Chương 21: Chapter 20: The Face Of The Enemy

++I have never had an easy time making friends, in either life. Friendship, to me, was made difficult by the fact that I was essentially an adult surrounded on all sides by babbling children. And then I was reborn, which made things even worse and painfully literal. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E Illusion magic was, thankfully, not on the endless list of things that had been banned for no good reason.

I had made a mild study of it already with Doctor Brown, but with him I had found it purely theoretical. His powers were limited more on the practical side of evocation. Another thing I had learned about the magicians of this new age, they tended to specialise much more than those of the past. I suspected that was because, despite their education and resources being far better, their actual level of talent tended to be lower.

More than just the very best freaks of nature could learn magic in this environment, after all. My reading was mixed in with long periods of magical conditioning. I had never actually stopped doing this, always pacing myself but never doing less than the amount that would guarantee me the fastest growth rate long-term. It was this training regime that left me with almost two thirds an adult magician's power at the age of only nine. And it would continue to raise my mana capacity and output, too.

Now that I was starting to end the initial period of extreme growth a new practitioner of magic can enjoy, I could expect to become twice as powerful every year or two I sustained this for. Lessons interrupted my learning periodically, which was, naturally, not an unwelcome change. I was happy to be whisked into the lecture hall on my first day actually attending Winzorth, and happier still when I got a look at its interior.

Though it was not much larger than the ballroom Doctor Brown repurposed for educating myself and Agrian in more destructive magic, I could tell at a glance that the place I would be studying now was more purpose-built. The walls were lined with runes that, as I experimented with a few gentle nudges of mana, proved able to deflect magical energy as surely as steel plates would a ricocheting bullet.

"What are you doing here?" a sharp voice caught my ear and turned me around to see one of the other students glaring my way. He was about Agrian's age, perhaps a new arrival himself. Taller than me by over two feet, though that was hardly unusual.

"I am a student," I replied. He snorted at that.

"Who let this little girl in?" he asked the room at large.

"This is a serious place, we don't have time to be baby sitting. What, are you some older apprentice's bastard? Out with you, you're taking up room the actual magicians could use."

"I am a student," I told him again. The boy seemed angrier by the moment, while others around us snickered. This only made him more angry still.

"My sister is enrolled here, the same as you," Agrian stepped in to tell him. I saw the boy turn his glare Agrian's way at that, lip curling.

"Oh, so that explains it then. She's allowed here as a favour to her family. Daddy pulled some strings did he?" Agrian punched the boy hard. I will not pretend that the sight was not amusing and satisfying, especially when the target actually lost his footing. He fell at my brother's feet with blood streaming down his chin from both nostrils, glaring up at him in shock and confusion.

"Does anybody else have any words to share against my sister?" Agrian asked the room at large. Everyone here was, unlike the four boys who had struck him earlier, of Agrian's own age, and seeing him next to them made me realise how tall he was. Closer to an adult's height than most of the thirteen year-olds around us, and he had gotten broader at the shoulder too. He looked somewhat like our father, then. And he received no arguments.

"What is going on here?" a new voice cut in. We all turned to find an adult striding into the room, one I could only gather was our tutor. To my surprise, it was a woman. She was tall, almost as tall as my father in fact, and looked to be approaching middle age, with the lined skin and grey hair of someone who had already seen half their life move past. Her glare was as intense as if she had been practicing it for each day of those decades, however, and I saw every boy in the class wither back from it.

Agrian did not, though. Nor did I.

"You struck each other?" the magician asked, flicking unimpressed eyes between Agrian and the student whose blood now coated his knuckles.

"I did," Agrian said fearlessly.

"He called my sister a bastard and tried to order her out of the room, then insulted my father when I ordered him to stop." The woman looked to me at that, which I did not care for at all.

"A girl," she sniffed.

"Been a while. Young, too. I imagine she'll drop out soon like most do, you shouldn't have bothered." She turned from me, Agrian and the downed boy and started heading for her podium at the end of the room.

"Pick yourself up and do not fight again, I will not have such barbarity in my classroom. Fisticuffs are for those magicless monkeys in the army, not magicians." I actually found myself liking this woman, despite the hostilities. As she took her position and gestured for the students to take our own, I could not help but see a weary strength in her that I approved of greatly. It only grew from there.

"I am Alice Varylani, your Professor for however long all of you study illusion magic. I will be blunt; for most of you that won't be very long at all. Few have the knack for illusions, even among those with magic, and I don't expect to keep more than a tenth of you. Once this first session is completed, I will have perhaps a dozen students." Muttered discontent spread around the room at that, and she rolled her eyes.

"Oh shut up," Professor Varylani snapped.

"It's not my fault that most of you have the talent of an Estian apeman, we have nothing but what the Gods give us so there's no use complaining to me. If you have a problem with your natural gifts, take it up with Nglaru." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. She made a lazy sequence of touches to her shoulders and forehead at that, a sign of submission and respect to the Gods done without the slightest hint of either.

"Now let's begin." Professor Varylani was my sort of teacher. She did not waste time and did not tolerate fools, nor did she mince words. As she had said, few of us had the talent for illusion magic and she did not delay in testing us for that talent. The test itself was simple. We had to output our mana and modulate it between a series of shapes, volumes and densities within rapid succession. Raw mana, not aether.

Nobody could do this right away, it was such a bizarre effort, manipulating pure, formless energy like that, that even I had not ever practiced it before. There was simply never any need to. The shape my mana moved in had no bearing on what spell matrixes it would form, only the way it moved. It was this that made the test so excellent. By forcing mana into unfamiliar and untested areas, Varylani was assessing the raw potential each of us had with it. Our task was virtually impossible at first.

