Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  Still, my mother managed to convince him to let me try a tent at the other end of the fair, one with a funny looking painting mounted in the center and a pair of hand grips set on a table in front of it. When I got to take a closer look, I saw that the painting was actually more like a wood carving; the swirling, bizarre image was actually cut into the background material, which might have been wood or might have been something else, I really couldn’t tell.

  It was a glyph. I didn’t know what that was, then. All I saw was a weird carving that didn’t seem to make much sense to my eyes at first. It actually hurt a little to look at it, but still, I found myself fascinated by it for some reason.

  The game in this tent was magical aptitude. Most kids got tested for magical aptitude in school, usually a few years older than I was at the time, but some parents paid out big bucks to get their kids tested early in the hopes of getting them a head start on their training if they showed the knack for it.

  My parents didn’t have big bucks. Almost nobody in our town did. And our public school wasn’t exactly top notch, so the testing done there wasn’t what you might call “accurate”. I’m sure plenty of kids who had some potential talent got looked over by either careless or inept testers at my school.

  In any case, these carnivals knew that the parents in little shit towns like mine were desperate to get their kids tested. Every parent wants to think their kid is special. So, they would set up tents like this one with a rudimentary testing glyph and charge parents a couple of bucks to see if their kid was a natural for magic.

  They weren’t terribly accurate, but every now and again, they’d pick up a hint of ability, and that kept the parents lining up around the block. Something about the scarce odds of winning a lottery makes it that much more compelling, I suppose.

  I was too young to know what it all meant. The lady in the tent… she was fat and looked bored out of her mind… told me to put my hands on the two metallic grips on the table and look at the carving. Look at the carving, and try to see.

  Try to see what, I asked her. Anything, she said.

  I stared at the carving for a few seconds. The strange swirls and patterns didn’t seem to make any sense, and it actually kind of hurt to look at, like my mind didn’t want to believe what it was seeing. Then, my eyes seemed to unfocus and the pattern began to move.

  It scared me at first. Pictures weren’t supposed to move. I thought maybe it was a trick or something, and that made me more curious than scared, and I kept staring in that unfocused way.

  People were talking all around me in excited voices; my mom, the fat lady, other people waiting in line in the tent. I didn’t really hear them, though. I was too caught up in watching the carving move and shift and re-orient itself.

  Finally, somebody shook me and I snapped out of it. There was a digital screen set up on the table, the kind that fills up from the bottom with little red lines like a thermometer. It was supposed to tell you how much aptitude you had for magic.

  The screen was filled to the top.

  I was only vaguely aware of what it meant. I knew my parents were excited. The fat lady didn’t seem bored any longer; she was chattering away with my parents like talking was her new thing.

  As for me, I wanted to go back to looking at the weird painting and making it move. But that was all for that day.

  I remember that day very clearly, but the weeks following it are a little more hazy… I was so young when it all started. I can remember my parents arguing a lot. Tutors or coursework in magic is very expensive, far more expensive than my parents could afford.

  My mom wanted to get me going right away. My dad wanted to know how the hell we were supposed to pay for it. That led to her demanding he find a way, and that only made him angry. He probably felt like she was making him feel inadequate as a father.

  Finally, a solution presented itself. My dad did manage to scrape together enough money to have an official testing done, by a proper facility, one outside of the public school system. It was almost identical to the one in the tent, and the result was the same… a filled graph, and lots of excited voices.

  I remember it being a pretty good day. The people at the testing center gave me ice cream and let me watch whatever I wanted to on TV while they talked to my parents.

  At that point, I was in a real ballerina phase. A lot of little girls go through it; all you want to wear is a little dancing outfit with the tutu and tights and never take it off. They look so pretty and graceful and… special, I guess. Everyone’s eyes were on them.

  I found a channel where they were showing “The Nutcracker Suite”… a little girl staple if there ever was one… and sat watching, almost as enraptured as when I looked at those glyphs moving under my unfocused gaze. One of the ladies from the testing center came in with my parents and sat down with me.

  “You like ballerinas?” she asked.

  Duh. Obviously.

  “How would you like to be the most special ballerina, ever?” she said.

  Let’s just say she knew how to push all the right buttons. Ice cream, ballerinas… whatever this lady was selling, I was buying.

  My parents, as well. Later on, I found out that I was being admitted into a special program for kids who showed a lot of promise with magical aptitude but who lacked the funds to follow up on it. Mom and Dad were too excited to ask a lot of question as to who was paying the bill and what strings were attached, or maybe they were simply too naïve.

  In any case, I got to leave school early and go to the training center, and during the summers, I went to what was basically magic summer camp. The other kids there were mostly a lot older and a lot richer than me, and all of them were bigger.

  I was a skinny little girl away from her parents for the first time, surrounded by bigger kids who were old enough to intimidate me but not old enough to figure out that intimidating little girls was a lousy thing to do.

  There was one… Mary Ellen Whitehouse. I’ll never forget her. She was a few years older than me and was born to be a queen bee, strutting around that place like she owned it. Maybe she saw an easy target when she saw me… me being the new kid and all… or maybe she didn’t like how much more attention I got, but whatever it was, she had it in for me.

