Redheads (END)

Lesson #1: Discussing the royal family without using their titles is a crime in the Holy Kingdom of Calice.

It became increasingly clear that Soren was not a man of many words. Perhaps more talkative people would take this as a sign of general disintelligence, like resident yapper Third Princess Maelle, but I took it as a sign that his traits had been distributed in a more specialised manner. It was clear that he had a deep, profound connection with magic, much like how some artists are able to connect with their works on a more soulful level, whereas most only end up capable of expert imitation at best. I had no reason to believe so—most savants ended up becoming horrible teachers—but for the first time in many years, I felt not just grateful, but excited to learn under someone again.

“Watch.”

He’d taken me to the edge of Annabelle’s shelter. The rain had petered out slightly, but the ground was still logged with spring water. Everything had a navy sheen to it, like we were at the bottom of the ocean.

“Magic is like painting,” he said. “You must make paint, find a brush, then execute the stroke. Try to visualise that as you train. With your eyes, this should be no problem.”

A rectangular blue prism floated into his palm from seemingly nowhere.

“The brush.”

Then it shattered, and a magical circle appeared—slowly filling with colour.

“The paint.”

It hummed and pulsed, and finally—

“The stroke.”

A bolt of pure ice tore into the horizon, whizzing away until it dissolved into the sky’s fading memory of its passing.

Frost Lance
2 Water Quanta
Spell
Burst Speed

Deal 3 physical damage to a target. If it survives, Freeze it.

“But that’s not the order you said it in,” I said, rather nitpickingly. “And how did you even make the paint?”

“Your mind is already on the right track. Good job.”

“...Thanks?”

“Let me tell you a story.”

He gripped his gauntlet with his other, and in a practised motion, twisted it off. The metal disengaged with a hiss of pressurised gas, like a mechanical exoskeleton, revealing a tattooed forearm extending from the back of his hand and running to his elbow. A Water Mark.

I didn’t know what I expected, but I never thought anything in this world would function with a mechanism like that. Bearing his arm to me, and holding his gauntlet in his spare hand, he talked.

“Before Her Grace appointed me as her personal attendant, I was at a plateau with magic. I realised I did not truly understand anything, and the few pieces I did were rife with misconception. It was only with her guidance that I managed to break through and ascend to a level worthy of her acknowledgement.”

He opened his palm.

“Before there is paint, there needs to be an objective. An artist needs to know what elements they want to mix together, what kind of reality they intend to create on their canvas.”

The tattoos on his arm flared to life, glowing a deep blue. Then, in his outstretched hand—appeared a prism of the same colour.

…That again? What card is that?

“For the longest time, I believed spells to be the reference in this analogy. But it is actually the Mark. The Mark is the reference from which every mage draws their visualisations from.”

I repeated everything he was saying over and over in my head. Reference. Paint. Brushstroke.

Except nothing clicked. I was never good at art, but this seemed kind of farfetched, even in a fantasy world. There didn’t seem to be any logical link between the concepts he was trying to bring up aside from a roundabout analogy—after all, it felt really obvious that one component was missing in all of this.

“But I don’t have a Mark,” I said. “Isn’t… that the whole point? To try and get one?”

Soren closed his eyes.

Suddenly, it felt like the earth was rumbling—I wasn’t sure if that was real, or something I imagined from the sheer intensity of his focus. I could feel the weight of his aura, the depths of his power—the years of training to demonstrate what he was trying to show me.

Listen to me.

As his forearm tensed, so did the glowing veins on his arm—and slowly, ever so gradually, they changed. The light emanating from his body seemed to refract before my very eyes, travelling faster, attacking my brain with an alarming urgency. Notice it.

Notice me.

Before I knew it, I’d blinked, and everything had changed. His Mark was screaming a light blue, the colour of Air.

But it was still a Water Mark.

“No,” he said, eyes still closed. “The answer is imagination.”

He flicked his palm away from me, towards the empty expanse of night, far beyond the reaches of the blue glow that illuminated our camp. Then in a flash, a bolt of air fired off, and my ears exploded with the noise of a projectile faster than the speed of sound.