I succeeded at it before any others, naturally. In fact it took me only half an hour, and I enjoyed the look of genuine shock upon our Professor's face as she verified this fact. Next came Agrian, just ninety seconds after me and scowling at the fact. Five more minutes passed before the next success, an older girl on the other side of the hall. After that, the students began to clump together more. The next success came fifty minutes later, then several more all within a few minutes.

The last came fifteen minutes after that, and at that point Varylani shook her head and called out.

"Stop, that's it. Anyone who hasn't managed it yet is too slow to be worth the effort of teaching." She turned from the students for a moment and made her way to a board at the end of the room, then began writing. I soon realised she was recording each of our names and completion times. Recording them in order of fastest to slowest.

I was not especially proud to see my name at the top of the list, I simply considered it my due, but Agrian was grinning with no small amount of satisfaction at the placement of his own. Alira Bella Paula, the third to finish among our class, was glaring our way as her own name was added. I noticed once more then that she seemed older than the rest, too. Older than the boys who had targeted Agrian, even.

She caught me staring and glared my way more directly, like she was offended to have even seen my eyes turned towards her. I looked away, learning fast that simply making eye contact was a good way to cause problems in this school, and turned my focus back to the front of the room as Professor Varylani's lesson resumed.

"We have now separated the wheat from the chaff," she began.

"Everyone not on this board can leave." Silence followed that, disbelieving and lengthy. For the life of me, I could not guess why. She had communicated quite clearly what would be done with those who were unable to pass her test, and just as she had predicted it seemed nine for every ten in the room had failed.

"Did I stutter?" the Professor snapped.

"Out! Go!" Then the room began to move, and in a few minutes more it was virtually empty.

"The rest of you, don't think you're off the hook yet," the Professor added.

"If any of you prove to be unteachable too, you'll be right out along with the rest." I could not help my grin. This was precisely the sort of environment I had always cultivated with my own apprentices, albeit without a nearby dungeon belching screams out through the classroom to serve as motivation.

"Teach us then," I called out.

"It will show you who can keep up that much faster if you do not waste time." She turned to glare at me, and looked for a moment to be on the brink of snapping something back. Then she paused, and smirked, and I got the impression that she considered it a point well scored.

"Alright then, we'll start with something small. There might not even be any washouts."

True to her word, it was a small thing we were learning. And surprising to me. I had expected to pick up some new form of aether manipulation, perhaps controlling colours and textures, but to my shock we instead continued our practice in raw mana shaping. What this would stand to do for us, I could not guess. Mana is, as I said, massless and formless, unless turned into something physical like fire or aether. Shape should not have any bearing on it.

"Why are we doing this?" someone asked the Professor, a boy shorter than Agrian but who looked thirty or forty pounds heavier.

"Because I told you to," Varylani replied.

"My father said that a magician ought never do something just because he's told," the boy shot back.

"Your father is an inbred pig who needs eight servants on hand to keep rubbing the drool off of his nine chins," Varylani snapped.

"Now shut up and keep focusing." The boy shut up and kept focusing, as did the rest of us. This time, to my surprise, I was not the first to see results, that distinction belonged to the older girl at the corner of the class. I found this out only when Varylani headed over to her, spent a long moment examining her mana through a more portable device dispensing aetheric mists, and then nodded in satisfaction. Everyone else must have been surprised, but I was able to see just what the girl had achieved myself.

In fact, as I looked at the odd regularity of her shapes, and saw how the mana turned and twisted, I found my vision shifting as well. Birds were swirling around before my eyes, making me flinch back and fall right from my chair. I did not hit the floor so hard, but somehow I was left with ringing ears, unable to really see or hear for long seconds. When I regained control over my senses, I found myself looking up into a number of faces crowded around me. My fellow students, and Professor Varylani.

They all looked down with a mix of amusement, smugness, contempt and, in some, worry. The Professor alone seemed irritated more than anything else.

"Are you one of those idiots who have fits?" she demanded.

"I…am not," I groaned.

"Good. Then don't have another one. Everyone back to your seats!" I obeyed just as all the other students did, groggily replacing myself in the chair I had fallen from and being left to wonder what exactly had happened. Our teacher soon spared me from that confusion, because a few minutes later, once I myself succeeded in perfecting the mana shapes she had described, I found her nodding in satisfaction at the sight of them revealed in aether.

"Two quick ones this year, good," she noted.

"You two pair up, you're about to learn how to actually use this for something." She was talking about me and the older girl, the one who, I was increasingly convinced, was not even a child. At the Professor's word, we sat opposite each other in a secluded corner of the vast room and faced each other. She was glaring down at me, while I, truthfully, did not especially feel one way or another about her.

"Pairing me with a child," she growled.

"I'm already in a class of them, and they give me the youngest one as a partner!" I did not like this woman, I decided fast. She had every bit of the endless bitterness I had sensed in Professor Varylani, and none of her steely composure. The line between indignation and petulance is very thin at the best of times.

"I want to learn magic," I told her flatly.

"I think you do too. I do not know why you are so much older than the other students here, but I can only assume that something prevented you from attending this Institute when you were their age. Is that correct?" She hesitated, suddenly not looking like she knew how to regard me at all. It was a look I was very used to being given when adults heard me speak for the first time.

"That's…right?" she sounded unsure, as if not certain whether she was being tricked or not. I saw her look shiftily around and knew I had only moments to cement her opinion.

"Then let us both focus on learning, and we will both get what we want here." I did not smile, adults did not take me seriously when I smiled, but she did. After a moment, at least, and very briefly.

"Alright then," she nodded.

"Let's."