Magic crashing back into the world and destroying so much may have set off an apocalypse reminiscent of the Bronze Age Collapse, but humans are communal and ingenuitive. It only took a generation before we started pulling ourselves back together, discovering the new laws of physics, and rebuilding technology. In this lecture, I will be going over the major contributions to the creation of the current political systems…

Political science lecture by Professor H.J. Farns at Slate University, 393 Modern-Era

-

My eyes almost popped out of my head. Vincent Angon had taken on an apprentice? Why hadn’t I heard about that? It should have been on the news!

Well, maybe not the news for everyone—plenty of people didn’t care about taming, in the same way I didn’t keep up with magiaball—but I’d thoroughly curated my personal news feeds to show me everything taming related. If nothing else, it should have come up on the taming forums I was on.

“I… I don’t think I can beat them if they’re good enough to attract your attention,” I said honestly. It did sting my pride a bit to admit, but I had to face reality.

Vince—I still wasn’t sure about calling him that, even if he had insisted—frowned for the first time since I’d met him. He shook his head at me.

“That’s not the right attitude to have. Yeah, there’s no shame in cutting your losses when you’re outclassed by a landslide, but you don’t even know her yet. Her primals are around your level, and this’ll be a one versus one, since you’ve only got one.”

That didn’t actually help my nerves nearly as much as he seemed to think it would.

One of the biggest reasons I’d sought out a Sharmond, as opposed to one of the far more common primals in the area, was because he would shine in the standard competitive two-versus-two format as a defensive and utility primal. I just hadn’t had the time or credits to go galavanting around, picking out the perfect companion for him.

Besides, even if her primals weren’t much stronger, the fact that she’d managed to catch the attention of a world-class tamer like Vincent Angon? She had to have been a born prodigy. I was snapped out of that line of thinking by Vince speaking.

“Well, I messaged her, and she’s on her way. I assume you’ve got Scales tucked away in a storage gem?”

“No, I don’t, actually,” I said. I was blushing with embarrassment again, and cursing my pale skin for making displays of shame so hard to hide. “Scales is waiting outside. Susan keeps some water bowls out there for pets, and he usually drinks some and takes a nap.”

I probably should have a storage gem already, but I’d been cheaping out, since even the lowest grade gems weren’t cheap, weren’t a subsidized commodity, and weren’t technically needed for any step of the process. They just helped.

“Really?” Vince asked, his bright red eyes sharpening their focus again. “No storage gem, but you still managed to tame a primal?”

“I studied the spell a lot and spent a lot of time with Scales to get the bond to hold,” I said. “I know it’s not quite as strong, but it still works fine.”

Vince picked up his satchel and dug around in it for a bit before tossing me a clear storage gem about the size of a tennis ball. It was cool to the touch, with a strange texture that I couldn’t really place. The closest thing I could think of was the time in history class when the teacher had passed around a plastic bottle from the Pre-Arrival era, though that wasn’t quite right either.

“I can’t accept this!” I said. “This had to cost, what, two hundred credits?”

“Nah, it’s not charity,” Vince said, waving his hand. “How about this: If you beat Laurel in a one-on-one battle, you can keep it as a sign-on bonus. If you lose, I’ll take it out of your paycheck. I still need a guide to the local area, after all.”

“Speaking of,” I said, seizing on the chance, and unwilling to argue entirely against my interests. “You meant to put seventy credits a day, right? Not seven hundred?”

“Hmm? No, I meant seven hundred. Is seventy a day even minimum wage?”

Vince squinted off in the middle distance, his glowing red eyes dimming slightly as he did the mental calculation.

“If we do ten hours a day, that’s five hours of overtime… and… hmm,” he muttered, then looked back up. “Dangerous jobs require at least double minimum wage… Then I added a hundred credits on top because I don’t want to be stingy… Yeah, that’s seven hundred.”

I traced along the math with him, and it seemed to check out. I just hadn’t really expected it. It wasn’t that people in the village would take advantage of others; it was just that small places like this tended to be cheaper, even for a good quality of life.

“Your primals could crush anything within a hundred miles,” I said, even though it would mean arguing for less pay. “I’m not sure I should technically qualify for hazard pay.”

“Sure. But with how little essence is in the air here, it would take forever for them to recover whatever strength they’d spent, even inside the gems. And that’s not going to protect us against natural threats like a sinkhole.”

I bit my lip, then nodded to him.

“Well. Thank you. That’s too much, but… thank you.”

“No problem,” Vince said. “Now come on. Laurel and her boyfriend are on their way.”

We stepped outside, and Scales let out a soft, excited bark at me.

“Hey, Scales,” I said, holding out the crystalline ball. “Look at what I got.”

The diamond-scaled primal leaned forward and began to sniff at the storage gem. He opened his mouth to try to bite it, like it was a toy, and I gently moved his head aside, letting him know that it wasn’t a toy.

Scales blinked at me, then tilted his head to the side slightly before flopping over onto his back to demand belly rubs. I sighed, but couldn’t help myself from laughing a bit as I scratched him.

While he was relaxed, I sent a small stream of my essence into the storage gem, where I could feel several functions woven together. There was the anima circuit that could be used to bond to a primal, as well as the complex essence core that could allow Scales’ ousia to physically merge with the orb—allowing him to recover any spent power faster—the proprietary tech that was the reason these gems cost so much.

