Hugo’s first instinct was to lie. There was no way that his family was ready to hear that little Xhosa had over twenty in strength and dexterity. He knew that no one was a light mage, so they wouldn’t be able to contradict his lie. On the other hand, he knew that the school or whatever education system they had here would have light mages on hand. It was probably best that he was honest from the get go. Or at least as honest as he could be. He pulled up his stat screen and read off his stats. He left off the fact that he already had two skills.

Xhosa Bandile [Domainless]

Strength 21

Dexterity 20

Resilience 8

Regeneration 9

Intelligence 12

Wisdom 11

Charisma 9

Perception 10

Rank 0

345/100 Points

Health 8/8

Mana 2/2

Skills: Mana Dart, Mana Vision

His aunt paused as she was writing things down and said, “What?”

Hugo repeated himself.

“Don’t lie to me, it isn’t funny,” Cebisa said.

Hugo threw up his hands. Maybe he should have told her a believable lie. He said, “I am not lying, that’s what it says.” He juggled a few pans and lifted his father’s chair with one hand. Once he was convinced that everyone actually believed him, he set his father down.

Her hands shook as she wrote down the stats. “Well then. Perhaps the curse really is broken,” Cebisa said. She stared at the paper for a moment before saying, “Looks like you have enough points to rank up twice. Go ahead and do that now. We need to have you allocate them before you bid.”

Hugo nodded and ranked up. It was so easy, manipulating the screen as a nox. The Acomarian system really was made for them.

“Alright, that should have gotten you four free points. Right?” When he nodded, she continued, “You need to put one in dexterity, resilience, wisdom, and charisma.”

Hugo hesitated. “Why should I spread them out like that? Whatever domain I get, I will want to tailor my stats towards that one, not throw them around, right?”

His aunt shook her head, “No, you have to have your stats symmetrical.”

Hugo looked at his screen and saw what she was talking about. That would make the stat screen look nice. “That’s kind of silly. I want my stats to be useful, not look pretty.”

“Trust me. This matters. One of the reasons I got rejected was because of my uneven stats. It doesn’t matter how you allocate your points later, you need to have matching stats for bid day,” Cebisa said.

Now it made sense. His aunt must have been one of the few family members to get soulmarked, but she hadn’t gotten a domain. It must have been so frustrating for her to be so close and yet so far. Apparently if you didn’t get an apprenticeship, you didn’t get a domain. That meant that this bid day was even more important than Hugo had imagined.

“Please Xhosa, trust my sister. She knows what she is talking about,” his mother said, pleading in her eyes.

Hugo nodded. He decided that they probably knew better than him what it would take to land an apprenticeship. He allocated the stats and said, “Alright, done. What is next?”

Xhosa Bandile [Domainless]

Strength 21

Dexterity (21)

Resilience (9)

Regeneration 9

Intelligence 12

Wisdom (12)

Charisma (10)

Perception 10

Rank 2

45/300 Points

Health 8/(18)

Mana 2/2

Skills: Mana Dart, Mana Vision

“We have to decide on which competitions to focus on. A few weeks ago, that was a difficult discussion. Now it just seems like wasted conversations. With your stats we are going to focus on attracting formation and barrier masters. That means nguni and iliwa,” Celbisa said.

Seeing Hugo’s blank look, she clarified, “Stick fighting and rock throwing.”

When Hugo nodded, she turned to his mother and said, “Themba, you can teach him nguni, again. I will see if I can find some good sized rocks for iliwa.” She got up, taking her paper with her. She didn’t even say goodbye, distracted by Hugo’s stats.

“Come on Xhosa, we can go out to the backyard again,” Themba said.

Hugo followed her out the back door to see a small deck and a yard full of plants. He thought the yard was full of weeds at first, then he saw that there were fruits on some of them. This was their garden, he just didn’t recognize a lot of the plants.

His mother threw him four short sticks, which Hugo easily caught. He was glad for the juggling practice earlier. Each stick was a few inches thick and about two feet long with a short handle. He swung them experimentally. They felt familiar. Perhaps the practice Xhosa had done earlier was lending him some muscle memory.

Themba’s lessons quickly disabused him of that notion. She had mundane dexterity, but she was much better at this than he was. She constantly distracted him with an attack on one side, only to sneak in a strike on the other. After a little while, she stepped back.

“I am sorry, Xhosa. You are much worse than before. We will have to go back to the basics,” Themba said.

She led him through a set of exercises. He practiced attacking and defending simultaneously, going through the same motions over and over again. Eventually, his mother called a halt. It was after their normal bed time, and she needed to get up early again in the morning. As he fell into bed, he thanked his soulmarked regeneration that would fix his bruises by the morning.

The next day, Hugo practiced his stick fighting and rock throwing. The iliwa competition was apparently just throwing large rocks into small circles. It didn’t take him long to catch on. It was clearly his best event, it seemed like he had a good chance of getting a formation apprenticeship.

The following morning, his aunt accompanied him to the apprenticeship bid. His parents really wanted to come along, but they were needed at the shop. They promised to have a celebratory dinner with him that night.

They joined a line waiting outside an ornamental building. It was a three story open air building with hundreds of people milling about inside. Celia handled the registration and led them inside.

Hugo was surprised to see that there was a hole in the ceiling that reached to the roof. Both stories above had a square balcony, one above the other. More than a hundred nox with heavy robes were looking at the people below. Celia pulled him to the side and pointed everything out.

