What We Do to Survive

Eventually I had to get going. I did have other things to do, no matter how much I would have liked to just sit and relax by the window. I did grab another cup and a flaky pastry before I left, hopefully they would still be serving it when dinner rolled around but I didn’t want to risk it.

I had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to meet with Janna, though I did need to work out a few potential study plans for her depending on how well she did with the exercise I assigned. I didn’t particularly want to go back to my room, I had everything I needed with me already and the cafeteria was much closer to the practice rooms than my room was.

Fortunately, it seemed the room I’d reserved for Janna and I was currently not in use. It would only take a couple of minutes to set everything up, I still needed to transmute the training tools I wanted on hand, and then I could spend the rest of the time doing some practice of my own. An hour of casting training would leave me with plenty of time to regenerate some of my lost mana and write up the plans I was considering. With my mana still somewhat strained, I wouldn’t be doing anything particularly complicated, but it was always important to review the basics as well.

Setting my bag down by the same table we’d used last time, I arranged three small bowls and filled them with wooden balls, a heap of thin threads, and a large handful of fine sand. As so many times before, I was thankful for the incredible convenience of applied alchemy. It had always been a pain to source the specific aids I needed for various exercises, and transporting many of them was equally difficult. I still hadn’t gotten the sand out of all of my old clothing from when the bag I’d kept it in burst during transport.

Now I could simply carry around a couple of dense metal blocks and create whatever I needed on the spot. It had taken some time to work out some of the alchemical matrices necessary, but fortunately alchemy was one of the simplest magical disciplines when it came to modifying spells.

The majority of modern day alchemy was based on just two spell forms. By combining different parts of the All-Material and All-Form forms, you could theoretically change anything into anything. In practice, it was much more complicated, but it did make the spells much simpler than in other disciplines that made use of a half dozen or more spell forms in a single spell.

Instead, the difficulty came in knowing exactly what parts of the two forms to express in your spell, but after a semester and a half of class, I was slowly building a good intuition for it. Combined with the extensive references the Academy maintained, creating the correct alchemical matrices hadn’t been particularly hard.

With that out of the way (and the table pushed into a corner just in case as well), I walked slowly into the center of the room, cracking my knuckles and letting my mana unspool slightly from my core. This wasn’t going to be a particularly interesting practice session, but it was important to practice your fundamentals. As Professor Zim had told us, ‘repetition was the mother of learning’. Sometimes you had to do a lot of repetitive, boring work if you wanted to progress.

Unlike the smooth stone of the rest of the room, the back wall was a dull, matte grey and pockmarked with small cracks and craters. It was a specially reinforced surface, made specifically for practicing the more destructive sorts of magic. Despite all my practice, I’d never even left a mark on the surface, making me even more impressed and wary of whatever students had damaged it so much. In past years, I’d vowed to eventually manage something like that, but that was a task for another time. For now, the fundamentals it was.

Flexing my mana, I carefully formed the spell matrix for the ‘force spike’ spell above my palm, studying it intently. The spell was formed from four different Spell Forms, only one of which I was particularly familiar with. They were Direction, Force, Penetrate, and Destruction, with force being the most important and the others helping to shape the spell.

It was a second circle spell, but barely. It only used ordinary three-dimensional representations of the spell forms, though the bit of the Force Form was particularly tricky even without including higher dimensions. The rest of the spell was comparatively quite simple, utilizing very basic expressions of the three forms. It had been one of the first second-circle spells I learned, and I had been practicing with it ever since.

It was also the combat spell I knew best, and my eventual goal was to make the forming of the spell matrix utterly instinctive, allowing me to cast the spell in an instant as though I was using pure mana manipulation. To that end, I had devoted hours to just memorizing every nuance of the spell matrix, even having modified it slightly to account for my needs. It also meant casting it over, and over, and over for hours and hours until I could do it in my sleep.

Dismissing the outline, I turned to face the back wall and extended a hand. The matrix formed and activated with little more than a thought, launching a nearly invisible projectile of force at the wall. Without a moment's pause, I cast again, then again, and again until I had launched a total of ten force spikes at the wall.

I let out a gasp as the severe mana usage hit me all at once. Though the effort was entirely mental and spiritual, it still had a physical effect, leaving me winded and aching if I overdid it. After a minute of rest, I repeated the exercise. The matrix formed slower this time as I knew it would. Closer to four seconds per shot than the three I had managed the first time, but it was still much better than I had expected.

