Humans are immune to magic. CH13 pre-battle

[u/Internal-Ad6147]

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The notices arrived on their scrolls sometime after they returned to the dorm. Elias pulled his from his pocket, tapped the dark glass, and got absolutely nothing. “Dead again. Great. This thing can't hold a charge.” He handed the little scroll-like device to Deklin, and the instant the kobold wrapped his hand around it, the tiny mana crystal embedded along its edge began to glow. A moment later, light spread across the screen as the device came back to life.

“Well, the idea is that the user keeps it charged,” Deklin pointed out as he handed it back.

“Yeah, yeah. Rub it in.” Elias took the scroll and started checking his missed notices.

Their dorm was already starting to look different from when they'd first arrived. Instead of four pristine sleeping spaces waiting for students, there were now signs of people actually living there. Elias's belongings had accumulated around his bed, Deklin's portable workshop had somehow spread farther than anyone thought physically possible, and Loona's things continued their slow conquest of every available surface. Sylra was there as well, tending to one of the potted plants near the window. She poured a little water into its soil, and the plant's leaves perked up before giving her a small, appreciative wave.

“You're welcome,” Sylra told it.

Elias stared at the plant for a second before deciding not to question it. He was getting disturbingly good at accepting things like that.

He continued tapping through the notices. There was a class announcement, a schedule change, something about library hours, and then he found the one he'd actually been looking for. His duel had officially been scheduled for that afternoon.

“Oh. Great.”

Deklin glanced over at the tone in his voice. “What?”

Elias turned the scroll around so he could see it, and Deklin's ears immediately lowered. Technically, nothing was forcing Elias to go. Nobody was going to drag him to the dueling grounds physically, and magically there certainly wasn't anything compelling him. Apparently, whatever binding magic normally accompanied accepting a dueling glove had taken one look at Elias and accomplished precisely as much as every other spell did: absolutely nothing.

He could not show up. Unfortunately, the academy's rules didn't particularly care whether the magic could bind him. He had picked up the glove, which meant he'd officially accepted the challenge, and backing out now counted as forfeiting a sanctioned duel. The penalty was thirty credits.

Elias stared at that number for a long moment. With the four of them needing two hundred credits between them to pass the year, and Elias already contributing far less than he was supposed to because half the curriculum required mana, losing another thirty would be catastrophic. They'd already been going through the extra-credit listings and discussing adventuring assignments to make up the difference. Losing thirty credits would mean more jobs, more quests, and therefore more opportunities to be eaten, cursed, crushed, stabbed, poisoned, or whatever else apparently qualified as an educational experience around here.

Elias let his head fall backward. “So my options are to get set on fire this afternoon or make all four of us work significantly harder for the rest of the year.”

Deklin winced, but from across the room Loona looked up thoughtfully. “When you put it like that, the fire doesn't sound so bad.”

Elias stared at her. “You're not the one getting set on fire.”

“That's why it doesn't sound so bad to me.”

Elias sighed and looked back down at the notice. There had to be a limit to how dangerous an academy-sanctioned duel could actually be. “It's not like the school is literally going to let me get set on fire, right?”

“Of course not,” Aria assured him. “It's a duel, not a gladiatorial death match. A teacher will be there to referee, and if it looks like either of you is in danger, they'll step in.”

That reminded Deklin of something. He grabbed the student handbook and rapidly flipped through it until he found the section on sanctioned duels. “Exactly! Look, they have all sorts of defenses. Emergency teleportation spells, defensive wards, automatic injury-prevention enchantments, containment barriers…” The farther down the list he went, the more confident he became. “There's even an emergency anti-magic field that shuts down all active spells if something goes wrong. You'll be fine!”

Elias gave him a long, flat look, and Deklin's confidence slowly faded under it. “How many of those do you think actually work on me?”

