Uriel was no stranger to violence, but she had to admit that this was a level beyond what she had grown accustomed to.


    “Three degrees west, five point four six units north,” she called out. “Shield gap is coming up. Ready spells. Barrage beginning in ninety seconds.”


    A timer ticked down across the FCDs of seven separate Reserve magicians—four A-class, two tactical, and Uriel at master. Each of the artillery-type specialists scrambled to their positions, kneeling down on the rapid-deploy platform meant for this kind of unit.


    The Graduate Reserve did not function like a traditional military unit did. Its original stated intent was to create a modular internal fighting force of magicians that could be deployed reactively against issues within Auria while the bulk of the magical military acted proactively. Uriel and every other Reserve member with a functioning frontal lobe knew that its actual purpose had changed to be a safe place to avoid the draft.


    Not so safe anymore, apparently. On some level, the original functions still persisted. Of the thirty-two magicians deployed to this temporary outpost, only three were from the AMI Reserve branch—Uriel, Ashley Aurum, and a tactical-class private by the name of Alexis Lance. The rest were mix-and-matched from other universities, a number of which were substantially less prestigious than AMI. While a disproportionate number of AMI Reserve had been called upon, they’d been split across over a dozen similarly sized squads distributed at intervals of multiple miles across the border.


    Uriel assumed that a part of that was because the families suspected. It was inevitable, to some extent. There was only so much a clandestine student movement could do before it was no longer as secret as she would hope. They couldn’t afford to kill off their own, not when so many of them needed their children to ensure continued Aurian hegemony. They could, however, separate them and monitor them with dozens of lower-class magicians that they knew they could control.


    As the countdown proceeded, Uriel began weaving a set of spell processes that she could have set up with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back.


    “Spotter,” she called out. “Confirm position.”


    Her favored spell for devastating attacks was the master-class spell Antimagic Railgun, but she could only cast that once or twice an hour if she was fully focused on restoring her magic. It was almost a strategic-class spell in how many resources it took.


    For the time being, she was using a tactical-class artillery-type spell that was similar in function but different in form, compressing flux down before sending it in a highly accurate long-range spell. Five of the other six artillery specialists with her would be doing the same, albeit with lower-powered spells. The last was their spotter—while Uriel was capable of doing long-range recon herself, she didn’t have the flux sensitivity that Alexis did. The former class 2 student and now Reserve grunt was significantly above average at her job—typical of an AMI student


    “Confirming,” Alexis said, muttering a list of incantations with perfect clarity at a speed not even Uriel could match before looking up. “Defense composition is lacking as predicted. Layered simple shields. Shift change is happening now. Adjust point two degrees north to hit the weak point.”


    “Copy that, spotter,” Uriel said. “Point two north.”


    With final adjustments in place, the time ticked to zero.


    “Mau flagea!” Uriel shouted.


    “Blaiz flagea!” the rest of the artillery-types declared in unison.


    The shield bubble that Ashley Aurum was currently magically fueling lost power for a quarter of a second as their resident fortification-type specialist manipulated their own defenses to let their artillery barrage through.


    After that, there was silence.


    “Confirmation on hit,” Alexis said after about half a minute. “Defenses were insufficient. Significant damage inflicted. Not total. Defenses coming back up.”


    “Thank you, private,” Uriel said. “Dismissed.”


    Alexis nodded, saluting before scampering off. She had a lesson to instruct, if Uriel recalled correctly—the private was primarily on research and teaching and wasn’t even supposed to be in the line for active duty.


    “Major,” one of the other artillery-type specialists said. Justin… Lilac, was it? An offshoot of a prismatic family’s boy, one way or another. “Do you mind if I take a quick break?”


    “You don’t have to ask me,” Uriel replied. “Just ensure that you’re ready when we need a barrage.”


    Lilac scurried off, and Uriel immediately put him out of mind. He wasn’t her soldier, anyway.


    She tapped her foot, her hand snaking inside her pocket and thumbing a worn-out wristwatch. Her brother’s, once upon a time.


    Keep this safe for me. His last words to her. Uriel had already reached adolescence by there, her understanding of politics and war enough to understand that something was wrong—but not exactly what.


