Perhaps I had been slightly too hasty with expressing my dislike for written exams. Sure I didn’t like taking them and found them both overly stressful and generally pointless, but at the moment I would have much preferred to be frantically answering questions than taking Professor Meadows’s demented ‘final exam’.

The stone around me flowed and warped like hot tar under the direction of my magic, rising slowly from the ground to form a rough dome around the chalk circle within which I was sitting. From the other side of the training ground, I could feel Miranda’s stress and anxiety rippling down our bond and I really couldn’t blame her. Professor Meadows had really outdone herself this time.

In essence, the task itself was relatively simple. Unfortunately, what it really boiled down to was ‘here are some rules, don’t die’. As someone who was deeply attached to not being dead, that was something that I always strived for, but today Professor Meadows planned to make that task particularly difficult.

Even for a professor well known for designing devilishly tricky and dangerous exams, what she had prepared for us today was particularly nasty. It wasn’t nasty in the way a trick question on an exam or a misleadingly worded request was nasty. In fact, Professor Meadows had laid out the rules in very simple words that even an idiot couldn’t misunderstand. It was nasty in the way an improperly brewed healing potion could be nasty. Everything might look and feel perfectly fine while you were working on it, and then you were just suddenly dead.

The goal of the exam was to construct a bunker out of purely mundane materials in such a way that when, at the end of our allotted three-and-a-half hours, Professor Meadows bombarded the entire training ground with combat spells you didn’t die. Each student was placed at the center of two concentric chalk circles arranged in a large grid on the packed dirt of the training ground. If you moved outside the smaller circle, you failed. If you tried to expand your build outside the larger circle, you failed.

Professor Meadows was ‘generous’ enough to give us a list of what spells she was planning to use, and it was both terrifying and not as bad as it probably could be. For instance, she wasn’t going to be using any earth spells or something ridiculous like a disintegration ray or turning the entire area around us into stone. However, knowing that in just a few short hours I was going to get bombarded by a sixth-circle meteor storm, fifth-circle force-ram, seventh-circle cloud of boiling ash, and a dozen other rather terrifying-sounding spells was in no way reassuring.

She had also told us that before she began, she was going to use a ninth-circle dispel on the entire area to make sure that we weren’t using any wards, enchantments, or magic items to attempt to get around her test. At least she’d given us the opportunity to take off any such items before we began, because otherwise I would have been very upset to lose several of my creations that were in no way durable enough to survive an archmage’s attempts to dismantle them.

I hoped Professor Meadows knew what she was doing. I vaguely remembered a clause in the Academy rules that said that no exam could have more than a twenty-three percent fatality rate. I really hoped that didn’t mean that Professor Meadows would bombard our class until twenty-three percent of us were dead. That would be… bad. I also neither knew and really, really did not want to find out what the Academy would do if her first volley of meteors simply obliterated the entire training ground and reduced us all to ash and charred bones. She would probably be punished, but that was not going to bring me back to life.

As the ground rose up to form a fully enclosed dome around me, I threw one final furtive look at the students around me. We were around half an hour into the exam and I was one of the first people to actually start casting spells. Most people seemed to be frantically figuring out what spells they were going to use and testing out various ideas on a much smaller scale. One young man I vaguely recognized from class was actively crying as he flipped through a thick notebook, his hands shaking and tears dripping down onto the pages.

I wondered how many of them I was going to see again. My first exam with Professor Meadows had resulted in at least a dozen fatalities. This time there would presumably be fewer of them, but that was mostly because our class was not really that big.

I hoped Miranda was going to be okay. We had spent some time preparing for this exam together, but right now there was nothing more I could do for her and this was not exactly her best field of magic. Miranda was a capable mage and a dependable servant. It would be very unfortunate to lose such a valuable asset in such a shameful manner, and explaining her absence to Lea would be difficult. On the other side of the training ground I could just barely make out a flash of her silver hair. Then the earth closed up around me and I was plunged into total darkness.