Wind Shear
1 Air Quanta
Spell
Burst Speed

Deal 1 damage to a target. Then if this spell resolves with a creature target, tap it and Interrupt.

He opened his eyes again. Everything had stopped glowing.

A Saint by technicality.

Lesson #2: Soren can multicast.

“What in the…”

“Imagination,” he repeated. “I believe that is the thing that separates the gods of legend and humans now. We are bound by our Marks, chained to mortal understanding of spells. But the heroes of old didn’t use to be this way. At least, not according to my lady.”

I believed him.

Very much so—I had no reason not to.

But there was a doubt welling up in my throat. The smell of electricity lingered in the air, a slight static, as if a circuit somewhere had overloaded and fused. I looked closer at his arm, and tiny specks of blue dust were present, floating around, occasionally sparking as if remnants of a shattered battery lingered. It was the indication of something wrong, no matter how subtle. Then memories returned to me, and doubt turned into confusion.

“I… I don’t know. You just… seemed… so much more powerful in the battle,” I mouthed off.

Soren let out a hollow laugh in response.

“Of course. Have you ever seen a blind painter?”

What?

He reached for his face, and in a shatter of navy blue, his mask was there. Without a word, he pointed at the horizon.

Boom.

There was no wind-up, no blueshifting of the light from Water to Air. The smell of a ruined experiment disappeared, and his magic fired off without warning into the night, the only hint of a challenge existing in a tiny flash of sky blue.

Boom.

And again.

Boom.

And again.

And again. Three.

Boom. Four.

He kept going. And going. And going and going and going. He never stopped. It was a military salute. I briefly worried that he would kill a bird.

My ears rang. It felt like my throat was closing. After an excessive number of bursts, he put his arm down, then turned to me. My mind was shaking too much to begin to try and understand what expression could possibly have existed under that helmet, what kind of monsters were present in this world.

“I was forcing it based on memory,” he said, voice dripping with distortion. “I need this visor to see. But with your eyes and a Codex, you should be able to cast with far greater precision. For instance…”

He conjured his sword out of thin air, intending to swing it as a further demonstration of his powers—

Galebrand
5 Air Quanta
Legendary Artifact

While this is on the battlefield, damage from all Air sources is doubled.

—but at the last moment, he stopped.

“...”

I get it already. You’re strong.

“Hm.”

Soren tossed the azure gauntlet in his spare hand at me. I caught it reflexively—it was suspiciously, futuristically devoid of mass. Despite how bulky it looked, it was lighter, and far less heavy than the gauntlets that I spawned into this world with. And deep within its source, I felt a sense of energy.

“Wear that on your dominant arm.”

I clenched my fists and nodded.

For some reason, I was angry—like I wanted to prove him wrong. But this was stupid, wasn’t it? He was telling me that I could do it. Why was I mad?

Wake up, Daisuke.

You didn’t always use to be this way.

I didn’t want to think. I just put the gauntlet on—at least, as much as I could, just throwing my hand into it and hoping it would do something. Miraculously, it whirred to life with mechanical clicks, hissing out puffs of gas as it compressed and attached to my arm. The thaumaturgical implement on its back, a circular ornament about the size of my palm glowed with a pale red as it moved on its own, humming along like a well manufactured machine.

Wait. Red?

And then—a jolt of electricity ran through my body.

“Ow! What the fuck?”

The smell of smoke quickly filled the air. I looked at the gauntlet, and it was… grey.

No… still blue?

No, it was definitely grey now. That was just a trick of the light, the backdrop of the spell Soren used to illuminate this “training session.” The massive gem on its back had also died out—no longer glowing, reduced to a passive shell. But one thing was for sure, it had been blue before I wore it.

“...”

Strange. Why isn’t he saying anything?

“Is this thing supposed to do—”

“What element is that?” He asked.

“Uh… what?”

He shattered his visor again. Then he peered at the gauntlet.

“I’m afraid I’ve never seen anything like this before. It… looks the same with and without my mask. What do your eyes see, Sir Primot?”

I winced. Sir Primot? Really? Talk about annoying.

As I did, the gem buzzed a slight red again.

And then.

Ah.

It hit me.

Am I stupid?

This whole time, have I been a fucking idiot?

A painting?

