“So you woke up this morning in your room?”

“Yes. One second I was on the docks of Menocht, the next I’m laying in my bed.”

“You say...that you were in the time loop for a few years. Correct?”

I nod.

“...And after only a few years, you were able to fight off against the entire armed city of Menocht?”

“Look,” I say. “Technically, yes: But it was never enough to stop the plague, and in the end everyone always died. But that’s besides the point. In a world without consequences, decemancy is the most powerful kind of Art there is.”

Her lips press into a line. “How many creatures do you think you’ve killed over the course of your time in the loop, to further your practice?”

I stare at her. There were entire cycles of time where I razed the city of Menocht almost to the ground. Then there were the cycles when I killed all the neighboring cities in an attempt to bring the situation under control with an army of undead...then there was the time when I flew all the way to the capital of Illuet province to request an audience with the High Counselor. The loop-controllers hadn’t liked that plan one bit, the loop promptly restarting as soon as I entered the High Counselor’s chambers.

“Not sure,” I say. “The number’s probably too high to count, honestly.”

“You must have some kind of estimate.”

I give her a hard look. “I’ve killed in excess of ten million people, conservatively.”

She gives me a blank stare. “People?”

I snort. “Yes, people. They always came back in the next loop, so I saw nothing wrong in killing them.”

She inclines her head, looking as though she’s trying to decide what to say next. “I understand you. Have you ever had someone measure your affinity in the loop?”

“No.”

“Want me to measure it now, in the office?”

I frown. “You can do that?”

“I have a potentioreader in the closet I can bring out.”

“The result would be considered as part of the life-death oath, right?”

“It counts, don’t worry,” she assures me.

I look at the ceiling. To be honest, I’m kind of curious. I never worried too much about my power while in the loop. After awakening, I simply tried to do my best and didn’t dwell on what kind of status and opportunities my raw affinity percentage would give me. But now that I’m back in the real world, and I need to start planning for the future, figuring out where my affinity stands is important.

“Sure, why not.”

She brings the potentioreader out and places it on the desk. It’s a black sphere the size of a skull resting on a small three-legged metal stand.

“What do I do with it?” I ask. The last time I was read by a potentioreader, I was too young to remember.

She grabs the ball in her hands. “Just hold it like this. It’ll change color.” Even as she speaks, the ball turns a muted blue color.

“Fine, hand it over.” Soon, it's warming the space between my fingers. I expected it to be cold, to suck something out of me, but instead, it feels like the sphere is churning the energy up within my chest like a blender.

I give Jasmine an uneasy glance. “How do we know when it’s done?”

“When it stops changing color.”

Okay then. Its surface is red and swirly, almost like a red-tinted ocean swell.

“I use the colors to measure potential by inputting them into an algorithm on my glosscomp,” Jasmine says, breaking the silence.

“Interesting.”

“Aren’t you at least a little excited to see what the results are?” she teases.

I shrug. “Excited or not...”

“...It’s the Dark Art,” she finishes. “Decemancy.”

“...Right.”

“It still has its uses, even if it’s carefully restricted.”

“In wars, maybe,” I murmur. Now that my actions have consequences again, I can’t see myself using decemancy for any notable purpose besides flying around or creating soul gems. What use would I have for animating corpses or killing people?

Even if I want to get to the bottom of the dilation loop and who trapped me inside it, I’ve decided not to go about finding the truth in a violent matter. At the end of the day, I left the time loop without having aged a day and obtaining a powerful affinity. If anything, I should technically be...Thankful was the wrong word, but I didn’t have a better one.

“I can see that you’re skeptical of your own affinity’s use,” she observes.

“Can you now? It’s not that I'm unaware of the utility of decemancy. Rather, I’m also resigned to the sweeping limitations on the affinity’s expression.”

“Even this school has a track of study in pursuit of the Dark Art. It’s small, but it exists.”

I think back to Jeremy and our conversation. The school where he worked employed a single decemancer.

“How many students are enrolled in the decemancy track?” I ask.

“I can check while we wait for the potentioreader to calm down,” Jasmine offers.

“Sure.”

“Four students are studying decemancy. All of them are also pursuing studies in another affinity.”

She sits back down on the couch. “It’s really still going?” she murmurs, giving me an appraising look. “Did you really make a bone construct?”

“Wasn’t that difficult,” I say. “The reagents are really flexible. Anyone with any affinity for the Dark Art could make one given two soul gems, enough time, and sufficient animal bones.”

“Oh, really?”

“You can use human bones, whale bones, dog bones, hell you can even use fish bones.” You’d just need a lot of fish bones, but they’re not exactly in short supply. “Aside from that, you need two soul gems and a flight focus. The latter you can get from any bird bigger than a sparrow.”

“It does seem suspiciously easy when put that way,” Jasmine admits. “For some reason, I bet there’s a catch.”

“Well, I can’t think of any.”

She folds her arms and leans back into the chair. “How did you get the bones to align properly?”

“That’s the job of the flight focus,” I reply. “The skull falls into place around it, then you keep adding links to the back of the skull to form the backbone. The ribs are simple and the backbone just repeats itself.” The wyrm only has those three components. If anyone has any experience in decemancy at all, they’d be able to form a composite skull and rib cage with their eyes closed.

