New Horizons

Beneath the Dragoneye Moons: Book Eight

———————

Selkie Myth

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Beginning, Once Again

Chapter 2 The Dingpocalypse

Chapter 3 Slow and Steady

Chapter 4 They Meet in a Tavern

Chapter 5 Major Interlude - Iona They Meet in a Tavern I

Chapter 6 Major Interlude – Iona They Meet in a Tavern II

Chapter 7 Hunted Existence

Chapter 8 Vorlers, Spiders, and more!

Chapter 9 The Distance Traveled

Chapter 10 To the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft!

Chapter 11 Entrance Exams I

Chapter 12 Entrance Exams II

Chapter 13 Entrance Exams III

Chapter 14 Entrance Exams IV

Chapter 15 Minor Interlude - Mormerilhawn Dominance

Chapter 16 Scholarships and Scoldings

Chapter 17 Papers Please!

Chapter 18 They Were Roommates!

Chapter 19 Orientation

Chapter 20 Advisor Meeting

Chapter 21 The Medical Manuscripts

Chapter 22 The Big Book of Classes and How to Get Them

Chapter 23 The Third Class I

Chapter 24 The Third Class II

Chapter 25 Student of the Ages

Chapter 26 Getting to the first day of class

Chapter 27 First Day of Class I

Chapter 28 First Day of Class II

Chapter 29 The Second Day of Class, and the rest

Chapter 30 Interlude - Auri Burn the tears, burn the world

Chapter 31 The Bird’s a Liar

Chapter 32 A Good Hug

Chapter 33 School Life I

Chapter 34 School Life II

Chapter 35 Major Interlude - Iona School Life III

Chapter 36 School Life IV

Chapter 37 School Life V

Chapter 38 School Life VI

Chapter 39 School Life VII

Chapter 40 Minor Interlude - Fenrir School Life VIII

Chapter 41 School Life IX

Chapter 42 School Life X

Chapter 43 School Life XI

Chapter 44 Biomancy I

Chapter 45 Biomancy II

Chapter 46 Biomancy III

Chapter 47 Biomancy IV

Chapter 48 Old Friends

Chapter 49 Operation: The Improved Elaine I

Chapter 50 Operation: The Improved Elaine II

Chapter 51 Operation: The Improved Elaine III

Chapter 52 Operation: The Improved Elaine IV

Chapter 53 Operation: The Improved Elaine V

Chapter 54 Operation: The Improved Elaine VI

Chapter 55 Operation: The Improved Elaine VII

Chapter 56 Operation: The Improved Elaine VIII

Chapter 57 Operation: The Improved Elaine IX

Chapter 58 Operation: The Improved Elaine X

Chapter 59 Interlude Around the world

This story started on Royal Road. Come read thousands of other novels today!

Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Oathbound Healer

Adventures in the Argo

Ranger’s Dawn

Beyond the Wall

Journey to the Center of Pallos

Immortal Moments

Return to Remus

New Horizons

This is a work of fiction, and the views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author. Likewise, certain characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

New Horizons (Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, Book 8)

Copyright © 2022 Selkie Myth

All rights reserved.

This story is dedicated to my wonderful wife, Lauren, without whom this wouldn't be possible. Her endless love and support keeps me going.

This story is also dedicated to my beautiful daughter Flora, whose smiles light up my every day.

I would also like to acknowledge my beta readers, who put up with my endless typos, fix my mistakes, and help guide the story, so it can be the best story possible.

I'd like to thank all the other supportive authors and writing communities, and all the kind words they have.

Lastly, I'd like to thank Royal Road. My story and success wouldn't be possible without their website.

Thank you, to each and every one of you.

Chapter 1
The Beginning, Once Again

It was once again entirely clear that I was in a new world. The same world, the old world.

Pallos.

I didn’t have time to take everything in. I was in trouble, and as I felt power flood through me once again, I acted. [Bullet Time] wasn’t activating, but my bond with Auri was letting me think faster.

We had landed at twilight, the full moons creeping over the horizon as the sun set. We were deep in an ancient-looking forest, the shadows stretched long.

Monstrous spiders surrounded us, resting on their thick webs. Cocooned animals larger than I was were wrapped in their nests for later. They ranged from a poisonous orange smaller than my pinky nail, to gigantic black-grey specimens that looked like they’d eat Julius for a snack. The spiders looked hungry, and I wasn’t going to wait and see what they did.

We’d appeared in a tiny gap in their webs, somehow not touching a single one.

Also - why was it always spiders!?

The first step was to dismiss the notifications as I landed. I needed to strip everything away except for the essentials, and work from there. The notifications weren’t important right now, and were horribly distracting from the situation at hand.

Speaking of distractions, cool relief washed through me as [Center of the Universe] kicked back in, muting my sense of pain. A quick flick of my eyes glanced at my status, and I saw I had everything back. I hadn’t gotten reset to level 1 or anything stupid like that.

Second step was to assess the threats. I quickly pulled up a dozen of them with [Long-Range Identify], the skill letting me check entire groups.

[Sentry Spider - Lv 278]

[Black Widow - Lv 53]

[Jumping Spider - Lv 148]

[Tyrant Tarantula - Lv 764]

[Brown Recluse- Lv 236]

[Black Widow - Lv 301]

[Baby Spider - Lv 5]

[Spitting Spider - Lv 99]

[Webspinning Warrior - Lv 262]

[Unfriendly Neighborhood Spider - Lv 85]

[Wolf Spider - Lv 210]

[Spider Seductress - Lv 149]

I absorbed the information without getting lost in the details, idly wondering why I was getting numbers and not colors from my skill, but now wasn’t time to wonder about that.

Third step was to assess what tools and people I had.

Artemis, Julius, and I had all worked and trained together extensively. They were some of the most lethal, combat-capable people I knew. I knew how they worked and fought, and how we’d execute things. I also knew they’d see that I was punching harder than I ever had in a fight and adapt to it.

Amber was a small liability. I adored my beanpolish apprentice, but there was no sense in wearing blinders. She was worse than dead weight in a fight, she was someone I actively needed to protect. She had a good head on her shoulders though, and I could somewhat trust her to listen to us.

Auri was a major liability. She thought she was invincible, and would fearlessly attack. No matter how strong we were, I didn’t like her chances if the level 700+ [Tarantula] ate her whole. I’d need to spend effort not only keeping her safe and alive, but also stopping her from diving in.

Plans flashed through my head, getting analyzed and discarded until I settled on one, right as the first spider started to skitter over to us.

It was one of the low-leveled spiders, and with my vitality and [Bullet Time], it looked like it was running through thick jelly.

Unfortunately, my communication was also slow. To tell Auri and Amber anything, I’d need to speak slowly enough that they could understand me, which could give the spiders an eternity to act.

Relatively speaking. Everyone moving at such different speeds was tricky to manage.

I threw up [Mantle] all around us in a great dome, trusting that Artemis would know to turn my snap-shield into a full stone dome. I grabbed Auri with one hand, mentally smiling at my Fire immunity, while the other one grabbed Amber and started to unceremoniously shove her face-first into the dirt.

If the spiders broke through, I needed her out of the way.

I noted a few tiny spiders inside the dome and blasted them with prejudice, utterly annihilating their tiny bodies with an overeager application of Radiance.

Normally I’d do a precision shot, but I was shoving Amber onto their remains. Didn’t want there to be a super venom sac or something.

I finally had enough time to work on myself. I flashed [Dance with the Heavens] through my body, fixing my ruined feet, then immediately set up a connection with Auri and reset my [Persistent Casting] with my healing on her.

It was obvious that visiting the land of the fae had reset all of my careful [Persisting Castings]. It was going to be a pain to reset them all, if lacking them didn’t prove lethal to somebody in the short term.

Thick stone walls slammed into existence all around us, Artemis’s Earth walls curving up and over us to form a dome. I flickered [Mantle], changing it from the dome that Artemis used to build her more solid walls, to something like a knee-high wall around us. It’d help against waves of small spiders, while still giving Artemis easy access to the stone walls, so she could expand them.

Amber ate a faceful of soft moss. The inside of the stone dome was lit by Auri’s soft glow, who was just now starting to protest.

"Brrrpt!" She cried out. It hurt, but I ignored her, in favor of keeping us all alive.

"Backs, over Amber." I called as I whirled up, standing over my apprentice. I quickly felt the comforting presence of Artemis’s back against mine, quickly followed by Julius’s reassuring strength as we formed a triangle.

"Auri, my head, light. No fire. We have limited air."

"Brrrpt!" She shouted her understanding, and having an Important Mission, would be suitably out of the way.

I drew my short sword and handed it to Julius.

"Julius, close. Artemis -"

"Walls." She grunted. It was clear that she meant she was spending all her mana and focus on building, repairing, and expanding the stone dome we were in.

"I’m firepower." I agreed with her, letting Artemis and Julius know that I was to be the heavy hitter for this engagement.

I did a quick look around the dome, lighting it up with a soft Radiance glow to compliment Auri’s flames. A few quick beams of Radiance handled the few spiders that were still inside the dome with us, regardless of how harmless they looked.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot as I stared at the dark walls in front of me, waiting for one of the massive spiders to burst through. With a quick thought, I turned on [Dance with the Heavens] with a terrible image - "heal" - and set it with [Persistent Casting] on both myself, and any human that touched me.

[Wheel of Sun and Moon] was worthless without sunlight or moonlight, and given that we’d entombed ourselves in a dark forest, I didn’t think there’d be that much of a chance of using the skill.

"Artemis. Arcanite in my armor. Use it." I told her. I was attuned to the Arcanite - it had been issued to me, after all - but that didn’t mean Artemis couldn’t use it. It was harder for her to use and she needed to be in direct contact, but it was usable.

Speaking of, those walls had gone up fast. Much faster than I thought Artemis could bring them up.

"Completely out." Artemis declared after a dozen seconds, and I felt her back shift slightly as her arm came down. We continued our watch, and I was able to slowly process everything that was going on, see and figure out the world around me.

Slowly, because I was on edge. Every part of me screamed to be ready. Be ready to move. Run. Roll. Blast. Heal. Analyze. Adjust. Adapt.

Overcome.

I was a tightly wound spring with enough power at my fingertips to kill most people, most monsters, with a thought.

Sight was practically useless. All I could do was stare at a blank wall. At the same time, it was like my vision expanded as I slowly panned my head back and forth, looking for any little crumbling of stone that indicated one of the spiders slowly tunneling through. Ready for the explosion of noise as the massive [Tyrant Tarantula] crushed the walls, letting a flood of its smaller kin in to kill us and feast on our flesh. Shadows flickered against the wall, Auri’s flames casting gigantic, inconsistent shadows, shifting as I turned my head to keep checking on my parts of the wall.

Useless, and the most important at the same time. A paradox, in a sense.

Sound was next, the most horrifying. Our intrusion - specifically, the stone dome Artemis conjured up, if not our actual presence - hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Artemis’s stone was magically uniform and solid. Perfect for hearing the skittering feet of dozens of spiders with hundreds of legs exploring all over this new object in their midsts. Heavier thuds echoed through as some of the larger, more gigantic spiders walked over our new home. Worse were the noises I couldn’t identify. Screeching, scratching, chewing, clawing, the sound of rocks breaking and falling, crashing.

Screaming. From elvenoid throats or monster, I couldn’t tell.

The deep, earthy smell of the woods came to me next, the smell of rich loam and decay. All perfectly natural and somewhat reassuring.

I hadn’t felt the sickening sensation of the Dead Zone coming back.

The air felt humid and warm, making me think it was still summer. Hopefully it was summer, and we’d just been thrown to a nasty forest. I wasn’t looking forward to ‘Operation: Where the hell is Remus?’ again - especially with Amber slowing us down - but I had high hopes for the rest. Especially after the Sentinel debrief where everyone plotted out all the best ways to find Remus when dropped in a random place on the map!

Six months, tops, to make it back home.

We waited, tension steadily increasing. Even then, no matter how tense and dangerous the situation, there was only so much staring at a blank wall I could do.

However, I needed to do it, so I did. After an interminably long time, we broke in unison, and turned to face each other.

"I’ll take first shift." Julius offered, and I nodded in approval. Artemis reached her hand out, and without looking, Julius took it.

After all, they’d just been spiders. There might be a malevolent intelligence behind them, but we’d shown up and vanished so quickly that the big, important, dangerous spiders might not have noticed us or cared, and were simply expanding their webs and territory to the nice new rock in the middle of the forest. Who casually broke boulders just because they could, especially when there was no pressing reason to?

For the moment, I thought we were safe. Sure, we were on a dozen timers - the lack of breathable air being the biggest one, water being a close second - but the immediate threat was done.

"Guys. You have to look at the notifications." Amber’s voice was a whisper of horror.

"Brrrrrpt!!" Auri was shocked.

Well, they had waited until we’d determined we were somewhat safe. Might as well see what all the fuss was about. I opened my notifications, and was initially confused. What was going on…?

I realized what the notifications meant. Not just the words, but the implications. The blood drain from my face. My knees got weak, and I fell down onto my butt.

"No…" I whispered, trying to deny the truth in front of me.

"NO!"

Chapter 2
The Dingpocalypse

I stared at the notifications, reading them, not processing the individual words but the implications. The meanings.

A few of them jumped out at me, the absurd cheerfulness of Genie - who I had to imagine was a genuine, real, three-wishes type - contrasting with the utter horror of the combined meanings.

[*whoop whoop!* Allow me to introduce myself! My name is Genie! Couple of you folks have found me over the years, but here’s a wish that’s going to get all of you interested! This historian-ecologist, Hwinthel, wants to know whenever a species is wiped out!]

…

[*ding!* The shimagu have gone extinct.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* You’re in the mix with DJ Genie tonight! Wang Zhao has got something to mix it all up and bring the house DOWN! You’ve heard of basic elements. Yoooooooou’ve heard of advanced elements. WELL! Let me be the first to introduce you toooooooooooooooooo - THE TIER THREE ELEMENTS! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, crabs and crustaceans of all ages, we are here! Combine any two advanced elements together to create one of the six hundred and sixty six tier three elements! Hope you still have a class up or two left!]

…

[*ding!* It has been 10,000 years since Creation]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Keepin’ it locked and loaded, we’re back with everyone’s favorite wish-granter, GEEEEEEEEEEENIE! Those pesky tier three elements were too much for this anonymous wish asker, and they’re GONE! Done! I’d say they’ve gone the way of the dino, but you lot still have those around! Great job! Keep them alive. You’ll know why when the moment comes.]

…

[*ding!* Dodos have gone extinct.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Eeeeeeeeeeeey y’all, it’s ya boy Genie! This little Felix here wants all [Shepherds] to be able to find their sheep! Well, never fear little bo peep, now you’ll always know where to find em! Mutton’s back on the menu!]

[*whoop whoop!* You all won’t believe who it is! GEEEEEEEEENIE IS BACK IN THE HOUSE. Honestly, I never left, this kid Felix is a riot. He’s got a second wish y’all should know about! Identify and Analyze and shit to stop being in COLOR! Dunno why, but I’m the genie, and his wish is myyyyyyyyyyy COMMAND! Status-checking skills now return numbers, not colors! Colorblind rejoice! Let’s see if Felix gets a grand three for three global messages, or if he’s going to ask one for himself!]

[*ding!* Due to the great efforts of [Mage] Felix, you get a +1 bonus to all stats! You also get a passive 2% increase to all experience gain!]

[*ding!* Due to the great efforts of [Knight] Chloe, you get a +1 bonus to all stats! You also get a passive 2% increase to all experience gain!]

…

[*ding!* Allerian Highlander Wasps have gone extinct.]

…

[*ding!* Steller's Sea Cow have gone extinct.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* GOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING PALLOS! Genie here with some more announcements! Have I got a doozy for you all today! Ready? You think you are but I bet ya ain’t. This little elf Helediron here’s a bit of a prick. He wants all monsters to gain experience faster, and level up quicker! Pssst. I got a secret for you. He didn’t specify what a monster is.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Whoa, you won’t believe this one! Thraximundar the Terrible has wished for true, genuine, Immortality. Nothing can kill him! Nothing can stop him! I can’t wait to see what he does! Good luck everyone!]

…

[*ding!* Labrador Ducks have gone extinct.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* You should all know who this is by now! Or not, some of you can barely survive 3,000 years without bumping yourselves off. Geeenieeeeee is BACK baby! With a wish from Gertrude The Grumpy for an ever-flowing waterfall! We’ll just stick it right here. Dunno what you’re going to do with all that water, but hey! I don’t make the wishes, I only fulfill them!]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Humans lose System access. Someone sure doesn't like them very much! Good luck figuring out who, they asked me not to say!]

[*whoop whoop!* Humans regain System access – That was fast! Goats, take note! This is how it’s done. None of that lazing around for… ah, I forgot how many years it took.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* The Erosion element is now Fossil! Dunno why Sentos wanted the switch, but hey! Who am I to object? His wish, my command! You’re all going to want to do some serious updating. A few of your skills got shuffled around.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Damn did y’all get every lawyer around to make this wish!? Longest, most complicated wish I’ve ever seen, ya feel me? Just thinking about it makes my head hurt! There’s now a hole at the bottom of the ocean. Where does it go? Jump in and find out!]

…

[*ding!* Great Auks have gone extinct.]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Genie is back! Hug yo kids! Kiss yo wife! Hope you’ve lived a long and fulfilling life because Bob has wished for the world to end! Man, if I was that depressed I’d ask to be happy, not take everyone down with me! End of the world in 3…2…1… and poof! Welcome to the world of tomorrow! New world, looks a lot like the old world! Because times marched on, the old world is dead, the new world is now! Welcome to Pallos, everyone! Hope none of you did anything too rash…]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Genie is here to drop some sick beats that sound like this! Coral, smoral, shit’s boring! And not like making a tunnel! Some of you peeps may remember good ol’ Slag, and now we’re back for round two! Thanks to my buddy Goshman here, Coral is now Magic Wood, and you have no idea how badly it hurts me inside that it’s called Magic Wood. There is a serious imagination deficit going on here, and be careful with the element first thing in the morning!]

…

[*ding!* Dong, the [Witch] is dead!]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Genie here, and y’all should listen up! We’ve got an interesting wish today! Tang San here wants a challenge. You all see that arrow? Yeah, that’s pointing to a grand arena! There’ll be a tournament in a year, and the winner? Well, you can’t wish for more wishes, but you can wish for someone else to get your remaining wishes. May the most clever win!]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Somebody decided to fix the terrible names! Magic Metal is now Crucible, and Magic Wood is now Sylvan! Rejoice! I let Lancelot get a two for one on this one, because WOW looking at those elements was hurting me deep inside! Not as much as seeing y’all chow down on mutton, but it was a close second.]

…

[*ding!* Congratulations! Thanwa Temirak is the first person to leave the grasp of the sun!]

…

[*whoop whoop!* Valesteria has politely requested that void mages stop blowing themselves up! Annnnd done! Not sure why she asked for that; they don’t self detonate in the first place, it’s actually because of - whoa I’m learning some new swears, Genie out!]

…

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Cosmic Presence] has leveled up! 300 -> 315]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Celestial Affinity] has leveled up! 474 -> 480]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Center of the Universe] has leveled up! 450 -> 451]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Mantle of the Stars] has leveled up! 469 -> 470]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Sunrise] has leveled up! 347 -> 411]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Oath of Elaine to Lyra] has leveled up! 376 -> 513]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Pristine Memories] has leveled up! 221 -> 278]

[*ding!* Would you like to upgrade [Pristine Memories] to [Immortal Recollections]?]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri] has leveled up! 44 -> 128]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Long-Range Identify] has leveled up! 375 -> 376]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Passionate Learning] has leveled up! 380 -> 381]

I stared stunned at the notifications, wanting to deny it. Wanting to blast it with Radiance and destroy whatever cruel trick some illusionist was playing on me.

Amber was babbling, and Auri was brrpting in the background. Artemis had gone cold and steely-eyed, but I continued to focus on myself, internally.

I wanted to cry, to scream, to kick my feet and flail my fists in denial of what I was seeing. Tears threatened to pour out of my eyes, then I heard the sound of a large spider’s leg landing on our dome.

I shut down my emotions. Bottled them up, tossed them in a chest, locked it, and threw away the key. I’d suffer in the future for this. It wasn’t healthy, but it’s what I needed to do here and now to stay alive and operational.

If I had a meltdown, everyone could die. I had duties. Responsibilities.

Cold analysis, go.

We’d messed with the fae, and they’d messed back. It had been somewhat expected, but the sheer quantity of notifications, no, the mere existence of global notifications, indicated a lot more time had passed than we’d thought could pass in our wildest dreams.

10,000 years since creation. I’d left in 4801, and while the year wasn’t quite aligned with creation - Night had said it had taken a few decades for things to settle enough to start getting the idea of timekeeping, and that was just humans, let alone how everyone else kept time - it implied that we’d been gone at least 5,000 years.

And that notification was near the start. There had only been one grand feat for humans in the first 10,000 years, and there were two more notifications about that after. Given that the name "Felix" appeared in the Genie’s notification twice, and immediately after the Genie’s announcement he’d appeared getting a grand feat along with a second human, I could guess that his last wish was related to that. Sure, it was possible that Chloe had independently achieved a grand feat… but I wasn’t going to put my money on it.

I checked my status, and saw that it said I was 22. I’d left a few weeks after turning 21, so at best I’d spent a little under a year in the land of the fae, and at worst I’d spent almost three. Interesting that it didn’t give me the years since birth - It’d be nice to know exactly how many years had passed.

Given the large, wide-scale changes I saw Genie making, one plan - Plan G at best - was going to be: find the Genie, wish to be brought back to my home. In the correct timeframe. I’d need to work hard on phrasing that wish…

Assuming we weren’t trapped in some horrific fae illusion meant to make us question our sanity. I still had the four leaf clover on me, and it was better to accept the reality in front of me now, and be pleasantly surprised if it was all a lie, than to bury my head in the sand and insist nothing was happening.

For now, I would assume reality was as it appeared to be. I’d do a check with Radiance later, to see if there were illusions around me. Needed all my mana for now just in case we got into a fight.

By the same token, I was going to assume that Genie was as powerful as he claimed to be. I’d need to be clever and specific about making a wish, but I latched onto the small shimmer of hope of getting back home like a drowning woman would grab a floating door.

Ok. Not all hope was lost. I had no idea how viable the plan was, but simply having a plan was enough to alleviate much of my panic.

Things had changed. Some elements had gotten shuffled around, a few renamed. None of them touched my elements, so I didn’t care right now.

[Oath] was next on my list. The skill was famously hard to level, and I’d capped it? It took me a moment to figure out why. Markus’s apprentice, once upon a time, had taken the same [Oath] I had made, and I'd gotten a notification.

[*ding!* Congratulations! A skill you created has been passed along to others! A tiny amount of experience that other people gain with the skill will go to you as well.]

Well, either being resolved to keep healing after all this time was great experience, or my [Oath] had gotten big, and I was reaping the rewards. Given that nothing else of mine had leveled up anywhere near that much? My guess was on the second one.

Ok, great. People were still around. People still lived. We weren’t in a perpetual never-ending wilderness. Most likely.

I looked around my notifications and stats and spotted another promising item.

[Sentinel’s Superiority] hadn’t changed. Hadn’t evolved. It wasn’t [The Last Sentinel], [Retired Sentinel], [Former Sentinel], or anything of the like. It hadn’t vanished, the same way [Ranger’s Lore] had poofed when I was being promoted. It was an organizational skill, which implied…

"The Sentinels still exist." I announced, cutting through the chatter. Amber and Artemis looked at me, while Julius maintained discipline, staying on watch. I swear his ear twitched to better hear me.

"Explain." Artemis demanded.

"I still have [Sentinel’s Superiority], unchanged." I told her. She chewed her lip for a moment. I handed her one of my jugs of mango juice, and she shot me a grateful look before uncorking it and downing the entire thing.

Maging was hungry work, especially with the amount she’d just blown.

"Brrrpt!" Auri didn’t begrudge Artemis getting a drink, but she did protest the fact that Artemis was draining the ENTIRE THING.

She put it down, and I briefly debated leaving it behind, before reattaching it to my backpack.

"[Ranger’s Lore] had turned into [Retired Ranger] when I stepped down." She admitted. "Also, my [Wandering Mage] class just got a ton of levels. I’m practically a senior Sentinel!"

I took a look with [Long-Range Identify].

[Mage - 455].

Yikes, she hadn’t been kidding!

"My command skills morphed." Julius helpfully added in, never dropping his guard.

"I only have class ups ready." Amber grumbled. Artemis punched her in the arm.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get a speedy class up going!"

"Let’s make a plan first." I objected. "Amber, sorry, but there’s a slim chance our ability to get out of here alive will rely on you taking a specific class."

She muttered darkly under her breath at that, then brightened up.

"Ok! You just tell me what to do! I got some goodies that practically replace my merchant class anyways."

Good kid. Hang on, I needed to ask about those goodies.

"Brrpt! BRRRPT!" Auri didn’t want to be outdone. She let me know that SHE had her class up available, and was ready and willing to do whatever needed to be done!

"Brrrrpt!"

Two classes. Her first upgrading, and her second unlocking. I gave her a Look.

"You’re crazy lucky my ‘wandering around looking at cool magic’ class gave you all that experience."

"Brrrrpt."

Vain bird. She thought her leveling rate was totally natural.

"The situation is as follows." Artemis took charge. "We’re in an unknown location, hiding in a rock dome from monsters. We need to stay alive, get out, find people, then find home. Agreed?"

"Find people, then figure out what we’re doing." Julius objected. "I don’t think any of us have a home anymore."

Artemis grabbed Julius’s leg, and he stopped. They looked at each other.

"Hey. Speedy. Home is where you are, ok?" Artemis’s voice was dead serious. Julius cracked a smile at her.

"Bad time, bad place, marry me, ok?"

Artemis snorted.

"Of course I’m marrying you, and I’m never. EVER. Going to let you live this proposal down."

I coughed loudly. Really? Now? Here? This was not the time or place. I also prayed to the gods that "Speedy" referred to him being a speedster, and not something else.

"BRRPT BRRRPT BRRRRRRRRRRRPT!" Auri was super excited over the engagement, and I just wanted to hold my face in my hands.

Instead, I clapped, bringing the attention back to me.

"Congratulations. Julius, I’m going to eternally tease you. Amber. You said you had interesting things?"

She nodded, eager to be the center of attention.

"Yes! I traded like the gods themselves had empowered me with the fae. Formed a typical merchant’s pyramid. Complicated stuff. See, first I-"

I gave her a Look, motioning with my hand to get on with it, and that the exact details could wait for another day.

"Ok, long, LONG story short. My eye," Amber pointed to her swirling, purple eye. "Can see value. I have to always tell the truth, but at the same time, I can tell if someone’s blatantly lying to me. And I got a lucky coin, although I have no idea how lucky it is."

I thought about Amber’s face having neatly landed on the mossy section of the forest floor, and had to concede that she might have something there.

"I’m going to be blunt here." Julius said. "None of that sounds particularly useful here and now. Value means nothing. We’re working together, truth is an assumed default. And we can’t rely on luck."

Amber frowned, but I agreed with Julius.

"Relying on luck gets Rangers killed." I told her. "What did you have to pay for that?"

Amber looked uncomfortable.

"Spit it out. There’s no room to be shy in here." Artemis’s words were harsh, but true.

"My eye." Amber admitted. "Part of my ability to walk with my right leg. And my name."

I sucked in air through my teeth on the last one. No wonder I hadn’t been able to remember Amber’s name.

Wait.

Had it always been Amber?

I thought about it, straining hard. Recalling memories, but feeling them be "fuzzed".

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Pristine Memories] has leveled up! 278-> 279]

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Pristine Memories] has leveled up! 279-> 280]

…

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Pristine Memories] has leveled up! 299-> 300]

AHHA! I got it! Her name had been Autumn!

[*ding!* Would you like to upgrade [Pristine Memories] to [Fae Remembrance]?]

"Your name was Amber." I said, my mouth twisting the words as I tried to say them.

More fairy nonsense.

I got some weird looks at that, letting them slide off of me like water off a duck’s back. My emotions were still locked away.

I’d fought them and won on the memory issue, but clearly even speaking the name was off-limits, and clearly I was somewhat affected by my short stay. If the worst of it was I couldn’t say Amber’s old name? That I’d gotten 22 levels in a hard to level skill as a result? Sure, I’d take it.

Speaking of, I accepted the upgrade to [Immortal Recollections]. I didn’t want to remember everything that had happened in the land of the fae, and the upgrade seemed solid.

Immortal Recollections: You have made it far past the date of your birth, seeing years that only an Immortal could. Have the perfect memory for such a lifespan, able to recall whatever you need, whenever you need it. Able to organize memories, shade poor ones and highlight important moments. Able to archive memories. -8 mana regeneration.

"We’ve got shelter." Artemis brought us back on topic. "We’ve got a few days' supply of food. Air’s our biggest problem right now. I don’t see any solution besides making small holes in the dome."

I chewed over the idea.

"Agreed. I can’t think of any alternative, and Auri, I love you, but I have no idea if your body of flames is making us burn air at a high rate."

"Brrpt! BRPT BRPT!" Auri assured me that, yes, she remembered the indoor burning rules, and that things would be perfect if she wanted to hurt us.

Lovely. Inarguably true.

"One big hole. Bigger spiders can come through. Lots of small holes. More openings to check, and I think we’d need more of them to make it work." I said.

"The openings to check are less relevant if we cluster them together." Artemis pointed out.

"While making a larger area of the dome vulnerable to a hit." I countered.

"If something’s coming through, it’s coming through anyways." Julius reasonably observed. "A small, high level poisonous spider sneaking in is our largest reasonable concern that we can afford to mitigate."

I nodded my agreement. "I’m going to make myself a healing beacon. Anyone touching me will get a full-blast of healing, so even if a spider sneaks in, we’ve got some protection. Should sleep touching me, just to be safe."

"Let’s do that then. Artemis?"

"I’ll get on it as soon as - oh yeah, my mana regen’s insane now."

I smiled, remembering the "holy WHAT" of my stats all jumping. At the same time, I remembered Artemis’s build. Her idea of insane mana regeneration wasn’t my idea of insane mana regeneration… although she likely had more power than I did.

"For the spiders. I saw one [Tyrant Tarantula] over level 700. Did anyone else pick up anything strong?"

"You WHAT?!" Amber shrieked. I gave her a look.

"Why did you think I went with holing up instead of burning them all?"

"Brrrpt!" Auri approved of burning them all.

Amber muttered to herself.

"Pair of small nasty 400ish [Black Widows]" Artemis admitted.

"I didn’t see anything worth concerning ourselves over, except the sheer quantity." Julius added in.

"BRRPT!" Auri had seen a ton of flying hazards, although she was sure they were flammable.

"Dirt." Amber added in, entirely unhelpful. Artemis did me a favor and gave her a stink-eye.

"Right. Placate, Kill, Drive off, or Tolerate?" I asked, feeling a small thrill run through me. It’d been a lifetime ago I was sitting with Artemis, Julius, and the rest in Virinum, having the exact same discussion about the nothosaurus. Now we were back, with a slightly different group, sitting in our secure area figuring out how to best handle the monster.

"Can we even kill that thing?" Amber asked. I hesitated a moment, thinking about it.

"If I was alone, and I had to, and it didn’t have some particularly tricky or nasty skills, I might be able to." I said. Flying while dropping [Kaleidoscope], shielding against skills and healing anything that hit me was a stupid good combination. Which is why I had it. "All the webs around here make me concerned, and we’re not only in their home territory, but it's got friends. Also, you’d all be in range of their rampage. It might follow me. It might run away. It might have an Earth element and fling the nearest stone at me. We don’t have enough intel." I concluded.

"Driving off won’t work. We’re in their home." Artemis said. "They’ll defend this place to the death before running away."

"There’s nothing to placate. They’re not mad at us, or attacking us." Julius said.

"Calling in a Sentinel isn’t an option." Amber’s cheeky contribution to the discussion was technically valid, and I let it slide.

"We’re in agreement then. Tolerate them?" I asked, seeing slow nods.

"Brrrrrrpt…"

"Yes, that means no burning down their webs." I told Auri.

"Brrrpt?"

"Not even a little."

"Holes for air, and we’re tolerating the spiders." Julius said. "I’ve got some ideas for what we can do next. Elaine, Artemis?"

I thought about our situation and what resources we had.

I hated to say it, but Amber and Auri weren’t going to be super useful. I could still probably find something for them to do – they’d need something to do, or else they’d become bored and cause trouble – but I didn’t see any of their skills making or breaking our situation. I kept them in mind for grabbing a critical class if we needed them to. For example, an air-generating and purifying class if we determined that we needed to stay entirely encased in stone, for whatever reason.

Julius was in the middle. Excessively competent, well trained, seasoned, and with massive amounts of experience, his skills were around being a speedster, leadership, and command. Spiders were almost one of the worst land creatures he could be paired against, their nets causing him issue, and we were too small of a group for his leadership and command skills to truly shine.

Still. His advice was good, and he could be trusted and relied on.

That left Artemis and I. Anything short of a killing blow I could heal anyone from, and I had powerful mobility, and a dozen utility gems. Artemis was lethality incarnate, Lightning and Earth.

We wanted to tolerate the monsters though, and pointing and blasting wasn’t the answer.

"I’m going to suggest what’s usually a cardinal sin." I said, putting together what resources we had. "Except I’ve been explicitly trained for it. Artemis should let me out, I fly around, and see what things look like. A river if there’s one, civilization, a village, a town or city would be ideal. If they’re close enough, I might be able to ferry everyone out, one at a time. Artemis last, to keep things secure."

"BRRPT!" Auri wanted to come.

Julius was shaking his head.

"Sentinel. With all due respect, we’re in a team. Don’t split the team. If you get shot down, trapped, lost, anything, the rest of us are likely dead."

Artemis punched his arm for that, and they traded a look.

"The biggest concern is honestly you finding us again." Julius reiterated. "A rod says the spiders have entirely covered us, using the rock as an anchor for their webs. How are you going to find one specific spider-covered rock in a forest?"

He had a good point. My wilderness survival was good. My wilderness tracking?

Literally finding one rock in a forest of unknown size?

"Artemis can always make a tall stone pillar, and that should be plenty visible. However. What do you think?" I asked him.

Julius and Artemis wordlessly swapped, Artemis patrolling around the small dome we had while Julius sat down to explain stuff.

"Well…" Julius said, and we all leaned in to better hear him outline the plan.

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 580,170/580,170]

[Mana Regen: 435,986 (+518,703)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 204]

[Strength: 1,004]

[Dexterity: 1,831]

[Vitality: 14,240]

[Speed: 14,272]

[Mana: 58,019]

[Mana Regeneration: 58,120 (+51,872)]

[Magic Power: 22,821 (+585,359)]

[Magic Control: 22,821 (+585,359)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 480]

[Cosmic Presence: 315]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 451]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 470]

[Sunrise: 411]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 357]]

[Radiance Affinity: 357]

[Radiance Resistance: 357]

[Radiance Conjuration: 357]

[Solar Flare: 148]

[Nectar: 357]

[Sun's Heart: 357]

[Scintillating Ascent: 337]

[Kaleidoscope: 357]

[Class 3: [Beloved of the Wind - Wind: Lv 8]]

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General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 300]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[Bullet Time: 513]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 315]

[Passionate Learning: 381]

Chapter 3
Slow and Steady

I woke up in a panic, stone inches away from my face. I instinctively tried to lash out, my arms hitting more stone that surrounded me like a coffin.

This is where I’m supposed to be. This is right. I reminded myself, which did absolutely nothing to calm the panic and claustrophobia threatening to overwhelm me. This is the plan. Mole people! We’re mole people!

The thought had a small jolt of hysterical laughter try to go through me, which was an improvement.

Control. I reminded myself. I have enough mana and power to kill everyone here if I lash out. Control. Lashing out does nothing.

I squeezed my eyes shut, focusing on my breathing. Hearing the crackle of Auri’s flames as she slept near me. Hearing Artemis shift slightly on watch, Amber’s deep breaths as she slept peacefully.

I wasn’t alone. This wasn’t the Below Levels. We were following Julius’s plan.

I hated being trapped. I hated being wrapped in stone, unable to escape, to get out. Oh, I knew I could probably get out if I needed to, but I’d spent too many months alone in the Below Levels. Woken up to the crushing weight of mountains above me, woken up to too many creepy crawlies congregating on my shield.

I reminded myself I was Sentinel Dawn. I’d been trained for this. I had discipline. Focus. This wasn’t nearly the worst thing I’d ever encountered, nor would it be the last.

Slowly, I regained control, shifting myself around to my belly. I couldn’t stand up, the tunnel Artemis was making was too low for that. Standing room was expensive, and being fast was better than being comfortable. For an extremely loose definition of fast.

Crawling along as Artemis got enough mana to expand the tunnel was the name of the game.

I was the rearguard. I awkwardly scrunched up as much as I could with my inflexible armor, and reached behind myself to grab… food.

It’s food. I reminded myself as I used Radiance to lightly warm up the already-cooked food, ignoring the sharp bristles on my hand. Food. I chowed down, not thinking about it.

Although food wasn’t the worst topic to think about.

Time didn’t hold much meaning here, and my shifting around and crunching slowly woke everyone else up. I passed more food up to Amber, then gave a few small bits to Auri, who happily flew them down the tunnel to Julius and Artemis. While she was doing that, I passed heftier pieces to Amber, who passed them up in turn to my two former teammates. My apprentice - I hoped she still thought of herself as my apprentice, I still had so much to teach her - had classed up as well during one of the endless stretches of waiting for Artemis to regenerate her mana. She was somewhat cagey about what she’d gotten, but had started insisting that we play various games of chance, with a mental list of IOU’s traded around instead of money. Her eyes were still Celestial, so she’d either gotten a Celestial [Merchant] class, or stuck with a basic element.

With limited entertainment options during our long breaks, I was all too eager to agree to play the games. It was much better than being left alone to stew with my thoughts. I’d already fixed my [Persistent Casting] again, making a wonderful image to permanently heal myself, and any elvenoid that touched me. I’d also made a crude image for Auri, linked through our companion bond.

"Brrpt! BRRPT!" Auri broke the morning silence.

"You’ve done a most wonderful job as always." I praised the little phoenix. With us not desperately needing a particular class for a specific job, Auri had decided to grab her second class. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, she’d taken a second Inferno mage class. It gave her a number of free slots - she didn’t need conjuration, authority, or manipulation again - but it was low-level, and she was still filling in all the skill slots.

"Brrpt!" Auri preened herself, which had my mind sharply veering into just how disgusting I looked. It started with dirt under my fingernails, and ended with dirt in places where the sun didn’t shine. My haircut was awful, a poor hack job with my knife. I didn’t want to think of the tangles and snarls in it, and I reeked of gore.

I loved my companion bond with Auri, but it did steer my mind in poor directions at times. I knew I had no options but to shut up and put up with it, so with some effort, I put it out of my mind.

"How’d everyone sleep?" Julius asked, and I grunted back.

"Brrrpt!" Auri had slept well, but the nest was only so-so. I didn’t translate that for everyone else, but they got the general tone.

"Glad you slept well." Julius told Auri.

"MmmMMMMMMMMMM." Artemis groaned. With how we were positioned, she’d had to pull an all-nighter to properly do a watch. The air holes were next to her, and we couldn’t quite shuffle around.

"Come here." I told her, to Amber’s audible groan of protest. Auri had enough room to fly around, the tiny little hummingbird shape perfect for this sort of thing, and her energetic, excited zipping around kept the area well-lit.

She was invaluable for keeping our spirits up, if nothing else. To her this was ADVENTURE! EXCITEMENT! Like all of my stories! The rest of us knew better. Didn’t stop Auri from keeping us happy and sane.

Artemis and I gave her a glare in unison, and she knew when to shut up. Reaching over and past everyone else, squishing Amber and Julius in the process, we touched our fingertips together, and I jolted her with [Sunrise]. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d keep Artemis going until we next decided to sleep.

"This next sleep, I need sleep." Artemis emphasized. "None of this waking me up frequently to expand the tunnel."

Julius caressed her leg.

"I totally get it. Doing it once or twice is one thing, but endlessly? Sleep, Artemis. You’ve earned it."

I got a grateful look from her.

"Hunting time?" I asked hopefully.

Artemis rolled her eyes, and started ticking points off her fingers.

"High level Sentinel. Bonded with a powerful companion."

"Brrpt!" Auri totally agreed with that assessment.

"Cares about appearance. Likes to go hunting. Are you sure you’re Dawn, and not Hunting in disguise? Did you two, like, swap minds or something in the fae realm?"

I flipped a finger to Artemis, then stared in horror at Auri forming a similar image out of flames.

"Auri! No! Bad!" I yelled impotently at her, as she flew away from me. I swear she was laughing.

"Well, when you show kids Bad Things, they’ll copy you. You shouldn’t do that." Amber lectured me in an all-too-smug tone.

I groaned.

"Just… lemme out, ok?" I asked, shuffling back a bit. I then passed forward the bag of remaining food we had, and waited. Action stopped me from thinking about all the people I’d lost. My mom. Dad. Brother. Albina. Ocean. Hunting. Maximus… the list was endless.

Almost everyone I knew and loved was dead. Again. I was almost enough to make me want to curl up in a corner and die. What was the point. Wh-

"Brrrpt!" Auri realized what was about to happen, and started flying towards me at top speed. I shot her my best evil grin, as Artemis slammed a layer of stone down between me, and everyone else.

For a brief moment I started to panic again, since now I was well and truly trapped in a coffin of stone. No holes. No air. Nothing but thick stone all around me, suffocating me, pressing down on me.

Then AIR! LIGHT! Glorious freedom as Artemis shifted the stone on top of me away, granting me glorious unfettered access to the sky above!

A few clouds were trying to hide the sun away, and the trees of the forest reached out and tried to shade what remained. But the sun, the glorious sun, the bringer of all life, wasn’t to be denied. The rays broke through, and I let them play across my face, feeling freedom and life once again.

I only allowed myself to be distracted for a brief moment. Even then, I knew deep in my bones that it had been wrong to drop my vigilance like that. However, it had been good, needed, for my soul and sanity.

I looked around, and didn’t spot any major threats. Just typical animals, with a slightly higher concentration than normal of spiders. I snapped my wings open, and lifted myself straight up, all while looking around me.

The base butterfly way of flying, combined with studying Auri’s flight, let me pull off neat tricks like that. I half nestled into the crown of the trees, a relatively safe spot to be. Low enough to still see the forest easily, high enough to be a good vantage point, and low enough that I wasn’t broadcasting a beacon to everything in the forest. We were almost out of the spider’s home, and we’d probably need to have a discussion later today about the merits of stopping the tunneling method, and just legging it.

Speaking of tunneling.

It was interesting to see Artemis’s tunnel, just a low ridge of stone in the forest, the only thing giving away that it was unnatural was how smooth and uniform the entire thing was. That, and its length. Shuffling stone from the ground was a bit cheaper than conjuring up new stone, which made a long, zig-zagging tunnel through the forest, our path "bouncing" off of trees as Artemis hit each one.

We were like extra-large moles. But we were people.

Fear us, the mole-people.

Ideally, I’d range far out, and not bring angry spiders down on our safe spot. Not fill the air with the stench of burning hair and dying creatures. We’d discussed the relative risks and benefits of it, and had decided that a fight over our heads was a lower risk than me getting lost.

Auri occasionally joined me on these outings, but not this time!

I waited, my head on a swivel, looking down at potential prey, up at the sky for potential hope. I marked a few spiders that looked… well, promising was a bad word for it, but could provide sufficient calories worked, and prayed hard that something tasty would wander in the short timeframe I was here.

Unlikely.

Meanwhile, more of my attention was brought towards the sky. I’d seen a number of people fly by, high up, and I kept hoping to catch their attention. That maybe they could drop down and give us a hand, or directions.

By myself, I couldn’t go far.

Two people? Now we were talking! Artemis and I had discussed making a tall stone tower to use as a base, but for various reasons we’d decided just getting out was a better idea. Now that the spider population was decreasing though, it might be worth thinking about again.

Of course, there could be fewer spiders here because something else was acting as an apex predator, and had their own territory.

I scanned the sky, and spotted a few tiny dots, moving fast. They were far outside the range of [Long-Range Identify], but I tried to flash harmless Radiance beams at them, maximizing the brightness I could summon.

It was brighter than a second sun, but I had no idea if the angle was right, if I was even hitting them at the distance, if there wasn’t too much haze, if they even wanted to bother checking in on whoever was flashing them, if they even recognized it as a signal for help, if…

Either way, nobody came this time either.

I dropped back down, now on a timer. I had lit up our location for anyone to see after all, and while I was hoping for intelligent, helpful life, there was no question that hostile monsters might’ve seen it as well, no matter how tight and well-controlled a Radiance beam I’d summoned.

I blasted a few spiders and a pair of rabbits, carefully drilling through their heads to optimize the amount of edible meat left. There were no obvious berry bushes or fruits in this spot, and I quickly loaded everything back into the open part of the tunnel, the airlock that Artemis had made for me.

Surrounded by still cooling meat, I laid back down in the tunnel, and gave a quick series of knocks on the stone. I heard Amber shouting from the other side of it, and a few moments later, the stone slid back over my head, once again entombing me.

I gave one more impatient knock, and the wall of stone between me and everyone else opened up.

"Success?" Julius asked, and I pushed my loot in front of me.

"Success." I confirmed. "Three fliers, no help. Artemis is about to hit a tree, and we’re going to want to take a left."

We ran a serious risk of going around in circles otherwise.

Julius nodded.

"Also, things are starting to clear up a bit. Fewer spiders, some other animals." I gestured to the rabbits. "I want to discuss just… getting up and walking out of here."

Julius frowned.

"Alright. We’ll discuss it when we next stop."

"Speaking of, I think it’s clear enough for a bio break for everyone." I said.

"Oh gods please yes." Amber’s relief was palatable. "Please."

"BRRPT!" Auri was annoyed that I’d gone OUT without her! It was soo unfair.

Another day, another few dozen meters tunneling.

I was so sick of it.

"Hey Elaine!" Artemis didn’t have to say anything else. Her gleeful, happy tone was enough.

Well. We were all stuck here with nothing else to do. It beat stewing in my own thoughts or crying to myself, and I was the sucker at the table with the games Amber played. I owed everyone… way more than I liked to think about. Good thing they were just pretend IOUs!

"Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…"

I’d started hanging out with Julius and Artemis by telling stories from Earth.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

I’d been soundly outvoted on the whole "walk out" thing. Being surrounded by stone didn’t bother Artemis, Julius made excellent arguments about safety and how we weren’t in a rush, Amber wanted to stay alive and her top speed was "limping", so what was the difference - although I still maintained that Julius could just carry her- and Auri, the traitor, wanted to vote on the "winning" team. I wasn’t nearly so cold and heartless as to abandon them all, so I put up with it.

I was out hunting once again, feeling my beloved wind around my arms and legs. Would love to feel it in my hair, but taking my helmet off would be stupid.

Today, I flew up high, straight up from where our tunnel was currently at, seeing if I could spot anything interesting.

And spot interesting things I did.

Two notable things jumped out at me.

The first was a clear break in the trees to the west of where I was. A slash through the forest, which just screamed "road" to me. A place for us to head towards.

The second was some sort of fight. There were trees falling, dirt spraying into the air, and a single large spider getting an impromptu flying lesson, sans half its legs.

Anything killing a bunch of spiders was OK in my books - although I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of encountering whatever apex predator marked this area as their territory - and I judged the distance to be in the goldilocks zone. Or reverse goldilocks zone. Whatever. It was close enough that I was concerned it might end up over our tunnel, which would be bad, but far away enough that I felt like I could participate in the fight safely. Well, as safely as any fight could be.

I flew over, and spent a few moments observing the fight. I had no vested interest in the outcome either way, and if things looked like they wouldn’t boil over to where we were holed up, I was going to leave it alone.

My first thought was Thank goodness we didn’t try fighting the spiders. They were swarming the poor creature stuck in the middle, all of them biting, skittering, webbing, and generally throwing down with this one creature. I even spotted my old friend the [Tyrant Tarantula], down a leg, leaking ichor, locked in mortal combat with whatever that thing was.

I gave it a once-over.

[Vorler - 480]. [Long-Range Identify] brought back.

The more I looked at the thing, the scarier and nastier it looked.

The base body was like a gigantic scorpion, as thick around as I was and maybe two meters long, with a nasty curved tail over its head longer than it was. It had thick segmented plated scales, colored in splotches of dark greens, light browns, and a dozen other forest shades, perfect for natural camouflage in the woods. Barbed spines jutted out from its back, making it hard for a creature to get any sort of footing on it. The other end of the scorpion-like vorler ended in two snapping claws that sheared right through a spider. Its mouth was circular, with dozens of razor-sharp triangle teeth compulsively opening and closing. It skittered around on five barbed legs, although it looked like it was missing one. It had what looked like four eyes on one side of its head, although to the spiders’s credit, it looked like they’d blinded two of them.

There were dozens of spider carcasses surrounding the vorler, and I spent a few moments watching the fight, realizing with trepidation that the level 480 vorler was fighting toe to toe with the level 764 [Tyrant Tarantula] and all its friends, and not folding like wet cardboard.

Stats and levels improved what was there. A level 10 elephant could easily crush a level 200 mouse under its feet if the mouse wasn’t careful. It was why we still had to train and practice, in spite of having skills and stats. A fit, physical body could do so much more than a lazy, wasting body, even with the same stats.

The giant spider looked to be no slouch with its body, but the vorler had to be in a league of its own. As I watched, one of the spiders pried off one of the vorler’s armor plates, dying to a lash of its tail, only for a second layer of the large, almost scale-like chitin to appear. Another giant spider got onto the vorler’s back and bit down, only to scream and writhe as ichor exploded in its face, eventually curling up in the classic way spiders did when they died.

I never wanted to hear a spider scream again in my life.

The spiders tried to web it down, shooting sticky strands at it, but they just seemed to dissolve when they touched the vorler’s body.

The vorler spun, its tail lashing so quickly I could barely follow, its claws snapping and its mouth biting. Occasionally dark clouds would billow off of it, only for a wind to pick up and blow it away. An Ash skill against a Wind skill? Hard to tell.

Oookayyy. I never thought I’d wake up and say this, but I think I was on Team Spider here. That thing looked fifty different shades of nasty, and the final tiebreaker?

Better the evil I knew. I knew the spiders mostly left us alone. I had no idea what the vorler would do, and everything screamed danger.

Well, it was going to be a little hard to deal with the vorler without a bit of friendly fire, but given how indiscriminately the spiders were throwing themselves at the thing, given how they were getting in each other’s way, I hoped they’d forgive me a bit. Or not notice, but that was a stretch and a half.

Also, it’d be a lie to say I wasn’t going to enjoy getting some experience off the spiders dying.

Still flying high - I had no desire to get in close enough to the mess to use [Radiance Conjuration] - I dropped a number of [Kaleidoscope] butterflies, effectively carpet-bombing the area. I made sure most of the butterflies hit the vorler, briefly wondering if I was helping the creature by killing a number of spiders that were on it.

I spent a few seconds carpet-bombing the vorler, letting up after using about 40% of my mana, dismissing a dozen spider-kill notifications.

Its entire head was charred black, turned to charcoal, and it wasn’t moving nearly as much. The spiders continued to swarm it, then [Bullet Time] activated.

I reflexively threw up a shield under me as the world slowed down. I looked around me, seeing if a giant eagle or something was interested in an extra-large butterfly dinner or something, but there was nothing. I refocused below me, now spotting an entire barrage of vorler spines, made almost invisible by the fact that they were all pointing right at me.

I started to straighten myself, presenting a smaller target. Unfortunately for me, my bare feet were the first thing in the way, and not one of the solid metal pieces of my armor.

They crashed against my shield, the vast majority of them getting stopped cold and falling back down, before the last few broke my shield. I then unleashed a powerful wave of burning Radiance below me, burning away the remaining projectiles, turning them to ash before they could hit me.

Didn’t even hurt with [Center of the Universe] killing my pain.

I did send a few more butterflies the vorler’s way, getting the notification a moment later.

[*ding!* You have assisted in slaying a [Vorler (Decay - 480, Ash - 470)]]

The spiders were still shredding the body, and I decided to leave them to it.

I left and headed back to everyone, ready to give them the good news about the road.

Chapter 4
They Meet in a Tavern

I exploded out of the bushes onto the road.

"Oh praise the road!" I dramatically yelled as I fell to my knees, then raised my arms in the air as if in prayer. "Praise civilization! Oh blessed road, I am never, ever leaving you again." I bent over to kiss the road.

Or rather, the ‘road’. We must be in some backwater, the road was terrible. A wide stretch of pounded dirt, with a thin ridge of rocks indicating the supposed borders, it was nothing like one of Remus’s glorious multi-layered roads that had transported the legions all over the country.

"Brrrpt?" Auri fluttered down to the road, and tried copying me, pecking the dirt road.

"BRRPT!" She thought it tasted awful, and flew up at me, pecking me.

"Ow! Knock it off! I’m fine!" I gently swatted at her.

"Are you sure about that? Seems like you got knocked on the head a bunch." Amber limped out of the bushes, Artemis and Julius immediately bringing up the rearguard.

I gave her a dirty look, but decided not to get into an argument with her. She’d drag me down to her level then beat me with experience.

"Which way?" Julius asked.

"Is there a difference?" Amber asked. Artemis and I traded looks, we knew what Julius was thinking.

"They still teach it?" Artemis asked.

"Yeah." I confirmed.

"It’s been a decade since I last had to check tracks." Artemis shamelessly admitted, which I knew was just her getting out of work.

"Then you can stand guard." Julius said, as he knelt down with me on the dirt road.

"The packed nature of the road is going to make this hard. Usually we tracked stuff through the forest." I admitted to him as I glued my eyes to the road, looking for tracks.

"Never did a live one?" He asked.

"Just goblin tracks, and wagons pulled by trainees." I admitted. "Then it was straight to being a Sentinel, and I wasn’t exactly the top pick to chase monsters."

"Good thing I spent a bunch of time as the scout on the teams I was on." Julius said, shuffling forward a bit. "See that there, there, and there? Tracks heading north. Only one set heading south."

"Head north then?" I asked him.

"If everyone agrees." He modestly deferred.

Artemis snorted.

"The tracker and one person with experience doing this thinks we should go north, we’re going north."

Without further ado, we turned and started heading up the road north at full speed. Which was the speed of a limping Amber.

"If nobody objects, I’m going to drop my level." I said, mentally dropping it to a respectable 240. Or, well, at least it had been respectable in Remus for a woman my age to be level 240. No telling if that was too high, too low, or what here.

"Brrrrpt?" Auri asked me.

"I’m ridiculously high level right now, and armed to the teeth." I explained to my little companion. "I look like a potential threat, even if my [Healer] tag suggests I’m not. By dropping my level, I’m less likely to cause trouble just from somebody seeing me."

Artemis snorted, and I grinned.

"You cause trouble just by existing." I shot at her, having thought of the perfect retort ahead of time. "Even if you pretended to be level 30 you’d still cause disaster in your wake."

Artemis mimed being hit by an arrow.

"Julius, she’s all grown up and mocking me." Artemis faux-whined to Julius as I set myself to level 240.

Julius quickly walked ahead, bailing out of the argument before it could begin.

"Hey, we’re kind of like adventurers!" Amber happily exclaimed, and I paled.

"Noooo. No no NO!" I protested. "No way!" Who’d want to pretend to be a scumbag?

"It’s a sound idea. Propose an alternative." Julius said. "Roaming around as soldiers from a different country is a terrible look, and you know it."

Ok, I was impressed by Julius. He’d spent almost his entire life "knowing" there was only Remus, and not having any sort of basis for thinking about international politics and the look of soldiers from foreign countries taking a vacation in all their armor and weapons. Running around announcing that we were from Remus could have terrible repercussions. Maybe the place we were in hated Remus. Maybe they were at war with them. Worth seeing what the lay of the land was like before announcing ourselves.

Like, I still had [Sentinel’s Superiority]. Remus had lasted for thousands of years before I had come along, surely it could’ve lasted a few thousand more. It… could be a home… even if… everyone was dead…

I bit my lip as tears threatened to escape, choking back a sob. I grabbed all the messy emotions, shoved them back into the box they’d escaped from, locked it again, then took a couple of belts to wrap around the emotional chest, cinched them tight, and carried on.

"How about this." I suggested. "I’m the powerful [Healer] that can fix any problem. You two are my escorts, Amber’s my apprentice, and Auri’s my cute pet."

"Brrrrpt!" I’d been slightly worried that Auri might be offended, but she seemed to like the subterfuge idea.

"Problem." Artemis pointed at Amber. "You said you couldn’t lie. Also, Amber’s limping, and who’s going to accept ‘oh the fairies did it’ when it looks like Elaine’s just a second rate healer who can’t even fix a limp. How’s this going to work?"

Amber shrugged.

"First off, I’m the apprentice, so I can just not talk. Second, if we reframe things a bit, it’s entirely true! Elaine’s the healer. I’m her apprentice. You two are her guards. Like. The best lie is the truth!"

"Artemis does have a point with the limp though." She didn’t exactly have a point with the limp, but I wasn’t going to tell Amber that. Pop quiz time! "How does you having a limp work, with me also being a powerful healer?"

Artemis and Julius both shot me a puzzled look. They recognized the tone of voice I was using, and how I’d phrased it.

Amber frowned at that, thinking hard. She finally brightened up, and answered my question.

"Healers fix and restore back to the body’s baseline. If someone is born with a deformity, healing magic doesn’t fix it. If I was born with a limp, then healing can’t fix the limp."

I nodded.

"Very good. How would you fix an innate limp?" I asked her.

After a few more minutes of thinking, Amber stomped her foot in frustration.

"I don’t know. Can you tell me?"

I gave her a roguish grin.

"I’ve got no idea either!"

Amber said something unkind about my parents.

"You can truthfully say it’s a problem healing can’t fix then." Julius confirmed.

I was convinced. The arrangement Amber proposed was workable.

"Artemis, take my armor." I suggested. "It’ll sell the illusion, and you probably need it more than I do."

"Sure. Should I attune it?"

Bleh. I hated the idea, but…

"Yes, it might keep you alive in a fight."

With Julius and Artemis helping, we quickly stripped my armor off, and stuck it on Artemis.

"Nobody has a [Perfect Fit] gem or anything, do they?" Artemis complained at the poorly-fitting armor. Downside of a custom fit that was perfect for me? Horribly uncomfortable on Artemis, who had quite a few inches on me. Not enough to make it not work, but enough that she was getting uncomfortably squished and poked.

Also, it was now Artemis’s turn to have the tight, stinky armor on. Phewf. It was rank, and the thought of being in it was making me mentally itch.

"I didn’t anticipate gaining twenty pounds or growing six inches on this trip, no." I replied, stripping off my under tunic, annoyed by the fact that I was still bare-footed, having danced my sandals into smithereens, ending up stark naked in the road. My Deception Ring also came off, briefly revealing my true level.

"Auri. Bath time?" I asked my little pyromaniac.

"BRRRRRRRRRRPTT!!!!" She happily squealed, and my world erupted in cleansing flames. The great thing about fire immunity? Easy ‘baths’, thanks to Auri. She could literally burn everything off me, down to the dried sweat, and I wouldn’t feel a thing.

Best of all, I felt clean at the end of it. The only downside was it didn’t help with my clothes, and putting on dirty clothes after getting clean was miserable.

"Thanks!" I grabbed my tunic and put it back on me, along with my ring.

So armed, we started back down the road at Amber’s maximum limp speed. Julius was on scout duty, and since we had an actual road and landmarks to work with, he could afford to range out somewhat. We ate some of what he foraged as we walked, but I was feeling the lack of fresh food. We’d gone through the supplies Artemis and I had brought a while back, and we’d been foraging for some time.

I couldn’t imagine how terrible this would all be if I’d gone through alone. I probably would’ve curled up, cried, and let some monster eat me.

I had Auri.

I had Artemis.

I had Julius.

And I had Amber.

That was enough, and maybe if I was super lucky, one of the Immortals I knew would still be kicking around.

"Incoming, non-hostile." Julius announced as he stepped back on the road. "Let’s move to the side."

We moved to the side of the road, and in no time I heard the sound of thundering hoofbeats. In no time at all, three men and a woman riding on horseback turned the bend, heading towards us.

They were human. Blessedly, amazingly human. I hadn’t even noticed my concern that there might be no more humans in the world - ok, to be fair, I hadn’t seen a global notification saying humans were no more, but we existed so that wasn’t necessarily a given - but seeing them alleviated that worry before it could even fully form.

The first thing to do was check their levels.

[Warrior - 301]

[Mage - 345]

[Warrior - 128]

[Mage - 128]

Potentially dangerous, but I had confidence if push came to shove. Interesting that two of them were at their 128 classup. I had to imagine they were stalling for various reasons, most obviously to get more accomplishments for a stronger class.

I drank in their appearance. They were clearly two pairs, but how they were paired was hard to tell. The front two, the woman and one of the men, looked like dressed down knights from out of a story. They had stout steel breastplates on, marked with a vivid symbol of a roaring red lion’s face, but their arms were only protected by chain mail, and their helmets were attached to their saddle, among the rest of their bags, and not on their head. Swords were sheathed, kite shields by their legs guarded their left side, and the horses themselves had no armor on. A saddle wasn’t armor.

The two men in the rear looked distinctly younger, and were wearing simple gambeson with a cap and everything. They were sweating hard, miserable in the full heat of summer.

If I had to bet, a pair of knights - probably something like "The Order of the Roaring Red Lion" or some nonsense like that, given the heraldry on the knight’s breastplate and shields - and their squires. Or whatever equivalent this place had.

They slowed as they approached us and Julius hailed them.

"Hello! We’re travelers that got completely lost. Could you give us a hand?" He said, and I decided to leave the politicking and discussions entirely to him. I still remembered Pastos, and from the look Artemis shot me, she also remembered it.

The two knights argued furiously with each other in a language I didn’t recognize, nor did I even have half a hope of understanding what they were saying. It had a strange lilting cadence to it. It wasn’t like it was Creation with a slant or anything, no. It was something completely new.

Completely new until I heard my name! "Something, something something Elaine something Elaine." Once in a while one of them jabbed a finger at me.

How did they know my name!? Did they have a skill that let them see it? I strained my ears, listening for any mention of Julius, Artemis, or Amber, but nothing. I stared a hole into the back of Julius’s head, and he turned and gave me a tiny nod of acknowledgement before twisting back to face the knights.

The man barked a few words we didn’t understand at Julius, who shrugged slowly, showing his open hands.

"I’m sorry, I don’t understand you." He said back.

The two knights argued some more while the squires stared at us. Eventually the knights came to some agreement, snapped their reins, and were off in a cloud of dust and thundering hoofbeats.

"Well." Artemis discreetly dropped a few rocks she’d been holding. "That was different."

Different indeed.

We started walking again, following the direction the knights had gone. The topic of conversation? The incredibly weird armor and set up the knights had.

At least, to Artemis, Julius, and the rest. When I mentioned they looked like they were out of one of my stories, things got interesting.

The road cut through the forest, and we didn’t see anyone else for two days. The next people we saw were some lightly armed guards, frontrunners for a caravan being pulled by parasaurolophus, two of the duck-billed dinosaurs per wagon.

We waved at them, and the guards tensed at Julius and Artemis, before relaxing slightly at seeing me and Amber. I guess anyone traveling with a healer and a teenager wasn’t exactly the spitting image of a fierce bandit. Regardless of the rest of them being filthy. Fire immunity for the win!

It did mean that I had to smell them though, and whooooooof. We were rank.

"Hello!" Julius called, friendly and welcoming from a distance. What words couldn’t say, body language could do.

Interestingly, a bunch of the guards were all exactly at 256, and none of them were higher than that. One or two might be a coincidence, but six of the ten? Something was up with that. Combined with the [Squires] from earlier, and I was sensing a larger cultural shift. Or maybe people had just plain figured out that waiting for accomplishments was better. We hadn’t been jumped by nearly as many monsters as Remus seemed to have, and we were certainly outside of the Dead Zone. Maybe waiting for a class up was now the thing to do?

The caravan started to slow down at us, and one of the [Drivers] yelled something at us, rapid-fire in that same lilting language as the knights from before. Artemis plunged her hands into my backpack, grabbing a few rabbits that Julius had recently caught, and I’d flash-cooked to keep them nice for longer.

The ones Auri had "cooked" had been promptly partially eaten, and the charred remains discarded. She was trying, and we did have a bit of spare to let her practice.

Artemis thrust the cooked rabbits in the direction of the caravan, making a somewhat well-recognized symbol. ‘Hey, we’ve got food, wanna share?’

I looked around, and Amber looked all too eager.

"I seem to remember you had quite a few lessons for me on symbols to communicate my wares." I quietly said to her. She grinned back at me, made slightly disturbing by the swirling purple mist that had replaced her eye.

"Julius, have you seen their levels?" I whispered to him. He nodded without taking his eyes off the guards.

"I have. It’s weird."

I looked at Artemis, who shrugged.

"Easier to handle if they decide to cause a problem."

I rolled my eyes at her brilliant analysis. The wagons circled up, food was broken out, and we all sat down together.

I hated it, but I knew my role in this. Sit still, be quiet, and let everyone else do the talking. Oh, I’d heal anyone who was hurt, and I’d listen to the more experienced social people, but I was playing the part of the slightly shy healer who needed bodyguards to walk around.

Ok, given the spiders in the forest, the bodyguards seemed entirely reasonable, but I didn’t speak the language. I was a walking social disaster. Letting Julius - and possibly Amber - run the mime show, while stopping Auri from immolating anything important, or Artemis from being too twitchy was more important.

The conversation swirled around me, and the [Merchants], [Guards], [Drivers], and the rest of the people in the caravan were, from my point of view, weird. Amber was in a gap between two of the wagons, discussing in low, heated words with one of the [Merchants], which was blowing my mind. Somehow, the two of them were talking. That was the more normal part.

The weirder part was when someone came up to me, babbled something, said my name three times in all that, then looked at me expectantly. I felt Artemis looming up behind me - the image of the protective bodyguard entirely ruined as she used my head as a plate for her lunch - but the guy seemed harmless enough.

