Excerpt: "Learning Curve? We Eat Those for Breakfast."
It took the average mage five years to master basic sigil casting.
It took Kael Arclight exactly three sleepless nights, two mana-burns, and one severely offended spellbook.
"It's not cheating if the rune matrix is open source," he told Mira, soldering a leyline conduit to a salvaged wand core. "I just added parallel processing."
She had no idea what that meant. The wand exploded ten seconds later. The next one worked perfectly.
Damian Voss didn't learn magic. He audited it like a hostile takeover.
He studied the way guards enchanted their boots for traction. The way spell scrolls activated when exposed to blood or sunlight. The subtle delay between a spoken incantation and its effect.
By the end of the week, he had created his own sigil script.
Not elegant. Not pretty. But terrifyingly efficient.
"You invented magical shorthand," Mira whispered, staring at his notes.
"I improved it," he corrected, calmly inscribing a barrier rune with a dagger and a teaspoon of monster blood.
Riven learned the only way he knew how: trial, error, and punching things until they stopped glowing.
He didn't care how the runes worked—just what they did.
Fire spell? Good for intimidation. Lightning bolt? Better for ambushes. Illusion ward? Could be used to fake a retreat, stab someone in the back, then walk away like a ghost.
By the time Mira caught him pouring mana into a bear trap, he just grinned.
"Enchanted pressure plate," he said. "Now it bites twice."
Magic didn't come easy to them.
But systems did. Pressure. Leverage. Control. In their world, they'd built empires.
In this one, they were just building the next one—using mana instead of stock options.
And this time?
They weren't bound by regulation.
Chapter Three: Ghost Protocol and Guild Problems
They didn't run.
They vanished—slipping into alley shadows, ducking beneath illusioned curtains, and cutting through a bakery that served invisibility scones on Tuesdays.
Within fifteen minutes, they were back at Mira's abandoned lab hideout, cloaked in silence and soot. The floating lanterns overhead dimmed automatically as they entered—Kael's handiwork.
Everyone was quiet at first.
Riven paced near the window, blade in hand, eyes scanning the rooftops like the fog might return. Kael sat on a half-repaired arcane bench, fiddling with a busted spell-lock orb. Damian stood at the worktable, slowly redrawing the sigil the Synod had used—once. Then again. This time faster.
And Mira?
She stared at her hands.
They had stopped glowing.
But something still buzzed under her skin—like a spark that had tasted fire and wanted more.
"Alright," Kael said finally. "New rule: no more accidentally summoning multi-dimensional anxiety demons."
"That thing wasn't supposed to show up," Mira said. "The Synod don't use that kind of projection. It was something else. I think it came through me."
Riven raised an eyebrow. "That part where you lit up like a divine toaster and vaporized it? That was neat."
"I didn't do it on purpose."
"Still neat."
Damian spoke next, his voice calm but low. "They're watching us now. Not just the city guard. Not just the Guild. We've tripped something older. Something… curious."
"Yay," Kael muttered. "We've attracted the attention of arcane cryptid Illuminati. This is going great."
Planning Table (and Mild Paranoia)
An hour later, they'd scrubbed the last of the Synod fog residue off their boots and convened around a crude planning board made from an old mirror, a stolen chalk wand, and one of Riven's leftover gauntlets pinned to it as a "threat marker."
"Next objective," Damian said. "Information. Infrastructure. Integration."
"Please," Kael added, "translate that from Corporate Overlord to Basic Adventurer."
Damian pointed at the map Mira had updated. "We need intel on the Arcane Guild. Their operations. Their vulnerabilities. Specifically: the spell registry, the leyline access records, and their encryption protocols on enchanted artifacts."
Mira blinked. "You want to hack the entire Guild?"
Riven leaned back in his chair. "Preferably before breakfast."
Kael cracked his knuckles. "If they control every legal channel of magic, we don't ask permission. We go straight for their backbone."
"And you think they just leave their secret scrolls lying around?" Mira asked.
"No," Damian replied. "But every bureaucracy has cracks. We find one. We widen it."
Mira pointed at a marked circle near the eastern district.
"There's a branch office," she said. "Not the main Guildhall, but it processes minor enchantment licenses and magical zoning violations. Security's lighter. It's where junior mages do internships, write citations, and cry in the breakroom."
Kael grinned. "So… a magical DMV."
"DMV?"
"Perfect," Riven said. "Nobody pays attention to the janitors in a DMV."
Damian nodded. "We'll need cover identities. Magical signatures. Passphrases. Mira, you'll forge credentials. Kael, craft signal dampeners. Riven and I will observe the routines. We move in two days."
"Why two?" Kael asked.
