Chương 226: Chapter 205: Something Always Evaporates, Eventually Me

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 5 — 2: 10 PM [Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · Evocation Spire · Tiered Lecture Hall & Open Range The Evocation Spire made its argument architecturally, and it made it without raising its voice. Hathaway sat in the second row of a perfectly ordinary tiered amphitheater: polished oak desks, warded stone to her left, her right, and her back, lumen-globes burning at a civilized amber.

Then the floor ran forward past the podium and simply stopped, and where the fourth wall should have closed the room off from the world there was nothing at all, only a clean vertical drop and forty miles of uninhabited mountain range shouldering up into the afternoon. The seam where the stone ended was flawless. No evidence whatsoever of the eleven thousand catastrophes that had certainly happened here. Someone reset the geology between blocks the way a bartender wipes a counter.

It's a lecture hall with a firing range, and there is no door between the two, because the department does not believe a door should exist. The block belonged to the Head of Evocation. Hathaway had never laid eyes on Clarissa Deiner, but she had the woman's foreword committed to memory, printed in crimson across page one of the mandatory textbook. It was now ten minutes past the hour, and the podium was empty. A restless murmur climbed the rows.

At Yggdrasil an absent professor generally meant one of two things: an unannounced survival examination had already begun and several students were losing it, or somebody had detonated a laboratory and the timetable was politely accommodating the crater. Then something extremely large and extremely soft began fighting the faculty door. Every head in the hall turned. A tremendous fluffy stomach compressed against both jambs, squeaked, and popped through into open air like a cork surrendering to a bottle.

It was a Greater Cat. Hathaway clapped both hands over her mouth. Do cats hold tenure here? Is there a faculty lounge with a scratching post and a dental plan? She had never seen this breed catalogued anywhere. It was aggressively spherical, black-furred, and threaded through with glowing magma-red striations that pulsed as it moved. Its ears burned, actually burned, two enormous plumes of standing flame, and its long black tail terminated in a condensed knot of living fire.

Sizzling whiskers trailed embers on either side of a face that managed to be deeply, unmistakably evil and, simultaneously, so devastating that every Witch in the room was calculating whether third-degree burns were an acceptable price for cautiously squishing one cheek. The creature drifted over the podium. Its whiskers vibrated.

Its vast glowing eyes swept the open range beyond the missing wall with real interest, tracked a distant ridge for several seconds, and only then appeared to recall that acknowledging the students would require looking down.

"Meow-awoo." The voice rolled out of it with a rumbling architectural echo that rattled ink in the wells three rows up.

"I am Katnero, teaching assistant for this course. A Fel Greater Cat." It licked a paw the size of a dinner plate.

"Lisa will be ten minutes late." The most lethal sophomores on the continent leaned forward in their seats, and their eyes went soft and glassy. Hathaway cleared her throat and shouldered the burden of the collective consciousness.

"Respected Teaching Assistant," she said, with the grave professionalism of a delegate opening trade negotiations.

"May I pet you?" Katnero's burning ears flicked. It puffed out its chest to about the diameter of a wine cask and radiated supreme institutional authority.

"You may not, meow-awoo! It is currently class time!" Class time is a temporal restriction, Hathaway's parser reported, and her spirit went up like a flare. Which means the moment the bell rings, petting becomes administratively sanctioned. She has told me how to farm her. Then the rest of the announcement finished loading.

"Where is the professor?" Katnero patted its own voluminous, magma-striped belly.

"She has not finished her nap. She has waking temper, meow-awoo." The tiered hall stared at the floating cat. In the front row Surtrina propped her chin on one hand, golden eyes narrowed.

"All right, TA. What can you actually teach us, or did you just come up here to read out a memo?" Katnero grinned. It was wide, jagged, and phenomenally unkind.

"Lisa says," the cat rumbled with enormous pleasure, "any student who lands a spell on Cat gets ten extra points on the final." Hathaway's jaw came loose. Ten points? She looked at the hovering bulk of it. A hitbox so generously proportioned that a blindfolded first-year could tag it by falling over in roughly the right direction. Ten free points, and the only cost is shooting a cat. Her chest tightened around something warm and treacherous. Is this a psychological screening?