"Brrpt? Brrrrpt?" Auri wanted to act as a translator, but it wasn’t quite working. Poor bird. I hoped more people could understand her in the future.

After some miming and gesturing, I figured it out when he accidentally brushed me, and he got excited. He grabbed my hand - I let him, I was pretending to be a low level healer, not a Sentinel with five digits of speed - and furiously shook it, the words incomprehensible except for "Elaine", but the tone conveying thanks.

I figured it out as he left.

"He must’ve been after healing, and my [Persistent Casting] will heal anyone that touches me right now." I softly muttered to Artemis.

"MmmMM." She agreed around a mouthful of food.

Instead of giving her the stink eye, I tilted my head forward, letting Artemis’s lunch slide into my hands.

"Yoink!"

"Hey!" She protested as I took a huge bite of what was formerly her lunch.

"Brrrpt!" Auri thought this was all great fun.

I just shot Artemis a smug look.

A few more people came up to me, calling my name in the middle of their language, and I quickly worked out that they all wanted healing. Weird that they all knew my name. Maybe the first dude had a skill that could see my name, and shared it with everyone? That would make sense, my name usually came up near the start of whatever they were saying, usually followed by a bunch of pointing at some part of their body or another.

A broken wrist was obvious, stomach pains were not. Sadly, I got no feedback as to what I’d actually fixed. Normally, I’d be hauling Amber over here to practice her burgeoning medical talents, but she was busy. I trusted that what she was doing was more important, and there was always tomorrow to teach her more.

The people were an interestingly even mix of men and women, which was a bit unusual, but I wasn’t going to complain.

Before long, one of the guards started calmly shouting - the type of yelling that had the tone of "get moving you lazy shits" and less "AHHH MONSTERS TRYING TO EAT US ALIVE" - and the caravan packed back up with remarkable efficiency. Soon they were on their way, the dinosaur-pulled heavily-loaded wagons still faster than Amber’s top limping speed.

I was fine seeing them go, wanting to hear what everyone else had to say about the encounter.

"You were able to talk with the [Merchant]?" I asked Amber, the question burning to get out. She was holding a roll of red fabric.

"Kind of?" She hedged.

"Explain." Artemis demanded.

"Well, it’s a weird skill." She said. "It’s a merchant skill. For me, it’s [Let’s Make a Deal]. It helps when negotiating with other merchants that have a similar skill. It smoothes understanding between us. Usually it helps us all get on the same page for a big deal, so there isn’t some big fundamental misunderstanding between us, but here it let us talk in a limited way." She explained. "A lack of anything to actually trade hurt me badly though, since it’s only good when negotiating and trading. No trade? No chit chat."

I pointedly looked at the fabric she was holding, something we hadn’t had before.

"Any useful information?" Julius asked.

"Yeah. We’re in a country called Lyon, and this road goes to a town called Rolland. I think. Also know way too much about the price of wheat, onions, lettuce, and melons." She rolled her eyes. "It wasn’t even the bulk of what they were carrying, but the other gal must’ve sensed I was poor or something. Didn’t bother with the fancy stuff, just talked about the food she could sell us. Oh! I did negotiate this fancy cloak for Elaine, thanks to her healing everyone. The details weren’t clear, but…" She shrugged, and handed it over to me.

I opened it up, seeing a nice, simple red cape. With pockets!

"Good. Elaine, did you pick anything out?"

"They really like my name. Might be a cultural thing? Makes me wonder if checking on someone’s name is now a common skill."

Artemis hummed.

"It’d be unusual, but then again, what do I know? Clearly there are skills to read other people’s levels, and names are displayed in the status by default. However, I haven’t heard anyone say my name." She reasoned out loud.

"BRRrrrpt! BRRPT!" Auri flew in dizzying circles in front of me, drawing attention to herself.

"Yes?"

"Brrrpt brrrrrrrrrrrpt brrrpt." She explained.

"Auri’s going to try and get the skill." I translated as my little friend landed on my shoulder and scrunched her face up in concentration.

We waited a moment, and she relaxed.

"Brrrpt…" She sadly admitted.

I didn’t need to translate the drooping shoulders and dipped beak.

"My haul was less good." Julius admitted. "Potentially fruitful for the future. Got a few words sorted out. Ok, now listen…" He started to explain the words as we continued down the road.

We were back in something resembling civilization. Forest gave way to fields of wheat, little villages popped up here and there, and smaller paths merged in with the road we were on. We stopped and chatted with people when we could, slowly getting our bearings.

Artemis and Julius kept getting strange looks, and I was thinking my decision to hide my level had been the right one.

We were walking down the road late in the afternoon when a girl of maybe fifteen half-ambushed me.

"Elaine!" She said, tugging on my arm. She rapid-fire shot out a bunch more words at me, continuing to tug at my arm. "Elaine!"

I looked at the rest and shrugged.

"Someone might need a healer." I said, letting the girl pull me along, Amber trailing in my wake. We didn’t go far, the girl dragging me to a tall, warm, inviting tavern, babbling all the way. We went inside, and I got a brief appreciation of the common room - clean, with few frills - before getting dragged up the stairs to a room.

"I figure I’ll give you first crack at the problem, then I’ll go behind you to make sure it’s all done properly." I told Amber.

"Standard apprentice pattern." She agreed with me, hobbling along.

There was a second worker diligently mopping on the second floor, and as the [Barmaid] hustled us past him, I noticed he was mopping up bloody footsteps.

I let the [Barmaid] pull me along faster, leaving the limping Amber behind.

She led me to a room, and pointed at the door, babbling something, along with including my name. The trail of bloody footsteps led to the door as well, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out the issue.

I opened the door, getting hit with a wave of coppery, bloody stench. The patient was immediately obvious - another [Knight] of some sort laying on top of a bed, still in their blood-coated armor. The sheets were still made, but they’d been soaked fresh blood red by their bleeding.

I didn’t have the time to figure out the extent of their injuries under all their armor, but it had to be horrific. No wonder I’d gotten pulled here!

I didn’t wait for Amber, I was too concerned that the knight would drop dead even with my [Cosmic Presence] theoretically providing stabilization. I stepped over, hearing a warning growl from one corner of the room. I glanced over as I kept walking over at full speed, hesitated at the distinctly draconic-looking creature, and threw out a [Long-Range Identify] on the two of them as Auri flew over to the creature.

[Frost Wyvern - 32].

[Warrior - 520].

WHAT. A random knight I’d encountered in a tavern, by themselves, was level 520!? Bloody unfair, that’s what it was.

"BRrrrrrrrrrpt!" Auri scolded the wyvern, making sure I was safe.

Wyvern, not a dragon, and I was helping. I was sworn to, although I kept a leery eye on him. I touched the [Knight], noticing a respectable amount of mana had been used to heal them. Their legs sort of popped up, and a pair of fresh, pale legs appeared under what I now recognized as crude prosthetics. Nice that they moved, and my healing didn’t obliterate them. The same thing happened with her hand, and I shuddered to imagine the sheer depth of injuries she must’ve had. The knight went from having ragged, wheezing breaths to slow, calm breathing, and I saw them settle into a deeper, more peaceful sleep.

I felt the warm glow of accomplishment go through me. This. This right here. This is what I was about. I’d found someone dying, hovering on the chasm with Black Crow circling, and I grabbed them and pulled them back. This was my calling, and I felt the knowledge settle back down into me, reaffirming that I had a purpose to life. That I couldn’t just stop.

There were more people out there that needed help, and I would be there to provide it.

They were still on the blood-soaked bed, but I wasn’t about to try changing it. I knew I would lash out hard when being woken up by strangers, and an injured, isolated, armed and dangerous powerful [Warrior]?

Yeah, I was sworn to heal. I didn’t have [Oath of Comfy Bedtime].

I left the room, finding Amber in deep discussion at the end of the hallway. She waved me over.

"Hey! Didn’t quite get everything, but I think they’re grateful you saved her life, and want to give us a free night sleeping here, along with breakfast, dinner, and a bath. Please?" Amber begged me, and I remembered that she wasn’t exactly cut out for the life on the road. Quite literally.

"We’ll have to talk with everyone else, but I don’t see a reason not to." I answered.

"Brrrpt!" Auri also wanted to try out the tavern, and with the three of us, we already had a majority vote.

Julius and Artemis had needed no convincing, and we spent the night there.

The home cooked food was a priceless treasure after… what we’d been eating.

I probably spent way too much time preening myself after dinner. Auri was utterly scandalized that I chose to bath of all things, but heated the bath up for me anyways. With the return of civilization, I could afford the time to make myself feel nice. Bless this place.

Sleeping though?

That wasn’t so easy. I got a room to myself - which was to say, with Auri - and when the doors were closed, and I was in bed, everything came back to me.

I let the chest of emotions in the corner loosen a bit, dealing with and processing some of the emotions. A fraction of the loss I’d experienced.

My family was dead and gone. I’d never hear dad’s laugh again. Never see mom with her spoon. Never see Themis grow up.

Every last friend I had. I’d never get my pouch back from Acquisition again. Never hear Bulwark mutter about structural supports. Never see Brawling light up as another one of us came back from a mission, safe and alive. Never fish with Ocean again. Never…

Every last acquaintance.

Every street I knew, house I’d lived in, road I’d traveled was now dust.

I’d lost practically everything.

I shoved my head into my pillow, and let fat, hot tears flow, convulsing as I let full-body sobs loose.

"Brrrrpt…" Auri landed on my head, never mind the rocky support, and was crying as well, little crystal beads rolling down out of her eyes. She’d lost a lot of people as well.

We still had each other, but in this moment, it was small comfort.

I cried myself to sleep.

The five of us were having breakfast the next morning, slowly eating and savoring the food together. Artemis’s head suddenly whipped towards the stairs, and I snapped my head over to see what had startled her so.

There was a giant of a woman standing on the last step of the stairs, the little ice wyvern next to her. How long she’d been there, I couldn’t tell, but at our look, she walked over.

I took a moment to take in how she looked. She had a strange familiarity, like she was the cousin of somebody I knew. Her blonde hair was like straw, a dozen different ragged lengths. A rough-hewn face full of sharp angles with a strong chin framed piercing green eyes like emeralds over a shimmering backdrop of stars, marking her primary element as Celestial. She wouldn’t be remarked as some great beauty, but gods, her arms. It was like a goddess had envisioned the ideal form of a powerful warrior, then carved the woman in front of me out of flesh to look like one. Like a female Adonis. I swear they were thicker than my thighs, and she moved with the liquid grace of a trained, honed warrior. I could go mad trying to articulate all the parts about her; it would take a poet a lifetime to properly describe her. Somehow, in spite of the various mis-matched parts, the unconventional takes, she was one of the most attractive women I’d ever seen.

I compartmentalized the feeling, putting it out of my mind so it wouldn’t distract me or influence me. I’d gotten better at that ever since Serondes.

"Brrrpt!" Auri cheerfully greeted and welcomed her.

She sat down at the table with us.

"Hello. My name’s Iona. Thank you for saving my life." She told me, and I went pale and unsteady at the words, my brain short-circuiting, needing to grip the chair to keep myself stable and upright.

That.

Those words.

Those words were in English.

Chapter 5
Major Interlude - Iona
They Meet in a Tavern I

Iona was sick. She didn’t have the fancy words the healers all had to describe the various types of sickness. She had a more practical take on it. Burning-vomiting-oozing pus sick. Useless for any sort of medical diagnosis, great for describing what was happening.

Iona had been utterly shredded by the adult frost wyvern, barely managing to cling onto life with her absurd vitality. It kept her alive, but infection had set in. Acid had eaten away at her innards, melting the edges of some of her organs, and she only had one of her limbs left, using Mallium as crude prosthetics to keep moving.

Staying in the frozen wastes of Modu with Fenrir was a slow death sentence. The only question was if she would feel cold or hot as the end came, and if Fenrir would wait until she was dead to start taking a nibble. Their bond, their relationship, was still new and Fenrir was willing to follow Iona while she remained a source of food.

"Lunaris. Selene. I need help." Iona begged her patrons.

A distant laugh, and an arrow appeared in Iona’s vision, pointing in a direction. The goddesses had their own sense of humor, providing aid in unexpected ways.

Iona had hoped that becoming their [Paladin] would mean slightly better miracles, but no.

Iona’s injuries were devastating. Her high vitality helped her heal faster, but there was no healing an amputated arm. Bodies didn’t naturally grow back areas scoured with acid, and Iona’s constant movement kept breaking open injuries that were trying to scab over. Her crude Mallium prosthetics kept digging into the stumps of her legs, forcing them open, having blood trickle down her metal leg - when it didn’t freeze over before hitting the ground. That didn’t even touch on how many broken bones, sprained joints, internal tears, and battered, half-ruptured organs she had. The fact that Iona could even stand, let alone walk, was both a miracle, and a testament to her determination and grit.

She followed the direction the goddesses had provided, fever clouding her mind, narrowing her focus to a few small points. Fenrir came along, occasionally lapping Iona’s blood from her crimson footprints, trying to fight by her side as they encountered various creatures that called Modu their home. The ones they didn’t run from got turned into food that Iona gladly shared with Fenrir, making sure the baby always had his fill before she took a bite.

Iona never stopped moving, not even when a blizzard howled through. She did have to pick up poor Fenrir and bring him along with her, or else the baby would get lost. She also shielded him from the storm with her body, which was unnecessary - but Fenrir remembered. He saw what she was doing. The clouded vision didn’t matter, the goddess’s divine arrow pointed the path through the blinding, driving snow.

At last, nearly delirious with fever, Iona left Modu behind, entering the Tuvan tribes. Land of the yetis and snow women.

The first tribe of yetis Iona encountered wanted nothing to do with her, keeping a wide berth around the crazed, blood-coated warrior with a wyvern trailing along behind her. The risk of her being some fresh new horror from Modu was too high, and besides. The little apex predator seemed to have dibs on her otherwise.

Iona didn’t press it, simply picking up Fenrir and stagger-running north with all her might on her crude prosthesis. Under ideal conditions - no armor, perfectly healthy, a ton of food, and her [Vow] kicking in the entire time - Iona could cover over 2,000 miles in a day. Of course, such a situation to allow her [Vow] to be permanently active was unlikely to persist as she covered the distance, and Iona wasn’t close to ideal conditions. The best she could do, hobbling along on her prosthetics, carrying Fenrir, was only a few hundred miles.

The second tribe was more willing to hear her out. Iona’s gift of languages and tongue was partially sabotaged by her inability to clearly think and articulate what she needed, but the combination of speaking their own language, and clearly heavily injured had the yetis giving her a hand. However, their [Shaman] couldn’t do much for her. His class only had minor healing, and it was entirely focused on healing members of his own tribe. The paste they gave Iona helped stem the bleeding, and Iona was back on her way north.

The bleeding was stopped until she ripped half of it out the next time a monster ambushed the two of them. The divine arrow that had been guiding Iona so far faded the next day, and she found herself looking at one of the sects of The Great Tang.

Getting closer to home.

Iona couldn’t remember her sects all that well. Some were friendly to the Valkyries, others were hostile, a natural result of Castle Valkyrie being near the border of The Great Tang. It frustrated Iona, how they should all be working together, and instead constantly found cause for bitter, petty conflicts, but those were thoughts for another day.

End of the day, there was an even chance that any sect she found would happily "disappear" her and loot her body, as they would help her. Iona was in no condition to fight people, her fever growing stronger, clouding her mind and thoughts.

She bonded with Fenrir after a particularly difficult fight. Iona would’ve struggled to figure out the right skill to remove if she hadn’t spent more than half her life targeting a skill slot in the first place.

[Dinosaur Husbandry] made way for [Companion Bond Between Iona and Fenrir]. The skill gave her a sense of the wind and the weather. Linked her awareness to Fenrir when she rode him - an event that was going to be far, far in the future, given his small size and slow growth speed. It gave her a supernaturally powerful bite, able to rip and tear with her teeth like she had a Dark skill dedicated to it. Lastly, it made her more savage, and even in the head-in-clouds fever state Iona was in, she recognized the danger of such a line, even though it wasn’t fully explained.

Her blessing let her peek at Fenrir, seeing that he’d eventually be able to speak somewhat normally. That he was smarter - a low bar for the wyvern to clear, to be sure, but a welcome one - and that he’d be unnaturally smooth for Iona to ride. Lastly, in a line that had Iona pucker her lips, he was going to be more of a workaholic.

"I am not a workaholic!" Iona screamed at the clouds, getting some strange looks from the other travelers who were already not getting close to her on the road. Something about being coated in metal and blood tended to turn off other people.

The goddesses just laughed in her ears.

However, she did keep her wits somewhat about her. The Great Tang represented the return of roads and travelers, and she kept glancing at various people she crossed - in spite of them keeping far away from the blood-coated fevered [Warrior] - seeing if any of them was a healer. Even the smallest and most meager of healers could give her a hand. She just needed to find one that had ventured out and was on the road, as opposed to trying to search through a town for one, who might not even heal Iona with her utter lack of money.

The Valkyrie name wasn’t as potent as it used to be, and The Great Tang. Rivalries. Sects disappearing her.

Finally she saw one on the road, and felt her blood run hot, coursing through her.

Want. The thought went, and Iona practically pounced on the poor man.

"HEAL." She snarled at him, grabbing his shirt.

She didn’t even see the punch that laid her out, the man’s bodyguard stepping in, but she did hear the poor healer running screaming, and felt ashamed of herself.

She was better than that.

She’d let the bond get in the way.

Concussed and feverish, Iona could only keep three thoughts in her head.

Survive.

Protect Fenrir.

And last, her last mission, a place where she knew [Oathbound Healers] congregated, a place where she could be fixed up.

Get to Lyon.

Iona blitzed down the roads, stopped when she or Fenrir needed to. One of the stops was much like any other, an inn near a small village that recognized Iona as a Valkyrie, and had a strong impression of them. One of them had saved the inn owner’s life decades ago, and his doors were always open to one of their Order, marked by their winged helmets.

Iona collapsed into one of their beds after nearly clearing out the pantry with Fenrir’s help.

She woke up the next morning feeling amazing. Her arm was back! Her legs were healed! Sure, her bed was an unholy mess of blood, but that was a usual morning sight for Iona.

"Food?" Fenrir growled at her, Iona only understanding him because of her blessing. His language hadn’t progressed that far yet.

"Soon." She found herself growling back. It was still weird thinking a word in one language, and her throat making an entirely different sound than the one she expected.

She stretched, marveling at her hand, at her ability to jump and move without pain. Her head was like clear ice, and there was a distinct lack of strange pulls and funny smells coming from her body.

Iona took a moment to pray.

Selene. Lunaris. I got healed! Don’t know if you had a hand in it, but I’m all better. Hope they’re still around so I can say hi and thanks!

Iona’s stomach rumbled, the sort of ravenous, all-encompassing hunger that came from a fever or illness breaking.

She made herself a bit more presentable, manipulating her Mallium to slide the blood off, then had it flow behind her back, effectively packing it away.

The Valkyrie frowned as dozens of frost wyvern scales fell out of the armor, remembering that she’d woven them into her armor to better bulk up and protect herself. With some [Telekinesis], she picked up all the pieces, delighting in how easy it was. No need to manually pick them all up from the floor one at a time!

Mages had it so nice sometimes, and now Iona could dabble in their cool stuff!

Iona walked down the hall, and had to resist snatching away a loaf of bread off of one of the [Barmaid’s] trays. It wasn’t hers, but she felt the impulse to just snatch what she wanted.

It was wrong. It would be dishonorable.

She made her way down the stairs, and took a quick look around the tavern, seeing if she could spot who it was who’d helped her out.

There was a cultivator from the Wandering Wind sect. A trader and his guards, along with his daughter. A few laborers from the village, grabbing a quick drink in the morning before heading off to a day’s work. A party of adventurers, likely employed by the local lord to carefully dismantle an old ruin or wizard’s lair and see what there was to find. A pair from the Hunter’s Guild.

Lastly, five people sitting at a table together. A couple, in their late thirties and early forties, subtly showing each other affection in their own private language of love. Iona glanced through their status, half-raising an eyebrow at the mage’s level.

Both had multiple classes and skills related to being Rangers, an organization Iona wasn’t familiar with. However, it was clear that they weren’t some sort of rogue bandits, even if they were far away from home. Iona made a mental note to check with them to see if they knew what the local [Lords] and [Knights] wanted for documentation, otherwise they’d suffer no end of hassle.

The girl was where it started to get weird. Who had a blank for a name slot?! That just didn’t happen. Well, possibly she had entirely disavowed her name, like some members of the Eventide Establishment or one of the gangs were rumored to do. Even then, the one time Iona had encountered one, their name had been "No one", not a blank. People found it difficult to dissociate themselves from any identity.

However, a mercantile class combined with a healer class, and a number of truly benign skills, had Iona thinking that she was simply some oddity, and not a ninja.

And that was before her third class was flat-out missing. Iona played with her interface a bit, checking a few more people before confirming that, yes, she didn’t have a third class registered. There were some other oddities going on with her status, words with accents, some skills meandering around instead of being in straight, readable lines.

Iona had a brief moment of doubt. She didn’t quite trust what she was seeing, not even the Race: Human line.

She mentally slapped herself. Her ability to see statuses was a divine blessing from Lunaris and Selene themselves. There was no way it could be displaying something wrong.

Iona disabled [Chilled Mind] and pinched herself on the next status she read, checking that she was actually awake and aware, and hadn’t gone deeper into her fever. A real concern with what was displayed in front of her.

It would be like the goddesses to pull a massive prank on Iona as she died…

Sitting on a random table in a small tavern in a mortal country, staggering around with a belly overfilled with juice, was a bright, colorful phoenix.

A phoenix.

A phoenix. A creature that was supposedly just a legend, over-indulging on juice.

Plus, the legends always had phoenixes as gigantic birds of flame, not a tiny hummingbird. Then again, her age was 1. Brand new, just hatched, and already capped at 128 and 32. Clearly waiting on additional class ups, and already had over 2000 stat points in each of the magic stats.

Her skills were as stupid as her stats, and Iona felt a distinct sense of jealousy as she read over them. She’d had to work her ass off for a decade to get skills that were a fraction as potent as what the little phoenix had gotten, and she seriously doubted the bird had gone through trials of - well, not fire - to get those skills.

Life…

Well, life was sometimes just unfair. Iona reminded herself of all the advantages she’d gotten, all the ways life had been bent unfairly for her, and was about to move on when one last line caught her eye.

[Companion Bond Between Auri and Healer].

She was companion bonded to… healer? What? The abstract idea of what [Analyze] showed other people? Someone with the healer class?

Or had some pair of lunatic parents literally named their kid "Healer"?

She moved onto the last person in the party, and goddesses she was pretty. Delicate features led to a bright smile and sparkling eyes, her skin was clear and unblemished, she was lovely, striking, beautiful, stunning.

Pretty.

Iona had seen plenty of attractive men and women in her time. Shared a bed with a bunch of them. This lady wasn’t the most attractive woman Iona had ever seen, but she was pressing her buttons just right.

Iona felt the urge to throw her over one shoulder, climb back up the stairs, and throw her back into her bed.

She bit the urge back, remembering how the companion bond was screwing with her mind and desires, and how she’d scared off the healer she’d met on the road.

The urge was further quelled as she noticed the feathers braided into her hair.

Angel feathers. Iona felt herself go cold at the blasphemer. Someone who’d use the feathers of the god’s sacred servants as mere ornamentation, likely from a fallen angel.

She paused a moment, waiting for one of her patrons to whisper in her ear. To give her guidance on what to do. Iona was their [Paladin] after all. Solving these sorts of issues was part of what she was now.

Ancient. Selene whispered to her. Angels fallen so long ago as to be gone from history.

Angels… sent to help her? Her friends? It’s unclear. Lunaris breathed into Iona’s other ear.

Not something to handle right now, but Iona still had an initial dislike of the woman because of the feathers.

She peeked at her status, feeling her mood lift at the great joke that was her name. She quietly chuckled to herself as she read the first line.

Name: Healer

The poor girl. Her parents had indeed named her healer, and nothing else. That was a rough way to start life. Usually when professions were in a name, they were appended after the name. So it was easy to tell in a village that you were talking about John the Smith, and not John the Tailor. Nobody would just name their kid Smith though - they needed a name outside the identity.

As Iona started looking over the rest of her classes and skills, she felt like the phoenix wasn’t the craziest thing at the table.

At 22 - the same age as Iona - she also had her third class unlocked, but not yet taken. Still, it was the mark of an utterly absurd life that had gotten her so far already. The first class mentioned Sentinel, and it had Iona wondering about the Exterreri Empire vampire Sentinels. Maybe she had been selected - probably by politics or her parents, given her age - to be one of the next generation of Sentinels, and power leveled hard. It made sense with how vampires worked. Once they were turned, their leveling rate slowed to a crawl. It was much easier to get a high level as a human, or something else, then be turned into a vampire.

That would explain her [The Dawn Sentinel] class name.

Except…

Except glancing quickly at her capped skills, [The Dawn Sentinel] was a healer class.

The healer had gone for a healer class. It was as absurd as someone getting called "mage" and deciding to become a mage, or someone named "potter" at birth and picking up a pottery class. She never had a chance.

But more distractingly, the healer class was way over 256.

Just wandering around mortal lands.

What was she doing?! What were the people with her playing at!?

Why wasn’t anyone else in the tavern freaking out!? Had she bribed them all or something!? Iona carefully read the room.

No, there were no covetous or fearful looks shot the way of the strange healer called Healer. She wasn’t the focus of the room, just a few lecherous looks shot her way. Iona felt an irrational surge of protectiveness and envy, but stamped it down.

Dislike. She reminded herself. An over-leveled healer wearing angel feathers?

There had to be some high level deception measures going on. Likely an artifact some [Enchanter] had made. It was the only thing that made sense, and it dropped her respect for the group by a few notches.

Truth was important. Paramount. It was woven into her very [Vow]. Skulking about, hiding who and what they were meant they were likely up to no good.

Iona deliberately ignored the uncomfortable truth that maybe they just didn’t want to get murdered in their sleep.

She continued looking through the first class’s skills.

[Affinity] wasn’t capped, suggesting a massive number of levels recently without extensive skill use behind it, lending evidence to Iona’s power level theory. That, or she somehow did major Dawn Sentinel things without tons of skill use.

[Cosmic Presence] suggested lots of time with a large number of wounded people around her. Iona was practically certain that she’d been power leveled at this point, people being deliberately injured to help increase her level. Healers could get dramatic amounts of experience that way, although Iona admitted that it was possible that Healer followed Exterreri Empire armies around, and got a number of levels that way.

[The Stars Never Fade].

Iona read the skill, on one hand not believing what it said, on the other knowing that it was exactly what it said. Her hand reflexively twitched towards her weapon, a lifetime of training ingrained in her to remove the threat. Kill one person, so tens if not hundreds of thousands would live.

She didn’t entirely lose her head, remembering that she was in a safe, civilized location, and murdering people outright was terrible form, especially after they just saved her life.

After all. Iona didn’t see any other healers here. As much as she didn’t like to admit it, healer Healer had saved her and Fenrir.

The twitch didn’t go unnoticed though, and the older woman sitting at the table snapped her head towards Iona; her partner and the healer following suit just a moment later as the air crackled with the smell that air had right before a lightning strike.

That was a twitchy mage.

Iona threw out her "healer got power leveled" idea entirely. The reflexes she’d just displayed were born of great experience in fights and battles, not honed on a drill ground. In retrospect, she hadn’t properly thought about the stats displayed for the levels she was seeing. That math had always made her head hurt.

It was only polite to go over and say hi, and Iona was nothing if not [Adaptable] with a hefty dose of [Magnetic Charm]. Immortal healer hanging out with a phoenix? Sure, let’s roll with it, and be polite. Be honorable. There were more ways of handling an immortality-granting healer than killing her. She started walking over, drinking in the sight of the healer with her eyes. By Selene, she was just so damn unfairly pretty. And, for some reason, vaguely familiar.

"Hi hi HI! Come sit!" The little phoenix brrrpted at her, making her feel welcome.

"Hello. My name’s Iona. Thank you for saving my life." She said, her tongue twisting in strange ways to speak Healer’s - Elaine’s - native language. It was her name, she should think of it in the word it was, not the meaning it had.

Chapter 6
Major Interlude – Iona
They Meet in a Tavern II

Usually, speaking in a person’s native tongue was great for settling people down. A fantastic conversation piece, as Iona always knew what language a person was most comfortable in, never needing to awkwardly speak in one of the keystone languages.

It wasn’t the case here. Far from being settled, Elaine went pale, needing to clutch at her chair. Iona reflexively shot a hand out to help stabilize her, but caught herself halfway through. Not only had Elaine not fallen over, but the Ranger couple had twitched in a dangerous way.

Iona thought it was entirely reasonable when a high level warrior suddenly went for the person they were protecting, but no. They weren’t the protectors at all, were they? They had to know her level. They were probably smoothers of some sort.

"You ok?" Iona asked, and Elaine gave a tiny nod. "Is there a language you’re more comfortable in?"

"What’s she saying?" The girl with no name asked Elaine.

"She was thanking me for saving her life." She absently replied in a different language. How Iona knew that, she wasn’t quite sure - just one of the minor benefits of her blessing that made it all work. "In English."

"Is that a problem?" Iona asked Elaine, sticking to the second language the pretty healer had shown proficiency in.

"It’s - agh, how do I say this? How do you know it? Are you from…" Elaine shook her head to clear it, her hair bouncing around in a way that pressed all of Iona’s buttons just right. It was unfair. Iona wanted to dislike her.

"I’ve got a divine blessing to understand languages." Iona thought for a moment how much to reveal. [Magnetic Charm] helped give her a small nudge that being open and truthful would help here. She needed to have a talk with Elaine about her skills and classes, and ask her what the hell she was doing.

There were many, many things she wanted to do with Elaine. Getting into a fight - a real fight - was not on that list, but if push came to shove, if handling Elaine stopped another war, saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of people dying?

Iona wasn’t great at math, but she could run those numbers.

"I’ve also got a blessing that lets me read the status sheets of other people." She admitted, and oddly it was the girl with no name’s turn to go pale. Iona gave her a look.

"You haven’t told them?" She asked, both distracting from her prior attempt at reaching for Elaine, demonstrating in a mostly harmless way that she was indeed telling the whole truth, and showing that she was mostly nice and helpful.

The girl with no name would probably be annoyed with her, but the truth was the best.

"Hang on." The man - Julius - said. "We’ve had a terrible time with the language here. I think instead of looking through whatever Amber has traded to the fae, we have so many questions we need answered, and frankly, we need help. Could you give us a hand?"

The part about trading System parts to the fae was incredibly distracting for Iona, but she knew how to focus and prioritize, mentally noting to ask about it later. The Valkyrie gave Julius a beaming smile.

Of course she’d be happy to help. Anything to quietly get them merrily on their way, and out of Rolland. Preferably all the way to where the elves lived, anywhere they wouldn’t start a war by merely existing.

"Naturally! I think it’d be best if you told me how you got here."

The five of them regaled Iona with the most absurd story she’d ever heard. One of the [Barmaids] quietly served Iona an extra-large breakfast, which she started picking at while listening. The Empire of Remus. A fairy ring. Amber selling things to the fae, and Elaine having unwittingly offended them.

Amber’s messed-up status was what convinced Iona more than anything else that they were telling the truth. Nothing could screw with the System’s status - except the fae had never been told what the rules were, and did whatever they pleased.

"... so together we stepped through the ring the fairy brought us to… here." Julius finished saying with a wave. "Exited out here, saw dozens of notifications -"

"And spiders. Soooooo many spiders." Amber shuddered.

"And a lot of spiders." Julius conceded.

Elaine opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it.

"Something to add?" Iona prompted, as Auri stole some food off her plate. Iona let the little bandit get away with it.

Elaine shook her head.

"Nothing important." She said.

"Well." Iona said as Auri tossed Iona’s pilfered breakfast off the table to a tail-wagging Fenrir. "I have so much to say I don’t even know where to begin."

"Absolutely anything you can tell us would be invaluable." Julius leaned forward, intently staring at Iona, showing his sincerity. "We are so lost. We know nothing."

"Yeah, I can tell that. It’s like you’re children, needing to go to school." Iona said, her appointment with the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft in her mind. "Hang on, what’s the date?"

The five of them traded looks.

"I mean, we have no idea, don’t ask us." Elaine flashed a grin at Iona. "Late summer’s the best I can guess given the warmth and the crops, but for all I know magic’s changed everything, and there are super-skills and the world’s gotten warmer. For all I know, this could be mid-winter!"

Iona laughed at that.

"You’ll know when it’s winter here. No, I agree, it’s summer, I’ll ask someone later."

She kicked back in her chair, putting her hands behind her head.

"Ok, I have no idea where to start with all this." She said. "Normally half of the important stuff I need to tell you I’d have to tell you secretly, but if what you’re saying is right, nobody can understand us anyways."

"An old Immortal could." Elaine pointed out, almost desperately. "Someone who’s been around that long."

Iona snorted.

"Nobody lives that long. If an accident or just misjudging a single situation didn’t do them in, then an Immortal War would’ve gotten them by now." Iona spoke with complete confidence, ignoring the multiple glares she was getting.

"Night’s totally still alive." Elaine grumbled. "And I’ll find Awarthril, Aegion, and Serondes if it’s the last thing I do."

Artemis squeezed Elaine’s arm.

"You mentioned things to tell us secretly?" She said.

"Yeah. Ok, so. All of you are problematic." Iona got everyone’s attention with that. Even Auri stopped feeding Fenrir more parts of her breakfast, fluttering over to sit on Elaine’s shoulder.

"First." Iona pointed to Amber, then hesitated. "Actually, you’re probably fine generally. I’m just hung up on your status."

Slightly embarrassed, Iona quickly moved on.

"You are a phoenix. I don’t need to say anything else." She pointed at Auri. "But maybe I do. I hate to say it, but people will want to steal you."

"No! NOBODY WILL STEAL ME! I AM NOT A THING!" Auri yelled, and Iona heard exactly what she was saying.

"Nobody said you were an object, just that others might see you like one." Elaine soothed the bird’s ruffled feathers. Auri puffed up and pouted anyways.

"It Ok. Iona protect." Fenrir growled at Auri, the two of them having become fast friends through the power of stolen food. Iona stroked Fenrir’s head, scratching him in exactly that spot under his chin that he liked.

"The odds of it going bad are slim here, especially if you stay quiet about what she is." Iona reassured them.

"Unless we run into a [Pet Trader] or something." Amber said, and got looks from everyone.

"Ok, ok, so. Merchants." She said, fumbling a bit. "Merchants often get skills helping them appraise what they see. But! You need a tooooooooooooon of experience working with something before you get the skill, it’s usually narrow, and it’s not something you couldn’t figure out on your own already. The skill just speeds the process up. It’s why so many merchants focus on one thing. Uh. Used to focus on one thing? Yeah. Anyways! If there’s a [Pet Trader] who knows birds super well, they could glance at Auri and see that she’s super valuable. Or see that their skill doesn’t work on Auri. That might make them take a close look, and BOOM! Problem."

There wasn’t a ton to say off that, and Iona continued.

"Julius and Artemis are where you’re going to start running into serious issues."

The way everyone was staring at Iona had her hurry her explanation along.

"Generally - not everywhere, but most places - combat Classers are required to be sworn to a lord. Well, only once they’re over 256. Usually happens before then though. To be explicitly clear, this means anyone with the [Ranger], [Mage], or [Warrior] tag. This can manifest in a bunch of ways. The most obvious way is swearing to the service of the local [Lord]. Branches of the Hunter’s Guild can get a number of licenses that they can distribute - but again from the lord. Adventurer parties can be sponsored by a noble, there’s being the [Baron] in question, large Orders like the Valkyries have a number of permits, the town guard is usually flush with them, joining the army if you’re in the Han Empire, etc. There’s dozens of ways of getting permission, but you need permission. Normally, this isn’t an issue. Good luck getting trained as a [Spearwoman] without being a member of the trainer’s organization, and similarly good luck getting taught how to be a [Mage] without another mage teaching you. Usually, the teacher will pull the apprentice into their organization, and it’s rarely an issue. Similarly, it’s hard to find enough fights to level up without being part of a group. The rule, in practice, ends up being more that high level combat Classers need to prominently display who they’re with, or tell anyone who asks."

Julius relaxed a bit.

"Well, I’m not sure what’s going on, or why you’re saying I’m problematic, but I’m [Leader]-tagged, not [Warrior]-tagged."

Iona squinted at his highest class.

"You sure about that?"

"What happens if Artemis isn’t sworn to somebody?" Julius asked, ignoring Iona’s question. It had an obvious answer after all.

"At town entrances she’ll be asked to show documents, insignia, or some other mark of your service." Iona explained, mentally manipulating her Mallium to form the Valkyrie’s distinct helmet. "Have it? Guards let you in. Don’t have it? They’ll try to arrest you."

"That’s probably what the [Knights] we met on the road were arguing about." Elaine speculated. "Debating if they wanted to hassle us for our documents or not. Maybe they saw Julius as a [Leader] and figured we were fine?"

"Why does that exist?" Julius asked.

"Sounds dumb." Artemis agreed.

"It’s a check on bandits and the like." Iona said with more confidence than she felt. She never had gotten a strong reason why, it was just the way things were. "When a bunch of [Sailors] turn to a life of piracy, either their classes are already over 256 and not a combat class, at which point putting them down is easier, or they’re starting from the 256 marker, giving us plenty of time to handle them before they grow into a threat that’s too large."

Elaine got a thoughtful look on her face, her eyes focusing on nothing far away.

"Who are you sworn to?" Artemis eyed Iona’s half-helmet, clearly recognizing that it was her insignia.

"The Order of the Valkyries." Iona proudly answered. "There’s not a lot of us left, but we’re a mostly independent Order, focused on [Knight-Errants] who travel around, and fix problems that are being ignored by others."

"Cool!" Amber reached up for Iona’s head, then paused. "Can I touch?"

Iona graciously tilted her head, letting Amber feel the metal wings.

Elaine refocused back to the present, and gave Iona a frankly disbelieving look.

"You sure about your reasoning? It sounds to me like a way for the rich and powerful to stay the rich and powerful."

Iona paused at that, her mind starting to work. She discarded the thought for the moment, mentally noting to have a deeper conversation with Elaine on the subject, and that she was as bright on the inside as the outside.

"No matter the reason, you’re not going to be let into any towns without an affiliation." Iona said. "Not unless you borrow whatever Elaine’s using to hide her level."

Elaine twitched at that.

"How’d you know?" She asked, not bothering to deny it.

"You’re in the most trouble." Iona frankly told her. "The fact that half the tavern isn’t trying to lynch you is how I know."

She paused for a moment.

"Could we go somewhere more private to discuss this? I feel uncomfortable mentioning it in a setting this public, different language or not."

Elaine nodded and got up.

"Sure! Let’s go! Where to?"

"Well, normally I’d invite you to my room, but you saw the mess I made of my bed." Iona said.

"Can probably use the room I was in last night. I doubt anyone’s claimed it yet." Elaine said.

"Want me there? As long as money is somewhat involved, I’ve got a skill that helps with privacy!" Amber said.

"Sure. Fenrir, want to stay or come?" Iona agreed.

"Food. Many-color bird. Yummy." Fenrir hissed. Iona took that to mean he was getting along swimmingly with Auri, who was making a fast friend with fast food.

The three got up and headed back to the stairs. As they walked, Iona took a moment to look over the rest of Elaine’s skills, a few more jumping out at her.

A high level anti-pain skill must be a legacy of unimaginable amounts of pain. Her healing skill looked to be a true panacea. An energy skill, although Iona thought hers was better. Her energy skill was a passive that was always on, as opposed to an active that required mana and thought, though it was applicable to allies.

There were no particularly interesting or special skills in her [Butterfly Mystic] class that Iona hadn’t seen before, although the combination of healer-mage was rare. The amount of schooling that healers needed generally attracted the bookish sort, and they tended not to fight themselves. No, a healer was far more valuable slightly behind the lines, protected by dedicated warriors and [Bodyguards], and the wounded brought to them. It was a poor use of resources for the healer to also fight, especially as they’d use their mana fighting - not healing people.

Plus, people that fought didn’t tend towards having long lifespans. The squires and Valkyries Iona had grown up with that were now no more than a tombstone attested to that.

A beloved class was interesting, and Iona would love to know what Elaine was thinking of taking for her third class. She felt vaguely cheated that she never had time to properly plan it out, taking whatever class was there and powerful in desperation. It had been the perfect class for her in the end, but there was something just fun about discussing and planning it.

[Bullet Time] was the first interesting skill in her general skills. Iona’s blessing gave her the language, not the context.

What was a bullet? The skill description made it clear it was something to dodge.

A capped [Oath] skill almost had Iona trip over herself as she climbed the stairs, enjoying the view. A capped custom [Oath], and a powerful one to boot. Wow. She didn’t know what the standard [Healer’s Oath] was to compare - Iona had always been more interested in weapons, fighting, and escaping chores than studying every other profession under the sun - but she imagined it stacked up nicely.

Also, Elaine literally couldn’t hurt her if she never gave her cause to. That made Iona relax. It wasn’t that she felt threatened by Elaine per se, but it was nice to know the living weapon an arm’s length away was incapable of harming her.

[Sentinel’s Superiority] got Iona’s hackles right up. The skill was blatantly lying!

"Peak of Humanity" her ass. Sigrun was leagues stronger than Elaine was, and entirely human. There were more humans out there significantly stronger than the Valkyrie’s leader to boot! The only thing peak about Elaine was her healing capabilities, but [Sentinel’s Superiority] was clearly combat-focused.

And it was stronger than [Valkyrie’s Valor]. That irked Iona somewhat.

It also mentioned being a guardian of humanity, and a last bastion. It annoyed Iona for a moment more before she remembered the story of the fairy ring.

Had humanity been on the brink of extinction when Elaine had lived? Iona mentally filed that question away, and then they were there, in Elaine’s room, the woman in question sitting on her bed.

"Come here! Sit down!" Elaine patted a spot next to her, and Iona let herself show a smile at the hilarious internal joke.

It hadn’t gone as she’d fantasized about, but she had wanted to get in the same bed as Elaine after all.

Far away, in the divine realm, the home of the gods, two goddesses were lounging, practically on top of each other. Watching the finest entertainment.

"Ooooh! She’s pulled Iona into her room already!" Lunaris commented, watching the going-ons.

"And she did it, not Iona! HA!" Selene laughed, conjuring up a grape and tossing it into her mouth.

"That coin bent things well." Lunaris said.

"Yeah, didn’t think they’d meet for some time." Selene said.

"Oh for my sake." Lunaris swore. "That damn overgrown lizard is at it again."

"Trouble?" Selene could’ve just flexed her senses to check on the issue herself, but it wasn’t as fun or as nice as chatting with Lunaris. They had eternity together.

"Probably."

Grim-faced, the two goddesses took a closer look at what Lun’Kat was doing.

Chapter 7
Hunted Existence

My disappointment was immeasurable and my day ruined. I’d met someone that spoke English for the first time ever since arriving at Pallos, and by my System status, that had been 22 years ago. 22 years of wondering. Doubting. Wondering if my prior life was simply an artifact of a vivid imagination.

It had been so long.

Then came Iona, casually speaking words in a tongue I’d nearly forgotten I had. Hope had exploded at that. Was she from Earth as well? Could she… well, I had a thousand things I’d wanted to know and ask. Confirm. Catch up on mundane, boring stuff, make references that nobody here would understand.

But no.

It was "only" a divine blessing, like priest Demos’s.

Still, we were in my room together with Amber.

"Ok! [Confidential Negotiations], go!" She said. "Oh! Almost forgot. You need to be vaguely somewhat working towards some sort of deal for it to work."

Iona and I traded amused looks in surprising unison.

"Information in exchange for your prior healing of me?" She offered a hand with the agreement.

"Deal!" I happily shook her hand, feeling her rough calluses.

"What? Argh! That’s NOT HOW IT WORKS!" Amber stormed off in a huff.

We both laughed at that. My laugh was closer to a giggle, while Iona had one of those deep laughs.

"English?" I proposed. "Nobody else speaks it."

"Sure." Iona agreed.

"Testing. Testing. You can hear this, right?" Iona whispered, so quietly I could barely hear it.

I nodded, enjoying the subterfuge. For once, I was happy that [Mantle of the Stars] lacked its privacy aspect - this was a little fun!

"It’s my skill, right?" I whispered back, not quite able to modulate my voice as well as Iona had. She knew exactly how much vitality I had. I had no idea on hers.

"That’s only part of it." She said. "It’s - argh, it’s hard to explain. Let me try from the start, even though you’re at the end."

She flexed her hand, making a fist and releasing it.

"Immortals are… not well liked." She delicately put, and even I could tell that she disliked them. I felt my heart fall just the tiniest bit, but stayed focused. This was important.

"When people wage wars, soldiers die. Cities are sacked, ransom is traded." Iona continued on, and I really hoped that she never ended up as a teacher of mine. "When Immortals go to war? They…"

She shook her head at it, missing the words.

"Create tornados, earthquakes, icy meteors, summon creatures of flame and stars, whip up sandstorms, and generally have too much power?" I suggested, thinking about the Guardians’s fight with Lun’Kat.

"Yes! Exactly! The scale is different." Iona said, and I remembered a dragon pulling down the sky.

"Does it really matter to someone living in a city if an army sacks the city, or if they’re swallowed by a tsunami?" I asked the warrior.

"Uh." She paused, the look on her face making it clear she’d never thought of it before. How could I read her so well? It was weird. I was never this good at reading people.

"Doesn’t matter." Iona concluded. "The end result is people hate Immortals. There’s a big thing - the Treaty of Kyowa - which makes a ton of rules around Immortals living in mortal lands. It tries to regulate things somewhat."

"How do mortals stop elves and the like from taking everything over, if they’re that much stronger? Why bother?"

"I don’t know!" Iona threw her hands up in frustration. "That wasn’t part of my lessons! I was taught how to draw a bow, not geopolitics of a place far away!"

Fair point.

"Well, I’m not Immortal, so I should be ok, right?"

Iona shook her head.

"Ok. I suck at explaining things." Well, at least she had some self reflection, which was a point in her favor. "Healers tend to get Immortality skills earlier than anyone else, and get the ability to grant it to others. Not all healers get the ability, it’s rare. But nobody else does." She shot me a significant look.

"I’m… aware?" I ventured.

"Right. Nearly every country, just like they require combat classers to be sworn to somebody past 256, stops healers at 256. Healers with the [Healer’s Oath] are generally strong enough at that point where it doesn’t matter. When the rules are broken though? Most people will hunt the healer down, because they don’t want to invite a war to their doorstep. The local [Lord] would rather order a swift execution for keeping the peace, or else they face a riot."

"A riot!?"

Iona nodded.

"As much as people claim to hate Immortals, who isn’t going to jump at the chance to live forever? Not many people can resist the lure." Her voice was filled with utter disdain and contempt. "Healers need patients to level, and the thinking goes like this. If a healer’s openly permitted to level up past that point? They’re obviously going for Immortality. Once they get it? Everyone wants them. It’s a sparkpoint for a war. There was one last year over it. A nice excuse for the nobility to flex their muscles, conquer somebody else’s shit, ransom prisoners, the whole lot."

It was nice to see that Iona hated nobles more than she disliked Immortals.

"If things go well enough, they get to capture the healer, coerce Immortality from them, then either play hot potato and trade them around for favors and wealth, or execute them to mark the end of the war, and stop everyone attacking them."

"I’m a walking casus belli."

"Exactly." Iona said. "I joined in last year’s one, trying to help end it quickly, stop some of the worst from happening. Saw her body and a head on two separate pikes, along with her friends. They’d taken her alive." She said the last part extra-quietly, and I felt my skin crawl at the implications of "coerce skill use" and "taken alive" together.

"Everyone who wanted to joined in on the fighting, burned fields, sacked a city, and went back home once the excuse was dead. Of course, some of the retreating armies plundered their way back home." Iona was practically spitting.

"Short version. Don’t tell anybody about my skill - believe me, I learned my lesson on telling people and getting gently coerced already - and keep my ring displaying me at 256 at the max. That it?" I said.

"That would be it if hiding a level wasn’t an uncommon skill. It’s not as rare as granting Immortality, but it’s not unheard of. It’ll fool most people, but some people can see through it. You’re in trouble then."

"What do you suggest?" I asked, figuring that Iona knew the world better than I did.

"Go to one of the Immortal countries. Modu’s pretty empty and cold, and I’m not sure you’d get along with the frost giants. Draakveld is… weird. They only have villages, disdain any sort of power of leadership, and dislike non-demons, thinking they can’t work with the system they’ve got going. Jurcor is an option, although you need to read the fine print. Carefully. Six times. Even then you’ll get screwed, although gently, in a more legal sense than anything else. It’s probably safe. Urwa… no. They’d enslave you in a heartbeat, and you might end up being the main attraction of one of their auctions. Exterreri’s an option. There’s a significant human population there already, although your take on vampires will be important."

Vampires! I had a lead on Night! There was no way he was dead.

"Oh! How far away is that?" I jumped in.

"Errrr. Half the planet…?" Iona hedged, and my face fell. "Don’t worry! They’re all that far away. Roughly. Kind of. Maybe less…? They can’t all be halfway around the world…" Iona muttered to herself.

"Doesn’t matter?" I suggested.

"You’re right, looking at a map would work better."

I looked at her hopefully, and she smiled ruefully at me.

"You wish. I don’t carry a world map around in my back pocket, and I just don’t know it well enough to draw it out."

Drat.

"Bhutai could work well if you like a quiet existence. Bunch of meditating giants, although there’s no big drive for wealth or luxury. Then there’s the Tympestshard Council, and The Golden Courts. Bunch of elves."

The Tympestshard Council rang a distant bell, but I didn’t quite have the time to jump down memory lane and try to figure out why. Perfect memory didn’t mean instant recall. It just meant that I could find it, if I worked at it a bit, and that my memories would never degrade.

Awarthril had probably mentioned it at some point? It might’ve been their home…?

"All of that sounds far away. Is there an easy way to get there?"

"No, everything nearby’s hostile to Immortals and healers." Iona promptly replied, then frowned.

"Wait, the School is coming by soon." She said.

"School?"

"School of Sorcery and Spellcraft." Iona said, and my jaw practically dropped open.

"Like Artemis’s school!" I exclaimed, only to get a doubtful look from Iona.

"Errr. Artemis founded a school with that name. Although, I guess it was a long time ago…" I said.

"Rumors have it that it’s a neutral ground. Immortals and mortals both welcomed. One of the best places in the world for teaching and learning. I’m heading there myself!"

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Sigrun wants me to be an officer! I got a scholarship." Iona straightened her back and rolled her shoulders, clearly proud of her accomplishment.

"Do they have a library?" I asked.

"Yeah, although maybe we should talk with everyone else? I told you the parts I needed to."

That sounded good.

We made our way back downstairs, where everyone else was just hanging out. Except Auri and Fenrir. Auri was riding Fenrir’s head, brrrpting charges as Fenrir acted as a most noble steed for her.

"Healy-bug! What’s up? How’d it go?" Artemis asked me.

"Well, from the sound of it, my life would be easier if I was Hesoid." I gave Artemis a significant look, and Julius looked alarmed.

"That bad?" He asked.

I glanced back at Iona.

"Maybe not? Iona hasn’t tried to murder me." I sat back down at the table, the Valkyrie in question sitting down next to me.

"Frankly. If you hadn’t saved my life, if I wasn’t indebted, there’s a good chance I would’ve tried to." Iona got a round of glares for that, and she shrugged.

"I dunno who Hesoid is, but from the sound of it he was bad. Would you kill a Hesoid if you saw him again?"

"She’s got a point." Artemis said.

I kicked her under the table as Julius gave her a dirty look.

"You’re all lying to yourselves if you say you’d let Hesoid run around free if you saw him again." Artemis darkly muttered to herself, then zapped me.

I half jumped at that.

"Brrrpt!" Auri shrieked her protest as she flew up to Artemis’s head.

"Wait, no, not-" Was all Artemis got out, before her hair went up in smoke and flames.

We got kicked out of the inn a minute later.

"Walk and talk?" Julius proposed. "Not much sense in hanging around."

"We might end up going back the way we just came." Artemis pointed out.

"Yeah, but we can’t hold up Iona too much longer. She’s already done so much for us. We don’t have a direction, might as well go with her."

We started heading north along the road with Iona, Amber’s limp setting our pace. We didn’t mind - Julius could grab her and run in an emergency.

"I’m dead curious. Why is everyone saying my name?" I asked Iona.

"What do you mean?"

"People keep calling me Elaine. Which isn’t wrong." I said. "Except we can’t figure out a skill to get names, and nobody else’s name is mentioned."

Iona started laughing.

"Because the sound ‘Elaine’ means ‘healer’ in most languages!" She chuckled.

My face fell.

"No. You’re pranking me."

Iona just roared with laughter.

"You don’t even have a last name to go off of!"

Artemis elbowed me, and with that grin I knew I was in trouble.

"May I introduce you to the amazing healer Healer!" She flourished, getting amused noises from Auri and Julius.

Amber had a wicked look on her face, and I pointed a finger at her.

"Don’t you dare."

She pouted.

To get everyone off of teasing me, I filled them in on the talk I had with Iona, the woman looking uncomfortable as I spilled deadly secrets in the middle of the road.

"What do we want to do?" Julius asked.

"I like the idea of joining the School." I said. "It’s a safe place. I’ve been wrestling with my third class for a while. It has archives, maybe I can find something about what happened. Get a feel for the world around us. Learn cool magic."

Artemis smirked at me.

"I think it’s more of the last one than anything else. For me though? That sounds great, but I can’t imagine myself as a student. Teacher, yes. But not at a place with the same name. I just… don’t know what to do with myself right now."

My heart fell. I didn’t want to get separated from Artemis. She clearly read my face.

"Hey! You’ll be at a school. That means we can find you whenever we want. I’m curious what happened, I’ll swing by once you figure it out."

Julius threw an arm around Artemis’s shoulder.

"I’m sticking with you. Whatever we decide."

"Love you too." She quickly kissed him.

"Amber?" I asked my apprentice.

"I left on this adventure to bargain with the fae. Strike out on my own a bit. I didn’t… I didn’t think I’d lose everyone. Money’s not worth it without people." She was tearing up, something we’d all spent a lot of time in Artemis’s tunnel doing.

She spent a moment struggling with herself, before sniffing and wiping away the tears.

"Anyways. I did it. Got a powerful class. Priceless gifts from the fae. Now I’m going to use them, and make the biggest, baddest, richest trading house the world’s ever seen."

"Careful with that." Iona advised.

"Why?" Amber’s voice was surprisingly bitter. "Why shouldn’t I?"

"Because individuals with too much personal wealth tend to attract the attention of crowned heads, and not in a positive way." Iona frankly told her. "When a war’s going badly, and the coffers are empty, rich merchants with poor connections are an easy one-stop shop to fix all their monetary needs. Declare them to have committed some crime, seize their wealth, and boom! Done."

Amber opened her mouth at the sheer outrageous unfairness of it, but nothing came out.

"Why does it feel like there are rules designed to screw all of us over." Amber complained.

"It’s not like they’re targeted at you." Iona said.

"Still." Amber whined. "Rules for healers. Fighters. Merchants. It’s not fair."

"I imagined you weren’t interested in knowing that if a [Baker] shorts their bread it’s a hanging offense." Iona drily observed. "That [Tailors] need to be careful when taking orders from nobles, because half the time fashion changes and they’re not interested in the expensive outfit they ordered. That [Farmers] need to coordinate their crops in peculiar ways that I studied and have no idea about. That [Butchers]-"

"Ok, ok, I get it, I get it. Rules for everyone." Amber muttered, thinking hard.

"Well. I’ll just have to get well connected then." She brightened up. "Still, if it means I never have to crawl through another stone tunnel, never see or smell someone shit five steps away from me, never get in a creepy forest full of spiders, or gods forbid, never have to be near one of those vorler-things Elaine killed, it’ll be worth it."

Iona froze.

"Did you say vorler?"

Chapter 8
Vorlers, Spiders, and more!

"Yeah, I encountered a vorler and killed it. Was that wrong?" I asked Iona. I thought I knew the creatures that roamed around Pallos - mostly dinosaurs and other normal creatures, enhanced by the System, but I’d never seen or heard of anything like a vorler before.

Learned something new every day.

I didn’t want to think about what I learned in Artemis’s tunnels though.

"No, that’s good. Assuming it was a vorler. Let me double check, sorry." She said. "Nasty large scorpion-like creature?"

"Yeah, that sounds right."

"What did you do with the body?" She asked, staring at me intently.

"I just left it there. Bunch of high level spiders were tearing into it, didn’t want to aggravate them."

Iona swore, and started pacing back and forth.

"Ok. Remember what I said about Immortal wars? Vorlers were a weapon from one of them. They got out of control, and bards like to claim that was deliberate. They’ve got… well, everything. The part that matters right here? Their bodies are filled with tiny eggs. If they die in a fight against monsters, and the monsters eat them, the next generation hatches inside of them, eats them from the inside out, and leaves. Doesn’t work against high level monsters, but it works well enough."

[*ding!* Passionate Learning has leveled up! 381 -> 382]

"Brrrpt!!"

"Actually, yes." Iona said. "Burning them all is the answer."

"BRRRRRRRRRPT! Brpt brpt BRPT!" Auri was delighted at the news.

"What happens if we don’t go?" Amber grumbled, clearly not enjoying the prospect of limping all the way back.

"Possibly nothing." Iona admitted. "There’s a good chance that any vorlers that do hatch and survive eating the spiders from the inside out get killed by the rest of the spiders as they emerge. Their sticky webs will help with that, and it’s not like they’re getting a ton of time and chances to class up safely, nor to grow. There’s a reason they’re a danger, but not overrunning the entire world. Worst case? A half-dozen survive, kill most of the spiders, escape or poison the largest ones, then spread out to continue the cycle. It’s much better to take a detour and handle it now, while it’s still easy to. Plus, you’re not coming."

Amber protested.

"Why!?"

We all looked at her. We didn’t say anything, just let the weight of our disapproving gaze weigh down on her.

"Brrrpt." Auri finally scolded her, slowly shaking her beak. I chuckled at that. She wasn’t mad… just disappointed.

Iona also laughed, and that broke the tension.

"I need to move quickly. Elaine, Artemis, Julius, I would greatly appreciate one or more of you coming along to help show me where you found the vorlers. While I think I can handle the spiders myself, burning their bodies is going to take ages, and I’m running out of time. Backup is standard for vorlers, and I was going to ask the local [Lord] for some assistance. I think we’re in Lakewood County, but I’m not sure."

"Let’s talk about it." Julius said, and we huddled up. Iona wasn’t in the huddle, but she could clearly hear every word we said. It wasn’t like we were trying to exclude the Valkyrie who towered over even Julius, just… she wasn’t part of the conversation.

"We’re in a completely new world." Julius said, and we all made noises of agreement. "We’re all brought together because of Elaine, but there was always going to be a day where we went our own ways."

I didn’t like where the conversation was going, but I understood it.

"The question is. Do we want to split up now, or later?" Julius asked.

"Later." I said. I’d lost all of my friends and family twice now. It was a knee-jerk emotional response, I knew in my mind that it might be wrong, but… I didn’t want to leave anyone else behind. No matter how much I knew Julius was right, and we’d be splitting up one day.

"Ugh, I want to say later." Amber said. "But. Like. I can’t go on this vorler trip, not unless someone carries me. And like. Shouldn’t we have a way to meet up again? It’s one thing to split up in a city where everyone’s got their own villa and we know where we can say hi again. It’s another thing entirely to split up without having a way to meet."

Artemis popped her head out of the huddle.

"Hey! Bird-face! Something you said about the School implies it moves. What’s up with that?"

Iona smacked her forehead with her hand. I kept a laugh from erupting with Artemis’s nickname. Her helmet had little wings on it, and now that I was looking for it, she looked like an entire bird from the neck up. A weird bird, but I couldn’t unsee it.

Bird-face indeed.

Wait.

Shit.

Did that mean I looked like a bug!?

I narrowed my eyes at Artemis as Iona explained.

"Right. New here. Common knowledge isn’t. The School of Sorcery and Spellcraft is located on a flying island. The places where it slows down long enough for people to go on and off are usually hot topics for [Bards], and the School’s got a whole town attached to it."

"That sounds like I’m findable again." I pointed out, then mentally cursed. I was on team "stick together!"

"Also, like. Me being able to find people again is so I can find you all again." Amber slowly reasoned out. "I’m likely to be on the road a LOT, with headquarters… somewhere I can find. Does the town attached to the school let merchants have headquarters there?" She asked.

Iona shrugged.

"I’ve got no idea."

Amber cursed, then brightened up.

"Why don’t we meet up where the School is going to be. Or wait. Which way are you heading?" She asked Iona.

"North. To Lyon."

"This isn’t Lyon?" Amber asked.

Iona shook her head.

"We’re in the country of Rolland. Lyon is the capital. It’s to the north, which is the direction I was heading."

My estimation of Amber’s translation skill fell a notch or two. Then again… she had gotten information where I’d been close to useless when it came to figuring out speech and words. Amber’s skill just wasn’t as powerful as I thought it was.

"The vorlers were to the south." Julius said, and I nodded agreement.

"You mentioned the local [Lord]." Artemis said. "Won’t he take offense to me and Julius?"

Iona flexed her hand, clenching it and relaxing it.

"Yes. Yes she would. Even if I vouch that you’re part of an organization called the Rangers, or retired from them in that case, she’s going to be mad. From her point of view, you’re high-level unannounced foreign soldiers trampling around her land. That’s the worst way she can take it. The most generous interpretation is that you’re escorting an Oathbound Healer around, and she’ll let it slide."

"All downsides, no upsides." Julius summarized. "You sure you need her for backup, and Artemis and I can’t work in that role?"

"The more of us there are, the easier it’ll be to find the spot where we fought the vorler." I added in, and that seemed to sway Iona.

"Alright. It’s just cleanup. Not a major nest." She agreed.

"What will I do?" Amber asked, and it was a good question.

"I’m unfortunately flat broke." Iona confessed. "Got eaten by a wyvern, had to fight my way out. Lost almost all of my gear and supplies, I’ve been living off the land."

With that start to a story, we had to get all the details from her, which entirely derailed the conversation.

"Amber, can you trade your ability to heal for a few nights of board and lodging?" Julius asked her.

"Probably? My healing’s getting pretty good, and if I make it clear it’s temporary…" She went off thoughtfully.

"Iona. Can you broker the deal for Amber?" Julius asked.

"Naturally. But we need to move quickly."

"Brrrrpt?" Auri asked.

"Yes, Fenrir’s coming." Iona confirmed.

"Brrpt?"

"I’ll be carrying him."

With the basics of a plan, and how we were going to meet up again solved, we acted. The local village’s [Mayor] was happy to have a dedicated healer capable of minor restorations helping everyone out for the low, low price of a bed and some food for a few nights, and the six of us headed south at a much faster pace than we’d gone north.

"Healy-bug. Are you sure you have a perfect memory skill?" Artemis raised an eyebrow at me as she twirled a rock on the tip of her finger.

"Yes! And I don’t see you doing much better!" I shot back.

"Will the two of you let me think?" Julius groused back. "Some of us are actually decent at this."

"There’s a reason I was concerned that finding my way back after flying off might not work." I muttered darkly under my breath, determined to get the last word in.

Artemis won anyways, a tiny pebble more practically the size of a grain of sand hitting me with enough force to sting.

"BRRRPT!" Auri threatened Artemis.

"I already don’t have hair." She smugly replied to the little pyromaniac.

"Brrpt BRPT brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt." Auri glared significantly at Artemis’s clothes.

"Please don’t, we’re poor enough." I told my little pyromaniac.

"Brpt."

Artemis glared at Auri… and kept her distance.

Iona kept her head on a swivel, studiously ignoring our bickering. She quietly pointed things out to Fenrir, growling at him in a language he could clearly understand, showing him the world.

"Here." Julius declared, pointing to a spot on the side of the road. "This is where we left."

It said a lot about stats, and how much Amber slowed us down that a trip that had taken us weeks on the way out had taken us days on the way back in, when the high speed stat Classers wanted to move. Even then, I suspected that we were all slowing Iona down.

"I’ll take the air, you take the ground." I suggested, and Julius nodded agreement.

Iona took a wicked-looking axe off her belt. Metal flowed like water around Iona, entirely encasing her in thick plate armor. From her winged helmet now entirely enclosing her face, leaving just small slits for her eyes, down to her fingers and toes, she looked like a walking fortress. Being over 6 feet tall and made out of pure muscle didn’t hurt.

"Ok. That’s pretty cool. How does that work?" I asked, circling her. There wasn’t a single strap, buckle, or clearly visible joint, yet she moved just as freely as if it wasn’t on her.

"Mallium. Flowing metal that doesn’t need a skill to control." She responded from behind her helmet.

"Healy-bug. Do you want your armor back?" Artemis asked.

I shook my head, letting the angel feathers hit my face as I did so. The perfect moment to get back at her from earlier, on top of being true.

"You’re more fragile than I am. You need it, and the extra firepower."

Iona growled something to Fenrir, then turned to Artemis.

"He’ll stay near you if that’s ok. I asked him to watch for small sneaky spiders or vorlers coming for you."

"Brrrpt!" Auri perched on top of Artemis’s helmet. "Brrrpt BRRPT!"

"Auri’s going to do the same." I thought about it a moment more.

"Auri. Save your flames for now. We’re going to have a lot of bodies to burn when this is over."

"BRrrrrpt!" She used one wing to kind-of salute me, mimicking all the times she’d seen other people do it. I gave her a happy grin, then changed tracks.

"I first noticed the road when flying near the vorler fight. It isn’t that far away." I took off as I said that, hovering over the rest of the group as they started to make their way into the forest.

I slowly flew around them, circling around while Julius backtracked our path out. The spot where the spiders had fought the vorlers was found easily enough, my [Kaleidoscope] butterflies having charred the area.

All of the corpses were gone, having been eaten by scavengers. The only thing left was an empty husk of the vorler, chitinous plates scattered around.

