One mighty roar, and then a massive fireball began to form in his throat.
The owner of the gym was not like a dragon. He was a dragon. He unleashed the fiery attack across the floor of his own business.
Smoke, and Callum Wells' head exploding with confusion. He was trying to stay awake. The fire spread rapidly and the whole gym was burning.
The flames came closer. Callum went down onto the ground and fainted.
When he came back to himself, Mari was lying in the smoke beside him. Callum got her up onto his shoulders immediately and started running for the way out of the burning building.
That was when a live electrical cable broke loose from the gym ceiling and came down directly on him. A powerful shock went through his whole body. He did not stop.
A strange purple aura began forming around him.
I can't leave this girl, he said to himself.
The smoke was so thick that his eyes closed on their own. He went down onto his knees. The cable was still lying across his neck. But he gathered the last of his strength and he stood up, and the purple energy surrounding him intensified dramatically, and then, suddenly, he was outside the gym.
Street concrete under his hand.
He had made the portal himself and he had not even known he was doing it. He knelt there and kept watching his own hand.
What just happened?
Then somebody behind him asked, "What are you doing?"
There was a man in a suit standing on the sidewalk. The same one Callum had seen before, at the edge of a funeral crowd. "Wait there," he said.
He snapped his fingers and cast some kind of power over the burning gym.
Callum was still completely wrapped in purple. The man simply adjusted his tie, as though he had not just done anything particularly large. Then he turned around to Callum and asked, "What are you?"
Callum ignored the question. "First you tell me what this madness is."
The man's expression went serious. He touched a device in his ear. "Fire at the Shah gym. One witness, one victim."
Callum kept yelling at him.
The man turned his wrist over and showed the symbol there. "What is your classification?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. Until you tell me something, I'm not saying anything."
The man became frustrated, and in one movement Callum was handcuffed.
Callum was literally shocked. "What are you doing?"
He realised it at that very moment. His headache had magically disappeared.
The man started pulling him along and taking him away.
In a room at the Guild, two people stood watching a hologram of Callum.
One of them gestured at it for the other. "Use a magic blocker like that on a person and you lose your head."
The man in glasses expressed his surprise. "It's still conscious."
"He barely felt it going on," the other said. "And honestly, that was better for him."
The man in glasses asked, "You're telling me this isn't a mundane?"
He thought it over. The system had monitored every person in that area. A mundane would have been knocked out on the spot. But this one had stayed awake, used magic to save somebody else, and carried the victim out of the fire himself. It was strange, and it left him unsettled.
Thirty years a magic user, and still unregistered.
The other man simply said, "I just brought him in. I didn't solve him."
In the interrogation room, the agent in glasses told Callum that he was no longer a suspect. They could move on. What they had to do now was register him and test him — his type of magic, his abilities.
Callum was confused. "What are you talking about?"
The man explained. Every mage served the Arcane Regulation Guild.
He put images up on a screen, auras of different colours around different mages, and said that most mages started very young. Callum was going to be a late bloomer.
Callum protested. "I already have a job." Then, hopefully, he asked whether he could just ignore all of this.
The man's expression turned serious. The Guild hunted deserters. Then it executed them.
An image of flames came up on the screen.
Callum's eyes widened. He thought: mandatory training, mandatory selection, mandatory service. It was a tyranny he had never had the slightest idea existed.
His fist closed. I am not going to let this happen.
The one with the glasses asked, "Are you ready for the test?"
Callum asked, confused, "Meaning what?"
The man explained that a protected chamber would be saturated with mana around him. Callum looked up. There were glowing, unknown letters written across the ceiling. The result would show what type of magic he had.
A wave of blue energy released from the ceiling.
Callum asked, "How long is this going to take?"
The man replied casually, "A few seconds. More or less."
The casual tone alone was a shock. At first Callum felt nothing at all, and then in the next moment came an overwhelming pain.
He fell to his knees. He shouted that something was wrong, that they had to stop, but the man in the suit stood there with the rest of the people and simply waited a little longer, and Callum was in agony, holding his head and screaming, and he thought he was going to die.
Some time later his eyes opened. The suit was standing in front of him with his arms crossed. Callum sat up and asked whether that intense pain was normal.
Maybe it was because the test was being conducted at such an age, the man said.
Then he told him: while you were out, we marked you.
Callum looked down at his wrist. There was a symbol tattooed into the skin. He kept staring at it in pure annoyance. These people had no concern for freedom whatsoever.
The man told him, at the end, that it was rare to get a spatial mage. "You'll need a tutor. And yes — the cost of that will be counted inside your service time to the Guild."
So I got power I didn't ask for, Callum thought, and a tattoo I didn't ask for, and now a debt, and none of it was my choice.
He decided this man was a scammer.
He threw him a furious look and got up off the hospital bed. "Is there any chance I could go home and settle things first?"