The Silver Calamity - Cover, Synopsis, and Chapter 1 - A Friendly Welcome (Patreon)

If you couldn't tell by now, I like jumping back and forth between new stories on Patreon and old. But I always go back to each story. It just might take a little while sometimes.

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Synopsis:

Roydan
The legendary city of hunters, spanning the size of an entire plane and commonly known to be the city with the largest number of dimensional rifts by quite the large amount. A regular non-magician can spend an entire year walking across it and still not reach even halfway to the other side.
But this is a city of hunters.
Whether they’re retired or active hunters, families and friends of hunters, or even entire guilds of hunters, you can find them all within this neutral city.
And hunters are all magicians who have crossed the threshold of Tier 1 at the very least, breaking past their base humanity with the help of the mana cores recovered from monsters within the rifts.

Now enters Silver, the youngest Tier 1 magician in existence with several secrets hidden behind his sleeve as he leaves the Dread Sovereignty to live in Roydan. As he leaves behind the shackles he was cloned into and enters a brand new world all of his own volition.
The only Silver and Antimagic dual mage in existence.

This is the start of Silver’s new existence outside of the Black Calamity’s control, and the beginning of his road to becoming the Silver Calamity himself.

But that road isn’t always an easy one, and it’s one that he must pave on his own.

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                                                                                                          Silver

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my fifteen years of life is that life is a fickle thing. One instant you can be locked in a room being forced to eat mana cores for a living until you’re strong enough to be of use, and the next…

A long beeping tone sounds from the ceiling of the tram I’m sitting in, followed by a woman’s voice coming through the speakers, “Attention all passengers! We will be arriving at District 94, Station 2 in five minutes. If you are getting off at this stop, then please be sure to check your belongings as you will not likely see this Dimensional Tram again. Thank you for traveling with the DT Service and we hope you enjoy your time in the city of hunters.”

…I’m sitting in a DT cart blankly staring out the window while heading to my new life, far away from him.

“Papa, is Roydan really full of hunters?” a little girl exclaims with a giddy tone in her voice from several seats in front of me. “Do you think we’ll be able to meet any?!”

I glance in their direction to see the girl’s father – judging by the little girl’s manner of address – trying to get her to talk more quietly before looking out the window again at the blue and purple waves streaming by outside in the dimensional barrier. If I had to guess, those two are probably a couple of tourists trying to see the city for themselves.

But from what Aunt Jenny said, I doubt it’ll be as exciting as they make it sound. Or rather, it would be exciting as long as a dimensional rift doesn’t open somewhere nearby them while they’re visiting.

Cause the chances of that happening are higher than most people seem to think.

After all, the city is full of hunters for a reason.

Putting those thoughts out of my mind for the moment, I focus on watching the few rift animals flying by outside of the tram like dolphins swimming in the sea. They have beautiful purple scales that practically sparkle from the lights of the tram passing by, and really do look just like the dolphins I’d seen once when Black took me with him to the ocean to test out my magic.

A shiver runs down my spine at that memory, but I do manage to take in some solace from the dolphins.

“Hello, sir?” I hear, bringing my attention back to my surroundings as I turn around to find a woman wearing the blue and purple uniform of the DT employees standing next to me with some sort of notebook or something held by both of her arms against her chest. She has long brown hair going down to her midback and equally brown eyes as she looks at my face. “Have you checked your belongings yet?”

I open my mouth to answer before pausing for a second and changing my mind on what I was gonna say.

No reason to tell her I don’t have any belongings besides what’s on me now.

“Yes, miss, thank you for checking,” I tell her with a slight nod of my head, making her smile in response – likely at my polite answer. But it turns out to be a not-so-good answer as it seems to get her to talk more.

And of course her eyes move to my hair and eyes right before doing so, which are the only features I didn’t get from Black during the cloning process.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have very pretty hair and eyes, sir?” she asks with a warm smile on her face.

I can’t help but raise my hand towards the pure silver strands falling slightly onto my forehead before giving her my best fake smile and answering, “From time to time. Thank you again, ma’am.” Albeit with a slight hint of finality to the way I say it this time, hoping she’ll take it and leave.

I’m really not that comfortable talking to people.

Fortunately for me, the woman seems to understand and smiles at me once more before nodding and continuing on to the next passenger.

I let out a sigh while turning back to the window and seeing my face in the reflection, including the same sharp features as my original, albeit at a younger age and with different colored eyes and hair. But my silver eyes and hair – from what I’m told at least – is because of the magic Black experimentally added into the cloning procedure to give me my Silver magic.

