There was a vote on which school should Dash pick. Patreons had only 20h to pick and I suspect they somehow coordinated :)“Some spells scale with power. Some scale with control. The interesting ones scale with what you know.”— Aurelia Academy, Advanced Magical TheoryI stared at the three options glowing softly in my workshop’s light.Attack magic.The words practically vibrated with promise, invoking images of Alice wreathed in flame, of the pyromantic display she’d put on during the arcade simulation, bolts of compressed fire that turned armored targets into slag.That had been a game, sure, but the abilities were modeled on real combat magic, and the memory of watching her work, the sheer volume of destruction she’d channeled through those gestures, still lived somewhere in my hindbrain where the monkey neurons handled awe and envy.I wanted that.Some part of me wanted that badly, the part that had spent months in mining tunnels with trash gear while classmates who’d manifested properly threw around abilities that rewrote the rules of physics.Attack magic would put me in that category.Would give me something flashy, something that announced I belong here in a language that couldn’t be misunderstood.But.I already had a way to attack.The coilgun sat on my workbench. Engineering the projectile was easier than engineering the magic, and I understood the physics of electromagnetic acceleration in a way I absolutely did not understand the physics of throwing fire from my hands.Attack magic was cool……but cool wasn’t the same as necessary, and the gap between what I wanted and what I needed had been narrowing all week in ways that (...)