Did she post this bounty knowing full well that no Witch alive could bring herself to pull the trigger? Because if that is the game, then the professor has already won, and she didn't even have to show up to— FWOOSH. A bolt of corrosive green went out from the seat directly in front of her. Surtrina's arm was still up in the follow-through, smoke curling off her fingertips. Hathaway sat looking at the back of a very calm red head. Surtrina! Hathaway's whole soul filed a formal complaint.

You cold-blooded, black-hearted woman! You shot the cat! You shot the cat while I was still doing the ethics! The [Acid Fog] hit nothing. Katnero was simply elsewhere, having crossed nine feet of air in the time the spell crossed two. Two black curses followed from Victoria and closed on the space it had left, a tenth of a second late.

"Meow-awoo! Meow-awoo!" The cat rematerialized near the ceiling, whiskers trembling with undisguised joy, and let out a booming peal of feline mockery that carried from its ears all the way down to its toes. Surtrina lowered her hand without a flicker of surprise. Spectra's [Bestow Agony] went out from the desk beside Surtrina, flat and clinical and without hesitation, and Katnero dismissed it with a lazy mid-air hop that had no business obeying momentum.

The hall had seen what it was looking at: a fully tuned evasion engine with opinions. Katnero went out over the missing fourth wall in a lazy backward roll, its tail flame drawing a slow orange comma across the open air. The most expensively educated Witches on the continent walked off a cliff, and Hathaway threw her moral objections out after them and followed.

With the walls gone and the restraint gone with them, a whole class collapsed onto one target from every angle at once, which meant half of everyone's attention had to be reserved for not being killed by an ally, because dying to an enemy was an occupational hazard, while dying because the girl off your left wing sneezed mid-incantation was a story that would follow you to your funeral and then be read aloud at it. That paranoia throttled the entire formation, and Katnero drank it like cream.

"Aaaargh!" Hathaway shrieked, ducking a stray lightning arc with the full-body anguish of a woman who had been struck by it.

"Why won't it connect!"

"It is not dodging your spell," Spectra said, still firing.

"It is dodging the breath you take before it." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Fifty spells. Hathaway counted them later and wished she hadn't. She cycled elements, laid down area denial, tried a spatial lock, tried leading the target, stacked [Silent Cast] under [Concealed Fluctuation] and fired out of nothing at all, and in a moment she would decline to discuss she threw a desperate [Banishment of Sorrow] at it.

Katnero demonstrated, with a showman's timing, the single most fundamental law of the meta: if it does not hit, it does not do damage. On the rare occasions the crossfire genuinely boxed it in, the cat greased its way out through a gap the width of a coin using cantrips that every second-year in the room had learned at eleven. It never improvised once. That was the part that stung.

Every clause of the [Witch's Evasion Doctrine], the whole Dodge Law start to finish, had been running since the door swung open: two displacements, the constant bobbing that denies a Witch the stable elevation she needs to lock by intent, the refusal to let any pair of eyes rest on its center of mass, the landing that always came down a meter off its own arc.

Even the ember haze trailing from those burning ears turned out to be load-bearing, mana fog laid from the first second, quietly rotting the auto-targeting on every spell. We are being taught, Hathaway thought, by a syllabus with fur.

"Meow-awoo! The dumb Witch cannot hit the smart cat!" It was humming now, a jaunty booming tune, executing a slow barrel roll through a net of arcane fire.

"A smart cat would never tell the dumb Witch in the second row that she points her claw at everything before she casts it! As expected, the smartest cat is smart me!" Hathaway put her face in her hands, which cost her the initiative and, arguably, was the point. But they were the most brilliant and least sentimental sophomores of their generation. Fields of fire divided. Altitudes were claimed and held.