My eyes linger on, well, my eyes for a few seconds before I snap out of it and reach for the one belonging apart from my clothes that I do have. It’s a basic magic sword with an ice mana core as its base, letting me use it as a focus to recharge my mana.

Since I’m playing at being an ice magician and all.

I take a second to sense the mana inside of my mana pool; both the black and red, dirty feeling anti-magic mana, and the pale blue, chilly feeling ice magic that is the result of my silver magic temporarily taking on its form.

My thoughts are suddenly interrupted by the shaking of the entire cart, along with several loud noises and the sounds of guns being fired. So I narrow my eyes and stand up from my seat while the other passengers in the cart – most of whom are by appearance tourists – start to panic.

An attack on the DT just a few minutes before arrival? Are these attackers stupid or what?

“Attention passengers. Attention passengers,” the same voice from earlier repeats over the speakers of the tram in a much more panicked manner, “Tram cars 2, 3, and 7 are all currently under fire by pirates. If any of you are magicians, then we are more than happy to pay for your services.”

Cars 2, 3… and 7? Aren’t I in car 6 right now?

Ugh.

“Please keep calm everyone!” the same woman who was speaking to me earlier shouts out, “If you aren’t a magician, please either stay in your seats or hide beneath them for your own safety!” And when she notices me standing up from my seat, she immediately hurries over while saying, “Young man, please don’t-”

I flare my ice mana, making my eyes glow a faint blue in the process to prove my status as a magician. This startles her enough that she gasps. But she gathers her bearings quickly enough and asks, “Are you willing to help us? We’ll pay you 2000 credits.”

“Deal,” I tell her while walking over to the door to the seventh car, where I hear screams echoing from along with the sounds of gunfire.

While walking, I quietly mutter to myself, “Ice Coat,” to activate one of my Tier 1 spells, causing a thin barrier of ice to coat my skin. I then pause for a second in front of the door before grabbing it and opening it, showing the narrow gap between the tram cars.

I walk the few feet of the gap and yank the door open, revealing several men and women in what looks like scrap armor firing sub machine guns and pistols into a barrier set into place by a magician on the other side of the car. The magician has on a red set of what looks like magic armor, with red chainmail covering his body underneath a thin red cloth that reveals the chainmail in some places. It has several flickers of flames jumping from place to place on it, marking the man’s element as fire without much doubt.

My entrance seems to attract everyone’s attention, including the magician who simply grins at me while his long red hair flares out behind him from the heat being expelled by the barrier he’s using to protect himself and the passengers from the bullets.

Without a hint of hesitation, I drop down to my knees just before an array of bullets fly by overhead, following which I raise my hand palm facing outward and mutter, “Ice Bolt.” This sends a bolt of liquid ice straight at the pirates, freezing a lot of the bullets midair in the process as I sprint forward whilst still crouching to avoid bullets.

The pirates all start swearing, and a glance behind me makes me glad I closed the door to the other car as I see all of the dents in the closed door. I quickly make sure to roll out of the way before turning back and finding a sword piercing straight through where I was standing. So I draw my own sword out of its sheath, revealing the faint, pale blue glow it gives off and the nice silver steel of the blade as I swing it to bisect the wrist of the man who had swung his own blade at me while he’s still trying to draw it out of the car floor.

A loud scream echoes through the car, but I ignore it to move out of the way to hide behind the now-handless-pirate right before another round of bullets hits where I was just at. But the pirates don’t seem to care about their own as they move their guns to spray bullets straight at the man’s back, tearing a path through his gut and splattering blood on my face.

Good thing I was crouching down low or that’d hit me.

“Burst,” I mutter right as the pirates are lowering their gun’s firing angle to hit me, sending a large wave of ice mana outwards from my body to freeze all of the bullets and the pirates’ guns, along with their hands too. But before I can even get up to go finish them, the fire barrier flickers out and the man sends a long stream of flames to engulf most of the pirates, leaving just one left alive.

Out of curiosity, I mutter, “inspect,” to see the man’s mana capacity, just to check on his Tier. And surprisingly, he actually ends up being Tier 2.

Huh. Didn’t expect to run into a Tier 2 magician already.

Seemingly uncaring of the non-magicians behind him trying to thank him, the man just makes a beeline straight towards me.

Guess I’m gonna have to talk to him.