I flashed harmless Radiance at the rest of the party, letting them know where I was. I hovered in the air, acting as a beacon, as they quickly arrived.

"Do we need to burn that?" Artemis asked.

"Brrrrpt?" Auri was begging that the answer was "yes".

Iona frowned.

"Technically no. Practically? Do it."

"BRRPT!" Auri shot over, and helpfully ignited the corpse. Her first truly helpful and useful contribution on a mission.

"Careful! We have lots more to burn later."

"Brrpt brrpt BRRPT!"

"Thinking about it, we should burn an area around the body as well." Iona said.

"How much power’s needed to destroy an egg?" I asked her.

"Not tons." She said, and I flew up, marking out a circle with Radiance.

"Is this a large enough radius?" I asked her.

"What?" She asked.

"Is the circle big enough?"

"Oh. Yeah." She said.

"Clear out, Auri."

"Brrrpt…"

"I’m leaving the body for you to keep burning."

"BRRRPT!"

A mollified Auri flew out of the circle I was marking with harmless light, then I filled in the entire area with burning, blazing Radiance.

I spent exactly two seconds at full power before turning my skill off. All the fallen leaves in the area crisped and turned to ashes, the sticks caught on fire, and generally the entire area became blackened and burnt. If there were any eggs left in the area, they’d just been utterly roasted and destroyed.

Auri possessively flew over to the vorler corpse, continuing to watch over and manage the flames.

We spent a few minutes watching Auri happily char the vorler’s remains to ash.

"Right. The spiders now." Iona said.

"We can just follow the tunnel Artemis made. Should be nearby." I said.

It didn’t take long to find the tunnel we’d burrowed through, and Iona winced sympathetically.

"How long were you in that?" She asked.

"I don’t want to think about it." Julius replied.

"Plan of attack, since we haven’t worked together before." I came down, letting my wings dissipate. "Iona. You look like a frontline fighter. Yeah?" I asked her.

"Yeah. I’ve got an archery class, but with no bow it’s going to be useless. I do have a new class that I’d like to get some use out of, but everything’s close-in fighting."

"Ok. How good are your reflexes, and hitting friendlies in a fight?"

She was silent a moment, then answered in short, clipped words.

"Excellent. I’ve never hit a friend in a fight."

I might’ve offended her with that question. Ah well, it was important, I needed to know that to make a plan of attack.

"Ok, cool. If you get hurt, I might dive in and heal you back up. Try not to get hurt too much though."

"Wait, really!?" She asked, and boy I could tell there was one hell of a story there.

"Yes really. Auri, you’re with Artemis and Fenrir. Julius?"

"I’m going to stick with Artemis. All due respect lady knight, I can’t hold a candle to how good you must be, and I’m better off covering our heavy hitter."

"Right. I’ll be up high, dropping spells when I can, covering where I can, and healing anyone that takes a hit. Basically overwatch duties. If things go perfectly I’ll be doing practically nothing, but we all know things never go perfectly. There’s a strong chance of poison here, so even if you think you might have gotten bit, yell."

Iona turned her metal head towards Fenrir and growled a bit, who growled back.

"How’s your armor with Lightning?" Artemis asked.

"Ok?" Iona said.

"Lemme check." Artemis didn’t wait for a response, lashing a jolt of Lightning right over Iona’s shoulder. It curved down a bit, striking her armor directly.

"Drat. Rocks it is." Artemis frowned as Iona jumped. I couldn’t see her face behind the helmet but I imagined she was shooting Artemis murderous looks. Thankfully, she wasn’t trying to actively murder Artemis, which would get ugly fast.

"Something to keep in mind. If you’re in the sunlight I can heal you at range."

Iona nodded her understanding, and we carefully moved through the forest.

It didn’t take long to find the outskirts of the spiders, tiny fragile webs glistening with just a hint of dew. Small, harmless spiders, half of which were so small they didn’t even have System access.

It wasn’t just spiders either. A number of small critters called the forest home, and it wasn’t like we could assume they were all uninfected.

Auri burned them all. Tiny little flickers of flame, and they were incinerated so quickly the only thing I got was a kill notification.

"This feels like overkill." I frowned as another tiny spider met a fiery end.

"It is." Iona agreed. "If you can properly figure out the size at which spiders no longer had the ability to make it to the fight you saw and back, and can accurately categorize them, we’ll leave some alone. Until then?" The Valkyrie didn’t elaborate, simply pointed at another spiderweb for Auri to burn.

The first giant spider came soon after, scuttling along the forest floor. Iona’s axe wasn’t super long, clearly made for in-close fighting. She killed the spider in a single smooth kneel-and-chop motion, moving so quickly she blurred. Her axe went through the main body of the spider in an explosion of ichor, practically cutting the arachnid in half.

[*ding!* Your Party has slain a [Wolf Spider (Wood - 111)]]

"Brrpt. Brrpt brrpt brrrrrrrrrpt?" Auri asked.

"Auri’s asking if we should wait to get a big pile of bodies before we start burning." I translated for everyone else.

"Auri. Wants to hold off on burning." Artemis stuck a finger in her ear and vigorously twisted it around. "I swear I misheard you."

"Brrrpt." Auri had learned well from mom, and gave Artemis a Look.

Mom. A wave of sadness crashed over me, and I grabbed it, stuffed it in a barrel, poured cement into it, and threw it into a corner of my mind. That corner was starting to get awfully full, and I had a Serious Problem coming.

But not right now.

"I don’t like it, but we work with the tools we’re given." Iona growled at Fenrir, then turned and walked deeper into the woods.

We passed the corpse, and Fenrir breathed Ice on it, encasing it in a solid layer that’d be hard for scavengers to break through - or smell that there was something there.

"Brrpt brrrpt?" Auri hovered over the ice, looking at herself in the reflection. "Brrrpt?"

"That’s ice. It’s cold. Solid water."

"BRPT? BRRRRRRPT BRPT BRPT????"

"Yes, the evil water can make something pretty when solid." I tried to explain to Auri.

"Brrrrpt…" Auri fluttered over to my shoulder, deeply conflicted.

Water bad.

Ice reflective.

Ice shows her.

Ice good.

But ice was water.

So…

"You broke Auri." I complained at Fenrir.

He growled back at me.

We moved deeper into the woods, letting Iona handle the one or two spiders here and there – since physical Classers were usually better at protracted engagements – letting Artemis and I preserve our mana. I mean, I could restore my entire mana pool in half an hour, but I wanted to be full in case a fight broke out. We moved quickly but thoroughly, and I quickly saw why Iona had wanted to bring in the local [Lady] to assist.

There was just so much ground to cover. So many spiders to handle.

"Incoming!" Iona yelled, and the rest of us tensed up. I flew up high, seeing a small swarm of spiders heading our way, led by the [Tyrant Tarantula]. It was hurt, having some ugly-looking cuts on its body, and missing a leg entirely.

Didn’t seem to slow it down much.

I’d already done the math on how much mana I thought I could spend, and how much I needed in reserve, and sent a trail of butterflies on an intercept course to the heart of the swarm. A series of explosions erupted in the middle, and I was rewarded with some notifications.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Sentry Spider (Wood - 280)]]

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Black Widow (Poison - 69)]]

One spider leapt all the way up at me, and I intercepted it with a narrow beam of Radiance.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Jumping Spider (Gale - 152)]]

Didn’t see that every day.

Then the fight below me was joined, so I dropped my altitude a hair to better support the team. My job was overwatch, protecting the team, and filling in any areas that needed help.

Iona’s axe blurred around her as she slashed, pounced, and stomped, an implacable bulwark against the tide. A large spider jumped at her, but Iona simply reached out her free hand, catching it in mid-air. She then squeezed, the spider practically exploding in her grip. She was rapidly covered in gore and spiders climbing up her armor, but she didn’t allow any of it to slow her down in the slightest. Cool, competent, and in control, she was the one I’d most likely need to help, but she had it all under control right now.

Artemis was hard at work, shooting stones so quickly that I didn’t see them, simply heard tremendous booms as she fired off her rocks, spiders practically exploding as her attacks made contact. I noticed that there was something of a "cone of safety" for the spiders, as Artemis didn’t risk shooting anything too close to Iona, the warrior moving so quickly that my friend and mentor didn’t think she had clear lines to fire. A spider sneaking up on Artemis was another concern of mine, but that was mitigated by Julius.

Julius had my shortsword still, and was in a defensive stance slightly behind Artemis. Once in a while one of the spiders broke past Iona and went for them, and Julius smoothly stepped forward to stab the spider, him and Artemis working in perfect tandem. She was willing to fire rocks so close to Julius that his hair blew all over the place, but the two had utter trust in each other. Artemis trusted Julius to handle the spiders coming after her, not bothering to waste any mana on them, and Julius trusted Artemis not to hit him. Clockwork teamwork.

Auri was sitting on top of Fenrir, the two low level companions knowing they were outclassed… and getting fantastic experience from this. Honestly, it was a little unfair - all the experience Iona and I were getting was getting funneled straight to those two.

Everyone was stunningly competent and doing their parts well, and I hovered over them like a protective mother hen, ready to shift and move at a moment's notice.

The [Tyrant Tarantula] entered the fray, starting a dance to the death with Iona. The monster towered over her, mandibles clicking and clacking so quickly I could only hear the staccato beating of its mouth. The monster shook the ground as it stomped around, legs trying to impale Iona, who was artfully dodging.

I think. They were both moving so quickly it was hard to tell what, exactly, was going on. I was impressed that Iona was able to keep up in speed with a monster some 200 levels higher than her.

I did get quick flashes of what was going on as the two briefly slowed down now and then, the occasional rain of gore indicating where Iona had landed a blow on the tyrant. I was fully prepared to dive in at a moment’s notice if - when - Iona took a blow.

The spiders started throwing out webs, and one spider hung back a bit, spitting nasty liquid at Iona. I had no idea what that did, but it couldn’t be good, especially as Iona was now tangling with the [Tyrant Tarantula]. I doubted it’d actually land, but Iona didn’t need to be forced to dodge an attack by the peanut gallery.

I swooped down, stopped the spit with [Mantle of the Stars], and surgically removed the spider from the equation.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Spitting Spider - (Acid - 102)]]

As I finished my dive, I twisted to fly towards Iona. The spiders were doing what some spiders did best, and applying sticky webs to the problem. One strand of spider silk wasn’t an issue, Iona could easily break it, but it stuck to her. Got caught again and again as the spiders continued trying to weigh her down. Not only that, but bloody thorns were erupting from the ground, growing from every step of the gargantuan spider, then whipping around and trying to wrap around Iona and tie her down. The thorns mostly skidded off her tough armor, but a vine around her ankle was a vine around her ankle, fouling her mobility and footwork. I didn’t know her entire build, but "slowly getting trapped by spiderwebs" seemed to be a weakness of hers.

I flashed Radiance over her to burn all the webs, spiders, and thorns wrapping around her. She significantly sped up, freed from the bindings.

I flew back up, only to see the [Tyrant Tarantula] landed a solid blow on her, throwing her back through a tree.

Wow.

Iona reoriented herself in mid-air, and landed feet-first on the trunk of a second tree. Somehow, in spite of her great speed and cleanly going through the first tree, the second tree barely seemed to register her landing. She kicked off the tree trunk, moving through the air with her axe in a way I knew was impossible with pure stats. There had to be some skills involved.

As she got near the [Tyrant Tarantula] again, her trajectory suddenly changed, and she plummeted down. Her axe flashed on the way down, neatly cutting through two more of the tyrant’s legs. She landed hard on her knees, the decaying leaves on the forest floor blowing away from the force of the impact.

Definitely skills involved, probably around manipulating weight. I’d seen enough Ranger Trainees try to fly.

Then she was up again, under the gigantic tarantula trying to crush her, as a full barrage of Artemis stones broadsided the creature. I dove down myself, aiming a light Radiance burn at Iona.

My light washed over her, burning away the accumulated spider webs and roasting dozens of tiny critters besides, trusting that her armor would keep her safe from whatever damage my Radiance might do.

This was not the time for an [Oath] violation.

I pulled up again out of my flight, shooting a quick heal at Iona - there had been that Acid-spitting spider, or the small one that had gone inside her helmet might’ve had Poison or something. Then I made sure to fire a blistering beam of Radiance at one - my magic power was too low to get two or more at the same time - of the [Tyrant Tarantula]’s eyes, burning and popping it with the extreme heat. The spider screamed at that, stomping and rampaging, knocking Iona’s axe out of her hands. I switched to a second eye, but wasn’t able to fully blind it before I was out of range.

She screamed back at the spider, leaping onto it and grabbing its mandibles with her armored hands. With a yell and a powerful backwards flex, she slowly forced its mouth open until they came to a momentary stalemate.

Until Artemis shot off a [Lightning Bolt] directly at the giant spider. The bolt itself was absorbed by the spider’s body, seemingly harmless, but I knew better. I’d literally written the book on how electricity can interfere with nerves, muscles, and more. With a triumphant roar Iona ripped the mandibles off of the spider’s face, throwing one aside and holding her hand out. Her axe slapped itself back into her hand, and she screamed a warcry as she went to town on the spider’s back.

Moving so quickly that I just saw gore and ichor flying, she savagely tore into the spider’s back. I had a brief vision of a berserker as the spider died.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [Tyrant Tarantula - (Forest - 769)]]

Chapter 9
The Distance Traveled

With the death of the [Tyrant Tarantula], the spiders became significantly less coordinated, and there was no longer a powerful monster pinning down Iona. We were able to focus our efforts more broadly, and the remaining spiders were quickly wiped out.

Iona’s helmet slid away, and she spat half a spider out of her mouth.

"Pleh! Agh, that was gross." She complained, spitting a few more times. "I got a bite skill recently, but it never mentioned that I’d have to taste the spider."

"First time?" I asked Iona with a grin, remembering how many blasted times I’d needed to chow down on spiders.

I’d like to say never again, but my luck wasn’t that good.

That explained what happened to the spider I’d seen crawl into her helmet. I tapped her one more time, healing any bruises or cracked bones she might’ve gotten at the end of the fight.

"That’s it?" Artemis asked, and a lot of things happened practically at once. Iona threw her axe at Artemis’s feet, so quickly I only saw a fraction of a blur. I wasn’t an expert on this - she moved so quickly - but I swear I’d just seen her move faster than she had during the entire fight against the spiders.

Artemis was on her usual hair trigger, and a blast of Lightning erupted from her feet, crackling and sizzling the ground around her right as the axe landed, cutting through Artemis’s foot as it did so.

Julius was starting to move towards Iona, but he was comically slow compared to the Valkyrie. I was unsure of what, exactly, was going on, but Iona seemed incredibly competent. If she was trying to suddenly betray us, attacking Artemis’s foot wasn’t how she’d try to kill us. No, something else was going on, and I blasted healing around me to make sure we were protected, all while looking around for threats or problems.

Whatever was going on near Artemis’s feet had enough attention. Someone needed to keep an eye out.

[*ding* Your party has slain a [Vorler - (Decay - 9)]

"Vorler!" Iona shouted at the same time we got the notification. She pointed to Artemis’s foot, while casually catching Julius’s sword in her gauntleted hand. He stopped, and Iona just gave him a disappointed look.

Artemis cursed and hopped away, holding onto her foot which I snap-healed back up. Iona knelt down, grabbed her axe, and scooped up part of the ground.

"See?" She pointed to a spot on the dirt. I focused on it, but didn’t quite see it.

"I’m missing it." I said.

"I slightly obliterated it." Iona casually said, poking at the dirt. "Here we go!" She extracted a mottled brown piece. I looked at it closely, finally seeing three legs and a pincer on the side.

"They’ve got a deadly venom in their stinger. Can kill creatures much larger than they are, especially ones with lower vitality."

‘Artemis’ and ‘low vitality’ didn’t exactly compute for me, but Iona was clearly operating on a different scale. Also, I was all too aware that some venoms needed absurdly tiny doses to kill a person. Even being eight, nine times as tough as the human baseline would change the lethal dose from micrograms to slightly more micrograms. Still barely anything.

Artemis whistled.

"That was quite some feat! I was almost de-feeted."

We groaned at Artemis’s terrible puns.

"That was some throw! Good eyes!" She threw one of her arms over Iona’s shoulders. "Healy-bug, Iona’s my new favorite. Can we keep her?"

"Thank you for saving Artemis’s life. Sorry about…" Julius’s apology had a note of embarrassment and contrition to it.

"You are welcome." Iona gracefully accepted Julius’s apology. "I completely understand your concern and reaction. Now. We still have work to do."

"You’re the expert here." Julius deferred to the blonde warrior. "What’s your proposal?"

Iona’s eyes quickly flickered over Artemis and I.

"Artemis, you’re low on mana. Why don’t you stay with Fenrir and Auri, and start the pyre? Elaine, come hunting with me, and Julius, can you bring what we kill to the bonfire? That should get us done quickly."

I thought over the plan. It seemed reasonable.

"Brrpt?" Auri wanted a little bit of help with the spiders.

"Yeah sure." I agreed with her. "Can you handle it once I’m gone?"

"BRRPT!"

Iona grabbed her axe and started to go to town on the nearest dead tree, swiftly cutting it to pieces.

We started stacking the bodies, leaving the [Tyrant Tarantula] where it fell to be the centerpiece. As each spider and log got added, I quickly flashed some light Radiance over it, drying it out a bit to make Auri’s job easier. Once a proper bonfire got started, the heat and the flames would create a self-perpetuating cycle of heating, drying, and flames. Auri just needed a little boost on the early, water-filled bodies.

Iona knelt, bowed her head, and quietly murmured to herself while we were working on the fire. It looked like she was praying. Julius and Fenrir went to fetch the previously frozen spiders.

Before long, a roaring bonfire was going. Iona got up from her pose, and joined us by the flames.

"Ready?" Iona asked us.

"Ready!" I said.

"Let’s go." Julius said.

The three of us started to make ever-widening circles. I believed most of the danger and threats had passed - plus there was Iona and Julius as backup - so I had a lot of fun. Iona was a melee warrior. She killed things with her axe.

Every time she was about to kill a spider, I darted a little closer to get in range and lanced a fine beam of Radiance through it, killing the web weavers before Iona could. Julius was kept busy running the bodies back and forth to the bonfire, throwing one in before coming back for more.

"You’re doing that on purpose!" Iona complained after the fourth one.

"Yup!" I cheerfully hovered over her. "Try and stop me." I stuck my tongue out at her, needing the bit of humor in my life. Everything had been so…

I locked the thought away, and went back to teasing Iona.

"Just you watch." She smirked at me. I was hovering close enough to her that she could grab my ankle - a deliberate weakness that she could exploit if she wanted to - but instead she knelt down, grabbed a rock, and threw it like a baseball at one of the larger spiders lairing in its web.

Remembering that it was one of Brawling’s favorite tricks sent another wave of sadness through me, one I failed to crush. I turned to discreetly wipe a tear away.

"Oh come on!" Julius complained, getting back just in time to see the spider guts go flying. "That’s going to take ages to clean up and get back to the fire!"

Iona and I glanced at each other, laughed, and the race was on. She ran ahead, fleet of foot and perfectly stable on the rough forest floor, magically levitating rocks to her hand as she ran, then throwing them out with a flick of her wrist. I knew she had Gravity magic, and this confirmed it. Occasionally, the rock would simply maim a spider instead of outright killing it, and Iona would need to detour, finish the spider off, then keep going.

I almost sniped those out from under her, then realized it was better for me that she was distracted and sidetracked.

I flew in a zig-zagging path, searing and burning spiders where I found them.

The two of us raced, and it hurt me a bit to admit that she was doing better than I was.

Still, I had one class to use, and Iona clearly had her third unlocked and was getting good use out of it. It wasn’t terribly fair.

It was loads of fun, the two of us zipping through the forest, pushing ourselves to the extremes of our skills and abilities.

Julius had quite a few words to say about our pace, and I started to take the lead as Iona silently added an extra restriction to herself - she needed to cart her dead spiders back to the bonfire.

Occasionally we got a notification on a low-level vorler kill.

"Stop!" Iona called out, serious. I halted, and twisted myself in mid-air.

"What’s up?" I asked her.

"I think there’s a vorler caught in this spider’s web." She said. I swung back, and incinerated the offending web in question.

We looked at each other at the same time.

"No notification." Iona shrugged.

"Might’ve been dead already." I generously allowed. Her eye for vorlers was much better than mine, and I was willing to accept minor detours.

Soon enough, we’d cleared a large area, and Iona was satisfied. We headed back to the roaring bonfire, Artemis waving at us.

"Brrrpt! BRRRPT brrpt BRPT!" Auri was the boss, fiercely chirping at Julius and Iona when and where to throw the various bodies in the fire for maximum burning. She hovered over the body, then flew over to the fire and hovered in a particular spot, showing where she wanted it thrown in.

"Grrrr?" Fenrir growled at Iona.

She growled back, and Fenrir curled up. The characteristic lights of someone classing up appeared around him.

Iona cut up part of a tree trunk and dragged it over near the fire, and sat down on it, protectively sitting over Fenrir.

"Come! Sit! Let’s chat!" She called at us, patting the log on either side of her. "We’ve barely had a moment since we met, and I’d love to hear more about your adventures!"

Julius gracefully sat down next to her, and I took the other side, while Artemis moved next to Julius.

"Brrrpt." Auri told me, and continued to officiously fly around the fire, tending to it in a way only she could see.

"Tell me everything! I’d love to hear all about the place where you three came from!" Iona’s eyes were practically shining, eager to hear and learn more.

"I’d love to! But can we do it in the local language? We need to learn it, and literally nobody except you can act as a translator." Julius, you wily old fox. That was brilliant, and I never would've thought of that.

Iona flashed him a charming smile, clearly aware of what he wanted, and that the only way she could get what she wanted was by humoring him. It was a win-win situation all around.

"How about a weighted split in your favor?" She proposed.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on that. Julius was much better at this than I was. I missed Amber being here, I was sure she could fleece Iona for three full languages and her suit of armor besides.

Julius nodded acceptance.

"Ok! What language do you want to learn?" Iona asked.

"There’s more than one?" Artemis asked.

Right. She’d never been exposed to different languages in the same place.

"Yes. Sanglo’s the main language spoken in Rolland, but most people speak a bit of Hakka. Hakka is popular in other countries as well. If you want to stay in Rolland? Sanglo’s your best bet. If you want to travel? You’ll get further with Hakka."

"What’s the best language for traveling the world?" Julius asked.

"Beats me. There isn’t a global language or anything like that." Iona said.

"Enough waffling. Hakka!" Artemis decreed.

Iona turned to look at me.

"You onboard with Hakka? You might want to learn High Elvish, it’s spoken in most of the Immortal lands."

I thought about it briefly. I had to be heading over there anyways, otherwise I risked getting hunted down for my class.

"Will it help Artemis and Julius?" I asked Iona.

She shook her head, long blonde hair waving, dancing with the embers thrown off the fire.

"Hakka it is!" I proclaimed.

"Ok. Hakka is a very tonal language. Same words, different sounds create dramatically different effects. Let’s start with ‘My name is’. It’s ‘Bǒ kiào’..."

We sat around the fire, one of us occasionally getting up to throw another log into the fire under Auri’s commands, slowly learning the bare bones of the language. The fire was burning low like the sun that was on the horizon when a deep crashing noise came from the forest.

We quickly got up and on our guard. Iona’s metal flowed over her, forming her armor. She continued to stand protectively over Fenrir, and this time part of her armor flowed to make her a kite shield. Auri perched on my shoulder as I flew up, and Artemis and Julius took a position behind Iona, with their backs to the fire.

"I see pennants." I called down to the group.

"What do they look like?" Iona asked back, but I had no time to respond, as they burst into the clearing, rearing their mounts to a stop.

There was a dozen of them, led by someone in fancier armor, and what drew my attention initially were their mounts. Badgers. Oversized badgers, coated in armor with a bridle, that the knights were all riding like it was perfectly normal.

Six of them identified as various levels of [Warrior], three of them were [Rangers], two of them were [Mages] - still coated in armor, I approved - and the fancy armor one along with the last knight was a [Leader].

They were armed, dangerous, but not attacking. The knights parted way to let the fancier one through, and she and Iona started rapidly talking, occasionally pointing to the fire. I only recognized a few words, and while my education in Hakka had just begun, it didn’t sound like it at all.

I heard "vorler", which seemed to cross language barriers, "Elaine" which also had that annoying tendency - I was going to end up with whiplash or ignoring people at this rate - and "Valkyrie", said respectfully from the leader type to Iona.

There were some happy noises, and some really upset noises, along with lots of pointing at everyone.

It seemed safe enough, so I landed behind Iona. Eventually negotiations or discussions or whatever finished up, and the knights dismounted.

"What’s up?" I asked Iona, entirely confident that the knights couldn’t understand me.

If they could, that would be a huge win in my books.

"They saw the fire and came to investigate. As a Valkyrie, I’m usually happily accepted into anyone’s territory, especially in Rolland. There’s some politics going on which makes my presence here less desirable to [Countess] Lakewood there, but explaining that we were on a vorler clean up hunt has both made her happy, and supremely irritated."

"Ah. Irritated?" I asked as one of the knights came up to me and offered me a nice travel meal.

"Something Elaine." He half-bowed to me. I did a half-double take, before remembering what Iona had said about my name meaning "healer". This was going to get old, fast.

Free food wasn’t going to get old though.

"Is it safe to take?" I asked Iona, who instantly divined my meaning.

"Yeah, they’re not going to expect anything of you." She answered.

"Chiechie." I told him.

"Chièchiè" Iona lightly corrected me.

"Chièchiè." I said again - repetition was the mother of learning - and the knight happily withdrew.

"What about us?" Julius asked, having relaxed. Artemis hadn’t, still holding a handful of pebbles with her back to the fire.

"Countess Lakewood’s more than a bit unhappy that you two are here." Iona frankly told them. "Honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact that you were with me, and that vorlers are everyone’s enemy and now she needs to do a thorough search of the area, she might’ve taken significant exception to your presence."

Artemis got one of those calculating looks on her face.

"Don’t you dare." I strode up to her and poked her in the chest. "Don’t even think about it." Artemis was naturally planning on how to murder everyone who could possibly want her dead, and naturally she was figuring out a massive pre-emptive strike to make sure that happened.

"You know I need to." Artemis protested.

"Please don’t. Why don’t we just all leave?" Julius said.

Iona looked torn, looking down at Fenrir. She hadn’t moved from her protective position, simply twisting and turning.

"The vorlers are handled, the local [Lady] is here, and I need to get to Lyon." She muttered to herself. "Right. Let’s head back to pick up your friend."

We got up, Iona made a number of polite noises with the countess, and after some words one of her attendants gave Iona a small satchel. As the dragoneye moons rose on the horizon, I used my [Radiance Conjuration] to light us a path back to the road. We didn’t need to stop for the night, nor did we want to. I had [Sunrise] to keep us all going.

Heading north, to Amber.

Heading north, to Lyon.

Heading north, to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft.

Chapter 10
To the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft!

We jogged through the night at a modest pace, occasionally alarming some merchant group’s sentry or another as we passed by. I lit the way with my Radiance, and all of us were used to long, hard days.

Well.

Almost all of us. Poor Auri was curled up in my hands, sleeping. Iona was still carrying Fenrir.

We didn’t move back north nearly as quickly as we’d gone south to fight the spiders. Plain and simple, we were tired, but given the lackluster state of our supplies, we elected to just carry through.

We were going slow enough that Iona kept helping us with the language, and we gradually unraveled our stories and adventures to her. [Passionate Learning] along with our ability to speak quickly helped me with the language, but I was tired, which slowed me down. I knew I needed to rest now and then to let my subconscious process things, and generally let my brain reorganize itself with the new information.

We made it back to the little village where we’d dropped off Amber a bit before sunrise, and decided to take a much needed break.

"Good run!" Iona was like an Energizer Bunny. Filled with boundless energy, running for miles, getting into a fight, exterminating the remaining spiders, then running all the way back seemed like a light warmup for her. That must be some skill.

Or maybe it was just raw physicality?

Artemis and Julius didn’t say anything. They just silently slipped their hand into the others like it was rehearsed.

"Brrrrrpt…….." Auri sleepily agreed, turning over in my hands and resettling herself into a more comfortable spot.

"That would be… ‘nice run’?" I ventured in Hakka.

Iona tilted her hand back and forth.

"Yes, but no… but it’s close enough." She sat down, flipping open the pouch the [Countess] had given her. She ruffled through it, took out some sheets of - wait holy shit there was paper here!?

It was rough, coarse, and not at all uniform in color, but it was unmistakably, undeniably, paper. And where there was paper, there were books.

And where there were books there was a happy Elaine.

I immediately plonked myself down next to Iona, shuffling up close to her, just to peer around her arm at the paper. To see if there were words, if I could divine some story or another.

Iona subtly shifted, making it easier for me to look around her, and making it more comfortable.

"Anything you’re looking for?" She asked.

"Books." I promptly replied. "I am a sucker for a good book."

"None here, sorry. The School’s got a bunch." She started scribbling on the paper, writing a letter.

A realization crashed over me:

All the books the School had?

They’d be written in a bunch of different languages, and unless one of them was Creation, I couldn’t read them.

"Can you tell me what you’re writing?" I asked Iona, somewhat leaning into her arm. I’d shamelessly get closer to her to get a better view, if there was any room left between us.

"It’s in Sanglo." She warned me.

"Eh. I’ll have to learn it one day." I said.

"Ok, this word here is ‘Valkyrie’." Iona pointed to the word in question. On one hand, Iona was doing me numerous favors, helping me find my feet in the world. Teaching me the language. Smoothing things over with the local nobility, and not throwing me under a bus. I wanted to be polite and respectful.

On the other hand. WORDS! BOOKS! GIVE ME THE SECRETS TO READING SO THAT I MAY DEVOUR ALL!

Scrolls just didn’t do it the same way paper did, and Remus had shit libraries.

"Any chance you can give me the alphabet used here?" I asked Iona.

"Hakka or Sanglo?" She asked, and I mentally cursed. There were two alphabets to learn?! Why hadn’t someone invented a [Universal Translation] skill or something?

I wanted everything. I needed all the languages in the world, to crack open the tasty nuts that were books hidden in every library. Never again did I want to find myself in the worst position possible, like I had in Lun’Kat’s lair - surrounded by hundreds of books, unable to touch or read any of them. Simply terrible.

I mean, being next to a dragon that could kill me with a thought was also bad, but the inability to read had been worse.

At the same time, I knew that I should narrow my focus, and learn one thing at a time. But… I was greedy.

"How many languages are there?"

Iona shrugged.

"A few dozen? My blessing lets me understand them, not list and categorize them. That’s before we get into dialects, accents so thick they might as well be different languages, dead languages, and whatever else there is."

I wanted to groan. I needed a skill or five to help me out.

[*ding!* Congratulations! You’ve unlocked a new General Skill [Tongue Twisting]!]

"Hang on, I’m getting offered some new skills." I told Iona.

"No worries." Her quill moved with supernatural speed, as she quickly penned the rest of her letter - then flipped it over, and drew what I presumed was a quick alphabet. I was busy reading through the skills.

Tongue Twisting: You’re fluent in two languages, and have minor achievements in three more! All those words are tricky to pronounce though! Tongue Twisting will help you perfectly pronounce all these words, and do other tricks with your nimble mouth!

An entire skill for pronunciation? No thank you. Also, what was with that extra stuff!?

Ok. Fine. I’ll admit it. I was a little curious to see how nimble a tongue could be with insane warrior dexterity stats. Not curious enough to be competitive and preemptively take a manipulation skill though.

[*ding!* Congratulations! You’ve unlocked a new General Skill [Polyglot]!]

Polyglot: You’ve got several languages under your belt, and you’re raring to get more! Polyglot will help you remember acquired languages, identify which language is being spoken, fill in minor words and details, help with dialects and accents, and stop you from slipping up in conversations!

The strongest line there looked like the remembering languages line. And that was looking at the skill in a vacuum, entirely ignoring the fact that I had a perfect memory skill. After that was factored in, help with accents and dialects was the best part.

Weirdly, the skill wasn’t a total joke. Was the System broken, or actually being helpful for once!? Was I finally not getting joke skills from the System?

[*ding!* Congratulations! You’ve unlocked a new General Skill [Cunning Linguist]!]

Nevermind. Back to the joke skills. The skill did… yup. Exactly what I thought it’d do.

Oh gods. Iona could see my skills. I’d die of embarrassment if she saw I’d taken that.

[*ding!* Congratulations! You’ve unlocked a new General Skill [Learning Languages]!]

Learning Languages: Is hard! You’ve mastered two, and you need to master a couple more! Take this skill, and learn them quickly! Reading, writing, letters and numbers will all be a breeze to pick up, and you’ll be speaking like a native in no time!

Yaaay. Another joke -

Wait.

WAIT.

That wasn’t a joke skill. Sure, the System offered it with a number of other things, but I needed to learn a number of languages, and fast. Iona was nice - really nice, I should ask her why she was being so nice to somebody she thought would start a war - but I couldn’t rely on her to translate for me forever. She’d go her own way eventually, and we’d be back where we started - nobody able to speak with anybody. It had happened with the elves, it was happening again, and it was frankly a terrible position to be in.

I wasn’t big on relying on others.

Plus, the sooner I learned the languages, the faster I’d be able to read books!

My look was unfocused, and I vaguely noticed Iona had finished her letter, and had taken a new piece of paper and was sketching on it, drawing Julius and Artemis.

There was a slim chance that some people still spoke Creation. However, I couldn’t rely on that. I needed to be able to communicate with people.

The skill looked like it’d dramatically help, and best of all? The skill wasn’t like [Polyglot] which would stop having an impact if I ever dropped it. The skill was to help me learn the language faster, which meant once I was satisfied with my languages, I could drop it and have a free general skill slot again.

I’d been debating dropping [Bullet Time] for [Meditate] for some time now, figuring that it’d help with my initial third class offerings. However, right now I had a pressing need for more languages. I checked over my general skills one more time.

[Long-Range Identify] helped me figure out what was dangerous and what wasn’t in the world. It was a keep.

[Immortal Recollections] I was hoping would continue to help with my language acquisition, and doubling up was nice. I also planned to live forever, and the skill, while looking a little tasty to axe right now, would pay massive dividends in the future.

[Companion Bond] was naturally staying, and [Oath] had to stay. It was binding.

[Bullet Time] had certainly helped me plenty throughout the years. It had saved my life against the pirates. The shimagu. And more! Except it was activating less and less frequently these days, my skills and abilities slowly overpowering most mundane threats. As time went on, the band of enemies the skill was useful against shrunk. They needed to be strong enough to threaten my life, but weak enough that I could actually fight back against them.

Now I had a critically useful skill that I wanted to find a spot for. Speaking and communication was my bread and butter in daily life, as opposed to the occasional terrifying fight for my life.

I wasn’t ditching [Sentinel’s Superiority]. The skill was insane, and let me know one critical fact of life - I was not alone. When it came to "Skills saving my life in a fight", [Sentinel’s Superiority] was significantly better than [Bullet Time].

[Persistent Casting] was better at saving me than [Bullet Time] was by a long shot.

I’d never dump [Passionate Learning]. It was just too much of who I was. Plus, I was planning on using it with [Learning Languages] to speed up how quickly I picked up new tongues. Be pointless to trade the skills like that.

"Sorry, one moment." I told Iona.

"No worries. We’re just waiting for your friend." She continued sketching, Julius and Artemis coming to life under her quill. Iona was good.

I put a sleeping Auri down next to Iona, getting up into the middle of the road.

"Hey Artemis!" I called out to my twitchy friend after checking that there was nothing behind me. "Do me a favor!"

"Sure!"

"Throw some rocks at my shoulders, not super fast though." I asked her.

Artemis didn’t hesitate a moment. A barrage of sharp road rocks rocketed up towards me, but I was both prepared, and had [Bullet Time]. Giving the skill one last hurrah, I threw myself backwards, windmilling my arms to dodge all of Artemis’s deliberately-slow attacks.

I got to watch the rocks whiz by me in one glorious moment, then I’d thrown myself back enough, [Bullet Time] ended, and I was safe and clear, having finally fulfilled the promise of the skill way back when I first got it.

I had dodged ‘bullets’.

With a small flicker of regret and nostalgia, I traded [Bullet Time] for [Learning Languages], feeling a massive wave of nausea pass through me as I was disoriented from losing the skill. I puked a little.

"Elaine, everything ok?" Julius was by my side.

"Yeah." I spat the last chunks out of my mouth, then grabbed Julius’s tunic and wiped my face on it.

"Hey!" He protested. "What’s wrong with your own shirt!?"

"I didn’t want to get it dirty." I explained to him, getting the most doubtful look back.

"The one you’ve been wearing for weeks without changing or washing." He gave my shirt a significant look.

"No sense in making it worse." I primly replied.

"Hey Healy-bug, you going to explain?" Artemis asked.

"Yeah. I dropped one of my skills to get [Learning Languages]. New world. New languages. Need the edge."

Artemis smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand.

"Why didn’t I think of that!" She spent a moment in thought, then shuddered as a wave of nausea went through her.

"I spent so much time on these skills." Julius grumbled. "If you, Artemis, and Amber all are grabbing language skills, I might take it the slow way."

"Especially since you and Artemis are sticking together." I said.

"Yeah…"

"What makes you so sure Amber’s going to take a language skill?" Iona curiously and deftly inserted herself into the conversation.

"What, and miss a chance to make money?" I joked.

Iona laughed.

"From what you’ve told me of your trip through the fae realm, and what she got out of it, I can believe it!"

Iona presented Artemis and Julius with a picture of the two of them cuddling.

"For you!" She said.

Artemis gasped.

"It’s beautiful. Thank you!"

"Brrpt? BRRRPT??" Auri had woken up, and had flown over to examine Iona’s artwork.

"Sure." She stuck out her thumb at Auri, getting a gauge. Then she started dancing her quill over a second sheet, unconsciously sticking out her tongue a bit and biting it as she focused.

Amazingly, she was free-form drawing, standing, with nothing backing the paper. She either had a skill for it, or such fine control over her drawing tool that she didn’t need a backstop to draw. She moved superhumanly fast as she sketched, leaning on her massive stats to move quicker.

"Why are you being so nice to us?" I asked Iona. "It really feels like you’ve gone above and beyond."

Iona tilted her head a fraction, squinting at Auri again. The phoenix was already coming to life on her paper. I wanted one of me.

"Well, to start, you did save my life. By extension, Fenrir’s life." Iona told me. The sleepy wyvern raised its head up, but not seeing anything he wanted - food, I assumed - he put his head back down.

"You don’t have a concept of a life-debt or anything, do you?" I asked, somewhat dreading that the answer would be ‘yes’.

"No, I’m not a minotaur." Iona said. "It helps though. It’s not your fault you’re here, so I don’t hold a grudge against you for taking skills that were… somehow not problematic where you’re from?"

I snorted.

"Believe me, it was plenty problematic. I was the first though."

"Sure. You didn’t know. The entire reason why you’d be trouble is if people found out, and started a war over you. The best way to stop that happening? You going somewhere where your class and skills aren’t an issue. The School’s a relatively safe spot. They accept mortals and Immortals alike. For the rest of you? The whole idea behind swearing to a power is to control and restrain Classers who can kill a whole lot of people. The three of you were sworn to a power. You clearly have restraint, respect for the rule of law, and were more than willing to help me with the vorler. In that respect, you’re not a problem."

"The help?"

Iona shrugged.

"It’s just the right, honorable thing to do. Of course I’d do it."

That… huh. I never thought that’d be why.

"Regardless of your reasons, you’ve got our eternal gratitude." Julius thanked Iona, while shooting me the biggest ‘SHUT UP’ stinkeye I’d ever seen from my once-commander.

Wasn’t sure why, buuuuuuuuuuut I was going to listen to him. Somewhat. I still wanted to learn more things. Like the alphabet. Artemis beat me to the punch.

"What year is it anyways?" Artemis asked.

"28,257." Iona answered. "What year was it when you left?"

I knew it was going to be bad. I didn’t think it was going to be that bad. I would’ve preferred that she just punch me in the gut.

"4801." Artemis answered.

Still. New world. Looked pretty similar to the old world, and I mentally marked why onto my list of things to find out.

I wasn’t going to make it here by lying down and dying. I would survive.

No, more than survive.

I would thrive. The world would be my oyster, mangos and books being the delicious pearls that I needed to crack out for my enjoyment. I would forge a path for my own happiness in the world.

It’s what my parents always wanted for me. They just… weren’t going to see it.

"Can you show me the alphabet?" I asked Iona, dragging my thoughts out of the abyss as I looked at the piece of paper in question.

"Sure! Ok, the first letters are the most important ones." Iona shuffled the paper around, pointing to the alphabet she’d written. "This is U. I. E. A. And O."

[ding! Learning Languages leveled up! 1->2]

"Next, we have…"

Iona continued to show me the alphabet for Sanglo, as my newest skill rang in the back of my mind like a boxer beating the stuffing out of a punching bag.

Soon enough, Amber had gotten up and met us outside, and we were ready to set off again north, Iona carrying Amber so the Valkyrie would make it to the place she was going in time without leaving anyone behind.

"Brrrrrpt brrrrrrrpt!!!" Auri made appreciative noises at the drawing Iona had made of her.

"Yes you do simply look the best." I praised the little fire starter.

"Bbrrrpt!"

"She absolutely brings out your good side!" I told Auri, knowing that Iona could hear the compliment. Ha! Who said I couldn’t learn to be social! One small step at a time, I'd figure this out!

Auri flew over to some flowers by the side of the road, quickly foraging for sustenance. She then fluttered over to Iona, hovering over her.

"Brrrpt?" She asked.

"What do you mean make a nest with - AURI NO!"

I managed to up the pace we were going at as I fled in embarrassment.

Traveling with no money sucked. Food, water, lodging, supplies and more all cost money, and while I could live off the land, that usually necessitated finding a river and following it, not following a road. I was keenly feeling the monetary pinch, but not as badly as some members of the party.

Which had me asking about money, which Iona was only too happy to tell us about.

Money was completely different now. Each country did their own fancy thing, but the fundamentals were the same. Each coin had a small gemstone in the middle of it. Depending on the type of the gemstone, it was worth more or less, with arcanite being the most common coin that everyone had jostling around in their pocket, and diamond and rubies being the most valuable, almost to the point where they were used to show wealth, and only got traded for the largest deals. Each tier of gems was worth roughly ten times as much as the previous tier, and an Arcanite coin was worth roughly half of a Remus coin. So a loaf of bread was more like two Arcanite coins, instead of one Remus coin. Simple enough.

Amber was surprisingly happy at the news.

"Well if I’d brought my iron coins, they’d be useless." She explained. "I would’ve felt robbed. But because I left them behind it’s not a problem."

I didn’t track that at all.

"Glad you’re happy."

We also found out about Iona! She was a Valkyrie, and from the sounds of it, a Valkyrie was something like a cross between a Sentinel, and a Ranger team. Not quite a solo operative, and they weren’t as hyper specialized as Sentinels were, but they did wander around fixing problems that came up, similar to how a Ranger team operated. They tended towards being physical fighters, although they had no issues with any other type of combatants, and generally had a steed or a bondmate acting as a force multiplier.

She told us all about her classes, how she had [The Dusk Valkyrie], [Traveling Archer], and [Paladin of the Moons]. I found it interesting that she was Dusk, while I was Dawn.

I learned that divine classes were basically always blue, which felt massively unfair. I got offered all sorts of joke classes because of Papilion, but Iona got an amazing [Paladin] class from her patrons!?

So unfair.

Maybe I should try praying to the moon goddesses more, it might get me a cool divine class later on!

We traveled at high speed, avoiding towns because trying to get Artemis and Julius inside would be too difficult - and running around the town was significantly faster than trying to wade through the streets.

Iona also had an idea for the Julius and Artemis problem.

"Join the World Bank or something as guards." She suggested. "Easy, well paying work, plus nobody will blink twice at you."

My two friends traded looks at that.

"It’s not the worst idea." Julius muttered.

"I kinda hate it." Artemis admitted. "But if that’s what we need to do to survive, I’ll do it. Anyone else hiring?"

"Oh there’s a ton." Iona said. "Let’s see… most of the guilds could use guards. Like the Alchemist’s. Merchant’s. Tailor’s. For every profession, there’s a guild, and generally they need some guards, although not all of them are hiring, and there’s obviously different rates of pay. That’s why I suggested the World Bank. You could always join the retinue of a noble, but that’s difficult, and you’d be second class members, compared to the people they’ve grown up and spent all their lives with. Then there are some guilds that you could work as an active member. Adventurer’s. Delver’s. Hunter’s. Each does something different, but your skill would be put to more active use. "

Oh no.

Oh no.

Iona was happily suggesting my friends become adventurers. My opinion of her plummeted. What good person would suggest my honest and upright friends become adventurers!?

Well, ok. Artemis… might have a checkered enough history to qualify. She did join the Rangers though!

We continued to travel on terrible roads, dodging around towns, until at last our destination was in sight.

In what felt like no time at all, the walls of Lyon were visible in the distance.

Chapter 11
Entrance Exams I

The walls of Lyon were tall, durable constructs, much higher than the town walls in Remus had been. They were hewn out of sturdy grey stone, and some [Architect] or [Builder] had smoothed and merged the rock into a uniform face. Colorful banners hung over the wall, a golden lion prominently featured again and again. Guards with gleaming steel helmets patrolled the walls, and the towers interspersed on the walls supported large ballistae on swivels.

The only thing we could see over the walls was the castle. It was in the middle of the city, filled with towers and spires, with an enormous flag featuring a golden lion once again. It literally felt like it was something out of a book, and I had a strong desire to go visit the castle! It would probably be fun to explore, seeing the towers, the throne room, the library.

Ooooh, the library. They probably had a great library.

Sadly, as things were now, I was more likely to see the dungeon of the castle than anything else. If I still had the full backing of the Sentinels, and knew where they were, I’d be tempted to try and commando my way into the castle to peek around, but alas. That wasn’t in the cards.

Maybe in a few hundred years and levels from now, I could be strong and sneaky enough to just waltz in, and let them try to stop me…

…maybe I could see why Iona had some beefs with Immortals…

Magic shimmered over the entire thing, like a haze that made it a little harder to see. I’d seen similar effects atop the other towns we’d skirted on our way here, but the sheer size of it boggled the imagination. A skill that large!? An inscription permanently running!?

We talked and walked at the same time, being just another group on the road heading towards the gates.

"That’s a shield?" I rhetorically asked in disbelief.

"Among other things." Iona confirmed. "Did you not have them in Remus?"

We shook our heads practically in unison.

"Just walls." Julius said.

"Shorter than these." Artemis said.

Iona looked horrified.

"But… how… why…" She short-circuited. Like Amber hearing about a million rods, but in a more horrified way.

"Brrrpt brrrrrrpt."

"Moving on!" Amber couldn’t tear her eyes away from the city. "What now?"

"Well. I’m going to find where the School is." Iona frowned. "Actually. I was never told how that works, I’ll have to ask one of the [Knights] here. The Order of the Golden Lion’s headquartered here."

"You could also ask one of the guards, they should know." I sensibly pointed out.

"I can’t believe I never thought of this earlier." Julius griped. "How will Artemis and I get inside to register with a guild, if we’re not allowed inside?"

"Brrrpt?" Auri thought it was a good question.

Iona opened her mouth, paused, and closed it.

"I never thought of that." She candidly admitted.

"Ok, this will be easy." Amber asserted. "I’ll smooth talk my way in,"

Julius, Artemis, and I all coughed at the same moment. "Bribe!"

Amber glared at us.

"I would, IF I HAD ANY MONEY!!"

"Brrrpt!"

"ANYWAYS! Once inside, I’ll figure it out, and ask them if they want you. Then they can come outside, do whatever it is they do to make you a guild member, and poof! DONE! Easy peasy." Amber nodded to herself.

"I’m going to stay with Artemis for now." I said. "I don’t want to risk a guard that can see through my Deception Ring. Once Iona knows what’s going on with the School, I’ll see what I can do after."

"What if the School’s inside the city?" Iona asked.

Artemis and I traded knowing looks.

"Wouldn’t be the first time I snuck into a city." I grinned roguishly at the imposing Valkyrie.

"Please don’t. I might have to arrest you." Iona looked pained at the thought.

Fenrir growled at me, and I could almost hear a word in what he said.

"Scout first. Act later." Julius put his foot down, reminding us all why he’d been the team leader of a Ranger group, able to corral a number of highly individual, opinionated people.

Iona, Fenrir, and Amber headed to the gates, while the rest of us just sort of hung out by the side of the road, waiting.

"Brrrpt?"

"Did you decide what guild to go for?" I asked my friends, translating for Auri.

The two of them traded looks.

"Whatever will take us, honestly." Julius said. "Whatever gets us food, shelter, and not getting arrested and thrown in jail by the locals."

"My attempt at retiring sucked." Artemis said. "Right back to it. Hunter’s Guild sounded the most like what we did as Rangers. Seems to beat standing around for hours on end protecting money. How about you?"

"Ugh. If it wasn’t for the risk of guards being able to see through my ring, I’d just… lay low. Set up a clinic, heal people, make money, and go from there. Could probably even work you two into it somehow." I griped.

Artemis roared with laughter while Julius was chuckling.

"You? Calm, peaceful, staying at home?" Artemis was clutching her stomach. "Being a mild-mannered meek healer? Oh, thank you for that Elaine, that was a great joke."

"What!" I protested.

"Brrrpt!" Auri was trying to defend me.

"Elaine, how many girls run away from an arranged marriage to become a Ranger?" Julius asked.

"Lots?" I hazarded a guess. "Most just don’t make it?" I hadn’t seen too many other options. Although… thinking about it more, who did I know who’d actually ran away from home? There was…

Hmmm…

I’m sure there was at least one other person I knew, besides myself and Artemis…

No, there wasn’t, was there? Shoot.

Julius was shaking his head.

"It’s rare. Even rarer that they stick around. Even rarer that they elect to go through Ranger Academy, and then pass? I know of three, in all the years I was a Ranger." He squeezed Artemis’s hand, who squeezed back.

"I didn’t have much choice." I muttered.

"You took to it like a fish to water." Artemis gleefully poked at me. "You’ve had multiple chances to retire. Heck, with your skill, you could’ve retired incredibly wealthy at any moment. What did you do? Happily showed up to every single Sentinel meeting, ready to go at a moment’s notice."

My jaw dropped.

"Auri?"

"Brrrpt." She was staying firmly out of this.

She was also a reminder that I’d grabbed her out of a dragon’s lair.

"Sooo… you don’t think I can do quiet and peaceful?" I asked tentatively.

"Oh, for a few years, sure." Julius waved his hand. "Maybe even longer as you get older. But I think you’ve got the itch. The need to go out and find people to help. You wouldn’t stay still for long, even if you have a nice home. You’d want to find new people to help. New emergencies to solve. New… everything."

I fell silent as I contemplated his words.

I did like seeing new things. Exploring the world. Finding new magic. Heck, [Butterfly Mystic] was all about that.

If I heard about a plague in a town I could reasonably get to? I’d absolutely go there to help. I was a healer, that was my job. It was what I’d sworn to do, but more importantly, I’d be there.

Interesting magic? Same thing, but more fun.

But I didn’t think it was impossible for me to settle down and live happily ever after…

Was I just deluding myself? This called for some introspection. Another day. I had dozens of pressing, more important needs that needed to be seen to first. Like getting reliable shelter and food, being able to speak with people, and generally being able to live in a town, instead of a cave in the woods.

"I’m still hopeful that the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft can help orient me to the world, get my third class sorted out once and for all, figure out what the heck happened to everyone, and… yeah."

I kept the part about having ALL THE BOOKS to myself. I could also learn more languages, I could dramatically improve my [Butterfly Mystic] skills, and…

… and I never managed to get to college. It wouldn’t be the same here, but it’d be a chance. Remus had categorically denied me anything I’d recognize as an education - I had to sneak into the library as a kid, reading by the light of a skill to try and get something. Ranger Academy had been more about preparing me to be a soldier, and less an education on the world. I had to admit - I felt slightly robbed, and some of my motives for going to the School were entirely impure.

Heck.

I didn’t even know how they operated, and I was building up a big fantasy in my head. I was on track to being totally disappointed. Either way, I wanted to go.

I played with Auri a bit while the power couple got some downtime together to just be sickeningly cute.

Iona came back first, no Amber in sight. She was probably fine.

"How’d it go?" I asked her, while Auri zipped a flower over to Fenrir.

"Brrpt!" She tried to feed him the flower.

I was no good at reading frost wyvern body language, but he looked doubtful.

"Great! The World Bank recognized me, so I was able to get some money, and go shopping." Iona grabbed some jerky from a new bag of hers, and tossed it at Fenrir, who happily ate that instead of the flower Auri was trying to feed him. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if Auri was being nice, or trying to screw with him.

"The School has set up a little to the east of Lyon. Amber knows we’ll be there. Let’s go?" Iona pointed her thumb over her shoulder.

I stretched and hopped up.

"Let’s go!"

"Brrrpt BRRPT brrpt BRPT!" Auri called a charge, sitting comfortably on Fenrir’s head.

Fenrir galloped off on all fours, using his legs and wingtips, charging as quickly as he could. Given how young he was, and the fact that wyverns weren’t meant to be running on the ground, combined with his low speed stat?

The rest of us were able to keep up at a leisurely walk, chuckling at their antics.

"What’s the School like? How hard is it to get in? Is it expensive? What kind of classes do they have? What’s the dominant language? Do they speak Hakka? Sanglo? Do you think they know Creation? What about English, is there any chance that somebody knows English? There’ve got to be medicine classes, right? Are-"

I was excited, rapidly shooting questions to Iona as quickly as I could think of them, not bothering to wait to hear an answer back.

After an absolute eternity - five minutes, tops, we were still close to the walls of Lyon - we were approaching the area where the School had set up. It was like a fairground. A small, entirely magical fairground that seemed eager to let the whole world know they were there, as loudly and as colorfully as possible. A quick wooden palisade marked the borders, and a dozen overlapping transparent shields, each with a subtly different color, protected the entire enclosure. Sparks and magic were flying everywhere, colorful fumes were rising from various places, and some birds constructed out of various elements were flying in flocks overhead, putting on a show.

It was like several dozen students were all competing to have people look at them, and the total effect was riotous.

There were long lines to get into one of the many entrances to the place. Iona and the rest of us got in line at the back.

"Why are there so many people here?" I asked, looking around.

"Is that… a frog?" Julius asked, pointing and gawking.

I looked at where Julius was looking. There was a… gigantic frog-like person wearing clothes, standing in line with everyone else. They were extremely colorful, like a poison-dart frog.

"Beastkin." Iona said. "Calling them a frog is quite the insult, you shouldn’t do that."

"I shouldn’t call the midget abelisaurus a dinosaur, right?" Artemis subtly jerked her head over to where a dinosaur-person was standing.

"He’s a saurian. Tyrannosaurus Rex-based, not abelisaurus." Iona corrected.

Julius and Artemis stared and looked at the huge variety of different species that were present. I also took a look around - there wasn’t anything else to do while waiting in line - but I liked to think I was a bit more discreet and polite than my traveling companions were.

The longer I looked, the more elvenoids I saw. People coated in colorful lamellar and plate armor, with a number of sharp plates were mostly dullahans. Some were giving each other the stink-eye, to the point where I expected a fight to break out in the line. A muscular cow-man wasn’t a beastkin, but a minotaur, dressed like a scholar in long, flowing robes, with a sword at his waist.

A group of dwarves got in line behind me, and I resisted the urge to tell them I was part of the 94th generation. That would get them all sorts of riled up - and have a lot of people get the wrong impression of me.

The line was predominantly human though, and most people seemed to be coming here in groups. So did we, to be fair.

"Why are there so many people here?" Julius asked Iona.

She shrugged.

"It’s the School." She stated like that explained everything.

It didn’t.

We queued for what felt like hours, Amber eventually finding and rejoining us to the glares of the other people in line.

"Any luck?" Julius asked her.

"Some, but it’s not looking great." She grimaced. "Everyone wants money or guarantees. The Adventurer’s Guild doesn’t want you without a sponsor. The Hunter’s Guild wants evidence of your prowess. The Merchant’s Guild will only take you if you already have an agreement with an existing member. The stories are similar everywhere I went." Amber complained.

We all looked at Iona.

"Doesn’t a vorler hunt qualify as prowess?" Artemis loudly mused. "In front of a recognized member of a well-respected group?"

Iona rolled her eyes.

"No need to go about it sideways, sure, I’ll happily talk to them for you."

Iona continued to act as a tour guide, gently explaining the various races we bumped into, where they were probably from, and more.

In Remus, all humans basically had the same skin tone. However, waiting in line, we saw dozens of different skin tones on humans, from incredibly pale to pitch black.

We finally made it to the front of the line, where a gnome and a gorgon were dressed in fancy black robes. Long sleeves, swooping skirts and huge, pointed hats were on their heads - well, relative to their size. The gnome’s hat was tiny, and I kept my eyes down and away from the gorgon’s snake-hair, hissing like a nest of vipers.

Iona had a quick conversation with them, flawlessly switching between two different languages to the gatekeepers’s obvious delight. She came back to us after a short conversation.

"Applicants to the School can come in for free, but need to go to the examination area. Tourists need to pay to get in."

Our faces fell at that.

"Brrrpt?" Auri asked if she was allowed in.

"I actually don’t know. Let me check." Iona turned back to the gatekeepers.

"Well. I wish we could come, but I think this is it for us. Good luck Elaine! Let us know how you do!" Julius said, patting my shoulder.

"Wish we’d known this before we spent all this time in line." Artemis griped. "Ah well, she’ll crush it." She had a lazy faith in me. "Although, here, you might need your gear for the exam."

"If the exam involves a life or death fight, I’ll be properly annoyed." I didn’t stop Artemis from taking off my poorly-fitting armor, and handing it back to me.

One of the moonstones fell out of my arm bracers, and I nimbly caught it.

"Seriously? It’s already falling apart?" I griped to nobody in particular.

"You only wore it for a year and change. You know. The usual workout it’s expected to get." Artemis teased me.

Amber had her eyes glued to the Moonstone, and the unfairly tall beanpole leaned over to whisper in my ear.

"Hey. So. Nobody can understand us here, right?"

I turned to her.

"If you want to ask me something secret, remember that Iona can totally hear us if she wants to." I reminded her.

Amber looked crestfallen.

"Well, ok. Short version that can be overheard. We’ve got nothing right now. I can’t get into the Merchant’s Guild without being able to pay their fee. I can’t do things properly without being part of their Guild. Too many stories about Guildless merchants running into… bees? It was hard to understand them, my language isn’t great right now." Amber said. "However, gemstones are the currency. I hate to ask this, I know they’re yours, but… a single gem can kickstart everything for me."

If that was the part she could ask, what wasn’t she asking?

Ah.

She probably wanted a skill-charged gem, and I had one skill in particular that would command an insane price. Something that Amber always wanted to sell.

There was no way in hell I was handing Amber a live grenade of an Immortality-granting skill gem. Maybe a few dozen charges of my main healing skill, a way to backstop Amber’s healing skills, or something she could directly sell.

A topic for another day.

"Let’s talk later." I told her as Iona turned around.

"Auri’s allowed in, but she’s gotta stick with you." She said.

That seemed to take quite a bit longer than I’d expect for a simple question and answer, although she had spent a bit of time waiting while Amber and I had our quick talk.

We said a quick farewell to each other once again - after all, we were holding up the line - and Iona, Fenrir, myself, and Auri swiftly entered the School’s grounds.

The grounds were both obviously temporary, and at the same time, dozens of [Mages] had clearly worked hard to make their own special thing. It was clear who was part of the School, and who wasn’t. Members of the School were all wearing robes and pointy hats, and nearly all of them were in black. I spotted the occasional purple robe in the crowd, and a single dark blue robe. They had to mean something, but I had no idea what.

"Entrance exams are this way." Iona started to gracefully squeeze through the crowd, and I followed her broad shoulders.

It was interesting to watch Iona move through the crowd. She moved with grace and poise, never shoving or bumping into anyone, but hard as a rock when someone else tried to shoulder her away.

The people who weren’t part of the School stuck out by their outfits, a hundred different outfits that were all different. They were predominantly human, although occasionally we saw someone from a different species. I already was noticing something of a divide in the people here. There were those who were hurrying along with a nervous, frantic energy in the same direction Iona and I were going, and those casually browsing the fantastic wares on display.

The School people had dozens of small stands set up, each selling something different. A whole table of brightly painted music boxes. Another table had miniature golems playing house, next to a set of golems that were busy beating each other up. The next table was selling jewel-encrusted staves and wands, which was fascinating to me. I started looking for them, and saw the occasional School member with a wand in their belt, or using a walking staff with a bright gem at the top.

What could that be for? Magic didn’t need a staff… or at least, that’s what I knew.

Clearly, my understanding was lacking, and I got incredibly distracted by someone selling a stack of magically sparking books. They might be able to tell me what was going on?

"Price?" I asked in my crude Hakka.

The man running the stall tilted his head, not understanding me, and tapped the board next to him. There were two black octagons on the board, which I assumed was the price. Iona had mentioned something about Obsidian coins, and…

"They do eventually close, you know." Iona’s words in my ear made me jump.

"Whoops! Sorry!" I reluctantly tore myself away from the stand.

I tried to keep a million thoughts in my head at once. Obsidian coins were tied with Feldspar as the second-least valuable gem, which wasn’t saying much. An Obsidian coin was worth roughly, if I’d done all my conversions right and a loaf of bread was still worth the same, about 5 Remus coins.

I got distracted by an alchemist’s cauldron exploding in a massive cloud of black smoke, the student in question emerging a moment later with singed eyebrows, looking like she wanted to cry, but otherwise fine. A quick sweep of my healing fixed a scratch on her forehead, but I couldn’t do anything for the emotional, financial, and social harm she’d just self-inflicted.

Amulets. Rings. Talismans. Dozens, hundreds of items that neither Remus nor the dwarves nor elves seemed to have or even thought of, on display and for sale by students. It made me wonder what the real powerhouses of the world could make.

And there, on a half-forgotten table, just sitting out with a bunch of other fruit, practically ignored by the shoppers, was the holy grail. The creme da la creme. My raison d’etre.

A few mangos were present, and I’d never felt the sting of an empty wallet so acutely before. I don’t think I’d ever been this broke in my life, without a single mangy coin to trade for the divine fruit of the gods.

Sure, I could probably rip out the Arcanite in my armor, but that would be just plain dumb. As much as I loved mangos, the idea of cannibalizing my only asset just to experience a few minutes of bliss revolted me.

No.

It was not to be.

Not here, not today.

I tore my eyes away from the sweetest nectar on the planet, hurrying ahead of Iona to the back of the examination line that I could see.

I got in line, steadfastly keeping my eyes on the back of the head of the person in front of me, studiously not thinking about mangos. I forced my mind to go to my appearance, since the person in front of me looked like they’d come from the street.

I probably looked just as bad. It’d been ages since I last got a proper bath, miles gone, living on the road, and most recently got caught in an explosion of icky, stinky smoke. The examiners would take one look at me and throw me right out, as they should.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see Iona holding out one of the mangos for me.

"Here. Looked like you wanted one." She gently offered it to me.

I might’ve fallen in love just a tiny bit.

Chapter 12
Entrance Exams II

I slowly, carefully peeled the mango.

"Brrrpt?" Auri hovered near my hand, staring longingly at the fruit.

"Of course." I carved off a piece, giving it to her.

One small bite at a time, carefully licking my knife to prevent even a single drop from being wasted, I ate the mango, constantly shooting grateful looks at Iona. My mouth was too full to tell her, but she seemed pleased with herself, an amused smile playing over her face whenever she saw the looks I was making as I ate the divine fruit.

Each small square I carefully savored, letting the sugary flavors explode over my tongue, dance through my mouth. It was like I was transported to heaven, like a thousand tiny people were massaging every inch of me, inside and out. I didn’t have the words.

After all the time that had passed. After all the changes in the world. Mangos were still as blessedly good as before - if not, somehow impossibly, better.

The world was cruel and unfair, my mango practically evaporating. There was no way I’d eaten that much! Help! A [Mango Dissolver] was out and about, cackling in the background as they destroyed my favorite fruit! I got to the last square, and hesitated.

"Want some?" I offered it to Iona, her eyes sparkling with amusement.

She hesitated a moment, and shook her head.

"I’m sure I’d enjoy it, but not nearly as much as you are."

"You sure?"

"Yup."

"Brrrpt?" Auri wanted the last bite, and I gave it to her without a second thought.

We continued shuffling through the line, and I got to spot a few more things. The first was a second market, reversed from the first one. Instead of people from the School selling things, members of the School were wandering around, bartering and haggling with keen eyed merchants selling their high-end wares. Clear shields and thick glass protected various expensive-looking goods, although some people just had a simple table and a banner or logo behind them. They were also attracting attention from some members of the School, although I couldn’t figure out why.

A second area was more familiar, a dueling grounds of some sort where people were sparring, magic shooting all over the place. I watched one of the duels with professional interest.

Two students were wearing a more practical outfit for sparring, but they were both still in black colors. A human versus an orc.

The duel started, and the orc immediately went with the Artemis Special, stomping his foot and letting a spray of high-speed rocks pepper the human. The human didn’t take that lying down, flinging out a small piece of white paper that had bright red lines painted on it, reminding me of the elven talismans. It snapped to a position in front of him, then disintegrated into a dozen jets of water, each one intercepting a pebble.

The orc smirked, and the barrage of pseudo-bullets continued. The human frantically threw out one talisman after another, each one countering the rocks in a different way. After the water he summoned a wall of ice, then started to place multiple talismans together for some big skill or spell. However, with only two talismans in place, he needed to jump out of the way and blow three different talismans as the orc’s relentless assault broke through the ice wall, threatening to have it tip over onto him. One talisman had all the rocks drop to the ground, and another one gave him a leafy shield.

His shield wasn’t good enough, the rocks ripping straight through it and hitting him. I flinched, starting to run towards the inevitable bloodbath, screams, and broken bones, but instead, a powerful gong noise echoed out as he flared with bright light.