The cat had the whole sky and the sky started closing anyway: from the full range to one slope, from the slope to a wedge of air above the treeline, from the wedge down to roughly one cubic meter of trembling nothing. A dozen convergent kill vectors arrived on that coordinate at once. A cancellation matrix swept the sky a hand's width ahead of them and unmade every spell in flight, and the accumulated firepower of an entire class went out with a soft, humiliating shower of sparks.

"Good. You're all warmed up." The voice came from behind them, from inside. Clarissa Deiner had walked in through the faculty door at a stride, and floating at her shoulder with the unhurried loyalty of an old dog was the Variant Staff that had made her name: [The Overcast Codex].

"Meow-awoo!" Katnero blew back in over the lip of the missing wall, straight through the middle of a class that had been trying to kill it nine seconds earlier, and hit the floor beside her like a magma-striped cannonball. It dropped its enormous burning head down over her shoulder, engulfing her to the collarbone in smoldering fur, and purred with the aggressive entitlement of a co-conspirator cashing in a heist.

"Cat did a good job! Reward! Dried fish!" Clarissa snorted and reached into a pocket without breaking stride, producing a handful of premium dried spirit-fish. She fed the leviathan off her palm a strip at a time as she walked, her free hand sunk deep in the dense black fur behind those blazing ears, with no apparent concern for the heat. Vermilion hair pulled back into a low ponytail that had been tied once, quickly, and not thought about since, the exact shade of the magma banked under the cat's coat.

Eyes a deep unlit navy, dark enough to finish the animal. A crisp white shirt worn with the collar thrown open several buttons past the point where the faculty dress code stopped negotiating. Hathaway hung in the air among the dying sparks with her wand still up and her ears ringing, and suspected she had just been robbed. The ten points were never a prize. They were a fuse.

She would have bet her stipend that the Head of Evocation had spent every minute of those ten standing on the far side of that door with her Codex open, watching her pet farm the sophomore class for snacks, waiting with a mother's patience for the precise microsecond her cat was in danger of being singed. The class came back in over the lip of the missing wall and sat down without being told. Clarissa reached the podium, turned, and leveled a finger straight at Hathaway.

"You. Answer. What is the ultimate truth of the Evocation school?" Hathaway's stomach dropped through the floor and kept going. Why is it always me? What am I emitting? Do I need to file for a seat transfer to the back row, or possibly a different tower? She swallowed and gave the woman her own foreword back, carefully, the way you hand a knife to its owner.

"Either we vaporize the enemy in one wave, or we get vaporized ourselves." Clarissa nodded once. Then she shook her head, and her face went dead serious.

"Right. And not right." One vermilion eyebrow arched, and a wicked, delighted grin unfurled across her mouth.

"The truth is this. So long as you cast an Evocation spell, no matter what else happens, something is getting vaporized." Hathaway shut her mouth. I cannot even find the edges of it to start refuting. Clarissa's fist came down on the podium hard enough to crack like a shot.

"I know the prejudice! Evocation is one fireball, two fireballs, all fireballs, no technical depth whatsoever beyond stacking damage on damage! And then the Witch Authority's garbage regulatory patches nerfed our output until its own mother wouldn't recognize it, and now half the continent looks at the meta and says Evocation is finished, washed up, can't keep pace with the current version of reality!" She pressed a hand to her chest with the anguish of a woman betrayed by her nearest relatives.

"After all these years, has a single one of you sat down and reflected? Have you been studying Evocation properly?" Hathaway took a small, silent step backward. That cadence. That exact vocabulary. Her inner developer produced the diagnosis with grim clinical confidence. Textbook Galaxy Brain Cup. Judging by the silence in the tiers, forty-four other people had arrived at the same chart. Clarissa did not wait for an answer. [The Overcast Codex] turned one page with a sound like sailcloth tearing.

Out past the missing wall, the world came apart. Dozens of magma geysers detonated up out of the mountainside, roaring hundreds of feet into open air, and then, instead of arcing and falling like anything with self-respect, they slammed into an anti-gravity lattice woven invisibly across the high altitude.

