Chương 45: “Fur-ocious Rivalry”

Professor Fae had been pacing for the better part of an hour now, wearing a visible track into the thin rug around her desk. Her office-classroom, already cluttered with reagent bottles, half-finished summoning diagrams, and a terrarium, looked worse than usual. Papers had been shuffled into piles and a cup of tea sat untouched and cold on the edge of her desk, placed there sometime around yesterday. Today was Thursday and her class was tomorrow. But most importantly, one particular student was due to attend.

Celestia von Reingarde. Or more accurately, Celestia von Reingarde's elemental spirit. Fae stopped mid-stride and pressed both palms flat against the surface of her desk, leaning forward. The creature had occupied every waking thought she'd had since the summoning last week. She had never encountered anything like it.

A quadruped of compact and grotesque proportion, standing no higher than a man's knee, its body a dense mass of wrinkled flesh compressed into a shape that defied the structural logic of any known species. The face alone warranted a full academic paper.

The skull appeared to have been designed at full size and then crushed inward, leaving the snout inverted, the upper half of its face folded into deep crevasses of skin, and two bulging eyes that protruded from the sockets at angles suggesting they operated independently of one another, like a creature surveying multiple planes of existence simultaneously. Its pink tongue was also of disproportionate width, lolled from its mouth at intervals. It breathed with labored intensity.

And the tail—a single, tightly wound coil of cartilage and fur—sat atop hindquarters for no seeming evolutionary purpose.

"Fascinating," Fae murmured to herself for perhaps the hundredth time, tapping a finger against the desk. She pulled her notebook from the pile and flipped it open to the page she'd been adding to all week. The entry was dense with questions, annotations, and increasingly speculative notes. What kind of element did it embody? No classical element matched its manifestation. Perhaps it hailed from the deep northern lands, where uncharted icy lands still produced creatures unknown to modern taxonomy.

The flattened facial structure probably suggested adaptation to extreme cold, a compressed nasal passage to minimize heat loss. That would explain the labored respiration; a creature evolved for subzero temperatures struggling in Summit's mild climate. Or the unexplored western tunnels. The pale, fawn-colored fur was consistent with subterranean fauna adapted to minimal light. The bulging eyes could be low-light vision rather than the aesthetic catastrophe they appeared to be.

Fae had attempted to find Celestia multiple times during the week. Her elemental spirits, currently deployed across the academy's surrounding forestry on patrol duty, doubled as her eyes and ears across campus. The principals had assigned her this role after the demon attack, supplementing the detection spells they'd already blanketed the mountain and the academy's borders with.

It was tedious work that pulled her away from research, and the patrol range meant she couldn't leave the academy grounds until she'd established enough additional elemental contracts to cover the gaps in coverage.

'Ugh.' The compensation was something she couldn't afford to refuse, since summoning materials and the various ways to keep her elemental spirits content were expensive enough. The patrol work kept her coffers from running dry. But it ate her time. And her time was the one resource she wanted to spend on that creature. During the weekend, she had managed to get a few more contractual spirits and finally fix the research issue.

However, another problem was that Celestia had been absent from campus for most of the week. Fae's spirits reported no sightings in any of the dormitories, lecture halls, or common areas at all. By Wednesday, Fae had resorted to asking other faculty if anyone had seen her, but no one had a direct answer. By evening, she had been sitting in her office with her head on the desk, staring at the far wall with the resignation of someone who had lost something extremely important.

Then, this evening, one of her elemental spirits had relayed a sighting. Celestia von Reingarde had been seen entering the female dormitory. Fae nearly knocked her cold tea off the desk when she shot upright.

"Where is she now?" The elemental, a small bird perched on the window, had tilted its luminous head and conveyed the information in impressions. Direction and distance towards a building… Training Building Four? Fae frowned. Training Building Four was the combat elective's facility. What was Celestia doing there on a Thursday? But it didn't matter. Celestia was finally back, and that meant the creature was likely close. Fae grabbed her coat, shoved her notebook into her satchel, and left.

The walk to Training Building Four took several minutes. She crossed the courtyard at a brisk pace and arrived at the entrance slightly out of breath. She pushed open the doors. The interior of Training Building Four was lit by the low glow of magic stones mounted along the walls. The elevated spectator seating formed a half-circle around the central stone platform, and on that platform, two figures were moving. Professor Cassia Flamesy stood at the center, wooden sword in hand.

Opposite to her, Celestia von Reingarde was barely standing. Her dress-armor was scuffed and dented in several places, and her breathing was ragged. A bruise was already darkening along her jaw, and a thin line of blood ran from a cut above her left eyebrow. Cassia moved forward and struck with her wooden sword, clearly imbued with aura. Celestia raised the spear's shaft to block, but the impact knocked her guard wide open, and before she could do anything, Cassia's follow-through hit her across the ribs.

A grunt escaped Celestia's lips as she staggered sideways. Celestia planted her back foot, steadied herself, and thrust forward. However, Cassia simply sidestepped the thrust and brought the flat of her blade down on the back of Celestia's extended arm. Then Cassia's sword came up and slammed into Celestia's face. Her head snapped to the side and she hit the platform floor hard. The spear clattered out of her grip and rolled away. This book's true home is on another platform.

Check it out there for the real experience. Fae's blood ran cold as she shouted, "You brutish, sword-swinging oaf!" Mana surged through her body and two of her contracted spirits responded instantly. The ground beneath Cassia detonated. Stone and dust erupted upward in a concentrated blast that swallowed the space where the combat professor had been standing. Simultaneously, a wall of compacted earth surged from the floor between Celestia's unconscious body and the explosion, shielding her completely.