  What is it about the cafeteria that makes it Ground Zero for bullies? It seems like any time someone wants to test you, they make their move when you’re eating. That’s what she did. Walked right up and took my dessert. Vanilla pudding. I still remember that.

  I’d like to tell you I put up a fight, or at least said something, but I didn’t. I just sat there, scared to death of her. She looked me up and down and decided that taking my pudding away from me wasn’t enough.

  “You’ll never be as good as me,” she said, and grabbed my arm.

  Electric shocks jolted out of her hand and into me. Now, as an adult, I know what she did to me… an extremely low-level version of a Striker Mage lightning bolt Trick. Take a lightning bolt and dial it down to only giving someone an uncomfortable shock. Everybody learns to crawl before they run, and Striker Mages are no different.

  Touching someone and giving them a shock isn’t particularly impressive to an adult, but to me, it was terrifying witchcraft. I’d never felt an electric shock before. I screamed and fell backward off my chair.

  “Quit crying, baby,” she said, but I couldn’t. I’d never been so scared in my life. By the time I got myself under control, one of the instructors at the center… in fact, it was the same lady who offered me ice cream that first day… asked me if I was scared of Mary Ellen.

  All I could do was nod.

  “And would you like to get stronger? So strong that she couldn’t hurt you again?”

  This lady knew all the right tunes. I nodded again.

  And that’s when they showed me the first Physical Adept glyph. It was easy. Too easy. And so there were others, many others. Any time the instructors thought that I was getting distracted, the ice cream lady would remind me about M
ary Ellen, or tell me how this glyph or that glyph was going to make me faster, more graceful, the best ballerina ever.

  All that time, I’d been avoiding Mary Ellen as much as I could, but you can only dodge bullets for so long. One day, she caught up to me, and grabbed me by the arm, sending those damn shocks into me.

  “I want to hear you cry again, baby,” she said, digging her fingers in hard.

  I hit her. It was clumsy, reflexive; this was before I’d had any martial arts training. My hand swung around in a wide arc and slapped her across the face. Mary Ellen stood a good five or six inches taller than me, and had some meat on her bones, but that slap knocked her straight to the ground.

  Now it was her turn to look at me, unable to speak. She held her hand to her face; I don’t think she’d ever been hit that hard before. And then, she started to cry.

  I started to cry, too. I thought I was going to get into trouble. But I didn’t. Instead, the ice cream lady took me aside, called me a brave girl, and said they had something new to show me. A special kind of dance.

  “What’s it called?” I asked her.

  “Muay Thai,” she said. “Kickboxing.”

  And just like that, I forgot about being a ballerina.

  Fast forward a few years, and there I was at eleven years old, on that pivotal day when I realized my parents couldn’t control me any longer. It started off simply enough; I was acting up like a standard defiant pre-teen, and my dad reached the end of his rope, and tried to hit me.

  He wasn’t a bad guy, my dad. He was just tired and used up from working all of the time, and didn’t have any other tools in his parental toolkit than yelling and hitting. Some people aren’t naturally good parents. I realize that now, as an adult and with a little emotional distance from it all.

  But at the time, I was an eleven year old girl who was furious.

  He slammed the table with his hand and stood up. Every other time he’d done that, the noise had scared me into submission, but not this time. This time I stood up with him and stared him down.

  He didn’t like that. He let his hand fly, tried to slap me. After all my training, I saw it like it was moving in slow motion, and I wasn’t scared of it at all.

  I stepped outside his range and brought up a backfist strike to his forearm. There was a crack. His eyes went wide and he screamed, dropping to a crouch and cradling his broken arm. His face got pale and he looked up at me.

  In his eyes, was fear. Just like Mary Ellen. And that’s when I knew. I knew he could never tell me what to do again. Nobody could.

  I’d always thought of that day as liberating, but now I know, that’s the eleven year old in me doing the thinking. An eleven year old shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever she wants. No one should. That sort of power would warp an adult’s mind, much less a child’s. But at the time, I had no concept of the need for boundaries. I was free. Nobody could tell me what to do.

  It only got worse as I got older. My parents had no idea what to do with me. Hell, they were flat-out terrified of me. They pretty much let me roam free and tried to tiptoe around the house when I was there.

  I rarely was. There wasn’t anything I wanted there. I spent most of my time at the training center, getting stronger, getting faster.

  When I wasn’t there, I was at the gym, pulverizing anyone who wanted to spar with me. I had to start fighting men, grown adult men, in order to remotely have a challenge, and by the time I was in my mid-teens, I was having trouble finding anyone willing to get into the ring with me.

  Muay Thai wasn’t enough. I discovered ju-jitsu, and dove deeply into that, and then, anything else anyone could show me.

  A pattern began to emerge. I would learn a technique, master it, and then outpace my instructors, discarding them shortly thereafter. It was a pattern I would repeat for a long time.