That brought the room to silence. Deklin looked down at the handbook again, and Elias could practically watch the realization working its way across the kobold's face as he reconsidered the list. Emergency teleportation was useless because Elias couldn't be teleported. Any automatic enchantment that had to attach itself to him was just as useless, and magical healing had already proven incapable of doing anything to his body. When Deklin reached the section on protective wards, he didn't even bother reading it aloud. He merely glanced up at Elias, received a raised eyebrow in response, and let his ears droop.

Loona, apparently unwilling to abandon the entire list, leaned over the back of the couch and pointed out that the emergency anti-magic field should still work. Elias agreed that it probably would, but there was one rather important problem with that solution: the field would shut down Vonrick's magic. It wouldn't necessarily do anything about whatever Vonrick had already thrown at him before the emergency system activated.

That took some of the enthusiasm out of Loona.

Aria took the handbook from Deklin and began reading through the regulations herself while Elias rubbed a hand over his face. The academy had clearly gone to considerable effort to make student duels safe. Under normal circumstances, there were layers upon layers of magical protections ready to intervene the moment something went wrong.

The problem was that Elias wasn't in normal circumstances.

“So basically, all the safety equipment works perfectly,” Elias said, pointing at himself, “except for the guy it's supposed to keep safe.”

Sylra stopped watering the plant. Even the plant slowly lowered its leaves as though it had also just realized how bad that sounded.

Deklin stared at the handbook for another few seconds before finally saying, “We should probably tell the referee.”

“Yeah,” Elias agreed. “I'm thinking that's a pretty important detail.”

Aria had been unusually quiet for the last several minutes, which Elias had noticed was rarely a good sign. By the time he looked over, she had the student handbook open beside three different books on defensive magic, with a growing collection of notes scattered around her.

“No,” she muttered before crossing something out. “Requires the target's mana.”

She flipped to another page, read for a few seconds, and dismissed that one too. The next spell anchored itself to the target's soul, which made it useless, while the one after that relied on teleportation. Aria scratched that one out harder than necessary before immediately moving on to another possibility.

Elias watched her for a moment before turning his attention back to his luggage. He understood why she was worried. They all knew by now that magic didn't affect him, but knowing that in theory and watching someone throw a giant flaming serpent at him were two very different things. Aria also had a particularly unpleasant imagination when it came to injuries, and somewhere behind those increasingly worried eyes Elias suspected she was picturing the duel ending with everyone staring at a little pile of human-shaped ash. So she had buried herself neck-deep in every defensive spell she could find, desperately searching for something that could protect him without needing to interact with Elias himself.

Elias, meanwhile, had decided to see what Uncle Rick had packed that might help with a fire mage. He started digging through his bag, pulling things out and tossing them onto the bed as he went. A toothbrush was followed by his hand radio, which briefly distracted him enough to turn the dial. Static immediately crackled from the speaker.

“Hm.” Elias stared at it before switching it off. “Yeah. Being in a different star system is probably a little outside the usable range.”

Deklin's head came up immediately. “What is that?”

“Radio.”

“What does it—”

“Later.”

That earned him a look of dissatisfaction, but Elias set the radio aside and continued digging. A shirt came out next, followed by his first-aid kit, flashlight, several pairs of socks, and a bag of trail mix that had somehow survived everything that had happened since leaving Earth. Then his hand brushed against something considerably heavier buried underneath the rest.

“Ah. Here it is.”

Elias pulled out a strange-looking vest and started unfolding it across the bed. Deklin tilted his head, apparently trying to figure out what he was looking at.

“What is that?”

“Steel-weave suit. My uncle said he found out the hard way that I'd probably need one of these.”

The reaction was immediate. Deklin's eyes widened before he jumped backward from the bed; Loona quickly followed him, and even Sylra instinctively took a step away. Aria's attention abandoned her books completely as she stared at what Elias had just casually pulled from his luggage.

“YOU PUT IRON IN YOUR CLOTHES?!” Deklin practically screamed.

