Luc and Marie weren’t the only two taking the mage test. A magical boy a few years older than them had signed up for the test as well and sat waiting with the rest of them for their proctor to come in and talk to them before the test began.

  A shaky breath filled Luc’s lungs, surprised at how nervous she was. She’d never been nervous about magical girl work before, even when first signing up. Maybe it was the fact that it had been a necessity, something she needed to do just to make ends meet and didn’t have the option to be nervous about doing well. This was different. It wasn’t just about making money, it was about making a difference, and taking another step toward getting into Mage Academy.

  She also didn’t know what exactly the difference would be between the work they were doing now, and how that work would change once they leveled up.

  Luc pressed herself into the arm wrapped around her shoulders, Marie’s arm curling tighter around her at the increased contact.

  “Nervous?” There was a tremor to the question even as Marie tried to make it into a joke.

  “A bit,” Luc admitted. She stared at the front of the room, eyes on the magical boy on his phone. With him in mind, she kept her voice low as she asked her next question. “Do you know what the difference is between what we’re doing now and grade two work?”

  “You don’t?” Marie asked, and Luc rolled her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I did.”

  “A little late to be asking, don’t you think?” Marie’s eyes danced as her fingers drifted up and down Luc’s bare arms. No one had said anything about them needing to wear their magical girl outfits for the test, but working with magic outside of uniform felt like going to school naked.

  “I’m sorry, not everyone has a well of knowledge about the mage commission like you,” Luc muttered.

  Marie accepted Luc’s words with a nod. “The grades are how they decide what threats we can deal with. So grade one, magically mutated natural creatures, like the giant bees we dealt with.”

  Luc nodded. Those did seem to be the most common problem they dealt with, and generally the least dangerous.

  “Grade two is non-sapient, non-natural magical creatures,” Marie said. “So anything that’s not a naturally occurring animal, like those imps that show up sometimes.”

  After a moment of thought, Luc spoke. “Or the werewolf?”

  Marie nodded. “The werewolf was definitely grade two. It’s why I stepped in to help you that day.”

  “Sure, helped,” Luc muttered. Marie’s gaze slid sideways onto her, the expression one she ignored. “We deal with those things all the time, though.”

  “Yeah, we do kind of straddle the line between grade one and grade two already,” Marie said. “The fight Rainbow Blade ended up ending would have been grade three, I think.”

  “Because of how many there were?”

  “No, because it was sentient,” Marie said. “Grade three is sentient magical creatures. Four would be other magical girls, or untrained magic users. Grade five is mages or mage creations, so it’ll be a while before we ever get there.”

  “Is that as high as it goes?”

  Marie nodded, and Luc fell into silence, considering the idea. Mages were an entirely different class, but Luc could think of instances where a magical girl defeated a trained mage. And instances where a mage was so far beyond the baseline that they were barely even human anymore.

  It was hard to imagine herself at that level, as a mage at the top of her game. She still wasn’t convinced, the way Marie was, that she’d get into Mage Academy. If she did, what would she do?

  “Are there other mages with powers like mine?” Luc asked, the question slipping out as they waited.

  Luc could practically see the idea working through Marie’s mind as she thought. “There are plenty of people working in mage tech, so there have to be.”

  Her nose wrinkled in disgust before she could stop it. Sitting behind a desk or whatever those corporate types did wasn’t what she had in mind when she imagined using her future. She wasn’t taking this test so she could hide the hours away making tools; she wanted to be out helping people.

  The door at the end of the room opened. A woman Luc had never seen before stepped through, surveying the small group waiting for her before speaking.

  “Thank you all for signing up for the grade two test. Your tests have been individually designed to test your abilities based off of your power and your career with the commission so far. Please, follow me to your test chambers.”

  With a gentle squeeze, Marie let Luc go and rose to her feet. A smile flashed across her face, there and gone in a moment as they made eye contact before following the woman out.

  She deposited the boy in his chamber first, then opened up a door for Marie. Luc stayed silent but gave Marie a quick thumb’s up before the door closed behind her.