    Now, that same sensation of wrongness permeated her consciousness. She had deployed expecting a repetition of the chaos that had split her budding movement apart during the war games against Cascadia. Syl and Bianca, both of whom had inexplicably survived that event, had warned them about war. Uriel remembered the last war, and this wasn’t like that.


    This was trench warfare. Uriel had experienced this a couple of times, but never with the stakes that were currently at hand. Neither side could advance far past the fortifications they’d set up because both sides had seeded the ground with so many traps and explosives that going too far beyond their setups would ensure certain death. They were trading artillery shots with not much else happening. Uriel had just killed real human beings from miles away, and she could barely even see her destination.


    This felt insufficient. The master-class magician couldn’t shake the idea that there was something more to this. They had brought so many magicians to the war games in an ambush attempt, and Uriel knew for a fact that they had more. Why were they so non-committal here?


    There was only one answer she could think of to that—they were a distraction. If they were, though, where were they attacking?


    She couldn’t find out without turning this entire defensive upside down.


    All she could do for now was hurry up and wait.


    #


    [RANK HIDDEN] [NAME HIDDEN]: Prisoner transfer was successful. The previous Cascadian prisoner expired under duress, although we believe that the amount of useful information he could provide had reached its limit in any case.


    Syl had received the message during Practical Magic training, where he had practiced countering his dueling partner with only counter-casts. It had left the class 1 boy flabbergasted, but Syl had concluded he needed to practice counter-casting real magic more. There was every possibility he would slip up trying to counter a strategic-class spell, and that wasn’t the kind of mistake a magician walked away from.


    The message hadn’t been sent with the tag labeling it as urgent because it wasn’t. It was a good update, as was the fact that the previous magician he’d brought it had likely been executed. Their special unit hadn’t accidentally tortured any magicians to death for at least two years.


    Cascadia—and possibly Polaris, based on the two magicians he and Bianca had managed to capture alive—were clearly searching for something, but without their specialized technology or their plans, Syl had no way of knowing what that was. Enhanced interrogation was their best play, but that took time. For the time being, the unit had deployed another research unit with better protection to the Tower to search for any anomalies that they might have missed.


    That meant that Syl and Bianca were back at the academy now. Though they were both keen on identifying on what exactly the enemy wanted, they also had very little interest in any war that was anything short of absolutely necessary. They’d done enough heroics for several lifetimes. Even if a hostile nation was knocking at the door, they were going to take advantage of the normal life they’d never gotten the chance to have before.


    For Syl, that meant another day in the class 3 spell theory class. He’d found a perverse kind of entertainment in going to the class to examine what he knew and compare it against what beginners were expected to learn. Sometimes history was involved, too, and that ranged from surprisingly accurate to propaganda so blatant he had to wonder if a single person in the room believed it.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Today’s lesson involved some history, it seemed. With their teaching grad student currently on deployment with the Reserve, lesson timing and manner had been changed. She had a link to the campus intranet from an uplink installed as part of the standard rapid-response outpost, so she was calling in from a makeshift classroom near the border. Alexis Lance had told the class that she was on a “research outing” with the Reserve—an official line, of course—but Syl was pretty sure less than half the people here bought that.


    The intranet connection was a flux reproduction of the internet, which had once been a wholly electronic system. It carried features that the old internet wouldn’t have, but it was also remarkably limited in comparison. There was nothing like the worldwide connections that had once been possible, but the front half of the classroom held a three-dimensional representation of the room Lance was in, which electronics hadn’t managed to accomplish before they’d either stopped working or been bombed out of existence.


    “We’re going to examine sabotage-type spells today,” Lance said, sounding harried. She startled, looking off to the side, then shook her head and looked back at the class. “This is the second half of the Enhancement school of fundamental magic, bringing us to our last unit.”


    The bulk of the semester so far had been focused on the five fundamental schools of magic, each of which carried two primary opposing classes within them—Manipulation’s, for instance, were conjuration and absorption. Existence, Detection, and Acceleration had all had some holes in their explanations, but Syl had decided that they were good enough for beginners. Fortification, the “positive” end of the Enhancement school, had been interesting enough and had surprisingly followed the actual course of history. He was hoping this would be the same.


