Our Failures

Chapter 4: The Tests

I stood in a triangle with Kasan and Natalie, although Natalie had stopped participating a while ago. It was exam day nearly half a year since my flare and I was more than confident I would pass. I was passing around three one-hundred pound balls with Kase, it was a little tiring but not enough to make me stop. Although I wasn't having major trouble with it Kase was using nearly no effort at all, his magic easily grasping the balls and passing them along.

We heard Natalie's name called from the room door where an illusion specialist was waiting to test her illusion spells, which were a massive downgrade from her atomic and healing magic. Then after nearly ten more minutes of waiting, I was called for my general atomics trial, something I had been looking forward to.

I was dragged to a courtyard sized room where a log was sitting in the middle. The test was supposed to test the speed in which you could cause the whole log to burn. Then they would get a second log and test how quickly you could drain the energy from the fire. The fastest was done by a man named Blayze with a time of thirty seconds to do both. He was considered the best Atomic Archmage ever even if he had a horrible lisp.

Once they gave me the go-to start I focused on my magic quickly grabbing hold of some atoms before filling them with magic, their speed increasing until finally, the log started crackling and then burst in flames. I increased the magic still, filling as each atom greedily sucked up the energy until the log was nothing more than ash, all the original atoms changed.

A second log floated over to me and set down before near-instantly lighting on fire. The primary difference between putting out a fire and starting one is how you use your magic. In starting a fire you excite the atoms in whatever you want to burn but when putting one out you have to remove a source of its power. The log is too large to casually teleport and we still need it for proof of success so the next is magic but no one is feeding it magically so lastly we take oxygen from it, which is easy. However, that doesn't show mastery of energy so instead, we surround the atoms in a vice of magic and suffocate it that way. Which is exactly what I did.

"Your time is Three minutes and forty-nine seconds, good job kid," He handed me a slip of paper with my name, the date, and my time as well as a stamp. "Take this to the next room over for your healing exam."

I nodded before swiftly walking away, reminding myself that skipping away was unprofessional. Mere moments later I found myself sitting on a bench in front of the exam room. I started thinking back on what led to this moment, the hardships I overcame. I was now one of the more athletic kids in school thanks to the training Sarapeth put me through. Evidently, you need a physical side for your magic to be strongest and that's exactly what I got. There was one week that I ran away, went home and refused to go back. In the end, it was my mom who convinced me to go back, because her son wouldn't quit, not like that.

Then she began teaching me better ways to use psychokinesis, ways to increase its speed without losing accuracy. Two weeks ago I became the second strongest magic user in the school behind Kasan, and it was nice because evidently, Kase was joining the military as well. He would be a rear illusionist, or at least that's what Sarapeth said, then again she said that Kasan was likely to be automatically put on mage level with this test.

I was sent on a few 'mission', although they can't really be called that. Every time I was sent out it was to uphold 'peace' while a bunch of pissy Merushians cried that they were unjustly degraded. It wasn't our fault they didn't have magic and yet they took it out on us. It was on the third mission that I was given a warning because I had used my magic to forcefully calm a protester, as though because they didn't like magic I shouldn't be able to use it. I had nearly gotten thrown out of the military camp for insubordination but thankfully Sarapeth was able to calm them.