Aether Engineering

Chapter 20

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

Silas woke up from his stay in the hospital to find Primrose standing over him, her arms crossed. He just barely cracked his eyes, making an attempt to examine the situation before he revealed he had woken up. There were more than a few things that were bothering him, and Primrose had the answers.

She knew what was going on at the academy, why there were three wildly different curriculums, why the academy was willing to admit students at no cost, and why all the faculty seemed to be so impressive. Most importantly though, Silas was interested in how Reah could possibly be so powerful.

There was a reason why everyone wasn’t taught to use the aether space and it largely had to deal with age restrictions. Fundamentally, the young were unable to progress far as arcaners. Depending on the person, you were likely to be unable to start seriously delving until you were somewhere between 15 and 16. With that limitation in place, it was impossible to teach the general public how to use the aether space. Most people in the province were already working a full-time job by the time they turned 16.

That one concept had major ramifications on the society of the entire province. Instead of long training times, soldiers were rushed into battle as soon as they were deemed advanced enough to have merit in combat. With some members of society able to easily overpower others without access to weapons or resources, the system of requiring anyone who may have knowledge on how to use the aether space to wear a colored band around their arm was initiated. Even the noble class held themselves up as the protectors of the province, validating their status by devoting themselves to becoming truly strong.

Reah’s strength called a great deal into question. She looked no older than 16, but she had casually demonstrated enough power to make her a valuable military resource.

Myles’ attempt to observe Primrose before their conversation could begin proved fruitless. She noticed almost immediately, but she also didn’t make a move to hide herself behind a mask of calm professionalism like she usually did.

“I confess that I am disappointed at your team’s performance, Silas.” Without the mask that Primrose usually wore, the statement was actually frightening.

When Silas had first heard that she had been called by the moniker of ‘white tiger’, he had done research into the name. It was surprisingly easy to learn of her feats. She was in many ways a legendary figure for the province. Though her name wasn’t mentioned in any history lecture, she had played a large part in the relatively recent railroad war and had been employed by the province’s military ever since. She had apparently been born in the Perralin Empire proper and come here to find work as a mercenary.

Right now, Silas had no illusions that he was looking at the mercenary side of Primrose. Her expression was filled with frustration, and she wielded it like a spear, deftly keeping him off balance, pressuring him to own up to his team’s failure, to explain himself.

Silas decided to comply with her wishes. Maybe he would be able to steer the conversation in towards the topic of Reah. “We ran into a pack of ogren, but there were too many of them to fight off without injury. By the time we won, we were in no condition to continue the mission.”

“I’m not interested in what you did, I’m more concerned with what you failed to do.”

Silas felt a slight wave of irritation before he realized he could turn this into a chance to redirect the conversation. “We weren’t strong enough. We might have been able to fend them off without injury if we had as much mana as Reah, but I didn’t even think that was possible at our age. Is there some sort of trick to get strong so quickly?”

A brief look of confusion passed across Primrose’s face, not entirely wiping away the look of frustrated disappointment that she wore but managing to soften it. “Reah? Oh right. I didn’t know she was fond of that name.” Primrose gave a slight chuckle of genuine amusement before refocusing on the topic at hand. “Reah is a unique case, and not one where it is my place to discuss. Regardless of that though, I was not discussing your lack of combat strength, but rather your lack of preparations.”

Silas mentally tucked away the tidbits of information about Reah before thinking about Primrose’s response. Ever the master of conversation, Primrose had brought the topic back to where she wanted it. It was this ability to calmly dominate a conversation that had made finding answers to his questions impossible in the past. “What do you mean by preparations? We bought plenty of rations for the mission. We did give away the medicine we purchased away, but in the end, Kate was able to solve that issue.”

“We will discuss that in class later. For now, I fear that we have gotten ahead of ourselves. I came here to ensure that you did not choose to skip this morning’s class on account of your injury.”

Silas felt his mouth go dry. Their morning class was combat training! With his wound still in the process of healing, it would be reopened in seconds from the intense exercise. Silas couldn’t even walk without leaning on someone.

Primrose didn’t bother listening to Silas’ protests, instead, pushing him out of bed with a clump of evoked pure mana. Before his knees gave out from under him, pure mana drifted toward him, supporting much of his weight. The arrangement still allowed him to move by himself, but he had to support so little weight that there was minimal risk of hurting himself.

When they arrived in the basement of Redleaf hall, Silas quickly realize that he wasn’t the only one who was too injured for an intense training session. The group took their spots in the small dueling pits that were the rooms central features.

Primrose walked up to her spot on a slightly elevated mound at the front of the room. The same frustrated look that was on her face that morning was there now. The group looked away in shame. They all knew how badly they had failed.

