by Turtle Me
“Your assessment will be through portal five,” he said, motioning us toward the shimmering gate. “Guardians will be led to the viewing room where they can watch from there. Any questions?”
Alaric went ahead, stepping confidently through the portal marked with the number five. I followed after him, unsure what to expect.
The jarring sensation of teleportation gates in Dicathen was enough to make some people physically ill, but the Alacryan portal left me with only a dull sense of vertigo that quickly faded.
Studying my new surroundings, I found myself in a brightly lit tunnel. Runes flashed on the immaculate white walls, illuminating our way. Aside from the main path that stretched out in front of us, there was a set of stairs to our right, and a metal sign indicating that it led to the viewing room.
“Break a leg.” Alaric smacked my back before heading up the stairs. “It’ll be interesting to see you fight.”
With a deep breath, I made my way along the marble pathway, this entire place reminding me of some sort of underground lab rather than any sort of testing area.
The hall took me to a small changing room, where I found some kind of tight suit neatly folded on a bench, as well as a locker for me to hang up my current clothes.
“For your own safety, please wear the protective suit,” a tinny voice repeated every few minutes as I changed.
After putting on the foamy, skin-tight suit, which was covered in runes, I walked up to the door clearly labeled “assessment hall.” The runes on the suit flashed brightly as I neared the entrance, and the doors slid open as if the suit itself was required to go through.
‘Wow, fancy,’ Regis commented.
I had expected to find myself in an arena of some sort, but after walking through the automatic sliding metal doors, I was greeted with the sight of a huge, empty chamber.
The enormous room was a perfect cube, around fifty yards in width, height, and length, with rows of intricate runes pulsating across the walls. Both the floor and walls were divided into smaller square tiles, but devoid of additional detail aside from a glass pane near the ceiling. I could just make out several shadowed figures standing behind it.
“Candidate Grey, Striker,” a voice boomed from high above. “Your first assessment will now begin.”
That was it. No guidance, no instructions of any sort. Instead, a row of lower square tiles receded from the wall, and out crawled a trio of giant, armored spiders… each of which were at least twice my height.
Regis let out a groan. ‘Again… how come all of the monsters we fight are so damn ugly?’
294
Ascension 101
As the three giant spiders, each one clad in rune-covered armor to protect their bulbous bodies and twitching legs, let out a series of chittering hisses, I couldn’t help but wonder how they had gotten these beasts out of the Relictombs.
‘Maybe they’re just normal mana beasts from the surface,’ Regis answered.
Ah. You’re probably right, but aren’t these supposed to test—
One hulking, armored form skittered toward me, cutting my conversation with Regis short. Despite the spider’s large frame, it moved incredibly fast.
The runes on my suit began glowing brighter as one of the spider’s clawed legs slashed past me.
‘Hey, do you think the runes on your gear react to the runes on the spider’s armor?’ Regis asked in my mind.
Artificing was not my field of expertise, but I thought Regis was probably onto something. Perhaps the shadowy judges above could track my performance with the runes, similar to how Emily had helped me train back in the castle. I could just imagine how fascinated Emily or Gideon would be if they saw something like this firsthand.
Actually, Gideon would probably feign disinterest while getting grumpy out of envy, I thought with a smile.
I dodged another barrage of strikes from the spider, glancing toward the other two, which were still waiting at the edge of the assessment hall.
The giant spider lunged at me and I grabbed its fangs, holding it at arm's length. “Uh, excuse me?” I called out as I turned into the momentum of the spider’s attack, using its own weight to send it tumbling away. “What exactly am I supposed to do for this assessment?”
There was no response.
Frustrated, but hesitant to do anything that might give away my strength, I continued to defend against the relentless assault of the first spider, feeling like a mouse fleeing from a tarantula. As I threw myself back from a slash of the spider’s claws, a warning sounded in my mind and I was forced to spin and dive to the side to avoid the stabbing fangs of the second spider, which had suddenly burst into motion and joined the battle. Had the mana beasts’ armor been designed to be more silent, I might not have heard the creature’s hurried approach in time.
‘What do you suppose happens if those things bite you? Do people die in this test?’
Thanks for the concern, but I’m fine, I thought back, sliding under one spider’s thick legs just as the other leapt at me, causing them to collide with a crash.
‘I’m not concerned, I’m bored.’
My companion’s words got me thinking, and so I started to experiment, purposely allowing a few of the spider’s strikes to hit me.
Surprisingly, despite the speed at which the spider struck, most of the force was dampened upon contact, as if the foam suit I was wearing was several feet thick, rather than several millimeters.
‘You should find out what happens if you get hit in the face,’ Regis suggested, half out of curiosity, half for his own amusement.
Despite Regis’s obvious intentions, I was curious too. I waited until the third spider had sprung to life and joined its brethren, then, right after I had dodged one of the spider’s fangs, I let spider number three swing down at my cheek with its front limb.