“Why don’t more decemancers exist, then? If it’s that easy, we’d see more bone constructs flying the skies, I guarantee it.”

“...”

“I’m just pointing out...your affinity test is taking way too long. I’d say that you aren’t being fair to others pursuing the Dark Art.”

“Are you saying...that I’m not being fair to people who had actual teachers and reagents laid out for them on wood tables?”

“How did you learn the Dark Art, Ian?”

—

Jasmine

The affinity test had gone on for five minutes now, the longest to which she’d ever borne witness.

He’s got some power, alright. With the kind of power she suspected in his possession, she didn’t think his affinity itself mattered: decemancer or not, high-affinity practitioners were all highly sought-after. But his high affinity made one thing more evident: Ian was telling the truth about the dilation loop. There was no way anyone could mask such a high level of affinity for a week, let alone years. The only way Academia Hector would have Ian Dunai registered as a regular is if he entered as one.

I still find it hard to believe that such a large affinity lay dormant, that someone noticed it and employed a dilation loop to crack it open...and that this all transpired without Ian having any recollection of entering the dilation loop in the first place.

She recognized that the situation was already beyond her.

“How did you learn the dark Art, Ian?”

He gave her a level look. “On the ship. It’s a long story. Honestly, I’ve already been here for a while...it’s probably easier to talk about it next time we meet.”

She nodded. “Fine with me.” There was silence for a moment. Jasmine observed that he seemed oddly comfortable with silence that others might consider awkward.

“Ian,” Jasmine began, “did you ever spend long periods of time alone in the loop?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Why?”

“Why were you alone?”

He gave her a confused look. “There wasn’t anybody to talk to.”

“Didn’t you have the people on the ship? Or in Menocht?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “The people on the ship died whenever I tried to help them, so I stopped interacting with them early on.”

Aside from in the last time loop iteration, Jasmine noted, when he talked to one individual on the ship and brought him with. I’ll ask him about that later. “What about in Menocht?”

“Whenever I arrived there, everyone was insane.”

Jasmine still didn’t know quite what to make of Ian’s insistence that the people of Menocht went insane after being infected by some kind of contagion.

“What about nearby towns and villages?”

“I didn’t see the point in reaching out to them. I wasn’t lonely,” he explained. “I didn’t like talking to people who weren’t real. Besides, I’m used to being alone. I like being alone.”

“Did the time loop feel like a game to you?”

Ian closed his eyes and sighed. “Sometimes it felt exactly like a game. Other times...”

Just then, the potentioreader stopped changing color. Jasmine walked over, bringing her sensor bar over to read the results and convert them into a hexadecimal code.

“It’s red,” Ian said simply.

“We’ve known that since the beginning,” Jasmine retorted. The sphere had turned rust red almost instantly, and certainly wasn’t going to randomly change to blue halfway through.

He looked at Jasmine as though she’d completely missed the point.

—

Does she really not see what I mean when I say that the sphere is red?

It isn’t red like a flame, or roses. It’s so red that the color burns my retinas. It’s pure, unadulterated, red.

“Explain to me what you mean,” she says.

“It’s hideous,” I say, shuddering. “It’s unnatural. Nothing is this red.”

“Hideous?” she replies. “I’m not seeing it.”

I take in a deep breath, then exhale. “You see this?” I say, holding out my palm. The pink-red energy of the Art dances across my palm like the cross between lightning and fire. “This red is the color of the setting sun.” I point to her desk. “It’s natural.” I now point to the sphere, which I’ve since placed back on the pedestal. “This red is fake.”

She’s still looking at my hand when I point to the sphere.

“Sorry, I’m still waiting for your results to load,” she mutters. She typed in the hexadecimal output code from the sensor bar thirty seconds ago. Considering the distributed network speed on campus, I’m surprised the results are still loading.

“Ah, they just finished,” she says. “Here, you look at them first.” She disconnects her glosspad from the glosscomp hub and hands it over.

Am I nervous? I breathe in and out. This doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like I’m a kid, getting the potentioreader test to decide which path my life is going to follow. I already know what the results will be. Or at least I can guess.

Results:

Color: Red II

Type

Affinity (± 0.10%)

Light

0.50%

Dark

1.01%

Life

3.01%

Dead

99.91%

Mountain

1.20%

Cloud

1.20%

Sun

0.01%

Moon

0.00%

Beginning

7.79%

End

8.00%

Regret

12.23%

Remorse

12.67%

Any affinity less than 20% is considered too low to even consider pursuing. Before, none of my affinities exceeded that threshold.

I look up at Jasmine and shrug. “My Death affinity is quite high. Who knew.”

—

Jasmine

‘Quite high.’

What a joke. Over 99% affinity? 100% affinity within the margin of error?

Jasmine’s thoughts raced, her heart starting to pound. That someone placed him in a time loop to unlock his potential is more and more likely. But who? More likely, what organization would gain from the creation of such a powerful practitioner of the Dark Art?