The dust hung in the air for a moment before beginning to settle. Cassia Flamesy stood several paces from where the blast had hit, unharmed. She had moved the instant she felt something off, her reflexes carrying her clear of the detonation with room to spare. Her wooden sword rested on her shoulder, and her single eye was fixed on Fae with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and annoyance.

"Oh?" Cassia tilted her head.

"The leash-puller came to play? I didn't realize they let pet owners in here!"

"You know very well I have the authority to come here as much as you!" Fae snapped. She stepped off the edge of the spectator seating and jumped. A wind spirit caught her mid-fall, curling beneath her feet and lowering her to the platform floor with a controlled gust that sent loose dust scattering in a circle around her landing. She glared at Cassia.

"Blah-blah-blah-blah!" Cassia waved her wooden sword dismissively.

"Authority this, authority that. You sound like the principals."

"Hmph! And what exactly are you doing to my student?!" A third spirit materialized at her side, its form vaguely humanoid. She gestured once, and the spirit drifted across the platform to where Celestia lay unconscious behind the earthen wall. It knelt beside the girl's body, and a soft glow spread from its hands across her bruised face and ribs. Cassia planted the wooden sword against the platform, tip-down, and leaned on the pommel.

"What do you mean your student? She's also mine!"

"And you were beating her up for?" Cassia paused. Her eye drifted to the side for a fraction of a second.

"... A lesson."

"See!" Fae thrust a finger in Cassia's direction.

"You ignoramus! Always resorting to physical violence! Do you need me to put you in your place like last time?"

"Hah!" Cassia barked. The grin was back.

"You just got lucky after you got something special from the Tower last year."

"You're talking as if you didn't strut around when you forced that fight two years ago after you got out of the Tower!"

"So?" Cassia shrugged, both shoulders rising and falling with the absolute shamelessness of someone who had no interest in fair play.

"A win's a win!" Fae's eye twitched. They glared at each other across the platform, the space between them charged with enough mutual hostility that the healing spirit beside Celestia wanted to finish her task as soon as possible, knowing what might happen next. Their rivalry had started long before either of them entered Summit. Fae had been a commoner. A girl from a farming village with no family name and no future beyond the season's harvest.

What she did have, however, was an affinity for elemental spirits so natural that they would help her with whatever she needed. Birds would land on her windowsill and refuse to leave. Stray cats followed her through the village square. A fire spirit had once crawled out of her family's fire pit and sat beside her, making sure she was warm during the evenings.

It was only when a traveling Elemental Summoner had passed through the village by chance when he noticed the girl sitting on a fence post with three spirits perched on her shoulders. He had stopped walking and immediately offered to take her as an apprentice before he'd even asked her name. Cassia's path had been the opposite. Born into House Flamesy, a baron family with a lineage of warriors, she had been expected to carry the family's martial legacy. The problem was that she had no natural talent for it.

But what Cassia lacked in talent, she replaced with stubbornness. She trained before dawn and after dusk. She broke bones and trained through the recovery. By the time she emerged as a titled climber, now achieving something to her name back in the Flamesy territory, there was no one in her generation who could say she hadn't earned it. The two of them had known each other since they were children.

Fae's mentor had been a frequent visitor to the region where House Flamesy's lands were, and the old summoner had often brought his young apprentice along on his trips. The girls had met at an age where most friendships form easily and last forever. Theirs had gone the other direction. Every interaction had been a disagreement, and every disagreement would escalate very quickly. By the time they were teenagers, the mutual animosity had solidified into something neither of them could be bothered to outgrow.

Cassia broke the silence first.

"What's that title you got from the Tower called again?" She scratched the side of her head with her free hand, brow furrowed in exaggerated thought.

"I forgot. Was it 'The Whorer'?" Fae's face flushed red." Elemental Whisperer! And you know that perfectly well!" She crossed her arms and lifted her chin.

"You think your title's so grand?

'The Mage Killer.' It just shows how much of a savage you are!"

"Worked pretty well two years ago," Cassia said. The grin widened. Fae opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again.

"That—you—!" She took a sharp breath through her nose.

"That was a fluke and you know it. If I'd had everyone properly contracted at the time—"" Yawn. So many excuses."

"—I should have buried you under so much rock and that they'd have needed a mining expedition to find what's left!"

"What? Wanna fight again?" Those words were the trigger. Fae's mana flared as fifteen elemental spirits materialized in rapid succession. They came in all sizes and shapes, surrounding Cassia in a wide circle. Cassia looked at the small army around her. Her grin stretched wider.

"Hah! Come at me!" She dropped into a fighting stance and flooded aura into her wooden sword until the blade hummed.

"I'll make you cry like two years ago!"

"I did not cry!" The first spirit lunged forward...... The next morning, students walking to their Friday classes noticed that something was different about the eastern end of campus. Training Building Four was gone. The walls had collapsed inward and sections of the roof lay in uneven slabs across the ground outside. The stone platform at the center had been cracked clean in half with plenty of scorch marks running along the ground in wide arcs. A small crowd gathered at a safe distance, staring.

An official notice was posted on the bulletin board nearby. Training Building Four is currently closed for structural repairs. The facility sustained significant damage overnight due to disagreement between faculty. Students enrolled in electives that utilize this building will be temporarily reassigned to Training Building Two until further notice. — Principal-Archmage Valen Weaver The students exchanged looks, glanced back at the rubble, and carried on with their day.