“This is a big risk,” Raehel said.

  Archmund stood in the gardens of Granavale Manor. They had one day off from the final preparations for the Harvest Festival, and he needed to test his final touch.

  Gemstone Rapiers were id out on a sheet on the wn, each catching the sunlight and glittering nobly like gold.

  “What is?” he said.

  “You have your Ruby of Energy, right. But you also have your Ruby of Fire, your Quartz of Barrier, and your Gemstone Sword. Now on top of that you want to add a Gemstone Rapier?”

  “What, exactly, is the risk?” he said.

  “Look, no offense, but you’re not like me,” Raehel said. “I highly doubt you can support so much Gemgear so quickly. It’s only been what, a year since you started climbing the Crystal Tower?”

  Climbing the Crystal Tower. He supposed it was a rather elegant metaphor.

  “Six months.”

  “Six months! Okay, maybe you are a bit like me. But not enough.”

  Frankly, Archmund had started to have it with Raehel’s attitude. Sure, she’d been a great teacher and he’d learned a lot, but this was exactly why he hadn’t wanted to be taught by a genius. They were snooty and arrogant and failed to consider the limitations of their own knowledge.

  “Right, and all geniuses like you rely on shooting tiny embers and raindrops and little pebbles as your primary attacks,” he said, sarcastically.

  It wasn’t an actual indictment of her abilities by any means. He wasn’t stupid. Mary had told him everything. She had combined her powers to create an incredibly lethal nce of superheated rock. The way she used her powers reminded him of some silly little video games he’d pyed in his past life, Doodle God or Little Alchemy, where you combined basic elements together to make things like “magma” or “cy” and work your way up to abstractions like “life” or “death”.

  “Shows what you know about magic. Besides, I saw how you got humbled by your swordsmaster,” she said. “Jumping around like a rabid baboon, swinging your sword like you actually wanted to kill him, and then hitting his neck head on and utterly failing to leave a scratch.”

  “You saw that? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I wasn’t going to interrupt a fight involving someone hopped-up on Gemfury,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Had to hold Mary back too. You would have cut her down, the way you were letting the power take a hold of you.”

  “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  “These are dueling swords, Granavale. Rapiers. They barely rank when it comes to actual danger.”

  “Oh.”

  Briefly, he wondered if this whole pn was doomed to failure because he’d fundamentally misunderstood the premise.

  “But it’s a hell of a lot better than what most noble houses have,” Raehel said, her voice suffused with forced cheerfulness. “I just don’t get why you want to try it yourself. When I was training, I got real good with all of my Gems before adding another one to my soul-circuit.”

  “What, you’re telling me just touching a Gem once will drain my soul of magic even when I’m not using it?”

  “It’s not entirely unheard of!”

  The scientists of Flow State called one of the impediments to entering it “allostatic load”, which was a fancy word for tasks that you hadn’t done yet, so they distracted you from the important things that you wanted to get into flow state on. This was just like that.

  “And that’s why you’re here,” Archmund said. “So you can tell me if I’m doing things wrong.”

  Raehel harumffed at that. “I’m not a medical doctor, you know.”

  Yet regardless she was the only person he knew who had a natural sense for the flow of magic, an intuition for the tides of Numen through human souls and bodies. He had the advantage of his Gemstone tablet and the ability to peer into the System directly; she did not, but could almost match his abilities.

  “I’m not going to give people who I want to personally defend me magical weapons that could turn them into mindless berserkers at any moment,” Archmund said. Ignoring Raehel’s st scrambled protests, he picked up one of Gemstone Rapiers — they were all identical, anyways, and, as always, dumped the whole of his magic into it.

  “It’s like you never learned about moderation,” Raehel said, wincing.

  As his magic flowed through the rapier and back into him, he felt foreign muscle memories twitch, urging him to move his body and dance with his bde. He gave a few experimental pokes at the air before him, his feet adopting a dueling stance.

  He nodded to Raehel.

  Begrudgingly, she nodded back.

  As they’d pnned.