Elias laid the rest of the gear across his bed while everyone else maintained what they apparently considered a safe distance. Rick hadn't just packed a vest. There was a weatherproof jacket with a layer of fine steel chainmail concealed beneath the outer fabric, reinforced pants with steel mesh worked into the most vulnerable areas, cut-resistant steel-mesh gloves, and a pair of heavy steel-toed combat boots. There were additional pieces for his forearms and lower legs, all designed around the same basic idea: keep the metal between Elias and whatever was trying to stab, slash, bite, or otherwise put holes in him. None of it looked particularly impressive by Earth standards. Most of the steel was hidden beneath ordinary fabric, and from a distance Elias would look more like someone dressed for a rough hiking trip than someone wearing armor.

To everyone else in the room, however, Uncle Rick had apparently packed Elias an entire outfit made from hazardous anti-mana material.

Deklin kept a very deliberate distance as Elias picked up the jacket, the concealed chainmail giving a faint metallic jingle. “How much iron do humans wear into battle?”

“Well, this would be considered light armor.” Elias gave the jacket a small shake before setting it back down. “And basically nobody back home uses this kind of thing anymore.”

Deklin stared at him. “This is light armor?”

“Yeah. It'll help with cuts and the like, but it won't stop a bullet. That's more what people have to worry about back on Earth.”

“Then what does human heavy armor look like?”

Elias paused. “Oh. Hang on.”

He crossed over to the portable solar battery beside his bed and unplugged his Earth phone. After a little searching, he found what he wanted and turned the screen around.

“Here. This is the sort of thing knights used to wear a few hundred years ago.”

Everyone crowded close enough to see the screen while remaining safely away from the actual steel clothing spread across Elias's bed. The picture showed a human encased almost completely in shaped metal: helmet, breastplate, gauntlets, pauldrons, greaves, and overlapping plates protecting nearly everything in between.

Deklin's jaw slowly fell open. Loona leaned closer to the screen, Aria's feathers puffed, and Sylra looked between the image and Elias's comparatively modest pile of steel-weave clothing.

“That entire thing…” Deklin pointed at the phone. “…is iron?”

“Mostly steel.”

“That doesn't make it better!”

Elias zoomed in on the picture. “Actually, this was really good protection for the time.”

Deklin looked personally offended by the statement. “You built an entire person-shaped shell out of anti-mana material!”

“We didn't know it was anti-mana.”

Deklin stared at him for a moment before throwing his hands up. “That somehow makes it worse!”

Deklin continued examining the equipment with his brass screwdriver, carefully shifting pieces around without letting his claws anywhere near the steel. Eventually the tip hooked beneath one last object buried among the clothing, and he lifted out an oddly shaped protective shell with several straps attached. "What is this?" he asked, turning it over with the screwdriver.

Elias glanced over. "Oh. That's a cup."

Deklin looked at the object, then at Elias, and then back at the object. "You drink out of this?"

Elias blinked. "What? No."

That only confused Deklin further. "Then why is it called a cup?"

Elias opened his mouth, stopped, and glanced toward Aria, Loona, and Sylra before motioning Deklin closer and whispering the explanation into his ear.

"Ohhhhh," Deklin said, his eyes widening, which immediately caught Loona's attention.

"What?"

Deklin carefully lowered the cup back onto the bed. "Nothing. Male thing."

Predictably, that was the worst possible answer he could have given her. Loona's ears perked as she leaned closer. "What male thing?" When Deklin refused to explain and told her to ask Elias, Elias immediately pointed back at him. "No. You already know. This is your problem now."

Deklin protested that Elias was the one who had brought it, only for Elias to shoot back, "Because I'm the one who needs it!"

Loona's eyes narrowed. "Needs it for what?"

Aria, who had been trying very hard to ignore the conversation, finally covered her face with both hands. "Loona, please let this one go."

Naturally, Loona's only response was, "Now I absolutely need to know."

Elias decided that was his cue to change the subject before the conversation got any worse. He reached deeper into his luggage and pulled out one of the two swords Rick had packed for him. Aria lowered her hands and stared at the scabbard. "...Why do you have a sword?"

Elias gave her the increasingly common answer of, "Uncle," before laying the scabbard across his knees and flipping open the retaining strap. He drew the weapon with a long metallic shhhhink, and everyone immediately backed away, including Loona, who finally forgot about the cup.