“Alright. There are eight stations set up on the ground floor, and you are going to have to compete on all of them, even the ones you know you will do poorly at. The masters on the second floor will be watching you compete, and at the end of the competition they will take turns bidding on promising applicants. Almost everyone gets chosen, only a few unlucky each year,” Celia said with a frown. She was obviously one of those that didn’t get chosen in a previous year.

“What about the third floor?” Hugo said. There was another balcony up there with a few dozen people milling about.

“Don’t worry about them. The third floor holds the grand masters. They only pick a few apprentices each year, and it’s always a gifted noble child. You need to focus on impressing the masters on the second floor. We are going to start you off with your weakest event and work your way around to end up at the iliwa. You want the formation masters to have your rock throw on the top of their mind when they go to bid,” Celia said.

Together they walked over to the section of the building that tested for resilience and regeneration. Hugo didn’t even know what these events were called. Everyone milled about while they waited for the event to start.

After a little while, a soft bell rang out and a hush fell across the crowd. After a few beats, the masters on the top floor started chanting.

“Masters who have earned our place above, we salute you.

“To those who are about to compete, we salute you.

“Winners and losers alike, we salute you!”

They ended their chant with a thunderous clap and the crowd cheered. Immediately afterwards, the competitions started. Hugo’s first event was something to do with alchemy. Hugo didn’t really understand what he was supposed to do. There were several ingredients arrayed on the tables and they were given the task of creating an arnica tincture. They weren’t given any other instructions, just the name.

Knowing that he didn’t have a hope of doing well, Hugo just threw together a random assortment of barks and leaves. He poured in some high proof alcohol and swirled it around. It quickly changed color and smelled earthy.

Hugo went up to the judges and there was already a line of applicants. The three judges inspected the tinctures, smelled them and looked through the bottles. Then they asked the applicants to drink their own concoction. Hugo paled. He wasn’t sure if he trusted himself enough to down his own creation.

Luckily, an applicant in front of him showed him that wouldn’t be necessary. He simply refused to drink and the judges accepted that. Hugo imagined that hurt their chances, but he didn’t plan on ever being an alchemist. He likewise refused to drink his tincture.

As he was walking to the next station, Celia said, “That was embarrassing. I thought I taught you better than that. Please try harder on the next events. If you can show the masters above that you excel in many areas, more formation masters will bid on you.”

Hugo nodded seriously. There was no way he could have done better with the alchemy test, but he would try harder on the remaining seven.

The competition for life magic felt really odd to Hugo. They were asked to stand there and get hit by spike balls while answering anatomy questions. Hugo knew human anatomy fairly well because of his first aid classes, but he got tripped up by the differences in nox biology. He hadn’t known before today that they had two hearts. After he failed, they inspected his cuts and bruises. It seemed like a good way to test for someone’s regeneration stat, but he wished they would have just asked him.

The next competition was testing his wisdom stat for the ritual domain. At first the competition seemed like a simple memory test, before he realized that he was also competing against three other applicants at the same time. They took turns creating an increasingly complex ritual, replicating what the others had done before and adding one step. Hugo went farther than he expected, but still made a mistake by placing the ram’s horn facing the wrong way. The judge caught the error right away and sent him on his way.

They tested his intelligence with a game that everyone seemed to know but him. It involved four applicants in a rune covered field, pressing runes to attack the other four players. When the contestants hit this rune over here, three corners erupted in fire. That rune over there sent lightning whips across the ground. Complicating things was that the runes seemed to work at random, lighting up and dimming every so often. You could stand near the freeze rune for most of the match and it would never light up so you could attack.

There must have been some pattern though, because some students absolutely dominated at the competition. They seemed two steps ahead of everyone else, arriving at a new attack rune just as it lit up. When it was Hugo’s turn, he was resigned to a bit of pain. Most of the attacks were unavoidable if you didn’t know they were coming. But then Hugo realized he might have a way to see the attacks coming.

Just before the match started, he activated his secret weapon. Mana Sight. Just as he had hoped, there were tendrils of mana connecting to the runes on the court, and Hugo could see them expand and contract. With this new knowledge, he was able to avoid the lightning whips. He immediately countered with fireballs, taking out a different contestant right away. The other two contestants were fast and jumped away as he got close to various runes. But eventually, he left the court victorious.

With a huge smile on his face, he walked over to the light mage event. They blindfolded and put earmuffs on everyone and had them walk through a maze. Throughout the maze, nox would jump out and attack the contestants with bells. If you were hit, you were out. The only way to make it through the maze was to have amazingly strong perception. Or a cheat, like mana sight.

The skill allowed him to see the bobbing ball of mana in the attacker’s soul core and avoid them all. He made it halfway through the maze before the skill cut out. With only two points of mana, Hugo couldn’t keep it up for long. He was disqualified shortly thereafter.

Celia came up to him afterwards and congratulated him. “You are doing really well. Keep this up and you will create a bidding war.”

The next competition was for shadow mages and tested their charisma. Unlike humans, the nox considered shadow mages to be perfectly valid. Just like the last test, there was a maze. In this one the contestants were expected to sneak along, avoiding the maze guardians. Instead of the guardians attacking, they just talked, and the contestants had to convince them to pass. Usually by flirting. Hugo got caught early on in the maze and his flirting just made the guardian laugh in his face.

When that blow to his pride was over, it was time to move on to the final two events. First up was the dexterity event, nguni, or as Hugo still thought of it, stick fighting. He was feeling kind of confident. He knew that his mother was still better than him at it, but he had twenty points of dexterity. That had to count for something.

When he was almost to the front of the line, there was a bit of commotion behind him and his opponent was swapped for someone new. It was Meluzmi, the angry boy from in front of the post office.