  She drew out her neckce of Gems, and they orbited above her head like a halo, coruscating in rainbow colors with the light of her magic.

  Clumps of dirt rose from the flowerbeds. Raehel pelted Archmund with them.

  He held his rapier before him. A chunk of dirt shot towards his face; he flourished his rapier and blocked it. The dirt met the Gemstone Rapier’s gleaming bde and lost all momentum, falling onto the wn.

  But the barrage didn’t stop. It was supremely annoying, yet completely conquerable. He twisted his wrist gracefully, catching and blocking each speck of dirt, all of which fell to the ground impotently.

  Raehel’s primary attack was like a DDOS, a distributed denial of service attack, in which computers were bombarded with so many malicious requests for information that they became unable to serve regur useful information. If he was focused on keeping his clothes unsullied, he was unable to take down the attacker. This was just like that.

  Odd thought detected. ‘Keeping his clothes unsullied.’

  Raehel changed it up, as they’d discussed. She let the flowerbeds rest (he would have to apologize to the gardener ter). Her sapphire gleamed brighter than all the other gems, turning far bluer than the sky.

  Globs of water condensed, drawn from the ambient moisture of the air by Raehel’s power. She flicked her wrist, her purple robes rippling in the air, and the water pelted Archmund.

  This assault was no more difficult to deflect than the st. The water shot at him with the force of a cataract. Simply blocking with his bde wasn’t enough — he twisted his wrist with a flourish whenever his bde met a droplet, sending it curving and flying beneath him. The pnts would be getting a good watering today.

  This, as far as he was aware, was outside of the usual ws of physics. Humans usually weren’t able to deflect water around them by flicking their wrists. He’d have to check his Skills and his Stats ter.

  Ugh. Having to deal with peasants. Having to dirty his hands with them. It was lucky this was just a training exercise, or else he’d have to dirty his bde with their filthy blood.

  He was reasonably sure that was also an odd thought that he didn’t usually have. Then again, he had been raised as a very spoiled noble boy.

  He wondered if Raehel was in danger from him.

  Probably not. There was little killing intent in this Gemstone Rapier, only contempt. He could deal with lip from those of noble birth — that was simply part of the deal of fraternizing with the upper css. And even a noble bastard’s daughter, which she’d implied she was, had enough noble blood to make it justifiable.

  Another obviously foreign train of thought. He hoped.

  “Good Skill!” Raehel shouted.

  “I haven’t Attuned this one, though?” Archmund said back.

  Raehel shrugged. “Gemgear has some passive Skills. Stuff that you can tap into by just feeding it any magic at all. Maybe this is one of those. Or you just learned real fast?”

  She actually sounded somewhat impressed. He really hoped people would stop underestimating him.

  “We good to keep going, or are you satisfied?” Raehel asked.

  “Air next,” Archmund said.

  Raehel’s octahedral Topaz glowed a pale yellow, and the winds gathered around her. She closed her eyes, and lightly pantomimed a punch.

  Archmund couldn’t see a thing, and he felt even less. He nervously jittered the Gemstone Rapier in front of him.

  “Have you started?”

  Raehel opened her eyes and looked at him with disbelief. “Yes. Come on.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she gestured at the garden around them wildly, fpping her hands and gesticuting like a shocked mongoose.

  He looked behind him.

  He winced.

  The gardener really wouldn’t be happy with them. Though the damage was contained to a thin and narrow strip behind him, that strip looked like the path left by a tornado. Leaves stripped off branches, branches torn off stems, stems torn from roots.

  “I’m gd I’m rich,” was all he could muster. Was that a foreign thought or was it one of his usual?

  “I’m also gd you’re rich,” Raehel said.

  “So,” he said, brandishing the bde. “What do you make of it?”

  “One st test, and then we’ll talk it through,” Raehel said.

  Raehel’s Ruby Tetrahedron gleamed with the light of the afternoon sun, and a flock of fiery motes, like hummingbirds set abze, flickered to life around her.

  Archmund gulped.

  Raehel thrust her hand forward, and the fires rushed towards him.