On the Shoulders of Titans

by Andrew Rowe

  I activated my attunement. I could see his aura just a little bit without my attunement active, but it was much easier while it was on.

  Keras projected his aura over the practice sword, mimicking the style of my own blade. Then, as I watched, the aura shifted — with one half of the blade’s aura moving to overlap with the other half.

  I blinked as I realized what was happening. “You’re pushing all the mana into one side so that it hits harder.”

  Keras nodded, then shifted his stance with the point facing toward us.

  The aura, too, shifted — until nearly the entire aura was concentrated on the point. “I call it aura compression. It’s similar to what Mara does when she focuses mana in her hands before she punches someone, it’s just to a greater extreme.”

  “And my whole hand ain’t hittin’ anyone. It’d be more like if I just put my mana right on knuckles.” Marissa flexed her fingers on her left hand. “I should try that.”

  “I’d be careful with that,” Keras cautioned. “When you’re focusing mana in your hand, you’re also reinforcing it so that you don’t break your fingers. You might be able to concentrate some more on the points of contact, but don’t abandon the rest of your hand entirely. With the blade aura, though, it’s extended beyond your hand — you don’t need to worry about hurting yourself. You can make the aura as dense as you can manage. Try it.”

  I pushed the mana on my blade. The transference sword was a saber, meaning it only had a single striking edge. Moving all the aura to one side was an intuitive choice, and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t considered it earlier. Everyone always seemed to have double-sided blade auras, regardless of the style of sword, so I’d just sort of assumed it was normal.

  Always question everything.

  It was a core part of my philosophy, but that didn’t mean I was perfect at it. I was only human.

  Maybe that was something I could improve on eventually, too.

  The blade aura moved easily enough, but it was powered by runes that were designed to continuously emit energy all around the sword. The moment I stopped concentrating, the aura snapped back to its original shape. And every moment I pushed on the aura, it took up just a little bit of my mana.

  Someone like Keras probably had hundreds or thousands of times my mana. He didn’t have to worry about the cost of shaping an aura.

  But for me? I’d have to figure out a smarter way to use this technique.

  I swung in the air experimentally, concentrating as I moved the blade.

  I imagined an opponent — and in the moment before I made contact, I pushed on the blade aura, compressing it.

  For just a moment, the transference aura overlapped with itself, giving it twice as much force.

  Good.

  I repeated the process, cutting and thrusting.

  I could see numerous applications for this.

  Focusing the blade aura to add more force was a great offensive strategy, but if I could manipulate the aura of a blade, I could do it with other auras, too.

  “Mara, punch me real quick.”

  Marissa turned away from practicing with her own aura blade and grinned at me. “Sure!”

  I chuckled. “You don’t have to sound that excited.”

  Marissa waved a hand dismissively. “S’ what friends are for. Got a particular place you want me to hit you?”

  Keras looked on with raised eyebrows.

  I shook my head. “Surprise me.”

  She jabbed me in the ribs before I was ready. I doubled over in spite of both shield sigils and two shrouds protecting me.

  “Oh, goddess! Was that too hard? I was expecting you to have a trick or somethin’.”

  I raised a finger and motioned for her to wait while I coughed. “Just...wasn’t...ready...” I took a breath, activating the ring of regeneration. She probably hadn’t hurt me seriously, but the ring gave me an immediate feeling of relief from the pain.

  I straightened, bracing myself. “Okay, one second.” I took a breath.

  Then I extended another thread of mana from my hand, touching a different rune. “Okay, let me try this.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated, pushing mana through the thread.

  The barrier that Marissa had just cracked began to mend itself back together.

  Marissa blinked, watching the cracks in the barrier disappear. “How’re you doin’ that without touchin’ the sigil?”

  “I made a tiny thread of mana and attached it. It connects my attunement to the sigil, letting me feed power straight into the sigil and keep my hands free for other things.”

  “Ooh, that sounds useful! Wish I had transference mana so I could do the same thing.” Marissa grinned. “Shame you still can’t take a punch, though.”

  I groaned. “I said I wasn’t ready.”

  “You came up with that just now?” Keras raised an eyebrow at me.

  I shrugged a shoulder. “Seemed like an obvious application of your technique.”

  “It might be for you, but not everyone is as good at extrapolating from existing styles as you are. You’ve got a good tactical mindset. I’ll try to keep teaching you more foundation techniques like that, and hopefully you can continue to expand on them when you need to.”

  Was he...complimenting me?

  I wasn’t sure how to handle that. I wasn’t used to teachers being...well, nice.

  “Uh, thanks?... So, what’s next?”

  “Next, you practice what I just taught you. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. I noticed you refocusing your aura mid-swing — that’s a good exercise. Get used to doing it. Eventually, you’ll be able to do it almost unconsciously, and that’ll make it harder to predict.”

  Marissa rolled on her heels. “Okay, but what’s going to be after that?”

  Keras scratched the back of his head. “Haven’t thought that far. I’m...not really used to teaching people my fighting style. Maybe spell striking? No, you’re probably not going to get a lot of use out of that yet. Blade splitting would probably be the next logical step. Or spell cutting. Or maybe aura extension?”