A moment later, the two runic arrays I’d hastily scrawled on the ground triggered and I was bathed in warm white light and a gentle breeze of fresh air caressed my face. Even though our final construct had to be purely mundane, there were no rules against making things easier for yourself with magic.

I wanted as much time as possible to reinforce and build up the barrier around me while showing my classmates as little of my work as possible. Thus, I’d enclosed myself in a thin outer shell of transmuted stone pulled from the ground beneath my feet. Over the next three hours I was going to build as many reinforced layers as I could manage, optimally eventually leaving only a tiny space for myself deep within the dome.

However, an incredibly well built bunker wasn’t going to help me if I suffocated before the exam ended and I didn’t particularly like the idea of spending three or more hours in total darkness, so I’d first prepared some temporary enchantments to deal with that issue. They would both be destroyed by Professor Meadows’s dispel, but honestly they wouldn’t have lasted much longer than that regardless. Not exactly my best work after all.

The next few hours passed both far too quickly and far too slowly for my liking. With every spell I cast I felt time slipping away from me. Each took painful minutes to cast, longer to modify, and an uncomfortably long time to actually take effect properly. The ground beneath me slowly sank down as more and more of the material beneath my feet was drawn up above me. Despite mostly focusing on building a dome, I didn’t fully ignore the much less durable ground beneath me either. About half of my layers extended into the ground, full spherical shells connected by triangular braces and packed with every form of insulating and shock absorbing materials I could think of.

The outside of my shell was made from a material Professor Meadows had called ‘alchemist’s steel’, a combination of tungsten and carbon that was devilishly complicated to transmute and nearly impossible to work without magic, but if properly created was more durable than even many magical metals. The first layer was roughly five inches thick and behind that was three more equally thick layers, the gap between them filled with a type of gel that absorbed and distributed heat and blunt force but was horribly toxic if imbibed.

Behind that was a dozen more thinner layers, each one formed from a different material we’d studied over the course of the last few months. In hindsight, it finally made sense why Professor Meadows had spent so much time teaching us about various building materials that were difficult, if not impossible, to create by mundane means. It had initially seemed like a rather odd choice of direction for the class to take; we were supposed to be studying magic after all, not metallurgy and construction.

Now that I was putting things into practice however, I was very thankful for those lessons. The All-Material spell form theoretically allowed for the creation of any ‘natural’ material, but it was well known to be one of the most complicated spell forms ever discovered. To use it, you had to both intimately understand the material you were manipulating and which part of the spell form corresponded to that material, and even then there were a number of arcane rules to follow when modifying the all purpose alchemical transmutation spells I’d learned in my first class with Professor Meadows.

Suddenly, our overall curriculum seemed much more reasonable. Alchemy was more than the study of a pair of spell forms. It was the study of how to apply those spell forms, and this exam was a do-or-die test of how well we had absorbed those lessons. I had absolutely no doubts that anyone who tried to make a simple dome of granite or iron was in for a very harsh and very short lesson.

About two hours in, I discovered that apparently I was rather claustrophobic. It wasn’t debilitating, but as the space around me grew more and more cramped I couldn’t ignore the sense of the earth closing in around me like the maw of some vast creature. That would have been something nice to know earlier, but there wasn’t much to do about it now. I pushed that irrational fear aside as I did with my concerns about Miranda and my fears for the future. There was no room in my mind for fear, only action.

When the alarm spell I’d cast earlier warned me that there were fifteen minutes left before Professor Meadows began the second phase of the exam, I wracked my brain for anything I might have missed. There was very little space left within my ‘bunker’, barely enough to sit cross-legged with my back hunched over and my hair brushing the rubbery padding I’d added to the innermost layer around me.

Now that I was left with so little space, one of my largest concerns was once again suffocation. At the moment, I had an enchantment constantly creating new, breathable air and removing what I exhaled, but that would be gone soon. I was breathing slowly and evenly, ready to fall into a proper meditative state where my body would less quickly burn through the oxygen in the room. I had also prepared a spell to transmute fresh air for myself, but depending on what sort of dispelling magic Professor Meadows used, it was entirely possible I would be completely unable to cast anything for some time afterwards.

