressing concern. With some of the electives starting that day, though, I had to make a choice.
The most obvious options were the ones that were directly applicable to my attunement. I saw three of those: Introduction to Ritual Magic; The Art of Artifice: Permanent Enchantments; and Introductory Potion Enchantments.
There were also some options that appealed to me on a personal level. Introduction to Magical Dueling would have been the obvious choice in that regard. I’d spent most of my life training with a dueling cane and studying the techniques used by my father, his father, and so on down the line.
Of course, they’d all been attuned, and most of those techniques weren’t things I could hope to mimic properly. Even now, I’d be a sub-par magical duelist; my attunement wasn’t made for direct confrontations. People would probably laugh at an Enchanter for even trying to take the class.
If they did, I’d be the one laughing after our first match.
Enchanter or not, I was still a Cadence. I knew how to fight.
I looked at some other options, and a few of the classes focused on history and tactics sounded interesting, but I knew where I was leaning the moment I saw the dueling class on the list.
I also knew I’d potentially be less competitive with my own attunement if I didn’t take an elective to enhance my skills. I decided to find a way to solve both problems at once.
I went back to my room, skimmed the rules, and didn’t see anything indicating I couldn’t take an additional elective. That solidified my plan: I’d take the Art of Artifice and make magical items focused on dueling, while attending the dueling class at the same time.
I’d have to hope I could afford the materials for the items, and that I didn’t have to fight anyone until I had some magic items ready. Gambling on multiple factors made me nervous, but that just meant that I’d have to work harder to minimize the risks.
I knew I’d be hurting for free time if I took an extra class, but that was a problem for future me.
I had a few options on when I could take the classes, but my schedule for the rest of the day was open, so I decided to go to the next dueling class that was available. That ended up being just a few hours later. I used that time to look up the relevant books for the class — it turned out there weren’t any — and to pick up some lunch.
There weren’t any classrooms at the spot on the map where the class was listed. Instead, I found an outdoor stage with stands to seat at least a couple hundred people. It was clearly designed for theater performances, but when I took a seat in the stands, I figured I already had a pretty good idea of what we’d end up seeing on the stage.
I was a bit early, so I watched other students trickling in, trying to size up my competition. At least half the students had a glove on their right hands.
It was traditional for nobles to wear a glove until they had trusted retainers to protect them. The “passing of the glove” was a symbolic release of the wearer’s well-being into the hands of another, and often one of the most significant ceremonies in a noble’s life.
Usually, the glove would be passed to a single retainer who had served the owner for many years. It was a daring formalization of their connection, and some nobles — my father included — never offered their glove to anyone.
I’d always pictured giving my glove to Sera when we were old enough to be attuned. Now, she’d never be a simple retainer to me; she was family.
I’ll probably never find someone else to be my retainer.
It was a disappointing realization. I’d grown up on stories of the legendary bonds of loyalty between nobles and their retainers, and they’d settled in somewhere deep in my psyche. While many childhood ideals had eroded with the passage of time, the idea of having a retainer was rooted deeply enough in reality that it had dug in deep.
This way, at least, I’ll have to earn a retainer rather than being handed one. Maybe that’s for the best.
It felt a little better to think in those terms, and it helped to brush the line of thought from my mind. I turned back to observing the class.
Most of the prospective duelists had the same few attunements: Elementalists; Guardians; and Shapers. I noted a couple Summoners as well.
Summoners are going to be serious trouble until I can make some items… and probably even after that. An Elementalist might be able to handle two against one, but I don’t have any kind of battlefield control capabilities.
Sera must have come to the same conclusion. She arrived shortly after the other Summoners, two familiar figures trailing behind her. The first was Patrick, the same childhood friend I’d seen in my magic theory class. The second was Roland Royce, a son of two of my mother’s retainers.
Patrick had grown broad in the last few years. Not fat, just… thick, like a bear. With a build like his, I would have expected a Guardian attunement or something physically-focused, but he proudly wore an Elementalist mark on his exposed right hand.
Roland was as short as I remembered, and wearing his usual cold and determined expression. At a glance, I didn’t see his attunement mark, but I did see two dueling canes on his belt, one sitting on each side of his hips.
With each use of a cane painfully drawing mana from the wielder’s hands, it would require prodigious focus to use two of them accurately. I expected most people to laugh at Roland when they saw his setup.