Chương 168: Chapter 160 - A Year with the Twins

Hey guys it's Riley, Listen. Yes I know this is chapter 160 and that's OK. There are a few other chapters i want to add in at a later time (158 and 159) that aren't actually written yet: D For now you have to live with 160. Sorry about that. Amber - Three and a half years later Turned out Chelsea really was a tyrant.

"Remember, when you get home we have sword training," Amber's mother reminded her.

"This is stupid. There has to be a way I can get out of it," Amber replied.

"Law is the law." Fiona shrugged.

"Be thankful, Chelsea is doing incredible things for the children in this city. Free education? That's unheard of."

"She's forcing us to go."

"Amber. It's only three classes." Her mother said it slowly in that tone. Amber knew that tone very well. Fiona was approaching the limit of her patience, and Amber had learned years ago that there was very little to gain from pushing beyond it.

"Fine. But at least don't make me wear this. I'm going to stand out like a sore thumb." Amber looked down at herself. The dress was ridiculous. It was an overly frilly princess-style thing with enough fabric around the skirt to make her feel twice her actual size. Chelsea kept Amber stocked with clothes, which sounded wonderful until someone remembered that it was Chelsea. Since coming to this world she didn't do… subtle. Everything Amber owned was elegant.

Far too elegant, in her opinion, especially for a four-year-old going to school.

"I think you look beautiful," Fiona replied.

"You're not going to let me out of this, are you?"

"Nope." Her mother smirked.

"The carriage is waiting for you." Amber stared at her for a moment before starting toward the door.

"Fiona, the Brutal," she mumbled as she passed.

"Brutally stubborn maybe." Fiona laughed at her daughter's frustration and followed her outside.

"Have a great first day of school, sweetheart. Maybe try to make some friends?" Amber stopped beside the waiting carriage. She happily accepted a kiss on the cheek from her mother before replying.

"Thanks. I'll think about it." Carriage rides were still weird. The school Chelsea had created occupied part of the cathedral's first floor, and from their home it was barely a ten-minute ride. Walking might have taken twenty. Amber and Chelsea used to walk farther than that going to and from school every day on Earth. Being four years old and related to the Holy Empress meant walking was no longer an acceptable form of transportation. To make matters worse, Chelsea hadn't sent an ordinary carriage.

She had sent one of the fancy ones. People watched it as they passed through the streets. Amber could see heads turning through the window as pedestrians tried to determine what important noble or foreign dignitary was traveling through the city. Amber sank lower in her seat. Her first day was going wonderfully already. The carriage eventually pulled up in front of the Crystal Cathedral, where dozens of children around Amber's age were arriving with their parents. The vast majority of them clearly weren't wealthy.

Some wore clothes that were slightly too large or had obviously been altered to fit. Others had simply been dressed in the nicest clothing their families owned. Parents crouched to straighten collars, smooth hair, or give one last nervous instruction before sending their children toward the entrance. Amber looked down at her ridiculous princess dress. Then back at the expensive carriage. She wanted to scream.

She looked exactly like the spoiled rich girl arriving at public school in a luxury vehicle while everyone else walked in holding their parents' hands. Before Amber could even reach for the carriage door, it opened from the outside. The formally dressed driver stood waiting and held out a hand to help her down. Of fucking course he did. Amber accepted it. The moment her shoes touched the ground, she became aware of people looking at her. Children stared openly.

Some of the parents were better about hiding it but they still stole glances. Amber kept her attention forward and followed the flow of students toward the cathedral. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die. The feeling only became worse once she stepped inside. There it was. The final nail in the coffin. The main lobby had been illuminated more brightly than usual for the first day of classes.

Staff members stood near the entrances directing families toward different areas while children moved between them in small groups. And right in the middle of everything was Chelsea. Chelsea spotted Amber.

"Amber! I'm so excited." The glowing Holy Empress hurried straight toward her. Amber closed her eyes for half a second. Fantastic. As though the carriage and dress hadn't already announced that she was important, Chelsea had now personally run across the cathedral to greet her.

"Chels. I get that you made this whole thing a law that kids four to seven must attend school, but come on. Even me?" Adriane stepped up behind Chelsea. Amber hadn't noticed her at first, which was impressive considering the Silver Sword was one of the least subtle people on the planet.

"Amber, you are representing the Wixx family. Don't complain out loud and so much." Amber looked up at her aunt.

"Good pep talk, Aunty A." She sighed.

"Amber, you've got this," Chelsea said.

