Mary’s fireball flew towards him, and burst around his fist harmlessly.

  There was a shield of something, about three inches away from his outstretched fist, that kept the fire from hitting him, making it dissipate harmlessly in the morning air.

  “Woo hoo!” Mary shouted from atop the hill. “You did it!”

  “Again!” he shouted.

  “Give me a second!” she said. “It’s draining!”

  He supposed that would be another area of development for the both of them. He’d spent a bunch of time pouring his energy into his Gems as his primary mode of self-development, but she had to do that while also learning how to read properly. And yet it was imperative that they both keep at these basic exercises.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, an essayist in his previous life, had written on the necessity of both genius and drill. Genius was the brilliant creative spark that allowed for truly great transformations and innovation, but drill was the rote, tedious acts of doing and practicing and memorizing and assembling. The transformative manifestation of Genius came only after the skills and abilities had been developed and cultivated through drill.

  That had been his takeaway, at least. He hadn’t read the actual essay in a lifetime. It was entirely possible he’d jumbled it up with decades of later life observations, like how CEOs of innovative companies, like Jensen Huang of Nvidia, were often builders and engineers themselves.

  He shook his head to clear it. The words “Jensen Huang” or “Nvidia” or “computer chips” or “AI” meant nothing in this world, which was deeply and profoundly reliant on magic for a significant portion of its industry.

  “Are you feeling better yet?” he shouted up the hill.

  “Just… a few… more minutes…” Mary panted.

  He supposed she wasn’t as powerful as he was, as he walked up the hill to join her. She hadn’t practiced as hard or as smart as he had, if that made sense. He’d charged his Ruby to exhaustion, building up his magical reserves, while she’d also had to do the daily tasks of being a maid of the Granavale Household. Once she’d been freed of that daily burden, he’d demanded that she learn how to read.

  The wind picked up and blew fiercely as he reached her.

  “Just a bit more,” Mary said.

  Her long, black hair was frazzled, and she swayed on her feet. Archmund caught her as she stumbled forward just half an inch and lowered her to the ground.

  “You can rest if you want,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Can’t. Can’t let you pull so far ahead of me…”

  “Then practice more,” he said.

  Mastering the Quartz under a “live fire” situation would have to wait until he had partners able and willing to attack him for real. Briefly he considered asking his father to help or to hire a specialized magic tutor. His fierce independent streak resisted the idea, but he had to admit that maybe reaching out to an expert, now that Granavale County could afford the tuition fees, might be a worthwhile investment in himself.

  That was a matter for later. He held out his hand, and Mary grabbed it, pulling herself to her feet.

  She was still sweating, her cheeks were flushed, and her breath was ragged.

  “No. You keep resting,” Archmund said. “That’s an order.”

  She dropped down to the ground and pouted. “Fine. If you insist, young master.”

  “Be as sarcastic as you want. I can tell that’s an order you don’t actually have any issues with,” he said. “Give me the Ruby.”

  Wordlessly she passed it to him. There was no static jump between their fingers as she handed it over — when it wasn’t in use, it was an inert rock.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He turned to look down the hill.

  The wind had picked up, rolling the golden fields of grain of Granavale County. There were a few commoners out in the fields, just starting with the early harvest. Archmund didn’t recognize some of them. The Omnio Empire wasn’t strictly under a feudal system, where commoners were serfs legally restricted to parcels of land, and so bands of migrant workers often journeyed throughout the Empire chasing the harvest season for different crops.

  He hadn’t paid enough attention to the seasons in this world. He’d had other concerns.

  Yet now those concerns had snuck up on him and become, for lack of better words, unavoidable. He’d wanted to live a nice, quiet life under his own direction, yet out of the fear of extreme poverty that plagues medieval worlds, or even the fear of becoming an impoverished foreign noble like those that existed in Great Britain right around the end of World War One, he’d risked his life diving into an extremely dangerous Dungeon and through that gained the economic resources to start the revitalization of his home. He had, very unfortunately, made himself Mildly Important, and taken the responsibilities akin to that.