The array stripped the gravitational weight out of the molten rock, compressed the mass down against raw mana until it went from liquid to something with an edge, and fired the entire payload straight back down at six hundred meters per second. The shockwave rolled through the tiers and lifted every loose page in the room, and when the light bled off, forty miles of jagged geography had been replaced by a smooth, glassed-over plain.

"My own work. Tier Six," Clarissa said over the settling roar, unbothered.

"Modified from the Tier Five [Clarissa's Scorching Ray]. I call it [Clarissa's Annihilation Crucible]." She crossed her arms.

"I stripped out an enormous number of useless properties in pursuit of absolute lethality. It is not an exaggeration to say its destructive yield crowns the entire Tier Six catalogue." Hathaway's diagnosis died where it stood. She read the patch notes. Her developer brain rewrote the whole file in one pass, and the correction was almost embarrassing in its obviousness. She read them so carefully that she went back into her own source and shipped a leaner build. That spell is a patch note.

She just spent four solid minutes complaining about a nerf that visibly did not happen to her. And then, looking at the glass where a mountain range had been, something older than her opinion woke up underneath her ribs. Heat bloomed through her chest and went out along her arms. Her pulse climbed. What rose with it was a bright, physically pleasurable want: a wish, immediate and total and unconsidered, that the hand on the wand had been hers.

Across the tiered hall, every pair of eyes had gone bright and starving, fixed on the podium. And Clarissa Deiner opened the vault and threw everything in it at them. She gave up the catalyst formulas, the actual proprietary reagent ratios, without so much as a rounding-off.

She projected the spell model and walked them through its construction node by node, the acceleration matrix, the bounce lattice, the gravitational strip, pausing to answer questions from the back rows as though the questions were doing her a favor. Hathaway wrote until her hand cramped, dizzy, blindsided, being repeatedly struck about the head with free premium loot. I am going to name my firstborn after this woman. Her quill flew. My firstborn spell. Let us not get carried away.

No wonder her ratings sit at a perfect score while the pass rate is a crime scene. She's running an open-source project on the subject of annihilation, and every commit is public. Under that torrent the architecture unspooled in her head faster than anything had all week. Two days, maybe less, and she would have the whole matrix compiled and stable. As the block wound down, Clarissa leaned back against the podium and mentioned the final examination the way one mentions weekend plans.

"All of you at once," she said.

"I don't care how. Your own strength, bought gear, or shoving a classmate into the blast to buy three seconds. Survive five minutes under my live fire without dying and you pass." The grin came back. Beautiful, without mercy.

"Kill me once and you get full marks." Hathaway's heart, which had been having a lovely time, stopped.

"Five minutes," Victoria said, beside her.

"Last year's cohort averaged forty-nine seconds." Hathaway thought about the pass rate for this course. She thought about the fact that Clarissa Deiner was famous across the Inner Sea for firepower sufficient to stand in an open exchange with Irene Habsburg and trade, shot for shot. The old joke ran through her mind. The Missing Seven: the affectionate mockery of an Arch-Witch who had spent everything she had on a single discipline and left the other seven schools merely excellent instead of transcendent.

It was told as a limitation. It was, on inspection, a description of a woman who had dumped the entire stat sheet into one column and then out-scaled everyone who spread theirs evenly. Hathaway glanced back over her shoulder at the tiers behind her and ran the arithmetic the registrar had clearly already run. The survival clock is the real weapon. The moment I'm going down anyway, taking one of you with me costs me nothing and costs you the credit. She swallowed. Understood. I get vaporized either way.

The math resolved with a certain clean satisfaction. Either the family heirloom finally opens for me somewhere sufficiently far from anything I love, or Professor Deiner does it in December with better production values. Two routes, one ending, and one of them at least comes with a grade. The great bell tolled through the spire. Hathaway was out of her seat before the second stroke, wand already stowed, eyes locked on the enormous black-and-red tail swishing lazily above the podium. Class is over.

The cooldown has expired.