I reached into my own essence. Essence was made up of three parts: anima, pneuma, and ousia. Or in a layman’s terms, magic, body, and life force.

Most normal things, like humans, cows, bugs, and so on, only had small pools of anima and pneuma, and were almost entirely made up of ousia. Ousia was the baseline of existence, the foundation on which all other power was built, and was deeply strange. When you leveled up, it represented the compacting of your natural ousia, which in turn made your pneuma and anima denser and more powerful.

Even almost five hundred years after the arrival of magic, the interactions between ousia and human biology were still hard to understand, and I was no biologist.

Where ousia was passive and beneficial, anima and pneuma were much more active.

Anima could be used for spellcrafting, matching the pattern of the anima to those found within the spiritual parts of the world in order to manipulate elements in specific ways, like being able to fly, breathe underwater, teleport to places you’d been recently, or grow plants faster.

Pneuma was the physical counterpart to anima’s magic. Running pneuma through your body transformed you, making you stronger, faster, and more perceptive. Most importantly, though, while your pneuma was active, anything that should harm you instead harmed the pneuma shell around your body, at least until the shell broke.

Though there wasn’t much need for people to become magians, awakening their essence and absorbing ambient power to form deep pools of anima and pneuma. Some people did anyway, of course. If someone were passionate about building things, they might decide to go into the construction of anima cores for flying vehicles. An athlete might become a magian in order to gather more pneuma, focusing on improving their physical abilities around the sport.

And tamers like me awakened our essences in order to bond with primals, like Scales. Nonsapient beings who had emerged with the return of magic, who spawned into existence already awakened, tied to an element, and with a natural predilection for specific spells and abilities.

The connection snapped into place. Yellow light sparked in the center of the gemstone before it began slowly expanding outwards. There was a small flash as the gem started glowing with the steady yellow color of my anima, and Scales vanished. A moment later, he reappeared, sneezing and chuffing. I scratched his head.

“Good boy!” I complimented him. His tongue lolled out happily at that, but the moment was broken by a sharp voice.

“Hey.”

I looked up to see a woman approaching us, presumably Vince’s apprentice. She was pretty, about my age, with neon green eyes marking her as awakened, and she had ochre skin, not as dark as Vince’s or Susan’s, but much darker than mine. Her black hair was cropped short, and she wore a floral sundress.

More importantly, she had a primal wrapped around her shoulder. It looked like a snake that had bark in place of scales and antlers branching off its head. I mentally crossed my fingers that it wasn’t a wood element primal, even though it looked like it was once, even as I scanned the creature with my augpad.

[Name: Unknown

Tamer: Laurel

Species: Serest

Element: Wood

Rarity: Epic

Level: Ten

Gift: Unknown

Spells: Unknown

Description: Serests are the first form of a land-based, horned, serpentine primal species that possesses high anima stores and access to several different utility spells, as well as strong offenses at higher levels. Click here for the full description.]

Curses. Its element would give it an innate advantage against Scales, since wood elemental effects tended to cut through water element ones. Unless… maybe the Serest didn’t have any offensive spells that used its own element yet?

That was a slim chance, but it was possible. The Serest was only level ten, after all, and the description suggested they didn’t come into their offensive power until later on in their development.

I thought through my options as quickly as I could. Scales’ pneuma was largely focused on its shell, giving him a strong defense. If the Serest could cut through it, I would be finished, but if I could outlast its hits while hitting back… Something that small didn’t seem like it would have much pneuma for defense. It would mostly be speed, if I had to guess.

Even though I knew Scales’ powers like the back of my hand, I was getting nervous, and I couldn’t help but pull up his own info on my augpad, just to make sure Scales hadn’t suddenly lost half his essence or something. That wasn’t possible—I was just paranoid.

Name: Scales

Tamer: Aiden Scipio

Species: Sharmond

Element: Water

Rarity: Rare

Level: Eleven

Gift: Water spells are stronger when under duress.

Spells:

Pneuma Bite (Null)

Boost Scales (Null)

Anima Bubble (Arcane)

Empty

Description: Sharmonds are the first form of an amphibious primal species that bear some resemblance to dogs and sharks. They have powerful defenses that allow them to resist opposing anima and pneuma. Click here for the full description.

I took a breath to steady myself. Laurel, who was standing across from me, raised her eyebrow, looking both annoyed and kind of amused at the same time.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve just never actually battled another tamer before.”

Why had I gone and said that? I was so stupid.

Vince clapped me on the shoulder.

“You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it! Shame you don’t have a second primal, so this could be registered and all that, but what can you do? Take a breath.”

I did as he said, and Vince nodded.

“Alright then. Three…”

I joined my essence with Scales’ own, and he began channeling his power, unleashing his battle form. Magic shimmered in the air around him as he grew to the size of a large dog, his teeth sharper, his scaled hide thicker.

“Two…”

Across from me, the green-haired girl’s primal leapt from her arm, assuming a battle form similar to itself, but with larger fangs and bigger, sharper antlers. Since both the Serest and Scales were relatively low-leveled, their pneuma-empowered battle forms didn’t look all that different from how they looked normally, but it was still enough to be noticeable.

“One…”

I let my augpad slip back into my pocket, focusing on the battle before me. Even though I wasn’t technically a registered member, I was still battling in front of a Regent. I needed to give this everything I had.

“Go!” Vince shouted.