The Atomic Archmage: Hacking the Skill Panel with Science

The Obsidian Tower was universally regarded as the most secure structure on the campus of the Royal Magic Academy. Built from black, magically reinforced dragon-stone, it was designed to withstand a direct siege from a hostile army. Its heavy glass balcony doors were enchanted with Tier-3 locking wards, supposedly impenetrable to anyone without the Headmaster’s master key.

Sylvia Von-Rose bypassed the "impenetrable" wards in exactly fourteen seconds.

Crouched in the freezing autumn wind on the stone balcony, the fifteen-year-old prodigy of the Crimson Duke let out a soft, haughty scoff as the heavy glass door clicked open with a faint hiss of released mana.

The Capital relies too heavily on brute force, Sylvia thought, echoing a sentiment she didn't realize she shared with the boy she was currently trying to burgle. A Tier-3 locking ward is powerful, but if you simply apply a microscopic thread of hyper-concentrated thermal mana to the internal tumblers, the metal expands and the lock clicks itself open.

Sylvia pulled her dark velvet cloak tighter over her crimson silk nightgown, her breath pluming in the cold air.

She felt a surge of aristocratic pride. She had bypassed the security of the VIP suite flawlessly. She was a genius. A prodigy.

Now, all she had to do was slip inside, locate the illegal, ancient artifact Ren Valerius was obviously using to fake his immense power, and expose him to the Academy. Once he was exposed as a fraud, that terrifying, maddening aura of absolute superiority would vanish. He would be just a peasant again.

And more importantly, her cheeks would finally stop feeling so hot every time she thought about the way he had effortlessly brushed a speck of diamond dust from his crisp white coat.

"I am not doing this because I am obsessed with him," Sylvia muttered furiously to herself under her breath, slipping through the glass doors and into the pitch-black suite. "I am doing this for the integrity of the Academy."

She closed the balcony door behind her with a soft click, plunging herself into the darkness of the Royal VIP Suite.

Sylvia held her breath, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She raised her jeweled wand, ready to cast a silencing spell if the borderland boy woke up.

But as the moonlight filtered through the heavy glass windows, Sylvia blinked in utter confusion.

The suite was... wrong.

She had seen the blueprints of the Obsidian Tower in the Academy archives. This top floor was supposed to be divided into a grand foyer, a study, and four separate, lavishly decorated master bedrooms.

But there were no walls.

The entire top floor had been completely hollowed out, transformed into one colossal, cavernous living space. The debris hadn't been magically banished; there was simply no debris at all. The demolition had been so surgically precise that not a single speck of dust lingered in the air.

What kind of barbarian knocks down the walls of a Royal Suite? Sylvia thought, her aristocratic sensibilities deeply offended.

She crept forward, her velvet slippers making no sound on the thick, plush carpets.

As she rounded a massive mahogany wardrobe, she finally saw the sleeping arrangements, and she had to forcefully clamp a hand over her own mouth to suppress a scandalous gasp.

In the exact center of the massive room, bathed in a pool of silvery moonlight, sat the most ridiculous, oversized bed Sylvia had ever seen in her life. It was at least twenty feet wide, clearly constructed by forcefully bolting four king-sized bed frames together.

But it wasn't the size of the bed that made Sylvia’s face flush a brilliant, furious red. It was the occupants.

The three terrifying maids who followed Ren around like shadows were fast asleep, completely lacking any sense of aristocratic decency.

Lyla, the towering cow-kin, was sprawled out on the far left side of the massive mattress. She was snoring softly, her powerful, muscle-bound arms wrapped tightly around a pillow the size of a small boulder.

On the right side lay Elara, the Head Maid. Even in sleep, her posture was infuriatingly perfect. She lay flat on her back, her hands folded neatly over her stomach, dressed in a surprisingly delicate, frictionless white silk nightgown that left very little to the imagination.

And in the center of the bed, curled into a tight, possessive ball, was Kira. The silver fox-kin was wearing a pair of skimpy black shorts and a loose tank top. Her silver tail was wagging lazily in her sleep, and a faint, rhythmic crackle of blue static electricity danced across her ears, smelling sharply of ozone.

Sylvia stared at the scandalous, tangled pile of beautiful women sharing a single bed, her mind short-circuiting.

This is a harem! Sylvia panicked, her aristocratic upbringing screaming in sheer, flustered horror. He brought a literal harem to the Academy! What kind of depraved, borderland mud-peasant sleeps surrounded by his own servants?!

But as Sylvia peered closer through the gloom, her emerald eyes narrowed in confusion.

Lyla, Elara, and Kira were all sleeping deeply, but the space in the very center of the mega-bed—the space Kira’s arms were currently wrapped protectively around—was empty.

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Ren Valerius was not in the bed.

Sylvia frowned, lowering her hand from her mouth. Where was he? If he wasn't sleeping, he had to be plotting. He was probably in a dark corner of the suite right now, polishing his illegal explosive artifacts.

A soft, rhythmic splashing sound caught Sylvia’s attention.

It was coming from the far end of the suite, emanating from the massive, arched marble doorway that led to the Royal Bathing Chamber. A thick, billowing cloud of warm steam drifted lazily out of the archway, carrying the faint, incredibly pleasant scent of synthesized lavender and eucalyptus.

Sylvia’s heart gave a sudden, traitorous thump.

He's awake, she realized. And he's in the bath.

A rational, dignified noblewoman would have turned around and left immediately. Spying on a boy while he was bathing was grounds for immediate expulsion and total societal ruin.

But Sylvia Von-Rose was currently driven by a potent, confusing mixture of wounded pride, intense curiosity, and a strange, fluttering heat in her chest that she absolutely refused to acknowledge.