The runes around the collar of my suit lit up, encasing my entire head in a silvery dome. The runes surrounding the limb that was about to strike my cheek also flared to life, and, just as it made contact with the protective barrier around my head, both of us were blown back by a concussive force.
I spun in the air, landing on my feet, but the three spiders’ bodies slumped. They scuttled slowly toward the tiles that they had come out from as if they’d been scolded, then the tiles closed behind them.
“The next assessment will now begin,” the examiner watching behind the glass window declared, his voice echoing through the chamber.
Before the last echo had faded, the entire testing chamber began trembling, and the tiles on the ground and walls began sliding outward, forming square pillars. The tile on which I’d been standing lifted me upwards a few feet, then water began flooding the room below me.
“Seize the gem located at the top of the assessment hall before the water touches you,” the voice commanded. “Begin.”
I rolled my eyes. At least this time I had some clear instructions.
Wasting no time, I channeled aether into my legs and leapt from platform to platform. The entire chamber had been transformed into a sort of vertical maze, with rectangular platforms crisscrossing each other to block my view of the top.
Additionally, the platforms moved at random intervals, keeping me on my toes more so than the oversized spiders.
Regardless, with my draconic physique and aetheric enhancements, the assessment was little more than a casual climb up a children’s playground. High above the floor where I fought the spiders, I found a fist-sized crystal hanging from the center of the ceiling. Below me, the water had filled less than a quarter of the space.
As soon as I grabbed the crystal, the platforms slowly receded, and the water drained through a series of empty tiles in the floor. The pillar I stood atop lowered until I was again standing in an empty square room.
After the water had completely drained and the chamber was back to its original empty form, the central squares of the room began to glow with a dull blue light. A single square at
one corner glowed white.
“Please step onto the white square,” the judge announced in his eerie, echoing voice. I did as I was asked, though a part of my mind told me it was stupid. What did I really know about this whole place? They could have detected my lack of mana, or Alaric could have turned me in, and stepping on that white square might disintegrate me, or teleport me into a prison cell, or—
I caught myself before I dug myself into a hole and steeled my nerves. There was no reason for them to be suspicious, and I had already decided to trust the old drunk. I was in the heart of the enemy’s empire, but here I was Grey, not Arthur Leywin.
Once I was standing with both feet firmly placed on the white square, further instructions echoed down from the shadows above.
“Step only on the white tiles. Your goal is to reach the black tile”—one blue tile turned black in the opposite corner from where I stood—“without leaving the platform or touching the blue tiles. You must do so before you pass out from mana loss.”
‘Wait, what did he just—’
Regis was cut off as a sucking pressure began pulling at every inch of me, and I felt the aether in my body being drawn out through my aether channels. How the hell?
‘It’s like that platform in the Relictombs!’ Regis shouted in my mind. ‘They must have modeled this place on those crazy djinn’s tests.”
He was right, of course. I immediately pulled all of my aether back into my core, similar to what I had done with my hand back in the Relictombs, and it seemed to work. My physical body was weakened due to the lack of augmentation, but it drastically slowed the rate at which aether was being sucked out of my body.
I bet they don’t even realize what they’ve created here. There is no way they know that this place can manipulate aether as well as mana.
‘Probably a good thing, though. The sweaty, pained expression on your face doesn’t give anything away.’
I suddenly realized that, while I had been speaking to Regis, the tile in front of me had turned white, and the tile below my feet was slowly turning blue. I stepped forward quickly, and the title behind me instantly changed to the same glowing blue hue as the rest of the tiles. Besides the square I was standing on, one tile to my right, and one tile in front of me were also white.
This, too, was familiar. It wasn’t exactly the same as the revolving platform puzzle I had navigated in the Relictombs, but it was similar in premise: a maze that I couldn’t see until I was standing in it.
I chose the right-hand path, and two more tiles turned white, one in front of me, one to my left. I stepped forward again, and the tiles forward and to my left and right all turned white. When I stepped forward once more, however, I found myself at a dead end as no new squares changed color, and was forced to return to the previous tile.
The path changed before me with each step, sometimes leading me backwards, other times stopping suddenly, forcing me to dart back to a safe square before the title under my feet turned blue. And all the while, the aether continued to leak out of me. After nearly two full minutes, I had progressed approximately halfway across the board when the voice from above spoke again.
“Your ability to manipulate and contain your mana is impressive. We will now increase the level of difficulty, but not to worry—you will be scored at a handicap.”
Behind me, the corner square where I had started turned gray, then fell out of sight, leaving a shadowed pit beneath it.
‘Oh, great.’
I waited, counting until the next square descended.
Twenty seconds between squares, unless they speed up as they go. That gives us… a few minutes at most.
‘Step on it, chief,’ Regis urged.
As I progressed across the platform, I twice found myself turned around and cut off by the collapsing tiles. Still, this maze was a much simpler version of the one I experienced in the Relictombs, and even that hadn’t been able to stump me.