Painting with logic? A step by step process? A manual?

Painting like it’s a card game? Writing a story by identifying the best tropes to chain? Having a system?

What the fuck kind of message can you tell with that?

No, before that—what the fuck is art without emotion?

“What are you boys up to…?” asked a familiar voice. “I heard some loud sounds, and Maelle-sama told me to check, and…”

I turned to face her. Soft features, a sweet voice, eyes that could melt even the most calcified of hearts. Puffy cheeks. Hints that she had cried earlier. She was dressed simply in a cloth tunic meant for sleeping, and her hair—usually a bright pink, was now instead vaguely cerulean, and her head tilted to the side as if it would help her see better. A little bit of a klutz, yes, but that’s what made her cute. Also, I completely made up the “-sama” part—not important right now—I just didn’t want her to be sad anymore.

I snapped into action.

Has the god of this world just been punishing me this whole time for not being true to myself?

I mustered all the courage in my body. “Good timing, Assistant. Codex, now.”

She blinked at me. Soren regarded me with a stern expression. Actually, his expression was always stern, as if it had been set that way at birth and his facial muscles had atrophied ever since, but still. Sterner.

They spoke simultaneously. “...As… assistant?”

“Not now, genius. I’m getting to the good part.” Oh, how I always wished to use that quote unironically. Jinpachi Ego would be proud. “Now, Assistant. Book—and quickly.”

I snapped the fingers of my left hand. In my other, more covered appendage, the gauntlet’s gem grew with a shiny orange hue.

What am I feeling right now? I’m feeling…

Proud.

It resonated.

Sparks of energy gathered around my arm. I saw them arc. I heard them flicker. With every dance of electricity, jolts fired through my bones and seared my nerves—and I could tell something was very wrong, like this was inhuman, this was not something normal people were meant to feel and the cells in my body were agonising and channeling every last ounce of their ATP to scream at me and tell me to give up. But I didn’t care. I wouldn’t stop. Not now, not ever.

The gem’s hue turned even brighter, even deeper.

“Quickly!” I snapped.

“U-um… um… Okay!”

Annabelle obeyed, conjuring her book and placing it in my palm. Soren stepped back to watch the spectacle. I flipped through the pages of her bible, running through the possibilities of what spells I could cast in my head.

Don’t be an idiot. Just use your eyes.

Orange.

Gravity.

Doesn’t exist.

Did it matter if it existed or not? Those [Wind Shears] that Soren fired—had he fractured a card to form those magic circles? Clearly, he hadn’t referenced anything when he fired off his barrage.

He’d talked about imagination. Or drawing from memory. The whole point of his lesson was to teach me to do that, to wish upon the desires I truly wanted to see reflected in reality.

So… just do it?

I tossed the book behind me, and I pointed my gauntlet into the night.

This is the man I want to be.

Eventide Collapse
3 Gravity Quanta
Spell
Slow Speed

Draw a line on the screen with a predefined maximum length. Deal 3 damage to all creatures that this line intersects. Exile any creature destroyed this way.

I imagined that I was the strongest sorcerer in the world. Then a magic circle appeared.

Lesson #3: Believe in the reality of your art.

“Bang.”

An indescribable burst of energy erupted from my hand. An orb of pure mass—almost imaginary in its nature, swirling—ruptured outwards. The air around it seemed to warp violently, collapsing into its epicenter as if being sucked into a black hole. The sphere travelled and travelled, running along the path, absorbing everything in its wake—until abruptly, without warning, it disappeared into nothingness as if an arbitrary limit had been reached. All that remained was a thick line in the ground, the only proof that it had ever existed at all. One that would soon be washed away in the rain.

For now, I looked at it with pride.

I did that. This is my resolve.

Soren was the first one to speak. “...Quantum Mage,” he muttered under his breath.

Annabelle spoke after. “Pr… Primot, what was that?”

“Magic.”

As that word left my mouth, the smell of wrongness assaulted my nose again, and everything on the right side of my body went numb. My arm went weak, and I started clutching at my shoulder.

…But I didn’t care. I’d done it. I casted a spell.

“Anna… did you see… I fucking…”

I felt the cool touch of mud and grass on my face, and then I fell asleep.