  “Ooh, blade splitting. I like the sound of that.” Marissa grinned, turning toward me. “Well, Cadence? You want to try mixing this into a little sparrin’?”

  I shifted into a defensive stance. “You bet. Let’s get started.”

  ***

  We kept practicing, but Keras didn’t teach us any more of those interesting — if unusual — sounding techniques before it was time to get ready for our final exam.

  We did, however, get considerably better at aura compression. And, in my case, I got in a more practice with recharging my shield sigil with mana threads, too.

  I drowned myself with practice. It was easier to do that than to think about the possible implications of what my mother was really up to, or about the things my father had hidden from me.

  We had a couple brief strategy meetings, but without the details of our mission assignment, we didn’t have much to go on.

  Sera and Patrick gathered a little bit of information from other students — we weren’t strictly forbidden from discussing this test like we had been with the fake spire exams.

  Unfortunately, no one knew much about it until some of the first students came back from their tests. And every group Sera talked to was given a completely different scenario.

  One team was told to reinforce a fortress that was under siege. Another was given the assignment to attack that same fortress and steal a flag from it.

  Another team was sent into a wilderness area and told to search for a magical item. That sounded similar to the test I’d taken with Marissa, but much larger in scale. And they’d been attacked by monsters repeatedly. Actual monsters, as far as they could tell.

  That made me a little nervous. I stopped by Researcher to ask her for information — one of my new favorite “clever bordering on cheating” tactics — but apparently this test was so new that nothing had been filed on the assignments of specific groups. The teach
ers were making them up on a day-to-day basis.

  We tried to glean what we could from the returning teams, but we didn’t learn much else. As such, we made our preparations as broad as possible.

  I considered some options for enchantments I could work on in the last couple days, but I’d been spending most of my time on practicing spells and combat, rather than saving up money. I couldn’t afford many more raw materials, so I didn’t have a lot of options to work with.

  I wanted to upgrade the standard shield sigils and bring them up to the same level of power as the phoenix ones, but they were standard school issue and we weren’t allowed to tamper with them.

  The phoenix sigils were already close to their mana capacity, so I couldn’t safely upgrade them much further, either.

  Instead, I convinced Keras to help me out a bit.

  I handed him a small stack of coins.

  “You want pure silver?” He asked.

  “Yep. It has the best enchanting capacity per volume of anything we have on-hand. Unless you can make valden?”

  He shook his head. “I can change some of the properties of a material, but I’m not sure what that would do to the enchantment capacity on it. Might make it better, might make it worse. Probably not worth the risk.”

  I nodded. “Just extract the silver from the coins, then.”

  “That’s easy enough. You want the results in any particular shape?”

  I handed him my phoenix sigil. “You can use that as a mold.”

  The coins we were using weren’t pure silver, but they had enough silver content that he could easily separate it from the rest of the metal and reshape it into what I wanted.

  After that, I actually went to the Divinatory and did what I was supposed to be doing from the beginning — I had them run tests on the metal to check the enchantment capacity. I didn’t want to take the risk that Keras’ manipulations had somehow altered the metal in a way that would make it unstable.

  And it was always good to know if Keras was really doing what he claimed, too. I didn’t have a lot of reason to distrust him on this subject, but I always liked to verify things in general.

  The metal was perfect. It was, as Keras claimed, perfectly pure silver.

  Silver had roughly twenty times the capacity of copper for an object of equivalent size. The phoenix sigils I’d made before weren’t pure copper, but they were close.

  That meant these new silver phoenix sigils were going to have plenty of mana capacity to work with. More than I could possibly fill at my current skill level, which was good.

  I wasn’t going to have time to make a full set before the test, but I got to work.

  The first enchantment was an upgraded shield. The next level of barrier had twice the total capacity of the previous phoenix sigils, and four times that of a standard shield sigil.

  Next, I added a higher tier version of the self-recharging rune, which would allow these sigils to recharge within the same period of time as the old ones.

  Finally, the hardest part — a regeneration enchantment. I’d barely been practicing with life mana, but I knew how to use it now, and that meant I could make basic healing and regeneration enchantments without crystals.

  Up until this point, I’d only had two regeneration items to work with — the ring being the strongest, and the bracer I’d made by transferring the mana from the healing rock. Ultimately, I wanted everyone in my group to have some form of healing. Anything else was irresponsible.

  Also, it fit the phoenix theme. That was important.

  The best I could manage was a higher-end Carnelian enchantment, which made the regeneration function comparable to that of the bracer, but much weaker than the ring of regeneration.

  I still was concerned about wearing too many regeneration items at the same time, especially when I was working on enchanting. I hadn’t forgotten what had happened with my hand. Still, regeneration was too useful of an ability to ignore. I just had to be a little more conscious of how much I was pushing myself while I was wearing regeneration items.

  I had a couple options on how I could distribute the items. Giving four out of five people a regeneration item of some kind was a good option, but keeping the ring in reserve for emergencies was another idea.