Hopefully, I was just overcomplicating things. If I wasn’t, then I prayed I’d done the math correctly and would have enough air to last me the last thirty minutes of the exam. I’d never really concerned myself with such a thing before, but I vaguely remembered reading about how much air a person needed to survive and how quickly the lifegiving air in an enclosed space could be replaced by an insidious poison.

At least Professor Meadows had told us not to worry about getting out of our bunkers as she would take care of that herself. She was a cruel and vindictive woman, but she also followed her own twisted code. Once we had passed her exam, she would make sure we survived the aftermath of it as well.

With less than a minute left, I filled the majority of the remaining cavity with a breathable foam that we had discussed in class less than a month ago. It was a very unpleasant substance, horribly sticky and irritating to the skin, but it would hopefully ensure that shockwaves rippling through the dome above me didn’t simply burst my organs and crack my bones. I squeezed my eyes shut and kept my lips tightly sealed as the sensation of countless tiny bubbles rubbing against my skin sent unpleasant shivers down my spine.

Then, a ripple of nothingness tore through me, utterly obliterating every speck of mana around me not shielded by my soul. In an instant, my mana sense went completely dark in a way I’d never experienced before. It was still functional, but I could feel nothing. There was no ambient mana, no traces of my classmates huddled within their own defenses mere meters away from me. Only the link I could still feel between myself and Miranda remained, a tether leading out into a sea of darkness.

And then, the darkness was washed away as a blinding cacophony of stars was born high above the training ground. They fell, and I could feel the shaking of the earth in my bones. The next half hour was one I would never forget and certainly not an experience I ever hoped to repeat. Through it all, I clutched at Miranda’s tether as though it was a lifeline. It tasted of fear and anxiety, but a corpse could feel neither.

When I finally emerged from my bunker, crawling awkwardly through the neat, cylindrical tunnel Professor Meadows’s magic had made in my construct, I beheld a wasteland. The hard-packed dirt of the training ground was simply gone, blasted away until there was a nearly two yard difference between the ground around me and the grass beyond the border of the training ground.

The once pristine training ground was now a cluster of cracked and pockmarked structures, emerging from the bedrock like shells on a sandy beach. Other students appeared slowly around me from the more intact bunkers, most of them having used, at least outwardly, a very similar design as I had.

I glanced over to where I’d last seen the crying boy. His spot in our grid was empty of all but rubble, cracked shards of some sort of pale stone piled up until they looked almost like an open egg shell. I wondered if he’d simply left, choosing to fail the exam and throw himself to Professor Meadows’s nonexistent mercies, or if he’d tried and died in the attempt. I had been far too busy casting to pay attention to my mana sense, but perhaps someone else had seen what had happened with him. I was sure I would learn the details from Miranda soon enough.

I looked down at my own creation and a small smile stretched across my face when I saw how well it had fared in the end. The outer layer of metal was mostly gone, only small patches of it peeking out from the scorched rock beneath the training ground. The gel beneath it was similarly obliterated, but the next layer had fared admirably. Outside of one massive puncture that extended down through at least a half dozen more layers of reinforcement and a few cracks leaking blue goo, it was nearly completely intact. Much better than most people’s work seemed to have fared.

Pathways of blue light crackled into existence throughout the field, one for each surviving student and all leading towards where Professor Meadows was standing silently with her hands folded behind her back. “Enough lollygagging,” she called out, her cheerful tone sounding jarring and out of place, “get over here so we can be done with all this already!”

I hesitantly tested the pathway with the tip of my boot, not fully trusting that it wouldn’t collapse under me at the least opportune moment. It felt solid, but that was not really a guarantee when it came to magic. An illusion could feel perfectly solid one moment and as incorporeal as air the next. I wasn’t the only one either. Professor Meadows was not a teacher who inspired confidence in her pupils.

Professor Meadows cleared her throat loudly. “The exam is over. Anyone not beside me in thirty seconds loses fifty percent of their points for the year!”

Well, fair enough. That certainly made my decision for me…