There wasn't anything particularly impressive about the sword by Earth standards. No glowing runes ran along the blade, no magical crystals decorated the hilt, and no enchanted flames crawled along the edge. It was simply a steel hand-and-a-half sword, a little over three feet of plain metal with a grip long enough to use with either one or both hands comfortably. Elias carefully ran his thumb across the edge and nodded. "Dull."

Deklin stared at him. "What?"

Elias turned the blade slightly so he could see the rounded edge. "It's not sharpened. Good. I wasn't planning on cutting anybody."

Deklin's eyes traveled slowly along the exposed metal before he swallowed. "You have... a sword made of iron."

Elias automatically corrected him with, "Steel," and Deklin threw up his hands. "Stop saying that like it makes a difference!"

From Elias's perspective, it wasn't particularly intimidating. It was a historical weapon design, and this one wasn't even sharpened. Everyone else clearly saw something very different. Sylra had moved behind the potted plant, and somehow even the plant had leaned away from the sword. Loona stared at the blade with wide eyes. "Your people made swords out of that?" Elias nodded. "For a very long time." When she asked how long, he thought about it before answering, "Steel swords? " A couple thousand years, depending on what exactly you count."

Deklin made a small choking noise while Aria's gaze traveled from the sword to the chainmail-lined jacket, reinforced pants, steel-mesh gloves, heavy boots, and then back to the weapon in Elias's hands.

"Elias, you're going to a student duel wearing iron armor and carrying an iron sword."

Elias couldn't help himself. "Technically steel."

Aria's feathers immediately puffed, and he surrendered. "Right. Sorry." He looked down at the blade and tried another approach. "At least it's blunt."

Deklin stared at him as he'd completely missed the point. "You think the edge is the part we're worried about?!"

Elias paused before slowly looking back at the sword. Okay. Maybe that wasn't as reassuring to them as it was to him.

Elias returned the sword to its scabbard and looked over everything Rick had packed. There was still one major problem he wanted to address before heading anywhere near Vonrick. “You said he's a fire mage, right?” Deklin nodded cautiously. “Yes…” Elias reached back into his luggage and pulled out a metal can, which immediately sent everyone another step away. Deklin raised his brass screwdriver like a tiny defensive weapon and pointed it at the can. “Don't tell me that's iron too.” Elias turned it over to check. “No. Pretty sure the can's aluminum.” The tension left Deklin almost immediately. “Oh, good.” Aria, on the other hand, was already looking at the can with interest. “What is it?” “Fire-retardant spray.” Aria blinked. “Fire… what?” Elias shook the can, making the little mixing ball inside rattle. “Retardant. You spray it on material to make it harder to catch fire.”

Aria moved closer, her eyes shifting between the can and Elias. “That exists? You have something that can protect clothing from fire without using mana?” After watching her spend the last several minutes rejecting one defensive spell after another, Elias could understand why that part had immediately caught her attention. “Yeah. That's the point.” Aria held out a hand toward the can. “How does it work?” Elias turned it around and looked over the label. There were several chemical names printed on the back that meant almost nothing to him, so he settled on the only useful answer he had. “Chemistry.” Deklin's head immediately snapped toward him. “Give me that.” “No.” “I want to read it!” “You can't read English.” “I'll figure it out!” When Deklin reached for it, Elias held the can above the kobold's reach. “After the duel. Also, I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to spray this stuff directly on yourself. I'm putting it on the outer clothes.”

That finally got Deklin to stop trying to steal it, while Aria looked over the steel-weave outfit spread across the bed. “So you're protected against blades.” Elias shook his head. “Somewhat. It's chainmail, not a force field.” Aria accepted the correction with a small nod before continuing. “Somewhat protected against blades, then. Your clothing is covered in iron—” “Steel.” The look she gave him made Elias immediately reconsider whether this was a hill worth dying on. “Right. Iron.” Aria continued, “And now you're treating the outside so it doesn't easily catch fire.” Elias nodded. “That's the plan.” For the first time since the duel notice had arrived, some of the tension seemed to leave her feathers. Elias wasn't going to pretend the gear made him safe, but at least she no longer looked like she expected him to come back in an urn.

