The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Eight (Patreon)

During the weeks my classes were working on their final projects, I rounded out the work with the spell that Oberon had traded to me while also starting working on the metal spell I’d use to carve the relays.

The metal spell, at least, was a fun challenge, and getting it to manipulate all of the runes that I wanted into the gun was a strong test of my skills with it. The bullets were a little bit easier, by virtue of how simple they were, but still complex. 

As I set up the carving array in my lab for the bullets, and the one up in the summoning room for the gun. I plastered several pages of runes covered in inductors and capacitors around the summoning room, since much like the spells that I’d put in Aldvarri’s curtains or Bridgette’s bracelet, I needed to give the spell enough stored up power that it would be able to remain active all the time. There wasn’t much point in having a hidden, divination and tampering resistant gun if it was only able to resist enemy mages for a few minutes. 

For that matter, it wouldn’t remain hidden forever. Once I used the trick, it would be anticipated in the future. Hopefully the shaping disrupting bullets could help offset that, but it made me shift the runes that I was using the spell to engrave into the gun.

I still kept the spells to add extra force to the bullet inside the barrel, but I eased off on the anti-divination spell, cutting it down to mainly be able to avoid passive senses like those given from the sensory arch-star. With the extra space, I crammed in extra anti-tampering, making it resistant to tampering from fire, metal, water, air, and force mages, as well as throwing a general shaping disruption spell around it.

I would have liked to add a full abjurative suite, like I had around my cloak, but the spells I’d already layered in strained my abilities with the rune compression arch-star.

Still, even with everything I was slapping on, it was just barely doable, and I activated the enchantments with my purely human aura, then turned my attention to the bullets.

Once the first bullet was carved, I set up a sympathetic linking spell that coated the entire box of ammo, and then applied the physical mirroring that Tara would be using to shatter a single one of the giant aura crystals and then replicate it with all the others. 

In this case, it would replicate the carvings in the bullets

Once it was done, just like I had with my entire pile of iron repelling single use spells, I copied out the linking spell again and started the ritual off on one of the bullets.

The draw it put on the aura was massive, so I was glad I’d shoved it into the lab.

Now that I was more confident and familiar with the metal shaping spell, I was finally able to turn my attention to the largest and most complex of the enchantments, the relay engraver. 

I decided to make a glove, for a few reasons:

I’d made a black, fingerless enchanted glove multiple times at this point, so it only felt fitting. My first two had been destroyed in a failure, and as people said, third time's the charm. That might just be stubborn pride, but I was determined to fulfill some degree of poetic irony, my greatest failures turning into my greatest victories. 

Outside of that, since I’d worn gloves twice already, if someone saw it laying around, or broke through Tara’s defenses to look in my room, they’d likely just see what they thought was just my third attempt at a lightning glove or something of the sort. 

It would be inconspicuous, since as I sewed the black thread over the already black glove, I had a hard time telling where the spell lines ended and the glove itself began. 

It would also fit well with the gauntlet, letting me put everything I needed to manage teh spell on one hand. 

Lastly, it was a good stretch of my rune compression skills. I needed that skill in order to activate each of the relays, so it felt more than a little precinct to get some last minute practice in. I might have strained myself with the gun, but this was even tighter, to the point I was forced to tear out and redo several of the runes while I worked.

Speaking of last minute, though…

I stood before Oracle, Bridgette, Osheen, and Tara, all of them studying me. 

I flexed my hand, and spiraled the three spells out, keeping the casting hidden from normal sight like a sorcerer did. Within ten seconds, I’d completed the veils and thrown them over myself, oriented to hide all of my magic. 

During my practice, I’d discovered that it was easiest to just hide everything. While I could, with skill and power, hide more specific parts of my aura from observation, that took more fine control than I currently possessed. 

Besides, when I’d talked about it with Tara, she’d pointed out that to an archmage’s sight, if I only hid my fourth and fifth arch-stars, they’d bare minimum be able to spot the realm-reaching third star, and might be able to put it together that I’d been the one to attack Edward Elide. 

If I hid everything but my first and second arch-stars, despite it being known that I’d reached third, the person watching me might draw the conclusion that I’d developed the power hiding arch-star. And if they were going to draw that conclusion anyways, it was best to just make it easier on me, and hide everything. 

Oracle hooted out that he couldn’t see anything, and Tara nodded. 

“I can’t either,” she agreed. “But now for the real test.” 

Oberon’s ex-husband was far from the first person to think of using a mental trick to hide details from the aura by altering someone’s perception. 

Most arch-stars could, to some degree, be replicated, after all. While spell bottles were much more limited than the spell storing arch-star, they could still store a spell. While a large aura crystal couldn’t expand the way the aura storage arch-star could, it could still store aura for later. And that was completely ignoring things like the anklets I’d made for Oracle and Bridgette.

It was definitely possible in theory. 

The problem was that most of the methods of altering someone’s perception with mind magic could be blocked by a mental bubble or shield, and even the most incompetent of arch-mages would have something to defend their mind. 

Tara activated her defenses. While there was no archmage of mental magic in Paerús, she was probably the closest, as her divination was linked fairly well to the mind, and she had excellent mental defenses. 

She studied me for a moment. 