  The woman opened up a final door for Luc and motioned her inside. With one last deep breath, Luc stepped through, exhaling as the door shut and locked behind her.

  She didn’t say anything about what the test would be.

  Luc stepped further into the empty room, approaching the single feature in the room: a table filling most of the space. Before her hand met the surface, she sensed it: the magic laying underneath.

  This wasn’t a piece of her power she used often, but when she pressed her palm against the table, she could sense the intricacies of the mage tech it was made of. Was this her test?

  It didn’t quite make sense. If the point of this test was to determine if they had the power to deal with magical creatures, what did the table have to do with it?

  The surface of the table shifted, turning from a cold, marble-like glass to a clear pane giving her a view of what hid beneath. At first, it looked a bit like a child’s toy, with multi-color blocks, puzzle pieces, and shapes secured beneath the glass. Its purpose revealed itself as words wrote themselves on the tabletop.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Use the tools provided to solve the puzzle and unlock your next task.

  A door on the side of the table popped open with a hiss and a drawer slid out. Luc rolled her eyes without meaning to as she peaked at the drawer. What had she been nervous for? This was going to be a piece of cake.

  Pulling out the provided toolbox from the drawer, Luc considered the problem at hand. Puzzles were simple, no matter how complex they seemed, because there was always a single answer. No matter how tricky or complex, twisted or seemingly contradictory, a puzzle had one answer. That meant she had far fewer options she needed to consider and be prepared for.

  Luc reached for her yellow utility belt as she began to assemble her tool. For this first puzzle, the only thing that made sense was moving all the pieces and connecting them.

  She removed a multi-bit screwdriver from her utility belt, taking the tip out of it and placing it back into its case. Each piece was held in place by a magnet, and she quickly fastened a metal washer to it, fitting it around the tip. With that in place, she funneled magic into the tool, polarizing the magnet with magical energy.

  Pressing the now larger tip of the screwdriver to the glass tabletop, Luc began to move the pieces underneath. It didn’t take much to move all the pieces together, forming a large key underneath the glass that unlocked the tabletop itself.

  Folding the top of the table up, Luc grabbed the completed puzzle piece and turned it over in her hands. Her fingers ran over seams in the pieces of hard plastic, fitting together strangely.

  She popped the first piece off the key she’d made and undid the piece of plastic with her fingernail.

  Deconstructing the puzzle piece she’d just made, Luc began remaking the pieces of plastic. Halfway through, she discovered the code marking each piece, and grinned. They expected her to need clues to be able to figure it out?

  Luc pieces together the plastic and wound around the room, discovering the slot it fit into. It slid into the wall without resistance, unlocking a panel built into the wall.

  The section of wall folded outward, revealing another puzzle built into it.

  Is this just an escape room?

  Luc had never been to an escape room before, although she’d seen videos of them. She’d always suspected that she’d have too easy of a time if she tried to do one, and this test was only proving that.

  The puzzle in the wall demanded a more physical use of magic, rather than relying on tools she could build. It wasn’t what Luc was used to, but she pieced together the puzzle and unlocked two things. A long, hollow tube with a cap covering each end, and a door.

  The door that appeared the moment she finished the third puzzle led her into an adjoining room, practically charged with magic. It prickled against her skin the moment she stepped inside, raising the hair along the back of her neck.

  Finally, a task more like what she’d expected.

  A magical creature, roughly the size of a cat but with too many limbs and eyes, launched itself across the room at her.

  Luc ducked through the open doorway at her back, pressing herself against the wall as the creature shot past her. It scrambled against the floor as Luc slipped into the second room, taking a quick sprint across it to reach the far wall.

  The tube was just a piece of a larger tool, the rest of the components inside the second room. They were making this far too easy on her, giving her everything she needed to destroy the little creature.

  Her hands worked practically of their own accord to fit all the pieces together into a short magical gun. The tube she’d unlocked fit into it like a magazine, her magic ready and waiting to flood through it.