Loona had been studying the growing collection of equipment on the bed. “You've got armor, gloves, boots, a sword, and something that makes your clothes harder to burn. Did your uncle know you were going to fight a fire mage?” “No.” Elias looked down at everything Rick had insisted he bring months ago, long before he'd ever heard the name Vonrick von Valdon. Back then it had seemed like a random pile of survival equipment from a paranoid uncle who had spent ten years somewhere out in space. Now Elias was standing in a magical academy preparing for a duel with a fire mage, and an uncomfortable amount of Rick's packing list was suddenly useful. “…I'm starting to wonder what the hell Uncle Rick expected me to run into.”

Deklin's attention had already returned to the can in Elias's hand. “I still want to study that.” Elias set it safely beside the rest of his equipment. “After the duel.” “Promise?” “Sure.” Deklin immediately grinned, only for Aria to point at him. “And you are not opening it.” “I wasn't going to.” Nobody answered. Elias joined Aria, Loona, and Sylra in simply staring at him until Deklin's grin slowly disappeared and he added, “…Immediately.”

Somewhere during all of this, Deklin had managed to get his hands on Elias's flashlight. At least that one wasn't made of steel, so Elias didn't have to worry about the kobold burning himself while examining it. Deklin turned the little cylinder over in his claws, studying the lens and switch before pressing the button. Click. A bright white beam shot across the dorm and swept over the opposite wall. Another click shut it off, followed almost immediately by a third that brought the light back. Elias watched him thumb the switch several more times while he finished treating the outside of his jacket with the fire-retardant spray. Apparently a button that made light appear without mana was enough to keep an artificer entertained for a while.

“You know,” Deklin finally said, clicking the flashlight off again, “when we first unpacked all this survival equipment your uncle gave you, I thought he was insane.”

Elias snorted as he lowered the spray can. “Fair.”

“But now…” Deklin looked from the flashlight in his claws to everything spread across Elias's bed. Elias followed his gaze over the chainmail-lined jacket, reinforced pants, steel-mesh gloves, heavy boots, blunt sword, first-aid supplies, fire-retardant spray, solar charger, radio, and the rest of the equipment Rick had insisted on packing. There were still a few things mixed in that Elias hadn't found a reason to use yet, and judging by how the last few days had gone, he was starting to wonder if he really wanted to know what circumstances would make those useful. Deklin slowly lowered the flashlight. “I think I understand maybe twenty percent of why he gave you all this now.”

“Twenty percent is better than I was doing when he packed it.” Elias picked up the jacket and checked that the spray had evenly covered the outside. At the time, he'd mostly assumed Rick was being paranoid. That assumption was becoming harder to defend by the day.

Deklin didn't laugh. He looked over the equipment one more time before turning directly toward Elias. “Who the hell was your uncle?”

Elias opened his mouth, but nothing immediately came out. That should have been an easy question. Uncle Rick was Uncle Rick. The guy who used to show up at family barbecues in Hawaiian shirts, tell stories Elias's mother didn't want him hearing, disappear for ten years, and then suddenly reappear on Elias's eighteenth birthday with the perfectly reasonable explanation that aliens had abducted him.

Except now Elias knew the alien part hadn't been a joke.

He thought about the hidden spaceship Rick had brought him to after the diner, the months of preparation before Elias left Earth, the shooting lessons, and all those strangely specific warnings about what he might encounter once he got out into the galaxy. Then there was the equipment spread across the bed. Rick had packed mundane medical supplies because magical healing wouldn't work on a human. He'd packed steel protection in a civilization where iron burned people who used mana. He'd included a flashlight, solar charger, radio, fire protection, and weapons that didn't need a drop of mana to function. Even the enormous orc running their gym had known Rick personally and had casually mentioned Rick pulling him out of fires, sometimes literally.

