Dinner passed much as lunch did, with boisterous laughter and swapping of stories. Mike was very sheepish as he told them about his old life, but they listened with interest as he described the job he used to hold.

  He was once again surprised to find out the familiarity some of the gladiators had with technology. Karl said his home city had a communication network much like the phone system Mike described. Haliard commented on some of the different styles of telecommunication he had seen, but he didn’t go in-depth.

  There was a faint sense of melancholia as he talked about the things in his past, even something as impersonal as long distance communication. Though Mike imagined he might be thinking of the people he communicated with.

  The joy cut off when the drone from the day before floated into the room. The faint whirring of its motors was loud in the silence its presence brought. The gem slung below glittered with another spell that flickered into being as it entered the room.

  “Michael Wilson is to follow this machine to his new training facility.” The illusion of Aric Blurington that sprang to life was every inch as haughty as the real one, somehow staring down its nose as the men even as it stared blankly into space. “Training will commence in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be back,” Mike told the rest as he rose. The illusion snapped out of existence and the drone floated backwards, heading back down the hallway. “What will you all be doing?”

  “When no one has a match, we review footage of other fighters and strategize.” Haliard gestured as he spoke. “You better hurry up, you don’t want that to leave you behind.”

  “Watch Bandit for me!” Mike shouted as he started to speed up.

  The drone was already turning down the hallway deeper into the mountain, causing Mike to have to run to catch up. The machine maintained a steady pace that was slightly faster than Mike’s walking speed but slower than his jogging speed, meaning he had to keep varying his pace to stick with it.

  Did he do this just to irritate me?

  They passed into the bustling servant hub of the room and the drone hooked to the right. Mike nodded to the servants he passed, trying to greet each of them, but they all avoided eye contact, keeping their eyes downcast as he passed. Eventually, he gave up and just moved silently behind the drone.

  Mike tried to commit the pathway to memory, but it was too much. There was one point where he swore they made five right turns in a row, each side roughly the same length, but they didn’t pass through the same area. The part that threw Mike the most was that they never seemed to be going up or down levels. The pathway was flat and regular, with the drone maintaining a constant height of six feet off the floor. He assumed there must be some magic at work and went back to following the drone.

  It led him through ten minutes of hallways. Mike passed a dozen rooms, from a washer room large enough to fit the cafeteria three times over to a massive barracks with beds stacked three high. One room he was interested in seemed to be an internal garden, complete with several stunted fruit trees. The glowing light enchantment there was different from the one in the hallway, more reminiscent of sunlight, and the tinkling of a waterfall caught his ear.

  The room that the drone stopped at was nothing special. Fifteen feet on each side, there was only a desk against one wall with chairs on opposite sides of it. The drone entered, hovering to one side. Mike went and sat at the chair, facing the desk.

  Five minutes passed in silence before Aric came sweeping in the doorway carrying a wooden box. Mike rose hurriedly, assuming that sitting while his slave master came in would be a bad move. Aric stormed to the desk and slammed the box on top, the sound loud in the open room. He dropped into the chair opposite Mike and stared at him.

  “Greetings, master?” Mike said questioningly.

  A few seconds of silence passed before Aric answered. “Greetings. Sit.”

  Mike dropped into the chair and waited patiently. Aric was studying him, looking him over, so Mike tried to return the favor as much as he could within the bounds of not giving away that he was a free man.

  The man was so young, barely more than a boy. The scraggly, patchwork beard he had failed to cover sunken cheeks marked by spots. Mike thought he couldn’t have been more than seventeen, if even that. His eyes were startlingly blue though, keen and intelligent. After a minute, he turned away from Mike, looking at the wall.

  “My father has placed certainly expectations on me.” A pause as Aric gathered his thoughts. “And those expectations involve you. I will train you in the magical arts, and trust Haliard and the others to teach you martial ones.”

  He turned back towards Mike and opened the box. He pulled out a cloth wrapped bundle and sat it before Mike, then unfolded it to reveal the cell phone Mike had carried across dimensions. The case was missing, but he reflexively reached out towards it. Aric snatched it back first.

  “Do you know how to power this device? I have seen the technomancers use something similar.”

  “Err, no master. I don’t have the… capability to do that.”

  “Hmm, fine. We will go with a grimoire that I understand better. If you perform well, I will contact the technomancers to repair it so you may use it again.” A pause. “If you perform well.”

  Aric placed it back in the box, watching Mike as he did. Thinking fast, Mike followed it as it went back into the box, trying to project a desire he didn’t feel. Aric smiled, thinking he had leverage beyond that of the Bind Person spell he believed Mike was trapped under. Mike didn’t care about the phone too much, but as long as Aric thought he did, Mike could use that. Even if he did manage to power the phone somehow, the only thing on there that he could use without a network was the music.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Next, he pulled out two sheets of paper and a surprisingly ordinary ballpoint pen. Pushing them across to Mike, he spoke. “You said you knew two spells. One for self-defense, and one for learning. Please draw them out on these sheets. If you need more paper, let me know, but I do not believe your spells will take more than that.”

  Mike reached out to grab the pen, but Aric placed his hand on it to stop him.

  “You do know how to write, correct? Your apprenticeship made it that far?”

  “Yes master,” Mike said, grabbing the pen after Aric withdrew his hand. He wasn’t sure what Aric was looking for, so he wrote IDENTIFY across one sheet and FORCE DART across the other. He put the pen down and waited.