“I can definitely tell you’re hiding something, but the spell is subtle. If I wasn’t already aware it was touching my perception, I don’t think I would have noticed at all. It’s markedly different from any human mind magic… I don’t know how, but it’s not even engaging my mental defenses.”

“That makes sense, I think,” I said. “These spells alter the concept of perception, which touches on something other than the mind. Probably? I’m actually not sure. I couldn’t cast the spells for our relay, but I can this. It’s… confusing.” 

“It’s not human magic, of course it’s strange,” Tara said. “Now for a real test. Since I’m aware, I can…” 

She frowned and squinted, then I felt the strain on the spells suddenly jump, until they crumbled as I was unable to expand their capacity fast enough. 

“Yeah. I can collapse them. Fight back against the thing touching my perception.” 

“As you get better at the skill, you should be able to fight that more,” Osheen said. “But it’s actually quite good news so far. This might not hide you from ultimate scrutiny, but at least you don’t have to literally turn and run the next time you see an Archmage.” 

“True!” I said cheered. “Now, my gun.” 

Tara nodded and tapped one of the flat cards she’d prepared for these tests, a simple metal detection spell. It fizzled, not revealing anything other than the metal of our belt buckles. 

“Good,” I said, and she nodded, then moved onto a more complex spell, one looking for metal in a specific shape – in this case, a gun. 

This was able to punch through the protections, but…

“Still not bad,” I said. “I don’t need it to be invisible, only not noticed by casual magical detection. Kind of like the spell Oberon gave me, actually. That’s funny.” 

Osheen chuckled, but it was a pity chuckle, and Tara didn’t even give me that much. They clearly didn’t see the humor in both the spells having almost identical levels of being able to hide my tools.

I still found it funny. Maybe they were just too worried about my safety. Not that I wasn’t, just that I’d, to an extent, accepted that I might die.

“As much as I think more defenses from divination are better, I do see your point,” Tara agreed. “Anyone with a little bit of metal detection won’t be able to notice it, they’ll need to look for the gun specifically.” 

“If nothing else, it means that when the tournament happens, you don’t have to spend it hiding in our room,” Osheen said with a smile.

“Speaking of, who is the archmage this year?” I asked. I’d skipped the meeting that I was supposed to attend for that. It got me in a bit of trouble, but I was confident that I wasn’t going to get fired for it. 

“Justin Hastings,” she said. “According to Draven, he was practically begging for it. With Eira’s catapulting into the public consciousness, and the Heenling and Elide houses becoming mainstays of  the old noble faction, he’s falling further and further behind. He was always one of the second rate archmages, so he’s using this to more firmly establish himself in people’s minds, and as a reminder of just how strong he – supposedly – is.

Osheen gave Tara an odd look when she mentioned Draven, but I couldn’t figure out why. My mind was caught up in the Hasting family. He had been the one piloting the metal bird at the meeting of the archmages during my first year, and Draven had mentioned how he was always stroppy about being the third strongest druid.

“This is perfect!” I said, and both of them glanced at me.

“How?” Osheen finally asked.

“Well, he’s a druid, but markedly weak. But the fact he is a druid… There’s fifty-fifty odds on him having the fusion arch-star. Draven made it to top three without it, after all.”

“So either he’s poor at using magesight, only using it as a crude tool like the one Oracle had as a baby – no offence, Oracle, you’re amazing – or else he’s using a fusion star and is bad at it,” Osheen said, picking up on what I was saying. “You only really gain the spellcasting instincts of your familiars to start, which means it’s not much more effective that just having a slightly stronger familiar and a few boons.”

“And that means you’re probably good enough to hide your power from him,” Tara said, catching on as well. “At least long enough to identify what arch-stars he has. I’d bet golden oaks to copper spears that he’s got fusion though – Eira Talik caused a huge stir with her fusion. I know Seth, at least, theorized it was an arch-star.”

“And best of all, if that’s true, we can be here, watching the fights, then slip away and work on casting the spells in clock towers all over the nation. The fights don’t go on all day, after all. But having made public appearances will give us a solid alibi, and Draven’s portal network would make us slipping out each night a lot less suspicious,” I concluded.

Tara whistled, and Osheen gave a nod.

“Let’s do it.”

With the last few weeks, I did my best to give my students everything that I could, while also finishing a veil for Osheen and the bracelet for Oracle, letting him stay out all the time, rather than just a few hours a day. 

I wound up actually just making Osheen another copy of the assassin’s cloak, though I shifted the design to incorporate the Traktath method, letting a lot more power flow through it, and expanded the influence to a sphere around him, letting it cover his wings. 

It wasn’t an especially inspired choice, but the spell was reliable, and could protect from a variety of senses, and even simpler wards. The odds that either of us were likely to run into something like that in a clocktower or floating above it were slim, but it was better to have overkill than be unprepared. 

Besides, much like the glove, there was a degree of poetic irony in it. 

Most of my students got my approval to cast the spells they’d been given, either the enchanting spells or the ones for beyond-their-rank magic, and I was confident that each of them would place well in the tournament. 

If nothing else, the first round and loser’s bracket, which was normally so heavily tilted against witches, wouldn’t be able to stop any of my students, and if the kids were by some miracle given a fair chance, then I had every bit of confidence in their ability to manage the tournament. 

And before I was ready, my fourth year at Yesgol and first year as a teacher came to a close.