“Course, if your shift is on the sleep rotation, then you don’t got to worry,” Kezil said, breaking me out of considering precisely that worry. “Rotates between chambers, unless things get really bad. And if you’re still in the bunks at that point, a little bit of heat’s gonna be the least of your problems.”

“Lovely,” I said, shaking my head. There was no way I’d be using a similar design. Had to be better ways to do it.

“Well, come on then,” Kezil said, leading me further along the ship.

There was really only one thing left to see, at least for the major parts of the ship.

The engines.

Honestly, they were kinda disappointing, on first glance. Then Kezil revealed they were using some sort of mana-blocking paint that kept me from inspecting the underlying enchantments.

Most of the engine was hidden under painted panels. If Kezil was to be believed, I’d be learning about both the panels and the engine in depth before I finished the trial.

“It’s a bloody travesty, is what it is,” Kezil said as we stood looking up at the crosswalks that ran back and forth above us.

“What is?” I asked, squinting.

“The whole design. Most advanced ship in Terra Vista’s history, and they throw in a five hundred year old manastream engine,” Kezil said, shaking his fist upwards. “Bloody politics. Council never should’ve been allowed to make ‘suggestions’.”

“If it’s five hundred years old, shouldn’t that mean it’s reliable?”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Kezil said, shaking his head. Then he gestured above us, to the dozens of people actively working on the engines. “That look reliable to you?”

“It is a lot of maintenance,” I allowed, nodding.

“A bloody travesty,” he said again, shaking his head. “Well, best get to your aptitude test, so I can see what habits I’m gonna have to break.”

I nodded, following behind him as we went to the actual final part of the ship. The R&R section.

To my surprise, instead of a normal cafeteria, it was closer to a food court. There were only six restaurants, but they all smelled good. I didn’t normally have to eat inside Conflict’s trials, but I was kinda looking forward to the fact I could.

Kezil pulled out an enchanted pad and handed it over to me.

Then, as I started reading, he went off to get food.

It was a multiple choice exam. Super easy to complete. Tap the right answer, then confirm.

I’d barely gotten started when Kezil returned with two plates stacked high with food. Pushing one towards me, he sat down and tucked into his place.

I set the tablet to the side to do the same. Kezil glared at me for a second, but didn’t say anything.

Turned out I was right. It was good. Worth taking a break for.

I looked across the table at Kezil, and fought off a frown. He seemed so… real. Had Conflict copied him? Or was it using a soul it had captured? Maybe it was Conflict itself, playing the role.

Whatever it was, the dynamic personality was going to make the following days easier to tolerate. And even with only a few minutes on the tablet, I’d realized I was going to be here for a long while.

There were questions on concepts I’d barely read about, nevermind understood. I was hoping I had a better grasp of the practical side, even if I didn’t get the terminology.

By the time I was finished, I was confident in maybe ten percent of the questions, with a shaky understanding of another third.

“Let me see,” Kezil said, reaching forward and plucking the pad out of my hand.

I raised my eyes as he tapped a couple quick settings and my answers were highlighted, either yellow or blue. Didn’t take long to figure out that blue was for the sections I’d gotten right.

At first, I’d thought yellow was for the parts I’d gotten wrong, but after the third time Kezil tapped the button then tapped in notes, I realized they were all for sections I had a shaky grip on.

All the red areas I’d been expecting were arranged together at the end.

“Well, at least your head isn’t too far up your own exhaust port,” Kezil said, nodding slightly. “Lacking in a few weird areas, but guess that’s what happens when they send me a freebound Shaper’s apprentice as an enchantineer instead of someone who came up through the guild. Almost good enough to clean the waste disposal units.”

Considering some of the things he’d said when he’d been showing me the bathrooms and attached showers, that was even less of a compliment than it sounded like.

After a few more minutes of tapping away at the pad, he pushed to his feet, waving me to follow him.

We moved all the way to the very front of the ship, the nose where all the sensors were packed in. Soon as we were there, he started taking me through each and every attachment point, enchantment, and design principle used.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I’d been right about not knowing what most of it did. One of its most important features was tracking the flow of mana ahead of the ship, to ensure that the Dauntless didn’t slip out of the manastream.

When night actually came, I had to suppress my surprise. There wasn’t usually a way to keep track of time inside the trials. It was even stranger since I didn’t get tired, which gave me even more time to investigate the tablet he gave me.

There was a lot of other stuff inside the tablet, though most of it was random Terra Vistan propaganda under the guise of fiction or history.

Kezil hadn’t been kidding about how thorough he’d intended to be. Every minute from dawn to dusk was spent learning the inner workings of the Dauntless. The longer we went, the more confident I got. There was a lot I had known but he had different terminology for.

My confidence didn’t always get his stamp of approval, especially on the fourth day of his instruction when I contradicted him.

We were having lunch at the little food court again, both of having finished our meals. The morning had been spent going over the design of the Leaves.

They were an incredible design. They were essentially balloons that relied on cupping the filtered air beneath them, which had a special mix of gases which gave it the green vapor look. They even had enchantments to keep the high pressure air in place. It was incredibly mana efficient, though also highly prone to disruption if mana ran low.

Not a problem along the Front or while following the heavier manastreams, though it kept the Dauntless from being deployed to most other places.