  I also considered giving the ring and one of the new sigils to Marissa, since she was our front line fighter, and thus the most likely to take a lot of damage.

  Ultimately, after a discussion with the rest of the group, I went with spreading the healing out as much as possible.

  Marissa and I wore the newly-made silver phoenix sigils. We were the most likely to be in close-range combat, and thus we needed the strongest shields we could get.

  I gave the regeneration bracer to Patrick, and the ring of regeneration to Sera.

  Patrick and Sera both tended to burn through their mana quickly, so they were both good options for the mana regeneration bracer. I ended up giving it to Patrick, simply because we still weren’t comfortable with the idea of feeding more mana into Sera’s body from an outside source, even if we were confident it was pure.

  We still weren’t allowed to bring the extremely dangerous magical weapons for this test, so that meant leaving Ceris, Selys-Lyann, and the Dawnbringer replica behind.

  As such, I held onto the transference sword, and I handed the demi-gauntlet off to Sera. She was getting used to casting spells again, but having a weapon to use was helpful. She took an ordinary dueling cane, too, just in case.

  After that, I had another decision to make.

  Was I willing to use the Jaden Box during this test?

  Using the box would potentially save our entire team from having to carry camping equipment, as well as other general supplies. The Jaden Box theoretically had a maximum capacity, but from what Keras explained, we hadn’t gotten anywhere close to reaching it.

  It was clear we would be observed to some extent, but mostly by a second-year student, not a teacher. It wasn’t likely they would recognize the box, or understand that I wasn’t supposed to have it. But if I used it to carry all our gear, there was a high chance they would talk about that in a report to the teachers after our assignment was over.

  I talked to Sera about it.

  “What are the odds you could get the box officially released into your care?” Sera asked.

  “Doubt it. It was being researched by Professor Orden. With Orden gone, it’s more likely they would want it returned to the Divinatory, or maybe another member of her research team. I can claim that Orden wanted me to hold onto it, but ultimately it was never really her property in the first place.”

  Sera nodded. “Okay. What about disguising it?”

  I blinked. “Disguising it how?”

  “There are other items that can hold things in a storage space, right?”

  I frowned. “Sure, there are bags that can summon linked items that are held in another location. They’re kind of the reverse of jump bells. But they summon everything around the anchor at once, and they’re also extremely expensive.”

  “I’m a Summoner. You’re an Enchanter. How plausible is it that we could have made one? Maybe with some unusual altered characteristics so we could summon one item at a time?”

  I rubbed my chin. “I don’t know. I haven’t really studied that type of item in detail. Maybe we could sell another student on it, but I doubt a teacher would believe it.”

  “People tend to believe things if you don’t give them a reason not to. As long as we can make a somewhat plausible explanation, I doubt they’re going to dig into it. Our team is going to be carrying tons of items you made. Do you really think this one is going to stand out that much?”

  I frowned. “I...don’t know. It’s too hard for me to see from an outside perspective.”

  “Let’s go with a middle route, then. We’ll still all bring bags, but we’ll put most of the heavy stuff in your box. Tents, that sort of thing. If all you’re storing for us is the tents, and you summon the tents all at once, it wi
ll probably look much less suspicious. Does that sound right?”

  I nodded. “Sounds plausible. I’ll see if I can study up on other storage enchantments tonight, just so I can have a plausible explanation if necessary. I’d rather still say we got the box from a teacher, though, and just not explain that it’s the Jaden Box. That would make having a higher level item more likely. One more thing, though.”

  “Hm?”

  “If I’m going to do this, you need to go shop for our supplies. I’m not going to have time.”

  “You just hate shopping.”

  “...That may true, but I’m still making you do it.”

  Sera sighed. “Fine. Deal.”

  ***

  I spent the rest of that evening studying storage and summoning enchantments, just as I’d promised. Much as I’d suspected, they were all higher level than I could possibly accomplish.

  The most basic were Sunstone level, and those just summoned a single grouping of items that were within a few feet of an anchor.

  Higher level enchantments were required for longer range, for a higher summoning area of effect, or for transporting larger objects. More importantly, however, I did find that it was possible to connect a single item to multiple anchors, and to tie summoning effects to different key words for activation.

  In essence, it was possible to fake most of what the Jaden Box could do with standard enchanting, at least in theory. I didn’t see any established item designs for multiple anchors, though. I was just speculating.

  The Jaden Box’s function for summoning people was the hardest part to mimic, but I didn’t intend to use that, so I didn’t have to figure out a way to fake it.

  Learning this all was useful — both because I did intend to make a copy of the Jaden Box for myself in the future and because it helped me realize just how potent the box was.

  Even if I used high level enchantments to get similar functions, the box had the advantage of actually storing things — it didn’t need anchors in other locations. That made it far more secure and easier to use.

  It did raise the questions of how and where the box was storing things. The notes had indicated that it was somehow utilizing an extra-dimensional space, which was outside of the scope of any enchantments in my books — even the advanced ones I’d taken from the restricted section.