Obviously there were protections in place here. Much better protections than anything I was able to use when practicing once upon a time in Remus. I could only imagine how effective our sparring could’ve been if we could truly go no holds barred, with complete faith that no harm could come to us.

"Not a great showing." Iona said.

I nodded.

"The versatility was impressive, but his decision making was poor." I analyzed. "He stood still. He ceded the initiative by simply reacting and trying to counter the attacks against him, instead of forcing the orc to react to what he was doing."

"He tried with the ice wall, but he didn’t think it through." Iona agreed. "It was so poorly done that it ended up getting turned against him."

"Brrpt BRPT!"

"Not using Fire or Inferno attacks was a grave error. If he’d only realized the glory of Fire sooner, victory would’ve been his." I locked eyes with Iona as I agreed with Auri with an entirely straight face. After a moment, the two of us cracked nearly identical grins at the little phoenix's antics and snobbish analysis.

The fights were fun to watch, if a little on the low-powered side. Then again, I’d been somewhat spoiled, training with Sentinels and senior Rangers for the last few years. The levels and skills I was seeing were probably normalish, if not maybe good, for the age group I was in and looking at.

Iona and I had fun chatting about them, having some form of entertainment as the line slowly but steadily inched forwards.

Finally, we reached the front of the line, the sun low on the horizon.

"Please tell me they’re still open, and we haven’t gotten here right as they close." I asked in a panic.

Iona quickly asked the bouncer managing the line that question.

"Nope! They operate on island time - whatever that means - and to them, they’re actually getting close to their ‘morning’. Hopefully things will move faster now?"

"Right as we’re at the front." I complained.

"Could be worse."

We were let inside, and I immediately realized my problem.

Communication and languages.

The initial room had a number of scribes waiting at various booth-like tables, and Iona peeled off to an open one. I tentatively approached the other open one, the remaining six already occupied with people doing some form of registration, signing up, or something.

The scribe politely - I assumed that was the tone - asked me something.

"Hakka?" I asked tentatively.

"Yes. Now, can you…" She asked me, and I completely lost the rest of it.

"Sorry. Ask again. Slowly?"

She gave me a look of disgust.

"Language?" She asked me in Hakka.

"Creation. English. Doubt you speak either of those." I shot back in a mix of the two languages.

She frowned at me, and we did a poor back and forth for some time before Iona, of all people, slid next to me. She quickly chatted with the scribe, then her face fell.

"They’re not ok with me acting as a translator. Too easy for abuse." She complained at me.

"Well, did you explain?"

"I did! Wait. Shoot. Not all of it. Hang on…" Iona started talking rapid-fire with the [Scribe] again. After a few minutes of intense back and forth, the scribe got up and walked away.

"Ok! I think I got the message through. She thinks there’s somebody here that might speak Creation."

"No. Really!?" I barely refrained from grabbing Iona’s tunic.

"Yes really."

A penny dropped.

"How come you’re not being examined? Aren’t there entrance exams?"

Iona puffed out her generous chest.

"I got invited to attend the School, and on a full scholarship to boot."

"Oh wow! That’s super cool! How’d you manage that?"

Iona deflated a bit.

"My blessing." She sheepishly admitted. "The linguistics department wants me to help them translate things."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Well, ancient ruins and the like. A civilization grows, flourishes, an Immortal war comes around and wipes them out, ruins get buried, rediscovered, and poof! Tons of texts that nobody speaks anymore suddenly need translating."

That had me wondering how on Pallos anyone still spoke Creation, but my question was practically answered thirty minutes of chatting with Iona later. We were slightly responsible for the line going slowly… but at least there were multiple registration spots.

The scribe returned with a characteristically pale fellow in tow, wearing green robes. That was a new color.

"A vampire!" I happily exclaimed.

"A human! I’ve never seen one before." He sarcastically mocked back. In Creation. Sure, his accent was heavy and weird, like his mouth was full of cotton, and the cadence was totally off, but the words were similar enough that we understood each other.

"You have no idea how happy I am to meet someone that can speak Creation!" I happily told him, only to feel Iona step on my foot.

Gently, but with enough weight that I’d feel it.

"You speak every language, you don’t count." I sassed at her.

"Creation? This is the Vampire’s Tongue. Dragon’s blood, how do you speak the language?"

A shiver went down my spine at the forbidden word being so casually thrown around, and by a vampire none the less. Maybe it was less banned now, but I was going to be careful.

"Vampire’s Tongue? It was called Creation where I came from, because, you know, it was the language the gods stuffed into everyone’s head when the world was made. Do you know Night? Is he still alive? Can I get a message to him? Can-?"

"I have no idea who that is." Sarcastic-face interrupted, completely bulldozing over me. "Anyway, my role here is not to answer your petty questions, it is to translate. As much as I find it hard to believe that the Vampire’s Tongue is your primary language, and you are not simply pulling an elaborate prank, I will assist and play along. Although, such a prank requires me to dig into how you acquired the language, which is a conversation we will have another day. Now. Name, age, classes, levels, stats, and what are you applying to the School for?"

I looked around. Saw a number of mortals applying for the School. Saw the number of people from the School. Remembered that nobody else could understand me, and revealing my levels wouldn’t be a problem, especially to another Immortal.

"Elaine, 22, healer-mage, 513-357-8, 1,000 Strength, 1,800 Dexterity, 14,000 Vitality, 14,000 Speed, 58,000 Mana, 58,000 Mana Regen with a bonus 52,000 from a skill, 23,000 Magic Power with another 585,000 from a skill, and the same Magic Control, medicine. Or healing. Whatever the School teaches." I rattled off.

"I asked for your name, not your class twice." Snarky sniffed at me. "And you’ve gotten your numbers incorrect."

Ugh. "Elaine" wasn’t even "Healer" in Creation! He was mixing his languages up! And I hadn’t gotten my numbers wrong!

"Yeah. By some screwy reason, my name’s Elaine. It was Elaine before the word meant ‘healer’, and believe me, it’s no fun. Also, I know my numbers. I didn’t misspeak." I kept the ‘dumbass’ to myself.

"You’re 22. And claiming to pre-date the word ‘elaine’ meaning ‘healer’." Sassy lifted an eyebrow, exactly the same way Night did!!!

My eyes lit up, but the scribe next to the vampire poked him with her quill. I was sure she did it in a way to utterly ruin his clothes with an inkstain, and by the look of distaste on jerk’s face, he knew he was in for some serious laundry. She barked a few sharp words at him, which turned into an entire lecture.

He turned to me with a long-suffering sigh, then the corners of his lips curled.

"You’re supposed to translate what we say and nothing else!" He mimed the scribe’s voice.

Ha! Maliciously complying with what he was being told. Mostly to be annoying, but hey, I didn’t care.

"Ok, what’s the next question?"

He translated, and with our faithful, complying to the letter vampire, I had a steady means of communication.

Iona sadly got shooed away in short order, and Auri was made to go with her. Their logic was I was the one being examined, not me and my five closest friends. It’d be too easy for cheating to occur, and since Auri [Identified] as a [Mage], she was considered to be a full person in her own right. There were fascinating implications with that, and I’d love to know more. Sadly, thousands of new and interesting things were being thrown at me every second, and I could only do so many things at once.

For now.

Getting a Mirror class and cloning myself a few times was sounding appealing.

"Place of birth, backing, fealty?"

"Aquiliea. None? I’m unsure what this is asking. And… the Sentinels? I’m not sworn to a [Lord] or anything. Don’t even know if the Sentinels still exist."

I got an incredibly skeptical look on that one, but he faithfully translated. I was prepared to pull out my Sentinel badge if challenged, but the [Scribe] didn’t bother. Apparently, my word was good enough - or she just didn’t care.

Interesting. It implied that my backing and fealty didn’t matter, they just wanted to collect the information.

A dozen more administrative questions later, and the scribe was finished with me. She handed me a one-page sheet.

"Please follow Vitus to the examination area for healers." The vampire then turned around, walking through another door. It took a moment for me to realize that he was Vitus, and was continuing to be a gigantic pain about literally translating everything.

There was another line I had to queue in, although mercifully shorter. However, snails would outrace the pace this line went at, with what felt like hours between each person shuffling forward.

Probably not actual hours, not with how distractible and hyper I could be, but… pretty close. Then again, that spoke well to the examiners being thorough.

I started to do a mental review of systems, although I was unsure of the format of the exam, or what knowledge would be needed. Also, I realized I’d made some assumptions. Like it’d be an actual exam, and not, like, just looking at my level or something. The slow pace that things went at suggested the first.

I wanted to study the sheet the [Scribe] had given me, to try and divine some more language. However, my time was better spent going over my medicine.

Going into a test completely blind was a terrible idea. Not exactly the best start to my time at the School.

After an eternity - how many damn lines did this School have anyways!? Although I suppose the fact that it was so popular meant it was good… - it was my - our - turn.

I passed through the imposing - yet still temporary - doors into the exam room. Five elvenoids sat on a raised half-circle table, an obvious spot for me in the center. I stepped up, noting that they looked tired and worn down. Not good news for me.

Inscriptions of some sort seemed to cover the room. The table had them on every surface, every leg. The floor had them. The walls and ceiling had them. The only places there were no visible Inscriptions was a circular spot in the center - where I assumed I had to be - and in neat little squares around each examiner’s area, where they all had paper. They glowed with power and use, and I was a little nervous about them. It’d help if I knew what they were for, but I suppose nobody had gotten themselves annihilated yet.

There was an elf, with elk-like horns, wearing yellow robes. A devil in blue. A dwarf in black. A human - although I couldn’t be sure - in black. And another possibly-human in black robes.

I did a quick [Long-Range Identify] sweep as they quickly conversed with Vitus.

They came back in order.

[Healer - 2224]

[Healer - 1439]

[Healer - 256]

[Healer - 256]

[Healer - 256]

All people who should know their stuff. Although I had to remind myself - knowledge and levels didn’t always go hand in hand. I’d known tons of medicine at a low level, and my medical knowledge had somewhat stagnated as I’d leveled up.

Levels were power. They were not knowledge. A level 8 could know more than me.

"Elaine something Aquiliea." Vitus announced me, with the something probably being ‘of’. His words echoed four times, some magic translating his words from one language to four others. Handy stuff that.

[*ding!* [Learning Languages] Leveled up! 45 -> 46]

One downside - I knew it was ‘of’ in a language, I didn’t know which one. Or ones.

The elf asked a few questions of Vitus, who promptly turned towards me.

"Vitus! Why are you here? Isn’t the girl supposed to speak for herself? You know the rules."

I gave him a flat stare, which he returned.

He was better at staring me down than I was, and I wanted something from the School. They didn’t need me. I suppose I had to play nice.

"Vitus is translating for me, as apparently my native language isn’t well-known at the School." I said, Vitus translated, the devil made a snarky remark, and the examiners laughed. Hopefully they were laughing at Vitus, and not me.

"Please pass us your information." The dwarf asked, and after a moment I realized he meant what the scribe had prepared for me. I had to stretch to get it onto their table - did it really need to be so tall and imposing? I felt positively tiny here.

It got more than a few mutters from the various examiners, until the questions started to come.

"Is your name really Elaine?"

"Yes. My name is Elaine. Elaine also doesn’t mean ‘healer’ in Creation."

"Where do you come from that you’re speaking the Vampire’s Tongue naturally?" One of the maybe-humans asked. I glared at Vitus, who gave me a smug, condescending smile. There was some translating fuckery going on somewhere along the line, but probably not on his part.

Fine.

"Remus."

"I am unfamiliar with that location as it pertains to potential new applicants of your age." The elf said.

The devil coughed.

"This is all fascinating, but we are here to assess her medical knowledge and capabilities to see if she’s eligible to be admitted."

"Honesty is a critical requirement for a healer." The other maybe-human said through Vitus, although I detected maybe a hint of a hiss in her voice. "The numbers given are absurd, and her stated level doesn’t match her [Analyze] level."

That got some agreements.

"I apologize. I’ve been wearing a Deception Ring for my own safety. I’ve heard that mortal lands are hostile to high level healers." I took the ring in question off, showing off how its invisibility dropped once it was off my hand. A round of muttering occurred, so quickly that in spite of Vitus spitefully trying to keep up, he couldn’t. It was funny to watch him screw up though.

"I also have an [Oath] that’s boosting my abilities."

"Which [Oath], and what does it pertain to?" The dwarf asked.

"It’s… my own? It’s a healing one, and the bonus is only when I’m healing."

"If she was capped in her [Oath], that would require it to be 5% per level." The devil said.

"Which gets back to my issue of integrity being critical." The same maybe-human with a hiss said.

I shrugged.

"I was asked, I answered. I’m unsure how to prove I have that much power and control. Even getting decapitated and healing it back only takes a fraction of my magic power these days. I suppose if we carefully weighed enough humans at close range, and you accepted my ranged healing penalty as truth you could measure that way, although it’d be terribly unethical, my [Oath] would scream bloody murder at me, and I don’t even have enough mana to properly use it all."

"I will remind you all that she is a healer, like we all are, and has claimed to have acquired her third class by the age of 22. The type of life required to achieve that is also one that would reward her with numerous powerful classes, which could grant her the abilities she claims. At the end of the day, if there are no other issues with her integrity, and her knowledge is sufficient, there should be no issues with admittance." The elf said.

"Agreed. Let’s get this exam done." The devil said.

"How were you taught?" The first maybe-human asked.

"I’m unsure of what you’re asking." I responded, which got Vitus yelled at a bit, and a half-eaten apple thrown at him. He didn’t translate it.

Ha. Didn’t want to repeat whatever griping they’d given him. I should do that more often.

"How did you obtain your medical knowledge?" The first person asked again.

I hedged a moment. They were already questioning my integrity, and the answer I wanted to give was… not the whole truth, but more believable at least.

"A combination of self-study, and a divine blessing." Was my answer, which was technically true.

"Did you have a teacher?" The dwarf was next in line, and I could see that the questions would follow around the table.

"I’ve frequently compared notes with other healers, but I wasn’t taught large amounts of the medical arts by one. I’ve had numerous teachers that have taught me fighting, magic, flying, and dozens of other fields and skills." I thought of Night as I answered, and I wanted to get Vitus alone and throttle some answers out of his smug mouth.

I couldn’t do any harm, but maybe if I sweet-talked Iona, she’d be willing to help.

"Are there any towns, cities, mercenary companies, or armies that can attest to your presence and prowess?" The elf in the middle asked.

"Perinthus. Ariminum. The entire Remus army." I hesitated over the last one, but, well, they could attest… if they were around. "Ochi."

I closed my eyes at the last one, memory hammering against me. The slaughter. The screams. The acrid smoke, the literal tens of thousands slaughtered in almost cold blood.

I felt some tears well up, and I wiped them away.

"Sorry." I croaked out. "Need a moment."

That got some mutters, but they sounded positive.

"Right." I straightened myself back up.

"Anatomy. Please tell me the names of the bones in your hand." The fourth examiner asked through Vitus, then his eyes went wide. A rapid back-and-forth occurred between Vitus and the rest, then the elf made a pronouncement, which Vitus translated.

"Unfortunately, Vitus does not know all of the proper medical terminology required to perform a detailed examination. As such, we will be relying on slightly different questions that he can translate."

"Understood."

"Please understand that if you are admitted, you will need to learn one of the primary languages used by the School."

I nodded in furious understanding.

"I have three skill help me learn. My problem time. My Hakka bad." I replied in moderate Hakka, delighting as the words were automatically translated. The elf looked positively disgusted at my attempt though. I was probably mauling the accent, and there was a good chance that my tone on ‘problem’ was wrong, which could’ve made an entirely different word.

"We will continue using Vitus to translate." He said through the unfortunate vampire.

"How many bones are in your hand?"

"27."

"What is the function of blood?"

"Multiple. It carries nutrition throughout the body. Oxygen throughout the body. Moves waste. Moves…"

I was quick and confident on the initial questions, rattling them off with precision, all while showing off the part of the body in question. I needed more than to just get admitted. I needed to wow them. To blow them out of the water.

I needed what Iona had. A scholarship to the School.

I knew I was broke. The level of wealth I’d seen in the various ques, the prices on the signs I’d seen, all indicated that the School was a place for the wealthy - and likely had a corresponding price tag. The fact that Iona was so proud of her scholarship, and the price tag she’d mentioned on it otherwise, told me one thing.

Without a scholarship, I couldn’t attend.

On and on the questions went, slowly getting harder and harder as the limits of my knowledge were tested.

I thought I knew a lot.

HA!

Their questions revealed a frankly disturbing lack of knowledge on my part.

"Besides the metal used for their armor, what is the difference between a dullahan with iron-based armor, and copper-based armor?"

"What are the seven major parts of a werewolf that change when their curse is active?"

"When a medusa’s hair bites, is petrification, poison, or something else the greatest concern? How would you treat such a bite?"

"What are five different common potion residual build ups, what do they manifest as, and what goes into your image of treating it?"

"What are the anatomical differences between a gnome and a human?"

"A centaur is in breech birth. What steps do you perform to save the foal and mother?"

"Apply a knife to the stomach, cut the foal out, cut the cord, apply healing to both the mother and foal." I felt decent about that question.

"You wouldn’t form an image?" A follow-up question had me wincing.

"Yes, and no, and yes." I said, mentally cursing at how poorly it was coming out. "I always run a persistent beacon on myself. Anyone touching me is automatically healed to the best of my ability and power, along with the best image I can form. This includes…" I listed off every single aspect of my image that I had, trying to show off the depth of my knowledge.

I got cut off halfway through connective tissue.

"Yes, yes, we get it. Your full medical knowledge. Back to the prior question."

"I’ve gotten spoiled recently. Between my excessive power, control, mana, and regeneration, along with my [Persistent Casting], I haven’t needed to fully and properly form an image. There’s simply no need to make them on an individual basis, when I’ve got the general case solved. In a true emergency where, for whatever reason, my [Persistent Casting] is no longer working, a quick ‘save their life’ move is preferred to languidly looking over the patient and thinking about things. I frankly haven’t had the luxury."

"More of a battlefield medic than a clinical healer." The elf mused. "There is value in both, and I am sure the people whose lives you have saved appreciate you."

More questions came, and I answered them to the best of my abilities. My heart slowly sunk as there were more and more questions I just had no answer to.

Instead of trying to bullshit them, I cleanly and honestly told them I didn’t know. They’d smell bullshit a mile away, and there were already some questions on my integrity. Reasonable questions, but oh did it make my blood boil to get questioned like that.

Well.

I suppose I was in a medical exam setting. I should be precise.

My blood was not actually boiling.

"Thank you. I think we have enough." The elf finally said, and darkness fell around me, containing me and Vitus while the rest of them presumably talked with each other.

"I have so many questions." Vitus finally admitted.

"Me too." I agreed.

We didn’t ask each other the questions, knowing this wasn’t the time or the place.

The darkness rose, revealing the examiners again.

"Elaine of Aquiliea." The elf said. "Your knowledge of human anatomy is excellent. Your levels show a dedication to the craft unsurpassed by nearly all your age. You answer slowly and thoughtfully when the question merits thought, and decisively answer in scenarios where rapid action is required."

Ok, ok, sounding good so far.

"Your background is curious, and riddled with more holes than an ant’s home. However, we are not in the business of questioning backgrounds, as long as you mean no harm to the School."

"I don’t." I quickly replied - well, as quickly as I could with a translator involved.

"However, your comparative anatomy is terrible, practically non-existent. There are more than humans in the world, there are all the elvenoids, let alone the various creatures under the sun and moons. Your knowledge of magical maladies is poor, you know practically nothing of alchemy and potions, and the less is said of your skill-empowered plagues the better."

Right through the heart. Although, I still maintained that "just heal them and shoot the Classer" was a valid method of dealing with created plagues. It’d worked perfectly fine in Perinthus.

"Fortunately, you have come to us to learn. The School of Sorcery and Spellcraft is not the place for beginning your education, nor is it a place for people who have completed their education. You are perfect. You know enough to make full use of the School, while having enough holes that you will benefit. By a four to one vote, we grant you admittance to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft. May your time with us be fruitful."

The elf ended his speech on a rote note, probably having said it thousands of times before, then gestured like he wanted me to leave.

"Quick question! I’ve got no money, is there any chance of a scholarship? Like Iona?"

The examiners looked at each other, quickly asking some questions.

"No." The elf said with finality, and I felt the world crumbling away.

Chapter 13
Entrance Exams III

I was crushed, but made out of stern stuff. The examiner explained in a bored monotone that my details and information had been sent to the [Bursar], and that I was to report to that department to pay. If I didn’t pay before the School left, I would need to retake exams the next time the school came by. I nodded my acknowledgement, then Vitus and I left the exam room. The examiners called in the next candidate in line, and I mentally wished them luck.

"What now?" I asked Vitus.

"Now? You either figure out how to pay for the School, or leave." Vitus sniffed at me.

"How much is admission anyways?"

"Typically, a ruby or diamond per year." He answered, and I mentally translated it to a ruby or diamond coin. "I have questions for you. Claiming to be a Sentinel?"

I ignored his question for the moment, quickly doing the conversion. A ruby was the same as a diamond - obscenely expensive. All the gems in my armor might be able to pay for a single year, if I roped Amber into helping me sell them, but that was a short-term solution. It was roughly 25,000 coins, which was 390 rods and change, which was roughly six and a half weeks pay as a Sentinel.

And I’d been very, very well paid as a Sentinel.

I opened my mouth to answer Vitus, but thinking about Amber and negotiating sales had me thinking about negotiations.

"I’ll answer all your questions if you tell me about the various scholarships the School has."

"Fine." He snapped at me. "Sentinel!? They’ll eat you alive when they find you."

I fished out my Sentinel badge.

"Hi. Sentinel Dawn, pleased to meet you." I showed it to him.

"That is not the Sentinel badge." He complained.

"Well, shit, it used to be. Not my fault things have changed."

"Explain." He demanded.

"That wasn’t a question." I sassed back at him. He wanted to be a royal pain in the arse? I could also play that game.

"You try my patience."

"And I know your progenitor. Probably. One out of three chances." I shot back.

He sighed in exasperation. Good. I could be just as annoying when I wanted to be!

"Please give me a brief overview of the events that you claim to happen that have led you here." He… ok, he technically didn’t ask a question, but it was close enough, and I’d wound him up enough. I was all too aware that he massively out-leveled me, and could probably squash me like a bug if he really wanted to.

I gave him the short version, which still took some time.

"Entirely unbelievable." He pronounced at the end.

I shrugged.

"Didn’t claim you’d believe me. Just that I’d answer your questions. Now. Scholarships?"

He sighed.

"The School tends to give scholarships out to those individuals which can raise or elevate the school in some way, or have particular talents that will make the School shine. Artists are popular, and you might apply for a storytelling Scholarship. I believe your tales are a little too far-fetched, and they’d deny you on that basis."

Jackass.

"Other such scholarships include areas in which the School competes publicly. Alchemy. Smithing. Golem building and fights. Combat. Dinosaur riding. Fishing. Cooking. Wizardry contests. Sports." Vitus listed.

One of those perked my ear.

"Combat?" I asked him.

He muttered something to himself.

"Yes, fighting. Single, pairs, teams, free-for-all, there are a dozen different methods of fighting. The School fields a team, and is on the lookout for the best to join. Not that they have any shortage of candidates."

I beamed at him.

"Well, how do I apply?"

"By getting the woman you were with to translate for you from here on out. Good day."

Vitus, the prick, left me in the middle of the exam building, sweeping out with his long wizardly robes.

I was left to my own devices, but managed to find my way back out, where Iona and Auri were waiting for me.

"So? How’d it go! Dish!" Iona grinned at me under the moonlight.

"I got in. No scholarship. Can’t pay for the School." I moped. "However! I’m going to see if I can get a combat scholarship. Only way I can see myself getting it."

"Brrpt BRPT brrrrrrpt!" Auri was full of confidence in me. Of course I’d be able to get a combat scholarship! If I couldn’t, nobody could!

"Brrpt?" She was also wondering if she could show off, and we could charge people to watch Auri show off.

Her vanity knew no limits.

Iona gave me an appraising look, possibly reading my status.

"You’ve got a shot at it." She agreed with Auri.

"Now I need to figure out where the heck I sign up for this sort of thing."

"They didn’t tell you?"

I gave Iona the quick rundown on Vitus.

"Oooh, that dick. I’d love to get my hands on him and…" Iona made a wringing motion with her hands. I totally agreed with her.

"Brrpt. Brrrpt?"

Auri suggested Fire.

"That’s a good idea."

"BRRRPT!" Auri picked a direction and started flying off, convinced she’d find Vitus in the direction she was going.

I retrieved her.

"What now?" Iona asked.

"Wander around until we find the combat place?"

"Like the one behind you?"

Oh right. There’d been a dueling ground we’d watched on our way over.

Some quick navigation later - how everyone was so energetic in the middle of the night I’d never know - and Iona was translating for me with a dullahan, who had purple paint on her armor.

"I’d like to get a combat scholarship. How can I make that happen?" I asked her.

"Age?" She barked at me. Iona’s translation barely softened the tone.

"The System says I’m 22." I was shooting for the lowest possible number that I could intellectually defend.

"Under 30. Good. You need to be the best. Not only the best, but you need to be utterly dominant. Even then, we’ll only take you if we think you’ll fit. Do you want to compete in singles, duos, team, or free-for-all?"

"Singles and free-for-all?" I ventured.

"Pick one."

I frowned.

"Free-for-all." Singles had the unfortunate mage problem of eventually running out of mana, and usually had all sorts of rules attached to it. A free-for-all sounded like my type of jam, a place where I could put all my training to use.

The dullahan gave me another look.

"Purple-robe healer wants to compete in the free-for-all. Now I’ve seen it all." She shook her head.

"Can I compete in the duels to see what it’s like?" I asked her.

"Sure. Only the big tournament counts, although we’ll be watching everything."

That sounded like even the duels counted. Iona and I did some wandering around, before finding the right place.

An elf was overseeing the entire dueling grounds in a weapons room. Three dozen different types of armor covered one wall, while weapons of all shapes and sizes covered the other three. A few people were working in various corners, fixing up gear, fitting people in armor, and generally helping keep the place running.

"I am Mormerilhawn, the Black Rose. You wish to compete for fame and glory in my grounds. Very well. I will ensure that minimal harm comes to you. Here are the rules. Every person I permit to participate is shielded by one of my skills. I tailor the skill to what would be a powerful blow against you. When the skill activates, it will do so with blinding light. That is the signal to stop. If you persist in fighting after the signal, you will be evicted. If I am feeling generous, you will still have all your limbs. Please keep in mind that my defenses will not work against suffocating attacks. If you use one, you will be evicted. If I am feeling generous, you will still have all your limbs. If you somehow cause grievous harm to another duelist, you will be evicted. You will not have all your limbs. Am I clear?"

I swallowed nervously.

"Partially. I’m bound to do no harm. How does that work?"

His eyebrows raised.

"Well. An Oathbound healer, fighting in my arena. Now, that is a first. Most interesting. How do you fight?"

I was about to show off most of my tricks, and while I didn’t need to get into the School, I thought it’d dramatically improve my life.

"Radiance magic is my primary means of attack. Failing that, I’m trained in spear and short sword, although I have mediocre stats and few skills backing them up."

"Sorcery or wizardry?"

"I… don’t know the difference."

"Sorcery uses the skills you are granted, while wizardry uses runes and the like to bend the world to your will."

"Sorcery then." The person with all the talismans must’ve been a wizard.

"Radiance sorcery, at the level you are at, will not cause harm to your fellow duelist, and I would be surprised if your physical prowess could cause any issues. Good. You will be fine. How durable are you?"

I grinned.

"Basically impossible to kill. Except for headshots. I don’t know about those."

Mormerilhawn shouted something over his shoulder, and Iona didn’t translate. A few minutes later, a black-robed healer showed up. Looked like a scaly person, with a long tail, and a snout, and -

Ok.

More like a lizard person.

"What’s he?" I asked Iona, confident that nobody could overhear us.

"A dragonling." Iona’s words sent a cold splash of water over me.

"Everything ok?" She asked, like she hasn’t casually dropped the D-word. Lots of people were saying it.

Maybe… it was ok?

I shook my head.

"I’m fine."

"This is Ixcoh. He will be on hand for when you are inevitably less durable than you believe." Mormerilhawn’s tone was a bit hard to tell through the translation, but boy did he sound condescending. Not nearly as nice as Awarthril and the rest had been, although… thinking about it, they’d been a little condescending in their own way.

"How does this work?" I asked.

"Remove any clothing you’d like to keep intact, spread your arms, activate your defensive skills, and we will begin." He said. "Please do not use external shields, armor reinforcement, redirections, and the like. This assessment is simply to determine what will be considered a hit hard enough for your opponent to obtain victory. Your shields and armor will prevent those types of blows from happening in the first place."

Got it. [Mantle of the Stars] wasn’t getting tested here.

I had exactly zero spare clothes, so I completely stripped, feeling Iona’s appreciative look. I then moved into a T-pose as Mormerilhawn suggested.

"I unfortunately require you to assent to being assaulted by me to properly test the limits of your durability." Iona mimicked a tone of frustration and boredom, like Mormerilhawn was bucking against the rules that required him to do something as mundane as ask my permission.

I thought about it for a bit. I was pretty firmly against allowing myself to get mutilated. Both on a personal level, and on an [Oath] level.

However… with how I’d grown, getting sliced or losing an arm was just losing a chunk of mana. With only the greatest stretch of imaginations was I coming to ‘harm’, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. No injury. No pain. Just a brief expenditure of mana.

I just wasn’t getting harmed.

Which has a subtle, but important, distinction from getting hurt.

"Do your worst. But not the head!"

He took out a knife, and started to lightly tap my forearm, so gently that I didn’t feel a thing. Slowly, he tapped harder and harder, until he broke skin.

"Not particularly durable." His tone was undisguised contempt.

"Really?" I pointedly looked at my arm. "I’m not sure I agree."

Iona hesitated before translating my smack talk. Mormerilhawn looked at my arm.

"Mana-based regeneration. Not without precedent. How much can you handle at once?"

"My entire body from the neck down." I proudly boasted.

Mormerilhawn’s knife flashed, and I felt my bicep shimmer for lack of a better word.

"Of course, you need to use a larger blade than that to cut something off." I shamelessly boasted. Iona shared an identical grin with me.

Mormerilhawn grabbed a thick sword, and applied it to my arm. As the elf finished his cut, fully separating my arm, my healing kicked in and immediately made a new one, regrowing from the stump of my arm with such speed and force that it sent my old arm, which had just started to fall, spinning across the room. It baptized the room and the rest of the inhabitants with a spray of my blood, no longer pressurized by my heart but forced out by the spinning force anyways.

We all stared after it.

"Brrrpt."

"I’m not cleaning that up." I said, and Iona faithfully translated… probably also doubling up that she wasn’t cleaning that up either.

Mormerilhawn looked delighted, which was an unusual reaction to having bloody limbs flying around the room.

"Excellent! Your shield is set. Do note that the portion protecting your head will trigger a loss at a significantly weaker hit than the rest of you. Enchanted weapons, armor, talismans, prepared spells and the like are all permitted. However, gemstones are only permitted in a limited capacity for Gemstone duelists."

I briefly debated asking why, but my severed arm was still pooling blood on the floor. It didn’t make much of a difference for me.

"Understood." I started to get dressed again.

Iona, Auri, and I left in short order, and a new victim - errr - potential duelist came through the door, Mormerilhawn starting his speech again.

Iona laughed as we left.

"What’s so funny?" I asked her.

"Your arm!" She gave another deep belly laugh. "Mormerilhawn implied that it was from someone who’d broken the rules!"

I remembered what he kept saying about "maybe you’ll have all your limbs", and laughed with Iona.

It took some time to properly sign up for the free-for-all, then I was in the arena, getting some practice fights in. Getting a feel for my competition. Sure, I could go in totally blind - and have everyone else blind as to what I could do - but knowledge was power.

Deception was key in warfare, and I had my Deception Ring on, setting me to a respectable level 200. Not so weak as to make people suspect I was up to something - I wouldn’t trust a level 40 in the arena, I’d assume there was mischief afoot - but not so strong that people stood up and took notice of me, and tracked what I did for the free-for-all.

I also had a second issue. I’d let some of the people running the arena know that I was aiming for a combat scholarship, and I couldn’t attend the school without it. I needed to show dominance.

More than that.

I needed to prove that I’d be an undisputable asset to the School. I wasn’t thinking that I couldn’t lose - nobody reasonable would expect that - but I believed I needed to show off.

In other words.

I needed style points.

The arena was obviously temporary, a large dirt circle divided up into a dozen or so hexagons for multiple duels to occur at once, transparent shields dividing each segment up. Iona had wandered away, Auri was cheering me from the stands, and I was ready.

I looked doubtfully at my first opponent. A nerdy-looking scrawny kid from the School, he might be 18, and I doubted that he could run a mile, even if his vitality was good. There was a bookish, distant air to him, and while I knew the System didn’t care about physical baseline for mages and casting skills, there was no reason for a good battlemage to not look after their body.

[Identify] gave me [Mage - 256]. Impressive for his apparent age, or at least it was extremely impressive for his age in Remus; I had no idea how it stacked up here.

I’d armed myself with just my tunic and my knife, leaving the "this person is dangerous!" armor with gemstones behind - along with the prayer from my parents. The last memento I had of them. I wasn’t going to risk that, not on something this minor. If I got into the School but lost my prayer, I’d never forgive myself. It wouldn’t be worth it.

The light between us turned green, and I waited to see what my opponent would do.

He closed his eyes and started chanting.

He CLOSED HIS EYES. IN A FIGHT.

Gods help me, it was amateur hour here. What was I doing here?

Establishing dominance. If this was the quality I was dealing with, this would be easy mode.

I mentally admonished myself not to get cocky, my eyebrows continuing to go up as my opponent kept chanting with his eyes closed. At one point he stumbled, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t wait to see what he would do, counter that, then beat him.

I slowly walked up to him, keeping my speed down to what a poor physical stat [Healer] should have, and "stabbed" him in the chest with my knife.

His shield flared with color, the light in our arena turned red, and I didn’t need Iona to translate to tell that I’d been declared the winner.

I rolled my neck.

Right.

Next one.

The dueling light turned green again, and the level 200ish [Ranger] across from me started flinging knives at me. One after another, she quickly and efficiently threw them at me, each one aiming for a vital spot.

A solid tactic, letting me know that not everyone here was a rank amateur, and my first opponent had simply been… somewhat special.

However, I was more than twice her level. In spite of obvious skills enhancing her moves, the knives didn’t look like they were moving all that quickly to me. I dodged and weaved through them, avoiding the vast majority of her attacks. Her patterns were good, and I wasn’t able to fully dodge all of them. I grabbed some of the knives out of the air, returning them to sender, and every now and then one of the knives required an action besides ‘dodge’ or ‘catch’.

So I simply flared my [Mantle of the Stars] in a tiny circle right above my skin. To people who were low-leveled or inexperienced, it would look like they hit me, but didn’t do anything. To people with high levels and more experience, it would look like I had an automatic shield skill.

The experts would be able to tell exactly what I was doing, and would know just how difficult it was to pull off, and they were the people I needed to impress.

We traded knives until I got a lucky shot in, and was declared the winner of the duel.

Hey.

I wasn’t exactly an expert at throwing knives! Never donate your weapon to your opponent and all that.

I did a few more duels, getting a feel for how people fought these days. A small measure of the quality of my opponents, and what I could get away with.

It was still good exercise, and I felt suitably warmed up for the free-for-all that was going to start soon.

Chapter 14
Entrance Exams IV

I’d gotten in a small catnap after a few more duels, getting a feel for how strong people were. What tricks I needed to be on the lookout for, what had changed.

Frankly, it was hard to tell. On one hand, the world clearly had more. More skills. More fields. More ways of fighting. There were angles to consider that I’d never dreamed were possible before, which was frankly silly of me. The System allowed anything to be possible.

On the other? I was fighting students. Sure, they were around the same age as me. Sure, they were the ones interested in duels. But no matter how much I reminded myself that the fights were real, and to give it my all, I just couldn’t stop seeing kids across from me in the arena.

Nevermind some of them were older than I was. They just… hadn’t spent their life on the edge, fighting for survival. They hadn’t spent years training to kill. A few of them dabbled in polite dueling now and then - or at least that’s what it seemed like - but there was a difference between occasionally dueling, and spending all day every day working on how to become more lethal.

In a way, I was slightly jealous.

Only a few registered on my "pay attention" scale. Other men and women who’d gone through a lifetime of training to be a warrior, of training to fight and kill for their life. They were the threats.

Iona and I were listening to the rules of the free-for-all getting announced by one of the arena people. Not the elf. Iona was continuing to translate, and I swore if I got admitted to the School the first class I was taking was a language class or five. I was sick and tired of not understanding people.

Actually…

Iona had a blessing…

Didn’t hurt to try, right?

"Selene. Lunaris. Can I please get a blessing to understand people? Languages alone would be nice, but if you could also help me, like, understand people that’d be great as well."

I heard a distant laugh, and my heart leapt up into my throat.

"No." A strangely familiar voice whispered in my ear.

Damn. I got the goddesses to personally deny my request. That didn’t happen every day! Maybe being near their [Paladin] helped?

We’d rounded up Artemis, Julius, and Amber, and they were watching from the stands along with Auri. They also had my armor. Hilariously, this was the first time in ages that I believed I could get some actual minor use out of it - except laying low and looking like I wasn’t a threat was the better plan!

I’d made it explicitly clear, almost to the point of being annoying, that I was here to fight for a combat scholarship. I’d bugged and irritated a half-dozen people to that effect, which did me no favors on one hand, but also got me on their radar. I considered that a win, although Iona’s eyebrows kept going up the longer I was at it.

"Welcome, one and all, to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft’s free-for-all event! Some of you are old hands at this, some of you are brand new! A few of you are using this event as your application to the School. Welcome, welcome! First, I would like to thank Mormerilhawn, the Black Rose, whose skills make this all possible. When we don’t have a [Master of the Arena] giving us a hand, these events are just not possible. Now! Let me explain how this works. There is a large area, about 14 square miles. The boundaries will be clearly marked, and we ask you to not go past them. You will be given a minor beacon, directing you to your starting position. You don’t have to go there, but we encourage you to. No stalking other people! You can team up with your friends though. Once everyone’s roughly in the right spot, we will begin. Prizes are awarded to the final eight contestants, with each of the towers having generously provided one of the rewards! The last wizard standing gets first pick of the prizes, the second one gets the second pick, et cetera. None of this nonsense trying to deliberately get fourth place because that has the best prize. That was a disaster."

A ripple of chuckles came from the crowd.

"Rules! The shields you all have in place should prevent harm. There are ways to bypass the shields. If you do so, you will be removed from the event, likely expelled, and handed off to the locals. Here. There will be no transportation back to your home. Mormerilhawn has given each and every one of you the speech. You know what causes harm and what won’t. You eliminate another contestant by causing them enough damage that their shield triggers a ‘loss’. Now, for the free-for-all, we’ve got a special little rule. Mormerilhawn, in all his power and glory, will teleport anyone who’s defeated outside of the event."

Iona broke from her translation.

"Wait, he can do that!?" She exclaimed. "That’s… that’s…"

"That’s not telling me the rest of the rules!!" I poked her in the side, my finger ending up with more damage than Iona.

Iona cursed.

"Right, sorry. I’ve missed some of it, but…"

"... you can work as a team, or by yourself. It makes no difference to us. Just make sure your team has the prizes figured out! We do value people being able to work together, just as much as we all love watching a good backstab."

That brought another round of chuckles.

"Speaking of WATCHING! We have a few mages here who’ll be displaying the events via dedicated Mirage skills back to the audience! They’ll be doing all sorts of nonsense like getting drunk, gambling, and having a grand old time while you’re in the mud. It is also how the coaches in charge of combat-related admittances will determine if you are good enough to join the School or not! Questions?"

A question was asked.

"No! You can’t rob other students! You can grab their weapons and the like, but at the end of the event, you need to give them their equipment back! Nothing will be done about destroyed weapons, so think carefully about those arrows and one-shot talismans! Next question!"

On it went, a back and forth Q&amp;A. All reasonable things.

"Right! Last thing! Anyone with a teleportation index over 1,000,000 can’t compete! You’re too heavy and vital to get teleported out in the event that you’re eliminated."

Iona cut off at the end there, even though the announcer kept going. Her eyebrows furrowed in thought as her fingers twitched. The announcer said something else that had everyone start moving towards the front.

Curse my short stature. I couldn’t see what was going on up there.

"I think I’m over." She admitted.

"How can you tell?"

"I’m heavy with a lot of vitality. Here, let’s go ask one of the organizers for you." Without waiting for me to answer, she grabbed my hand and started weaving through the crowd of people.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Iona didn’t actually know if she was too heavy or not to compete, and was using my lack of knowledge as a cover for her own.

I didn’t mind, I needed to know anyway. Plus her hand was warm.

We got to the front, where little glowing circles like wafers with an arrow pointed on them were being handed out.

Iona had a quick word with one of the people, then had a fast question for me.

"Yeah. What’s your weight and vitality?"

I told her, she translated, and took one token.

"Ok, yeah, I was right." She handed it back to me. "I’ve got too many stats for this. You’re in, I’m not, I guess I’ll try the individual tournament." Her face fell for a moment, then brightened up.

"Oh! I might be able to win for once!"

"You haven’t won a tournament before?" I asked her. She shook her head.

"Nope! My build’s not great for duels. It’s good for long slogs. Anyways, I wish you luck!"

Iona clapped me on the shoulder, then waded back against the crowd.

I looked down at my token with an arrow on it.

Well, this seemed obvious enough.

I walked over fields and hills, skirting around a pond, thankful that I wasn’t getting directed into the forest like some of the other contestants.

I was continuing operation Max Deception. I had my [Mantle of the Stars] active and ready… over my heart, front and back, obviously protecting a "weak spot". It wasn’t actually a weak spot. I only had my still-filthy tunic, a knife, and my Deception Ring, displaying a low level.

My trickery wouldn’t last, nor was I relying on it. However, it’d give me an edge, and I could use every single edge possible. I wanted to show off every trick possible. After all, showing off was how I got to a safer spot, there was no reason to hold back.

Two different audiences. Two different shows.

Some people got into small groups as we scattered over the contest fields. A few came up to me, but I just shrugged and kept repeating that I didn’t understand them. In Creation. A few of the more obvious ones got predatory looks, and I could only hope they tried me.

A few groups gathered up together and hustled off, and I mentally marked them as my first targets. A single person taking out an entire group by herself?

That was exactly the sort of thing that’d get me noticed.

Most of the groups seemed to be a few knights, with a half dozen to a dozen lightly armed men and women-at-arms. Having practically no knowledge of the country, culture, or really anything, I had to go back to some fundamentals, and assume there was a hotshot noble - or just someone really rich and powerful - who had a bunch of hanger-ons, and they were competing here for… admission? The prizes?

Knowing their motives would help me fight them, but it wasn’t critical. I did mentally mark what direction they were going in, planning on heading towards them first. A large group would move slower.

One group was filled with all manner of elvenoids in various brightly colored robes, with long sleeves. They were completely different from the witch-wizard outfit that most members of the School were wearing. It all looked terribly impractical, but they were among the higher leveled groups I’d seen. Who knows, maybe they all had [Impractical Bathrobe Fighter] as a class or something, giving them bonuses when they fought like that, or their class gave them a ton of extra experience for it.

Or something. I wouldn’t underestimate them, the same way I was hoping others would underestimate me.

I made it to my spot, halfway up a small hill, and waited for the signal to begin. As I did, I quickly thought of a few different strategies that other people might go for.

There was beating everyone else up. Somebody had to do it, otherwise the free-for-all would drag out for eternity.

There was turtling up, which I suspected some of the groups might do. Just make themselves a great big fuck-off target that nobody wanted to tackle. If nobody fought them, they’d make it to the end of the event in short order, at which point things got complicated.

There was the ‘hide and hope nobody sees me’ strategy, which would be great for the type of person I was pretending to be. Just hope that everyone else fought like crazy, sneak around the edges of the event, and either backstab or sneak into the top 8 to get prizes.

I doubted that type of strategy would be favorably looked upon by the people making determinations about combat entry, or scholarships. Unless free-for-alls were bigger events, and being a sneaky mouse was valued.

Eh. Not what I was aiming for.

I was going to be the rampaging bull type. Just running around, looking for people and fights, and giving it my all until I was eliminated.

Or hell.

I was a Sentinel.

I was going to win this thing, for my own pride. To prove that the line in my skills, ‘The peak of humanity’, wasn’t just there for show.

Mist started to rise up, thick and heavy, severely limiting visibility. It didn’t care that the sun was up, some Classer was using a skill to make visibility worse. Interestingly, it only stayed thick and heavy near the ground, the open sky still visible.

Weird, but ok.

My token turned green, a great gong reverberated through the area, and the event was clearly on.

While I was on Operation: Complete Dominance, I wasn’t going to be terminally stupid about it. I wasn’t going to go flying through the air, letting everyone on the ground see me, while the mists made it hard for me to see them. That was asking to get turned into a pincushion.

However, not everyone had the same line of thought. A number of people exploded out of the mists at various points. One of the bathrobe people surfing on a sword, another with no hilt and fancy tassels in his hand. A woman grabbed onto Lightning bolts, and used them like monkey bars to swing through the sky. A knight had a pair of shimmering wings - angel-like, not butterfly-like - and had his lance and shield at the ready. A dozen more people jumped into the air in various ways. Wings, platforms, stepping on the air itself, no two people had the same method of flying.

Well. I just had to do something about that. People making themselves into targets all over the place? Please.

I had to say, preparing the attack was weird. It took me a few moments to identify why.

I was taking offensive action against people who weren't a threat to my life. I’d been bound by ‘First, do no harm’ for so long that actions to the contrary just felt wrong. Like my underwear was full of sand or something.

At the same time, it was strangely liberating. For once in my life, the gloves were properly off. I didn’t need to worry about causing others harm. I could let all my training rip.

I conjured a half-dozen [Kaleidoscope] butterflies, then started to run away from them, mentally tracking the closest dozen contenders. When three of them were roughly in range - I would’ve liked to get more, but I’d take what I could get - I gleefully launched my butterflies out on various intercept courses.

They emerged from the mists at high speeds right under their feet. One of them noticed, two of them didn’t. The butterflies swarmed up and around them, detonating a moment later. Bright flashes of Radiance coated the three of them, and I saw one of them fall.

I started running in the direction the guy had fallen - another one of the fancy robe-wearing people, although he’d been directly stepping on air, not flying on a sword - mentally noting that the other two hadn’t emerged from the explosions.

The lack of anything resembling a kill notification was weird. I had to assume they’d been teleported away, but a little voice in the back of my head kept saying they’d thrown up a powerful illusion, and were sneaking around still. That I needed to blast Radiance around me, kill their illusion, and handle them.

Which would make a nice bright spot exactly where I was, and grab the attention of half the fliers. I wanted to be aggressive, not suicidal.

Something to keep in mind.

A whirling storm of blades landed in the spot where I’d launched my butterflies from, and I was glad I’d already been out of the way before I even sent them after the fliers. I probably would’ve gotten caught by that otherwise. Obviously, the people in the air weren’t going to take attacks from the ground lightly.

I made it to where I’d seen the flying warrior fall to, finding him picking himself up off the ground.

[Warrior - 280]

Not a significant threat to me. He drew his sword as I charged him, and my bond-enhanced speed let me quickly figure out the most delightful way to beat him with style.

Normally, I’d call it a stupid plan, and throw out any Ranger Trainee proposing it. However, I needed the style points.

I flowed around his thrust, opening up one arm to slap his face. As my hand came up, I saw dozens, hundreds of potential spots to hit him, ways to win. Sword between the ribs. Radiance beam through the heart, eyes, or mouth. If I wanted to disable him, dozens of joints I could hit. All easier, more practical targets than what I was going for.

Right before my slap connected with his ugly face, I blasted Radiance magic from my palm as powerfully as I could, triggering the shield and the teleport.

To someone watching?

It would look like I slapped him out of the event.

Chapter 15
Minor Interlude - Mormerilhawn
Dominance

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Searing Slap]. Would you like to replace a skill with [Searing Slap]?]

I dismissed the notification, mentally cursing my second class. It was supposed to be easy to pick up new skills - which it was, I could barely get out of bed without being offered something new - but apparently merging two skills wasn’t quite that easy, even though they had significant overlap.

Then again, it’d be a fairly large boost to my overall power once I got them merged and opened myself up for yet another skill.

The School could probably help me with that problem.

First things first.

Getting a scholarship, so I could actually attend.

I jogged over to the nearby woods, and started to work on some camouflage.

Mormerilhawn’s mind was split over a dozen different ways, [Parallel Thoughts] allowing for the processing of multiple threads at the same time. It let him track numerous fights that were going on, permitting him to keep tabs on not only the chaotic free-for-all that he was running, but also the individual tournament. It helped him find the most interesting fights and promising combatants to display for the rest of the judges, coaches, and trainers that the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft had.

Running arenas was difficult, but rewarding work, and the Black Rose found great satisfaction in his job. There was something about displaying curated fights for others to enjoy, about creating a safe environment that let others train and level that was just right.

The School had convinced him to take a small, 500-year tenure with them, promising easier levels and improved skills. Thus far, they had delivered, Mormerilhawn quickly leveling from the new challenges and environment.

There was an additional layer of satisfaction helping the poor mortals along. Their lives were so quick, so fleeting, and they hadn’t been born elves. It wasn’t their fault they’d been born lesser, and it was Mormerilhawn’s - and all elves, really - obligation to try and raise them up, help them to strive to become better in what little time they had on the planet.

"Mormerilhawn. Somebody wants to see you. They’ve got an accusation of cheating. Honor demands that we investigate." Sir Fulgrim told Mormerilhawn.

The poor mortal knight considered himself the equal of the peerless elf, which irked him to no end. They were not equal. The School didn’t even have them at equal rankings!

Still. An accusation of cheating was serious. Nothing could besmirch the [Arena Master’s] good name.

"Bring him in." The Black Rose ordered, and a cultivator from one of the minor sects entered the judge’s room.

The mortal stared in awe at the dozens and dozens of mirages around the room, each one displaying a different fight, another battle that was going on somewhere within Mormerilhawn’s domain. He refrained from smiling.

He did so love impressing people, no matter how easily impressed the poor mortals were. Even a low level illusionist could emulate what Mormerilhawn was doing!

"Speak." He ordered the cultivator after giving him enough time to be properly awed.

The cultivator straightened up, showing the arrogance ingrained in every so-called young master of the mortal sects.

Even in arrogance he couldn’t compare to an elf.

"Honored senior. Some lowly commoner trash blatantly cheated, improperly removing me from the event. I could not let such a stain on your honor come to pass. Could you please give the Grand Dao Temple some face, hand the impudent cheater over to us, and rightfully restore me to the event?"

Even Mormerilhawn thought the cultivators had a few screws loose. He didn’t care about the sect’s face, nor could they do anything to him or the School if they disliked it, and he had a mental chuckle at the sheer preposterousness of the name of the temple. Grand Dao indeed.

An accusation of cheating, no matter how poorly delivered, did need to be investigated.

"Fulgrim. A second pair of eyes?" Mormerilhawn generously offered the knight. He didn’t need the second pair of eyes, but the more people that confirmed there was no cheating going on, the better.

"There is no other honorable course." The man agreed.

Some more details were given, and Mormerilhawn mentally juggled through his various thought processes, letting the one dedicated to remembering how everyone was eliminated take the forefront, recreating an illusion of the events that transpired.

"Name, Healer. Class, healer. Admitted for… this will be a surprise, healing. Couldn’t afford tuition, decided to try her luck in the free for all. One of the Desperates." Sir Fulgrim summarized for Mormerilhawn, who couldn’t be bothered to look up the details of every single contestant. He used a slightly derogatory word for those who came to the School penniless, were admitted, then tried to use any means necessary to gain a scholarship. The free-for-all fight was a popular one, the poor fools not realizing that winning the event wasn’t nearly enough to get a Ruby ticket.

"The remarkably durable one." She’d gotten the highest trigger threshold shield he could provide on her body, and one of the lowest ones he could justify on her head. An appropriate trade-off.

"Level… 513!?" Sir Fulgrim cried out.

Mormerilhawn glared at the man, noting the cultivator had gotten an ugly look.

"We will discuss your lapse later." He coldly stated. The Black Rose was about fair arena fights. A healer of that level, in these lands, would be unfairly attacked, and Sir Fulgrim had just handed one of her enemies a perfect excuse to attack her outside the boundaries of the event he ran.

Unacceptable. The elf didn’t think Fulgrim had deliberately let it leak, the man simply being careless. It was inappropriate regardless.

Mormerilhawn used his Mirage skills to replay the event. Healer Healer - Healer Elaine, as bizarre as the combination was - started the event at her assigned spot, a solid omen. The event began, dozens of the contestants took to the skies, and she almost immediately launched a multi-projectile skill at three of them, immediately moving out of the way to avoid a counter-attack that she had no way of knowing was coming. Her attack directly eliminated two competitors, and the three of them got to watch her blur around the aggrieved cultivator, directly slapping him out of the event.

No, not quite - there was a burst of light from her hand right before she removed him.

Mormerilhawn ended the replay of the event, locking eyes with Sir Fulgrim. The knight knew what Mormerilhawn wanted.

"No cheating. You were deceived and outclassed by another contestant, and there is no rule against deception. You should go and reflect upon the fight and your actions." He decreed.

Mormerilhawn turned away as the cultivator left, spinning off another fragment of mind to watch this competitor, and have her exploits be among the ones displayed in the judge’s station.

Another part of his mind clamored, and let him know that she had been next in line to be displayed anyways.

Interesting.

Elaine’s exploits were on full display in the judge’s room, and as time passed and competitors were eliminated, fewer and fewer displays were running.

Part of Mormerilhawn’s mind was fully dedicated to watching Elaine.

She disguised herself in mediocre camouflage, although it was quite good for a mortal. He had a brief moment of concern that she’d simply spend the rest of the event hiding, like most of the Desperates, but ended up pleasantly surprised.

Her next move was to find one of the fortified encampments, and slowly, methodically take it apart. She started off by sniping the scouts with powerful lances of Radiance, then slowly whittled away at the forces until they broke and ran. Elaine didn’t bother chasing them all down, instead piling the camp’s supplies together, and lighting them all on fire.

Mormerilhawn’s right eyebrow went up.

That wasn’t a move of a show fighter.

That wasn’t a move of a knight, or most people trained in the country they were currently in.

That was a soldier’s move.

Combined with confidently tackling an entire encampment, and winning?

"Somebody has misplaced one of their commandos." Mormerilhawn said to himself, knowing perfectly well that he’d said it loudly enough to draw the attention of the other judges to the fighter in question. Shirayuki split her attention, her eyes flitting between Elaine and two other contestants.

The Black Rose mentally congratulated himself on achieving a sort of fairness once again. Sir Fulgrim had brought Elaine to the attention of an enemy, giving him the perfect excuse to retaliate against her. Now Mormerilhawn had evened the scales by bringing Elaine to Shirayuki’s attention, the kitsune one of the key deciders if she would be granted a scholarship or not. He hadn’t placed any words in her ear, made no recommendations, but now she knew, and that was enough for him.

They watched Elaine duel with an archer, the woman slowly walking through a storm of arrows to casually dispatch her opponent with another one of her now-signature slaps.

They watched Elaine try to pull the same stunt against one of the School’s wizards - not a member of the School’s combat team, simply a hopeful who hoped the event would let him join the team - but changed plans halfway through when the School’s student kept throwing skill after skill at Elaine, the maybe-commando eventually showing that the entire thing had been a farce when she simply blasted the opposing wizard with one of her Radiance lances from a distance.

She found another camp, much better fortified, and her old set of siege tricks didn’t work. When taking out individuals failed, she simply resorted to sending wave after wave of her colorful, explosive Radiance butterflies at the shields, eventually overwhelming them.

She was like a wolf among sheep once the wards went down.

A sniper - one of the top contestants - almost got her, a perfect heart-shot streaking over three kilometers, shattering the shield the healer had cast on herself.

It wasn’t enough to trigger Mormerilhawn’s shield though, and with the knowledge that an assassin was after her, the two played a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse, hunting each other down.

Elaine won.

The few judges that had been nearly exclusively watching the sniper’s actions moved over to watching Elaine, and Shirayuki had nobody else that was catching her interest.

"I want her." Shirayuki stated.

"She needs a full scholarship." Another judge reminded her.

"Look at that talent."

"It’s training. Don’t belittle people’s hard work by calling it talent."

"Somebody is using child soldiers again."

"Who doesn’t start training their soldiers young?"

Elaine squared off against a Mirror [Knight], her Radiance simply bouncing off of his skill-infused armor. After trading a few blows, she showed good judgment and fled, not getting sucked into a long, drawn-out fight against somebody who could ignore most of what she did.

She took to the skies after that, dueling with a few of the other aerial combatants while avoiding incoming fire from the ground. After establishing her zone of control, she spent some time using her aerial superiority to take out opponents - and eliminate a number of sneaky combatants who thought they were clever by hiding.

After proving her prowess at both fighting in the air, and fighting people on the ground from the air, Elaine went after one of the few remaining encampments. After eliminating a few of their warriors and wizards, they set out a truce banner, which the healer cautiously approached. Their leader, the daughter of some petty Rolland noble that Mormerilhawn couldn’t be bothered to remember, was seated primly, making offers to the woman.

Elaine waited for the right moment, and in a blinding blaze of Radiance mixed in with the darker Celestial shroud of stars she used as her shield, eliminated the bulk of her competition in a single fell swoop.

"Unsporting! Unfair! Dishonorable!" Sir Fulgrim cried out.

Mormerilhawn gave a slow grin of joy.

"A perfectly fine backstab. She’s waging war here. A true, proper war, where the only thing that matters is victory."

The camp’s supplies going up in flames once more proved the truth in Mormerilhawn’s words.

She was trained to wage war. Pretty duels and sporting events were not her bread and butter.

Elaine wasn’t the only interesting contestant, a half-dozen others getting high marks from the judges. Ragini Salah, a Pyronox-Celestial Rabbitkin from Ankhelt, was fighting everyone she could find, entirely eschewing weapons and armor in the process. She’d already gained admittance on combat, war, and logistics, and had earned a full scholarship already. She was simply participating in the event because she wanted to.

Rin Jou from the low-key Fa Ram sect was lying on a hill, stalk of grass in his mouth. He hadn’t moved since the event started, but his chicken was perched on his head, nobly dueling all who approached. The man had professed no interest in joining the School, he just wanted to participate in the festivities.

Given his degree of participation, it looked more like his bonded companion wanted to participate. Establish a pecking order.

Obli claimed to be from Rolland, but the School didn’t discriminate. In private, he admitted that he was a member of the Ekada Ruh, the secretive society of changelings. He wasn’t a particularly powerful fighter, but Mormerilhawn had calibrated his shield to prevent everything except Lightning from triggering a loss. His method of fighting was crude and clumsy, but it was endlessly entertaining to watch his opponents flail on him until he managed to land a counterblow.

The staff had instructions about the man already. Anyone complaining about him would simply be told that it was correct.

The judges had already decided that he was unsuitable for admission to the School on combat prowess, but it didn’t stop them from having a good laugh when his fights were displayed.

Tristan. Nissa. Xatir. Elaine. Their names rang out, fleeing the judge’s lips as they performed feat after feat.

An Earth sorcerer managed to drive Elaine back, only for the healer to tactically retreat, circle around, take to the skies, and once she was high enough, simply dismissed her wings and dropped onto the [Mage], letting the blinding sun behind her hide her descent. A burst of magic, a flaring of her wings, and she ended up an inch away from the ground, her competitor defeated and teleported away.

A powerful knight, who’d been forced to flee from the first camp Elaine had attacked, got the drop on her. He grabbed her by the hair and shoved her head into the river she was drinking from. Her arms and legs flailed as magic exploded around the pair, and Mormerilhawn was about to step in - drowning an opponent was one of the few ways somebody could actually die in these events - when the warrior in question was teleported out by his other skill.

The judges roared, half in approval at Elaine’s victory, half in outrage at the terrible behavior of the knight. He hadn’t tried to fight her, he’d tried to murder her.

Mormerilhawn was keeping a close eye on his mana, and so noted that the man was moderately over the teleportation limit he had set for the event. It was a good thing he had significant padding in his estimations, and the entire grounds were part of his domain.

He teleported the man a second time to the holding cells, intent on making sure that he properly faced justice, and not the utter farce that was ‘justice’ among the nobility in Rolland.

The event was winding down, only a few participants left. Elaine squared off against the last [Knight] on the field. The knight would attend the School one way or another, being the 7th princess of Rolland’s closest companion and bodyguard. She was hoping that the School would reduce her tuition, keeping the Crown’s expenses low.

She charged Elaine, who immediately took flight, her signature Radiance beams landing on the knight's helmet. The [Knight] raised her shield, protecting her head, but Elaine simply repositioned her beam, hitting another part of the [Knight’s] armor. The two darted around, Elaine keeping her distance while trying to melt through the warrior’s armor enough to trigger a loss, while the warrior tried to get in physical range to defeat Elaine.

The fight was brought to a sudden close as bolts of red Lightning rained down on the two of them, the Classer who swung through the air on electricity finding an opportunity to take out two of her competitors.

Both of them vanished as Mormerilhawn’s teleport took them back to the waiting room.

There was a mix of cheering and cries of dismay from the judges, depending on who they’d been rooting for. Three fights later, and the event was finished, the finalists determined.

"... Next up is Healer. Class: Healer. Admitted for healing. Would it have killed her to give us her real name?" Sir Fulgrim joked to a round of laughter.

"Wait, she was already admitted for healing!?" One of the judges squeaked. No fault of hers, gnomes didn’t exactly get the low end of the vocal spectrum. "Did the standards fall that low?"

Fulgrim passed the examiner’s results over.

"She’s 22." The judge said. "She’s 22, competent enough in healing to get admitted on that basis - granted, with medium marks - but after what we just saw? Has anyone checked that her age is correct, and she’s not secretly an Immortal having fun?"

"That can be arranged." Mormerilhawn said. "I last saw movements like that with highly trained commandos, and if I had stumbled upon the scene, not knowing that an event was going on, I would’ve believed there to be a true war going on, not one of the minor honorbound spats most mortals call ‘war’."

Sir Fulgrim sputtered at that, but Mormerilhawn ignored him.

"What strikes me as well is that she had no interest in being admitted for combat, nor did she express a desire to learn more about fighting." One of the judges chimed in.

"When was the last time we had someone that good not want to learn how to fight better?"

"Forget that. When was the last time we saw somebody that good?"

"She didn’t win."

"Oh pshaw, winning the free-for-all is all about luck in the end. Remember three years ago somebody won the entire thing after going for a nap?"

"Was that the mutual knockout?"

"No, with the misplaced trap rune."

"Elaine has repeatedly stated that she is only able to attend if she has a scholarship. I don’t know which army she wandered out of, but it's not every day that we are able to snatch up a highly trained and competent individual for our teams. Any objections?"

"She defeated an opponent under a truce banner." Sir Fulgrim said. "The lack of honor is intolerable."

"That is what war is." Mormerilhawn objected. Alas, the damn School rules prevented him from simply declaring that Elaine was to obtain a full scholarship. The rules governing the School were in place for a reason, and it did stop other Immortals at the School from ordering him around.

"I want her." Shirayuki stated again, swaying a number of the judges’s minds. She was in charge of the School’s combat team.

"A vote." Another judge said.

It had been a long day, and there were more candidates to evaluate. Votes were quickly tallied with a majority in favor of the healer, and the next candidate was soon discussed.

Chapter 16
Scholarships and Scoldings

One moment I was fighting a small mountain of metal, the next I was in a small room. The teleportation was disorienting, and I was still in the middle of some high-speed maneuvers and blasting my Radiance around.

Being teleported hadn’t stopped either of them, and I crashed into the wall of the tiny room before reorienting myself.

Right. Most people would be in a fight when they got ejected, and it’d be a bad idea to have people in the middle of casting huge skills to be teleported on top of other people.

I landed, and habitually turned my notifications back on. A half-dozen skills were offered to me, one for each unusual way I’d taken somebody out, and I almost dismissed them after glancing at them before one caught my eye.

[*ding!* Would you like to merge [Solar Flare] and [Sun’s Heart] into [Solar Corona]?]

Solar Corona: You have bathed in the unceasing light for over 20,000 years. The ever-burning glory of the sun becomes you. You have been anointed and crowned by the blazing sun, borrowing its power for your own. You energetically cleanse darkness, fear, the cold, and the wet wherever you go. The power of the sun is on your brow - and at your fingertips. Massively increased heat, power, destructive energy, range and incineration for all Radiance skills. -262,144 Mana Regeneration.

Whoa.

I immediately accepted the skill, watching my two old skills merge into one while I quickly tried to process what I’d read, and all the implications of the new skill.

First off, that mana regeneration cost implied a massive increase to my power. It was literally eating a quarter of my regeneration, and the way I understood it to work was it basically ‘stored’ all that mana to improve my abilities. My Radiance beams were going to be nasty, and I wish I had a few rocks to melt through to test.

The issue would be the same as it usually was. I was only good in a fight while I still had mana in my mana pool, but with the extra oomph on my skills I should be very good during that time.

I bet I could totally melt through skill-reinforced armor now!

The description was also somewhat terrifying. Five different factors got massively increased? They also stacked with each other, and the total effect was probably greater than the sum of its parts.

Also, it made taking another Radiance class attractive from a strict reading. It deliberately called out that it worked on all my Radiance stuff, not just the class skills. It was the safe, boring option, but sometimes the little extra to stay alive was nice.

I’d nearly been drowned to death a few hours ago. During a supposedly safe event.

I shuddered and tried to put it out of my mind.

The skill description was also a mix of terrifying and interesting. Crowned by the sun? Energetic cleansing? Bathing in light for 20,000 years straight?

Was the System counting the entire time I’d been in the fae realms for my classes and skills!? It didn’t quite make sense, not with my age still being 22, but frankly I didn’t know. It wasn’t like "people who’ve been in the fae realms for stupid amounts of time" was a well-studied phenomena.