When he’d mentioned being stuck to manastreams and the Front, I’d mentioned the fact it could be designed to work without mana.

“Lift can be generated with sufficient forward thrust, even without magic,” I said, starting to fold up my napkin.

“Kid, that’s not how any of this works,” Kezil said, narrowing his eyes as he watched me fold.

“No?” I asked, looking down at my poorly folded paper airplane. The cafeteria’s napkins really weren’t meant for the task. Then I shrugged, picking it up and giving it a toss. It barely made it twelve feet, but I still felt it proved my point.

At his soft chuckle, I rolled my eyes. “Kid, paper’s light. No way that’d work for a ship.”

“Maybe not exclusively, on a ship this big and heavy,” I conceded, starting to sketch on the pad that he’d issued me for my lessons. “Though it’s already used on the Dauntless, even if not very well.”

When he raised an eyebrow but didn’t object, I quickly drafted out the way that air flowed over and under the Leaves when the airship was moving at speed. Beside it I showed a more typical design for an airplane wing, showing how the shorter distance under the wing created a higher pressure that caused lift.

He squinted at it, then shook his head. “Principle’s simple enough, but how do you expect to get enough force to move forward without mana?”

“I mean, there are ways to store energy,” I said, waving a hand. “Burn stuff and capture the exhaust heat through steam or compression or even store lightning in a battery.”

“That sounds like using mana but with extra steps,” Kezil said, rubbing his chin, his milky white eye drifting in my direction while the other remained locked on my sketch. “Still, I suppose I could see how it’d work. Might even be worth looking into, for when enchantments get disrupted. Not for the Dauntless herself, of course. But if we had a couple Runners that could stay in the air after the mana was stripped off em… that’d help with the damn Warwalkers.”

“The… what?” I asked, looking up from my sketch.

“Warwalkers,” Kezil said again, tapping at his pad for a few seconds before handing it to me. “Wander out of the Front every couple years. Free Hills send them in to clear out the monsters in their section. They get damaged after a while, then either end up in Terra Vista or the Howling Wastes.”

I barely registered the words as I inspected the design. A supersized robot stared back at me. One that resembled Conflict, except far more mechanical.

Closer inspection revealed it was basically an oversized combat suit. According to the notes, a pair of poor souls were strapped into the combat core, then sent into the Front with the suit protecting them. It ran off the ambient mana and was effective against even Dragon-souled threats, as long as it could get its hands on them.

“They’re never the same,” Kezil said, flicking the pad to show other designs. “I figure it has something to do with the core pair’s preferences, though some say it’s whoever’s building them.”

“Who is building them?” I asked, staring at a design that looked like a giant robotic scorpion. There was so much more for me to learn here than just the design of the Dauntless, I realized as I dove deeper. Which’d be great for repeat visits.

“No one knows for certain, though most figure it’s one of the mad Dragons,” Kezil said, pulling his tablet free of my hands.

Not discouraged, I opened my own tablet to continue browsing, only to discover it lacked the designs. “Don’t suppose I could keep looking through those?”

“Shouldn’t have let you see as much as I did,” Kezil said, pulling at his beard. “But once you get halfways competent, might just let ya.”

“Deal,” I said with a smile.

Soon we were back to the lessons.

After another week, he gave me access to the Warwalker designs. There wasn’t much I could learn from them in terms of new enchantments, since most of it wasn’t particularly advanced.

The engineering on display was impressive though, and it made much better nighttime reading than the Terra Vistan propaganda. Unfortunately, the most interesting aspect of the Warwalkers, their ability to disrupt enchantments, wasn’t included in any of the notes.

It took us three and a half weeks before we reached the massive engines that took up the last fifth of the ship.

“This is where the work really begins,” Kezil said, rubbing his hands together. “More to do on each of these monstrosities than the rest of the ship combined.”

I blanched slightly at that. Experiencing the day night cycle made the time I was spending inside the trial feel far more real than it had during my former design and creation sessions.

Would’ve been an understatement to say I was missing my family.

Kezil was alright, and even felt like a real person. But he was the only one. I’d talked to several of the others and… well, it was more accurate to say I’d attempted to talk to them. They moved around, and they talked to each other, sure enough, but none of them reacted to me.

With that in mind, I threw myself into the engines, even at night. It helped me understand them faster, though Kezil still tested me on my knowledge as we went.

The engines were, as Kezil had said, an atrocious design.

They created pulses of air, which built up a resonance that would then push the ship forward. On the surface, that was fine. Yet they were over-engineered to the point of being barely functional. Sure, they pushed the ship forward, but they could’ve been replaced with engines a third the size that had the same thrust. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the sloppy design of the resonance chambers meant they were constantly shaking themselves apart.

To my surprise, Kezil admitted that the resonance pulse system could actually be one of the best, especially for high altitude maneuvers. It just required such high tolerances during construction that most of the time it wasn’t worth it.

Despite their complexity I slowly proved my comprehension. After a month and a half inside the trial, Kezil took me out for a celebratory dinner, exclaiming loudly how proud he was of me, declaring my success.

Yet I couldn’t join him in his celebration.

I’d learned everything he had to teach me.

So… why was I still in the trial?