It seemed that she’d managed to stumble on something far bigger than she knew. Peak practitioners were strong enough to level cities, their influence enough to start or end wars. People in power didn’t simply let weapons of mass destruction waltz around freely. No: as soon as he was discovered, Jasmine knew that his life would no longer be his own. He’d be bound, restricted, treated like a tool rather than a person.

“Ian,” she said sternly. “You cannot tell anyone your affinity for Death is over 99%.”

“Right. Wasn’t planning to.”

“What I’m going to do is write up a report. With your help, of course.”

“About what?”

“About how you’ve recently undergone a traumatic incident and unlocked the Death affinity.”

He looked up with a confused expression on his face. “That could happen?”

“It could, and it does, rarely. Usually one’s affinity might increase by a few percentage points. According to my records...” she pulled them up on her glosspad. “Your affinity for Death was 17.38% before you woke this morning. It’s within the realm of possibility that it might have been bumped up to 25, or 30% affinity.”

The corners of his mouth curved slightly downward. “You’re going to forge a potentioreader result for me?”

“Yes.”

—

I don’t think Jasmine ever looked more severe than she does now. Honestly, I’m not sure why she’s taking it upon herself to help me. I stepped into her office for the first time less than an hour ago. While she’s bound to keep silent on what we discuss, she most certainly isn’t required to forge official school documents.

“You’re welcome,” she says as she hands me a freshly-printed potentioreading.

Everything is the same as the results I received, except for the fact that instead of reading 99.91%, Death reads as a mediocre 29.91%. More than a ten percent increase from the former affinity level is probably pushing things, but I agree with her choice: placing me as anything less than around 30% affinity would be...possibly risky. Below 30% affinity, people struggle to do even the most basic things. It would be far easier to slip up pretending to be a 23% affinity practitioner than one with 30% affinity.

“Thank you.”

“Come back and give me an update when you figure out what you’re doing.”

I smile. “Trust me, I’ll be back here as soon as I know anything.” I would have already been dead in the water without her help, struggling to conceal any manifestation of power. “Who am I supposed to go to about this, anyway?” I ask, holding up the potentioreading.

“Talk to your Dean right away,” she instructs. “He’s the one you should be giving that report to. He’ll put it on file and send out copies.”

Hand on the doorknob, I turn around one more time. “Thanks for everything.”

“Of course,” she says, beaming. “See you soon, Ian.”

—

“Ian,” Dean Harley says as I enter the room. “Take a seat. Now, why did you request a meeting?”

I cough lightly. “I’ve recently gone through a harrowing experience.” I shake my head. “I went to see a counselor to talk about it.”

Dean Harley nods. “I’m glad you’re taking advantage of our counseling services.”

“She decided to do a potentioreader test on me because of some odd things that had been going on.”

The Dean’s eyes light up. “Don’t tell me...you’ve awakened as a practitioner?”

I hand him the potentioreading results sheet. “Nothing to be proud of.”

He places his finger over the lettering and hums to himself as he looks it over. “Seems like your affinities have all improved a little across the board. But, of course, the most notable jump is in your affinity for Death.”

I sigh. “The Dark Art.” Now that I think about it, the title is a bit vague. Why isn’t a Dark affinity called the Dark Art?

He gives me a sympathetic look. “So, I assume you’ll want to continue studies in your current track, in addition to an elective in the Arts.”

“Is it too late to join an extra class?” I ask. It’s almost the end of the semester if the winter formal is in a few days.

“Not in this case. The Arts electives are more like guided independent studies.”

My eyes light up. “Really?”

He nods. “Yep.”

I had been concerned that I would need to sit through lectures about the basics of decemancy and safety...lessons I’ve learned through painstaking trial and error. It seemed like this wasn’t at all the case.

“That’d be great if you could add it to my schedule, then, Dean Harley.”

“Remember, Ian,” the Dean says. “Even if it’s a Death affinity, it’s better than none at all. Go make us regs proud, eh?”

“I’ll do my best.”

I get a notification on my glossY practically before I leave the room.

Subject: [Dean’s Office Notice] Placement into Death Affinity I

Recipient: Durning, Kelsey J.

CC’d: Dunai, Ignatius J.

This is a notice indicating that Ignatius J. Dunai has been placed into the class Death Affinity I at the discretion of Dean Harvey of the Regular College, to be effective immediately.

If any parties affected by this change have any questions, they should reply to this message. Expect a swift response within the time frame of an hour.

Best,

Dani Lee,

Office of the Regular Dean

The email doesn’t state when the class–or independent study in disguise–meets. I pull up the list of academics and search for Death Affinity.

In the results, I see five classes. The first four are labeled Death Affinity I through IV, while the final class is just Advanced Death Affinity.

I tap Death Affinity I and wait for the page to load. It meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

I screw up my face. Why so late? That’s a horrible time to meet for class! Do these people think that the cover of darkness lends itself to decemancy? I grumble.

I add the class to my online schedule, then return to the full schedule view. I see all my classes layed out and let out a groan.

Tomorrow is Monday...and I still haven’t done any work. Given that it’s been years since I’ve looked at any of this subject material, I’m probably screwed.

I take a deep breath and remind myself to think positively. At the very least, this place is free of ginger.