"His artifact is probably in his coat," Sylvia reasoned with herself, her face burning hot in the cool night air. "And his coat will be in the bathing chamber. I will just peek inside, find the coat, and leave."

Sylvia crept away from the massive bed, taking extreme care not to wake the terrifying maids. She tip-toed across the plush carpets, making her way toward the arched doorway of the bathing chamber.

The plush carpet ended about ten feet away from the archway, transitioning into a beautiful, highly polished corridor of pristine white marble that led directly into the sunken bath.

Sylvia didn't think twice. She took a confident, aristocratic step forward, her velvet slipper leaving the carpet and pressing onto the smooth marble floor.

She had expected a standard Academy floor. She had expected the laws of nature to apply.

She was completely unaware that fourteen hours ago, Ren Valerius had looked at this exact stretch of marble hallway and found it highly inefficient.

Dirt is transferred to bathing areas via the kinetic friction of footwear, Ren had calculated earlier that afternoon. If a surface possesses a high coefficient of friction, biological contaminants will adhere to it. Therefore, the optimal solution for a sterile hygiene corridor is to remove the friction entirely.

Ren hadn't cast a magical ward. He had simply altered the physics of the marble.

The formula for frictional force is F = μN. Force equals the coefficient of friction (μ) multiplied by the normal force (N), which is the weight of the object pressing down.

In a standard hallway, the coefficient of friction is around 0.6, providing plenty of grip for a person to walk.

Ren Valerius had set the coefficient of friction in this specific ten-foot corridor to absolute, mathematical zero. μ = 0.

Therefore, F = 0.

No matter how much weight Sylvia pressed into the floor, there was absolutely zero frictional force to hold her foot in place.

The moment Sylvia’s velvet slipper touched the marble, the physics of her reality broke.

She tried to push off her back foot to take another step, but without friction to provide resistance, her leading foot simply shot forward with terrifying, frictionless velocity.

"Wha—!" Sylvia gasped.

Her legs flew out from under her in a comically flawless split. She hit the pristine marble floor hard on her back.

But falling was only the beginning of the nightmare.

Because there was absolutely zero friction on the marble, the kinetic energy from her fall wasn't absorbed or halted by the ground. The forward momentum from her initial step carried her forward.

Sylvia began to slide.

She didn't just slide; she glided across the marble floor like a puck on an air hockey table, moving at a constant, terrifying velocity directly toward the arched doorway of the bathing chamber.

Panic seized the aristocratic prodigy.

"Stop!" Sylvia hissed, desperately trying to keep her voice down so she didn't wake the Vanguard.

She slammed her hands down onto the marble, trying to grab the floor, trying to dig her fingernails into the stone to halt her momentum. It was completely useless. Her hands simply slipped across the marble as if it were coated in perfectly slick, industrial-grade oil. She couldn't find a single millimeter of purchase.

Newton's First Law, Ren’s voice echoed in her memory, a mocking phantom in her mind. An object in motion will remain in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

There were no unbalanced forces on this floor.

Sylvia was trapped in a perpetual, frictionless slide.

She tried to roll over, but without friction to push against, she just ended up spinning wildly like a top while continuing to slide forward. Her dark velvet cloak tangled around her legs, and her crimson silk nightgown rode up scandalously around her thighs as she flailed like a helpless, upended turtle.

"No, no, no!" Sylvia whispered in sheer horror.

She was sliding directly through the arched doorway.

The warm, lavender-scented steam washed over her face as she breached the bathing chamber. Through the thick mist, Sylvia’s wide, terrified emerald eyes locked onto the massive, sunken marble pool in the center of the room.

The pool was massive, and the water was bubbling softly, radiating an intense, thermodynamically perfect heat of exactly one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit.

And she was sliding at exactly five feet per second, directly toward the edge of it.

"Ah!" Sylvia squeaked, abandoning all stealth as the edge of the pool rapidly approached.

She desperately tried to cast a levitation spell, raising her jeweled wand, but she was spinning too fast on her back, completely disoriented by the utter lack of physical traction.

Her feet reached the edge of the sunken pool.

The coefficient of friction returned to normal the exact microsecond she passed the lip of the marble, but it was far too late. Her forward momentum carried her helplessly over the edge.

Sylvia Von-Rose, the haughty, untouchable prodigy of the Crimson Duke, plummeted backward into the steaming, sunken bath in a chaotic tangle of velvet cloaks, silk nightgowns, and flailing limbs.

SPLASH.

The sound echoed loudly in the cavernous bathing chamber, followed immediately by the frantic, bubbling sounds of Sylvia thrashing in the deep water, her heavy velvet cloak instantly soaking through and dragging her down.

She broke the surface, coughing up a mouthful of perfectly heated, lavender-scented water, her fiery red hair plastered flat against her face.

"Help!" Sylvia sputtered, blindly wiping the water from her eyes, her aristocratic pride utterly, catastrophically shattered by a localized physics equation. "I'm drowning!"

"You are not drowning, Lady Sylvia," a calm, deeply familiar voice echoed through the steam. "The water is only four feet deep. Simply stand up."

Sylvia froze.

She wiped the last of the water from her eyes, her heart hammering a frantic, terrifying rhythm against her ribs.

Through the thick, swirling steam of the bath, sitting on the marble bench on the opposite side of the sunken pool, was Ren Valerius.

He was not polishing an ancient, illegal artifact. He was not plotting the downfall of the Kingdom.

He was simply taking a bath.

And as the steam momentarily parted, Sylvia realized with a sudden, paralyzing shock that the cold, terrifying physicist who had shattered the Lumina Crystal was currently sitting completely, unapologetically shirtless.

Sylvia’s brain, already reeling from the frictionless floor, finally and completely short-circuited.

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