“Your performance in your examinations this month was disappointing, and it will be taken into consideration for your continued enrollment at the academy. That said, I think it important to discuss what went wrong as well as the few things that did go right.”

The group nodded along uncertainly. Silas doubted that he was alone in thinking that they already knew what had gone wrong in their missions.

“Let’s start with preparation because this is the area in which everyone in this room failed the most. Mercy and Silas, you two have been trained over the last month about the politics of both the local area and the society of our province as a whole.”

Silas nodded in response. It felt wrong to interrupt Primrose’s speech.

“How did you use these skills to your squad’s advantage during this mission?”

Silas paused. He hadn’t used the skills he had learned from those classes at all, but he had no idea how he could have made use of them.

While Silas was still thinking, Mercy gave her response. “How could those skills have come into use? We were sent to the middle of nowhere to kill a monster.”

Silas had to agree with that statement. Sure, he had done some research into the town he they had been sent to, but they had never even gotten there, how was he supposed to use politics in the middle of nowhere?

Primrose shook her head, disappointed. “Let me use the example of another group of students to explain. The group in question follows a different curriculum than you, so, they don’t have team members focusing on politics. Still though, they were able to safely arrive at their destination by pooling their money with another group who was going in the same direction and hiring a passing group of shikari.”

That was interesting. Not only was the tactic quite logical, but Primrose had just acknowledged the existence of the other curriculums within the academy. Since this group didn’t share their politics classes, that probably meant it was one of the groups of nobles. Their curriculum was heavily focused on command and combat.

Myles spoke up in defense. “That doesn’t really sound like politics to me. Besides wouldn’t hiring others to do the job for you be cheating since this was an exam?”

As much as Silas admired his friend from speaking up, he knew he was wrong. As Primrose responded, Silas thought through the issue silently. To his first objection, hiring shikari may seem like an ordinary transaction on the surface, but it was a lot more involved. Because of the travelling nature of a shikari’s work, it was hard to find information about their reliability. Narrowing down which group of available shikari to use was a skill in itself. A wrong assumption could lead to being extorted for money halfway across the voidlands or a loss of life if the shikari weren’t competent enough for the task at hand. Managing to convince another squad to invest into the plan would also take a degree of skill.

As for hiring others being cheating, Silas got the impression that the faculty were far more interested in results than process. The whole academy was unusual after all. Nobody here would be bothered by the use of unconventional methods.

Primrose continued on. She seemed to have something to say to everyone. Myles and Jane both got an earful for not bringing along any of the aether constructs they had created. Seth was made to explain his thought process behind following a herd of rock deer without coming up with suitable countermeasures for their abilities.

As the time wore on, Silas found a theme. Despite being their combat teacher, Primrose was much more interested in how they used their other skills to carry out the mission. It was a painful process as she went over various hypotheticals and how other students had performed differently.

The exercise was extremely valuable though, and Silas found himself paying close attention throughout. Each reminder of their shortcomings stung, but it was also followed by advice on how to improve. The main takeaway was that they needed to be more conscious of their skills and use them better.

When Primrose finally finished discussing their failings, she turned to their successes. It was hard to ignore how few these were. Kate and Myles were praised for how they reacted in the aftermath of the attack, combining knowledge to quickly create a means to make the odds of detection much smaller before using Kate’s unique skillset to prevent infection in her teammates. Mercy was given grudging credit for her leadership in turning the team aside from their main objective, deeming it too dangerous after they were all hurt in the run-in with the rock deer. Instead, they had managed to make their way downstream of where the plaguetoise polluted the water and constructed a rudimentary filtration construct at the entrance of a stream. The result was that the village afflicted by the poisoned river was able to obtain water from the stream albeit at greater risk. Primrose also mentioned that their filtration construct would not last longer than a week.

After discussing the results of their work, Seth seemed bothered by something. “What will become of the missions since we failed? Will soldiers be dispatched to resolve the issues?”

Primrose shook her head in response. “The missions you were assigned this month were made from requests that could not be handled by the province’s military. There will be no further response to the problems at hand. You can expect a similar situation in most of your monthly examinations.”

Silas felt a surge of guilt. They had originally been tasked with investigating a series of attacks by an unknown monster. Now that they had failed, the attacks would continue. Silas had known the military was understaffed from his class on politics. It was a lasting impact of the railroad war. Still though, this was a harsh truth to face.

Heads turned down in shame as the reality of the situation settled in. They may have been inexperienced students, but they had been the last hope of an entire village. If they had studied harder or used their skills more effectively, they may have been able to help more. Now, strangers would suffer for their failure.