Over the next half hour, I fired off eight more volleys of the spell, for a total of one-hundred casts. I had to rest for longer between each successive attempt, and by the end each casting was taking me upwards of twenty seconds, but it was still an impressive display. The last time I’d done something like this was at the very start of the semester, and I had done far worse then. My fourth casting today had still been faster than the first rep then, and the difference between the two final reps was like night and day.

I let myself rest for ten minutes, taking the time to go through the same strain-reducing exercise I’d been doing all day. Then I continued on, getting in another six volleys before the time I had allocated for the training ran out. I moved onto stretching, both physical and magical, then jogged around the room for a half hour and did several other short exercises that I could manage without any special equipment. Whenever possible, I liked to end my magic practice with some physical excursion. I wasn’t sure if it really did anything or if it was just a placebo, but I’d found it helped me relax and helped with the strain of rapidly drawing on a lot of mana.

A few spells easily got rid of the evidence of my exertion. They were no replacement for a hot shower and a change of clothes, but I still needed to meet with Janna and didn’t want to do so stinking and soaked with sweat. I spent the last half hour before she showed up getting some final preparations out of the way and rereading bits of the reference book I had brought with me.

Janna arrived almost exactly on time, flouncing into the room with her typical exuberant mask and her frilly skirts bouncing. I set my book aside, tucking it back into my bag, and waved her over to the table.

“Hey Janna, you’re just on time.”

She primly adjusted her stool and sat down, letting her skirts fan out around her. “Hello Orion. It's good to see that you are actually here this time.”

I rolled my eyes and ignored the comment. Instead I pushed the two of the bowls across the table towards her and silently gestured at them.

She scowled, but complied, carefully plucking two long threads from the bowl and laying them down on her palm. Letting my mana slowly extend out around me, I watched her carefully levitate the two threads side by side, then painstakingly overlap them as she began to tie them together. Her control faltered at one point, but she managed to recover and complete the exercise.

With a quiet hum, I nodded. “Slow, but passable. And the balls?”

She let the threads drop onto the table and scooped out five of the small wooden balls I’d transmuted earlier. Sloppy threads of invisible mana wrapped around each ball in turn and she turned her hand palm down over the floor. The balls spilled out of her hand but stopped before they hit the ground. They dangled and bounced, knocking against each other but did not fall further.

“Can you manage any more?”

She shook her head. “No, I started with two but haven’t managed any more than this.”

“I guess that's fine for two day’s work. How about the internal exercises”

She turned away, focusing on plucking the balls one by one and depositing them back in their bowl. “I can do the one with the spirals, it was tricky but manageable. I couldn’t manage the tribar though.”

That was honestly about what I’d expected. From the abysmal state of the circulations I’d seen last time, I hadn’t expected that she practiced internal manipulation much. The impossible tribar was a particularly tricky exercise that wasn’t really meant as an internal exercise at all, though I’d found it quite useful.

It was primarily supposed to be a training tool for practicing the sort of multi-dimensional, geometry warping matrices that were required for high circle spells. Past the fourth circle, most spells had to mimic the higher-dimensional, geometry warping parts of Spell Forms, making that sort of control a key skill to practice.

I would keep that to myself however. It would only discourage her in the future if she thought I was assigning her work I didn’t think she could do. “I guess that’s fine. I’ll find something simpler to replace that exercise.”

She bristled at the insinuation of her lack of skill, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she leaned forward, resting her chin on clasped hands and asked, “Well, what's next then? I tried the circulation again last night and still couldn’t manage it despite your ‘training’.”

“I didn’t really expect that you would, you’ve made good progress but this is the sort of thing that takes time. I didn’t think I’d have to be the one to teach you the value of patience.”

Her eyes narrowed at the dig, but once again she let it pass. The high courts of Gulivine worked notoriously slowly, meticulously collecting every scrap of evidence before ruling on a case. Members of some of the shorter-lived races had been known to die of old age before their cases were ever ruled on.

I regretted saying it almost the moment it had slipped out of my mouth. I always tried to be non confrontational, and here I was insulting a powerful noble twice in as many sentences. Unfortunately, m y slowly developing mana senses kept showing me just how inefficient and sloppy her spellwork was. I’d always thought she was much better than that and the disparity between my mental image and reality made it hard to be scared of her.

Deciding to put that aside for now, I grabbed a handful of fine sand from the last bowl and scattered it in the clear space between the two of us. “Let’s try something new.”