    “The magical schools as we know them today were not formally established until the early 30s,” Lance started, clearly reading off a prompter of some kind. Her own notes, maybe? “Sabotage-type magic was the last school to be fully realized. Until this time period, this kind of magic was largely either unused or classified as a more complex combination of other schools. It was not until the Taiwan singularity that sabotage-type magic came into its own, finding uses primarily in reducing the efficacy of electronic machines and artificially generated magic.”


    That sent murmurs through the class, which was a bit noisier than usual without the professor physically present to handle them. Most everyone had heard of the artificial intelligence that had quickly replicated and taken Taiwan under their own control. Just like the Sinners, those intelligences were living legends, seemingly too powerful to be true—yet they had walked the Earth at some point.


    They no longer did, of course, but Syl had to admit that the three times he had visited the frozen ruins of the nation-state, peppered by every permanent magical effect under the sun as well as several hundred megatons worth of nuclear bombs, he had gotten the unsettling impression that humanity had not been the only being to walk away from that. It was just an impression, of course, but the allure of that mystery drew in even the most ignorant magicians.


    After he’d gotten over his initial dislike for Lance’s elitism, Syl had accepted that she was at least a decent lecturer. It was clear sometimes that she knew that what she was teaching was incomplete material, but she did at least make it palatable.


    Syl was already more skilled at sabotage-type magic than someone like Lance could hope to be in her lifetime, so he tuned the lecture out as he continued on—


    He paused, his eyes locking onto a corner of the projection. The intranet ran off of transmitted flux, which meant that any notable sources of flux in the same area as someone holo-calling would interfere with the transmission to some extent. Syl couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the spell from here, but… he could guess the school of magic. He could even be fairly certain of which family had sent that person.


    Syl stood up and walked out of class without another word. If he was wrong, this was a fairly harmless waste of time. If he was right, then he couldn’t waste any time.


    Two minutes after contacting Bianca, she was out of her class as well, joining him as they both used stealth-type spells to avoid detection by errant faculty or school security systems as they departed towards the garages.


    “Lyon Red passed me in the hallway,” Bianca reported. “My stealth spells were up, but I believe he caught me.”


    It’s okay, Syl signed. I am guessing some of the prismatics already know what is happening. They will not identify us from this. Full suits available, yes?


    It would be a pain, admittedly, but there were so many moving pieces in the situation as it was that Syl didn’t think the Red plant in class 3 was anywhere near the top of his problems.


    “They are,” she said. “What problem did you identify?”


    I’ll tell you on the way, he signed back.


    #


    Alexis sighed, shutting off the intranet connection. It was flux-hungry enough to actively affect the amount of magic allocated to the outpost defenses, but not enough to the extent where she could reasonably use that as an excuse not to continue giving her lessons.


    That was part of her contract with the Reserve. She’d almost been sent packing to Lingdao after her relatively mediocre performance at school, a front that she was well aware had an attrition rate she didn’t want to risk. Alexis’ research into magical linguistics had made her valuable enough to keep on as part of the Reserve so long as she spread some of that expertise to incoming students, so she had accepted it over near-certain military service. Even if it was going to be her eighth year here soon, anything was preferable to even two years in Lingdao.


    At least, that was what she had thought. Now, with every earth-shaking impact in the distance sending heart-stopping fear coursing through her veins, she was no longer sure.


    “Just a few more weeks,” she told herself. “Then it’ll be done and you can go home.”


    Home. Home meant Viv and Ethan and ultra-processed food and shitty pre-integration TV dramas that had been restored and made compatible with the intranet. A boring existence, but boring was better than this.


    “Having a rough time?”


    Alexis’ gaze snapped up, her hand instinctively going to her FCD. She relaxed when she saw who it was.


    “Justin,” she said. “You scared me.”


    “My fault,” the Lilac said, holding his hands up. For a prismatic, even one from a lesser family, he was surprisingly down-to-earth. Easy to interact with. “I was just thinking that you look stressed. Want me to take over your next spotter shift?”