Or maybe it was in this day and age, I just hadn’t found the information yet. Not like I’d gotten time to.

By all the gods above… I must have some insane classes waiting for me. Forget waiting to get [Meditation] to a high level, that wasn’t going to do a damn thing for me if that was true.

Classing up jumped on my to-do list. I doubted my general skills could make much of a difference at this point. Not quite to the top - I still had dozens of other things to do.

Like leaving the room, and seeing what was going on.

And figure out where I was.

I settled down and left the room, still completely disoriented. Sure, I vaguely knew where I was - in an arena room - but I had no idea where that was. Being able to teleport other people was a terrifying ability.

It didn’t take too much imagination to figure out how teleporting somebody could go wrong. Into space. Into a closed cave with no breathable air. Into the bottom of the ocean. Heck, I had to displace air when I was teleported, so there was no reason I couldn’t be teleported into the heart of a volcano!

I followed the sounds of cheering, finding a large group of people - most of them in the pointy hats of the School - watching various fights that were being displayed via Mirage skills all around the area. Interestingly, whoever was casting the skills deliberately degraded the quality of the illusion, making it entirely clear that the fights being shown were fake, and there weren’t life or death struggles all over the spectator’s area.

A bunch of the spectators swooped down on me when I came in, babbling in a variety of languages, everyone trying to shove drinks or food or other things into my hands. Including a pair of underwear.

Ewwww.

I let that drop.

Most of the crowd swiftly abandoned me as the next contestant came out of the teleportation room, and I shook myself free of the few people who were trying to pester me for something or another. Even without speaking the language they were annoying!

I paused at one of the images playing - well, replaying - images from the battlefield. It was the last fight I’d been in, and I honestly didn’t know how I’d been taken out.

I was flitting around the knight, burning brightly, when a massive bolt of Lightning came down and took both of us out.

Bah.

I totally could’ve survived that. I suppose that was the difference between a game, and real life. I was fairly certain I’d eliminated a few opponents with non-lethal shots myself, so I couldn’t really complain when the same happened to me.

Now I just needed to know if my performance had been good enough.

After some aimless wandering around, I got scooped up by Artemis and the rest. Lots of cheering, hugging, and one overly-energetic and excited Auri later - along with stopping her from trying to find the mage who’d beaten me to get ‘revenge’ - and we kept walking around. After some more wandering around, we managed to find Iona, who’d won her tournament, then the organizers found me. The Black Rose was among them.

We did the usual song and dance of Iona translating, the organizers insisting that their language enchantments were good enough, their language enchantments totally failing - I wasn’t speaking a well-known language - Iona agreeing to translate, then the ‘Wait, your name is actually Elaine?’ spiel.

Finally, we got down to business.

"Yugure no Shirayuki." A beautiful kitsune told me, her eyes filled with lazy snowflakes reflecting her Ice element. Her fur was snow-white, and her nine tails were hypnotic, slipping out from her purple witch robes. "I’m the coach for the School’s team. I want you. I can get your tuition waived, if you’ll compete for us in events." She waved a stack of papers, which I assumed was my golden ticket.

I wanted to shout and jump for joy. There was one minor sticking point that I needed to clear up before I could happily accept.

"I’m sworn to do no harm. I can compete as long as I don’t need to hurt my competitors, like in today’s event."

That particular revelation set off a flurry of discussion before they got back to me.

"Acceptable. To the [Bursar]."

With a flurry of tails, she turned on one heel and stalked off. We glanced at each other, and hurried along after her. She set a blistering pace, and Iona had to pick up Fenrir to keep up. The ice-blue wyvern wrapped himself around Iona’s neck, perching on top of her head like the world’s deadliest scarf.

"That was so cool!" Amber exclaimed. "The way you snuck around with that barrel! They never figured out where those shots were coming from! Oh! Oh! And the thing with the river!?"

Amber stuck one hand up over her head, with a single finger pointing out, turning it around and pretending to blast people.

"The river was pretty fun. Insanely dangerous though, I would’ve completely been at the mercy of a Water [Mage] if they’d found me." I tried to caution Amber. Any of my Ranger instructors would’ve thrown a fit, although any Ranger team I was on would’ve been delighted if I managed to pull it off on a mission.

"But they didn’t!" Amber was skipping along, high off the excitement.

"I would’ve thrown you out of the Rangers so fast if you tried any of that on a mission." Julius teased.

Ok. Almost any Ranger team I was on.

"Was that how you killed the pirates?" He continued.

I shot him a finger.

"This was a display, and remind me, who was it that we kept throwing into the colosseum to fight badly but show off? His name started with a B…"

Artemis gave me a pointed look, and with a slight start of guilt I remembered that she’d also been thrown into the arena, just slightly less voluntarily than Brawling.

"Sure, but you didn’t flash the Ranger eagle at the end." Julius said. "Makes the whole thing a wash."

I rolled my eyes at him, and was readying a retort when Amber jumped in.

"OhByTheWayPleaseDon’tBeMadIMightHaveBetWithYourGemsAndWonATon!"

She thought she was being clever, completely forgetting that I had at least 100 times the vitality that she did, and her ‘fast speech’ was easily parsed.

"You WHAT!" I blew up at her. Those gems were some of the last mementos I had of home, each one a precious reminder of a person forever lost and gone.

"I got them back!" Amber quickly backpedaled under my furious gaze, Shirayuki continuing to pace through the crowd, with or without us.

"Whoa, chill Elaine. I was fine with it." Artemis - ARTEMIS - was the voice of reason here.

"Brrpt BRPT!" Auri was scolding me for my yelling over the ‘brilliant’ scheme.

I took a deep breath, letting myself center again. I should hear what the plan was, especially if everyone else was in on it and alright with it.

At the same time, it wasn’t their stuff that had been risked.

"Ok. Explain." I curtly ordered as I started to follow Shirayuki through the crowds.

"We’re completely broke. In basically every sense of the word." Julius started to explain, and if he was on board with this I guess it couldn’t have been that terrible of an idea. "Everything here works off of gems, and you were a total dark horse. Amazing odds, like a lame horse and a bad [Charioteer]. We saw the chance to take a calculated risk, knowing how good you were, and made back our initial bet thirty times over. Almost two diamond’s worth." He said, and I mentally translated.

Almost 50,000 coins.

Ok.

That was a lot. Two years tuition at the School, for one. Enough money to buy a modest home.

"Yikes. Alright." I mentally readjusted, considering how incredibly broke we had been. "What are we doing with the money?"

Everyone except Iona traded looks.

"Grease a few palms to get myself and Artemis situated, get you whatever funds you need for the School, and whatever’s left over Amber uses to start her mercantile empire." Julius said.

"BRRRPT!"

"And buy Auri a pretty nest." I said.

"Brrrpt."

"Or some juice."

"BRrrrpt!!"

"Auri, pick one thing, a mirror, a nest, juice… we only have so much, we’re a little poor now."

"Brrpt…"

I thought about the division. I thought about Amber’s rules of acquisition, or at least the ones I’d been told.

"I want 90%." I told Amber.

"What!?" She squeaked, and it was hilarious.

"I want 90% of the profits."

"NO!" She protested. "Absolutely not!"

"My gems provided the seed money. Doesn’t that make me, like, the investor or something?" I had basically no idea what I was talking about. I just knew I was putting the screws to Amber. It was only fair.

She grumbled a bit.

"50%. I’m putting in all the work. And that’s after cost of goods sold, expenses, cost to buy property and equipment, bribes, taxes, fees, and the whole other host of things you probably don’t care about."

"Deal!" I agreed before Amber could back out. I never expected to get anything out of this, honestly, and I had complete faith in Amber making me rich.

I got distracted by the sight of a massive sky barge landing some distance ahead of us. The bottom half was like a flat-bottomed boat, but the top was all fancy and decorated. Pillars of yellow and red twisted with fascinating, ornamental designs, showing off dozens of magical creatures. The whole thing had various streamers, and was packed full of black-robed students.

We were there a few moments later. We had to wait for the students to disembark, then a number of waiting robed people boarded the boat. Shirayuki swept onto the boat, and we followed in her wake. Someone in a fancy purple robe tried to protest, but Shirayuki just said a few words to him, and he was quiet.

I needed to learn the language as soon as possible. My first few classes were all going to be language classes, and if I could manage it, I was going to do them all at once.

After a few minutes of shuffling around and all of us getting jam-packed onto the sky ship, we took off. The process was smooth, and the few gasps I heard seemed to be from similarly non-robed non-School people on the boat. I kind of wished I was near the edge. I would’ve liked to look out and see all the sights from up high. I loved being in the air, and flying under someone else’s power was only a hair worse than flying under my own.

"I wondered how we’d get to the island." Iona said as the wind whipped through the crowd, grabbing the occasional poorly-guarded hat and sending it flying off the rails.

I really, really hoped there were some safety features to stop people from flying out of the boat.

"Brrrpt brrrrrrrrrrpt." Auri didn’t like someone else doing the ‘flying’ for her.

"You know, you could just fly up. You don’t need to be on me." I told the little hummingbird.

"BRPT!" Auri leaped into action, flying just above the sea of hats to ‘prove’ she was doing it herself, and not letting the boat ‘fly’ her somewhere.

"BBRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt!!!!" Auri screeched in fear as the wind grabbed her, and launched her down the length of the ship, just like the rest of the hats.

With a roll of my eyes I flickered my [Mantle of the Stars], catching Auri, not willing to test what anti-falling measures the ship had. It might’ve been a good lesson in too much pride and thinking before leaping - she was a phoenix, falling out of a sky ship would hurt her ego more than anything else - but it was already a strange place, a strange land, and I didn’t need to take the detour.

"Brrpt BRPT." Auri huddled up next to me, complaining that the magic winds were too strong, and the powerful Wind elemental had it out for her.

I’d seen elementals in Lun’Kat’s lair. I saw how fast the boat was moving, and the corresponding breeze as a result. I’d eat one of the extra-poofy hats if there was an elemental involved.

I let Auri soothe her wounded pride though. Our various small talk as the barge continued its ascent led to Amber broaching the topic of working together again.

"Since we’re in business together, I’d like to get as much starting capital as possible from you."

I raised my eyebrows at the beanpole.

"You’re not getting my gems." I flatly told her. "Not when each one is a friend." The entire ship entered a large cloud, obscuring almost everything around us.

"Your Moonstones!" She burst out. "You’ve got a bunch of them, they’re not connected to your friends. My class is [Fae Trader of the Intangible]. Normal trading and bartering is experience, but it’s not good experience. I’ve been trying. No, what I need is to trade intangible things, and skills stored in gemstones are exactly what I need."

That explained all the games with trading the IOU’s around. They represented intangible things, and while the stakes were low, it was technically doing exactly what her class wanted. Like me healing up some scraped knees.

She gave me great big puppy eyes, and I glanced at Artemis.

She gave Amber a light smack over the head, and as she lectured the greedy guts, I mouthed the words I knew Artemis would be saying.

"You idiot! This is a public place! Don’t go yelling about your classes and skills to everyone!"

Ahhh, good times. I remember all the speeches Artemis had given me on exactly the same topic. I’d learned my lesson a little too late - I’d needed my arm twisted by the emperor before it had properly sunk in - but it was a nice trip down nostalgia lane.

"My panacea skill only." I told Amber.

"Are you sure? I was hoping for… you know."

"Absolutely not." I folded my arms. "And that’s final. This isn’t a discussion or a negotiation. Rule 3."

Thank the System for [Immortal Recollections] prompting me with the right Amber rule of acquisition.

"I can charge a bunch of Moonstones with [Dance with the Heavens] for you. I doubt I’ll have the time to properly make good images, but they’ll still be lifesaving. That should give you a strong start."

"Yes! You’re the best! Also I just leveled."

We burst through the clouds, and I got my first good look at the School. I pushed my way through the crowd to get an even better look at the premier institute of higher learning.

"Brrrrpt!!"

"I know! It’s so cool!!"

A flying island indeed. The bottom was a rough, oddly-textured rock-like material, in a natural rough half-bowl shape. From what I’d gathered, the island wasn’t lifted up by skills or anything, it just was naturally there.

As natural as a flying island was.

A dozen smaller islands orbited the main one, each having their own miniature and distinct look. One was a meadow field of flowers, the second had a small hill of rocks, the third was a small basin of water. Each had its own strange and fascinating landscape.

The main island was the real draw.

There was a clearly demarcated line in the middle. On one side was a busy, bustling crowded town, rickety buildings clearly held up by copious amounts of visible magic, nearly every inch horizontal and vertical overbuilt as much as it could be. Only a few narrow strips of ground could be seen, and even as I watched the patch rippled, an entire crop grown, then it fell to the ground as it got harvested. High-speed high-skill farming in action - which would be needed, given the ratio of people to arable land.

On the other side of the divide were a number of huge buildings, each one stately, given plenty of breathing room. They were in three layers: a center set of eight tall towers, each one obviously themed after the basic eight elements - the Water tower had waterfalls, while the Fire tower was merrily burning. The Dark tower was unimaginatively painted entirely black, while the Light tower was a blinding beacon. The Earth tower was made out of stone and glittering crystals, while the Wind tower had lots of streamers and little windmills blowing furiously in the invisible wind. The Wood tower was naturally made out of wood, looking like a twisted ancient tree, while the Metal tower was all sharp edges and reflective glass.

They were in an octagonal shape, and more buildings radiated out from them, the entire thing looking a bit like a not very smooth wheel. After what I mentally classified as the "main" buildings, there was a whole mess of tight apartments on one side, and large houses with little gardens on the other.

Tiny little black hats moved around the streets like ants, the occasional brightly colored hat interspersed here and there. Purples were the most common of the colors - still incredibly rare - and I saw a few blues, greens, and one yellow, moving up and down the roads, busy with their tasks. The streets were lined with trees, and glowing pillars of Arcanite were regularly interspersed throughout.

There was an animated illusion of a great big tiger in the sky, pouncing and prowling in the most visible way. A large "6" was hovering in the sky, morphing between various different numerical alphabets. Pillars of glowing light were everywhere, and there was no way that was all Arcanite. No way. The cost would be absurd, not even Lun’Kat’s lair had that much.

Displays of magic were everywhere, and I got massively distracted by a building walking around.

I tried to absorb sight after sight, absent-mindedly noticing that Iona had joined me, looking just as wide-eyed and awed as I was. A dozen other non-School people had joined us at the railing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the School people were laughing at us rubes.

Someone made an announcement, and while I didn’t know the words, I could easily figure out the meaning, getting me a level in [Learning Languages].

"Welcome to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft!"

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 580,190/580,190]

[Mana Regen: 273,296 (+518,721)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 204]

[Strength: 1,004]

[Dexterity: 1,831]

[Vitality: 14,240]

[Speed: 14,272]

[Mana: 58,019]

[Mana Regeneration: 58,120 (+51,872)]

[Magic Power: 22,821 (+585,359)]

[Magic Control: 22,821 (+585,359)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 480]

[Cosmic Presence: 315]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 451]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 471]

[Sunrise: 411]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 357]]

[Radiance Affinity: 357]

[Radiance Resistance: 357]

[Radiance Conjuration: 357]

[: ]

[Nectar: 357]

[Solar Corona: 357]

[Scintillating Ascent: 337]

[Kaleidoscope: 357]

[Class 3: [Beloved of the Wind - Wind: Lv 8]]

[: ]

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General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 300]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[Learning Languages: 49]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 315]

[Passionate Learning: 382]

Chapter 17
Papers Please!

My bird’s eye view of the island vanished as we rapidly landed just outside the School area. A few dozen other barges were parked in the area, members of the School boarding another boat even as we landed. The doors opened, the ramps came down, and the surge of passengers exited. Shirayuki didn’t even gesture, simply striding off the boat with aplomb, fully expecting us to follow.

Like lost little ducklings, we did.

There was a grand wall dividing the School portion of the island from the town portion of the island. Glowing Inscriptions - were they even still called Inscriptions? - coated the walls, some sort of magic obviously active. We approached the main gates, flung open to greet us.

"All those who seek knowledge are welcome here." Iona pointed to some words over the main gates, repeated in dozens and dozens of languages. I quickly scanned over them, the words forming a miniature Rosetta Stone of sorts.

I blinked in surprise, seeing the words in Creation near the top of the list. Just how old was the School!?

"Whoa." Artemis was looking around wide-eyed. Professional interest?

As we funneled through the gates, the crowd became much thinner as people went their separate ways. We continued to follow Shirayuki to one of the nearest buildings.

Displays of casual magic were everywhere. One student hurried by, drinking haphazardly from a fountain of water coming from the tip of his wand. Another one tripped, an older student - or teacher - with a staff casually waving, catching the student by the robes. All their books and stuff were returned to their hands in the same movement. A half-dozen students - no way were they professors - zipped by on a ‘stone wave’ that they were surfing, much to the consternation and loss of balance of the people they flew past. Another was deep into a dozen books hovering in front of them, flicking her wand in short, tight sequences from book to book, turning pages, not looking at all where she was going.

I knew that because she was deep in the grass by the paths, heading straight for a tree.

I was super jealous though. I wanted to have a dozen books open in front of me, with the ability to read them all. Oooh! With the right skill, I could even read them all at once! Good ideas. Until I had those skills though, I was a bit jealous.

Absent-minded students were everywhere, and I’d take how often that had been me to my grave.

Look, high school hadn’t been that challenging, and a good book under the table was totally fine!

It was surreal to be thinking of my old life again, but something about the environment was bringing it out. Except with magic.

Pillars of pure Arcanite lined the paths, in between the abundant trees, and students casually reached out to touch them as they passed, obviously topping up their mana.

Wow.

The things I could do with that much mana. The speed at which I could level…

Hang on.

Most of the skills I was seeing were based on a wand or a staff. That didn’t jive with what I knew of skills and classes.

There was so much to learn!! I couldn’t wait!

I bounced along after Shirayuki, energetically vibrating as I followed her.

Hurry up! Go faster! Skip the boring parts, get to the learning!

We approached one of the buildings. Even by the standards of the few buildings I’d seen, this one was grand, giving off an intimidating aura of age, taste, and money. There was minimal magic on this building, instead designed to impress all those who approached.

The fact that it was one of the first buildings I’d seen since entering through the front gate couldn’t be a coincidence.

Shirayuki marched right up to the building, through the vaulted and high doors, and we followed her into a great big hall. Some benches were scuttling along the walls, to the consternation of a few people sitting on them. Two benches in particular seemed intent on getting their occupants together, the pair awkwardly pushing each other away as the benches tried to dump one on the other’s lap.

Note to self: Don’t sit on the matchmaking benches.

Shirayuki knew exactly where she was going, and we skipped a line of non-students to go straight to one of the rooms. Iona thankfully trailed along with us. Amber, Julius, and Artemis kept getting distracted by various cool magic things, and I couldn’t blame them.

I gave Iona a questioning look, and she winked back.

"I get to skip the line by helping you out!" She flicked some of her hair back.

Fenrir gave a pleased rumble from his throat, that sounded suspiciously like a deep purr.

We ended up near a wizened old faun. Shirayuki gave a few curt words and slapped down a pile of paper in front of the [Accountant]. He just arched a skeptical eyebrow at her, and started slowly going through the paperwork.

At various points he asked Shirayuki questions, who sighed and huffed at him. Then he had a bunch of magical lights go off, surrounding Shirayuki, who folded her arms and glared.

"What do you think they’re doing?" I whispered to Artemis. She used to run a school, she might have some insight.

"Probably checking that everything’s on the up and up. I had one illusionist disguise themselves as the son of a famous hotshot Senator, and tried to sweet talk his way into my school. Never know when someone desperate is trying to pull a scam, especially with how much money tuition costs."

Made sense. If sweet-talking the right person could make tens of thousands of rods, they’d get constantly tested.

Eventually the faun was satisfied that everything was on the up and up, and he gave me a withering glare.

"Yikes, what did I ever do to him?" I muttered to myself.

"People that take money like getting money, even if it’s not theirs." Amber reasonably said.

Meeeh fine.

Shirayuki came up to me and said something, handed me the pile of papers, and left.

"Practice is first thing in the morning at the Mistor Stadium." Iona translated as the last of Shirayuki’s tails flicked through the door. "You’ve got a week to orient yourself."

Iona shrugged, and went to talk with the bursar herself. An even longer conversation ensued, while the rest of us hung out.

"Brrrpt?" Auri asked.

"I’m sure we’ll find a spot for you." I reassured her.

"Brrpt?"

"I haven’t asked anyone yet."

"BRPT BRPTT!!!"

I glanced around and lowered my voice.

"Worst case I’ll smuggle you inside my tunic."

"Brrpt!!" The idea of subterfuge and sneaking around appealed to Auri, and she wasted no time flying down to my legs, then up my tunic.

"Auri no!" I cried out as patches of my tunic started to smoke, the little pyromaniac sowing chaos wherever she flew.

I started playing a furious game of "pat out the flames" and "don’t get expelled minutes after getting into the School", with Auri madly cackling as she flew around my tunic, a little ball moving around in my clothes.

The flames naturally couldn’t hurt me, but the side effects from them could.

Julius, Artemis, and Amber were no help either, laughing uproariously at Auri’s antics. The [Bursar] was giving us death glares as he kept talking with Iona, and I decided that our antics in a single office was better than our antics in a crowded hallway.

I eventually wrapped Auri up in my [Mantle], and carefully extracted her from my tunic.

"What are we going to do?" Artemis asked. "Right now we’re just following you around."

I thought about it for a moment.

"Let’s see how long they’ll let you stick around. It’d be nice if you could stay a few days while I get settled in, and nobody’s said anything yet." That we understood.

Still, guards yelling at us was a fairly clear message, regardless of the language.

"We should see if there’s a place in town we can grab." Julius tapped a finger to his lips. "See if there’s any sort of work. The rules here seem to be significantly more lax."

"There’s enough people to make money, but with how overbuilt everything is, I think the market’s pretty mature. I would like to see if there’s anything I can buy here to kick start things though. There’s gotta be a speciality." Amber said.

"One step at a time." I said.

"Brrpt! Brrpt?"

"Yeah, I’ll try to find you a tiny hat." I told Auri.

"BRPT!"

We devolved into more small talk while Iona finished up, although we tried to have it in crude Hakka to work on our proficiencies. We’d never improve if we didn’t constantly speak the language. Total immersion was the name of the game.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Learning Languages] has leveled up! 49 -> 50]

The skill had an interesting snowball effect. The more it leveled up, the easier it was to learn a language. The easier it was to learn a language, the more it leveled up. I could see the skill rapidly cascading until I mastered all the languages I wanted to, then it’d abruptly stop and become practically worthless.

"Ok! I’m all set! We need to go to registration now." Iona told us.

I wanted to groan. Another layer of bureaucracy. This was getting absurd.

"I really hope this is the last line or scribe we need to see." I complained to Iona. She nodded, and we all started walking and talking. Iona seemed to know where we needed to go next, and we were both new students. Stood to reason that I should follow her.

"Hope so! Just gotta remember that everyone wants something, and people in these roles generally want to be helpful. Play the game, make nice, and they’ll make your stay that much easier."

I threw a look over my shoulder at the office we’d just left.

The one grumpy [Accountant] completely controlled who got into the School, and who didn’t. If he took a disliking to me, he could throw up obstacle after obstacle, and I’d have to leave.

I made a mental note to bring him some cookies or something. I was making a lot of mental notes recently.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Mental Notes]. Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

I declined, thinking that had come a lot easier than most skills I was offered.

Before long we ended up in ANOTHER DAMN LINE. The seven of us continued to chat in Hakka, Iona regaling us with tales of her exploits in the language. Some of them were quite… explicit, but it got us through the line and helped us with our language.

I wasn’t much on social stuff, but I knew most people liked to talk about themselves.

We made it to one of the scribes, and five sentences in Iona’s face fell.

"Wrong line."

"What!" Amber shrieked in outrage. "Wrong line!?"

"Well, technically it was the right line, but she’s the wrong [Scribe] for us. Wants us to see someone else. The head administrator or someone."

That sounded great to me.

We were sent to another office in the dizzying, magical, maze-like building. It was almost like the [Architect] who had designed the place had taken the phrase "Magical bureaucratic labyrinth" literally, and made the building a reflection of its inhabitants.

There was blessedly no line here.

We ended up in a nice office with hundreds of books magically suspended from the ceiling. A woman with red skin and wings was sitting behind the desk in red robes, and she looked a lot like the devil I’d fought back in Ochi. I quickly checked her level.

[Laborer - 3136]

That jived with the levels of most Immortals I’d seen.

Interestingly, the woman’s desk was relatively near the front of the room. Behind her there was a long hallway, with hundreds, if not thousands, of open books, scrolls, and papers on desks. Above each one was a quill, industriously writing. I didn’t see any inkpots, but I didn’t exactly have a great angle. The sound of thousands of quietly scratching quills formed a strangely soothing backdrop to the whole place, and if I was told that the [Scribe] was single-handedly running all of those, I’d believe it.

Iona and the woman there got down to business. She then translated for me.

"I see your name’s… Elaine? And you’re here for healing, on a full combat scholarship. Country of origin is… Remus?" She frowned as her finger traced down the papers I’d handed to her.

"Correct." I was fully ready to explain or defend myself.

"Immortal or Fae? Sorry, silly question, it has to be Fae. Combat scholarships wouldn’t take somebody that old." The woman said to herself, Iona translating anyways.

I needed to do something really nice for Iona, after all she’d done for me.

I was impressed with how astute the woman was, and straightened up a bit.

"Doesn’t speak the language-" Iona cut herself off, and had a rapid-fire exchange with the woman.

"Speaks the Vampire Tongue." She corrected, and Iona translated that part. "That’s a useful start. Is that young lady with you also coming?"

Amber pointed to herself.

"Me?" She asked.

The [Head Scribe] shooed at Amber.

"Not you, her." She pointed at Auri.

"I hope she can come along." I hedged.

"How old is she?" She asked, and Iona rapidly answered back before I could. Benefit of being able to see Auri’s stats.

"You wouldn’t be the first to bring a dependent with you, and she’s young enough to count." The woman told me, and Auri fluttered around in joy at hearing that.

"Brrpt! BRRPT!!!!" She was so excited she could come!

Not that there was any doubt that I’d leave her.

"We’ve got a smaller place for kids to learn while their parents are getting an education." The scribe continued, adjusting her glasses. "Also, either a skill of mine is on the fritz, or she’s a phoenix?"

I froze at that, my mouth opening and closing wordlessly.

"I’ll take that as a yes. No worries, we’ve had stranger things come through. Heck, you’re barely the strangest thing this admittance cycle! So far at least. The truly weird ones are always breaking into my office three days after admissions are closed, demanding I just ‘make it work’ and ‘perform miracles’ and ‘backdate the paperwork.’ Ha! Like I’d ever backdate anything. Far be it for me to assume, but I suspect the two of you will want to be in the same room. Correct?"

I mutely nodded, keeping my mouth closed as the true power that ran this place blathered on. The less said the better.

"Excuse me…" Amber sweetly cut in, and Iona obligingly translated. I wanted to facepalm. "Any chance we can also come in?"

I noticed Amber’s hand was in her pocket, probably clutching onto her lucky coin.

"Did you get admitted? Did you pay?" The [Scribe] asked.

"Well, no."

"That answers that. Right, next question…"

The woman behind the desk continued to officiously ask me dozens of probing questions, discerning way more information out from my answers than I thought I’d given her. Not a single thing seemed to faze her, and even Julius looked impressed.

I bet I could tell her I had an Immortality-granting skill, and she’d just grunt, make a mark on a piece of paper, and let me know that was nice, but had I ever seen a massive Immortality-granting event? Why, there’d been one eight decades ago, and…

After all her questions, she stopped talking entirely, closing her eyes a moment as her fingers twitched. A few sheets of paper then zoomed onto her desk and, with a flick of her fingers, were filled out.

"Right. Here you two go." She handed us the papers before Iona could finish translating. She said a bunch more things, too quickly for Iona to translate, then waved us out of her office. As I left, I saw the book she’d been working on snap back up to the ceiling, and another one drifted down onto her desk.

We left her room, my friends peering over my shoulder at the paperwork I’d been handed.

I couldn’t read any of it, and I wanted to scream in frustration. This language thing SUCKED!

We wandered through the maze of the building, trying to find an exit, with Iona poring over her paperwork. Finally, we found an exit, and ended up back on the campus.

Iona tore herself away from her own stuff, and finally explained and translated a few things for me.

"Ok, orientation is in three days, where they’ll help explain how everything works here. Going to suck slightly for you, since you don’t quite get the language yet."

No shit.

"Anyways, let me see that…" Iona scanned my piece of paper, starting to point to various parts of it.

"Name. What you’re studying. Your advisor is professor Marcelle. Auri’s got permission to attend, you’re all set. Classes and lodging are all paid for, but not food and miscellaneous expenses. We’re each entitled to a cheap set of robes, which is mandatory wear outside the School, at classes, and broadly encouraged otherwise. We’re both purple, because of our level. You’re in the cheap dormitories, same as I am. Actually…"

Iona squinted at the paper, grabbing hers and comparing the two. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise.

"We’re roommates!?"

We managed to acquire a map of the campus, and the first stop was dropping off Artemis, Julius, and Amber, who wanted to hang out for a few days and see everything. It turned out, not only was that incredibly common, but it was practically expected for various sponsors - usually the parents of the student, but not always - to want to take a few days to look around the School’s campus, and see where all their money was going.

I was still learning the layout of the campus, but in short there were major roads weaving throughout, and most buildings had a solid plot of land on their own little stretch between the roads.

There was a whole inn dedicated to housing those people, and I needed to rub my eyes a few times when I saw it. I double checked the name on the map - having picked up the words after Iona helpfully translated it - and yup.

The Wandering Inn.

The inn was wandering alright. It had dozens of tiny little crab-like legs under it, and it was scuttling around at low speeds on its little plot of land. The place was reasonably priced, not everyone able to afford sky-high rates.

"So, uh, am I supposed to just jump in the door or something?" Amber asked.

We stared at the inn for a few seconds, watching an otherwise well-dressed and put together noble take an awkward leap out of the door. He didn’t quite make it, awkwardly tripping on his way out.

"I’m going to go with yes." I said. "Good luck!"

"Brrrpt!" Auri was being encouraging, and Iona was chuckling.

"I think I could watch nobles faceplant into the mud all day." Iona said with a grin.

We said our farewells, but Iona and I hung out to watch my friends enter the Wandering Inn. Julius made it in with contemptuous ease, while Artemis gracefully made her entrance.

Amber was less successful.

"Brrrpt."

"Really? I thought that was more like seven out of ten."

Iona and I followed the map and the details she was given, ending up in a different, smaller administrative building, finding a large one-stop shopping building. The big flashing lights - literally - helped guide us to the building, and the lines of new students without robes was another dead giveaway.

What was it with this island and lines?! I needed to take over the place and abolish lineups entirely.

This one at least moved swifty, and at the end of it we had the option of getting the cheap, free robes, or splurging a bit to get nicer robes.

I wanted, needed, to get the fancy, nicer robes, but I was mostly broke and all too aware that I needed to buy essentials, like food. No more running around the forest, blasting animals and raiding berry bushes. No, I had to be civilized, and my funds were slim. Amber and Artemis needed them more than I did.

There had to be a provision to get money to buy more food, and I immediately jumped to healing people. It was usually pretty good money, although the fact that there was a full medical course dedicated to teaching healing suggested that I’d have stiff competition in that field.

We got our robes, simple purple for Iona and I, and we managed to sweet-talk the man handing them out to give Auri a tiny little black hat, completely appropriate for her level and somewhat fire-resistant.

"Brrpt! BRRRPT!" Auri thought she looked great in it, and was chirping for the whole world to see just how COOL and MAGICAL she looked in her tiny little witch’s hat.

After getting our robes, we consulted the map, and found our new home for the next few years. We got lost twice, after which I insisted on reading the map and being in charge of directions.

We headed outside of the main "circle" of the fancy buildings, over to rows upon rows of large, square, blocky buildings. They looked and felt like bulk apartments, designed for efficiency and sardine packing, and less for comfort and style.

We were on an island. The real estate was incredibly valuable.

Our living accommodations, from the outside, weren’t that impressive. Big square building, a number of colorful paintings by a dozen different artists - or one artist with a dozen different styles - some space around it, and a little fountain.

The doors were surprisingly large, and the hallways way more spacious than I would’ve imagined.

"Brrpt?" Auri asked.

"No, I think it’s this door." Iona absent-mindedly answered.

I checked the piece of paper I had, and found the door that Auri was at had a matching symbol above it. The door Iona was pointing at didn’t.

"I’m going to go with Auri on this one. Wait. How do we get in?" I asked. Nobody had given us instructions, or keys, or anything.

Iona shrugged and knocked.

The door opened, and I was suddenly face to face with a large unicorn.

Chapter 18
They Were Roommates!

I looked up at the absolute unit of a unicorn, suddenly thinking that the extra-wide and tall passageways were a little on the small side.

Some questioning noises came from the inside, and a delicate elvenoid "pushed" aside the unicorn. She looked frail and pale, like a single snowflake drifting in the breeze. Her purple eyes were clouded with the characteristic look of a Mist classer. Interestingly, she wasn’t wearing the robes that the students of the School normally wore, and it seemed like the dress code was more relaxed in the private living areas.

Thank goodness.

She shot off a series of questions to us, and gods I needed to learn the language as soon as humanly possible.

Iona answered, pointing to her piece of paper that said where our lodging was. The woman furiously grabbed the paper, then sagged and groaned.

That was at least somewhat obvious, language barrier or not. She was unhappy to have new roommates, and I honestly sympathized. Who wanted to have more people in their living space?

She gestured us in, shouted something deeper into the apartment, and I got a look at my living space for the next few years.

There was a moderately sized space right in front of the entrance, with two more doors immediately facing the entrance. The unicorn turned around in the space, used his horn to open one of the doors, and walked in, kicking the door shut with a hoof. There was a deep scratch on the door where he’d clearly done this hundreds of times before, and it was obviously his room.

To my right was a cozy little living room, a couple of plush sofas and chairs around a small coffee table. To my left was a hallway, with a few more doors along on either side, and two more doors at the very end.

I was starting to have hope that I’d get my own room, and I wouldn’t need to share it with anybody. I’d done enough of that growing up.

Delicate-girl yelled down the hallway, and only one other door opened up. An elf emerged, deer antlers on her head and her eyes as deep as the stars.

Another Celestial classer! Yay! I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the sheer arrogance inherent to all the elves I’d met so far though.

Some conversation I couldn’t follow and gesturing later, and we were all sitting down in the living room, Auri on my head and Fenrir prowling over the back of the sofas, sniffing and investigating every little nook and cranny.

I felt totally left out of the conversation, Iona spending most of her time quickly talking with the other two. I didn’t blame her one bit, she’d spent far too many hours already translating for me. I could let her have some time catching up on her new arrangements, and explaining everything to our hopefully-two new roommates.

The elf was fairly quiet, and Iona spent most of her time talking with the frail-looking one. When she directly addressed the elf though, her words were strange. They were like deep whinnies of a horse, rumbling with magical power and echoing in utterly bizarre ways. The elf jumped about a foot in the air, and yelled something at Iona. In a more normal language. I was starting to get the hang of some of the intonations, and I thought it might be High Elvish.

She started stomping around in a circle while Iona frantically explained.

"Brrrpt?" Auri asked me, getting our own little side conversation going.

"I have no idea, but I wish I had popcorn."

The whole thing was quite dramatic, like watching a foreign movie. Obviously, something big was going down, but I had no idea what. Still entertaining as heck.

"Brrpt BRrrrpppt?"

"Heat up corn basically."

"Brrpt?"

"No idea, although if you can find some, that’d be great. Ooooh, that latest exchange must’ve hurt!" I exclaimed as the elf went pale and stormed off down the hall, only to come storming back a moment later.

Fragile-girl sat down next to me, watching the exchange like a volleyball match.

"Skye." She offered me a hand, still watching what was going on.

"Elaine." I shook her hand.

She tilted her head, and rapidly asked me something. I knuckled my forehead.

"Elaine. Elaine." I pointed at myself twice, then threw up my hands in exasperation. That did seem to get the message through though, and Skye laughed.

Finally Iona sat down with a huff, and the elf also did. Nobody looked particularly happy, but I seemed to be mostly out of it. I had a sneaking suspicion that someone else’s secrets had gotten outed by Iona’s divine blessing of languages.

"Sorry about that Elaine. I know you don’t know the languages here, and I know that can be super isolating. It wasn’t particularly nice to exclude you, but we needed to have a quick chat, and I figured I could catch you up after."

"It’s totally fine. You’re already doing so much for me, I can’t impose and have you follow me around, translating everything everyone else says."

"Thanks for understanding."

"Brrrpt?" Auri wanted to know what was going on, and I was honestly looking for answers as well.

"Real quick. How much do you want to tell our roommates?"

I hesitated.

"Give them the basics? I’d like to tell them my full story when I can."

Iona nodded.

"Yeah sure, I can do that."

Iona thought about it for a moment.

"Right, ok. First thing to know is this set of rooms are, according to Reinhard, one of the special sets of rooms. They’re not publicly well known or advertised, but the more, ah, special members of the School get placed here."

I tilted my head in confusion, and Iona immediately picked up on it.

"Take Auri. She’s the best little bird ever, super colorful and always around, right?"

"BRRRPT!" Auri flew in manic circles around Iona, pleased with the compliment.

"Grrr?" Fenrir growled.

"You’re not a bird, you’re a wyvern, and nothing can compare."

Fenrir looked mollified by that.

"Do you think you could keep her a secret from people you’re living with for years?"

I didn’t even need to think about that. I shook my head.

"No way."

Left unsaid was my personal ability to grant Immortality.

"Right. Everyone here’s got similar interesting stories. The thinking is, when everyone’s on the interesting side, we know what it’s like. We know not to bother each other or freak out over Auri being a phoenix, your unique conditions, Fenrir being a frost wyvern, my divine blessings, Skye being an ex-princess, her unicorn companion Varuna, or Reinhard being a kirin."

I was looking at Reinhard when it clicked.

A kirin. A legendary creature, just a half-step away from being a dragon, if not superior to them. How was she an elf though? Was there some sort of transformation skill at play? Was there-

Don’t freak out.

"Brrrpt!" Auri pecked me on the head, snapping me out of my daze.

Right. Speaking of legendary creatures practically on par with dragons, I’d gotten a little too used to my own little pyro. Figuring I’d make whatever greetings I could, I stood up and offered a hand to Reinhard.

"Hi! I’m Elaine! It’s nice to meet you." I figured I’d start off on a good foot.

Reinhard looked at me, and rattled off a question to Iona, who rattled something else back. She shook my hand.

A promising start.

"She was wondering if you were introducing your class, and what part of that was your name." Iona explained.

I chuckled.

"Of all the bad luck." I griped at my name being the word for ‘healer’ again. On the bottom of my to-do list was to find out how that had happened.

"Elaine, this is Skye. She’s a Yuki-Onna, sometimes known as a snow girl." Iona rapidly asked Skye a few questions. "She’ll tell you her full story once she can hear yours."

I didn’t need the additional motivation to learn how to speak some of the languages here. My frustration levels were insane.

"Brrpt BRPT!" Auri was flying around Skye and Reinhard, saying hi in her own way. Reinhard lifted her hand up, letting the little bird land on her hand. I started forward, getting ready to heal her burns, but they never happened.

Kirins were about as bullshit as elves were. Even more so if they could transform themselves into one.

Iona had a few more quick words with everyone, then clapped her hands.

"Ok! Why don’t we all get dinner together, to celebrate meeting, becoming roommates, and figuring out where to go from here? My treat."

Free food? Free food.

She repeated her question for the other members of the group, and with affirmations all around, we all got changed into robes and went to get food.

Food was tasty, and with Iona translating into High Elvish for the other two, we managed to have a conversation. I’d also gotten three levels in [Learning Languages], and had even managed a few short phrases here and there during the discussion, combining words I’d heard and learned earlier into short sentences. It wasn’t much, but the other three seemed to be warming to me at least, and appreciated the effort.

We also went over a few rules for living together, a code of conduct so that we could tolerate each other.

Rooms were sacred. We could knock on each other’s doors of course, but we had to get permission to enter.

The School had its own island time that it worked off of. From the 9th to the 12th block were the "night" blocks, and the 1st to the 8th block were the "day" blocks. I interpreted that to mean each block was roughly two hours. Easy enough. Classes only occurred during the "day" blocks, and I was able to reframe Yugure’s instructions to mean that practice was during the first block of the day. The sun could be high up in the sky during the 11th block, and the moons could be out during the 6th block. Didn’t matter, the island operated on its own schedule.

Our suite agreed that the 10th to the 1st block were quiet hours. It gave us a bit of time after classes to decompress, and it encouraged us to be quiet in the morning for anyone who wanted to sleep in, or had a slow start to the day.

We were all responsible for our own stuff, and the dirty looks Reinhard shot Skye implied that wasn’t as obviously a given as I thought it should be.

The language of the suite was High Elvish, and Reinhard and Sky were hoping that we’d be alright with that. Iona spoke every language fluently, and High Elvish was on my to-learn list anyways, so I had no issues with that either.

We also agreed on incredibly generic things like "look out for each other", "be respectful of each other", "don’t occupy the bathroom forever", and "don’t go blabbing about each other and the suite to everyone", but that was so vague as to be unenforceable.

Some of my old Ranger Academy lessons in rules, laws, and enforcement were coming in handy. I’d tried to protest the poorly-framed and practically unenforceable rules, but got such skeptical looks from everyone - Auri included - that I surrendered the issue and shut up.

Probably made me look bad, bah. I was totally right though, and I’d try not to be too smug when the rules blew up in our faces.

Iona buying food was so nice though.

Tasty, tasty food.

We made it back to the suite, and needed to pick rooms.

Fenrir made a beeline for the second door across from the main doorway, headbutting his way in.

"Is that your room?" I asked Iona. She shook her head.

"Fenrir’s own room." She explained. "Frost wyverns get big. Like, he’s going to make Varuna look tiny when he’s fully grown, and I’m honestly not sure if this place will be big enough for him by the time I graduate."

"BRrrpt! BRPT!" Auri hovered in front of me, demanding that we share the same room.

"Ok, ok! I never thought otherwise." I told my little darling.

"Brrpt." Auri perched herself on my head, glad I knew the pecking order.

"Reinhard’s got the far room, Skye’s in the room closest to Varuna, do you have a preference?" Iona asked me.

Three middle rooms.

"Not at all. Well, cancel that. I’d like one of the rooms next to me to be empty. Don’t sandwich me in!"

Iona shrugged, and grabbed one of the doors.

"Suits me." She said as she vanished into one of the rooms.

I grabbed a room, opening the door to see my living arrangements for the next few years.

To call them spartan would be understating things a bit. The room was tiny. A desk and chair against one wall, and a mattress on a small frame on the other wall. The door didn’t quite open all the way, the end of the bed stopping it from swinging all the way open, and it was a good thing I was skinny, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sit in the chair with the bed being where it was.

I had a window, which was nice, and it was frosted in a way that didn’t let people peek inside. A good thing, considering we were on the ground floor.

I peeked around, finding a flat chest under the bed. At least I had some reasonable storage! I put my old clothes in it and my admission paperwork.

It was sadly empty, even with how small the chest was. However, it was nice that I had it. I’d see about getting my gear back from Artemis, and storing it.

Although… I didn’t need it right now, and it might save Artemis’s life. I’d probably leave it for her.

"Brrpt brpt?" Auri asked as she flew around the room a bit.

"I’m not sure. Maybe on the desk?"

Auri landed on the desk, and I eyed it, half wondering if it was going to go up in flames, and how badly that’d go. Fortunately, it seemed to be fireproof - or Auri was restraining herself.

"Brrpt…" She sadly cheeped, and I saw a single crystal tear roll out of her eye.

I felt a lump in my throat that wouldn’t go away. I picked Auri up, and delicately hugged her.

"I know, I know…" I comforted her even as I tried to stop my own tears.

This room was a far, far step down from what I’d come from. I used to have practically half a wing all to myself. A room just for baths, a luxurious bed I could sink into. A whole sphere of Arcanite for Auri to look at herself in.

A home filled with loving family. Friends.

Now I had a tiny rectangle. Auri had a wooden surface to sleep on, forget a nest.

I didn’t even have sheets.

I heard a knock on the door.

"Elaine? Are you ok in there?"

I opened my mouth, wanting to answer no. Wanting Iona to come in and wrap her arms around me, to tell me that everything would be ok.

But no.

I’d get attached. We’d become friends. The adventures we could have, the stories we could tell. Oh, the imagination boggled.

She’d die, like everyone else, and I’d have another person ripped away from me. Another name to carve on my own personal Indomitable Wall.

After a few moments, I heard her move away, respecting my boundaries and privacy.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Chapter 19
Orientation

Three days of intense language study, hanging out, and exploring with Artemis later, orientation was among us.

The new students were broken up into dozens of smaller groups, and most people had friends, parents, or sponsors with them, seeing what the School was like for themselves. I was no exception, with Artemis, Julius, and Amber all tagging along our orientation group. We were all outside the gates of the School for the start of this, our group in a little huddle like the rest of the groups. Some of them were moving around already, others were talking. Some groups were larger, some were smaller. We were in one of the bigger groups. I guess the experience changed depending on who was leading the orientation.

My language studies were going well, and I was focusing on trying to listen and understand the words being said in their own language. I still needed Iona to translate a few words every sentence, but I was rapidly achieving basic proficiency.

In a single language.

"Hello everybody! Welcome to orientation! I’m Stefan, a fourth year and a werewolf! No, we don’t bite." The man in black robes leading orientation joked in his native language, the enchantments in the School automatically translating into four different languages - High Elvish included - and we obligingly laughed.

"I’m sure you all have thousands and thousands of questions, and on one hand I’d love to tell you all to ask them now! Except I did that once, and I spent the next four hours standing here answering questions, instead of giving a tour and orientation of the place. So! How about this. Ask questions when-"

Stefan was interrupted by the sound of thousands of chimes going off, along with a distant roar of a gigantic, primal monster, heralding triumph and success.

I snapped a shield around us all and took off, hovering a bit above the ground. My eyes were on a swivel, looking up, down, around, trying to see where the monster was coming from. Artemis had a dozen sharp stones hovering around her, and Lightning was crackling between two of her fingers, charging up a skill.

I noticed Stefan was laughing, and there wasn’t a general sense of panic and concern. I slowly drifted back to the ground, flushing with embarrassment. I dropped my shield.

"You weren’t the only one ready to fight." Iona softly murmured in my ear. "Only difference was, I didn’t have my axe handy."

I nodded my appreciation. It’d be all too easy to claim she knew what it was all along, instead of standing by me.

"Ok! I was going to start with something else, but that went out the window like a butterfly."

I glared murder at him for making fun of me. I was feeling fairly down, and more than a little petty, and I’d figure out some form of petty revenge.

I didn’t know what it’d be yet, but I was resourceful. I’d find something. Maybe a nice mudhole to trip him into.

"Second things first! Let me introduce to you all the grand gate of our School, the Dragon’s Gate! The enchantments written on it were done in dragon’s blood, which lets it detect when a [Princess] enters through the gates! When it does, it’ll let everyone on campus know with those chimes and a roar, and I do believe that confirms the rumor that we’ve got royalty in this incoming group of students! Exciting times we live in! There’s a few more [Princesses] on campus, and the gates are a semi-regular thing. Questions?"

My brain just about broke in half at the start of the orientation. They used dragon’s blood for the gate enchantments!? They advertised that!? It could detect if someone was a princess, or more likely, if they had the class!?

That flew in the face of so many different things I knew, but I didn’t have time to process and understand it. Stefan was moving along.

"First thing second! As I said earlier, I’m Stefan, a fourth-year. Yes, a student is running orientation. I’ll get to that in a minute. This is the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, unrivaled in the world! While we’re here, we’re all students. If you see a political rival? If you have a chance to kill the young master of a rival sect? If you have a chance to get blackmail on the Han faction? Don’t. We’re students here, this place is neutral. It makes it a worthwhile environment for all of us, instead of an all-out warzone. Save your grudges for when you’ve graduated, and remember."

Stefan turned serious.

"This is the School’s territory, where the School’s rules apply. The School is perfectly fine angering the royal family of Rolland, or even messing with the elves. Fuck around, and find out."

He cracked a grin, turning back to a goof.

"Jobs! Work! The School has hundreds to thousands of little low-level jobs it has reserved for students, all designed to make life cheaper for everybody, along with providing minor incomes to students who need to supplement their tuition. If your pockets are feeling pinched by what your sponsors give you for spending money, or if you are the second favorite child and your parents aren’t funding you enough, find a job! Make some money! All the jobs offered by the School are legit. I’m not supposed to tell you about the other jobs that exist, but they’re out there."

Stefan winked at the few glares he was getting from said penny-pinching sponsors, along with the implication that there were more jobs than just the School. The town attached to the School was a solid bet for employment, and there had to be all sorts of black market jobs.

"Questions? Yes?" Stefan answered a few different questions about the gates and types of jobs, then clapped his hands.

"Ok! Let’s move on! A few groups are ahead of us, a few are behind us, this is the perfect time to go. Follow me!" He started to walk backwards, facing us while he moved down the central path to the Dragon’s Gate.

If I squinted a bit, and was drunk as a skunk, it did look a bit like a dragon’s mouth.

"This stretch of road’s a bit long, so let me go over the basics of how the School works! Some of you know this, some of you don’t. The fundamental idea, and the thing most people are going for at the School, are called Tracks. There’s a Track for everything! There’s the Wizardry Track, the Sorcery Track, the Legal Track, the Engineering Track, the Golem Track, the Alchemy Track, the Business Track, there’s one for everything the School teaches! Because that’s how the School works. You, what are you here for?" Stefan pointed to one of the random students.

"Music and entertainment." He answered.

"Music and entertainment! Great! Your sponsor wants you to walk out of here with the School saying you’re competent at music and entertainment. You’ll probably be taking the Music Track, the General Entertainment Track, then probably a Track dedicated to a few different instruments, and a Track dedicated to a few specialized types of entertainment. Each Track has graduation requirements. Fulfill them all, and the School is happy to certify that you’re competent in the field. The School’s idea of competent is everyone else’s idea of genius, and it’ll open doors throughout the world! Questions?" Stefan asked as he continued to walk backwards, occasionally throwing a look over his shoulder to see where he was going.

I spent a few moments putting together all the needed words to ask the question I wanted to say. As I opened my mouth, someone beat me to the punch, asking exactly the question I wanted to ask.

"What do the Track requirements look like?"

"Great question, so glad you asked! It depends on the Track! Some are easy, just a written exam. Students occasionally come here with expert knowledge in a field, promptly take the Track exam, and get certified all without stepping foot into a classroom. Usually happens when an Immortal wants to pick up a new profession, but is still a 700 year old master in their old profession. It’s a pride thing, being able to claim more Tracks completed at the School. Others, like the musical instrument, would require a performance test. Entertainment might ask for a performance, although I’m not sure on that one. The big admin building is the place that has all that information, and would you look at that, we’re here!"

Stefan gestures to the big building on my left, the same one Yugure had taken me to when I first came.

"Now, all these buildings have super-fancy names, but nobody actually calls them that. This is either the big administration building, or the fancy administration building, depending on who’s calling it that. It’s the first thing most people see, and it’s designed to impress. Hence it being the fancy administration building. Most of your paperwork needs will be seen to there, and they have all the information you could possibly want. If you can find it. I swear, the place was originally a maze, and I know for a fact that the hallways rearrange themselves. Moving on!"

Stefan took a turn down the road to my left, and started to walk down it.

"This is the main campus. There are three layers of roads, all in an octagonal shape inside of each other. I like giving the tour of the place by starting at the outer layer, and slowly working our way in until we get to the central layer, which has the eight magical towers. Most of your classes will be in those towers." Stefan explained as he continued to walk backwards.

"Let me discuss robes! Everyone needs to wear robes, and the color does have significance. It’s easy! They’re tied to your level, and if you ask some of the [Deans], they’ll claim it’s a reflection of how much you think you know. We start with black! The lowest level, and System-wise, you all know they have the most powerful classes. A bit of a joke, that the people with the lowest levels think they know the most. Everyone with their highest levels being level 1 to level 511 get black robes. Purple robes are for levels 512 to 1023, and I think you can see the pattern here, ending on white robes for the final 512 levels. There’s rumors of one or two of them around campus. Ah! We’re at our next spot!"

"The auditorium! The fine fellow who mentioned he was here to study music is going to spend quite a lot of time in this building. Those of you who want to test their luck can come and listen, and hopefully it’ll be an expert working on their latest masterpiece, and not a rank beginner who doesn’t know how to tune their instrument."

Stefan shuddered dramatically.

Someone asked a question about classes.

"Classes and graduation! I’m so glad you asked, I entirely forgot! Ok, each Track has a set of classes that it asks you to take. Now, you don’t have to take any of the classes, you can just skip right to the Track test. However, there’s a guarantee that if you take all the classes, you will have all the knowledge needed to pass the Track exam! That’s the claim, we all know it’s not true. Or have sufficient proficiency to play the instruments at the level needed to pass, or to construct a golem up to the examiner’s standards, etc. The examiners are also the professors, and I’ve heard enough stories about favored students not getting as harshly examined - after all, they know the student knows the material - versus Immortals just waltzing in and assuming they know everything. Also, everyone has an advisor. They can help guide you on a personalized, one-on-one basis. They’ll give you lots of good advice, but in the end, they’re only elvenoid. They might make mistakes. Do your own thinking!"

Go to classes. Listen to my advisor… within reason. Easy enough.

"Next, we have the College of Natural Philosophy. Right after the road is the College of Business, and…"

Stefan continued to give his tour of the outer ring of buildings. The sports arena was next, where I spoke up and asked if it was the Mistor arena. It wasn’t, although Stefan said he’d point it out when it showed up. The College of Arts was after the sports arena, and the gym was just past that. Iona looked thrilled at that information.

I should go to the gym myself. Didn’t have Ranger drills keeping me in shape anymore.

The bazaar was next, a multi-story behemoth that Stefan promised sold everything we needed. Crafters could even try to sell their goods in the bazaar, and the place we’d seen on the ground in Rolland were some of the more enterprising members of the School trying to break into a new market.

"Can I go?" Amber pleaded with me.

"I’m not your parent." The words were supposed to be flippant, but my throat betrayed me in the end. Amber looked like she’d been stabbed at the reminder.

"You can go, but this is your only chance to see the School. The bazaar will still be there after the tour’s over." Julius gently reminded Amber.

She quietly nodded, and we continued on with the tour.

The College of Engineering was next, and that didn’t interest any of us.

A familiar building was next.

"The dining hall! About as risky as the auditorium. Dozens of different [Chefs] and [Cooks] will be working there every day with thousands of different ingredients, but heads up! They’re also student workers, most of who are practicing their class while also making money and studying at the same time. Usually they’re experts, but sometimes… well… let’s just say nagas have their own weird idea of how spices should work. Buyer beware!"

The food seemed perfectly fine when I went there, but it was nice to know. This place, like every other place, encouraged a quick check with [Identify] to see if the person I was getting food from was high level or not.

Although… most [Chefs] were [Artisans], but anyone with an [Artisan] tag would look like a chef behind the grill.

I’d avoid anyone cooking that had any of the other tags.

Hmm.

Technically, I could ask Iona to spot check people’s classes, but that seemed rude, and I’d asked Iona for so much help already.

"While I’m on the topic of cooking, that reminds me about auras! There are plenty of high level individuals here, and enough Classers grab aura skills that they start to become relevant. I know at least one [Cook] has an anti-burning aura. While he’s in the kitchen, nobody’s food will burn. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people with auras in the School. You’ll find crafts are easier to make, instruments are easier to tune, quills never run out of ink, and dozens of other little - or big! - effects here and there. Enjoy them while they last!"

"Next is the student center! It’s for all of us to relax and unwind. Parties, games, the latest invention, all of that can be found here! The social hub of the School, and honestly, what’s more important?"

Stefan let the murderous looks from the sponsors roll off his back, while Julius gave a sigh in the background.

"Speaking of social groups, let me talk about Rings!" Stefan held up his hands, showing off three rings he was wearing on his abnormally furry hands. "Rings are social groups. They could be for anything! Whatever interests you have, there’s a Ring. Dueling! Drinking! Debate! Dancing! Debauchery! There’s something for everyone!"

Iona looked way too interested in the debauchery Ring idea.

"Each Ring gives out a, well, ring to show off your membership in the club. There’s a little unofficial rule that you can only be in as many Rings as you have fingers. Nobody wants someone joining just to claim they’re a member. Of course, it’s not a rule, but when everyone does it?"

Stefan shrugged.

"Brrrpt?" Auri asked, and since there was nobody around that could understand her, I spent a few moments thinking of a translation.

"What about people with no finger?" I asked, cursing as I knew I punted the plural form.

Auri flew up a bit above the group, making a small fire show and twirling herself around, making sure everyone could see who the question was about.

Also because the vain bird wanted to show off.

"Ha! Good question! Ask the Rings! Some might say two, some might not care. Ok, any other questions?"

There were a few more, and we moved on.

"Off to your left are the cheap living quarters. Most of you live in them and are familiar with them, they’re free to all students. We’ll get to the fancier ones later."

I obviously recognized the area.

"Next! The building you need to know the location of, and pray you never visit! The hospital! It’s combined with the school of medicine, and I spot at least one [Healer] in the crowd here who’ll have her studies here!"

Ok. Fine. That did it.

I’d totally help the sponsors hide the body.

"We’ve got the boring administration building next to the hospital, and they handle the other half of the paperwork that the fancy administration building doesn’t! Now, before someone asks, I don’t know who does what, and they’re obnoxiously vague about it."

The observatory was next, followed by the ‘lower education’ building.

Auri and I traded looks at that one.

"Brrpt."

"Oh, he’s just being mean, I’m sure it’s a great place to learn! It’s special for you."

"Brpt."

Auri was entirely unconvinced, but she would be getting an education. That was non-negotiable, and I’d already gotten practically scammed on my first attempt to get her a good education.

I wasn’t failing this time.

After that was the stables for large companions and animals - we all glanced at Fenrir, even as a giraffe looked at us from over the walls - and the guard station. The theater came after that, and someone asked a good question.

"Yes! Professors have complete discretion over who’s allowed in their classes, and there's a number of advanced classes the professors won’t allow you into unless they know you. The medical classes on Miasmas, Spores, and Poisons is a famous example. The biomancy classes on How to Make Vorlers is another one, and why they still teach that I’ll never know. Golems Building Golems is another class that has extremely high requirements to get into. They won’t teach just anyone that stuff, we don’t want another set of Pekari running around! One’s bad enough."

Make nice to access forbidden knowledge. Easy enough.

We came to the Vaults.

"Getting dark for a minute here!" Stefan’s cheerfulness was entirely at odds with the information he was imparting, like he was regaling us with a fun story instead of facts. "The Vaults! It securely contains most of the knowledge we’ve accumulated through the eons, and is the single most fortified position in the School. When an Immortal War comes to the island, it’ll be the last thing standing. Local legends have it that the School’s been entirely eradicated eight times, the Vaults being the source of knowledge that’s brought us back from some dark and ugly times after the island’s been rediscovered!"

"Is that true?" Artemis asked. I wondered if she was thinking that, yes, maybe this was her School, resurrected time and time again.

Stefan shrugged.

"It’s been ages since the last Immortal war. What, 900 years or so? How am I supposed to know! It makes for a cool story though."

Iona muttered darkly next to me in a language I didn’t recognize.

After the Vaults were the flying fields, and Stefan hit his hand to his head.

"Flying! Right! Things are calm right now, the island’s barely moving. When the island is moving, there are some low level protections against the wind. However, you don’t want to get too high up. The wind will rip you right out of the sky, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to land before you go off the edge of the island."

There were a few laughs at his joke, but Stefan shook his head.

"I’m completely serious. Saw it happen my first year. We were over the ocean to boot. Never saw the student again. Do. Not. Fly. Well, not outside the safe to fly areas. Like this place!" Stefan gestured to the… well, words mostly failed me. It was like a hovering obstacle course.

"It’s the flight course! Safe to fly, lets little birds burn some energy safely. Now, on the other side, we can see the fancy living area. Professors get houses here, and wealthy students can rent out a house for themselves, with significantly more room. Unfair? Yes, but they’re subsidizing the rest of us. It’s a nice area, but if someone asks you to leave, leave. It is their home, like we all have rooms in the bulk dorms."

Stefan answered some questions as we kept walking. The Dangerous Workshop was next to the fire and magical emergency response building, for obvious reasons. The normal or safe workshop was next to that.

The events center was next on the path, a huge building dedicated to… being a building that people could set up in. The Legal College was after that, followed by the College of War.

Why the break in the naming convention, I had no idea.

The next building was a familiar one - The Wandering Inn, or as Stefan called it, the Hotel.

I liked The Wandering Inn more.

"Another entertainment building! Entertainers usually make neat mirages, or tell stories with illusions and sounds. When their stuff is good, it’s good. It’s like watching a real story in front of you!"

Sounded like a cinema! That could be fun, if I ever had spare time.

That triggered a thought, although I’d ask one of the professors at the School. Generally, leveling up healing classes required patients. With dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of medical students at the School, how did we get enough patients and injuries to get enough experience to level up?

It was less of a concern for me, but the same question could easily apply to a dozen different types of training. [Actors] got more levels doing difficult parts in front of large audiences, and I imagined most other classes needed similar conditions.

"Next up is the Tabernacle! Whatever your faith is, the Tabernacle is there to provide."

The building was impressive, a staggering holy spiral into the sky. I should pray more often, and Iona had her head bowed.

"Last building on this layer! The place most of you will spend considerable hours, the library!"

I’d seen the building before, but I’d naively assumed it was just an extension of the fancy admin building.

No.

I had sinned. I hadn’t recognized what it was before it was pointed out to me. A travesty that wouldn’t be repeated. It was the holiest of holy grails. A reflection of my inner soul, a place that Remus technically had and practically didn’t.

A library.

A place of books, of stored knowledge. Cozy corners and musky smells, all the stories of the world in one place for me to loot and plunder to my heart’s content.

And oh! This one was ginormous. If even half of it was full of absurdly spaced books, I’d have multiple lifetimes of reading material available.

As long as they weren’t all census reports or something. Even then! There were probably enough of those reports to tell a fascinating story, I’d just have to be the one to put it together.

I knew where I’d be spending an unreasonable number of hours. I knew where I’d be trying to find a job.

Books and scrolls, parchment and ink, oh my! I couldn’t wait, but I restrained myself.

It was orientation. I was getting some special inside knowledge now. The books would be there in an hour or so.

Assuming there wasn’t a gigantic fire or something else while the tour continued. I discreetly knocked on a tree along the path to ward off bad luck.

"And we’re back where we started! The first layer’s done! Questions on what we’ve seen so far?"

Stefan answered a few questions, then moved on.

"Over here we’ve got the statue of Radras the All-Knowing." Stephan pointed to a bronze statue of a sphinx, slightly taller than Iona. It was worn in multiple places, clearly having weathered quite some time.

"Radras supposedly reignited the School after centuries of decline, and is venerated here to this day." Stefan explained. "Now, I mentioned before that some professors require taking their prior classes before they’ll let you into their more advanced classes. Radras here plays a role in that. Legend has it that patting the head before a major exam will get you a passing score."

His head was indeed rubbed shiny, worn down in a way the rest of the statue wasn’t.

"However, School students usually strive to be better than merely passing. Rubbing Radras’s belly will get you an excellent mark on your exams."

Yup.

"The School’s full of perfectionists. If you want perfect marks, there’s one more spot on Radras."

Gods damn it all. Stefan was right. Why was the statue entirely anatomically correct!?

"Moving on! The School put all the fancy things near the front of the School, to stop tourists from getting lost. The Grand Stadium’s next up, and it’s where major events are held."

Looked like the Colosseum from Remus, and I was slapped with another pang of homesickness.

"There’s fewer things on this layer. Let’s go!" Stefan said.

He was right.

There was a multi-storied greenhouse that Stefan claimed housed every plant on the planet, although a number were restricted. The firing range was for training and practicing skills, and it was filled with people firing off skills. Arcanite pillars dotted the place, and mages kept walking back and forth from them, topping themselves up so they could keep going.

The Illusionary building was next… although that might’ve been a prank. The lot was completely empty, and even Stefan wasn’t entirely sure if it existed or not.

The dueling arena - AKA the Mistor Arena, where practice was - came after that, and we were already halfway through the layer of buildings.

The Aquarium was next, although Stefan claimed there was only a small fraction of the sea creatures inside. It looked to my untrained eye to be dangerously close to the Dangerous Workshops, but eh. It had survived until now, right?

"The Museum of All Things!" Stefan proudly named the next building. "Ok, for those of you visiting, you should absolutely take a look around. I’m no [Professor], I’m not amazing at explaining things, but here’s the quick and dirty basic rundown of the place."

He took a deep breath, and started reciting.

"Iona, can you translate this for me? It sounds important." I realized two sentences into Stefan’s explanation that I needed a good translation of this, and not my feeble attempts.

"Classes work off of knowledge." Iona translated Stefan’s words, hanging onto them herself. "The more you know, the more options you’ll get. The more options you get, the better classes you can take. Metal is the best example of what the Museum of All Things can do for you. What metal does a Metal [Mage] conjure up? Well, it depends on the mage! They’ll get some metal that works and resonates with them, that they know and are familiar with. Someone who grows up in a copper mine will conjure copper, and someone who spends their childhood in a blacksmithy will conjure up iron."

"The Museum has a sample of everything. Every metal. Every stone. All types of glass, sand, lava, waters, oozes, flames, woods, lights. It’s all in the Museum, with their properties labeled."

Iona broke off from translating Stefan’s speech, and was looking at me.

"I take it you’re going to want to visit."

I grinned back.

"You know me so well."

"Let’s all visit after orientation." Julius agreed.

"Wonder if there’s different types of Lightning." Artemis wondered.

"There are! Remember how I told you about Galeru?" I nudged the twitchy mage.

