What We Do to Survive

I got back to my room and just lay down on my bed. I was in no mood to do much of anything, the events of the last forty-eight hours racing through my mind like over sugared children. I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was, but I’d spent so long jumping at shadows that I’d missed the forest for the trees.

Of course not everyone was here for the same reason I was. Nine of every ten students were accepted through one of the many special selection processes. Whether it was through money, connections, or invitation, most had had a much easier path to get here. Most hadn’t searched out Avalon to attempt the tests, they had simply arrived knowing they were already in. It was the elves all over again, except instead of inborn magic it was family wealth and power that carried them through life.

Adara had been just like Mistletoe, confident not in her own skill and work, but because of who her parents were. It didn’t matter if she was a talentless hack, she was a Warbringer. Destined for greatness.

Despite myself, I felt a cruel smile creep across my face. She hadn’t looked so arrogant when they carried her desiccated corpse out of the building. Even in death her face had been a rictus of agony, frozen as her soul burned her body from the inside out. I hadn’t done it, but I almost wish I had.

A thought slowly pushed its way to the front of my mind and I sat up abruptly, eyes wide. Oh gods, it wasn’t me that was protecting Brenda. She was shielding me, lending me the implicit support of her family name. Miranda had all but said it while we were talking, but I’d brushed it off.

What had it been that she’d said? ‘You’re one of the best in our year now, but you were much less impressive last year.’ It was true, no matter that Miranda looked like she thought the admission would make me angry again. I’d finally caught up to and exceeded the skill level of my peers, enough that even some upper years had noticed it. During my second year though? I’d been noticeably sub par.

That made everything so much worse. I owed her. Owed Brenda! As I was now, I was confident in a straight fight with any student who was permitted to pick a fight with me. Last year though? I hadn’t been ready to even run from some of the third years. I’d thought I’d been so smooth, cautious, careful. Apparently I’d just been lucky and passably attractive. That was… terrible.

Oh and gods above, I’d just told Janna, poisonous, scheming Janna that I didn’t consider the two of us in a relationship. I was half way off my bed, unsure of what I was doing but needing to move when I remembered our oath.

I sat down hard, heart hammering in my chest. Right. She couldn’t share any information she learned about me during our meetings any more than I could tell anyone how pathetic a spellcaster she actually was. Everything was fine.

I breathed deeply, falling into a semblance of a meditative trance to slow my racing heart. Nothing had changed, I was simply better prepared to face the world now than I had been this morning. This was a distinctly positive lesson that I had hopefully learned early enough to do something about it.

I had to be more careful in the future. That could have ended very poorly for me. If I’d said something to the wrong person last year, I might not be here right now. I needed to figure things out, and soon. I needed to talk to Brenda, maybe consult with Miranda again.

Yes, yes that would work. Miranda was good at this sort of thing and her oath ensured she had my best interests at heart. I was immensely thankful for the decisions I’d made the day I’d let her go. She’d more than earned her life, and if I had anything to reward her with I’d have done it. Fate had been smiling on me the day that girl had tried to drain my life out through my dick.

She’d been desperate when she’d decided to go after me. Avalon had very strict rules about who was allowed to target who. I wasn’t quite sure how they were enforced, the monitoring alone must be a monstrously complicated system, but they were and brutally at that. My first week, a fifth year had been crucified and then burned alive for preying on a new first year student.

The rules were roughly as such. Any student could try to punch up any number of years, but if detected reprisal was fully permitted. In the other direction, only first years could target one another, third through sixth years could target down one year, and seventh year students could target fifth years and above.

However, first years were given a two month grace period where they were not permitted to target one another at all. Miranda had enough succubus blood in her that she needed to feed to survive. The Avalon Gate had been situated in the city-state of Armouth, a martial citadel notoriously hostile to beings like her. Feeding there hadn’t been an option and so she had been almost starving when the two month limit finally ended.