    She wasn’t supposed to do that, since this was reserved for people with classroom clearances, but it did sound nice. Being able to relax after this tension, away from the bombs and spells… Alexis deserved this, didn’t she?


    “If you don’t mind,” she said.


    “Excellent,” Justin said, smiling too wide. His eyes flashed alongside his brilliant teeth. “And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hook into the intranet. Just real quick. All I need is a few moments.”


    Alexis frowned. She wasn’t supposed to do that, but Justin was being reasonable. This was just quid pro quo, wasn’t it?


    “Go ahead,” she said.


    Those captivating violet eyes flashed again. “Thanks a billion.”


    Somehow, the next few minutes seemed to pass by in a hazy flash. Alexis rubbed her eyes, shaking herself out of her daze. She really was tired—she had barely even noticed Justin leaving.


    “I should take a nap,” she muttered to herself—or, at least, tried to. Alexis was familiar enough with rambling through chains of magical phrases thousands of words long in an effort to distinguish the microscopic differences between them to tell that her vocal cords were working to vibrate, to produce sound, but nothing was coming out.


    She snapped to alertness immediately, synapses firing as she realized what was going on.


    Shit, she thought. Justin did something. I need to get in touch with the others.


    Alexis picked up her FCD, working the buttons as best as she could, her hands shaky.


    No signal. Flux pulsed from her casting device and snuffed out just as quickly.


    Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Alexis scrambled to check the intranet port, then jerked to a halt.


    Someone, probably Justin, had used some kind of spell to physically chain her to this location. A second later, she noticed that the port was no longer empty. There was an FCD plugged into it.


    This was a setup, she realized. Her heart sank, realizing that the signature on that would almost certainly be heard.


    They were going to find her here. Alexis’ life was over.


    Sure enough, after some time that might have been a couple of minutes or an hour, the temporary door to her “classroom” opened and two magicians with their faces obscured wearing uniforms Alexis had seen only twice before stepped in, clearing the room with a sidearm in one hand and an FCD in another.


    Special forces soldiers.


    She hung her head. All her life, she had just wanted to learn. She hadn’t even been particularly good at that despite her passion, but she’d tried oh so hard just to end up here.


    What a pathetic way to die, she thought.


    The two special forces units put down their guns for a moment and started gesturing towards each other in a manner that Alexis eventually recognized was a standard English sign language. She couldn’t read it or say anything past the basics, but she could tell they were communicating.


    Were they deciding how they would kill her now? How to gather information from her corpse? Even if she could talk, she couldn’t tell them anything they would believe.


    One of them knelt down, forcing her to make… well, not eye contact, since they were wearing a helmet that blocked their face, but something similar.


    The magician held up a piece of notebook paper—real paper, not the plastic synthetics that most people used.


    Scrawled on it was a short, neat note.


    You are going to be okay. This is for your own safety.


    A blast of flux poured into Alexis’ head, filling it full of heavy cotton. Her vision started dimming at the edges.


    “Who?” she tried to ask, mouthing the words when her voice produced no sound.


    As if he had predicted her question, the magician turned the sheet around.


    An archmage, of sorts.


    An archmage who didn’t need to speak.


    Alexis’ delirious mind continued thinking even as she started succumbing to the sleep spell. A—the silent archmage… that rings a bell.


    Before she could connect any more dots, she passed out.


    #


    Syl looked to Bianca.


    Attack force incoming, he signed.


    A distraction, Bianca signed back.


    He agreed. If they had wanted just to wipe this outpost off and move onwards, a hostile infiltrator would have needed only to plant a bomb strong enough to wipe them all while they were off guard.


    Still hostile, Syl said.


    Bianca nodded. Dead or alive?


    Syl considered, then shrugged. It doesn’t matter to me.


    The wide-range spell jammer, an artifact retrieved from the inside of a Tower, finished establishing itself in that moment. With the tactical-class jamming field slipping into place, the shield spell covering the outpost shattered.


    Syl and Bianca stepped out of the room.


    Someone was going to regret their violence today, and it was not going to be either of them.