Chương 48: Chapter 47: How To Bully Like A Lich

++I hate children. They are repugnant, animalistic creatures that you can never take your eyes off. A child would sooner ruin its own life simply to worsen your existence by even the smallest degree than do anything to better the world. They are mindless beings made of deceit and spite, eagerly waiting for your back to turn simply for the joy of sticking knives into it. You cannot trust a child farther than you can throw them. And you should throw them. Throw them as far as you can, before they throw you.

++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Natural magic was an oxymoron. There is no natural magic, because magic, by its definition, is the act of a conscious, intelligent mind deliberately altering the world around it. That was what most thought. In truth, natural magic was by far the most common kind. Magic can take the shape of storms, of random mass-reanimations, of animacy taking to things that had never and could never know life at all.

And that was to say nothing of the non-human magical beings; the fae, or the mighty dragons. In the modern age, the era of Garamon's Empire and mass-producible rifles, these events were somewhat less significant. They were certainly harder to come by.

Dragons had found their mastery over the world challenged a hundred years before, when the humans they had enjoyed terrorising for so many generations started responding to their attacks not with bows and spears, but with gunpowder artillery able to hurl a solid iron ball clean over the horizon. This was a common trend in all the previously formidable works of this world's magic. Humans were weak individually, and for much of history even their sprawling armies had not given them control over the world itself.

Advancing technology had. Now those sprawling armies carried guns, and it seemed guns were better than swords. Better by far. So it was no wonder the connection between warriors and Godtouched hadn't been made by anyone in Garamon, even after they had so many millennia of exposure, one generation after another, to the servants of their Gods. Most magicians simply did not have ready access to the necessary points of comparison.

Whatever it was that made warriors so physically strong, it was the same process as the one that created Godtouched and Demigods. Weaker, less stable, certainly less refined, but ultimately no different. Because divine magic was, in the end, just magic. I did not have much more to do than this with the information, unfortunately. Hypothesising can only get me so far, what I really needed was a Godtouched of my own to experiment on.

I had managed that more than once before, during my first reign, but my knowledge of magic had been poor at the time, and the Gods kept killing their servants remotely before I could uncover much of use. That was another hint, itself. A God could, at any time they wished, end the life of their Godtouched subordinates, apparently by just thinking about it. Distance didn't matter, and I had not uncovered a ward that could block the effect. So that would be my first goal.

Find a way to imprison a Godtouched without them being discovered or terminated. There was no point in acting against my enemies before I had the power to at least do that. The Grandmaster was left with his necromantic studies, and I was left to go about the more mundane day-to-day life of a student at the Winzorth Institute.

The education was slow as ever, made for the drooling incompetents other people considered to be magical geniuses, but it was at least giving me more insight into this era's magic, and on occasion I would acquire a new trick or concept I did not already know. It irritated me how far beyond other magicians I was. An uneducated caveman, for want of a better word, I had still managed to independently learn much in my first life that was still taught now.

The different magical fields were a natural exception to that, and even my education in those was now being delayed by the Institute's new obsession with battle-magic. At the very least, I was able to enjoy myself while practicing. There really is not a better way of demonstrating superior mastery over another magician than with a bout of magical sparring, after all. Agrian and myself were among at least two hundred other students taken into a large hall for practical combat training. We were also the youngest.

This did not surprise me so much, I assumed that, like in most things, we were jumping the metaphorical line by merit of talent. It is always best to start a person's training sooner rather than later, and with our magical gifts I could only imagine the Winzorth Institute regarded us as having military potential akin to… I did not even know what to use for comparison. A modern, iron-clad battleship fell short of the mark. Perhaps a whole fleet of them would not. That was in the future, however.

And it did not actually mean much on its own right now. Whether I was the equal of one battleship or a thousand, I would not become the equal of a God by simply standing around and waiting to accumulate power by continuing the same exercises I knew already. Not unless I was willing to bet on going undiscovered for many thousands of years at least. Lichdom had given me superhuman potential already, I would simply have to create a new ritual to raise me to even greater heights.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. And for now, the main way I would be gaining the knowledge needed to do that was, apparently, by humiliating teenagers in contests of magic. Life does have its little pleasures, sometimes. It was Professor Varylani who had been placed in charge of overseeing the instruction, with several new adults I did not recognise serving as her assistants. We all gathered up in a grand hall and were sectioned into units.

Nobody asked why, but the Professor volunteered an answer anyway.

"Some of you have actual magical talent," she explained.

