Jack Wilder: Sorcerer's Rising

The Griffin

Chapter 10

The rest of the meeting with Jack and the government officials who were all clearly allies to his family went smoothly.  He learned a lot over the course of the day and clearly knew his near perfect memory would be put to the test.  He was even warned of the not so good people in the government that were close to being painted as the dark families in their society.  What concerned Jack was that some of these families held very places in the magical world.  Almost as high as him, the key word being almost as Jack would have the first and senior vote to none.  As a direct descendant of Arthur Pendragon the British representatives especially were likely to hold him in a very high regard.

Samuel and Jack had even discussed the MUT, or the Magical Underground Training.  Sammy had been in the program for a year and Tatiana had been in it for three.  However the place was clearly divided in two, Warrior and Intelligence. Samuel was obviously the warrior division while Tatiana was leaning towards an intelligence department.

To get into the underground that was literally under US soil you had to be at a certain level of magic. While that level was rather low, not everyone could enter the underground and sometimes people aren't able to enter it until they gain a certain control over their power.  Your magic also grows the older you become, but eventually it the power will interfere with your health in order to keep you alive, there for taxing your normal abilities. Jack was made aware that the oldest member of their society would be turning two hundred and thirteen next month.  However, due to the number of wars fought, and the number of blood feuds sought, the average age of a magical individual is in their early one hundreds.  To Jack's immense displeasure it was revealed the average age of a Wilder in the pass four centuries is only sixty five.

In the underground he would be taught magical and mental combat, a way to duel with your mind, which is sometimes the alternative to blood feuds.  Jack at first had extreme doubts until he and Samuel sat down and tried this form of mental combat.  To say that Jack ended the night with a headache would be a massive understatement.  When Jack later described it he said it was like running through a maze in Samuel's mind.  He accessed some memories, which was supposedly really good for a first timer, but on the receiving end of things Samuel claimed he just bulldozed into this giant garage and started destroying things, revealing things and memories Jack was not so fond of.  He later told Jack that you have to build mental defenses in order to defeat your adversaries and that it was a potentially fatal type of combat. Jack wasn't all that great at it, but according to the others he was a natural at defending.  Most people apparently have a wide open field and its really easy to tear apart someone’s mind.  The fact that he already had a building in it was great.

On the physical side of it, they taught basic incantations, tossing people aside, and lifting objects, in a nut shell straining your magical muscles until they were stronger.  Samuel told Jack that the Lionheart heir Patrick could move cars if put under adrenaline inducing situations.  He was the strongest magically amongst them; however Samuel always tried his best to keep up with him, though he admitted being made petty in comparison.  Patrick being a year ahead of the two of them though had more experience and chances to expand the muscle.  Patrick was also now on the USDA squad, so he helped strengthen the ties of the druids and keep control of the crazier factions of warring druids and apparently other things such as wraiths, demonic creatures, and necromancers of all kinds.  Jack couldn't help but feel he was being dragged into a brewing war.

That wasn't the only discouraging thing he learned on his now infamous eighteenth birthday, he also learned that as far as the light side war front his family always lead the charge.  That wasn't the discouraging fact as his father raised him to be a leader and a warrior; the real problem was that he was easily enemy number one, which made every person he cared about on the hit list of the dark factions.