I had been her first target, fresh off the paranoia caused by Adora’s harsh words. Between our brief struggle and the meager rations I’d been feeding her, getting her to swear the oaths had been a breeze. I was pretty sure that if I’d been able to bind it then, I could have convinced her to make a proper slave oath, anything to excape the gnawing hunger and burn of mana deprivation.

I stood up, feeling much lighter now that I had a course of action. I would talk to Miranda again tomorrow. We had class together so I could drag her off to lunch and pick her brains for how I should proceed. Then, I would schedule a time to meet with Brenda, she was always happy to spend time together on weekends, though I’d never actually sought her out for that myself. It had always been her coming to find me.

For now, I could do exactly what I always did when I was stressed, practice. Practice, practice, practice. If I was strong enough, I would never have to deal with shit like this. No one would dare make me.

After an hour of simple internal mana exercises, I might be even more assured in my superiority in that field but it was no reason to get sloppy, I was feeling calm enough to do something more interesting.

In this case, that meant my rather promising research into what made Mistletoe tick. I’d made some interesting observations on the surface level the day before, but hadn’t had time for anything deeper.

It was still early in the evening, I had about four more hours before I needed to get to bed, and I didn’t have anything due the next day. That meant I had plenty of time to do some hands-on research. No, I wasn’t planning to fuck her again, no matter how tempting that was. I meant actual research.

Digging out the same notebook I’d started, I sat down on the stool beside her to make some observations. She’d continued to drip aggressively, in fact it had gotten noticeably worse after I’d fucked her ass. Clearly I’d been right about her being something of a horny slut.

I’d set down a bucket under her the day before, as well as lay down some towels around her legs to catch anything trickling down her thighs. A day later, the bucket had collected several cups worth of the slightly pink-tinged clear fluid, and both towels were rather soaked.

As I cleaned up and replaced the towels, I wondered if Igor had ever had to deal with this sort of thing. If he had, he hadn’t bothered mentioning it in any of his notes. Maybe it wasn’t an elf thing and Mistletoe was an exception, I’d heard of girls who got really turned on by bondage, maybe that's what was happening. Alternatively, maybe that's why he kept them as dismembered torsos. Perhaps removing the arms and legs made them less horny?

Whatever it was, I could tell that the liquid was absolutely packed with mana, so I carefully emptied the bucket into several glass containers and replaced it. I hadn’t heard of any uses for elven arousal fluids, but that might be one of those deliberately suppressed bits of information. I couldn’t imagine the elf kingdoms would want outsiders to know that their women were valuable for more than just their milk.

I decided to reward her with a firm spank and a rub. I slipped two fingers between her legs, her pussy immediately clenching down around my fingers. It took barely thirty seconds of stimulation before she came, her legs thrashing against the metal bonds that held them in place and fluids gushing down my hands.

I shook my head in exasperation. I’d technically been engaged before everything fell apart, but she had never been even half this responsive. We’d had a good relationship, but there had been little passion there. Not enough for something like this at least. If this was how all elves were, it was a miracle they didn’t spend all their time like this. I’d barely had to touch her even.

Before I stopped, I decided to remind her of the previous time I had played with her. My soaked fingers slowly trailed up and slipped effortlessly into her rear. I sank my fingers in up to the knuckles, then pulled away and got cleaned up. That was enough for her, though if I found a good use for the fluids I’d harvested I could see this becoming a frequent event. She’d gushed almost a full cup into the bucket while I’d been playing with her, despite much of it running off down her legs.

Hopefully what I was about to do wouldn’t ruin that, though maybe it would make things even worse. Better? I wasn’t sure how to put it. Miranda had told me some girls liked a bit of pain, right? I wasn’t quite sure if this counted, but whatever.

Moving the stool around, I set it down directly in front of her, careful to avoid the tube leading up to her gag. Sitting down, I rested my hands on her bare shoulders, then leaned my head to rest against her forehead.