"And the rest of you could be replaced by grunting monkeys painted in the colours of a battlemage to intimidate the enemy and achieve the same result. We don't want the idiots dragging down the actually functional students, so we're keeping you all separate based on ability. Just in case some of you are even stupider than I think; the eleven year-old with more power than an adult is in the 'gifted' group. The farther away yours is from hers, the more useless you are."

She was still my favourite Professor, obviously. Telling it as it was. This same quality also made her loathed by the other students, who shuffled into place as she ordered them around and began their learning. Most of the early teachings were beyond useless to me, things more simple even than the magical attacks and wards I had been able to acquire by studying the fight my kidnappers had with Doctor Brown and my father. Fortunately, we soon moved onto the practical application of these techniques.

This was where I was able to both begin actually honing my own skills through sparring, and vent out some long-built frustration. I soon became the example for other students. This made me approximately as well-liked as the bubonic plague; but that was just fine by me, I had already acquired a reputation for cruelty somehow. My first opponent was a large boy close to ten years my senior. He opened the contest up by flaring out his mana in a volume that, I had to admit, was greater than my own.

Both my hands came up in time to form a shield—not the one we had just been taught. That was flimsy and brittle, my own protection boasted a few choice modifications to the spell matrix that left bands of soft aether pinching a harder core from both sides. This gave it more give, while also keeping a diamond-hard centre. Back in my own era, the greatest swords were made from metal layered in a similar way. Brute force met superior intellect, and the latter proved superior. At first.

My opponent's magic missile was a simple thing of dull force, and it shattered easily. Shattering did not rob it fully of its strength however. The remaining impact was enough to lift me from my feet and send me fully across the ring in which we fought. It was ten yards from where I stood to the edge, every one of which flitted beneath me faster than if I had ridden over them on horseback. I had just enough time to wince before impact with the floor, then something new wrapped itself around me.

It was aether, softer and more flexible than I could make it, yet, and deforming on impact so that my collision with the floor had all the physical danger of a fall onto thick mattresses. The sheer speed involved still left me disoriented, and by the time I regained my bearings, Professor Varylani was already looming over me.

"So much for the great prodigy," she noted coolly.

"Can't even beat a mouth-breather like that." Humiliating and abusing her students, I could tolerate, but I drew the line at humiliating and abusing me.

"What was I supposed to do?" I snapped.

"Hold yourself in place and block his spell," she suggested, like she was talking to a child. Of course, from her perspective, she was. I calmed myself.

"I weigh less than half what most of the other students here do," I replied, just as frostily as she tended to.

"If you want me to make a shield that defends against magical projectiles while also holding my body weight in place, you should teach me one that will actually do so for a user of my mass. And if you are too stupid and inept to manage that, then I would like to request a Professor who is capable of breathing through her nose take over this class instead." For an instant, there was the flash of a smile on her face. Then it vanished.

"You will never speak to me like that again," she told me in one breath.

"As for your question…" with the other breath, she answered it. I paid attention and studied her practical demonstration as she showed me a fascinating working of her magic. Ridged aether forming something halfway between flaps and wings from the sides of the shield. Almost massless, but still capable of catching the air. It would hold me in place with drag force alone.

"I knew of this technique already," I frowned.

"It is not enough."

"You can stop trying so hard to sound like a grown-up. Just sit there and look cute and you'll do fine. Now here's the second step." This one was new to me. A spell matrix that bound two things together; aether and air, or aether and ground. Then a second, also unknown. The opposite. With the touch of this power, a shield could continue to function for precious moments while entirely separated from its conjurer"You understand?" she asked the room at large.

I got the impression her question was meant for me, and nodded.

"Good. Then time for round two." I was placed against the same boy for a second bout, and he looked only slightly less enthusiastic about this one.

"I won't hold back this time," he sneered.

"That is because monkeys have very poor control in general." He was a student of the Winzorth Institute, and so as easy as it would have been to dismiss him as dull-witted, I knew he was not. He caught the insult fast and his nostrils flared in moments. The following magic missile was terribly predictable. It burst against my shield and failed to drive me back even an inch, rooted down as I was. His eyes widened and he was already building power for a second, this one stronger and more carefully-made.

I recognised the spell matrix involved as something designed to turn his projectile's explosion into a directional charge, throwing all its energy right into my barrier. An excellent change to test the second technique. I felt a tugging at my will as the spell matrix tore free of me, but the mana and aether both dissipated harmlessly without sending me even a step away.

The brief moment that followed was a race for both me and my opponent to strike first; he could generate more power in less time, but I had the advantage of being ready already while he had just committed his own mana to a failed attempt. It was a near thing, but my magic struck him first. Since I was feeling generous, I limited the effect to nothing more than a common force impact and flung him from the ring.