"It's not actually your first day of school."

"I know, but I feel like I have so many targets on my back from the start. The dress, the carriage, the glowing Empress and scary Silver Sword talking to me." Amber glanced around as she spoke. Several nearby children had totally noticed them. One boy had stopped walking until his mother tugged him along.

"They're small children, Amber," Chelsea chided.

"They don't think that way. But… so the twins." Chelsea grimaced. Amber knew she wasn't going to like whatever came next.

"They are going to be in your class." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Amber let her head fall to one side.

"Chels."

"Please just do your best with them. I'm sorry." Aurora and Belle were difficult. Amber loved them because they were family, but that didn't make them easy to tolerate for long periods of time. The twins shared some kind of connection that Amber had never fully understood. Maybe it came from being twins. Maybe it was a Blessed Demon thing. Whatever caused it, the two of them operated together with an unsettling amount of coordination. Unfortunately, that same coordination extended to their worst habits.

If one decided to cause trouble, the other usually knew exactly what was happening and joined in. Their bullying tendencies became way more effective when both of them were working toward the same objective. Amber had dealt with them plenty of times before. Spending several hours trapped in a classroom with them was… It was going to be a long year.

"I'll do my best," she said with a sigh.

"I'm not going to take their shit though."

"Please don't! They need someone to beat their attitude out of them." Amber looked toward Adriane.

"Aunty A? Wixx training? That would change their tune." Adriane laughed.

"Their mother says they are too delicate for that sort of thing."

"Actually?" Amber considered it.

"She's probably right." Movement around the lobby began changing as the last few parents finished saying goodbye. Staff members started guiding the children toward their classrooms, and Amber spotted several students her age moving toward a nearby doorway. She looked in that direction.

"I guess I'm off. Pretty sure that one right there is my class." She took a step away.

"Oh, I forgot to mention, you have your own servant in there to help you," Chelsea added. Amber stopped. She slowly turned her head back toward Chelsea. Of course she did.

"Of course I do," Amber said with a sigh. She crossed the threshold and decided this was hell. There were little germy hands touching everything. Children tried to talk over one another from opposite sides of the room, each apparently convinced whatever they had to say was more important than whatever the other children were saying. Aurora and Belle were already seated together, glowing faintly and carrying themselves with the confidence of little girls who said things like 'don't you know who my mother is!?.'

Amber had been inside the classroom for less than five seconds and already wanted to leave. The running away plan. She had to take mental stock on how on board she actually was with that. A woman wearing a cathedral uniform stood near the front of the room.

"All right, everyone. It's time to take your seats." Children scrambled toward the desks and claimed whatever seats remained open. Amber stayed near the doorway and watched as the last empty chair disappeared beneath another student. Every desk was taken. Her cousins noticed her standing there. Belle looked toward her first and waved, and Aurora shot her sister a look before Belle put her hand down and glared at Amber. Amber ignored them and turned her attention toward the woman at the front.

"Oh, hello," the woman said.

"You must be Amber." The older woman walked toward her with the look adults always used when talking to someone Amber's age.

"I am. And you are?"

"Ah, yes. My name is Miss Evette." There it was. That tone. Amber had spent four years listening to adults use it with her. Slower speech and exaggerated expressions.

"Cool, cool, cool. I'm just gonna…" She pointed toward the front of the classroom. Miss Evette looked confused as Amber walked past her. Amber climbed the small step leading to the teaching area and turned toward the class.

"Good morning, everyone. My name is Miss Wixx. I will be your teacher this year." The room went silent. Amber looked over the collection of four-year-olds staring back at her. Most of them had wide eyes. Chelsea had conned her. There was no other way to describe it. When Amber had objected to being enrolled as an ordinary student, Chelsea had presented her with another option. Students were expected to attend five classes each day. Teachers only had to handle three.

At the time, this had sounded like an obvious choice. She may have picked the more difficult path. She imagined what her life would be like had she gone the path of the student. Breezing through her studies. Acing every test. Napping her way through the year at the back of the class. But nooo… Chelsea had to sweeten the deal with something Amber was actually interested in. Her thoughts were interrupted "You're our teacher?" a boy about her size asked.

"How old are you?"

"Four. But I am more qualified to teach this class than most of the people in this city. Overqualified, if you ask me." A few children looked at one another. Amber could already tell that most of them had no idea what overqualified meant.

"Amber, we aren't go…"

"Miss Wixx," she corrected Aurora. The blessed demon stopped. The twins stared at Amber from their desks with an identical expression.