It took only two more minutes before I was standing on the black square. Behind me, more than half of the tiles were missing. Internally, I could feel that I’d lost perhaps a third of my aether.
The missing squares reappeared, the lit tiles all faded back to their default dull gray, and the sucking pressure vanished.
A panel in the far wall slid open, revealing a second entrance to the assessment hall. A man and woman, each garbed in a white mage robe with a distinct red band on the right arm, walked out, my “uncle” tottering behind them.
“Striker candidate Grey,” a thin bespectacled man said, reading off his clipboard. “Flexibility of offensive magic, below average. Manipulation of mana, above average. Athleticism, above average. Mental acuity, above average. Survivability rate, high.”
I cocked a brow, amused by the man’s reading that my mana manipulation was above average even though I didn’t have a shred of mana in me.
The bespectacled man finally looked up and gave me a smile. “Congratulations, Grey. You have passed the assessment.”
“Of course my nephew passed!” Alaric huffed before walking over to me and patting me on my shoulder.
“I have to say, your ability to obscure your use of mana is impressive,” the blonde woman said, echoing the examiner’s praise. “Even our suit wasn’t able to pick up on the minute traces of leakage while you augmented your limbs.”
“It is impressive indeed,” the bespectacled tester agreed. “And it’ll serve you well in the Relictombs since many of the beasts within are attracted to mana.”
I simply nodded at this new information, but quickly added a smile and said, “Thank you,” when I noticed Alaric staring at me intently.
“I highly recommend you partying with a Caster, as you specialize heavily in close combat. Even better if that party has a Shield as well,” the woman added before offering her hand. “We hope to see great results on your initiation ascent.”
I took her hand. “I’ll do my best.”
After I had changed back to my casual attire, Alaric and I were escorted back through the teleportation gate to Aramoor City’s ascender building.
“I guess you weren’t just spouting nonsense when you said you reached a convergence zone by yourself,” Alaric muttered before taking a sip of his rum. “You lasted for a pretty long time against those arachnoids.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. “How long do ascenders usually last?”
“Well, if you saw one in the wild, the sensible thing to do would be to burn them down, but the arachnoids that they use for testing are protected heavily by runes,” Alaric explained. “You weren’t able to do any damage to them, which is why they marked you low for that, but you still lasted longer than a lot of the formally trained candidates from academies.”
I turned to Alaric, who was peering down the nozzle of the dark glass bottle, trying to see how much rum he had left. “Would you believe me if I said that the times I got hit were on purpose?”
The old drunk’s eyes shifted to me as he raised a brow. “You got hit… on purpose? Why?”
“To see how the runes on the suit worked?” I looked away and rubbed the back of my neck, suddenly embarrassed.
“So while you were facing off against a giant armored mana beast, you thought that, ‘Hey, let me try getting hit in the face to see if this suit protects me!’ was a valid train of thought?” he asked slowly as we walked down a quiet corridor leading back to the main hall.
“It wouldn’t really have done any lasting damage even if I got hit.”
“Oh right, your very augmented regenerative abilities, right?” He rolled his eyes. “I can’t tell whether you’re an idiot or just ridiculously overconfident.”
“Those two traits aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive,” Regis chimed in with a snicker, his head peeking out. “He can be both.”
Alaric raised his bottle of alcohol. “I can drink to that.”
“You can drink to anything,” I groused, shoving Regis back into my body.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said dismissively.
“Good.” Alaric veered left at a fork into a larger hallway with marked doors on either side.
I followed closely behind the old man, watching his head turn left and right as if searching for a specific room.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked.
“My end of the bargain,” he said without turning back. “Now come on, the faster you’re briefed, the faster you can find a team and go on your preliminary ascent.”
“And then the faster I start making money?” I finished.
“Good-looking and smart. You’re just the whole package, aren’t you?” Alaric said mockingly.
Moments later, Alaric stopped in front of a door labeled “C28,” inserted a rune-inscribed key into the lock, and waited. The lock clicked, and he pushed his way through the door and slumped down at a large circular table, beckoning me to join him. The room had no windows and only a single entrance; inside, the table was surrounded by eight chairs. There was a projection artifact on the table and a drawing board hanging on the wall, but the room was otherwise empty.
“The rooms here are completely soundproof and impossible to scry into, even for regalia-holding sentries,” Alaric confirmed.
“Great! That means I can come out,” Regis exclaimed, leaping from my back and prancing once around the table before stopping to stretch.
“All right, we only have half an hour reserved so let’s get started,” the old drunkard declared, stamping his bottle of rum on the table as if it were a gavel.
He turned his chair around so he could reach the drawing board and picked up an ink brush. Regis and I watched in silence as he drew two wide ovals, one stacked above the other.
“These disks represent the first two floors of the Relictombs,” he began.
Regis raised a paw. “Question. I thought the different areas in the Relictombs were called zones?”
Alaric massaged the bridge of his nose. “They are… after the first two floors, which I was going to get to eventually.”