  The large conjuration ran back into the room, and Luc aimed without a second thought. The gun pulsed with magic as she fired, hitting it once, then twice before it went down.

  The conjuration let out half a yell before exploding into dust.

  Luc lowered the gun to her side with disgust. If she’d built it from scratch, it wouldn’t have needed a second shot to kill that thing. Was the test trying to slow her down on purpose, or were the tools just bad?

  She let the gun fall to the ground with a clatter as a small panel opened up from the wall. Ready for another puzzle, Luc grabbed the scroll and unrolled it without hesitation.

  Instead of another test, Luc was met with a spell, and congratulations.

  Her eyebrows shot all the way to her hairline. That was it? Really?

  Suspicion holding firm, Luc began memorizing the spell on the paper. It wasn’t so different from what had happened at her first mage test, but she still hadn’t expected it.

  It didn’t take long to commit the magical formation to memory, something oddly familiar about it, and Luc activated it for the first time. Magic flooded into it, filling its facets in a way that made her skin tingle. It continued to tingle until a small space opened up in front of her hand, empty and ready for whatever she wanted to hold inside.

  That’s why it’s familiar, Luc realized, thinking back to the first spell the commission had her memorize. The spell that connected her magical girl outfit and allowed her transformation had to exist at least partially in the same sub dimension as this holding space.

  With the spell memorized, Luc rolled the scroll back up and placed it back into the compartment it came from. As the compartment closed, a second door opened up.

  Luc strode through, ready for another test, and found herself coming face to face with their proctor. The woman blinked, clearly caught off guard by Luc’s entrance, then pulled herself together.

  “You were quick,” the woman said lightly. “As I’m sure you assume, you’ve proved you’re ready for grade two mage work and reaped the reward. I will update your credentials in the system before the end of the day.”

  “Thank you,” Luc said, still struggling to believe there weren’t more tasks waiting for her. “Is Marie done?”

  “You’re the first to finish,” the woman said.

  “Can I wait here until she’s done?”

  The woman nodded, and Luc took a seat, twining her fingers together as she waited. What is Marie going through right now? If she had to deal with the same puzzles, she’d probably have a hard time, but Luc couldn’t imagine that was the case. There was no point in testing Marie the same way they tested her, their powers were complete and total opposites.

  No, whatever Marie was doing, it was different from what Luc had faced.

  She had no way of knowing how much time passed when a door opened and Marie stepped through, practically shining with pride.

  Luc leapt up from her seat as the proctor jumped into the same spiel she’d given Luc. Marie’s eyes slid past the woman and landed on Luc, smile impossibly brightening the moment their gazes met.

  The moment their proctor stopped speaking, Marie slipped past her and broke into a jog.

  “You beat me!” Marie exclaimed as Luc met her, letting the girl grab her and pull her in.

  “It wasn’t that hard.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Marie said, rolling her eyes. “No test is too difficult for Miss Gadget.”

  “Shut up.”

  “No chance,” Marie said. “You got the spell, right?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s going to be so helpful,” Marie said. “You’re actually going to be able to carry around tools now. And I’ll be able to carry around more.”

  “As if you need more,” Luc muttered, but she could already see how useful the new spell was going to be. There were a few tools back at her apartment she could shove into the holding space and carry around, ones that could make quite a difference. “What now? Want to go out and take our first official grade two job?”

  “They won’t update us until the end of the day,” Marie said with a shake of her head. “Actually, I was thinking…” She slowed down, voice shaking in a way it hadn’t before their test. “Would you like to have dinner with me? And meet my dad?”

  Meet her dad? Luc had already met the commissioner, and Marie knew that. Did she mean meeting him as her… What, girlfriend? No wonder she sounded more nervous. That was terrifying.

  “He’s not scary, I promise.”

  Luc sucked in a deep breath, forcing down her nerves, and smiled. If she could face magical monsters, she could face her girlfriend’s father. “Dinner sounds good.”