"Why should we listen to anything you say?" Aurora asked. Amber had expected this. She rested both hands on the front of the small teaching desk and looked directly at her cousin.

"Because if you don't, I will fail you and you will have to repeat this class until you pass it." Aurora's face gave a mocking scowl.

"You can't talk to us like that. Our mothe…"

"I know for a fact I can talk to you like that. I am the teacher of this class. I will be in charge of teaching you all to read and write. If you want to be a spoiled little brat like the twins here, feel free to sit in the back and not listen. If you want an education from an A-rank member of the Merchants' Guild, then listen up." That got a reaction. Several children looked toward Aurora and Belle. Amber didn't care. If Chelsea wanted her to teach, then Amber was going to teach.

She wasn't spending her time every day arguing with two little demons who thought being princesses exempted them from basic decency.

"I'm going to tell m…" Aurora started again.

"And I will tell her you were disrupting my class. Now shut up." Aurora's mouth snapped closed. Amber allowed the silence to sit for a moment before changing her expression and returning to the polite version of herself.

"Everyone, we are going to start with introductions." Every day? She had to put up with this shit every day? Amber walked through the cathedral hallway after her first class with the exhaustion of someone ten times her age. Maybe she could run away. That remained an option. If she left the Holy City, she could return to her research without anyone forcing her to spend part of every morning teaching children how letters worked. The law only applied here. The Holy Empire had a ton of other cities.

She could disappear into one of them, rent a room somewhere, and dedicate herself entirely to magic. Unfortunately, Fiona would probably find her. Chelsea would probably make running away illegal then. Amber giggled to herself at how dumb that sounded. She pushed open the door to the teachers' lounge. The room was quiet. Several adults sat around tables with papers, books, and drinks spread around them. One woman looked up as Amber entered.

"Oh, I'm sorry, sweetheart. This area is for teachers. What cla…"

"I am a teacher," Amber replied to the older woman. Amber continued farther into the room.

"Just finished my first class and…" She paused.

"How do you do it? Every day?" A couple of the teachers laughed. Amber stared at them. She actually wasn't joking.

"You're really a teacher here?" the woman asked.

"Amber Wixx. Child genius extraordinaire. It's a gods-damned curse if you ask me. You know I developed my own branch of magic? And this fucking Empress has me teaching four-year-olds their ABCs."

"Uh!" The woman glanced toward the other teachers. They looked back with equally concerned expressions. Amber realized what part of that statement had caused the problem.

"It's not heresy. I'm friends with her. She just really shafted me. Anyways. What's your names?"

"Welcome to an Introduction to Magic," Amber said. This was the class she had actually been looking forward to teaching and how Chelsea had sweetened the pot. It was still experimental, one of the free courses being offered to adults who wanted to learn whether magic was something they could realistically pursue. Most of the people sitting in front of her were technically adults by the standards of this world, though quite a few looked barely older than teenagers.

Some were clearly considering adventuring and wanted to test whether becoming a mage was worth the effort before committing themselves to it. Amber understood and respected that. Magic was intimidating when someone had never touched it before. She had spent far too much of her second life trapped inside a baby body while reading everything she could get her hands on. Now she finally had the chance to take all of that knowledge and actually do something useful with it. Naturally, someone had to ruin the moment.

"A child is the teacher?" a girl who looked about sixteen asked, clearly skeptical. Amber stared at her. There it was again. She had been getting it all day. People looked at her and saw a child before they saw anything else. They didn't care what she knew, what she had studied, or why she had been placed in front of the classroom. They saw her height and her face and apparently decided that was enough information. It made sense. She knew that and she had been patient with it for years but all day… everyday?

Amber had reached her limit.

"Listen up!" Amber yelled.

"All fucking day everyone has been treating me like shit because I look like a child. Well, guess what. I am a fucking child who is more knowledgeable about magic than most, if not all, of the mages on this continent. If you shut up long enough to hear half of my words, you might learn something." The room went completely silent. Everyone was shocked. Amber stood at the front of the class and let that silence sit for a moment. Good. At least they were paying attention.

She took a slow breath and forced some of the irritation out. This wasn't how she had wanted to begin. She had actually been excited about teaching this class, and she refused to let one comment turn the entire lesson into an argument about her age. Amber straightened the materials in front of her and started over.

"Like I said. Welcome to an Introduction to Magic. My name is Miss Wixx. Does anyone have any real-life experience with magic?"