  He let his magic flow into the Octahedral Ruby, and a fireball formed at one of its eight points. He quenched it before it could grow larger than his fist.

  He wasn’t drained by that at all.

  “Nobles are just better at this, huh?” Mary said. She’d tied her hair back into a ponytail. Though her voice was more normal, her breathing was still heavy.

  He wanted to tell her this was the result of a hundred days of slavish practice. But he’d told her to do the same, and yet she hadn’t had the same results. Had she just not tried hard enough? If he asked that, it would have been an insult — yet maybe it was one that was deserved.

  He chastised himself. Sure, maybe she sucked at magic and wouldn’t be a great bodyguard, or maybe he was running into some issue with the magic system that wasn’t obvious, but she’d made an amazing amount of progress in learning how to read over the course of a week.

  “I don’t believe that,” he said, mostly for himself. “The idea that some people are just better from birth— I’m not sure it makes any sense.”

  “It’s true though,” Mary said. “My cousin, he’s a bit slow. We wanted him to man the counter like all the rest of us, but he always got distracted by the shapes of the coins or the knickknacks and wasn’t able to memorize all the tender. We taught him everything in the same way as the rest of us — me and my cousins, that is — and he just wasn’t able to pick it up.”

  He really didn’t want to armchair diagnose her adoptive brother, as tempted as he was to suggest that he wasn’t thinking slow so much as thinking differently.

  “And looking at you, Archie, with how good you do magic and how you survived going into a Dungeon? It’s hard not to believe that some people just are born better.”

  He resisted the urge to snap at her. She didn’t deserve that. It was practice. He was sure of it. It had to have been practice. Maybe this was his impostor syndrome working up again, but he had another reason to reject the idea of inborn differences:

  If inborn differences were the largest factor for power and success in this world, as the nobility liked to encourage, then he would never exceed his station in life. There’d be no chance of him rivaling the Princess Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio in power, despite how far he’d climbed so far.

  “Archie,” Mary said, her voice concerned.

  A world strictly defined by caste and bloodline could not be one with meaningful progression; such things struck him as nigh impossible. Entropy inevitably won out over order; such strong societal lines inevitably became suggestions.

  “Archie!” Mary said again.

  If such a world was inevitable, then noble families would be have sprawling, labyrinthine lines of descent, bloodlines tracked ruthlessly to eliminate any who might be a threat or to keep an eye on those who could be useful. Those with power had leverage over those who did not. If blood and power were absolute, then some counterbalance had to exist for any semblance of the rule of law to emerge — which it had.

  “Archmund,” Mary said, her voice rising.

  No, he rejected this ideology that society was governed by birth alone. And he would raise Mary up and make her as powerful a mage as himself if that was what it took to prove it.

  “Young master!” Mary shouted.

  But maybe he was in the wrong. Maybe his high-minded ideals of equality and equity, born from a world where vaccines existed and literacy was widespread and food was plentiful, legitimately weren’t compatible with his new circumstances. Maybe he was bearing the flag of meritocratic elitism to a world where such things were actually impossible, so he could justify his own achievements as a result of his hard work instead of the circumstances of his rebirth.

  Maybe he was a colonizer from another world.

  “SIR ARCHMUND GRANAVALE!” Mary shouted, her voice taking all the breath she had. Archmund whipped to face her, but then he did a double-take as the air suddenly felt lighter and cooler.

  In his spiraling thoughts, he’d unconsciously been feeding magic into the Octahedral Ruby. It had grown, first to the size of a golf ball, then a baseball, then a basketball. And then it had the size of one of those bouncy yoga balls that were used primarily for stretching exercises.

  But not for long; when Mary shouted his name, his concentration had broken, and he’d released the fireball.

  As he watched, it flew down the hill and impacted a patch of grass. The morning dew had quenched some of it, but the autumn grass was dry enough that the flames lingered and grew. The fire ate through the meadow grass, leaving an ever-expanding circle of burnt earth in its wake.

  Archmund swore.