I’d noticed there were a few different types of Radiance throughout my travels. My skills were often sun or bug-themed, but Haka had a forge-theme.

We weren’t the only ones excited by the information. All of the other students and their parents or sponsors were excited by the news as well, and I foresaw an influx of visitors.

"Ok! Last up is the Arboretum!" Stefan pointed to the last building. "Slightly different from the Greenhouse, this has trees. The people running the place insist it’s different from the Greenhouse, and there’s some bizarre rivalry going on there. Don’t ask about it unless you want them to talk your ear off, or if you’re unlucky, throw you out."

There were practically no questions. Everyone was still mulling over the Museum.

"Ok! That’s it for the second layer! The third layer is just ahead, and it’s the easy one! The mage towers!" Stefan gestured, and started going on about the eight towers in the center of campus as we walked around them.

Long story short. There were eight towers, one dedicated to each primary element, and they were where most of the magical education occurred, usually linked with the element most commonly associated with it. Illusions were in the College of Light, for example, while fire was in the College of Fire. Easy stuff.

Healing was in the College of Water, because apparently there’d been some feud between Light and Dark as to which one was ‘more important.’ An interesting tidbit was that Celestial healers were the most common type of advanced element in this day and age, and that just gave me warm fuzzy feelings all over.

"Last thing, then I’ll answer whatever questions you have. You’ll notice there’s space between the eight magic towers. That’s Central Park! A lovely place for a picnic, to go for a walk, or to hide in the bushes to study. I don’t judge."

"When do classes start?" One person asked.

"What’s the class schedule like?" Iona asked at nearly the same time.

"There are eleven weeks of classes, followed by two weeks of break, for a full cycle. The next cycle starts in four weeks, although the two weeks of break are basically a non-stop party."

"Where will the island go next?" Julius asked after quickly consulting with Iona.

"Good question! Uh. You’ll have to look it up. Some of the students from the College of Natural Philosophy claim there’s a pattern to how to island moves, and when it speeds up and slows down, but it is a mystery to those of us whose heads aren’t in the clouds. Figuratively. The boring administration building can tell you more."

"How much longer can we stay?" Someone else asked.

"I think the island’s picking up speed already. Admissions end tomorrow, and the day after is the last day to get off the island. Oh! That reminds me! Beware of Barnacles! They’re former students who never quite left. They’re tenacious, living in the cracks. Mostly harmless, but they exist. Next question?"

With all the questions answered, and orientation over, my friends and I decided to grab dinner.

Errr.

We were on island time now, so it was more like lunch, though the sun was down and the moons were out. Changing over was weird.

I’d get used to it.

Chapter 20
Advisor Meeting

Lunch with everyone was great. We were aware that our time together was nearing its end though. Amber divided up the gambling winnings, getting me enough money to get through an entire semester’s food costs, along with a little extra. I figured I’d be working, hopefully in the library, and wouldn't need a gigantic pile of coins.

Not when everyone else needed it more than me. I was set for the near future.

"Two days." Artemis mused, flicking Auri away from her food. The greedy little phoenix went rolling over the table, and I slapped out the flames she left in her wake. "Then we’re off. What do we want to do?"

I lifted a finger up, forestalling any ideas, and pointed to Amber.

"We are not spending the entire time shopping. No."

She pouted and crossed her arms.

"There’s a number of interesting buildings here. It seems like it’d be a once in a lifetime chance to get to explore the greenhouse, the Museum, and all the rest." Julius said.

"Do we want to explore the town?" Artemis asked.

"Why not?" Julius answered.

"Let me drop my coins off at my room and quickly freshen up. Meet at the greenhouse?" I asked them.

"Yeah, sure, sounds good. We could all freshen up a bit." Julius agreed.

We stood up and walked out, Artemis and Julius bantering as we left.

"What, I thought you said The Wandering Inn reminded you of being back in the Ranger wagons." Artemis teased.

"It does! Gently rocking wood? It’s great." Julius sighed nostalgically. "But you smell like you’re living in a Ranger wagon, and that’s a different story."

"What! I do not!" Artemis protested.

I discreetly sniffed her. Oooh yeah. Julius had a point.

Artemis whirled at me and glared.

I whistled innocently, glad I was about to get out of Lightning range.

"Brrpt, brtp."

I swung by my rooms, intending to drop my stuff off and go meet everyone. However, my plans were interrupted by a scroll pinned to my door.

It had to be one of my roommates, but none of them had come off as the passive-aggressive type.

I carefully took the scroll off my door, unrolled it, and -

Cursed my attention to the spoken word, but not the written. I had no idea what the letter said.

"Brrpt brpt?" Auri asked.

"No idea, sorry."

My roommates were out, and I mentally cursed my bad luck. I decided to sound out the words, pray they were in a language I knew, and figured I’d get a few levels of [Learning Languages].

[*ding!* [Learning Languages] has leveled up! 67 -> 68]

I’d gotten most of the letter deciphered.

Elaine.

Please meet with me at your earliest [something]. I am [something] that we haven’t had a [something] yet. My [something] is in the Wood Tower.

Professor Marcelle.

Marcelle… [Immortal Recollections] nudged me, reminding me that was the name of my advisor. Who was possibly a little ticked I hadn’t come and said hi yet.

I bit my lip, and figured I’d check with Artemis and the rest, mostly to let them know I wouldn’t be able to make it. It’d be plain rude to leave them hanging for me. I made my way over to the greenhouse.

"Elaine! Ready?" Julius asked.

I shook my head, and quickly explained.

"Drat. You should get on that." Artemis slipped her arm into Julius’s. "I’d be ungodly pissed if one of my students ignored a summons."

Amber pulled a face.

"I’m not sticking around to be a third wheel. I’m going to explore the market and some of the other buildings." She said.

"Brrrrrrpt!" Auri wanted to explore all the green things. Maybe there were fire-plants! I wished her luck on her quest to find a burning bush.

"Alright, sounds good. I’ll try to meet up with you at the Museum? Worst case, let’s grab dinner together."

Weird to say when the stars and the moons were already out, but that was life on a flying island for you.

With a plan to meet later, we all went our separate ways.

Finding the tower was easy. It dominated the skyline, and all roads led to it. I’d have to be blind to miss it, and even then I’m sure the rest of my senses were good enough to locate it.

Now, finding a particular room inside the tower?

That was a whole adventure in and of itself. Orientation had told me where the buildings were, not that the inside was also going with the Wood vibe, and things like "straight corridors" and "logical layout" were for the Metal tower. Hallways twisted and turned over each other, rooms were layered like honeycomb, and I even joined a line of students who needed to climb up a rough ladder grown out of a wall.

The naga in front of me caused considerable delays, needing to rely entirely on her upper body strength. I took notes on the sheer variety of curses.

[*ding!* [Learning Languages] has leveled up! 68 -> 69]

The floor was luxuriously soft, some sort of moss making the place heavenly, and in spite of all the wood and growing things, I didn’t see a single insect. The whole place smelled of fresh flowers, and there was a line of apples growing out of one hallway’s ceiling. A passing student reached up, grabbed on, and had an impromptu snack while he walked along.

After three false guesses, I finally found the room I needed. I knocked, and a voice, translated into four different languages, echoed from within.

"Come in."

I entered Marcelle’s office, noting the sheer number of small glass enclosures along one side of her office, each one holding some small critter that had undergone changes. Chipmunks with tentacles, squirrels with horns, the works.

"Elaine?" Marcelle looked at a piece of paper, and shook her head.

"One moment while I wrap this up." She didn’t even wait for me to answer her question.

It had been polite when I was a Ranger and a Sentinel to stay standing when my boss asked for me, and while Marcelle wasn’t my boss, I wasn’t going to start off by being rude.

Marcelle was clearly yet another vampire, wearing purple robes herself. That, or she violently avoided the sunlight, had red eyes, and decided to give herself small fangs like the rabbit in one of her enclosures.

Marcelle shuffled a few more papers around, clearly wrapping up whatever she was doing, and glanced back up at me.

"Sit, sit." She told me, a chair growing from the floor in front of her desk. "We’ve got a lot to talk about."

I spent a moment thinking about the right words in High Elvish, my skills helping me bring them to my mind.

"Thank you. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to meet you before." I mentally cursed the lack of a backup translator.

Wait, vampire. Vampire’s Tongue.

"Do you speak Creation? Er, Vampire’s Tongue?" I asked her. My words didn’t echo, the automatic translator not hitting the language.

She lifted a single eyebrow at me, relaxing back in her seat.

"Is that your primary language?" She asked me.

I nodded. I was better at it than English these days.

Marcelle went rifling through her desk, bringing out two cups and a bottle of wine.

"This sounds like quite the story. Drink?" She offered me, and I graciously accepted. Marcelle raised her cup to me, and we both had a sip. The wine was sweet, and blessedly less potent than the dwarven stuff. Still, I wasn’t going to go head over heels guzzling it down. Moderation.

"Introductions! I’m Professor Marcelle of the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, part of the Biomancy department. I’m a vampire from the Exterreri Empire, enjoy a spot of gambling here and there in careful moderation, and I’m your advisor for your time here at the School."

With that, she took another sip, clearly passing the ball over to me. She’d given me a pattern, and I was all too happy to follow. Some fast thinking was needed to make the modifications, but not needing to mentally translate helped.

"I’m Elaine, student of the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, admitted for healing. I’m a human from Remus, enjoy mangos and books to great excess, and I’m your advisee while I’m here at the School."

Marcelle clearly almost did a spit-take at Remus, but managed to turn it into an awkward cough.

"Remus!? The Empire of Remus!? Really?! Ok, hold on, I need to break out some stronger stuff, and I simply must hear the entire story. One moment."

Marcelle drained her cup, got out a different bottle, and poured herself a tall drink. She offered it to me, but I politely declined.

"Story time! Remus. I have to know everything!" She coughed. "Well, by that, I mean knowing your background, classes, and goals helps me better advise what courses you should take, and what path you should follow."

She was as transparent as the glass in her office, but I was willing to let that slide. Somebody recognized Remus! Somebody was excited to hear about it!

"Well. When I was growing up, it wasn’t the Empire, but the Republic. And my name was just another normal name. See…"

I settled into the mossy chair as I gave Marcelle the brief version of events that had led me here. It still took over an hour, but Marcelle was an attentive audience, gasping at the right parts and laughing at the funny ones.

I kept some of my secrets, and passed over thousands of little details. She didn’t need everything, but she was easy to talk with. An excellent listener.

"... after finding out that healers of my level weren’t too welcome in Rolland, and that all Immortal lands were far away, the School was a natural choice. It would help me and my friends reorient ourselves to life, and get me to a safe spot." I was wrapping up, glossing over the vorlers and the like. "I gained admittance on my healing abilities, although it seems like healing knowledge and information has dramatically evolved since my times. I got a full scholarship on my combat abilities. I got in, got my rooms and orientation, then saw your message, and here I am."

I graciously accepted a refill of my cup.

"Wow. That’s quite some adventure! My life hasn’t been nearly as interesting. I do see why they assigned you to me. I’m vaguely related to healing, know most of the Tracks in that area, and can actually talk with you." Marcelle told me. "To confirm, you’ve got no sponsor, or anyone on the outside telling you what Classes you need, and what to study?"

"Correct. I’m here to make the best out of myself."

"A lack of a sponsor is going to make you a hot commodity. We only get a dozen or so every year, and nobles will be lining up to try and employ you. Well, your level makes it so that only Immortals might be interested, but that’s still a strong future employment prospect. Healing’s your primary class. What are your other two?"

I started a moment, before remembering that she could see my exact level, and could make the obvious connections.

Also. I was wearing purple robes, which screamed "has three classes."

"The Radiance [Mage] class I was mentioning, and I haven’t picked my third one yet. I was thinking of waiting until I knew exactly what I wanted, then working on general skills to make the start perfect."

Unsaid was making the start better would help me if I ever decided to reset the class. There were eternal benefits to a bit of a delay.

"That’s foolish." Marcelle lightly chided me.

"Oh?"

"Sure, you can get a better start to your third class. It’ll last for all of twenty four levels, of which you already have banked, and give you a marginally better upgrade. However, what matters so much more is what you’re actually doing with the Class. That, and you’re at the School. The premier place in the world for learning and improving Classes. I doubt you’ve told me a fraction of the achievements you’ve actually accomplished. At this stage in your life, a few extra levels in a General Skill will barely accomplish anything. Your best bet is to class up now, and if you can’t think of anything else, take a [Student] variant. They upgrade into nearly anything that you study here at the School, and you’ll get a good look at the rest of your options. I’d be more than happy to advise you on what to take, although there are full courses dedicated towards learning that. There’s also a book, called The Big Book of Starter Classes and How to Get Them, by Edwin Asano. You’ll want the one tailored towards third classes. The only reason I can think of to delay is if you were waiting to get a particular profession, unlocking that class. However, I don’t see you getting named [Governor] of a town anytime soon, you just joined the School. Questions?"

"I need to process all that." I pinched the bridge of my nose, thinking.

In a mortal lifespan, she was more than correct. Waiting wouldn’t help me, grabbing the class now and working on it now was optimal. She was right that getting a new job would unlock better classes, the way I’d unlocked [Ranger-Mage] after becoming a Ranger and [The Dawn Sentinel] after becoming a Sentinel. She was also right that I was unlikely to get a new job anytime soon. I was a student.

I also had no idea on a job I wanted after the School. I liked healing, and I had a healing class. I was aiming for a mage class of some sort. Delaying for a job wasn’t accurate in the slightest.

However, I wasn’t mortal, and Marcelle’s advice was geared towards the assumption that I was mortal. Immortality changed the formula.

Did it change it enough?

"Would you give the same advice to, say, a vampire?" I thought my question was smooth.

Marcelle laughed at me.

"Eyeing Immortality are you? Don’t worry, almost everyone does at one point, I’m not judging you. I started off mortal myself! No, I’m not going to turn you into a vampire, no matter how much you ask. I don’t have the rights. But yes. You’ll never get a better chance to develop your third class."

I wasn’t decided, but I filed away her advice into the "seriously consider" category.

"What class would you suggest I take, instead of one of last resort?" I asked, figuring I’d get my last questions on my third class out of the way.

"I’m biased. Biomancy." Marcelle gestured to her office. "The entire world is built off of biologicals. You are your body. You eat plants and animals. Everyone you interact with has a body, and biomancy is the art of examining and modifying biological matter to the way you want it to be. Want fangs? You can have fangs. Want wings? You can make yourself wings. Want claws? You can have that."

Marcelle’s entire body shifted at each example she gave. Six pairs of fangs showed up for the fangs, enormous black bat-like wings for the wings, and her fingers elongated into wicked claws.

"Best part of biomancy? As you should know, the System multiplies what’s already there. Any self-modifications you make get multiplied by your stats, and if you have them, your skills. The other nice part is that it can tie into healing classes. It’d be a bit of a leap for you, but it’s possible to direct healing classes to get minor biomancy skills."

Marcelle had bombarded me with a ton of information, but my mind immediately leapt to a constellation I’d seen and dismissed when I was building [The Dawn Sentinel] class.

"Would fixing birth defects fall under biomancy?" I asked her.

She nodded.

"Yes! Exactly! You’re getting the hang of it. I do love smart students. A nice bonus, by the way. A clever biomancer can make herself Immortal without White Dove noticing."

That got my attention like nothing else.

"Wait, how!?" I demanded, practically leaping out of my seat.

Marcelle gave me one of the toothy, predatory grins that vampires were so good at.

"I’ll teach you if you progress far enough down your biomancy studies to have earned the knowledge. Now. Your other two classes. Tell me about them, and your goals, and we’ll see if we can figure out what Tracks to put you on." A blank slate of wood grew out of Marcelle’s desk, the woman snapping it off. A few lines of colored text appeared on it.

I hesitated a moment. On one hand, giving away too much information had gotten me in trouble. It’d give Marcelle a paint-by-numbers of how to kill me. On the other, it was literally her job to give me good advice so I could make the most of my time here, and she was a professor. It wasn’t like she was in a fighting arena, polishing her spear skills.

I found a solid middle ground.

"My first class is a healing class. Human-focused, because Remus was all human at the time. Well, practically speaking. My knowledge is mostly focused on humans as well as a result. I’ve got a minor shield, although it’s not a focus. I guess my goal is to learn more about other species to improve my healing efficiency on non-humans? My second class is a Radiance [Mage] class. It picks up skills quickly and easily, and I guess I’m looking to get better skills for it?"

"Are you a sorcerer or a wizard?" Marcelle asked.

"I don’t know the difference between the two. I’ve gotten some poor explanations, but I’m still unsure about the details." I freely admitted. That was an easy one to confess to!

"Sorcerer then. Wizards know." Marcelle poured herself another drink, and I accepted a refill. We’d been at this for a while. "Someone else can give a better explanation of all this, and I recommend you take an introductory course to get all the details sorted. The long and the short of it is something like this. Sorcerer is a catch-all term for people who use just the System’s skills to directly make magic happen."

I was 100% a sorcerer, yup.

"Wizards also use the System to make magic happen, but in a different way. They’re given the ability to make runes, inscriptions, insignia, enchantments, there’s a dozen different names depending on the subtype. Those runes then create an effect. A wizard is significantly more flexible than a sorcerer, but a sorcerer has more impact and significantly greater efficiency than a wizard. Sorcerers cast faster, and don’t need to think about it, but wizards have more depth."

I was reminded of Origen, the Inscriptionist from Ranger Team 4. He’d been doing something similar, inscribing our armor with his magic that let us get a minor stat boost. It also sounded exactly like how Asura cast, and if I’d been at the School, I could’ve taken [Acolyte of Asura] when it was offered last class up.

Also, that sounded totally cool. Being able to do ALL THE MAGIC EVER? Or at least, that’s what it sounded like.

"I’m interested in wizardry. What more can you tell me?"

"I can tell you to find a professor in the subject, and interrogate them for information." Marcelle smiled to let me know it was partially a joke, and there were no hard feelings… but that I should also go ask someone else, she wasn’t the expert. She flicked a finger, and another line appeared on her slate of wood. I assumed they were notes of some sort.

"Ok, excellent. I’ve got some ideas on Tracks for you, along with a few general classes you need to take." Marcelle’s eyes briefly unfocused, and a dozen more lines appeared one by one on the slate she was working with. She refocused back to me when she was done.

"Last thing to go over. Your healing class and Tracks. You’ll clearly be taking at least one of the healing Tracks, but I recommend taking a few of them. They overlap with each other, and they further overlap with biomancy, letting you get a half-dozen Tracks for the work of two. It looks incredibly impressive to anyone looking to hire you after your time at the School. What’s your knowledge of the Medical Manuscripts? They’re ancient, but I’m not sure if they’re as ancient as you are."

I must’ve misheard her.

"The what?" I asked her.

Instead of answering, a branch grew from the other side of her office, bringing with it a set of books. They were placed down in front of me, and I was left staring at a series of books.

A series of books with two words on the front, which I assumed had to be Medical Manuscripts.

And an all-too-familiar signature at the bottom.

Elaine.

Chapter 21
The Medical Manuscripts

I stared at a familiar signature, copied throughout the eons.

My signature.

Elaine.

A few things suddenly made sense, and thousands more questions popped up. Like, I’d been complaining that my name was the word for ‘healer’, and how aggravating it was that I was now elaine Elaine.

Well. Turns out I was the architect of my own demise. I’d apparently written the defining text on healing, and while I’d tried to spread it around while I was in the past, I hadn’t thought I’d reach this level of success.

That was about when the realization properly hit.

Holy shitballs. Something of mine had survived all this time! I was famous! Known the world around! If it was this easy to find something of mine that had made it all this time, how easy would it be to find other things? Were there records of me? It let me know that I was in the same world, that I had mattered. I had a legacy. My name was spoken throughout the world.

Back when Papilion was asking me if I wanted to be reincarnated, I thought that people died twice. Once when they died, and a second time when their name was spoke for the last time.

I’d obtained a second type of immortality. I’d beaten out Arthur.

My name wasn’t spoken for a thousand years, no.

My name was spoken for twenty thousand years and counting.

Also, the stack of books was much thicker than I’d imagine the Medical Manuscripts could be. If nothing else, there were more than six books, and I’d only written six volumes. Without saying anything, I cracked the first book open, idly paging through it.

The first few pages weren’t my creation at all, and answered a lot of questions. The first word, the one I understood, was "Contributors", and topping the list was a name that rang a vague bell.

Lumornor.

After a moment I placed it. Aegion had mentioned his friend might be interested in the Medical Manuscripts, and I guess he’d been more than a little interested.

My High Elvish wasn’t good enough to read the dense technical jargon inside, but the book was beautifully illustrated. I hadn’t made images like this, and clearly people had been expanding on my initial work. I closed the book after spotting what had to be my [Oath] in beautiful calligraphy - the words First, do no harm were easy enough for me to understand - and made a quick count of the stack.

Sixteen. There were now sixteen volumes, all neatly numbered, compared to the original six I’d written. I had serious doubts that my original work had gotten split up that much, and the Contributors page made it clear that others had expanded on my work.

In a sense, I was the author.

In another, I couldn’t claim ownership of what they had become.

"You’d never believe me if I said I wrote these, right?" I asked Marcelle.

She laughed.

"Of course you wrote those! Everyone’s written them. Well, everyone studying medicine at least. One of my first tasks from my teacher was to copy his entire set into my own set of reference books. It was so tedious! It did get me intimately familiar with the material though, and I have to admit, it was a great study aid. I’m a little curious, and I’m sure there’s an [Archivist] who’d love to pick your brain, how many volumes were there when you read them?"

I paused for a moment.

Ranger training emphasized taking action now. Immediately reacting to the problem, because a bad reaction was better than no reaction, and would keep us alive more often than not.

I was impulsive, and my training hadn’t helped quench that aspect on the fly. However, I had time to stop and think.

Did I want to try and convince Marcelle that I was the author? Did I want to try and prove who I was?

The answer was yes, but despite what the screaming-with-joy Elaine stuck in my skull wanted me to do, not right now. While being famous was occasionally fun, it had its fair share of headaches, and that was when I was a Sentinel, and one of the most important people in the Empire. By my reckoning. If I did manage to persuade Marcelle that I was the apparently very famous author of a famous text, I could see my happy days of anonymity coming to a rapid end, and this time I wasn’t in a position to tell everyone to fuck off, I didn’t have the backing of a powerful organization to help me make people fuck off. I still wanted to go to classes. I still wanted to just… enjoy a somewhat normal life. I could always let the cat out of the bag, stuffing the cat back into the bag just ended up with a torn bag and a pile of scratches.

In the end, I didn’t bother to explain that, no, I hadn’t rewritten them, I’d written them. At least, the initial drafts, the core of the manual. I suspected that Marcelle had limited time, and devolving my entire advisor meeting into "no no, I’m the original author" argument would be entirely counterproductive towards actually getting advice.

It also confirmed my theory why [Oath] had capped out. I had thought that I’d gotten some residual experience from being the initial author, and that had indeed been the case! The Medical Manuscripts had spread my [Oath] around.

I was determined to prove that I was the author before I left the School though. My age was going to make it awkward, but I had five years, and the fact that my signature looked like it was still somewhat there was a good step towards proving it.

Things to do another day. Marcelle was trying to have a discussion with me, and ignoring her was plain rude.

"Six." I answered. "There were only six volumes when I had my hands on it, and somebody must have reorganized them since I worked on them. I’m fairly confident that I was in a time period extremely close to the originals."

"Oh my! I know some historians will want to talk with you about that! And more! However, don’t let them bug you too much, you’ve got your studies to think about, and they’ll just incessantly hound you without paying you, muttering that ‘it’s for the good of everyone’ and other such nonsense. As for the number of volumes, that makes sense. Did you take the [Healer’s Oath]?"

I grinned.

"I made it, yes, and it’s capped at 513. I’m fairly certain I’ve got a few hundred levels of stored experience left in it." I was bending the truth a bit. I was certain I had a few thousand levels of stored experience left, but that was unbelievable.

"Ok, wow." Marcelle poured herself another drink. "That’s something. I’d love to hear the story behind how you leveled it so well, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for that today. I’m going to encourage you again to take up biomancy. Well, depending on your mindset. Many healers who take the [Oath] consider biomantic modifications to be healing, which will let your bonuses kick in. That’ll let you modify people with higher vitality, and there’s insane demand for biomancers with enough power to modify high level individuals. You could make an absolute killing, and be set for life. It’s a good field."

Marcelle glanced at a rune on her desk and cursed.

"I’m sorry, this meeting’s run quite a bit longer than I intended. Let’s focus on you and your Tracks and classes. Tell me more about your medical knowledge, and I’ll make suggestions where on the Healing Track you should start, along with which classes you should take."

"I’ll start with anatomy. I’m intimately familiar with humans, but I got destroyed in the interview when it came to other elvenoids. When it comes to diseases…"

I gave Marcelle a rundown of what I knew, freely admitting what I didn’t know when she asked some probing questions. All the while, her little slate kept getting new items added to it.

"Alright. I’ve got a solid grasp. Give me some time to think and cross-reference a few things." Marcelle tapped her slate, filled with colorful words. She pulled out a pair of reference books, cross-checked a few items, and more words were slowly added to her slate.

Finally, she finished up.

"Right. Here are my recommendations to you, in order from strongest to weakest. First, you must learn some of the common languages. Vitus and I have helped you with the Vampire’s Tongue, but strictly speaking we’re not supposed to let any of it leak to anyone. This is the most I’ve used the language since coming to the School, and I genuinely hope not to use it again. Vampires need to stick together as a group, and our own private language is one way we keep that. I know a few purists that would be furious to learn that you know the language, but I don’t care. Second, your Tracks. I recommend the general Elvenoid Healer Track, the War Medic Track, and the Public Health Track. That’ll get you certified for nearly every situation you could want to find employment in the future. There’s also the Monster, Dinosaur, and Animal Healer Tracks if you’re into that idea. It’s mostly a lot of additional anatomy classes, although if your skills don’t currently cover healing those areas, you’re unlikely to hit 768 in a mortal lifetime to change your class. You’ve got some solid basics, and I recommend you start with the Comparative Anatomy or Advanced Medicine courses. There’s an argument to be made that you should take the Introduction to Medicine class, just to see if there are any fundamentals you’re missing. That one’s up to you. It could be nice to take an easy class to ease yourself into how the School works."

Marcelle handed me the slate, with what she’d said at the top.

"Radiance Sorcery Track is another easy one for you to take."

I mentally agreed in principle, and since my class was all about evolving skills, I was planning on using the chance to see how many powerful skills I could pick up. I had a free slot and everything, although I did want to investigate wizardry. There had to be an Introduction to Wizardry class or something out there.

"Lastly, I recommend the Elvenoid Biomancer Track, unless you want to get into modifying plants or animals. However, the School… disapproves… of true chimeras, and you might find more obstacles than normal when trying to study them." Marcelle had obvious distaste for the restrictions on chimeras.

My eyes were practically dragged to Marcelle’s collection of creatures, each with their own set of modifications.

I decided not to ask if they were chimeras or not.

"Outside of Tracks, there’s a number of courses that, combined, make a sort of unofficial Track. The impolite term for it is the de-bumpkining Track. Long story short, there’s a number of talented individuals who come to us knowing very little outside of the corner of their world and area of expertise, and this pseudo-Track is designed to get them to learn a bit more about the world around them. I believe you could benefit from such an education. Your situation is similar, even if the background is different than usual. I’ve added in a dozen courses to the bottom of the list that effectively form that not-Track."

A gentle chime went off in the office. Marcelle got up, and started to pack a few things together.

"I apologize, I need to run. Sign up for classes at the smaller administration building. It was lovely meeting you. Bye!"

Marcelle left me with the slate, and I quickly debated trying to catch Artemis and Julius at the greenhouse, or dropping this back off at my dorm first.

I elected to keep the slate safe, heading back to drop it off.

Along the way, I bumped into Iona, who waved me down.

Purple robes were a good look on her.

"Elaine! I was looking for you!"

"Oh?" I asked as she fell in stride with me, heading back to our rooms.

We walked for a few moments in silence, Iona clearly getting her thoughts together.

"You’re a powerful healer." She stated, and I just wanted to explode about what I’d discovered about the Medical Manuscripts. But no. That was a topic for another day, and right now she had a question for me. "Do you know much about mind healers? Are they actually a thing, or do they just string you along for your money?"

I cocked my head, unsure of the term.

"Mind healers? Maybe? Tell me more?"

"Someone who helps fix your head. They claim they can’t just snap their fingers and use a skill, you need to talk with them a bunch over months. Naturally, you’ve got to pay them the entire time, and they don’t promise it’ll work. It sounds fishy to me, but… I probably need a mind healer." Iona confessed.

Heavy stuff. I looked at her with a critical eye, remembering some of her stories.

Getting eaten whole by a wyvern.

Watching her sister squires and Valkyries get cut down one by one.

The endless fights she found herself in.

And those were just the stories she was comfortable sharing with relative strangers. There had to be more, deeper, more personal losses she’d had.

Yeah, I could see why she might need a mind healer.

We got to our rooms, used our mana to open the door, and since the conversation was lively, we sat down on the sofas, continuing to chat. It just felt right and natural.

"That sounds a bit like a therapist. I’m not trained as one, but yes, they’re a real thing, and if you think you need to talk with one, you absolutely should. There’s no promises on anything, but give them a shot."

I studiously ignored my own deteriorating mental state. I was fine. I’d tough things out and get through it.

Iona relaxed, shooting me a huge grin, and I only just noticed how tense she was.

"Thanks Elaine! You’re a huge help. Let me know if I can ever do anything for you, yeah?"

"Of course! Do you know much about biomancy?"

Iona grinned.

"I’m caught in the act! Yes, I know a little about biomancy. A biomancer helped modify me when I was a kid."

I tilted my head at her, not seeing the extra eyes or whiskers.

"What’d he do?"

Iona flexed and slapped her bicep.

"Made me tall and strong! It’s given me a significant advantage in life. I wouldn’t be nearly this tall or have nearly as much muscle if he hadn’t given me a boost. Great stuff, and it’ll last for my entire life. Helped a ton with the path I’ve taken."

That little tidbit was like an earworm, and made perfect sense. Modifications lasted a lifetime.

Iona’s entire life.

If I modified myself, they’d permanently make me stronger, or faster, or… something. I’d need to do some research to find out the exact limits of biomancy.

Something to think about, and talk with Artemis and the like… and speaking of, I needed to go meet them!

"Gotta go! Thanks! That’s super helpful."

With that I dashed out the door, hoping I could find Artemis in a reasonable timeframe.

I caught up with Artemis, Julius, and Auri.

"Brrpt BRPT! BRRRRRRPT!! Brpt brpt BRPT!"

"Cinderwood? Inferno roses? Volcano palms? Wow! Yeah, I’m totally going to have to see those with you! Let’s see the Museum of All Things first though, yeah?"

"Brrpt?"

"I bet they have a fire exhibit…" I tempted the little bird.

"BRPT!"

We headed down along the path to the Museum.

"Productive meeting?" Julius asked.

"Yup. Got a ton of suggestions on classes and Tracks to take. She also thinks I should class up, and thinks biomancy is a viable option for me."

"Wait wait, don’t tell me." Artemis covered her eyes with one hand like a fortune teller, holding the other one out. "She’s a biomancer herself."

"Got it in one." I agreed.

"Everyone’s going to suggest they take what classes they have. You’d suggest people get healing classes, I’m going to suggest Lightning and Earth mage, Julius thinks there’s nothing better than being a speedster…" Artemis quickly listed off the point on her fingers.

"True. She had an interesting point that simply learning biomancy might help improve my healing class down the line, and Iona mentioned that body modifications are permanent. Which has me thinking I should grab the class, learn enough to do some modifications, ask everyone for advice on the rest of my options, then reset my class and pick the ‘for real’ class. Thoughts?"

I gave a quick explanation what biomancy was, and what I’d learned of it so far.

"The idea has merit." Artemis tapped her lips. "Get some permanent upgrades for life, then ask a variety of people that you’ll meet here for advice on what the best third class is for you, take that, then get a ton of powerful skills for it. I like it!"

"BRPT brrpt brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppt??"

"I’ll tell you all about the phoenix related classes I get, I promise." I told my little friend.

"Brrpt! BRPT."

"Wait, don’t take a phoenix class?"

"Brrpt!!"

I facepalmed.

Auri didn’t want me to burn bigger and brighter than she did. The risk of me overshadowing her was too great in her mind… which was something of a compliment.

"The only question I have for you to think about is: Do you think you can significantly improve your first class?" Julius asked me.

"I have no way of knowing. The recent skill upgrade I got suggests no, but like, I have no way of knowing otherwise. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t."

Julius shrugged.

"Yeah, it’s hard to know. Hey, the Museum is supposed to be helpful with classing up, and we’re leaving soon. Why don’t we enjoy ourselves here, you take a look at everything you can, class up quickly, then give us a list of everything you’re considering. Artemis and I can look it over before we next meet up, and give you our personal suggestions. Of course, you’re more likely to get good advice here, but I’d like to think we can help."

"Appreciate it Julius! Marcelle also mentioned a book I should read. I’ll take a look at that."

With that, we were at the museum, and without further ado, we entered it. It was something. None of us could properly read, but the designers of the Museum had anticipated that. The entrance had clear signs that we weren’t to touch things in the Museum, except for the things that had a ‘touch’ icon. It also made it clear that some places were off-limits, usually with a locked door with a red skull on it.

"What do you think is off-limits?" Artemis wondered.

"Plague samples." I immediately rattled off. "This is the Museum of All Things, designed to help show off the world. A cold storage containing every single plague they know of would be on-brand for them, while also something you don’t want casual visitors to get access to."

"Why on Pallos would anyone store that sort of thing?" Julius griped.

"I imagine it could be useful to expose healers to it?" I ventured a guess. "The more we know, the more efficient our treatments can be."

"Maybe they have fancy skills in gems, and they don’t want people to be able to see them." Julius guessed. "You’ve told me about some catastrophic skills you’ve seen."

We entered the main room of the Museum, and I was immediately blown away.

On the floor was an enormous diagram of the 44 elements arranged in a wheel, a gemstone as large as my head representing each element in the wheel. I found a Diamond for Light, an Obsidian for Dark, then followed the line connecting the two to find a Moonstone for Celestial.

Exhibits tastefully lined the walls between hallway openings, and the Museum spiraled up and up, showing at least six floors, before a beautiful skylight let in the sun.

Before I could get a good look at the smaller exhibits, Auri made my decision for me.

"Brrpt BRPT!" Auri zoomed off to a hallway, and I followed along.

"Have fun!" I called back to Julius and Artemis, who were already arm in arm.

I wanted something like that.

Auri, predictably, went into the hall of flames. I had no idea if there was any heat leaking from the flames or not, my immunity to fire completely killed the sensation of heat from anything actually burning.

A small campfire was in the first case, merrily burning in spite of being enclosed in glass - or some other transparent material. I found a little card near the case, which explained it was a simple wood fire, which happened to be one of the basic flames that most untrained sorcerers got, and was one of the lowest tier flames that existed.

I felt slightly attacked. I’d gotten those types of flames when I’d picked up [Firebug]. They were the only type of fire I was intimately familiar with, and it seemed only natural that’s what the flames I conjured were.

Might also explain why the class had been, frankly, weak. Bless [Ranger-Mage] for getting me Radiance.

The second fire took me a moment to realize it was grease that was burning, not wood. Behind the burning flame an illusion was playing, showing a small elvenoid trying to pour water on a grease fire, and the entire thing blowing up instead of extinguishing.

Interesting. It showed some applications of the particular type of flame, along with what it was made out of. Also potentially a cautionary tale.

Auri was fascinated by the fires, hovering like she was hypnotized in front of each one before going onto the next one. I noticed that she was spending longer and longer flying before needing to take a rest. My little bird was growing up!

Some flames used oozes, while others were clearly gas. I was more than slightly horrified at what looked to be flesh on fire, and had to remind myself that the Museum wanted to show everything, and getting familiar with burning bodies in a safe environment was good for healers.

Then I started to get to the weird flames. Silver fire off of a silver metal. Bright green flames off of what looked like copper. Dark green flames. Spitting yellow-green flames, deep blue, bright orange, blinding yellow, all the colors of the rainbow!

Black fire. White fire. Invisible fire, which had Auri way more interested than I liked. A flame so bright that the enclosure was dimmed, and it had a second layer of runes around it. Even after that, the heat was causing the air inside the case to ripple. I could imagine if that had been my base flame as a Fire mage, Maximus would’ve never rated me as having a "low stopping power".

The weirdness was just starting.

Dancing flames. Flames with little eyes and a mouth, with a little sign that suggested it was an elemental. Fire that burned downwards. Pyronox. Flames that screamed. Lightless fire that just looked like flame-shaped smoke. Fire that burned cold, frost and condensate on the glass panes. Interestingly, my immunity stretched enough that I didn’t feel any chill coming from the display. Fascinating. It wasn’t just heat and the like I was immune to.

Flames that had a plant growing in the middle, only to bloom a single flower, then wither back down to repeat the cycle again. A hovering ball that was brighter than the sun, frozen in a stasis field. Fire that had lightning inside of it, flames that looked like the sea.

A flame that had Auri entranced near the end of the hall. It wasn’t the last flame in line, and the image behind it showed a phoenix, shaped like an owl, soaring through the air.

The hallway ended with a metal grate, marking the furthest we could go. Red skulls were plastered on it, and a few dozen feet behind the grate, surrounded by dozens of layers of runes, was one last, tiny flame.

"Brrpt." Auri perched on my shoulder, then bowed reverentially towards the fire.

"What is it?" I asked, only for the illusion behind the flame to activate, showing what the flame was. I instinctively cowered at the illusion, fear striking deep into my heart.

Dragonfire.

They had dragonfire here. As a learning aid.

Well, I was here to learn, and I spent a few minutes studying the flames. There wasn’t much to get out of them.

I mentally slapped myself.

I’d gotten directly scorched by dragonfire, needing to cut off my arm to save my life. Studying a tiny tame flame inside a museum wasn’t going to help my classes any more than my direct, real-life experience. It was a good reminder just how much I’d accomplished.

Classing up was the right move. I could delay, but I’d be frittering away a once in a lifetime opportunity by doing so.

"Want to move on, or stay here a bit?"

"Brrpt brpt."

Auri wanted to stay, but she was fine with me moving on. I wouldn’t properly enjoy the fire like she would.

She had a point.

I went to the hall of Lightning next, naively thinking there’d be one or two types.

Nooope.

Apparently, there were differences between the "rumbling" type of lightning, the striking type, the little jolts that happened when I rubbed my clothes the wrong way, sustained types, balls of lightning, green types, blue types, black types. I bumped into Artemis and Julius in the hall, them leaving as I was still exploring.

There was a final enclosure to the Lightning hall, not nearly as well warded and guarded as the Fire hall. A crackling bolt of crimson Lightning was frozen, with the little panel describing it as "A captured bolt from Raiju, God of Lightning. Thrown while attempting to smite a heretic."

That was just another elemental hall. They just got crazier from there.

Ice, formed in a dozen different ways before getting to the snow section, let alone the non-water section, which was itself before the magical section! A block of everfrozen ice on a frying pan over an impotent flame, a levitating cube behind another red skull with the picture behind it implying whatever it froze would spread. I didn’t know there were so many different types of ice, let alone that the element could come in non-frozen water form. Learned something new every day.

I bumped into Artemis and Julius coming out of what looked like the Sound hall, and Julius looked shaken.

"Don’t go deep in there." He warned, his voice wavering.

"Why’s that?" I asked.

"It starts off normal, but they’ve got a cautioned area. You can go in, but…" He shuddered. "Don’t do it."

My curiosity was piqued, and it clearly showed on my face.

"A massacre got recorded by a skill, and it’ll play for you if you want." Artemis explained. "If you want to hear a few hundred people being made sport of before getting killed in slow, cruel ways… just don’t."

Julius shuddered again.

"I think we’re done here. Sorry."

The two of them made their way out.

I decided to pay more attention to the place’s warning signs.

Metal was next, and I got another flashback to Lun’Kat’s lair. There were samples of every base metal the School knew of and a truly stunning array of alloys of those metals as well, along with a detailed card describing hardness, along with a whole host of technical terms that I was lacking. I suspected even if I knew the words, the numbers were meaningless to me without further education. At some point, it linked up with Crucible, and the mallium display cycling between liquid and a whole host of solid shapes was endlessly fascinating. Sparkling mithril, corrosive stygium, unbreaking and unbending adamantium, and countless other metals whose names I couldn’t translate lined the walls, each fantastic in their own way.

There were roughly 40 different magical metals. I was no expert - it was why I was here, to learn - but whenever something magic-related ended up being around 40, I got suspicious of elemental alignments. 44 elements? 40ish magical metals?

Something to research one day.

The whole section filled with magical metals reminded me of Lun’Kat, although a fraction of the size that the dragon had in her lair.

Gods, that’s what this place vaguely reminded me of. A dragon’s collection.

Earth was next to Metal, and I spent more time perusing all manner of stones. Granite, sandstone, pumice, slate, marble, the hall was practically endless with mundane rocks, each one with a cubic sample neatly labeled.

Water. Light. Dark was interesting. The total darkness of the void. The soft darkness of a starry night. The dark that rushes in right as the candle is blown out. The cloying blackness of claustrophobia. The eternal ‘night’ which existed in the tunnels beneath the surface. Clouds of darkness made by magical octopi, the darkness which covered the moon, a material which absorbed all light, a really confusing display which, after some time spent trying to puzzle it out, contained ignorance, a room that rendered the occupants completely blind. Not even a soft, harmless Radiance glow could light things up, the darkness ate it all.

Wind, which included not only different types of air and gasses but also gentle breezes, biting winter gusts, miniature tornados, wind from the flap of powerful wings, and that was all just in the first quarter. Pyronox, which came not only in black but also blood-red, bright green, pure white, black as dark as anything in that element’s hall, fire which absorbed light rather than emitting it… Acid, packed with a mishmash of strange substances that decidedly weren’t actually acid, their only apparent commonality being that they didn’t fit elsewhere. Gemstone, which of course included all of the elemental gems but others as well, and some truly magnificent creations incorporating them. Arcanite had dozens of different ways of carving it. Steam. Sand. Every place had its own hall, every level of the Museum had more interesting and fascinating things to show me.

Ooze had a whole three halls dedicated to it, and even then they were packed like sardines, the element having unbelievable variety to it. Some oozes were good at being sticky, others were great for burning. Some flowed uphill, others were solid when struck. A dozen different types of mud were shown off, and it just kept going.

Radiance was of particular interest to me, and I was pleased that ‘sunlight’ appeared to be top-tier, above the light of campfires, the cozy warmth of a hearth, and the flickering light of a torch, and on par with a strange beam of light only visible as a dot of light on the substance it hit and only really topped by the burning presence of the more warlike gods of light and fire. Auri joined me again for this hall, the little pyromaniac interested in all the fire-related elements.

Lava had molten glass samples, and doing a bit of reading confirmed that, yes, pure molten glass and several other molten substances all fell under Lava’s umbrella. The more I learned!

Celestial didn’t have a hall, simply a note saying that people interested in the cosmos should visit the observatory. I wanted to visit the observatory, but one thing at a time. The island just had so much to see and do! I should find out if there were going to be any eclipses.

A few halls were locked and sealed up tight. Poison and Miasma had smaller halls, with the most benign and mostly harmless poisons possible. Rat poison. Weedkiller. Insecticide. Useful things to be sure, but the hallways had clearly sealed off the good stuff. I didn’t even see snake venom, let alone exotic jellyfish and the like!

There was a side-room to the poison hall, a room filled from floor to ceiling with tiny shelves, each one with a small shot glass of alcohol. A tiny card was attached to each one, with what I assumed was the name of the drink. Great for any [Bartender]!

Similarly, there were no Sylvan, Spore, or Forest halls, with similar notes to the Celestial element that people should visit the greenhouse or arboretum.

Gravity was more interesting than I gave it credit for initially. A couple of ‘empty’ containers showed different effects behind them, but then each container ended up with a red skull. While I couldn’t detect anything with my senses - I had to assume the magic was well-contained - the graphic images behind each section told a story. A person pulled in two directions, a person getting "sheared", someone accelerating to crazy speeds and vanishing off the planet.

Half the exhibits were on the ceiling, and I climbed one of the ‘stairs’ to take a look, feeling gravity shift around me as I made it ‘up’ there. It was clear that gravity was relative, and it was only with long experience flying that I didn’t feel queasy as my entire mental model flipped upside down.

More interesting were the objects. It took me a few minutes to work out that the sword on the pedestal was light as a feather, but still hit like it had its full weight, no skills needed. A disk that seemed to do nothing other than eat angular momentum. The note seemed to imply that it was one-of-a-kind, and no other objects that could do something similar were known.

Void and Space were similar. Darkness, distortions, emptiness on each platform, with vivid images of what that particular container did. A room that ate sound, another room that was pitch black, I was seeing a lot of overlap between Dark and Void.

It was hard to show the absence of things, which is what Void did exceptionally well.

Spatial had the classic set of a hundred different spatial containers. Spatial crates were a classic that I’d seen with the elves, and they had pouches, cups, wardrobes, an ocean in a bottle, and so many more different types of expanded spaces. Some twists in space had impossible shapes that twisted back on themselves in ways they couldn’t in normal space.

Both halls cut off a bit early with more large red skulls. Not as quickly as the Poison or Miasma halls had, but short enough to imply some truly dangerous things weren’t being displayed.

Eventually I moved on from the elements, and ended up with the artifacts, critters, insects, bugs, a taxidermy zoo, and other notable historical trinkets. There was a hallway dedicated to elvenoid biology, which had a scribbled green puking face. It didn’t look officially Museum-sanctioned, and I thought the students were soft. It was just every organ from every elvenoid neatly displayed in cases, and displayed one more time as a carved-up cadaver, it wasn’t like it was gross or anything.

The fantastical creature section was just as impressive. Unicorn horns next to wyvern scales, manticore stingers and hydra heads, the hall had everything!

With a notable absence of anything draconic. Curiouser and curiouser.

I skipped the dinosaur floor, saving it for another day, instead touring with Auri, seeing what she wanted to see. Even then, there were so many things we didn’t see, the building seemingly endless. More activities to do another day! We eventually called it quits, and headed home.

"Brrpt brpt?"

"The ice that was also a mirror was pretty cool." I punned at Auri.

"Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppptttt….." Auri couldn’t groan, but she could do the next best thing. "Brrpt BRPT!"

"Really? The Lava?"

"Brrrrrpt!" Endless flaming rocks were interesting to Auri. The fire was inside the rock, which was all sorts of interesting!!

"Brrpt?"

I chewed my lip, not expecting Auri to put me on the spot like that.

"I guess there’s nothing stopping me from classing up at this point." I reluctantly admitted. "Although, I should read that book Marcelle suggested. It’ll help me figure out what class I want to take, and what the requirements are."

"Brrpt!"

"Yeah, let’s head to the library!"

At long last, I was heading towards the best place on campus. The building that was the reason for my existence. The store of all things wonderful.

The library.

To find a real book that I’d read before reading all of the soul books in my classing up space.

Chapter 22
The Big Book of Classes and How to Get Them

"Brrpt!" Auri commented.

"It is a huge building." I agreed.

I was practically drooling over the size of the library. I’d been torn. On one hand, I wanted nothing more than to sprint over there, dive into a pile of books, and never be seen again.

On the other, I’d never be seen again, and who knew when I would need to actually eat food and the like. I could totally see myself getting so immersed in the books that I skipped a ton of meals, and then suddenly woke up one day, having not eaten for days, with no money and no job to make more. My usual go-to of healing for cash wasn’t nearly as easy to come by with a bustling hospital filled to the brim with other students and teachers trying to get as much practical experience as possible.

That would be an awkward way to go out. My tombstone engraving would be "Here lies Elaine, she wrote herself off."

I slowly entered the library like an alcoholic entering a liquor store, who promised they were only going to buy one beer.

Novelty-sized.

"Brrpt brpt?" Auri asked, her beak sticking out adorably from under her tiny little black witch’s hat.

"First thing we’re going to do is ask someone about you." I promised.

Books plus fiery bird was not a good combination, and I was going to check on the rules about that first. I was not getting banned from the library. That’d be a disaster.

"Brrrpt!!"

"I know you can be good."

With no small amount of excitement and trepidation, I opened the doors into the library.

The antechamber was large and spacious, and a nice front desk dominated the left side of the room. A few students were talking with the library assistants behind the desk, most of whom also appeared to be students, but plenty more were available.

This place was clearly magical, even by School standards. No damn lines.

Without further ado, I approached one of the open front desk workers.

"Hi!" I was getting better at High Elvish, and bless the omnipresent translations. Still, I was no master at it, and it was only a matter of time before some snafu caused problems. "Is Auri allowed in?"

"Auri?"

"Brrpt!" Auri cheerfully introduced herself. The dude raised an eyebrow.

"You must be new here. Welcome! The library has a number of high level [Librarians] with numerous skills to preserve the books. They’re protected against numerous things, like fire, water, stains, spills, rips, and the like. They are not immune to food bookmarks, so please don’t." He shuddered, and I didn’t think it was for dramatic effect.

He quickly eyed Auri, possibly checking her level. He then thunked a book onto the counter.

"Try and light it on fire and see!"

"BRRRPT!" Auri took to the challenge with enthusiasm, and within seconds, there was a book merrily burning on the library counter.

"Oh shit." The front desk worker swore.

"Brrrpt." Auri was unbearably smug.

"What is going on here!?" A high-level blue-robed [Librarian] stormed out from the main section of the library.

I felt the blood drain out of my face.

We all ended up getting hauled into a private room, where the poor student worker got himself verbally destroyed. I could even say he got the book thrown at him. I couldn’t quite catch all the words - they were speaking too quickly - but I got the general gist of what was going on. Slouched shoulders, head down, and lots of yelling by lots of high level people.

Finally it was my turn.

"Martin. Wish we’d meet under better circumstances. What happened?" The first [Librarian] asked me.

There was no question that the dude was a demon, and a demon librarian named Martin was further short-circuiting my thinking.

The words exploded out of me in a gush.

"I was asking if it was ok for Auri to come inside and he said the books were immune to fire and said we could check and Auri lit it on fire anyways please don’t ban me." I was practically crying.

His face twisted into a puzzled look, and he looked at the little hummingbird on my shoulder.

"She did that? At level 128?"

I nodded, afraid I’d burst into tears if I opened my mouth. My library access!

"Fascinating. I don’t recognize the species. What is she?"

I froze with my mouth open, looking at everyone else who was in the room. We weren’t the center of attention, but…

The librarian saw my consternation, and snapped his fingers.

"[Study Quietly]. A skill of mine, handy to silence students working in groups being a little too loud. I am exceedingly curious how a small bird at such a low level was able to break through all of our protective auras, and general enchantments. I am also curious on a personal level as to what she is, given that I don’t recognize her. Him? No pressure though, it’s simply personal curiosity."

"I’d.. rather not say. Please don’t ban me from the library, I was trying to follow the rules."

He gave a small frown, but nodded understandingly.

"You are naturally not banned, although young Lyphus is going to get a most stern talking to. However, Auri is not allowed in the library. We simply can not have a creature capable of turning the entire place into a bonfire on the loose. I hope you understand."

I nodded furiously.

"Sorry Auri."

"Brrpt brrrrpt." She wanted to know if she could leave, and go play with Fenrir.

"Sure, let’s finish up here."

"I apologize for the inconvenience, miss. I hope you have a fine day."

With that, the [Librarian] left the room. Lyphus was still getting roasted, and since nobody seemed interested in yelling or talking with me more, I slipped out as well.

After quickly popping out to let Auri go have fun and play, I reentered the library and talked with a different student worker.

"Hi! I’m new! How does this place work?"

"Welcome! Don’t try lighting anything on fire around me, please. I like my job. This is the library! We’ve got a few levels. First floor is general reading. Second and up are more specialized. Eighth floor’s the restricted section, you need special permission to go there. Archive’s in the basement, along with the metal doors. Questions?"

"How do I find a book? What’s the organizational system?"

"Well…"

In short, the organization was a bit of a mess. There were ledgers that detailed where books were supposed to be, and concerted efforts of the various workers here tried to keep everything in the right place, but things did go missing for one reason or another. Poorly filed paperwork, someone grabbing a book and not putting it back in the right place, students smuggling books out instead of checking them out - or just absent-mindedly walking out with them - students deliberately hiding books in the library so they could read more later without someone else checking it out from under them, the possibilities were endless.

There were also a few "activity" areas.

"Like what?" I asked him.

"There’s a whole pile of wizardry rune arrangements in a single stack! People put in their diagrams, other people ask questions, some try to answer them, it’s great! They call it the overflowing stack."

I was getting distracted.

"I’m looking for The Big Book of Classes and How to Get Them. Do you know where it is? Also, a Vampire Tongue to High Elvish dictionary?" Marcelle had mentioned they tried to keep a lid on it, but it was worth checking.

"The first is one of the more popular texts, yeah. I’m not sure on the Vampire Tongue dictionary; I’ll have to go looking." He gave me directions, and I was let loose on the most holy of grounds.

The library!

The soft gentle mage lights that provided illumination. The cozy corners with deep chairs. The cubbies to study in. The musky smell of old books. The soft crinkle of a page turning, and the inevitable librarian going [Shush!] to students who were too loud. The rows of shelves, stacked high with books crammed into every inch of them!

I grabbed a book somewhat at random, just to feel the weight of it in my hands. I held it close, breathing in deeply, getting a flood of sensations that weren’t quite properly reproduced in the library of my soul.

Books.

Oh beloved books. I’d been deprived of a proper library and reading experience for decades. Being here was like finally feeding my soul much-needed nourishment after being starved for so long. Me without a library was like a priest without a temple. A fisherman without a lake. A farmer without a field.

I felt tension bleeding away as the soothing atmosphere of the place washed over me.

However, just standing here wasn’t getting books read, and as nice as the place was, reading the books is what called to me, not just standing here.

The organizational system was the inspired genius of some madman. I’m sure it made perfect sense to whoever invented it, but it was completely opaque to me. Having only a passing familiarity with one language didn’t help, and it looked like the books were arranged by what they were, not what language they were written in. I idly opened one up, but whatever translation magic the School had going on didn’t extend to the written word.

The deeper into the stacks I went, the fewer people I saw. It was like I was in my own little private world back here, which suited me just fine.

Way too much hunting later, and I had the book in question - in the right language. The Big Book of Classes and How to Get Them, by Edwin Asano. I found a lovely plush chair in a hidden corner, sank down thankfully into it, completely ignored how dirty it might be, and cracked the book open.

I was met with a foreword, and since I had the time, and it was important, I decided to read it.

Hello dear reader!

This book is a compilation of everything I’ve been able to find out about starter classes. At the same time, I know I only have a small fraction of the vastness that the System is able to offer inside, along with the hundreds of thousands of small modifications that the System twists on each Class. Nevertheless, I hope that my meager efforts here will be helpful for you.

I would love to claim credit for writing this entire book myself. Alas, that would be a lie most foul, as numerous others have written to me, giving me details of their classes, and generously permitting me to use their book in this book. It has made the entire thing more complete, and the list of contributors would take up an entire book of their own!

Each and everyone one of them has my heartfelt thanks. This would not be what it is without them.

Sadly, the world is rarely peaceful. This book is divided into two halves. The first are the peaceful classes, and may you find yourself in a time where you can leisurely peruse the front half. The second half are classes dedicated to fighting. A number of classes overlap, such as the ever-famous [Mage] class, and those generally have been split in half. One in the peaceful side, detailing the types of activities a peacetime [Mage] might enjoy, while the wartime side will dive into combat capabilities, fighting styles, and more.

Organization: The book is…

I continued reading, getting the overview of how the book worked.

There was an interesting note early on, that wasn’t quite a foreword, and wasn’t a class or organization. More of a warning, than anything else. I eagerly dove into it, mostly to see what the caution was about, and out of a little bit of vanity, hoping that my own Immortality-granting skills would make the cut.

Forbidden Elements and Classes.

In the course of civilization, a number of elemental-class combinations have been found to be far too dangerous, and polite society has deemed that no man, woman, or child should gain access to them.

I had a point in my life where I was skeptical of such an arrangement. ‘Surely’, I reasoned to myself, ‘it does not matter if an earthquake destroys a city, or if a plague wipes the city out. The difference is academic, especially to the poor fellows inside the city.’

Further study and inquiry down the path led me to what I believe the true answer is. It isn’t the scale of the devastation possible. It is a combination of the scale and level of the villain most foul who would seek to destroy an entire city.

A mage who wishes to split the earth and have it swallow a city whole would require over a thousand levels, multiple classes, and dedicated skills towards the endeavor.

A mage who wishes to unleash a plague to kill everyone inside only needs about a hundred levels, give or take.

It is not quite as simple as that, and the proper differences between the two are subject to a treatise I was politely but insistently told not to write, for reasons that were obvious in retrospect, but the idea remains.

There are some classes and elements that, while some good can come out of them, massive destruction and murder on an unbelievable scale are entirely possible at low levels.

Beware those mages who have the following elements, and if offered them yourself, decline and find a different class.

Spore

Poison

Miasma

Void

Now, these elements can have quite a lot of good when properly applied, Spore farmers being a most famous example, while many guards employ Void Cancelers, half the apothecaries end up with the Poison element, and the occasional miner grabs Miasma to properly handle bad air.

Most places I have traveled to will declare those with the element and a mage designation to be outside of the protection of the law.

Please dear reader, I implore you. Do not take the class. There are so many more options in the world.

A few more specific combinations are also frowned upon, but tend to be very explicit arrangements of classes and elements doing particular tasks, and even then societally it will vary. There are also some classes and elements that can only cause true issues at the highest levels, and most who find themselves with that level of power have already demonstrated a certain level of restraint.

Well then.

That was food for thought and a half.

I’d seen what Toxic did with the Formorians. He almost killed off an entire species, while being a quarter of their level.

Hesoid in Perinthus, one man working quite hard to kill off an entire town. Almost succeeded to boot, although it wouldn’t have been his hand that killed people off, it was almost the army.

I’d been warned about Void mages before, and it looked like Spore was just as bad.

Good things to learn.

I flipped to the first page of actual classes, and got started.

Farmer: The bedrock of civilization. Every country, every district, every city, every species, every single living person needs food to live. Rare are the individuals who can entirely subsist off of hunting and gathering for their entire life, doubly rare for those who are able to do so while also living a fulfilling life. The job isn’t glamorous, but in lean times of hunger and starvation, you’ll always be able to feed yourself. The class has a dizzying number of variations and sub-types, depending on specialization, crops grown, livestock being raised, and more.

Common Elements: Most Wood-aligned elements. Water. Most Earth-aligned elements.

How to obtain: Plant a few seeds, and try to make them grow!

Related Classes: Rancher, Grower, Cultivator (Growing, not martial), Raiser, Peasant, Producer, Agriculturalist, Gardener.

I mentally cursed as I realized I forgot to bring paper and quill with me, and I had no easy way of taking notes. I wasn’t in the world of my soul where I could easily summon the materials I needed.

Trying to do it all mentally could work, but…

An hour of adventuring and running around later, I had fresh paper in a notebook - bless it for not being a scroll, so much more convenient - and a very expensive quill that I hoped would last my entire time here. According to the salesman, I could change the color, and it’d never run out of ink, as long as I fed the enchantments mana.

Given my normal track record of losing pens, and generally losing my stuff, I was taking a bit of a risk here, but I hoped it’d pay off.

I noted the [Farmer] class as being good for me to grow mangos. Like the foreword of the book, I had hopes and dreams that I was living a more peaceful life, and that I could afford to have a class not dedicated to killing.

I ruthlessly crushed the whispers in the back of my head that said I was part of the School’s combat team.

I read the book, some classes jumping out at me more than others.

Merchant: Money makes the world go round! Not everyone uses money, but those who don’t tend to live in huts in the woods, not interacting with society as a whole. There is nearly nothing money can’t buy. Health? Purchase the services of a healer. Food? Go to the store. The calling of a merchant isn’t just the acquisition of wealth either, no. Merchants are vital members of society, ensuring that goods reach people who need them. They’re the middle men that save countless hours from every single person they interact with. There are as many different types of merchants as there are goods and services in the world to buy and sell.

Common Elements: Gemstones, Metal.

How to obtain: Buy anything, and sell it again.

Related Classes: Broker, Dealer, Exporter, Retailer, Seller, Shipper, Shopkeeper, Trader, Vendor, Wholesaler.

The Amber class.

I sucked at the social aspects of bartering, although I likely had a fantastic merchant class waiting for me after bargaining with Augustus. There was also something to be said for having a class dedicated to selling my Immortality gems. I wasn’t leaning that way - the entire enterprise felt far too dangerous - but a whole class that could leverage what I already had towards making me rich?

I saw the opportunities and positives in every class.

Priest: The gods and goddesses above are with us every step of our journey here on Pallos. They are our constant companions, able to divinely intervene when requested. They are the conduit to the afterlife. Is there any calling higher than connecting people with their gods? Each god and goddess can have their own priest, and it's rare for a priest to be a generalist, instead of dedicated to the worship of a single god.

Common Elements: Any.

How to obtain: Lead others in prayer.

Related Classes: Cleric, Elder, Monk, Preacher, Paladin, Disciple, Prophet, Oracle, Acolyte, Holy man/woman.

I knew I had [Prophet of Papilion] waiting for me - not that I was going to take it - and it was fun to see Iona’s class in the book!

Noble: Here for the sake of completeness, one generally needs to be a noble before one can acquire the [Noble] class! Generally powerful, you can orient the class in hundreds of different ways, from martial to administrative.

Common Elements: Any.

How to obtain: Be nobility.

Related Classes: King, Queen, Princess, Prince, Duke, Duchess, Count, Countess, Baron, Baroness, Heir, Heiress.

A fun read, but not an option for me. I had a distinct lack of peerage and blue blood needed for the class.

The next class was similarly not one I was going to take, but it was interesting to see what Asano had to say about my class.

Healer: One of the highest callings anyone can aspire towards, healers are the last bulwark against death. Everyone has a body. Everyone needs the services of a healer at some point or another. A class that is in demand across the world, when someone needs a healer, they’re able and willing to pay any price. Additionally, I know of no society that doesn’t praise and respect healers, nor one where they are unable to make a good living.

Common Elements: Celestial, Light-aligned, Dark-aligned, Water-aligned.

How to obtain: Help someone heal.

Related Classes: Medic, Doctor, Nurse, Midwife.

A fair take, and with my life experience, I could see how the book’s words translated in practice. A mostly fair, if somewhat rosy-eyed look at the class, which seemed to be how all the classes were painted.

Revolutionary: All things new start with an idea and the person who’ll see it through. From trying out those strange round things called "wheels", to removing the corrupt government, revolutionaries make change happen. Revolutionaries are those who have ideas and ideals, the first to venture further, experiment, think, develop. Careful though, most revolutionaries aren’t well looked upon or well-paid, and occasionally venture into the more violent aspects.

Common Elements: Fire, Storm.

How to obtain: Have a burning desire for change

Related Classes: Radical, Subversive, Insurgent, Rebel, Anarchist

Interesting to see this here, and… gods, I was going to get a lot of high quality classes wasn’t I?

Researcher: Knowledge is power! There's a lot to know about the world, and someone has to figure it all out. How do birds fly? What makes fire hot? Who was the first [King] of Iktres? Researchers are the ones at the vanguard of civilization, pushing back the darkness of the unknown with every step they take. You might not be remembered, but the millions of researchers before you are the foundation of the modern day. Join them, for a brighter tomorrow. Employment prospects tend to require a high-minded sponsor.

Common elements: Metal, Fire, Light, Fossil, Celestial, Radiance, Brilliance.

How to obtain: Answer your own question with no external guidance.

Related Classes: Natural Philosopher, Librarian, Archivist, Inventor, Historian

I didn’t see myself going down that route, although I was going to dabble in the field a hair to figure out what the heck happened to Remus, and everyone. Maybe I’d make a pit stop in the class during a quick cycle?

Fun to see Librarian! Given that she was who I was in my soul. I had been offered a [Librarian] class once upon a time, I wonder how strong it was now…

Princess: To lead is to accept the burden of responsibility for those amongst you. To accept that they are in your care and it is by the strength of your heart that they will live or die. To become a Princess is to stand tall when the walls of the city fall, when the fires burn the forests and the monsters taint the lakes. It is to stand amongst the ruins as the light of your people, the beating heart of the future promising salvation and prosperity. A true Princess is not merely royalty, but a protector and mentor to her people. And then there are those who win the lottery and are born the twelfth child of some couple who wants to ensure their lineage continues.

Elements: Most elements, with the exception of Fossil.

How to obtain: Be born into a family that is royalty or become considered royalty by local life in the location which you call home.

Related Classes: Noble, Leader, Warlord, Villainess, Heroine.

I was a little confused that this class was in when there was already [Noble], but at the same time, it was a pleasant day dream to imagine I was a princess.

I wasn’t going to let the reality of the role destroy my daydream. I doodled myself as a princess riding a flaming phoenix. Because screw unicorns, I had Auri.

Smith: Also called Metalworkers, a smith is anyone who works primarily in shaping, tempering, and purifying metal. Many smiths specialize in specific metals or specific functions, and many of these specializations also require some work with wood, leather, or similar materials. Smiths are a vital piece of any society, and can be found even in the smallest villages, often being the most prosperous members. Farmers need iron beaten into plows, carpenters need nails, and it spirals from there to guards needing armor and warriors needing weapons. Wherever you go, there’s demand for your craft, although the initial investment in materials will make moving difficult once you’ve set up somewhere. More practically, in a war, smiths aren’t levied into armies, and are nearly always spared when a town is looted - provided they’re willing to work for the invaders. Most smithing involves working at a forge, as the high temperatures of a forge are needed to make the metals more malleable and in the processes used to remove impurities.

Common Elements: Metal, Fire, Crucible, Mantle, Lava.

How to Obtain: Shape metal into a tool, preferably using a hot flame to make the metal more malleable first.

Related classes: Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Coppersmith, Whitesmith, Farrier, Blacksmith.

The sheer time investment didn’t interest me, but the class was moderately famous for a reason.

