MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

Chapter 8: The perfect mistake

The moon over the Academy was not one, but a rope of three pearl-like bodies suspended in the velvet sky of the Arcane Veil, with the result that three times over it was painted, and light was disoriented to cast shadows upon the world. Leo was following through these shadows like one of them, and his heart was beating like a mad drum against his ribs. The call had not been in his Codex, but in a one-shock jerk of his consciousness-a mental provocation on the part of Riven which was like a fish-hook in his head.

He stole out of his quarters, the corridors all empty at this time of the day. After the psychological draw, he came tumbling again to the underpinning of the Academy, but this time no Riven was there at the oak-and-iron door. The pull carried him to the other side of it, along a narrower, more rugged-hewn tunnel that reeked of damp stone and old and stagnant magic. The air was icy cold and the light was dim, phosphorescence which was weak, and in spots of lichen on the walls. This was not a sanctified school. This was a forgotten artery.

One of the figures separated itself out of the darkness in front. Riven, as ever dressed in practical black robes, rather than the grey of his professor, made more of an assassin than a scholar. He did not talk, simply turned and took Leo further. The tunnel ended in an open circle, the floor of which was a mosaic of a broken, eight point star. The star had a tremendous, unlit pool of water in the middle of it.

Riven said, his voice a low murmur, which, notwithstanding the acoustics of the chamber, was gulp-guzzled. An athletic nursery since a lower age. The Academy closed it when a dozen of students went crazy. It doesn't teach you spells. It teaches you survival." He set Leo with a firm glance, with both the hope that he could find some useful instrument and with the cold realization of the fear which it would take to make one. The first thing to teach you is to breathe.

Riven, before Leo could enquire what that was, acted sharply and cutting with his hand. The mosaic floor was swollen with a green sickness light. It made the air in the chamber solid. As though one were drowned in concrete. The lungs of Leo caught and could not breathe. Panic, pure and instinctive, burst in his chest. He tore his throat with his nails, and he stared at Riven, his eyes bulging, he was looking with detached analytical interest.

Threat to environment identified. Fade away, fades away, fades away--here the voice of the Warden said the chillest words.

It was a wakeup call, it was no lesson. It was an execution. A simulated death.

Black dots were playing at the corner of his eye. Oxygen was screaming in his body but it would never reach him. He knelt on his knees and the cold rock was a savage shock. This was it. In this obscure hole he was going to die, a victim of the madness of his mentor.

Activating emergency procedure. Analyzing stressor."

His Codex which hither had been a tacit show burst forth into action. Glyphs fluttered at a blinding rate, streams of information in that alien script scrolling too rapidly to his eyes to keep up with. It was not following him with the eye, but eating the magic that killed him.

Pattern referred to: Asphyxiative Field, Class IV. Counter-hypothesis: Transference of essence through dermal absorption.

The Warden was not the only recipient of the information. It poured into the mind of Leo, a stream of cold and hard facts. He was not simply experiencing the magic, he was interpreting it. The discipline was not displacing air but it was inhibiting his lungs to process it. But his skin--his skin was capable still of absorbing ambient essence, could he but make it work as an organ of respiration.

It was an impossible insight. Learners took years to know how to feel magical structures. It was in a heartbeat being done to him by his System. It was auto-learning.

In a last, futile gesture of will Leo ceased to attempt breathing. He concentrated on all this, on the cold logic of the Warden. He could see the whole of his body like a lung, his pores opening, and when they did the raw humming magic of the very chamber itself flowing into his blood.

It was agony. It was as though he had plunged fire and ice in his veins. But the blackness receded. He made one of those blind, trembling yanks--not of air but of pure, undiluted power. The area was intact, trampling, yet he was beating around it.

The eyes of Riven enlarged slightly. He made another gesture.

The scene dissolved. One moment Leo was on cold stone kneeling, then the moment he was in deep, freezing water and the pressure was tremendous. The fake act of drowning was so real he instinctively struggled and water rushed in his mouth and nose. He was slipping down into a bottomless blackness.

Hydrostatic pressure critical. Thermoregulation failing. Counter-hypothesis: Internalised thermal regulation through controlled combustion of essence.

Again, the data-stream. The System was a supercomputer in detecting the problem and offering a solution. Leo, on pure survival instinct, took the burning-cold-blooded energy in his veins and concentrated it inwards, forming a miniature, imploded fire-furnace in his heart. The chilly cold had given way, and a raging internal heat had assumed its place, and was repelling the cold water. And he was not drowning, he was adjusting.

The situations were speedier, an unwearying, savage assembly of fake murders. He was cheated to death and the System had his body inculcated to be in a suspended animated state. He was hurled into nothingness and it taught him to re-use his own nature in a vicious circle. He had been attacked psychically in a way that made himself feel as though he was being attacked by razers in his mind and the Warden had built shields according to patterns that it had deciphered by the attacks themselves.

All through it the System was learning. It compelled Leo to study it, implanting knowledge unlearnable to him, into his nervous system. The tuition f*e was the agonizing pain, and permanent.

Finally, it stopped. Leo fell on the cold dry mosaic of the broken star, his body trembling involuntarily, his robes wet with phantom water and actual sweat. He threw up on the rocks, and his whole being was a disgust at the acts which it had just been forced to submit.

Riven leaned over him, and did not put out a hand. Stunning, I said to myself, I said to myself, I saw, he said, still staring at the space above Leo and, through it, at the book his Codex was still flickering. "It doesn't just respond. It evolves. It reforms itself on-the-fly to guarantee the survival of the host. No Codex is capable of that. They are fixed, rigid systems. Yours… yours is alive."

His stormy eyes fired a weird, even avaricious look down upon Leo. They attempted to develop an ideal System centuries long. An intelligent that learns and evolves by itself. They failed. The intricacy continuously brought about disastrous disintegration. A grim smile touched his lips. They never imagined to attach it to a soul that had been broken. It is the volatility of your character that offers the anarchic medium upon which its reasoning must exercise itself. Leo, you are not a faulty product. You are the perfect mistake."

The language was suspended in the atmosphere like oracle and was dark and fatal. He was a glorious, terrible accident.

He was standing himself up, sore in those places where he couldn't tell whether he felt sore. Now he looked at his Codex, the exhibit now steadying itself.

MIND: 4 → 5

WILL: 5 → 7

ESSENCE: 4 → 6

BODY: 4 → 5

The increase in stat was not the only thing that bothered him but the unnatural rate. It was only one night of tough, almost fatal training which had made him what most initiates would have become in a month of safe, systematic training. The figures were flickering with a dim, violent purple light, the witness of the bloody means of their procurement.

There came a cold shock in his bones. The System, his Codex, the Warden--it was all like pain. It fed on extremity. The nearer death the greater the transformations it made into keeping him alive. It was an unsymbiotic association with a monster, and the exchange was his own anguish.

He examined his hands which were still trembling. The war was no longer an abstraction. Here, in his aching muscles and his mutilated mind. How far was he willing to go? In what proportions of his human nature, how much pain, did he submit to make sacrifice on the shrine of this power? He had even allowed Riven to nearly kill him to score a couple of stat points.

There was an unasked question pouting at his mind--would he not be strengthened without being destroyed? Or was it each step towards living another step backward toward being human? The predicament was now his perpetual companion, and weighed on him like the Codex he had on his wrist.

He got on his feet, which were trembling in their own right. He met Riven's expectant gaze. He didn't speak. All he did was make one, sharp nod.

It was everything that he could say in response. He had chosen. He would grow. And he would have known what, precisely, he was becoming.