"Because that's how long Mira needs to recover from nearly shattering her soul in public," Damian said.
Mira opened her mouth to protest—then shut it. "...Fair."
Later that night, Kael stayed up fiddling with an unstable illusion crystal, muttering about "mana-sandboxing" and "anti-scrying subnetworks."
Damian meditated over a flame that hovered without fuel, eyes closed, body utterly still—but mind spinning at full velocity.
Riven slept with one eye open and both boots on, blade at the ready under his pillow.
And Mira?
Mira sat on the roof, watching the floating islands drift past the stars.
For the first time in her life, she wasn't the smartest, most rebellious person in the room.
But maybe… that was a good thing.
Because whatever these strangers were?
They weren't just survivors.
They were invaders—adaptable, unstoppable, and now? Officially on the Guild's radar.
Chapter Three: "The Guild Job" – Prep Montage
Day One – Planning, Posturing, and Questionable Alchemy
"Alright," Kael said, sketching glowing diagrams into the air with a stylus made from unicorn bone and industrial resentment. "I've mapped the energy signatures of the eastern Guild branch. Good news: their outer wards are from last era. Bad news: their inner vault uses password-encoded blood-sigil locks. We're talking biometric and arcane."
"So we fake the blood," Riven said, dead serious.
Mira choked on her tea. "That's… not how that works."
"Relax," Kael muttered, dragging a half-finished crystal bracelet across the table. "I've almost cracked the sub-ward interface. If we sync it with Mira's mana thread and give it a pseudo-Guild imprint, it might spoof the signature."
Mira blinked. "You made a magic Fitbit that commits identity fraud."
"I call it the Spoof Loop™."
Riven gave a thumbs-up. "Marketing sells itself."
Day Two – Disguises, Distractions, and Dangerous Pseudonyms
In the back room of Glamour & Grime, the elf tailor adjusted Riven's coat and sighed.
"You want to look like a junior enforcer, but also like someone not to mess with," he said, flicking a shoulder pad. "I'm thinking leather over silk. Intimidating, but chic."
Riven shrugged. "As long as I can stab someone in it, I'm good."
Kael emerged wearing thick enchanted glasses, a ridiculous plaid vest, and holding a clipboard enchanted with passive illusion spells.
"I am now 'Administrator Pell Quenforth,' Department of Wand Compliance."
Mira snorted. "You look like a tax auditor for potion licenses."
"Exactly. No one will ever want to talk to me."
Damian, meanwhile, wore a slate-grey robe marked with a forged Guild apprentice insignia and a subtle glamour to dull his presence. He looked... aggressively unmemorable.
"I've programmed my illusion to generate micro-twitches of anxiety in anyone who looks directly at me," he said. "People will avoid me out of instinct."
"Cool," Riven said. "You built social anxiety as a weapon."
"Efficient," Damian replied.
Training Montage Beats
Kael testing gadgets by flinging smoke bombs that turn into aggressive bees. "Note to self," he muttered, face swelling. "Fewer bees."
Riven coaching Mira in improvised close-quarters combat using a mop handle and a magically animated mannequin named Carl.
Damian quietly bribing a disgruntled junior Guild scribe for floor plans using a pouch of enchanted caffeine dust and a threat written entirely in runes.
That night, Mira found Kael on the roof, fiddling with an odd, humming device shaped like a gyroscope on caffeine.
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" she asked.
Kael shrugged. "My brain doesn't turn off unless I make it. So I tinker."
"What's that?"
"Prototype leyline tap. Might let us piggyback off Guild signal threads without tripping their wards."
"That's… actually brilliant."
Kael smiled faintly. "Back on Earth, I built satellites to escape Earth's noise. Here, I'm just trying to survive it."
Mira sat beside him. "You're not just surviving."
He paused. Looked at her.
"We're about to break into the most tightly controlled magical facility in the city," she added. "And you made a fake clipboard and a signal-thieving bracelet to do it."
Kael smirked. "Yeah. Okay. Maybe we're thriving a little."
Final Prep Beat
Downstairs, Damian placed the last forged scroll into a leather case.
He didn't say anything.
But on the chalkboard behind him, the plan was complete:
Phase One: Entry via maintenance passage (bribed custodian, allergic to dragon dander).
Phase Two: Misdirection enchantments to scramble scrying lenses.
Phase Three: Kael, Mira, and Damian extract enchantment records while Riven causes a "surprise inspection" distraction.
Phase Four: Leave no trace. Or witnesses.
The team gathered one last time, dressed, disguised, loaded with scrolls, gadgets, and backup plans.
Riven cracked his knuckles.
Kael flipped open his illusion clipboard.
Damian nodded.
Mira took a deep breath.
"Let's rob some wizards," she said.