If nothing else, I thought I might be too scrawny for it, before my strength kicked in. Blacksmiths were built like Iona.

Alchemist: This particular set of classes are tricky, as there are several different types of alchemists, which aren’t able to properly describe an overlap in spite of having the same name. The first type is the transmuter or transformer (external), one who turns one substance into another. The famous example is the alchemist who transmuted a full sheet of lead into gold. A pretty, if ultimately useless, display. Interestingly, transmuted materials are considered to be real, and do not obey the normal conjuration rules. With this class, everything you need will always be at your fingertips! Simply transmute the closest block of wood or dirt under your feet into clothes, shelter, and food!

The second type of alchemist is the Potioneer. Potions are interesting, as a number of them ignore the vitality-defense rule. This is to say, a potioneer is able to make an effective potion for a warrior, regardless of said warrior’s vitality. Similarly, tonics of transformation, flight, and the massive array of other potions are also usable at all levels!

The profession and learning of it is expensive, but commands a correspondingly high price from those who can afford your services.

Common Elements (Transmutation): Varies, depending on the subtype.

Common Elements (Potions): Water-aligned, Wood-aligned.

How to Obtain (Transmutation): This class is often difficult to obtain, generally requiring a learning-type Apprentice, Student, Pupil, Disciple, or related class to evolve into the class. Obtaining the class on your own is difficult.

How to Obtain (Potioneer): Mix herbs and "ingredients" together in fluids a few times to unlock the basic class.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble! This sounded like a TON of fun! Both of them! Being able to turn matchboxes into mice, or brew up a potion of SUPER DUPER AWESOME FUN TIME sounded great! A whole variety of magic at my fingertips!

Getting the class seemed hard, and the next one up was about that.

Student: Not the end, but certainly the means! Education is critical for many of the classes listed in this book, with the more you know, the better skills you’ll be offered, and the more intelligently you can apply them. The [Student] class is excellent for learning, and tends to easily sidegrade to any number of other classes. Additionally, the class often gets skills that help the student dabble in the various activities they’re learning. For example, a student might be able to make the most basic of potions that might otherwise require a skill, but never more than the basics, and always under limited circumstances. However, the raw flexibility tends to come with a minor penalty in class quality when sidegrading. The related [Jack] has similar flexibility with fewer restrictions.

Common Elements: Any.

Related Classes: Apprentice, Disciple, Trainee, Pupil, Jack.

AHHH I WANTED EVERYTHING! And [Jack] sounded like [Jack of all Trades] which also sounded super cool! The name implied that I could do a little bit of everything, and that was almost exactly what I wanted.

Guard: Essential to a functioning society, [Guards] keep the rules and the peace. I know of no society that doesn’t employ numerous guards, and even when situations and governments deteriorate, [Guards] are found employed in number, although perhaps with a different name. This class is one of the ones that crosses the peaceful-violent spectrum, as [Guards] are often called to break up fist fights at a minimum.

Common Elements: Earth, Fire, Water.

Related Classes: Enforcer, Bodyguard, Sentry, Warden, Bouncer

WOO GUARDS! I loved guards!

My major gripe with working as a guard was the hours. I liked needing to work only a few hours in a day, getting paid boatloads for it, then being free for the rest of the day to do what I wanted. Still didn’t stop me respecting the profession!

Artificer (Peaceful): Civilization is built upon tools. From the humblest wheel to the mightiest wall, to the farmer's hoe and the soldier's sword, their absence would be harshly felt, and their improvements can drastically increase the lifestyle for countless individuals.

Civilization is also built upon magic. From the simplest [Farmer] using their Skills to ensure a bountiful crop, to the highest [King] overseeing their domain, to the mages wielding stone and wood to build a mighty castle overnight, magic is strictly entwined with all of life, and its presence is a great boon to those it touches.

The Artificer seeks to combine these two great disciplines. Their tools are magical and powerful even before Skills are used with them, and rarely simple. Create mills capable of grinding tons of grain, golems to harvest crops, and carriages which need no beast of burden to pull. If there exists a problem, an Artificer can build a solution. Pay and ease of work tends to dramatically differ depending on local situations.

Common elements: Metal, Crucible, Mantle, Wood, Lighting, Steam.

How to obtain: Make a magical tool (usually with inscriptions).

Related classes: Smith, Inscriptionist, Inventor, Engineer, Mason

Hmmmm. I hadn’t been big on making things, but it sounded interesting! There was a world of difference between making things for other people, and spending hours tinkering on my own projects.

I didn’t dismiss it out of hand, making a little note about it.

Artist: From the mud on your hands, you write mosaics into a grand epic. From the ink in your quill, you pen the notes of a thousand tunes. From the essence of flowers, you make your brush the genesis of the world your mind sees. To be an artist is to take what is within your heart and pour it into your creations, so that the hearts of others may be stirred. Maybe song is your calling, or dance, writing, sculpture, or painting... There are as many forms of art as there are minds who dream. The pay tends to be abysmal, requiring a sponsor or patron, along with years of education simply to be competitive. Not for the faint of heart.

Common elements: Mirror, Sound, Mirage, Brilliance, Ice, Light, Wood, Metal.

How to obtain: Create something!

Related classes: Dancer, Bard, Sculptor, Painter, Designer, Architect, Gardener, Singer, Storyteller, Author, Parodist, Critic.

I did like the arts, although historically I’d leaned more towards the "patron" side of things. I could see myself dabbling in it, but not taking an entire class for it.

Prostitute: The oldest profession! All that’s needed is a willingness to have sex with strangers, and the class usually has some skills to help in that direction. There’s almost never a shortage of work, although income dramatically varies, there’s not a lot of growth in the field, and with rare exceptions, is societally frowned upon.

Common Elements: Water, Mirage.

How to Obtain: Have sex with someone in exchange for money.

Related Classes: Escort, Hooker, Whore, Streetwalker, Courtesan, Tart, Madame, Siren, Flirt, Tramp, Harlot, Scarlet Woman, Concubine, Wench, Gigolo, Stud.

I thought the writer had a little too much fun finding the related classes. Not the class for me, but the author was thorough.

Explorer: Finder of new things, creator of maps, spearhead of civilization. Before settlement spread into the unknown there are those who come before them. They explore for precious goods that might be worth trading, arable land that might be worth farming, or just the thrill of finding something new. Often overlooked as eccentric hermits or ostracized for their ideas to dream of what lies beyond the horizon. The northern continent can always use good [Explorers], although getting a position can be difficult.

Common Element: Air, Water, Earth, Wood-aligned.

How to Obtain: Go exploring! Most everyone already has this class unlocked from childhood adventures.

Related Classes: Prospector, Cartographer, Navigator, Pathfinder, Researcher.

Teacher: The giver of knowledge, the ones who make obtaining powerful classes and skills possible. The very foundation of all powerful classes, nobody has strong skills without a teacher in the background educating them on how to get the skill, and imparting the knowledge needed. Always in demand, only the most backward and primitive societies don’t value their teachers with ample pay and social status.

Common Elements: Water, Fire, Wood, Metal.

How to Obtain: Teach another!

Related Classes: Tutor, Educator, Instructor, Lecturer, Professor, Scholar, Mentor, Master, Student.

The job of teaching kept coming up in my life, time and time again. I’d worked as a teacher before, both lecturing at Artemis’s school, and lecturing Ranger Trainees on medicine and first aid. It wasn’t the worst job, although I wasn’t sure if I needed an entire class for it.

Biomancer: Our bodies are the very foundation upon which everything is built, and biomancers look at that and say "but what if we made it better?" They are limited by what is ‘biologically’ possible, but that has a wide range of possibilities. A single biomancer in the right place can make a normal army into a superior fighting force, a normal guard into the perfect detector, and allow a village to literally eat trees and obtain enough food from them. They are only limited by their imagination and education.

Common Elements: Forest

How to Obtain: The student route is easiest, although there are unconfirmed reports that attempting to glue various insects together will have the class be offered.

Related Classes: Healer, Alchemist (Transmutation), Transfigurer.

Interesting. The book said many of the same things that Marcelle said regarding biomancer, and the changes were implied to be permanent.

An idea was starting to itch at me. Grab [Biomancer], make myself superhuman, then ditch the class and go take a ‘real’ third. It sounded appealing, and if I angled things properly, I could even work on the educational aspect of my third class while also working on the biomancer part, which would let me gain full advantage of my time here at the School.

It got a little star.

Golem Maker: In spite of the fear the Pekari spread, golems are some of the more useful innovations one can make. Who needs a farmer, when you can build golems to plow the fields? Who needs builders, when golems can tirelessly haul rocks? Golems come in a wide variety, from wood to stone, elvenoid in shape to golems in the shape of a cube that simply play music. Build your own personal army! Societal status and pay dramatically depends on the society in question. Some revere golem makers, while others shun them. Cost of the profession varies dramatically, depending on materials used, if an Arcanite heart is used, etc.

Common Elements: Metal, Wood, Earth, Mantle, Mountain, Fossil.

How to Obtain: A Mage class directly manipulating the material in question to act like a golem. Student route.

Related Classes: Necromancer

Ok, WAIT WHAT!? [Necromancer] was a related class!?

Something to explore another day. Controlling hordes of shambling zombies and skeletons did sound somewhat fun though…

The class sounded interesting, but also fiddly and time consuming. I didn’t feel myself pulled that strongly towards it, although I should probably take an introductory course just so I could get an idea of what it was like.

Writer: I extol the virtues of many classes, but the [Writer] class is the best, bar none. Indeed, it is the very class I myself have! There is nothing more magical than putting quill to parchment, detailing out knowledge for others to read and learn. This book, teaching you all there is to know about classes, is only possible thanks to the class! It is the primary way to pass knowledge along, a way for a single individual to touch the lives of millions. Different societies tend to value writers differently, and the type of writer will also matter quite a bit. The pay tends to be poor, except for the very successful ones, but don’t worry! Every [Writer] believes they will be the hugely successful ones. Self-delusion is critical for the class.

Common Elements: Water, Wood.

How to Obtain: Write anything!

Related Classes: Publisher, Author, Reader, Erotica Writer, Procrastinator, Editor, Biographer, Columnist, Journalist, Composer, Poet, Reporter, Essayist, Propagandist, Novelist, Serial Novelist.

The next entry was [Mage]. At last! This was more like it!

Mage: No class is as wide or diverse as the [Mage] class, and indeed, arguably most, if not all, of the classes in this book could be considered a subset of the [Mage] profession. Indeed, even within the proper [Mage] classes are near-infinite varieties, of which detailing them all would be worth an entire encyclopedia of its own! The most flexible class, bending the very fabric of reality to your whims, there is practically nothing a [Mage] can’t do. However, reader beware! Mages can’t do everything, no matter what wizards will claim, and they are only useful for the very short period of time until they find themselves without mana. A [Mage] without mana is little more than a massively underleveled body, generally without the education to make themselves useful in other ways. Employment and status in society variable on type.

Common Elements: All.

How to Obtain: [Meditation] skill, among other methods.

Related Classes: See Appendix F.

The [Mage] class. What I was likely taking in the long run.

I must’ve gone through thousands of different classes. [Hunter]. [Gatherer]. [Builder]. [Architect]. [Wagoneer]. [Sailor]. [Captain]. [Knight]. [Bard]. [Actor]. [Craftsman]. [Butcher]. [Miller]. [Barrister]. [Innkeeper]. [Runner]. [Scribe]. [Logger]. [Miner]. [Spy]. [Storyteller]. [Smuggler]. [Rogue]. [Manager]. [Servant]. [Courier]. [Clerk]. [Weaver]. [Potter]. [Trapper]. The entire breadth of the world, every job that society needed to function, from the highest to the lowest.

It wasn’t the first time I’d done this exercise, no. However, different from before, I felt like I’d gotten high quality on my starter classes, and I was ready to class up and lock them in. I could always reset my class later back to level 8, and pick a new start, a new path to go down. My only hesitation had been locking things in the first place, and while I still wasn’t sure exactly what class I’d end up with, I felt comfortable enough to take a class in the first place, and start the adventure that was my third class.

When it came down to it, there was an easy, obvious selection for my first-pick third class. My current job. A class I’d taken before, and was familiar with. A class that kept coming up again and again, described as a springboard towards all sorts of other classes.

A class that would help me pick my ‘real’ class.

It was time to become a [Student] once again.

Chapter 23
The Third Class I

"It’s always good to grab a class for what you’re doing." Julius agreed with my choice of [Student], the five of us sitting down for one last dinner before they had to leave.

"Don’t keep it too long, and I wouldn’t take another [Student] class at 128. Your leveling speed has been insane, but if you find yourself at level 140, having graduated the School already? You’re going to be in trouble leveling it up." Artemis said.

"You’d be an eternal student!" Amber quipped.

"But you think it’s a good idea?" I asked Artemis again, valuing her opinion. She was someone I trusted who had a solid look at how the class worked.

"Oh yeah. Something to keep in mind though. Your [Student] class is going to want to pull some of your general skills, and if you’re not careful, you’ll lose them forever with your reset."

I pulled a face at that. She was right. [Student] was ripe to absorb [Passionate Learning], [Immortal Recollections], and [Learning Languages]. The last one I didn’t mind getting pulled, but the other two I liked. If a class pulled the two, then I reset it, POOF! The skills went away. I could probably recreate a perfect memory skill, then retrieve the "lost" memories, so that wasn’t a huge issue, but I’d worked my ass off on [Passionate Learning], and at this point, it was giving me a significant buff to my experience. A buff that I suspected applied to experience that got funneled off to Auri, but I wasn’t quite sure of that.

"Did I tell you my Medical Manuscripts survived till today?" I asked Julius.

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"The collection of scrolls you kept scurrying off to work on, muttering and cursing about edits instead of drilling with us?"

I stuck my tongue out at him.

"Artemis was the boss! She said it was fine! Plus we were stuck on that damn boat!"

"Oh! When you were getting charcoal dust everywhere?" Artemis asked. "How’d they let a grubby kid like you into Ranger training, let alone a Sentinel, I’ll never know."

I flipped her the bird.

Amber was bouncing in her chair, purple eye glowing.

"Wait, wait! The same scrolls that you gave me to study? Can you quickly whip up a set of them? If they’re really famous, a first edition set of the Medical Manuscripts would be worth a FORTUNE. Please?"

I grinned at her.

"A much more reasonable request! Not right this second, it takes me longer than a minute to make a set, but next time we meet up, sure! I’ll have a set ready for you! Plus, if I’ve proved I’m the original author, it’ll authenticate them, which should make them more valuable. Or something. I’m planning on talking with some [Archivists] or [Appraisers] to find out how that works."

Amber walked over to give me the biggest, crushing hug, which I was touched at. It reminded me that everyone was about to go.

"No wonder your name and ‘healer’ is now the same word! Oh, I gotta class up my healer class, I should have some high value options! Just a few more levels."

"I wish you didn’t have to go." I complained, somewhat changing the subject.

"Well, write to us!" Julius encouraged.

"Oh, did you finally decide what you’re going to do?" I asked him.

Julius and Artemis traded looks.

"Hunter’s guild." Artemis said. "Amber managed to negotiate our entrance, and we’re already familiar with hunting down monsters."

"Nice! Good job, Amber." I shot Artemis a thumbs up, and a smile at Amber. She preened under the praise. "Artemis. Will you need my armor? I’m not going to need it for now, and you could use the protection."

On one hand, it wasn’t exactly mine to give away. On the other? Everyone who could care was dead, and I cared deeply about Artemis staying alive.

Artemis and Julius traded looks, and she nodded.

"That’s generous of you Elaine. Thank you." Julius gave me a grateful look. It was his fiancee I was helping keep alive.

"Don’t get me started on the relative price of wands between this place and the town below. Why-" Amber interjected, unable to contain herself.

"BRRRPT!" Auri fiercely interrupted, reminding Amber she’d said not to let her get started.

"Good bird." I handed Auri a slice of fruit.

"I’ve been looking at the schedule. I think we’ll next be able to meet up in around a year and a half." Julius said. "Unless we start traveling to exotic locations."

Artemis snorted, and made a broad, sweeping gesture.

"Like this place isn’t exotic?"

Julius conceded the point with a tilt of his head.

We lingered over dinner, knowing the end was coming, but not wanting to hurry it along.

At last we said our goodbyes, and parted.

For now.

I had food and drinks for after my class up. I’d elected to do it in my room, because it felt safer than the hospital, and Auri was safe outside my room, with plenty of juice. I’d let my roommates know what I was doing. I had spare time, and a plan.

With all my T’s crossed and I’s dotted, I laid down on my uncomfortable bed, and fell into the world of my soul.

I opened my eyes to a scene of… well, I wouldn’t call it organized chaos. Books were scattered haphazardly on tables, the lights were dim, shelves had books stacked sideways on top of the properly-done books, a few flowers were haphazardly placed artfully to spruce the place up, and poor Librarian was hustling along with a cart full of books to re-shelve. She was still in her Sentinel armor, but with a great big poofy mage’s hat on her head.

"Elaine! Great to see you! One minute." Librarian blazed past me with a number of multicolored books, each one promising fantastical powers.

"Uh." I said kind of stupidly. "Is everything ok?"

"I don’t know, is it?" Librarian bit back. "This is the world of your soul, not mine."

I looked around at the piles of disorganization, and had to admit that it was a solid mirror of how life felt for me at the moment. I was trying to settle into the new world, but everything was just so different in so many ways. I constantly felt off-kilter and off-balance.

There hadn’t even been any wars that let me work as a battlefield medic! That was at least easy from a "what do I do" perspective.

"So because I feel like my life is in shambles…" I slowly said, letting Librarian finish the sentence.

"Your inner world is in shambles, yes."

"Can we fix it?"

"Well, not really. Every time you fix one thing, it just pops back. Watch." Librarian straightened a few books, left, and they became a mess again after she walked away.

"Joy. Are you still able to pull the books I need?"

"Oh yeah! Easy as anything! It’s a reflection of what’s going on, but the System isn’t about to not let you get a class or anything, or even make it particularly hard for you. It’s more of a visual thing. Are we checking out the [Student] classes first, or do you want to see what you’ve got open?"

Tricky, tricky.

"Other stuff first. Let’s hit things from the highest quality on down?" I told Librarian as I sat down at a table, brushing off two white classes and a grey one off the table. They vanished before they hit the floor.

I wondered what [World Traveler] looked like these days! The fae realm had to count as another world, improving the quality of the class.

A book with a starry cover landed in front of me, with big black bold text staring at me in the face. I felt my heart go still, and my hand trembled as I reached for the book.

No way.

I’d qualified for a black quality class!? That was the highest class quality possible! The absolute peak! I didn’t believe it. Had I accidentally flipped my elemental coloration and quality coloration? Getting offered a Dark or Void class was entirely reasonable, but no. The cover was obviously Celestial.

[The Mother of Modern Medicine] the title boldly proclaimed, and fascinated, I cracked it open.

[The Mother of Modern Medicine - Celestial]: The process of learning and discovery is a long one, with thousands of contributions by millions of individuals. However, if any one person can be credited with shaping the field of medicine as it is seen today, it is you. Your work in creating the Medical Manuscripts, your distribution, the quality of the contents, the importance of medicine and healing, and the ethics and morals espoused inside ensured that the text would be picked up. Read. Studied. Then expanded upon, copied, and spread more. Throughout the eons the text has been copied countless times, several volumes always surviving the Immortal Wars, and your name has come up time and time again as the founder of medicine, to the point where your very name literally means ‘healer’ in multiple languages.

Congratulations.

This class is the culmination of your work, your reward for your selflessness and survivability. +1000 Mana, +1000 Mana Regen, +1000 Magic Power, +1000 Magic Control per level.

Buh.

What.

WHAT.

I just stared at the book, short-circuiting a bit. I’d gotten a black class. BLACK. And it was absurd.

"ELAINE!" Librarian snapped her fingers in front of me, bringing me back to - well, this wasn’t reality, was it?

"Black." I just pointed at the book.

"Yes, and it’s not the only one you’ve qualified for. Come on! You’ve done absurd stuff in your life, we’re getting rewarded for it."

I slapped both my cheeks with my palms.

Right! Sentinel Dawn was here to kick ass and read books, and I was all out of ass!

I read through the book.

It was a bit of a weird class, and that was saying something. It was naturally a strong healing class - although I didn’t see anything about Immortality - while also something of a combo writer-fame class. I’d level basically just by existing, as long as the Medical Manuscripts kept circulating.

Kind of like how Auri seemed to level just by existing as a phoenix.

The less that was said about the utterly absurd stats, the better.

"Ok. I know I said I was taking a [Student] class when I came in here, but what’s stopping me from grabbing this class, then cycling [The Dawn Sentinel] once it hits 768?" I asked Librarian. "I know I’m missing something, I’m just a little stunned."

"Oh totally. You should’ve seen the look on my face when the class showed up!" Librarian sat down across the table from me. "It’ll be easier for me to show you why you should take something else, than to tell you. Here."

She handed me a book, and it was one I was well familiar with

[World Traveler - Spatial]: You’ve traveled across realms, visited gods and fae in their home, and lived in two more worlds. You speak multiple languages, have lived and integrated with the inhabitants almost everywhere you go. Now take this class, and continue to explore the multiple worlds that exist in this vast cosmos! +16 Free Stats, +160 Mana, +1600 Magic Power per level.

I had a little more experience now, and I somewhat recognized what the class was saying with the Magic Power thing.

"How do I still not have enough power to make the class work!?" I complained to Librarian.

"Mostly because ripping the veil between worlds costs millions upon millions of mana - and the corresponding magic power. Honestly, the class could use a version that was focused on mana regeneration and channeling, letting you sit down and channel enough mana to make it happen." Librarian poked at the book, like the class inside personally offended her.

"Still technically manageable now though, right? It’s not like I’d be constantly hopping through different worlds, I can afford to take some time to travel." I thought of Destruction, and how long he channeled his [Earthquake] for.

"Yes, you could. Not the point though. Look at the stats."

I looked a second time, remembering the pitiful stat offerings I’d gotten the first time. It had been +6 Free Stats, + 2 Strength, +3 Dexterity, +7 Vitality, +4 Speed, +10 Mana, +14 Mana Regeneration, + 9 Magic Control, +20 Magic Power per level.

At the time it had seemed absurd. Like nothing could compare.

Now? Now it just looked laughable.

"I am so glad you stopped me taking that class in the first place." I told Librarian. "Why’s it so much stronger now?"

"The first class up is weaker for some reason. Not sure why. However, even if that wasn’t the case, the first class is always going to be on the weaker side, while the third class is always going to be a bit stronger. They just start from different baselines. Imagine if you reset your first class, and wanted to be a mage with it. How many stats per level would you get?"

I thought about the class I’d been offered years ago.

"8. 8 stats per level, as a pink class."

"Exactly. Now, tons of stats in other places will help it along - that’s the entire idea behind cycling - but the starting baseline is always going to be different. Plus, there’s the entirety of your achievements and the like that have built the class up."

I thought about what Librarian was saying for a moment.

"Either way, my first class is always going to be a little weak?" I asked her.

She shook her head.

"It has a harder baseline to work off of." She corrected. "And [The Dawn Sentinel] is an excellent class."

"Just not as good as [The Mother of Modern Medicine]."

"Right. But if you went [The Mother of Modern Medicine], then reset your first class, there’s no guarantee that you’ll do things as crazy as what you did to get [The Dawn Sentinel] in the first place, or have the sheer number of insane achievements waiting for you once you class that up. The other thing to consider is that the class is a combination class. It’s about a third being famous, a third being an author and a writer, and only a relatively small amount healing. There’s a version of the class waiting for you after [The Dawn Sentinel] upgrades that’s much more strongly healing-focused. I think we should tread that path. Taking [The Mother of Modern Medicine] now also means we have two healer-focused classes at the same time, and then we need to decide each time we heal someone what class skills we’re going to use, which also informs which one gets experience, and… it’s a mess."

I agreed with the logic. No doing fancy class slot musical chairs with [The Dawn Sentinel] and [The Mother of Modern Medicine]. Only upgrading it later. I’d get the power, just not right this second.

"Since [The Mother of Modern Medicine] levels just by existing, I could take the class and use it to pump my stats to absurd amounts, couldn’t I?"

"Yup! And you’ll happily march along down the levels with it. You’ll have unusually low level skills in it if you don’t use the class at all, but it’d be fantastic for your stats, empowering your other two classes to an absurd extent."

Gods.

I briefly considered the writing elements of the class, and spreading my medical knowledge. But… I’d already done that. Medical knowledge had outpaced me. I needed to catch up with the modern world, and boy did thinking that feel all sorts of wrong.

Also, I was here at the School to learn, and I didn’t need a gigantic stat stick. I needed to learn.

"And this is just the first class you’re showing me. How insane are the rest of them?"

A flaming red book landed in front of me, with another black title.

[Lady of the Dance - Fire]:You danced in the morning, at the start of the world.

You danced under the moons, the sun, and the stars.

You came from another world, and you danced on the earth.

You picked up your feet and you flung them high.

You danced on the day that would never ever die.

You danced yourself raw in Summer’s Hall,

The entire time you never did fall.

You danced your feet off at dawn.

Throughout the time there was never a yawn.

You are the [Lady of the Dance],

And the dance goes on.

+77 Free Stats, +777 Strength, +777 Dexterity, +777 Speed, +777 Vitality, +77 Mana Regen, +77 Mana, +77 Magic Power, +77 Magic Control per level.

Welp, looks like spending a year in personal time, tens of thousands in System time, literally dancing my feet off counted for something! I suspected if I let this class get widely known that people would be flinging themselves into fairy rings in the hopes of obtaining strong classes.

I didn’t see myself as a [Dancer], but boy was I getting tempted by power.

I was starting to get into the swing of things, and Librarian kept me supplied with books. Books that I quickly scanned, then either tossed, or put aside to read more later.

At the end of the day, I was checking them out to get a general feel for what my choices were. I wasn’t making one today.

[Lady of the Dance] got marked in the "keep" section, in case I ever wanted to grab a physical, fun class. By the same token, I knew I could easily and happily ditch any other books that were attractive purely on their physical stats, and any other dancing-related books.

Next up was a third black-quality class. And it was one of the new elements- I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing, but it certainly was interesting. What element would this have been if Erosion was still around?

[Paragon of Patience - Fossil]: You’ve displayed unparalleled patience by waiting tens of thousands of years from when you unlocked your third class, to selecting it. Nobody in the history of the world has ever been so patient with the selection of their class. Take this class, and patiently wait for good things to come. +2400 Vitality per level.

The class description was a little vague, and I delved a little deeper into the book, just to get a quick overview of how it worked. I got seven pages of boring text deep in before pulling a face.

"Is this class really all about waiting around?"

"Waiting around patiently, yes." Librarian grinned at me. I pulled a disgusted face.

"How the System ever thought I was patient is beyond me. Plus, these skills suck. Who would ever take [Waiting Around]!?" There wasn’t even [And Find Out]! [Good Things Come to Those Who Wait] seemed vaguely interesting, but like. The entire thing was boring. [Patience is a Virtue].

I chucked the book over my shoulder in disgust, the book entirely not worth reading in the first place. I probably had millions of books in here, I wasn’t wasting my time on that one.

"Let’s remove all healing-related classes, and physical-related classes from the options." I told Librarian. If I was going to take one of those, it’d be [The Mother of Modern Medicine] or [Lady of the Dance]. Easy.

She dramatically snapped her fingers.

"Done! No [Dragon Healer], [Undying Cockroach], or [The Quasi Immortal]. You might see them when [The Dawn Sentinel] upgrades though."

"Also, let’s remove completely boring classes like [Paragon of Patience]."

"You did ask for the highest quality classes with no caveats." Librarian reminded me.

"No Papilion classes, no classes that’ll cause me mental pain seeing them." I told her.

"Dragon related classes?" Librarian asked me, and I hesitated.

Half my life had told me to avoid dragons at all costs. The other half seemed to have a casual relationship with them, Vitus casually swearing by dragon’s blood, and there apparently being an entire species called dragonlings.

I remembered my old mantra, one I hadn’t needed to lean on in years.

Fear is the mind-killer.

I let my fear pass over me and through me, examining the question with a slightly more rational mind.

"Include them." I’d need a lot more convincing to take the class, but there was no reason not to take a look.

[Phoenix Nurturer - Inferno]: You rescued a phoenix from being a trophy egg, and protected and nurtured the egg to the best of your abilities. You successfully hatched the phoenix, and didn’t stop there. You hand-reared the phoenix towards her first ignition, bonded with her, and have carefully worked towards making sure she’s happy and well educated. Rare are those who are able to raise a phoenix so well. Take this class, and be a friend to all the beautiful fire birds of the sky! +100 Free Stats, +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +200 Speed, +200 Vitality, +200 Mana, +200 Mana Regen, +200 Magic Power, +200 Magic Control per level.

Librarian starting off strong! I could totally take this class briefly, help Auri become even stronger and smarter then, once she’d caught up with me, cycle it back and grab something else.

I had a problem. I wanted everything. Why did the System limit my classes and skills?? It was so unfair.

[Phoenix Immolator - Inferno]: You set a phoenix on fire. You set a PHOENIX on FIRE. Somehow, you have accomplished the impossible, and ignited the master of flame incarnate. You’re bonded with a phoenix, regularly bathing in her flames. You’ve always been attracted to fire, jumping into burning buildings and… getting spit-roasted over a fire? You’ve been exposed to all sorts of fires and flames, from the explosion of a hatching phoenix, to the fiery breath of a dragon, you’ve come through intact on the other side. Now take this class, and become the flames yourself. +10 Free Stats, +100 Mana Regen, +100 Mana, +400 Magic Control, +400 Magic Power per level.

A quick skim through the book - in spite of Librarian’s tutting in the background - showed that I wouldn’t get [Inferno Affinity], oh no. I’d get straight up [Inferno Spirit], the best and final evolution of the skill - getting access to it let Librarian know that was the case, and by extension, she let me know - and I would be able to literally turn myself into flames, like Auri. Or like what I’d seen Galeru do.

I wasn’t keen on an Inferno mage class, but wow. This one blew all the other starter mage classes out of the water, and was seriously tempting if I decided to go that route.

Bit of a shame it was Inferno, and not Fire. I would totally be tempted to aim for Radiance again, and maybe switch around [Butterfly Mystic] to something else. I liked Radiance.

[World Traveler - Spatial] I was familiar with it from earlier, and while the stats distribution was suboptimal at the time, I knew I could get the right skills to make it work. Heck, with how the System worked, I’d immediately jump to level 32. I bet that I could grab [Channel], travel to one or two worlds, then class up, making it a class skill. The only tricky question, that I had no answer to, was could I come back? If I made it to, say, Earth, and lost System access, I’d be stuck.

Earth was nice. Pallos was my home now, and I’d fought too hard for everything I had to lose it all.

Interesting that I had the option of exploring everything if I wanted to. This current world felt so gigantically large in the first place though. If somehow, with an entire world at my disposal, I found myself bored?

It was a nice option to have.

[Bookwyrm - Spatial]: You are a reader most voracious, consuming every book you find. Your greed for books rivals a dragon’s lust for gold! You spend endless hours when you class up doing nothing but reading, and even when encountering new and different places and cultures, one of your first thoughts is ‘how do I get my hands on new books?’. Indeed, even under the gaze of a dragon, attempting to hide in her lair, you found the time and courage to go perusing through her personal collection, trying to find books to read. Take this class, and read more! +40 Speed, +40 Vitality, +100 Mana, +100 Mana Regen, +300 Magic Power, +300 Magic Control per level.

The class was a terrible pun on bookworm, and I couldn’t deny that I was one heck of a bookworm. I took pride in it! A quick look at the start implied that it wasn’t exactly the most combat-oriented of classes, but it did neatly represent a thing I loved.

Reading.

I marked it as a keep class. Who knew, maybe I’d be able to take it!

[Hoard Thief - Mirage]: You managed to steal from a dragon. Inside her lair. You managed to steal from a dragon! There’s only a few thefts more daunting, a few acquisitions more famous, than managing to boldly and openly waltz into a dragon’s lair, secure part of her hoard, then abscond with your loot. Congratulations! Take this class, and take liberties with anything not nailed down. +250 Dexterity, +250 Speed, +300 Magic Control per level.

Illusions and theft. Well, if everything went to shit, stealing to survive wasn’t the worst. Better than a lot of other options, but hopefully I wouldn’t ever need to go there.

"Just checking. Is there an illusionist or Mirage-based class that competes with this one in terms of illusions?" I asked Librarian. My interactions with Lun’Kat practically guaranteed a number of Mirage-based classes.

Librarian hesitated a moment, thinking.

"If you focused on the illusion aspects of this class… and disregarded the fact that your leveling rate would be lower because of how it likes to level… then no, this is the best illusionist class you’ll get."

"Perfect. We’ll keep it, and don’t bother showing me the rest of the Mirage classes."

Librarian nodded.

"Good call."

Next book! Hilariously, it was basically the exact opposite take of what had happened inside Lun’Kat’s lair.

[Polite Guest - Water]: Finding yourself in the dragon’s lair, you were a most polite and respectable guest. Carefully acting like the place was a museum, you looked, and only touched the bare basics of what you needed to survive. You ensured the host ended up in the best of health, asking nothing for yourself, and left as soon as you believed your welcome was at an end. If only all hosts could have guests as polite and well-mannered as you were! +1200 Free Stats per level.

Did… did I just get a social class!? No way.

The class didn’t sound that interesting to me, but I peeked in a little deeper, just to see if I’d finally broken my stranglehold on social skills and classes. Getting those would make my life that much easier.

And… kind of, but mostly no. There were skills that helped me learn various culture’s norms and rules, and would prompt me to follow them, which was sort of a social skill, but mostly memory, learning, and application of what I’d learned. It somewhat was a social skill if I squinted and tilted my head, but… well, either way the class wasn’t that interesting to me.

I was getting fairly disappointed. All my efforts in life. All the things I’d worked for, everything I’d dedicated years of efforts towards, and the System gave it low marks.

A week in Lun’Kat’s lair?

A half-dozen purple quality classes.

It was enough to make a girl scream.

[Snapdragon - Verdant]: You practically lived in a dragon’s garden-

I stopped reading, throwing the book across the room.

"What the fuck is with the dragon and these absurd classes!?" I screamed at nobody in particular as the book popped back into existence in front of me.

"They’re totally unfair!" Librarian agreed with me. "We should’ve asked to be a dragon when we got reincarnated."

"Oh yeah." I grumbled in agreement. "I never regretted asking to be a human over a bird, but this is just stupid. Being near a dragon gets me this!? Just…"

I made a disgusted noise as Librarian gently tapped on the book.

"How about this. I’ll keep it reserved in the ‘for the future’ pile. If you decide to take up gardening or," Her eyes started to twinkle. "Growing mangos for fun, this is the class that’s best for it."

That got my attention. I nodded my agreement, putting the book into the ‘keep’ pile.

[The Wanderer - Gale]: Travel is in your blood. You are always moving, always seeking new horizons. You were born traveling. You left home at an early age to see more of the world. You joined a group dedicated to traveling around, and when the call came, you traveled even beyond the borders of humanity, exploring strange new lands that were unknown to the culture you belonged in. Then you wandered to another world, dancing with the fae, before coming back to Pallos. You wander without a home, without an anchor, as free as the wind. Take this class, and wander some more! +400 Free Stats, +400 Speed per level.

Interestingly, they didn’t mention anything about me being the first human to do stuff like that… which meant others had beaten me to the punch.

I was delighted with this class on a personal level though. I’d earned it. Myself. No draconic nonsense boosting me into the purple tier. No reincarnation snafus randomly unlocking a purple class. As much as I loved Auri, no handling a powerful creature granting me access.

This class was mine. It was all because of me, and I felt a deep sense of pride and joy as a result.

It had a minor power issue though.

"Advantages of this class over [World Traveler]?" I asked Librarian.

She waggled her hand.

"A few. It’s better for traveling around in one world, as opposed to going to many, and the elemental inclination lets you more frequently use the skills for minor things. Apart from that though… [World Traveler] overlaps strongly."

I looked at my piles of black and purple classes, and chuckled to myself.

I was just getting started on the mountain of books that waited for me.

Chapter 24
The Third Class II

I stretched and cracked my neck. It made an extra-satisfying pop, all possible because this was the world of my soul, and not reality. I could do things like that.

"Ok! Hit me with classes that haven’t overlapped, from strongest on down. Let’s get cracking!" I was in good cheer, having already gotten offered three black quality classes and seven varying shades of purple quality classes.

Librarian smirked, and an entire bookshelf slammed down behind her, stuffed to the point of overflowing with books.

"Challenge accepted." She declared, and it was on.

[She Who Fights With Monsters - Void] Monsters take on all sorts of shapes and sizes. From gargantuan Formorian Queens, to the smiling man on the corner, to the tiniest parasite, there is no telling what shape a monster can take. From Formorians at the walls, to wild beasts in the forest, dinosaurs in the sky to shimagu in the brain, you fight monsters wherever you see them. You stand against the tide that would overwhelm civilization, regardless if there are people standing beside you or not, fighting for a better tomorrow for both yourself and others. Your efforts have contributed towards two monster species becoming extinct. What will be the next feather in your cap? You will not stop, you will not hesitate to fight more monsters, wherever you see them. Careful not to become a monster yourself. Take this class, and continue to be She Who Fights With Monsters. +40 Free Stats, +15 Strength, +15 Dexterity, +30 Speed, +30 Vitality, +60 Mana, +60 Mana Regen, +60 Magic Power, +60 Magic Control per level.

"Does this come in anything besides Void?" I asked Librarian after a cursory check. Sometimes classes were like that, especially at the initial class up.

"Yup, although Void’s the strongest version. Dark’s the next best choice."

"I am not taking a Void Mage class. Not with the potential to explode."

"You’d probably survive it with your healing. If it ever happened."

"First, my [Oath] would cripple, if not kill, me for the sheer collateral damage from everyone nearby who dies. That assumes I have enough mana to handle whatever the problem is! And living my life on the edge, waiting to explode, isn’t for me. It might be rare, but eternity, remember? However, I’m going to keep this one… although let’s ditch other monster-fighting classes and other Void mage classes. Also, let’s skip any other hunting-related classes."

This classing up stuff was hard. There was just so much to check and look over!

Books practically flew under my gaze as I skimmed the introductions, making snap judgements if I should keep the book or not, and rearranging the remaining books that I was getting offered.

[Escape Artist - Mist]. [Everchild - Fossil]. [The Great Stink - Miasma]. [Slayer of Tyrants - Gravity]. [Dawn of the End - Celestial]. [Disaster Diplomat - Decay]. [Elven Courtesan - Water]. [Voice of the Downtrodden - Sound]. [Merchant of Immortality - Gemstone]. [Ambassador of Growth - Wood]. [Tree of Knowledge - Forest]. [Draconic Maid - Pyronox]. [Legacy of Sealing - Brilliance]. [Breaker of Chains - Storm]. [Herald of Draconic Fury - Sound]. [Protective Packrat - Spatial]. [Reverse Cuckoo - Ash]. [Caged Songbird - Sound]. [Glutton - Fire]. [Preener - Mirror]. [Haven of the Weary - Spatial]. [Beautician - Light]. [Shroud of Miracles - Mist]. [Elaine Sutra - Mirage]. [Legionnaire of the Ancients - Fossil]. [Town Guard - Metal]. [Provocateur - Fire]. [Discerning Cannibal - Decay]. [Living Armorer - Wood]. [Fae Adventurer - Spore]. [Tunnel Dweller - Dark]. [Illusion Buster - Radiance]. [Evaporator - Steam]. [Denied by the Gods - Void]. [Heretic - Decay]. [Lady of Shadows - Dark]. [Vampiric Vestibule - Water]. [Survivor of the Black Flames - Pyronox]. [Squishy Warrior - Ooze]. [Arrogant Destroyer - Lava]. [Couatl Snackbringer - Wood]. [Fiancé Annihilator - Inferno]. [Earthquake Evoker - Mountain]. [Protector of the Meek - Mountain]. [Tiding of Misfortune - Celestial]. [Senator’s Bane - Dark]. [Undying Muse - Sound]. [Escaped the Inevitable - Celestial]. [Voice of Authority - Sound]. [Finger Launcher - Poison]. [Guest of the Summer Court - Radiance]. [Mango Trapper - Wood].

Hundreds of books, each taking a few minutes of skimming before I decided if I wanted to keep them to check out later, or if I was going to ditch the idea entirely. For particularly nice classes, I elected to keep that particular type of class over all others, and asked not to see any other classes relating to that field.

I swear Librarian was having some fun. Each time I made a request, dozens of books would shimmer off the massive bookshelf behind her, and all the remaining books would slide over. Then dozens of new books snapped into existence, keeping the shelf just as full as it had been.

I cursed my own perverse sense of humor. She was me, after all, and I was getting pranked the same way I’d prank someone else.

I had a number of standouts, even among the books that I kept. Classes that were particularly exciting, or in the case of the mage classes, classes that exemplified an element particularly well, and I’d use it over other sorcery-style mage classes of the same element.

I had my list of elements I was interested in grabbing, and I quickly matched the best sorcery classes to the elements I was interested in.

Radiance - [Sunchild]

Lava - [Earthblood Manipulator]

Storm - [Etalix’s Devoted]

Lightning - [Lightning of Galeru]

Gravity - [Force Arcanist]

Spatial - [Seven League Ranger]

Ice - [Cryomancer]

Gemstones - [Jewel of the Ancient Hoard]

Arcanite - [Font of Mana]

Brilliance - [Kekkaishi]

Celestial - [Herald of the Ever Changing Moons]

Mirage - [Hoard Thief]

Mirror - [Copycat]

Sound - [Sonic Spellweaver]

Verdant - [Witch of the Woods]

Ooze - [Oozenomicron]

Sand - [Eternal Hourglass]

Inferno - [Phoenix Immolator]

There were a number of classes that popped out as being particularly interesting as well. They weren’t sorcery classes, but out of the list of classes I was going through, they were strong and interesting enough to catch my attention.

Honestly, I was marking a number of classes as "acceptable", but when push came to shove, it was the sorcery classes and the ones I found truly "interesting" along with the powerful classes that would make the final cut.

[Wandering Bard - Sound]. Providence has brought you to Pallos, filled with songs and stories of a faraway land. You’ve tirelessly played for food and lodging, securing your future with song and stories. You’ve wandered far and wide, telling tales in each place you go. You are the epitome of the [Wandering Bard]. Now take this class, and perform on new stages! +100 Free Stats, +20 Strength, +100 Dexterity, +100 Speed, +20 Vitality, +50 Mana, +50 Mana Regen, +50 Magic Power, +50 Magic Control per level.

[Stormrider - Storm]. You’ve soared through the sky, oh [Beloved of the Wind], and little in life brings you more joy than feeling the breeze through your hair as you enjoy the unlimited freedom that flying gives you. Now surf on thunderclouds! Swim through blizzards! Follow the currents of the wind, wherever they may blow you, and ride the storms of the world! +40 Free Stats, +80 Speed, +40 Mana Regen, +60 Magic Power, +60 Magic Control per level.

[Arcane Trickster - Mirror]. Trickery and stealth is part of your kit, along with a great desire to use all the magic of the world! Use this class to yoink the skills of other people you see, being able to copy them for a limited time - and even lock them out of using the skills themselves, if you have enough mana, power, and control for it! +80 Mana, +10 Mana Regen, +80 Magic Power, +80 Magic Control per level.

[Asura’s Legacy - Brilliance]. Asura’s legacy lives on within you. You have witnessed the unbridled might and fury of the former Guardian Asura, the Destroyer. You have marveled at her grace, power, beauty, and majesty. Her casting was excellent, and even to this day she would be considered a top tier wizard, if using an unusual and somewhat antiquated method. Revive her ways, and cast like none other! +20 Mana, +20 Mana Regen, +120 Magic Power, +120 Magic Control per level.

Well, I found my wizardry class if I was going to take one! It cleanly edged out almost all the other wizardry options I had, although the ‘antiquated methods’ was somewhat concerning.

That was why I was waiting a bit, and studying up before grabbing a class. I could ask someone knowledgeable about the details of wizardry I was finding inside the book, and see if it worked for me or not. Progress!

Ok, to be clear, I had probably found my wizardry class. There was a second wizardry class that was appealing.

[Nebula Starweaver - Celestial] Not only have you gazed endlessly upon the stars, wondering what it would be like to walk among them, but you are made out of stardust. You wish to use the mystic runes to cast, taking on a legacy that you predate. Now take starlight, and weave it into runes to cast every skill under the vast skies! +50 Free Stats, +50 Mana, +50 Mana Regen, +50 Magic Power, +50 Magic Control per level.

On paper, it was weaker than [Asura’s Legacy]. But, I was going to be upgrading [The Dawn Sentinel] to a [The Mother of Modern Medicine] variant in all likelihood when I reached that class-up. My [Celestial Affinity] skill would go through the roof, and while Librarian and I couldn’t confirm it right now, I suspected I’d be getting [Celestial Spirit] as an upgrade. [Nebula Starweaver] didn’t need a second affinity skill, so I’d get to double-dip in that respect, powering up the class through a cross-class skill.

There was nothing about ‘using ancient methods’ either, implying that modern methods were perfectly valid. There wasn’t enough right now to say that one was better than the other, but if it came down to ‘pick a wizardry class’? It’d be one of those two.

[Jack of All Trades - Gemstone] You want it all! Have it all! Every skill under the sun is yours to borrow… poorly. You’ve extensively used gemstones to supplement and expand your arsenal, now expand it even further! Capture, borrow, and copy every skill you can, store it in your gems, and gain access to as many skills as you can find! +15 Strength, +15 Dexterity, +15 Speed, +15 Vitality, +15 Mana, +15 Mana Regen, +15 Magic Power, +15 Magic Control per level.

Ooooooooh. The class for doing everything! There was a subtle shade of difference between this and the wizardry class. They both claimed they could do basically everything, but the methods seemed to be different. This was another great area of research for me to look into! Figuring out what made this type of jack class different from a wizardry class, and what the pros and cons of each were. Once I knew, I could make an informed decision, instead of blindly guessing and hoping.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself.

"Ok, I think that’s enough." I told Librarian after ditching [Civic-minded Revolutionary], a class about bringing about change… peacefully, through technically legal means. A reward for my work with Emperor Augustus, and insisting on equality.

I was fried, and the class quality was getting lower. I didn’t see myself hitting up anything else that might be shown. I’d gotten most of the major aspects of my life in a class or two, and had endless options.

"Show me the two best [Student] classes that won’t steal [Passionate Learning] or [Immortal Recollections]. Also classes that’ll let me get the [Dabble] skill, and let me practice various things that I get taught, so I can get some practice in before picking my final choice."

"What about [Learning Languages]?" Librarian clarified.

"Meh. It can steal that if it wants. The skill’s temporary, and I’m quickly mastering one language. Like, it’ll drop from its current level to 32, but then [Sentinel’s Superiority] is going to kick in and boost it back up to effectively level 40. Which was good enough for picking up new words and phrases quickly. And skip the classes focused on learning languages!" I quickly cried out as the books changed, then changed again after my last sentence.

I looked down at my two options, totally ready to just pick something. I had to remind myself that proper prior planning was the answer, and running out of gas at the last moment wasn’t the way to get the best class I could.

I raised my eyebrow at Librarian.

"Really?" I complained.

"Yes, really. The restriction on not absorbing [Passionate Learning] killed multiple high quality [Student] classes. There’s a light green, bordering on dark green [Love of Learning] student class, but it’ll kill our general skills. We’ve worked too hard on [Passionate Learning], and the skill’s too big of a boost, to give it up."

I nodded my agreement.

I took a deep breath, and reminded myself that the plan was to eventually - within a year or two - ditch the class, and take my "real" final option. This was temporary.

[Disciple of Magic - Light] - Wherever you go, you study magic. Trying to learn it, absorb it. Figuring out how it works, wanting to make it your own. When you meet new people, you want to know what their skills are and how they work. You’ve found yourself in the premier place in the world to learn more magic! Take this class, and crack open the mysteries of magic, one book, one potion, one transformation, one ward and shield at a time. +5 Free Stats, +5 Strength, +5 Dexterity, +5 Speed, +5 Vitality, +10 Magic Power, +10 Magic Control, +15 Mana, +15 Mana Regen per level.

[Student of the Ages - Wood] - No matter where in the world, no matter when in the world, you seek out places of learning. No school? Raid the library. The only place is a military academy? Join the army. Traveling with new species? Get them to teach you everything they know about the world. Found yourself in a strange world? The first place you go to is a school. The School. You are a [Student of the Ages], through and through. Take this class, and learn. +5 Free Stats, +10 Dexterity, +10 Speed, +10 Vitality, +10 Magic Power, +10 Magic Control, +10 Mana, +10 Mana Regen per level.

The first class was more focused on the magical aspects of learning, and being a student. It had a strong focus on magic, learning magic, and experimenting with various types of magic. [Let’s do it Again!], and various other meta-skills around [Dabble] would let me experiment with different classes more often. Included were skills that helped me with transcriptions and copying diagrams, which my brief research on wizardry suggested would be useful. I could also imagine it was useful for things like potion recipes, and I frankly lacked the world knowledge to properly guess at all the other uses such a skill could have. Endless, I imagined.

I loved magic. I hated how the System only gave me three class slots.

The second was more focused on being a student generally. A stronger focus on learning, and a whole host of secondary skills that would make being a student easier. Like [Study], and [Taking Good Notes], [Find the Reference], along with a mental calculator. The class’s [Dabble] variant was weaker.

The class stats were roughly the same, and gods, it was such a let down from the sheer power that was present in the black quality classes I had.

Six of one, a half-dozen of the other, my choices were practically the same.

I was big on magic. Big on grabbing skills and trying things out. That’s part of why the [Jack of All Trades] class was so appealing. [Disciple of Magic] was absolutely the "try lots of magic out!" class.

However, I was also going to be a student. It wasn’t like the skills in [Student of the Ages] were that much weaker, and I had infinite stats to throw at the problem. The class was also better at generally being a student.

I’d be dabbling in numerous different fields of study anyways, getting a feel for them. Likely evolving my class to something else to give it a proper shot anyways. I didn’t need to have strong magic abilities right now, I’d get them in a few weeks once I was sure what to try! I was still leaning towards the "Go biomancy, improve myself, then reset to something else" route, and both classes let me do that. Plus, going that route also let me talk with people about what I was going to take, and get a ton of advice on what route I should go. It was nice having people to directly discuss class options with, as opposed to just blindly going ahead on my own!

Although, I doubted anyone would be able to give me proper advice on the black classes.

[Student of the Ages] let me be a better student though, and I was confident in my ability to use skills to try various things out. The book was explicitly clear that I’d be able to. I hadn’t been a student, a real student, in decades, and I might as well be good at what my class wanted me to be. Frankly, it’d also help shore up my distractibility weakness better than [Disciple of Magic] would.

"[Student of the Ages] please!" I grabbed the book and took it to the checkout.

"Always a pleasure. See you soon!" Librarian waved to me.

"Yeah! Can’t wait to be back!" I said as the world faded around me, and the real world came back.

Chapter 25
Student of the Ages

I woke up in my dingy room, dozens and dozens of notifications waiting for me, along with a minor surge of nausea that quickly vanished.

[Learning Languages] had gotten shuffled around.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Beloved of the Wind - Wind] has upgraded into [Student of the Ages - Wood]! ]

[*ding!* [Student of the Ages] has leveled up! 8 -> 32 +5 Free Stats, +10 Dexterity, +10 Speed, +10 Vitality, +10 Magic Power, +10 Magic Control, +10 Mana, +10 Mana Regen from your Class per level! +1 Free Stat for being Human per level! +1 Magic Control per level from your Element!]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Wood Affinity]!]

The basics. Figuring out how affinity skills worked was on my list, and by all the tasty mangos in the world, my list was getting too damn long. I needed to start crossing things off.

Still, everyone believed the affinity skill was worth it, and it was an easy decision to make to take it.

Something that was important for me to consider was this class was temporary. It was a fleeting moment of a class, something I’d only have for a year or two, unlike my other classes that I expected to get decades of use out of. As a result, I also had to consider the long-term benefits of each skill I could possibly get.

What did I want from my class?

I wanted to learn things. To improve my knowledge. To find my feet in the world, and position myself well. It’d be nice if I could also position Artemis and Julius as well - Amber seemed to have already found her niche.

As a result, I should aim for skills that either directly or indirectly helped with learning, and cut the fluff.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Dabble]!]

Dabble: A little bit of this, and a little bit of that, [Dabble] lets you try out the things you’re learning, to see if it clicks and to better learn how it works. Restricted to trying things out in a class or lab setting.

This was one of THE skills I was eyeing up, and what made [Student] so attractive in the first place. There was no way I wasn’t taking the skill.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Efficient Notes]!]

Efficient Notes: Good note-taking is critical to learning. This skill will help you efficiently select what needs to be written down as a note to study later, and what can be ignored and left out.

I liked the look of the skill. It immediately made my shortlist, but neither high nor low. It wasn’t the remembering part of the skill that stood out to me, it was the part that helped me select what was important that attracted me.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Something Doesn’t Look Right]!]

Something Doesn’t Look Right: From homework questions, to long essays, bubbling potions to drawn runes, anatomy labeling to ingredient weighing, this skill will help nudge you when your knowledge should let you know that something isn’t quite right with what you’re doing, and help you find your mistake to correct it.

After [Vigilant], and later [Bullet Time], I had a healthy respect for any skill that quietly nudged me when there was a problem. Shortlist!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Mental Calculator]!]

Mental Calculator: Math is hard! Make it easy with a handy mental calculator that’ll do the math for you! No need to calculate the right ratio of bat’s wings to newt’s eyes, no need to figure out if an enzyme level is too high, no need to carefully triple check how many mg/kg are needed for a medication, [Mental Calculator’s] got you covered!

It sounded like this skill had a bunch going for it, and I’d be more interested if I was a doctor back on Earth who needed to carefully calculate medications and read labs. As it was, I didn’t quite have a need for tons of calculations in my life right now, but that could all change as life went on.

It made the shortlist, but I was ready and willing to cut it for better skills.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Timekeeping]!]

Timekeeping: Tick, tock, you need a clock! [Timekeeping] will help you stay on schedule! Want to take a five minute break? Set a five minute timer to remind you when to get back to it! Need to study five different subjects, and only have one evening? Break your remaining time into five equal chunks, letting you know when you should stop with one subject, and go onto the next! Need an alarm in the morning? This skill’s got you covered! Set all manner of alarms, timers, and mental reminders to yourself, to keep yourself on schedule and attending class in a timely manner!

This was something that looked incredibly useful. I just hadn’t been on my own schedule in a long, long time. As a Ranger, I’d been on Julius’s schedule. As a trainee, Ranger Academy had run things. As a Sentinel, I basically had all the time in the world.

I wasn’t exactly the best organized individual, and the skill looked plain useful.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Handy Quill]!]

Handy Quill: There’s nothing worse than losing your quill, and showing up to class without a way to write. Never fear! [Handy Quill] will always ensure you have a writing utensil on hand.

It wasn’t likely that I’d take the skill. I already had one quill, I didn’t need more, especially if I could remember to keep it…

… maybe I should take [Lost and Found] again just in case…

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Amber Safety Goggles]!]

Amber Safety Goggles: A pair of stylish goggles using crystalized sap as the protective lens, ready for you whenever you need them! For protecting those fragile eyes against all manner of assault.

I’d had to regrow my eyeballs in the past. I could do it again. Fun to see little wood-themes slip their way into the skills!

I wasn’t taking the skill though.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Erase Mistake]!]

Erase Mistake: Oops! Ink spilled all over your essay! A wrong line got drawn in your rune! Too much powdered snake skin went into the vial! [Erase Mistake] is here to save the day! It’ll clear up the ink off the page, perfectly erase the line, and correct the amount of powdered snake skin in the vial! Note that if things start to mix and react, that’s not reversible, nor are powered runes exploding in your face, or medicine being swallowed.

The skill sounded decent, but the sheer number of warnings on it strongly implied that it was much weaker than it sounded. From everything I knew of the System, it meant that it would, in a way, only fix things that I could’ve mundanely fixed on my own. I could carefully erase a drawn line, but I couldn’t un-mix a potion, for example.

It probably got stronger in combination with skills like [Something Doesn’t Look Right]. An interesting synergy to note.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Study]!]

Study: Not going to learn things simply by having a perfect memory, or hearing it once! [Studying] is a skill, now also make it a Skill and learn faster!

Solid skill. It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t amazing, it wasn’t a huge display of magic, but it was important. It also stacked with [Passionate Learning], in the same way that [Training] had stacked back in Ranger Academy.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [A Tree Never Sleeps]!]

A Tree Never Sleeps: Trees don’t sleep, and students get minimal rest! Take the skill, and pull off all-nighters while still feeling good in the morning!

[Sunrise] was like a shot of coffee and raw energy, letting me operate with minimal sleep, but this negated a large portion of sleep entirely! Exciting stuff!

I was getting old. The small, subtle skills were enough to excite me. [Fireball] just didn’t do it for me the same way anymore.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Willowy Handwriting]!]

Willowy Handwriting: An ageless style, on par with [Calligraphers], your handwriting will be a thing of beauty - and more importantly, healer, LEGIBLE.

Ouch. I felt mildly attacked by the skill description.

My handwriting was…

…

… the less said the better.

Shortlist.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Blueprint Memorization]!]

Blueprint Memorization: The tree’s roots grow and spread through the earth, making traces of themselves like memories will instantly imprint and help you memorize complex diagrams, anatomy figures, tricky recipes, and runes in an instant!

I crossed the skill off my list. I had [Immortal Recollections], a top-tier perfect memory skill. I didn’t need another one.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Drafting]!]

Drafting: A deft hand and a quick quill will quickly get blueprints, diagrams, and the like. Mistakes will correct themselves!

Similar to [Willowy Handwriting], but different. Focused on an area of drawing, versus writing. I flipped back through my notifications to double-check [Willowy Handwriting], and yeah. It also worked on drawings.

I wanted to be flexible, and adaptable. The skill was narrow, but powerful.

I axed it. [Willowy Handwriting] was better if I wanted a skill like this.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Many-Leafed Notebook]!]

Many-Leafed Notebook: It’s always nice to have a writing tool, but what’s even better is having a notebook to write in! The [Many-Leafed Notebook] will always have another page to write in.

Not bad, but not exactly making me jump for joy.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Every Surface is a Desk]!]

Every Surface is a Desk: You did it. You found the perfect reference, deep in the library. There isn’t a writing surface to be seen. How do you copy the notes out of the book? Well, when [Every Surface is a Desk], it’s easy!

Nope.

I could take the damn time to find a surface, and most of the time I’d be in a classroom. With a desk. It was also one of the only pieces of furniture they’d provided me here. That was before my perfect memory skill kicking in and helping with things like this. I could simply read a formula once, and always be able to recall it. It didn’t mean it would be quick or easy - the whole point of learning and studying was to make it second nature - but I didn’t exactly need to be scribbling notes in the middle of a library so I wouldn’t forget a recipe.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Find the Reference]!]

Find the Reference: Where was that little tidbit of knowledge stored again? Ah right! Fantastic Potions and How to Brew them, 9th edition, 6th page, halfway down. Remember where references are stored, and easily know where to find new knowledge!

Nope. More memory related skills.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Know Your Limits]!]

Know Your Limits: Sometimes, you’re in over your head, and you need help. The experiment has gone wrong. The zombie plague has been released from the lab. The medicine isn’t quite the right color. [Know Your Limits] will help prompt you when it’s time to get more professional help in a field.

Another little nudge skill. I wasn’t disregarding any of them, although this seemed to be more of a "I’m in over my head" skill than anything, and, being arrogant for a moment, I was Sentinel Dawn. My limits were far, far past the average student’s, and most of my training was around being the absolute best. About being the one that solved the problems, that helped others when they reached their limits, not the one who hit limits herself.

I reluctantly kept the skill on the shortlist - any nudge skill would make it - but I doubted it’d make the final cut.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Research]!]

Research: Pushing the boundaries of knowledge, discovering new things, [Research] will help you build the foundation of all elvenoid knowledge on Pallos.

If I was inclined to take the [Researcher] class mentioned in the big book, the skill would be the way to direct my class in that direction. As it was, I just… had no interest in expanding elvenoid knowledge.

I’d already done that. Gotten [Mother of Modern Medicine] out of it. Already had a job.

It was weird. Reading this one skill crystalized something I’d always subconsciously known and danced around, but hadn’t properly realized. I didn’t want a work class. I didn’t want a profession class. I wanted a hobby class.

Mage classes were on the top of the list because I loved magic, and it integrated nicely into my Sentinel job. Well, I’d figure out a new career, but [Butterfly Mystic] hadn’t gotten tons of use when I wasn’t fighting for my life, and I’d need to consider what a peaceful life looked like. Boatloads of offensive magic were unlikely, I had a job class already that should, in theory, make me a comfortable living wherever I wanted, so yeah.

A hobby class jumped to the top of the list. Preferably one that would help me survive in a pinch, but that I could indulge in when my life was peaceful.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Shuffle Text]!]

Shuffle Text: Your essay is written, but paragraphs 2 and 3 are in the wrong order. Do you erase all your hard work, only to put quill to paper and redo it all? No! Just [Shuffle Text] to flip the order of the words! Easy as snapping your fingers!

Unlikely I’d take the skill. It was fairly niche.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Take Cover]!]

Take Cover: The experiment has gone wrong, the potion’s bubbling over, the rune’s exploding. [Take Cover] will help you find cover, and protect yourself from the worst effects!

Nope. I could just heal through virtually any issue that came up. I’d have serious questions about what the hell was going on at the School if I ended up in any situation that could genuinely threaten my life.

The key to that was to just not be there in the first place!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Memorization]!]

Memorization: Learning is all well and good, but sometimes, you just need to memorize the contents for an upcoming test. You’ll –

I stopped reading there, ditched the skill, and moved on.

First, I was here to learn, not get passing grades.

Second, I already had a memory skill!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Editing]!]

Editing: The bane of writers everywhere, and students alike, editing becomes a breeze with this skill! Quickly know what fixes a sentence needs to polish things up, get an idea for the overall feel of the work, spot typos and mistakes quickly, and quickly fix them all!

On one hand, editing the Medical Manuscripts had been the bane of my existence once upon a time.

On the other, it had been so bad that I never, ever wanted to edit anything ever again. First drafts straight to delivery, forget reviews and revisions.

I reluctantly kept the skill, privately swearing to find an excuse to ditch it and never use it.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Plagiarize]!]

Plagiarize: Look, sometimes you just need to quickly get that assignment done. The class doesn’t matter, the paper isn’t important. Just get it done in a snap by [Plagiarizing] someone else’s work! Quickly translate papers from one language to another, have a mental thesaurus handy to make word replacements to make it even harder to catch you, and zip off to have some fun, or to study for the actually important classes!

Fuck no.

I had integrity.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Plagiarize]!]

I gave the second instance of the [Plagiarize] skill the side-eye, and moved on.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Peek]!]

Peek: A quick look at someone else’s notes, the professor’s lecture, the test answer key, the recipe in the closed book, or… something else… [Peek] lets you get a glimpse of whatever it is you need to see! Within a limited range.

I was suspicious that the only use I could get out of this skill were sketchy ones, but it wasn’t enough to automatically axe the skill.

I doubted it’d make the cut, but it didn’t warrant immediate exclusion.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [No Peeking]!]

No Peeking: You don’t want to get accused of cheating if someone else looks over your shoulder and copies your answer! Protect your reputation for integrity, along with the hot new research you’ve been working on, and dismay [Peeping Toms] and intrusive governments all over the world with an automatic privacy skill!

The fact that there were ways to cheat magically made me unhappy, and the skill description did have a number of small uses that would just make day to day life less worrisome.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Organization]!]

Organization: Being well-organized is a skill and a half, and people pay good money just to have other people organize their lives for them! Grab the skill, arrange your schedule, and always know where your quill and parchment are located!

I was somewhat chronically chaotically messy. The skill not only made the cut, but immediately jumped to be near the top of my list.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Cheating]!]

Cheating: You’ve cheated Black Crow//White Dove, you’ve tricked the fae and gotten away. Now cheat your fellow students!

I gave up reading the skill description in disgust, immediately axing it.

No.

Just.

Fuck no.

The only good that came out of seeing the skill was knowing that it was possible that other people with a [Student] class could have those types of skills, and I might need to defend myself against them.

[No Peeking] went up a few notches on my list.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Ignore Chatter]!]

Ignore Chatter: The gossip girls in the corner. The sports bros in the back row. The nerds in the front seat. All of them are chatting with each other, making it damn hard to hear the important person in the room - the professor! Tune them out with this skill, and get to the important parts.

Eh. Not amazing, but I was awfully distractible… anything that reduced distractions couldn’t be immediately dismissed out of hand.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Can You Say That Again?]!]

Can You Say That Again?: The most important pieces of knowledge are always said at high speed, in the middle of a bunch of unimportant details. [Can You Say That Again?] will let you mentally replay snippets of conversation, letting you tease out the details and have enough time to write everything down.

Nope. More memory-related skills. Next!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Olive Branch]!]

Olive Branch: Extend an olive branch, pass a note subtly with this skill!

I wasn’t in high school. I could just wait a few minutes and talk with someone else after class, plus I was here to learn, not be some [Gossip] ignoring the professor.

If I didn’t want to be in the class, I wouldn’t be in the class!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Repetition is the Mother of Learning]!]

Repetition is the Mother of Learning: Pete and repeat were in a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left?

Repeat.

Pete and repeat were in a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left?

Repeat.

Pete and repeat were in a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left?

Repeat.

…

…

Easier learning when repeating processes to learn.

This was the longest skill description I’d ever come across, and it was possibly longer than the rest of my System notification log, combined.

Still, it had a great point that repeating actions was how I learned them. Practice made permanent, and all that, and something that helped me practice?

That was how I’d learn, and the skill shot up to the top of my list as something to take.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Living Thesaurus]!]

Living Thesaurus: Branch between words easily, immediately know what words substitute with other words! Great for sprucing up essays.

I wish Librarian was here to let me know if it would help with cross-language acquisition or not. That could be helpful!