  “That is it?” Aric said after several seconds of silence. Mike gathered it wasn’t rhetorical and nodded but quickly remembered he probably needed more.

  “Yes master. Those are the spells I know, written in the language I learned them in.”

  “Not one I am familiar with.” Aric picked up the Identify paper and examined it, turning it from all angles. “I cannot fathom it. I shall have to teach you how to write them out in our languages.”

  “Yes master.” Mike thought about it for a moment before deciding to try and manipulate the young wizard. “My master said I had a knack for languages and taught me that learning skill to grasp them more quickly. If I cast it on an example of writing, I can learn it.”

  “Oh, yes? That is an interesting ability. Are there any others you have?”

  “He said he saw talent for alchemy and enchantment in me, but I didn’t have time to learn them before…” Mike trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence. Aric didn’t notice his hesitation but just waved it away.

  “Alchemy and enchanting are both useful skills, though not common in a gladiator. I will have to see about testing you. Until I get those resources though, we shall learn.” Aric pulled out his own spell book, setting it down on the desk. It was a third as thick as his father’s, but just as ornate and decorated. He spun it until it faced Mike and opened the cover.

  The first page was occupied by what looked like a graph and the complex math equation describing it. Mike felt he grasped some of the meaning behind the curves and angles, but not enough to make it out.

  “This is the first spell we are going to learn. It is a simple Torch spell, focusing our mana and converting it to light. That is the basis of magic. Taking our mana and changing it.”

  He drew chalk out of the box and turned to the blank stone wall behind him. He started to sketch slowly, detailing some components of the drawing on the page. While he wasn’t looking, Mike stretched his hand out to touch the book and cast Identify.

  The pain was so intense that he went limp for a second, almost falling from the chair. His vision went white, and his ears started ringing. Mike gritted his teeth as he got his limbs back under control, pushing himself back upright in his desk.

  Behind all the new windows that had opened in his vision, he saw Aric turn towards and say something about what he was drawing. He indicated a few circles he had connected together, but Mike couldn’t hear him over the ringing. Aric paused, and Mike forced himself to speak.

  “Yes master.” He couldn’t hear himself, but it satisfied the young man who turned back to the wall. Mike closed the windows all at once after noting the first one.

  Torch Discovered! (25/100)

  Affinity Increases:

  None

  Mike regretted that he hadn’t gotten any Affinity increases from that spell, but there had been more behind it. Not as many as when he cast it on Eric’s massive spellbook, but he also didn’t pass out.

  Though it is a close thing, Mike thought to himself. He almost wished he would just end the pain. As he watched Aric draw, he did start to notice the pain fading in the background. The icon that showed the cool down of the spell seemed to match the pain. After it reached a third, the pain had faded enough that he could hear again. Aric was speaking about conversion rates and mana efficiency while he sketched on the wall.

  Studying the book in front of him, Mike understood more of it than he had before. Far more, in fact. What Aric was saying made sense to him on a level he didn’t understand. Mike smiled grimly, knowing that the pain was worthwhile.

  I got twenty-five percent of the spell this time. Was it my upgraded spell, my increased Intellect, Arcane Polyglot? There is so much I don’t know. He watched Aric sketching on the wall. And this one definitely can’t teach me what I have to know.

  “…and that defines our wavelength. Are you understanding this?” Aric turned to Mike. “You look stressed, is this too advanced for you?”

  “No master. May I rise?” At Aric’s nod, he walked up to the drawing on the board. “So, our mana flows from this portion…” He gestured to the left of the diagram, moving to the right. “…to here, where the shape our will gives it…” the portion that looked like a math equation. “…to out putting a light.”

  “Very roughly, yes,” Aric grudgingly agreed. “You do understand.”

  More than understanding just the current Torch spell, Mike started to understand how to write out the spells he knew. Identify would be more complex by far, enough that Mike thought it would need two pages if he mapped it out the same way.

  Pain faded as he started to pay attention to Aric. Once Mike had demonstrated that he was following along, Aric picked up the pace of his teaching and soon had the wall behind the desk covered in more symbols and patterns. The young man wasn’t warming up to Mike so much as getting into the rhythm of teaching, but both of them were soon more comfortable with each other.

  The cooldown on Identify was down to a tenth of what it was before when Mike realized he was enjoying the training. Aric was a better teacher than Mike had expected. He had a flexibility of thought that allowed him to explain things in multiple ways if one way wasn’t working and had a knack for telling when Mike was starting to get confused.

  After an hour, Mike rose and joined Aric at the board, sketching the symbols as the younger man checked his work. They weren’t a language, not really, but more of a pictographic lexicon. Aric had said there were thousands of symbols, with a college of wizards in the city dedicated to discovering more. Some showed more efficiency; some could carry more power than others that worked in the same place.

  When the cool down finally ended, Mike touched Aric’s spell book and cast it again. He had to lean against the desk as his vision went white, but he noticed the pain was reduced this time. It only took a few seconds for his vision to clear. He was able to stand before Aric noticed anything odd was happening.

  Twenty-five percent the first time. What did I get this time? Mike checked the icon for torch, which was a candle with rays coming off the wick.

  Torch

  Spell, 1 Mana Per Second Summons a circular ball of heatless flame beside your head.

  69/100

  Mike chalked the advancement up to the fact that he was learning about the inner workings of the spell. He checked a few others and saw that the larger gain of Torch was only a few percent on the spells he was taking from the spell book.

  Knowing that his training was having an effect on what he could absorb, he turned back to the board and started writing out spell symbols.