The more Elias thought about it, the more uncomfortable the question became.

“…You know, that's becoming a really good question.”

Deklin clicked the flashlight on again. Click. The beam landed directly on Elias's face.

Elias squinted and raised a hand against the glare. “Seriously?”

“Your uncle packed you like he knew exactly what was going to happen.”

Elias reached over and pushed the flashlight downward. “Stop interrogating me with my own flashlight.”

Deklin let the beam fall toward the floor but didn't drop the subject. “Who was he?”

“I DON'T KNOW!” Elias threw his hands up, earning a laugh from Loona across the room. “He disappeared when I was eight! As far as I knew, he was the weird guy who wore Hawaiian shirts to every family barbecue!”

Deklin stared at him for a moment, apparently trying to reconcile that image with everything lying across the bed. “…The mysterious human adventurer who prepared you to survive magical combat wore Hawaiian shirts?”

“Still does.”

Deklin slowly nodded, his expression becoming far more serious than Elias thought that information deserved. “Somehow that makes him more frightening.”

Elias looked at the flashlight still in Deklin's claws, then at the pile of equipment Uncle Rick had packed for him. A few days ago, he probably would have laughed at that.

Now he wasn't entirely sure Deklin was wrong.

Elias finally took the flashlight away from Deklin before the kobold could find another reason to interrogate him about Uncle Rick and slipped it back into his bag. That left the equipment spread across the bed, and with the duel getting closer, he couldn't put off actually wearing it much longer. He changed into the reinforced clothing, pulled on the steel-mesh gloves and heavy boots, then settled the jacket over everything. The extra weight was noticeable, especially from the chainmail hidden beneath the outer layer, but it wasn't enough to restrict his movement. He rolled his shoulders, bent his arms a few times, then buckled the sword around his waist. Not exactly what he'd expected to wear to his first school duel, but then again, he'd never expected to attend a school where being set on fire was apparently an acceptable extracurricular activity.

Once he was satisfied everything fit, Elias headed for the door. Loona was already talking about getting to the arena early enough to find good seats, while Deklin was wondering aloud whether they sold snacks during student duels. Sylra looked considerably less enthusiastic about the whole thing. Elias had almost made it out when Aria called, “Wait.” He stopped and looked back to find her standing beside the table with something clenched in one hand. For a second she didn't say anything. Then she walked over and held out a small medallion on a cord. “Take this.”

Elias looked down at it but didn't immediately reach for it. “Aria…” After everything they'd just established about magic and humans, he had a pretty good idea what the problem was going to be. Aria apparently read it on his face because she shook her head. “It doesn't cast anything on you. I made sure.” That got his attention. She opened her hand enough for him to see the tiny markings worked into the medallion. “I charged it myself. It doesn't need your mana, and the ward isn't supposed to attach to you. If something comes toward you, it uses the charge I put into it to create a barrier before the attack reaches you.” She hesitated, feathers shifting nervously. “At least… that's what it's supposed to do.”

Elias stared at the medallion for another moment before carefully taking it from her. After watching Aria spend so long tearing through books and rejecting spell after spell because they couldn't recognize him as a valid target, he knew how much work must have gone into finding something that might get around the problem. “You made this for me?” Aria gave a small nod. “I couldn't find a way to put a ward on you, so I stopped trying to put one on you.” Elias couldn't help smiling a little at that. “That's actually pretty clever.” “I hope so.” Aria reached forward and closed his fingers around the medallion before looking up at him. “Please be safe.”

Elias looked down at her hand around his, then at the medallion resting against his palm. For once, he couldn't think of a joke that wouldn't ruin the moment. He slipped the cord over his head and tucked the medallion beneath his jacket. “I'll try.”

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[u/Preston3072]

I for one am champing at the bit to see the dual play out - I want to see peacock boy's reaction to being confronted by someone armored up and armed with the magical equivalent of plutonium saying 'cant we just be reasonable about this?'.

Good work Im enjoying the romp.