A flick of my finger smoothed out the sand, forming it into a circular patch of even thickness about the size of a dinner plate. “I want you to make waves in the sand.”

She frowned, tilting her head as she looked at the circle. “I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what you mean?”

“Like this.” Holding my hand over the sand, I let a light sphere of barely solid mana drop gently into the center of the circle. It burst as it hit the table, spilling over the sand and leaving ripples in its wake like a stone dropped into a still lake.

I let her study the result for a moment, then reshaped it into the original smooth circle. “Now you try.”

She copied my movement, extending a perfectly manicured hand over the sand, a look of intense focus on her face. I had to suppress a laugh, her tongue was sticking out just a little between her lips, reminding me of the tiny kittens one of my neighbors had kept for a time. Her hair was even the same color as their fur had been.

Her first attempt was to make a disk with her mana and try to press it into the sand. She managed three even circles before the construct got too large and she lost control. She glared at me when I wiped the sand clean again, but I just stared back impassively. She leaned forward, sweeping her hair to hang over her shoulders.

Looking at her like this, I imagined that she would look good on her knees. The way she wore her hair would make for a good pair of handholds and from this angle the illusion of a small child disappeared, leaving a gorgeous, refined woman in its place. Miranda had said that I needed to make connections. If I could pull it off, Janna would make for a very valuable… ‘associate’. Her family was wealthy and well connected, and she had a guaranteed political office waiting for her in a few years.

The oath I’d sworn with Janna twinged slightly in the back of my mind, but did nothing more. I wasn’t violating any of the conditions we’d agreed to, simply skirting the spirit of the agreement. Unfortunately, I doubted anything would come of it. I was pretty sure, especially after my talk with Miranda, that Janna was another student planning on withdrawing after next year.

I silently cleaned up her second attempt, which had failed explosively and scattered sand all across the floor and table, still lost in thought.

A little over a year and a half was a lot of time, but I wasn’t sure it would be enough to maneuver into the situation I needed. I could probably force her into swearing something similar to what Miranda had done, but that would not be enough. That sort of oath, especially when freshly sworn, was easy to detect and she absolutely would have the connections needed to shatter it. After that… well I would be in some deep trouble. Making an enemy of the Gulivine Republic seemed like a good way to get myself killed.

Still, it was definitely something to consider. My primary concern with making social connections was that well, I sucked at that sort of thing. Talking to people, being friendly, the sort of double-speak that I’d heard others use? That was very much not my forte. If I could make that sort of connection, even if only in a somewhat underhanded way, without having to do any of that? Well, that had promise.

I wiped away another failed attempt, somewhat amused by her most recent technique. She’d tried to vibrate part of the table, once again scattering sand everywhere. It was still a decent idea and not something I’d done much work with. Professor Meadows had taught us that all things were made of small bits. There was definitely an idea there somewhere. I jotted down a note and shoved it into my bag.

There was that second year girl, Bella? Beatrice? Something like that. Her family was somewhat important in one of the other small nations not far from my own. I’d passed through her family lands on the way to Avalon. She was moderately skilled, moderately wealthy, and moderately well connected. A decent potential plan.

I had to put my scheming aside when Janna stood up and marched away from the table, arms thrown up into the air. “For gods’ sake Orion, how the fuck am I supposed to do this! Don’t just sit there smiling, show me!”

“Well that last attempt was pretty good. You’re on the right track.”

She whirled around, eyes wide and teeth clenched. “Well then, tell me that! I’m paying you to teach me, not mock me!”

She had a point, even if I felt figuring things out on your own was a better way to learn. I wasn’t trying to make her a better mage, just ensuring she could manage one particular technique.

“Fine. Sit down and watch.”

She did, though the scowl never left her face. I added some more sand to the circle and smoothed it out until it was closer to the size of a platter. Then I slowly formed a carefully shaped globule of mana in my hand, letting it bleed slightly into the visible spectrum. It was technically bad form to make pure mana visible, but she clearly hadn’t developed her mana senses particularly far.

I let the mana drop, maintaining my hold on it as it hit the sand and ballooned outward in a gentle wave. “You have to make sure to keep control of the mana through the entire process. If you aren’t careful, you’ll get something like this.”

Once again, I formed the mana and let it drop. This time however, I let it run wild, hitting the sand and bursting outward, sending sand flying every which way. I seized control of my mana just before it dissolved into ambient mana, splitting it into individual tendrils that collected the scattered sand and reformed the smooth circle.

“Now you try.”