I’d never tried this particular technique before, but I’d read that it was highly effective. It would probably be better if I removed the blindfold, eye contact was useful for many types of intrusive spellcasting, but that was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. The eyes were a window to the soul, and the suppressive enchantments in her blindfold were a valuable addition to her overall binding

I took a deep breath, unspooling my mana much as I had to intimidate Miranda. It was a difficult technique, very mana intensive but highly useful. I carefully shaped the mana, letting it pool around Mistletoe’s body and roughly conform to her restrained form.

Only then, once I had thoroughly smothered her in my presence, I began. I pushed inward in a brutal, crushing movement, mana shoving its way past the resistant nature of her body to seep inside. It was vaguely similar to what I’d done with Janna, but in the same way a blacksmith’s hammer was like a dwarven hammer-press.

What I’d done with Janna had been an expression of delicate control, minute threads of my mana worming past her defensis to observe what she was doing within her body and soul. That sort of approach was highly effective, but only because Janna was a human. She didn’t have the immense natural magic resistance of something like a troll, dragon, or elf.

Had I tried that same technique here, it would have failed no matter how tightly controlled my tendrils were. That little mana would never get past the spiritual barrier that flowed through her skin. Instead, I used a much more brutal, painful method. I forced my way through her resistance, burning mana to smash aside her natural defenses to get at the delicate mana within.

It was a painful, impractical technique. Certainly not something I would ever use on an ally. I was relatively sure what the Myrrdin had done was conceptually similar, but much more refined. Still, despite my inexperience, it worked like a charm.

After a moment of struggle, my mana spread throughout her body, carefully gliding around the complex structure of her natural circulations as I recovered from the strain of my entry. Now that I was passed the initial barrier, I could use my preferred threads of mana to probe and examine. Using brute force here only risked permanently damaging what I wished to study.

From here, it was easy to tell that my entry had hurt her much more than it had pained me. I wasn’t surprised, it was designed as a method for restraining and studying monsters that resisted typical scans. No one cared if it hurt, only that it was effective. There was surely a better way to do this, I just didn’t know it.

My pain had simply been the momentary feedback of my magic destroying itself against her protections. Hers was a constant ache, the mere presence of my mana burning her as her body identified it a foreign element. Added to the ache of stiff muscles and the sharp pain of shattered resistances, she would not enjoy this process.

I was tempted to dig deep into her core, to see what really made an elf tick, but I limited myself to my current plans. There was no reason to blunder around and make a mess. I wanted to study what I’d identified as the system that granted elves their preternatural balance. It looked comparatively simple to the rest of the system, so I felt it would be a good place to start.

It took some time, possibly as much as half an hour though it was hard to tell time while so much of my mind was occupied, but eventually I found the magic I was looking for. It had been easy to find from the outside, flowing relatively close to the surface of her body and isolated by the enchantments on my glasses.

From this perspective, everything was much more complicated. There was no outside aids to filter my perspective and there was so much going on inside her body! I’d thought my own circulations were impressive, especially seeing the embarrassing state of Janna’s own enhancement, but this made both of us look like rank amateurs.

I slowly trailed my mana along the threads that made up this enhancement. It was a fine mesh of looping tendrils, running into and around each other as they wound their way through her body. It wasn’t a particularly complicated pattern I realized, simply done in such fine threads that it looked almost like a uniform sheet of mana. The gaps between individual threads were sometimes so small that my own narrow tendrils looked comically oversized in comparison.

For a moment, I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. This was control on a level far beyond what I was capable of now. Maybe I should just go the easy route, use rituals to steal traits like so many other mages did.

My mana sank deeper, feeling along ever more complicated structures. The patterns around her bones were particularly terrifying, nearing the overwhelming complexity of the few seventh and eighth level spells I’d seen in passing. Would I ever be able to mimic something like that?

Yes. Yes I would, I decided, returning to the circulation I’d been studying. I could and I would. It would take time and effort, but when had I ever shied away from hard work? I wouldn’t be like Janna, like my classmates, like the thousands of failed mages who had taken the easy way and suffered for it.

I gathered my mana, forming fine fingers and feelers around the delicate mana flows. The time for that would come. For now, this was my goal, my focus. Other issues would come and I would conquer them in turn. After all, I was me.