  I think back on that time and I hate who I was then. An obsessive narcissist completely absorbed with chasing perfection, with complete contempt for anyone who was weaker.

  Finally, the day came when I discovered who was paying for all that time at the training center. As it turns out, that program served as a recruiting tool for the military.

  A lot of wannabe mages used military scholarships to pay for their schooling. This program was designed to scout out potential superstars at a very young age and give them a serious head-start, so that by the time they were old enough to serve in the military, they were already capable of bringing a lot of game to the table.

  They came to me when I was seventeen, not quite old enough to sign up myself, but old enough to enlist if my parents consented. Mom and Dad were only too happy to sign. They’d long since reached the end of their rope with me. They probably felt like prisoners in their own home, with a psychopath lurking in the shadows… and frankly, they weren’t far off.

  At first, the Army was a perfect fit. It was a structured training environment full of potential to practice getting good at any number of new skills. That was all I wanted; to get better at what I did. To keep ramping up my abilities.

  They fast-tracked me through my training. I was already light years ahead of the other recruits in terms of physical fitness and hand to hand combat training. As enhanced as my hand-eye coordination was, I breezed through basic marksmanship and the rest of combat training.

  That pattern continued, though Advanced Infantry School, Airborne School, all of the schools. I set a number of records while earning my Ranger tab. Special Forces selection was a walk in the park.

  My instructors were thrilled. I was the first Adept to join the service; that’s what they kept telling me. I was a trail blazer; they hoped that more young people would take up Physical Magic and join up for Uncle Sam.

  I didn’t care about any of that. All I wanted were more challenges. The rest of it… duty, honor, country, service… those were nothing but buzzwords to me, pretty wrapping paper to cover up the real reason I was there: to be better than everybody else.

  And I was. Over and over again, I would excel past the capabilities of my instructors or, once I got into combat units, my peers.

  People started to complain that I wasn’t a team player. That I ignored orders or refused to wait on my team once I felt like I had surpassed them. They were right, but at the time, I told myself that they were jealous of my superior abilities.

  They tried their best to rein me in. Once I completed the training process to earn that coveted Green Beret, I was assigned to a counter-terrorism unit in the Middle East.

  We hunted down and killed bad guys, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I hated being off mission; as soon as we took a target down, I was already itching for the next one.

  As before, I quickly developed to the point where the others were slowing me down. At least, that’s what I thought. And, they tried to rein me in. My CO… a real hard-ass with a reputation for discipline… called me out, told me to quit being a prima donna, fall in line and be a part of the team like everyone else.

  He was trying to help me. I realize that now. But back then, he seemed like an old and slow man who was dragging me down with his jealousy and his rules and his bullshit. So I told him to go fuck himself.

  That doesn’t really go over too well in the Army. He threatened to throw me in the brig for insubordination, which I took as a sign of weakness. I knew that any other person under his command who disrespected him like I had, he’d kick the shit out of them to get them back in line.

  “I’ll tell you what, sir,” I said, stepping right up into his face. “You kick my ass, right here and now, and I’ll do anything you say. I fucking dare you.”

  He couldn’t back down. He had to make an example of me. And he tried to.

  I wish he’d succeeded. Maybe that would’ve shaken me out of my arrogance and kept me from becoming what I became.

  Instead, I broke his back. It took six seconds.

  After that, nobody in SOCOM really wanted to work with me. I was too wild, too uncontrollable. I felt that since I could run ci
rcles around everyone in every measurable way, I shouldn’t have to listen to them. Makes for a terrible soldier.

  But there was one group that had a lot of interest in having me. This group didn’t have an official designation; they existed between the lines in order to do the ugly work that nobody wanted to admit to doing.

  As you might imagine, I was a dream operative for black ops. I know how I look. I’m thin and most men call me pretty. I look a little like a runway model or one of those ballerinas I used to worship as a little girl. And looking like that makes most people think I’m harmless at first glance.

  So my handlers could put me in a cocktail dress and walk me into just about anywhere, unarmed, and no security in the world would ever identify me as a threat. And all I needed to do, was get alone with the target for a second, and before they knew what was happening, I could snap their neck like a twig.

  I killed far and wide for the government, or at least, that dark piece of the government that does terrible things when nobody’s looking. And I didn’t care who the target was. It got to the point where I didn’t see them as people any more, just as targets. They ceased to be living, breathing, thinking, feeling people. They were creatures so weak, so slow, so clumsy, they couldn’t possibly belong to the same species as me. I was beyond them, and so I was beyond caring about them. They were like sheep, or cattle.

  And then I finally crossed the line and did the unforgiveable. My last target wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t even sure what he’d done to get a bullseye painted on him. Didn’t care. They gave me an address and a picture, and orders for termination with extreme prejudice.

  What that means is, anybody other than the target that’s there, whether they’re getting in the way, or simply standing around admiring the scenery… they go too.

  I slipped into his house after dinner time. He was in the kitchen and never saw me coming. Then his wife walked in, just as his body dropped.

  She had only enough time for her eyes to get big before I was on her. I hit her across the side of her neck with a knife hand strike and snapped her spine.