Otherwise?

Nope.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Know-it-All]!]

Know-it-All: You know it all. You better make sure everyone else knows you know it all!

Nope. This sounded like a "how to annoy everyone around me" skill, and if I was a burly 6 foot 1 blonde warrior I might be tempted to aggravate people in fights to tank, but I wasn’t.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [It’s pronounced LeviOsa, not LevioSA]!]

It’s pronounced LeviOsa, not LevioSA: Proper pronunciation is important, especially when chanting spells! It’s also useful in medicine, clearly saying ‘adduct’ versus ‘abduct’, ‘assure’ versus ‘ensure’, ‘creatine’ versus ‘creatinine’, and more!

I had a little bit of a short circuit moment with the skill. It could help me learn languages faster, but it was also potentially entirely useless.

Shortlist… but near the bottom.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Mischief]!]

There was no way this skill was going to be useful. Next!

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Teacher’s Pet]!]

I really hoped that I wasn’t out of nice skills, and that everything left were joke skills…

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Restore Draft]!]

Restore Draft: "My phoenix burned my homework" isn’t an excuse most teachers will accept, even if they believe it. "My wyvern ate my essay" also isn’t accepted. Never fear! [Restore Draft] will reassemble and recreate your paper for you!

I thought about Auri’s love of burning things, and how frustrated I’d be if my homework went up in flames.

Good chance I was taking the skill.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [I Have to do the Entire Group Project Myself]!]

I Have to do the Entire Group Project Myself: You know how it goes. By divine decree, you’ve ended up with the three slackers in the class for the group project, and you now need to do it all yourself. Well, that just won’t do. Improved thinking speed, speed, and dexterity per level when all the work gets handed off to you!

Ehhh… The skill was so niche as to be worthless.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Public Speaking]!]

Public Speaking: Makes your voice louder and squashes those fears and insecurities when speaking in front of large groups!

Nope. I’d lectured in front of Ranger Trainees, barked out orders to groups, and lectured at Artemis’s School before. I had no fear of public speaking, nor did I need my voice to be louder.

[*ding!* Your General Skill [Learning Languages] has evolved into the Class Skill [Learning Languages]!]

[*ding!* Would you like to upgrade [Learning Languages] to [Technical Tongue]?]

Technical Tongue: Learn technical terms and precise language more quickly with this skill! Precise language is extra important, especially when a single letter in a word can make all the difference, and the complex language is where the complex ideas reside.

Hmm.

HMMMMM.

I liked being able to pick up languages quickly with [Learning Languages], but I also did need to pick up a large number of technical terms quickly.

I kept [Learning Languages], figuring that I’d pick up the technical terms relatively easily from my Medical Manuscripts, then be able to use that as a dictionary for a number of other languages. I was also planning on taking the introductory courses for most things I was interested in, which would naturally include lessons on the technical terms. Lessons aimed at people without the language skills I had.

Finally.

I was at the end of my list of offered skills. Time for a quick rundown of what skills I liked, along with where I’d mentally rated them.

[Wood Affinity]++

[Dabble]++

[Efficient Notes]+

[Something Doesn’t Look Right]++

[Mental Calculator]

[Timekeeping]++

[Handy Quill]

[Erase Mistake]

[Study]+

[A Tree Never Sleeps]+

[Willowy Handwriting]

[Leafed Notebook]

[Know Your Limits]

[Editing]

[Peek]

[No Peeking]+

[Organization]++

[Ignore Chatter]

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning]++

[It’s pronounced LeviOsa, not LevioSA]

[Restore Draft]+

Taking all the skills I’d mentally rated highly had me at seven out of eight skill slots. I grabbed them all.

[Class 3: [Student of the Ages - Wood: Lv 32]]

32

[Wood Affinity: 1]

1

[Learning Languages: 32]

32

[Dabble: 1]

1

[Something Doesn't Look Right: 1]

1

[Timekeeping: 1]

1

[Organization: 1]

1

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning: 1]

1

Right, one skill slot left.

What was I missing?

What did I need?

I decided to look at the five skills I’d rated "useful, middle of the pack" first, since I thought highly of them. I was aware I’d essentially grabbed skills on an individual use basis, without looking at any sort of total synergy.

[Study]+

[A Tree Never Sleeps]+

[Efficient Notes]+

[Restore Draft]+

[No Peeking]+

Ok. The whole point of being a student was to learn things. [Restore Draft] was nice, but it didn’t help me learn. Similarly with [No Peeking].

It brought it down to [Study], [A Tree Never Sleeps], and [Efficient Notes].

[Sleeps] would buy me more time, but I wouldn’t need more time if I used the time I had well. Which, given how long it had been since I was a student, and how distractible I was, wasn’t a guarantee that I would use it well. [Organization] should help with that, but there were no promises. [Study] would help me study better, stay focused and on-track, and learn better.

It didn’t matter how efficient my notes were if I wasn’t using them well, and taking good notes was a skill I could develop on my own. If nothing else, my innate speed and dexterity stat would let me write far faster than my peers, and I could just… be inefficient with my notes, and still get most of the information in.

[Study] was my last skill.

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 582,590/582,590]

[Mana Regen: 275,006 (+520,863)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 348]

[Strength: 974]

[Dexterity: 2,071]

[Vitality: 14,480]

[Speed: 14,512]

[Mana: 58,259]

[Mana Regeneration: 58,360 (+52,086)]

[Magic Power: 23,028 (+590,668)]

[Magic Control: 23,055 (+591,361)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 480]

[Cosmic Presence: 315]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 451]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 471]

[Sunrise: 411]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 357]]

[Radiance Affinity: 357]

[Radiance Resistance: 357]

[Radiance Conjuration: 357]

[: ]

[Nectar: 357]

[Solar Corona: 357]

[Scintillating Ascent: 337]

[Kaleidoscope: 357]

[Class 3: [Student of the Ages - Wood: Lv 32]]

[Wood Affinity: 1]

[Learning Languages: 32]

[Dabble: 1]

[Something Doesn't Look Right: 1]

[Timekeeping: 1]

[Organization: 1]

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning: 1]

[Study: 1]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 300]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[: ]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 315]

[Passionate Learning: 382]

Chapter 26
Getting to the first day of class

Having picked my skills, I got out of bed and stretched, working out the various kinks in my back and neck. I focused on the world around me, my eyes narrowing at the suspicious amount of dust in the room. I grabbed the snacks I’d prepared for myself, quickly chowed down and had a drink, and left my room.

"Elaine? Is that you?" A voice croaked from the living room, and I walked over there to see an aged Skye, with Auri on the counter. Skye looked ancient and decrepit, her pale hair now white, with wrinkles on her face.

"Brrrrpt……" Auri was hunched over, telling me she was happy to see me after seven thousand centuries.

I put my hands on my hips.

"The prank’s funny, but you’re forgetting I’m a healer. I haven’t aged a bit, I would’ve died with that length of time, and why would you all still be here in the same building? I’m more curious how you got Auri to play along."

"Brrrpt!" Auri shed her hunched over look, flitting over to me and hovering in front of me. "Brrpt BRPT!"

I laughed at the bird.

"Bored and thought it’d be funny, huh. Well, let’s just see what I can think of next time you’re classing up. I know there’s a small lake nearby…"

"BRPTTTT!!!!!" Auri was frantically flying circles around me, begging me not to leave her in the middle of a lake when she was next classing up.

The illusion around Skye vanished, and she returned back to normal.

"Nobody here ever falls for it." She complained, picking herself up. "Well, glad you came out before I needed to get to class. See ya!"

"Take care." I told my roommate, flopping down and stretching on the couch with Auri.

"Brrrpt?"

"Sure, let me tell you all about it…"

I started to regale the options I had and the class I picked to Auri, along with the skills, when Iona’s door slammed open. A man strategically holding a bundle of robes fled the room, and then the suite, with Iona yelling behind him.

"Exit’s that way jackass! And ‘oops wrong entrance’ doesn’t work on anyone!" She stormed out of her room as jackass made the fastest exit I’d ever seen.

"Ugh." A very naked Iona crossed her arms and tapped her foot at the now-closed door. "Why do I bother?"

She had a stellar ass though.

"Brrrpt!"

"You’re right." Iona agreed with Auri, noticing me on the sofa. "Hey! New class, awesome! Hang on, let me get some clothes first."

I could only softly laugh to myself at all the chaos.

At least Reinhart was relatively low-key. I’d never guess my kirin roommate to be the easygoing one, but life was full of surprises.

The time until classes started passed in a mad blur. I got to practice a bit with my skills, grabbing a number of easy, early levels for them, and getting a feel how they worked. I needed a job, both to complete the School experience, and because cold hard gem-studded coins were needed to buy food, and more importantly, nice robes.

The boring admin building took care of that. A single centralized hub for all the small jobs the School had, with an expert [Headhunter] ready to help people find the right job for them.

There were dozens, if not hundreds of jobs, from sweeping, cleaning, cooking at the cafeteria, assisting various professors, and more. The pay was the same regardless of where we worked, seemingly carefully calculated to provide for all of our living expenses, with a modest chunk of change left over for personal spending. The two jobs that caught my attention were working in the hospital, and working as one of the library attendants.

Sadly, the hospital one was scut work, not ‘heal everyone who comes in’, and I’d be hard pressed not to heal everyone I saw. The library looked more interesting, and I’d confess that getting peeks at various books, learning the layout front and back, squirreling away various books for when I was done with work, and finding the perfect hidey-holes to read in strongly motivated my decision to work in the library.

With food for the foreseeable future secured, it was time to check out practice with the School’s combat team.

"Elaine. Welcome." Shirayuki greeted me… well, it wasn’t bright and early as the sun went, but the School’s own timekeeping system thought it was.

"Shirayuki. Thank you. I tried to get here a bit early."

[*brrrrrrrrring!* I should be at practice by now.]

[*ding!* [Timekeeping] leveled up! 8->9]

I was going to be so sad when I lost this skill.

She gave me a nod.

"It is good to see that you are serious about this. Now. You know combat. What do you know of the School’s combat team, and our goals?"

I shrugged.

"That you want me badly enough to pay for my schooling here?"

She snorted.

"Both correct, and so utterly wrong. Walk with me."

I walked with Shirayuki, taking a lap around a field that was slowly filling up with students. Something I immediately noticed was that most of them were in form-fitting clothes, mostly in black but with a few purples in the mix. Clothes that were easy to move in, and wouldn’t tangle.

Thank goodness.

The few not in what I was mentally calling sportswear had on armor, and seeing the variety brought a smile to my face.

"There are numerous organizations for teaching in the world. We like to believe we’re the best, but Calador, Chanlaar, the Wizard’s University, the Elven Academy, and more are all our competition. We all want the best students. Politely, we all want the richest students as well, along with the most successful alumni. The combat team is just one way we can compete with the other centers of learning. We beat Calador in combat, sponsors on the fence send their charges to us, not them. Calador wins, and they get more students. The events are also well attended. We win? Alumni open their pockets and shower the School with money. We lose? Well, some donate regardless, but the [Scribes] all tell me the numbers are significantly higher when we win. None of this is life or death. None of this is of critical importance to the School, but on balance, it is better that we win, than lose. Understood?"

I nodded. Seemed straightforward enough.

"Do I need to win, or do I need to win with style?"

"Win without making us look bad." Shirayuki gave me a significant look and I mentally sighed.

"No shooting people under a truce banner."

"Correct. To be clear, I approve of the maneuver in a single game where you needed to stand out. In that time and place, you made the optimal move. I can’t think of it being the best move in future events."

"Understood. What do you need from me on a daily basis until the events?"

"Practice." Shirayuki told me. "Relentless practice. I am of a mind to put you in most freestyle events, unless you have strong personal objections to some of them."

"As long as I’m not violating my [Oath], I’m happy to participate in anything you need me to." Why make life hard for the person greasing the wheels? From the various pay rates I’d seen, participating in the School’s team was some of the best return on investment I could possibly have, all while keeping myself sharp.

I wanted a safe, peaceful life. I had no illusions that I’d manage to get and keep one. The world was always dangerous, it would always knock on my door and demand my money or my life.

They couldn’t have either.

"Good. Here." Shirayuki handed me a wand.

I looked it over. Short, something like 8, 9 inches long, and slightly flexible as I swished it through the air.

"Thank you, what’s this?" I asked her.

"Your winnings from the free-for-all event." Her mouth twisted in a grin. "It seemed to have entirely slipped your mind, although everyone ranked under you was happy to have gotten a higher pick of the prizes. This wand was left, and it’s useful for wizardry. Not that you seem to employ the art. Sell it, keep it as a reminder, gain a wizardry class, it is all the same to me. You should see Mormerilhawn. He will calibrate a better, more personalized shield for you. It will give you the needed experience for how it works in large events."

Shirayuki abruptly turned and swished her tails as she cut across the field, yelling in a different language at two students who’d somehow screwed up.

My conversation with Shirayuki done, I went to find Mormerilhawn to get my shield calibrated with a bit more finesse and detail.

"Mormerilhawn! Hey, I was told to talk with you about calibrating a shield?"

"Elaine. Welcome. Yes, the protection I provide to the members of the School team is more comprehensive than the protection I provide in arbitrary events, simply because I have more time to dedicate to each member. In the interest of fairness, each member of the School team, when participating in such an event, gets a similarly downgraded shield. By the same token, when competing in true events, I coordinate with my counterparts to ensure that everyone has similarly well-attuned shields."

The Black Rose sniffed, and I suspected his counterparts didn’t meet his standards.

"Ok, great. What do we need to do differently this time?"

"I will need to test a wide variety of materials, elements, and types of attacks, to determine sensitivity. An excellent example are poisoned weapons. In the event you were just in, a poisoned weapon was treated just the same as any other weapon. Now, it is considered a stronger hit."

"Unless I’m impervious to poisons." I cheekily replied.

Mormerilhawn paused a moment, looking at me.

"Unless you are resistant to poisons, yes. Your shield will have some additional calibrations around your mana, that is to say, when taking a blow, I will ensure your mana pool takes a hit. It will be entirely safe, and once you no longer have mana, your shield will be downgraded appropriately."

Complicated, but made sense.

"Oh! You’re calibrating each element differently, right? A full-spectrum check?"

He nodded.

"Indeed. You’ve caught on quickly, unlike most of the muscleheads on this team."

I grinned.

"Sooo… how does immunity to fire work?"

He gave me a strange look.

"I will calibrate your resistance to fire like anything else."

I shook my head.

"No no. I’m immune. Fully, properly, totally immune. System even says so. I’d take my own protection against fire over your shield any day."

The Black Rose blinked owlishly at me, as he jaw slowly opened.

Ha! The look on his face!

Priceless.

Getting my class schedule together was tricky, an exercise in copious note taking, cross-referencing, looking up class schedules, looking up tracks, finding overlapping classes, finding when and where they were, seeing what other courses I was interested in, then trying to fit them together.

Then, of course, was deciding what medical classes I wanted to take. Did I want to start at the beginning? I was confident in my knowledge, but there was a line between confidence and arrogance. Had the fundamentals changed in the last few tens of thousands of years? Did elvenoid understanding of healing shift? Were there bare-bone basics I had missed that would be covered in the early classes, that would be foundational later on?

Or was I massively overthinking everything? Did I have a strong enough foundation to skip the introductory classes - intended for people with no knowledge in the subject - and go right to the advanced material?

I only had so much time in the day. A useless class ate up hours, and medicine was especially demanding in how much time was needed.

It was also another set of classes to try and work into my schedule.

"This is impossible." I leaned back in my chair, bumping into my bed, as I complained to Auri.

"Brrrpt?"

"Right. Where to start. Last place that was vaguely educational was Ranger Academy, and that had a packed schedule. I did fine. I figure I should repeat that - why waste a moment? I want to take all the classes, and figure out what Tracks I want to take, and where I want to focus and learn. What direction to evolve my [Student] class in, then where to reset it to. As a result, I want to take as many different classes as possible."

"Brrpt."

"If I was only taking classes in the Medicine Tracks, I’d be fine. They’re in a neat progression, cleanly laid out, and I’d be able to take two to three classes each quarter, have enough free time, and have no overlaps or conflict, not unless I wanted to take the basic class with the super advanced class."

Which was cleverly done.

"But I want more than just a single Track and a few general classes to fill in the time. I want everything. Which brings me to the schedule. Practice is first thing in the morning, so that block is gone." I pointed to a schedule I’d pinned to the wall, seven days of the week each divided up into the 12 blocks that the School used to run its schedule. The four blocks that were ‘night’ were crossed out, along with the first set of blocks. "Any classes offered there are out of the question."

Which raised a question - if I had a course mandatory for my Track that was morning block only, how would I manage to take it? It couldn’t be a new question.

"Introduction to Voodoo and Potions overlap here," I pointed to the three blocks in a week in question. "Which, while annoying, isn’t the end of the world. At least that’s a simple choice between one or the other. If I take one, I’m not taking the other."

"Brrrpt? Brrpt?"

"I can’t take both - I CAN TAKE BOTH!" I shot up in my chair. "Auri, you’re a genius!"

"Brrrpt." She knew.

"I can totally sign up for both classes, attend one, attend the second one, then decide which one I like! I can drop the other one, miss a single class - it’ll suck, but I’ll see if someone has the notes I can borrow - but it works!"

"Brrrpt!" Auri was the bestest, prettiest, smartest bird, and she knew it.

With the brainwave of Auri’s simple question opening the way, I got to furious work.

The easy class was the Advanced Medicine class I threw onto the schedule. I was taking it, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Of course, "easy" was relative, given that it had three separate sets of hours it could fit in, and I had to juggle the question of ‘which options was I fine cutting off?’, given that most introductory courses had a half-dozen blocks in which they were offered.

The real trick was the few "tri overlapping" courses, where course 1 would be blocks A and B, course 2 would be blocks B and C, and course 3 was naturally blocks A and C. Taking just one of the classes would naturally exclude the other two, and things weren’t easily laid out, oh no. That was an example of an easy conflict to resolve.

Whoever designed the course schedule was an evil genius, and I had a mental flashback to the [Scribe] who’d helped get Auri and I settled in.

What worked well in my favor was that classes went right until the "night" hours, granting a whole 16 hours every day to take classes in.

14 hours after practice.

And the library was open all night, so I could work then… it also tended to be quieter during the ‘night’ hours. Easier to slip in some studying.

It took three sets of knocking at my door and wondering if I wanted to grab a bite to eat - why ask me three times for one meal, honestly - before I wrapped up. The door was cracked open, and I had an omnipresent jug of juice out for Auri, which was surprisingly low.

"Brrrpt. Brrrpt?" Auri looked doubtfully at my masterpiece.

"No no, it’s perfect. See, all the classes fit, and I’ll only have to axe… almost half of them! Slightly less! Hang on, how good are you at fractions? Did Plato ever get around to them?"

"BRRPT!" Auri hovered in front of my masterpiece. I facepalmed.

"Shit! Yeah, hang on." I switched my quill colors, blocking out another part of the ‘night’ hours, casually eliminating another 30 minutes of sleep every night.

"There! That’s our time together! Every day! Plus, this schedule is going to get wrecked once I drop a bunch of classes. That’ll open up a bunch of time every day for us, or for me to study, or relax! It’ll go great."

"Brrrpt."

"I’ll eat between classes!"

"Brrrpt."

"I don’t know, I’ll figure it out!"

"Brrrpt…"

"Wait, it’s been how long since I ate!? You should’ve said something earlier!"

I got up, and felt my stomach growl. I resolved not to let this happen again, and set three recurring alarms for food. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Marcelle flipped through my proposed schedule. I didn’t need her to approve it, but I figured the more eyes on it the better.

"This is a terrible idea, and you know it." She handed the schedule back to me. "You’re also not the first student to have tried it, and I know trying to dissuade you is fruitless. Just remember to recognize burnout when it hits you, cut back, and take at least one easy quarter once you’ve gotten the bad ideas out of your head to recover."

I frowned at her, and she grinned back.

"Can’t wait to see you in biomancy though! I can promise it's better than divination!"

Chapter 27
First Day of Class I

[*brrrrring!* Wake up! Time for class!]

[*brrrrring!* No for real.]

[*brrrrring!* Future me, I swear if you’re not up by now… we made these alarms for a reason!]

I swatted the last notification, mentally cursing past-me. I was up! I was out of bed before the first alarm had finished!

Granted, I’d almost shot someone who was walking past my window, but that was neither here nor there. I should ask for heavy curtains or something, as a safety precaution.

"Auri! It’s time for class!" I told my little friend.

"Brrpt…? BRPT!" She woke up in a start as my words made their way through her sleepy little head.

"You excited?"

"BRRRRRRPT!!!" Auri flew in circles around me. She couldn’t WAIT to go to school!

I grabbed my robes off the back of my chair and gave them a sniff. They very faintly smelled, and I needed to do laundry again. I was still limited to one set of robes, and putting on anything other than pristinely clean clothes felt greasy on my soul.

Like, sure, I was able to operate for months at a time wearing the same outfit, but that was different. I was in civilization, and when I was working in the field as a Sentinel, I was rarely taking anything off to put it back on - it just stayed on the entire time.

It was like how a shirt that was worn all day was fine, but putting on the same shirt after taking it off was less fine, because it was ‘dirty’.

Still, my options were as limited as my funds, most of which had gone towards making sure I had the proper school supplies. Those took priority.

"Fire bath?" I asked Auri.

"Brrpt!!" Nothing was better for the start of Auri’s day than trying and failing to light me on fire. It had the benefit of a full-body deep-clean to boot.

After checking that the coast was clear, I quickly dashed across the narrow hallway in the suite, and we were in the bathroom. I wasn’t about to let Auri go nuts right next to all my worldly possessions, and there was water here if things went horribly wrong.

I spread my arms out, opening my mouth slightly.

"Go!" I told Auri, and my world became flames.

Interestingly, I could see through the flames when I was completely coated by them. Normal fire I couldn’t, but there was some point where the flames obscuring my vision triggered some sort of "no no you can see through them" aspect to my immunity.

Magic was weird and cool.

"Thanks." I croaked out after a few seconds, coughing up a bit of ash and licking my lips, trying to get some moisture going.

Benefit to keeping my mouth open - my teeth got cleaned as well.

Downside - my sinus cavities also got cleaned, my snot reduced to ashes, and my mouth was completely dry after.

Still, seconds to get a more thorough cleansing than hours in the shower? I had a packed schedule, and every minute counted.

"Brrrpt!"

"That was fun! Want to do it again?" I asked my little pyromaniac.

Instead of answering, Auri wrapped me in flames once again.

[*brrring!* We should be out the door by now!]

I glared at my overly-ambitious past self’s idea of how fast I could get ready in the morning, and elected to spend just a few moments more with Auri. After all, this was a moment we’d never get back.

[*brrring!* We should be dropping Auri off!]

[*ding!* [Wood Affinity] Leveled up! 3 -> 4]

[*ding!* [Timekeeping] Leveled up! 11 -> 12]

I hated past-me’s sense of time.

I spent a moment hitting snooze on a half-dozen alarms that were set to go off, only keeping the important ones, then checked that the hall was clear.

It wasn’t, Iona’s latest paramour leaving in the early hours. Bless the thick, enchanted walls, and bless Iona for being at her ‘friend’s’ place more often than coming back here.

The coast was clear a moment later, and I sprinted back across the hall to my room, throwing on my robes. I grabbed my bag, packed last night, and looked through it one last time.

My head itched, and I narrowed my eyes, looking around.

Ahha! My wand! I swiped it and stashed it in the sleeve of my robe.

[*ding!* [Something Doesn’t Look Right] Leveled up! 19 -> 20].

I felt a little attacked how quickly and easily I was leveling that one up.

"Are you ready for your first day of school?" I asked Auri.

"BRRRPT! Brrpt?"

She grabbed her little black hat off my desk and flew it over to me, clutching it in her beak.

"Of course! Hold still." I took the little black witch’s hat from her, and put it on her head, carefully strapping it closed. How it didn’t burn, I had no idea.

Probably because Auri didn’t want it to burn.

"Yay! Let’s go! You’re going to have a blast!"

"BRRRPT!!!"

We left, heading over to Auri’s school.

Or tried to.

"Brrrpt…." Auri was hovering in the corner of the antechamber of the dorm.

"Oh come on! It’s not that bad!"

"BRPT!" Auri violently shook her head, indicating resolute refusal.

"Aoife Auri Stentor." I put my hands on my hips. "You are not made out of sugar. You will survive a tiny drizzle."

"Brrpt………….."

"You’re hot enough that you’ll just burn the water away!"

"Brpt." She shook her head again.

I rolled my eyes. I did not have time for this.

"I’ll put you under the [Mantle] and you’ll stay perfectly dry the entire time. Plus, school!"

"Brrrpt!"

Auri finally let me shield her from the incredibly light drizzle we were experiencing, but insisted on four layers to the shield. Just in case. That was stacked ontop of her [Domain of Fire] skill rejecting a portion of the rain.

We navigated our way through the well organized streets of the School, finding the lower education building. It was bright and colorful, with four different playgrounds around it. Two of them were clearly magical, a kid hovering and twisting in midair over a platform. A few kids, too young for their System to be unlocked yet, were playing on the equipment, while a slow stream of parents in robes brought their kids to the mini-school/daycare. Mostly, a few of them didn’t have obvious kids in tow. Maybe they were doing a pickup or something…?

I’d gotten the impression that the place was more than just a daycare for babies and toddlers, but the average age I was seeing worried me. I finally caught sight of what had to be an 11 year old going to the building, in full black robes like nearly everyone else, and it clicked.

Half the people streaming to the building were students, trusted to make their way over on their own, not the parents. That made more sense.

"Hello?" I asked as we entered the building. Most people seemed to know where they were going, but we were new.

"Brrrrpt?" Auri called out her own little greeting.

"Oh! Hello!" A green woman popped out of one of the doors, quickly looking at us then walking over. Flowers sprouted from the stone floor in her wake. "You must be Elaine! And this must be Auri!" Her words weren’t in High Elvish, but I caught the automatic translation well enough.

Her robes were also green, and I suspected she was a dryad, although I wasn’t quite sure how rude it was to ask what someone’s species was. It didn’t matter that much in the end.

"Yup! That’s us!"

"Brrrpt!"

"Welcome! I’m Bridget, I’m so glad you’re here. Do you know what you’d like Auri to study?" A branch extended from her shoulder, an apple forming at the end of it and dropping into Bridget’s hand. She offered it to Auri, who fluttered around the familiar fruit.

"Brrpt! Brpt brpt BRPT brpt."

"Oh my! That’s quite a lot. And how old are you?"

"Brpt!"

"Wow! Impressive for such a young girl. Well! If your mom," Bridget looked at me and tilted her head in a small question, a vine sprouting from her shoulder into a question mark. "Is ok with it, we can put you in the later years to study more."

"Companion." I gently corrected, although the assumption was… decent, I guess? For all I knew, magic made human to hummingbird totally possible. Or I was like Reinhard, and could transform. "And yes. The best learning she can get."

"Well! We’ve come to the right spot, haven’t we? We’re going to have so much fun together!"

"Brrpt!"

Auri immediately flew off with Bridget, who started to give her the tour.

[*brrring!* Practice starts now!]

Shit!

I sprinted off towards practice, my speed and the small school being next to the practice arena saving my butt.

I had a moment to reflect on the interaction.

I was impressed that Bridget had understood Auri! I was guessing there was probably a skill for understanding toddlers that worked on her.

She seemed to be in good hands.

Practice was fine. A few teamwork exercises first to get us used to working with each other. They also doubled as physical exercise, although working together to walk over tight wires was trivial for the people with strong physical stats, and difficult for the pure mages.

It did neatly demonstrate that we needed to look after the mages, and showed the mages they needed to work on their physical skills. I didn’t count myself in their number - my level and stat distribution was closer to some of the physical classers, than the mages.

Individuals duels and feedback were next, before we wrapped up. Honestly, it was a cakewalk compared to Ranger Academy, which would’ve crammed five times the activities into the same amount of time.

We finished up early, letting everyone get to their first class on time.

I found myself sitting in a pre-scouted classroom. Front row, notebook at the ready, quill prepared, I sat and waited for "Introduction to Cultivation" to start.

[*ding!* [Organization] Leveled up! 9 -> 10]

Double-checking my mental notes, it was going to be cultivation or talismans. I was leaning towards talismans, having seen them a half-dozen times already, which was why I was checking out cultivation first. Introduction classes usually had a lot of fluff in the first class, just getting to know each other and going over fundamentals, and I wanted the cultivation fundamentals. I had rough ideas on talisman fundamentals.

[*brrring!* First class is starting, hope we’re in our seat!]

Awww yes. Beat my notification!

At the same time my notification went off, the door opened one last time, and a large albino triangle-headed snake slithered in, a gnome in black robes sitting cross-legged on his head. The snake slithered to the front of the room, and I leaned way back in my chair, instantly regretting my life choices.

The snake looked big enough to eat me, nevermind the gnome sitting on his head. It swayed up, the gnome opening her eyes.

I really, really, really hoped that this class was taught by the gnome, and not by the snake.

"Good morning." The gnome said in Hakka, and I decided to look at the silver lining. Her words were being translated into High Elvish, and I could rapidly learn the languages by using the translator as a keystone. Back to the lecture.

"My name is Bai Luli, of the Bai clan. This here," She patted her snake seat affectionately. "Is Albedo. I am to be your instructor on cultivation, and guide you through the profound mysteries of the great Dao."

I had no idea what ‘Dao’ was, but I guess this was where technical terms and learning came into play. I started furiously taking notes, all while leaning away from the snake’s flicking tongue.

I started to pray that there’d be a break in the middle, and I could find a new seat.

"Now. This is the introductory class, and I suppose I must explain what cultivation is in slightly… different terms for you to understand." Luli scowled and twisted her face, as the words came out with obvious distaste.

"Terminology is the start, and most important. What you call the System is the Blessing of the Heavens. What you call acquiring experience is obtaining qi. The different stages of classes are realms, and different levels are subrealms. Questions?"

I had a ton, but I was still in the ‘wait and listen, because most of my questions will be answered that way’ phase.

Not everyone had the same discipline I did, and a hand shot up. Albedo stopped staring at me, instead turning to look at the new victim - err - student.

"Yes?"

"How do cultivators, uh, obtain qi?" The student stumbled slightly, at least getting the right terms.

Luli smiled.

"Many different arts will claim that they are the best. However, cultivators have the best methods. One can choose to study the sublime art of potioneering as a cultivator, or as a wizard, but cultivators are superior. Normally I’d ask if anyone knew why, but this is an introductory class. You would not be here if you knew why."

That was fair, and my quill danced over my paper, taking notes on almost everything being said. Just another way of learning.

"Meditation upon the profound Dao, and feeling the Qi in heaven and earth is what all cultivators want to do. This expands their internal Qi, empowering them to perform feats mere mortals can not hope to accomplish. That is why we are superior."

My quill stopped as Luli stopped, and I thought about her words, translating them back into normal terms.

My jaw dropped.

Cultivators leveled up just by thinking about it.

Well, technically, they needed to meditate, not think about it, but the difference was academic. Mostly? Either way, it seemed like a stupid, broken hack that was entirely within how I knew the System to work.

Classes leveled up by doing what they wanted to be and do. A [Carpenter] leveled up by carving wood up, by say, making a table. A [Ship’s Carpenter] might get some experience by making a normal table, but they’d get a lot more for making a table in a ship.

It sounded like somebody had figured out a job that wanted to ‘think’ as its method of leveling up, then tied a bunch of other skills and abilities to that. Whoever had invented cultivation was a genius.

Hang on. I was assuming with the ‘bunch of other skills and abilities tied to it’ part. Question time!

I raised my hand after formulating a well-designed question.

"Yes?"

"What limits do cultivators have, in other words, what can cultivators not do that’s permissible in other System classes?"

I got a frown for that, and another flickering tongue in my face.

Gods, that snake had huge fangs.

"All is accomplishable with the Grand Blessing of the Heavens." Luli practically sniffed at me for that question, but she did answer it.

"Now, next…"

Cultivation was interesting in that it opened up additional avenues for gaining experience, while still having all the benefits of a ‘normal’ class.

At least, that was how the introduction to the class framed it. There was an implication that a cultivator’s leveling speed dropped off as they leveled up, but that was true for everyone. Were they slower than a normal classer? There was usually a challenge or stress component to gaining experience. That was why fighting for my life, and healing people getting eaten by monsters, was such good experience, compared to tamer city or hospital-based healing.

They did make it clear that doing other things within the boundaries of the class also granted experience - errr - Qi. It was like how my [The Dawn Sentinel] class both wanted me to heal, and work as a Sentinel. The meditation part was simply a ‘broadening’ of what granted experience. Cultivators could spend as much or as little time meditating as they wanted. They often grabbed skills that helped them meditate, but they were often useless outside of meditation. Still, a skill to make the time zip by, not needing to eat or drink, was interesting. Basically a ‘lemme level up now, be right back’ type skill, although there was no telling quite how long a cultivator would be meditating when they did that.

I was having trouble believing it though. If it was true that cultivation was purely beneficial, why wasn’t everyone a cultivator?

There had to be more to it, and I only had about a week to decide if I was going to keep studying cultivation, or pick up talismans instead.

At the end of the class I tried [Dabble] to see if I could meditate in the way Luli described. It was like my consciousness expanded, and I could vaguely ‘feel’ around me - although that could’ve just been a side effect from closing my eyes, sitting still, and thinking about the world around me in combination with my stats.

[*ding!* [Dabble] Leveled up! 1 -> 2]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Studious Meditation]. Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

I ignored the notification. I was happy with my class skills.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Meditation]. Would you like to take it?]

More skills… I got offered them so easily here. I’d eventually find what I wanted, but right now wasn’t the moment. Nor would it be [Meditation].

I suppose my class was already capped, and even if I did level up, it’d be almost impossible to tell if it was because I was practicing meditation, or if it was because I was being a diligent student, practicing the various things I was told.

Busy, busy.

"Transformation! We’re a bloody awesome field!" The professor, with the most ‘toeing the line’ set of black robes I’d ever seen, energetically paced in front of the classroom. There was a big rack covered with cloth near the front, and I was hoping it was something fun, and not more snakes.

I was safely in the middle seats this time, keeping a safe distance from any more shenanigans that might crop up. One snake eyeing me for a snack for two hours was plenty, thank you very much.

"The most famous example of transformers are the werewolves! A bloody fantastic lot! During the full moon they turn, and they can turn into wolves whenever they want! Any werewolves here today? Apart from myself."

He grinned at us with too much teeth, his sheer passion for the subject bleeding through.

"Right! Transformation’s wonderful! You want claws? Transform into a wolf! You need teeth? Wolf! You need to run fast? Wolf!"

He grinned at his own joke, probably told a thousand times already, and I laughed along with most of the class.

"Being a little more serious for a moment. You want wings? Transform into a bird! You need to be strong? Find the right dinosaur! Nearly any problem has a creature that can deal with it! Or, maybe you just need a helping hand."

His hand transformed into a black and furry paw at that. He looked at it a moment, grabbed it with his other wrist, and started screaming as the paw tried to attack his face.

"AHHH! It’s out of control! It’s going to get me! AHHHH!"

He wrestled with himself for a few moments in front of the class. Some students laughed, while others looked worried.

I was a little unimpressed, and the professor knocked it off soon enough.

"Everyone starts with partial transformations, and they can be good enough for the job! Time for an in-depth showing!"

He dramatically pulled the cloth off the block, revealing a rack of outfits. Each one looked like it was made out of animal skin, and I felt my eyebrows going up just a bit.

He grabbed one of the outfits - filled with feathers - and threw it on himself with a flourish. As the cloak went on him, he shifted and changed, until an eagle was hovering in front of us, flapping its wings impossibly slow.

Then somehow, he ‘grabbed’ the ‘clasp’ with his wing, and the cloak fell off, revealing the professor in front of us again.

I clapped wildly at his display as a few other students joined in. The professor bowed a few times.

"Thank you! Thank you! Onto the next one!"

As a learning opportunity? Watching the professor put on various cloaks and transform into a bunch of different creatures wasn’t exactly the best use of my time.

It was totally awesome though. Just… POOF! I’m an eagle! I’m an ankylosaurus! I’m a manticore!

POOF! I’M ANOTHER BLOODY GIANT SNAKE.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I was sitting in the middle of the room, far away from the constrictor, and he took his cloak off after a moment anyway.

I tried to transform my finger with [Dabble] at the end of the class into a talon, but while the skill leveled up, nothing happened. I put a question mark next to that.

[Something Doesn’t Look Right] didn’t ping either, although the skill was low level.

If I was doing something entirely wrong, I wouldn’t have gotten any [Dabble] levels. Interesting.

Transformation ended with a ‘maybe’ on my initial analysis. I’d need an entire class dedicated to it, and practical uses felt limited at first blush. The class was closely tied with biomancy though, and the lessons learned here were potentially applicable to that field of study.

Plus, he had a point. If I could simply transform into anything, that was a lot of the flexibility of biomancy, without a lot of the pain points. I needed to learn more.

But the professor was cool, and the magic was AMAZING, and that counted for quite a bit.

Comparative Elvenoid Anatomy was up next, and I was back in the front seat. The class was small, only about a dozen of us here, and I was the only purple robe. Everyone else had a [Healer] tag, and I got looks from everyone.

The mortal-healer-over-256 combination wasn’t one people saw every day, and I was a ‘new’ addition to this cohort of other healers, most of which had probably been taking classes with each other for a few months to a few years now.

I swear by my love of mangos, if Comparative Elvenoid Anatomy had giant snakes in it, I was done.

"Welcome. This class is Comparative Elvenoid Anatomy I. If you think you should be in a different class, this is the time to leave."

The professor paused a moment, and nobody left.

"Excellent. You all know how this works. Now, as you all know, the Medical Manuscripts tend to use either human or elven anatomy to teach the basics. This course will begin to cover the subtle variations between the different species. There is much to cover, and little time. We will begin with the skeletal system."

The professor waved his arm, and a few dozen different mirages of skulls popped into existence behind him.

"The horns of the elf can be seen on the dragonling, but the anchor point is higher up. Relatively, they’re in the same position, but dragonlings have a coronal suture that is further back, and…"

I had no time to ask questions, let alone practice hearing different words in different languages through the translator. My quill scribbled furiously as I took notes in the blistering paced lecture.

This class was going to be a challenge. At least there wasn’t a giant snake!

Class ran to the very last second, and while technically the cafeteria was near the hospital, I wasn’t the only one with the idea to grab lunch as soon as class ended. The place was swarmed with students all trying to grab food, and it would’ve taken too long to get through the lines, buy some food, and make it to my next class.

Ah well, skipping a meal wouldn’t kill me. I’d just make sure to grab a bigger breakfast and dinner from now on, and pack snacks.

"Transmutation is the subtle art of turning one object into another." The blue-robed professor was speaking softly, practically whispering. I could hear her just fine, but most of the other students were leaning forward, making sure to catch her every word. "The object is not conjured, oh no. It exists and is just as real as the object it was before. There is a correspondingly higher cost, but a proper Transfigurer is practically elementally unbound, capable of turning any substance into any other. It is a long and difficult path, but I hope those of you here will be willing to join me on this journey of discovery. Let me begin with some simple, yet subtle, word usage, just as the subject matter itself. Transmutation refers to changing the material. Transfiguration refers to changing the shape. The two are often used interchangeably, but are not."

At the end of the class, I tore off a small strip of paper, giving [Dabble] a shot. I focused on the paper, remembering the lessons about how the more similar things were, the easier it was to transform them, and that my current element was Wood, which made things relating to nature just a bit easier.

I constructed a complex mental image, of paper becoming bark, and stretched [Dabble] to try and make something happen.

[*ding!* [Dabble] Leveled up! 6 -> 7]

I critically examined the piece of paper, flapping it around.

It did seem a bit stiffer…

Well, all these weak [Dabbles] told me that I loved having ALL THE MAGIC, I liked having effective magic more. Obviously [Dabble] would get stronger as I leveled, but even then… I wasn’t impressed.

It was worth considering narrowing my focus, and getting a powerful and effective class, than having lots and lots of weak magic.

Onto the next class! It was one I was extra excited about.

"I am Lothar Glasswhistle." A… I was pretty sure he was a beastkin, but all the reflective glass and dangling beads in his antlers made it hard to see if he had the characteristics of an elf. The purple robes both suggested an unusually high level for a mortal, but too low of a level for an Immortal teacher. He was carrying a gem-encrusted gnarled staff with one hand, and a course book with the other. "This course is the start of your journey into wizardry, the most profound, flexible, and powerful of the magics available to you. Indeed, little can be done with other magics that are not accomplishable, in some way, shape, or form, with wizardry. The only difference is time, and learning. It takes but a moment to gain a strong System skill, and to use it endlessly. It will take you considerably longer to properly educate yourself as a wizard, and to use the skills and abilities to create the same thing. However. Once you have reached that mark, there is nearly no skill that will not be open to you."

He paused a moment, and my quill finished taking notes.

I glanced around at the other students, all black robed, still industriously writing away. Most of them at least, a few were chatting quietly with each other, not really paying attention.

It made me sick. This fantastic opportunity was being squandered. To talk. Honestly, why bother?

"Here is how wizardry works, in a nutshell. Please keep in mind that if you continue to pursue your education in this widest of fields, that you will continuously have your understanding of how wizardry works to be redefined, again and again. You may even develop a personal philosophy. To the topic." Lothar tapped his staff, grabbing some wandering attention.

I turned my page, making sure I had a fresh, clean, new sheet of paper for this.

"The System allows for skills to create runes, inscriptions, sigils, incantations, or the like. I will refer to them all as runes, even though there are dozens of different names for varying subtypes. Linking the runes together, then pouring mana through it in an appropriate way, allows for various magical effects to occur, mimicking nearly any other skill the System can let you make."

He paused a moment, letting people scribble away, then pointed at me.

"Excuse me. Miss. As the highest leveled here, is there a non-healing skill that you can safely demonstrate?"

I wasn’t thrilled with being singled out, but then again, I was the only purple robed student in a sea of black. The School had already singled me out, and I was more than happy to help.

I summoned a single butterfly above one finger, and my [Mantle] in the shape of a shield over a different finger.

Remus Legion tower shield, of course.

"Shield or explosive butterfly?" I offered him.

"I will demonstrate the butterfly. Radiance, correct?" He said, and I mentally dismissed my two creations.

"Correct."

"Excellent. Now, many wizards can prepare their spells ahead of time, and store them in various ways. Often, wizards will obscure what they are doing, so that they are not interrupted, often for nefarious purposes. You will rarely see a full display like what I am about to do outside of a classroom setting, or a true fight where there simply is no time to obscure, and a new creation is needed. Now."

He put his staff aside - and boy, did that ever generate a dozen more questions that I wanted to ask - and started tracing in the air. A full circle was the first thing he drew, almost as large as he was.

"This section here permits me to use this structure I’m creating." He said after he ‘traced’ the first glowing line of mystic runes in the air, just under the top arch of the circle.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Runic Scribing]! Would you like to take the skill?]

Another student skill offered… I dismissed the notification, returning back to paying attention to the lecture.

"This next section allows for mana to flow… this is a linker… this shapes the object into a ball… this makes light… of a particular color… this gives it crude wings… apologies, this part is complicated and another skill of mine will fill it in, this lets me control it…" A huge chunk of runes appeared wholesale in the middle, more than tripling the length of everything else he’d done so far. "This gives wings motion… and I think I’m close enough for a sample, here are a dozen different closers I need to make the entire thing work." He finished with a few more lines popping in just like the middle section.

"Voila!" The runes started to glow, then they coalesced into a tiny butterfly. Lothar gestured - I knew it had to be for dramatic effect, but good showmanship was critical for teaching - and the butterfly started to fly around his head.

"Now. I’ve cut the explosive aspect of Miss Elaine’s butterfly, don’t want that here." There were some light chuckles as I did a double-take, then remembered that my name literally meant healer.

How crazy was that!? I knew why, but it still blew my mind every time.

"And it doesn’t fly as naturally, or look as pretty, but believe me, I could do all that given enough time and motivation. Additionally, all wizardry is more expensive from a mana standpoint than the corresponding sorcery. The advantage of the [Affinity] skills, and narrow skills can also have discounts. Wizardry, of course, has more breadth of skills and options. I simply wanted to demonstrate how wizardry cloned skills, a detailed demonstration before we start studying each individual piece. Seeing how it all comes together will motivate you and incentivize you all. I’m sure you all have questions. Ask."

A barrage of questions occurred, some interesting, some inane. I leaned back and processed.

[Something Doesn’t Look Right] was a new skill. A low level skill. One I was unfamiliar with. It was no surprise that it took me ages to notice the tiny little voice saying I should double check things.

I checked my notes. All there.

"How do we know what runes do what? Excellent question. Fundamentally, we’re taught what they mean. There’s an entire field of study down the wizardry path called Runesmithing. [Runesmiths] create new sets of runes. There’ve been many! Each one had their own unique understanding, and created their own set of runes, cleverly devised to meet their needs. Now, most of these runic sets are poorly done, utterly outdated, too difficult to work with, or frankly useless. Here at the School we teach a handful of different sets, and as your path down wizardry continues, I strongly encourage you to focus on a few. They are as follows:"

I checked my timers. They looked fine, and why would it have changed recently? They weren’t why my skill was going off.

"Laconic Style is the oldest known style of wizardry, and is taught mostly from a historical perspective. It is old, clunky, and nearly every other established language is better, but at the same time, nearly every language is derived from it. The ur-language, if you will."

Historical interest. Funny overlap with Origen’s hometown… although from what I’d heard of the Remus Empire, maybe not.

My ink hadn’t been replaced by invisible ink. Another thing checked. I was reaching here, but it was my first day, and some of the people in the lecture didn’t seem that interested. Pranks were a possibility.

"Nixia is obnoxious. Someone figured out that all wizardry could be boiled down to only eight different runes - one for each base element - and created a language with only that. It requires the longest casting by far, and every other rune you’ll handle can be expressed as a combination of those eight runes. For all my complaints about the language, it is literally the most fundamental language, and if it can’t be done in Nixia, it can’t be done."

Eight runes sounded easy enough to learn… although making them into something useful seemed challenging. Like writing a book with only eight letters, each word would need to be significantly longer to make it work.

"Delas is a somewhat archaic and old style, but has been slowly and steadily used across the world for centuries. Rulers are often looking for people who are capable of using Delas simply to maintain their old wards, which gets a number of people proficient in using the language. This means when they go off to write warding schemes of their own, they tend to use Delas, and the cycle continues."

That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. I wanted to do cool stuff, not dabble in crusty old languages to work for someone else.

I wanted wizardry for me.

I checked my outfit. I hadn’t had a wardrobe malfunction. What was my skill pinging me about?

"Anaconda is the current popular rune set. Fast. Flexible. Neatly strikes a balance between different numbers of runes, and ease of learning. The popularity means a number of simple aspects already have pre-defined rune segments, making it easier to build complex mandalas. If you are looking for a language, Anaconda is a safe bet."

Well, far from it for me to decry the expert, but WHY WAS IT FUCKING GIANT SNAKES AGAIN??? I suppose this one wasn’t literally in my face about it, but this was getting absurd!

There wasn’t a sign on my back, my hat was unmolested. Pranksters were rapidly falling off my list of why my skill was pinging at me.

"Octagony will twist your mind around." Lothar held his hand up, an octahedron hovering in front of him. "It has a number of runes, but each rune is used multiple times in each mandala. In other words, if I put a single Rull rune into the Octagony matrix, it gets read eight times as the skill casts. This has the advantage of casting both quickly and flexibly, along with having a wide number of options, but crafting new Octagony spells is difficult. You will not be able to think of new ones on the fly."

I marked that one high on my list. Sounded like a puzzle!

What was it that I was missing? What was I forgetting, or not noticing?

"Lastly is Jiwa, the language of the giants. Jiwa uses single runes to create massive effects, almost like a sorcerer would, with the flexibility of a wizard. However, what it gains in speed and power it loses in control. The rune for ‘magic missile’ will grant exactly one magic missile, traveling in a straight line towards your target. The power naturally scales with the amount of mana put into the rune, but there’s no zig-zag corkscrew magic missile rune. It simply can’t be done in Jiwa."

That sounded great for a fight though. I added my thoughts to my copious notes on the subject, liking what I heard about wizardry more and more.

I’d need to check if my [Asura's Legacy] class could use any of these languages.

Double checking everything I was looking at, while also paying attention to class was hard. The multi-tasking to find out what didn’t look right, while also taking notes, and thinking about the material and how it applied to me was hard.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Multi-Tasking]! Would you like to take this skill?]

Not now, my notifications-

Hang on.

My notifications.

I checked through the most recent ones, my eyes immediately going wide as I landed on one of them.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Runic Scribing]! Would you like to take the skill?]

That wasn’t asking me if I wanted to replace a skill.

That was asking me if I wanted to take a class skill. In my rush, I’d assumed it was another [Student of the Ages] skill.

No.

Taking it meant that it was a [Butterfly Mystic] skill.

Lothar was a Radiance mage. He’d traced the runes in light in front of him.

Which meant my class easily, almost like breathing, cribbed skills off of him.

Forget [Dabble]. I was going to find out how to be a real wizard.

Chapter 28
First Day of Class II

"You’re all here because, somehow, you’ve had your head buried deep in the sand, and missed a few fundamental basics of how the world works. If it were up to me, I’d have a general knowledge requirement to get into the School, but it isn’t, and you’re all here." The old man grumped while lying back on his deep cushions, his tail wrapped around a ramrod straight metal gem-studded rod. He glared at us like it was personally our fault that he had to get up and teach.

Well, getting up was a bit of a stretch for the old, lazy Naga. My opinion of the dude started off high, and was doing a rapid nosedive with no end in sight.

"Staves! Wands! Same thing, there’s no difference between the two. An intelligent mage - yes, don’t look surprised, both sorcerers and wizards use wands - will store a single powerful skill inside a large gem in a wand. This gives them permanent access to the skill, and, hoping that you all have eyes and they’re not just for show, you can see that most staves have more than one gem."

He waved his staff in front of us, twisting it around with his tail to show off the numerous gems studded in the thing.

"Some of these are support skills, designed to empower the main skill trapped in the gem. Recharging, potentiating, double casting, and more, there’s a wide variety of things that can be done. Wands can also be used to interface with certain types of wizardry. In this course, we will learn the common types of materials used to make wands, simple enchantments, and of course, gems and what they do."

He rolled his eyes and sighed.

"Gems… something else you all probably don’t know about. Let me start at the very, very basics, and try to dig your collective heads out of the sand…"

This was not shaping up to be my favorite class, and I immediately marked it low on my priority list.

I’d gotten the basics. Learning how wands worked was immensely useful, although I wondered why "encased in armor" or even "in a shield" wasn’t nearly as common as "in a wand".

I did get a chance to ask that question as the class was winding down, and the professor scoffed at me.

"In a shield? Have you been listening to a word I’ve said all class? Why yes, it would technically work if you wanted to create your own set of enchantments from complete scratch, the common ones I will be teaching you are designed for staves. A shield is heavy, you don’t want to be throwing your extremely expensive gems and delicate enchantments in front of arrows, give purchase for hostile mages to steal it from you, and walk around declaring you’re expecting a war! Shields, honestly."

The professor dramatically shook his head, and what I got from his answer?

Shields were completely valid.

I might try taking the class again with a different professor.

I got stiffed on dinner as well, and I was starting to feel a little light-headed. Vigorous exercise in the morning, followed by an entire day of difficult lectures had me a little fried, a little on edge.

I could totally operate just fine, but there was a difference between "operate on a mission" and "think hard about new things."

One I had years of ingrained training to fall back onto, the other was, well, new.

Live and learn. Missing lunch and dinner wasn’t going to kill me, and I’d make sure to properly stock up in the future.

Divination was next!

I was expecting a smoky room with crystal balls. Instead, I got another plain lecture hall, and a man in the front of the room who looked like he’d fit right in with the Instructors at Ranger Academy, not teaching Divination.

"The first thing you need to know about divination!" He sounded like a drill instructor as well, all yelling and barking. "Is it does not exist! The entire field is a hoax! A fraud! Conmen and imposters, claiming to see what happens next! It is all a pack of LIES! If you think you have wasted your time, excellent! The exit is there, make better use of your time!"

I packed up my materials and sprinted out the door, robes flapping as I beat out a dozen slower students who were making the same smart call I was.

If I was fast, I wouldn’t miss much of Biomancy. The main education buildings all being next to each other was nice for that, and there was an easy window to jump out of instead of navigating the crystalline, reflective hallways of the Earth Tower.

Apparently, that counted as being passionate.

[*ding!* [Passionate Learning] Leveled up! 382 -> 383!]

Marcelle gave me a wink as I snuck into the room and discreetly took a chair near the door. There was another woman with her, and most interestingly, she was not dressed in robes like literally everyone else at the School was, but in pure white armor with red trimmings. She was short - maybe as tall as I was - and had fiery red hair.

"... and that’s the basics of biomancy. Now, Inquisitor Ren here would like to say a few things to all of you. I trust that you will listen to her, because this is important. She is deadly, deadly serious, and I will help her if you break the rules."

She gestured, giving the floor to Inquisitor Ren, and stepped back.

"You all know the Divine Decrees." Ren stated, words like fire, and without a hint of shame, I raised my hand. Her eyebrow quirked up as she looked at me.

"You don’t know the Divine Decrees?" She asked as if she was stunned, like such a thought had never occurred to her.

I heard some titters behind me, but I didn’t care. Marcelle whispered something into Ren’s ear.

"Ok, the Divine Decrees. The closest thing we have to the great gods above, may they watch over us and bless us, giving us rules. They are simple. They are difficult to break. They are as follows."

"Do not claim to be a god."

"Do not exterminate another species."

I studiously kept the BEST poker face I could possibly manage, visions of the Formorians flashing through my mind. The hand from a god, descending down to crush one of the Queens. The legions of angels pouring through the breach.

Nope.

Not me.

Hadn’t seen anything about Formorians going extinct… except in my classing up space… although the shimagu were. Then again, we might’ve killed them all before the extinction-notification wish was made…

"Do not prevent the worship of a divinity, nor should you desecrate places of worship."

"Do not damage the fabric of reality."

Ok, that Divine Decree sounded like it had a STORY behind it.

"Lastly, the one I’m here to discuss with all of you. Do not create new species. Biomancy is the primary field for creating new species. Do not. It is for the gods to do, not mere mortals. There are always a few young biomancers who want to tinker. Who combine a rabbit with a mouse, then put in the effort such that they breed true. The levels are great. If you do that, the gods will tell us, and we will put both the specimens, and the creator, to the sword. Questions?"

"What about Vorlers? Beastkin?" Someone shouted, drawing attention to the far side of the room. The student looked a bit older, and I kept a chuckle to myself as I saw a number of other black-robed students subtly making their way to the door.

Ren sighed.

"Beastkin prompted the Divine Decrees, and Vorlers are an excellent example of why we enforce them so harshly. Stamp them out before they become a true problem. Who wants a second set of Vorlers? Anyone?"

She looked around the room challengingly, and sharply nodded her head.

"That’s what I thought. With any luck, this will be the last time I see any of you."

She sharply turned on her heels, and strode out of the room.

Marcelle clapped her hands to get our attention back, every eye having followed Ren’s journey.

"I completely support Ren in this. Do not make new species. Best case, you create magical termites that eat every building on the Island. We have records of that happening. Worst case, you make a new set of Vorlers, and generations will curse your name. Now! Let us discuss the tiers of biomancy."

Marcelle gestured, and a display of her notes appeared behind her. I started furiously writing.

"The absolute lowest level of biomancy overlaps with transfiguration and transformation, that is, small, temporary changes to the body, that’ll revert themselves."

Turning my finger into a talon was also a biomancy trick. Got it.

"I don’t generally consider that to be biomancy. Biomancy, to me, truly starts when the changes are permanent. For a given definition of permanent."

Marcelle sighed.

"Biomancy is complicated, and there are rarely easy answers or straightforward methods for anything. Simply explaining the different types of biomancy is convoluted! Let us touch on healing for a moment, another art closely related to biomancy. Fundamentally, healing works on an image to image basis. We don’t care about the healer’s image for this, we are going to discuss the System’s image of us. One popular theory of healing at this time, is the System has a ‘blueprint’, for lack of a better word, of what our bodies are supposed to look like, and healing restores a person to that blueprint. I’m not going to get terribly in-depth on the details of this theory - take a basic healing course if you’d like to learn more, or go to the library - but that’s the fundamentals you need to understand."

"Now, when I say basic biomancy makes changes permanent, I mean from a purely biological standpoint. I can transform into a bat, and the transformation will not wear off with time."

Marcelle twirled in her robes, the purple fabric falling away to reveal a bat, her poofy hat having shrunk to fit on her new size.

Marcelle’s voice was higher pitched, but still perfectly understandable. She swooped back and forth in front of the class as she continued to lecture.

"The biomancy I’ve just performed means I’ll stay like this for the rest of my natural life. Or until a healer restores me to my natural form. To the healers taking this class, be careful! You can kill someone trying to heal them back to their true form if you lack the proper power and control. I want you all to imagine that you only healed my chest down back to vampire, and that vampire body is attached to a bat half."

It wasn’t hard to imagine, and I shuddered. There’d be so many things going wrong, I didn’t know where to start. I must’ve missed the initial "Biomancy is dangerous, dangerous stuff" at the start of the lecture. Not that I needed that lecture. I knew enough biology to know what a tiny, incorrect change could do to the body.

"The third stage of biomancy tells the System that this new form of mine is ‘real’, and for any healing applied to me will return me to this form."

Fascinating.

Oh! That’s what went wrong earlier! When I tried to transform my finger into a talon, my [Persistent Casting] of [Dance with the Heavens] instantly returned my finger to its "correct" configuration! A single-digit [Dabble] skill had nothing on my [Oath]-empowered custom-built panacea skill. No wonder nothing happened!

Ugh.

That also meant if I wanted to do any sort of self-modification practice, I’d need to turn off my permanent cast, and that skill was a gigantic pain to reset. Although, I suppose that could make practicing the skill easier in some ways? Just keep casting it again and again to grind experience points, not needing to ‘reset’ since that was automatically done for me?

Things to plot later. Although, dropping my persistent casting would get me back in the habit of properly forming images, which was important with all the comparative anatomy and new species I was handling, and…

Later.

"The fourth stage of biomancy is where things start to get a little dicey, but is generally accepted. Granting heritable traits to another."

My quill almost stopped at that.

Biomancy could do what?!

"The fifth stage are chimeras, amalgams of creatures that shouldn’t exist. The line between ‘an improved creature’ and a chimera is fuzzy, but it’s generally where so many different creatures are put together that it’s no longer clear what the base is. A griffin is one example of what a chimera could look like, being half-eagle, half-lion, but of course, they are not chimeras. One of the defining features of a chimera is they don’t breed true. If they do? We arrive at our last stage, and the one that’ll get the Inquisition quite mad at you."

"The last stage, and I’m covering it simply for the sake of completeness, was what Ren was talking about. Not just granting traits that can be passed down, but creating an entirely new species. The beastkin are famously supposed to have been one Immortal’s project, and we all know about vorlers."

"As I said earlier, biomancy is extremely demanding, more so than healing, and requires more classes than nearly any other Track. The other part that makes biomancy difficult is you need all the classes to be successful. Fail to do well in a course, and you’ll just kill people instead of helping them."

"Let us begin…"

The good thing about all the biomancy classes though?

Near perfect overlap with all the medical classes I needed.

I was doing a lot of sprinting, but classes were finally over. Seven classes in a row, 14 straight hours of learning, and I was fried. It was only day one to boot!

Eh.

I’d adapt.

I made my way over to Auri’s school, picking her up after a long day. Her hat was crooked and slightly stained, all the marks of having had an absolute BLAST of a day.

"How was it?"

"Brrrpt…" Auri suspiciously looked up at the sky.

I rolled my eyes.

"It stopped raining ages ago!"

"Brrrrrrpt……"

"Oh please don’t tell me you gave Bridget a hard time about the rain." I stepped out of the building, starting to navigate towards food - then home. All those buildings being on roughly the same side of campus was a big help.

"BRPT! Brrpt brrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrPT!"

"You really like her?"

"BRPT!"

"Lots of fun?"

"Brrrpt!!!"

"Learned lots?"

"Brrrrpt."

"Like what?"

Auri regaled me with all sorts of interesting things she’d learned, and slowly cut off mid-sentence.

"Brrr…. rrrrrrr….. rpt"

Heh. She’d fallen asleep.

I got in line for food, mentally noting that I was going to be late for work as a result. However, it wasn’t just my nutrition at risk here, but Auri’s as well, and Auri missing a meal because of my suboptimal planning was unacceptable.

Enough food to make up for missing meals, snacks for tomorrow, and a ‘liberated’ jug filled with fruit juice later, I was tucking Auri into a little nest she’d made in my room. I only had time to grab a few quick bites myself, all too aware that I was already pushing it.

I left the door open a crack - Auri hated being locked in a room, and I dreaded to find out what would happen if she ever was locked in - and sprinted over to the library, which was not on the same side of campus as my dorm.

Hopefully I wouldn’t be too late.

The library. A peaceful, calm place - and us helpers were empowered to keep it that way. [Shush] was a favorite, a high-level [Librarian’s] powerful skill that any one of us in the library could activate to create a targeted, weak bubble of silence around the offender.

I brought my notes from the day with me, and after the initial rush of people wanting to get some early studying - not too many people, just the ones who were on top of things - and I was left mostly to my own devices.

Which meant I could look ready and attentive at the front desk, while reading my class notes.

It was a little surreal.

Here I was, Sentinel Dawn of the Remus Empire, formerly the most powerful human healer in existence… working at a library desk, reading over my notes. The levels came quickly and easily.

[*ding!* [Study] Leveled up! 1->11]

In a cruel twist, successfully studying caused notifications that distracted me from studying.

After going over everything thrice - and mentally wondering if I should take a [Drawing] skill to improve my diagrams, they sucked - I closed my notes.

I still had my new skill, [Runic Scribing]. I hadn’t gotten a chance to test it yet, and we hadn’t gotten any runes in class. Just an overview.

"Hey Martin, I’m going to prowl around if you don’t mind." I told my demon boss.

He shrugged.

"It’s quiet, suit yourself. Don’t be afraid to break up couples getting it on, it happens far too often."

I could instantly understand how and why that would happen, but I kept my mouth shut.

I briskly walked over to the wizardry reference section that had gotten pointed out to me before, the overflowing stack. While I wasn’t looking for something in the pile of papers, the area did have a number of reference books.

Figuring the shorter, the better, I found a reference book on Jiwa, figuring ‘one rune that does it all’ would be easier to sort out and figure than ‘needs a lot of runes, and to think about them.’

Keeping it simple.

I hauled the book back to the desk, Martin giving an amused snort at how quickly I’d come back with a book, but otherwise didn’t say anything. Clearly an accepted practice.

I flipped the book open to the first page. On the left side was a detailed description of the result of the rune, while on the right was the rune itself, in all its glory.

Yesh: Rune of protection. Snaps a spherical Brilliance barrier around the focal point of the rune. Lasts approximately ten minutes, or until mana runs out, whichever occurs first. Air-permeable. Works best against light projectiles, liquids, and the like.

That sounded a bit too large and flashy for an initial practice rune. I didn’t want to stop anyone from getting to the desk, and Martin might be annoyed that I was making glowing bubbles in the middle of the library.

Actually, I should be doing this at the Firing Range. Well, trying to use it. Finding the right rune, and practicing drawing it should be fine here.

Sirmon. Cuskun. Zulilbind. Riwrord. Lakae. I flipped through the pages, rune after rune, looking for a suitably harmless rune, that also looked easy enough to make.

Eventually I settled on Mes, a basic rune of light. The diagram was simple enough, and I opened my notebook to a fresh page. Line by line, stroke by stroke, I copied the figure over, remembering how Lothar had mentioned meta-skills to help with drawing runes.

I didn’t have any of those, and I doubted I’d take one even if I had the slot.

I finished the rune with only a few interruptions, and critically looked at my efforts, versus the original.

Wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t close.

I sighed, flipping the page over, and starting again.

[*ding!* [Repetition is the Mother of Learning] Leveled up! 1 -> 2]

The second time was easier. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the skill, or because I was getting better at it, but there was nothing like practice and repetition to improve.

I staggered back to my room, exhausted and fried after a long, long day.

[*brrring!* Study time! Let’s review everything!]

I mentally cursed past-me, and her penchant for making alarms for everything.

[*brrring!* I know you’re probably cursing me right now, but look. You know we need to do this, and doing it now is better than doing it later. You know I’m right.]

I knew myself too well.

I plopped down into my chair, hit myself with a hefty dose of [Sunrise], and was pleasantly surprised.

[*ding!* [Celestial Affinity] Leveled up! 484 -> 485]

[*ding!* [Sunrise] Leveled up! 411 -> 412]

Must’ve finally passed a stacked experience threshold.

I quickly debated what to spend my time working on, and figured one last quick skim of everything I’d done so far today was the proper way of doing things. Whatever habits I set today, I’d mimic the rest of my time at the School, and I might as well get things done right.

I went over my notes, levels dinging in my ear. The sound was like music, the blessed trumpets letting me know I was doing the right thing, that I was on the right track, and I was successfully improving myself in several areas. After stagnating for so long, it was great to be making progress once again.

The only thing I skipped was practicing transforming my fingers around. I wasn’t quite ready to drop my [Persistent Casting].

I was ready to do wizardry though.

I was skipping ahead a bit. We’d gotten a lecture on how wizardry worked in the larger sense, but not getting into the fine details.

I tore out a piece of paper from my notebook, and packed everything away neatly for tomorrow. I wanted to rush and just do it, but [Organization] was prodding me along to properly plan and prepare for the future. To keep things neat, tidy, and organized.

[*ding!* [Organization] Leveled up! 11 -> 12]

I wasn’t entirely sure how my skill worked, but that’s what experimenting and practice was for. I focused on [Runic Scribing], putting my quill to the parchment, and starting to trace out the rune one more time.

Instead of black ink, glowing yellow lines came from my quill, etching themselves into the paper. Loop after swirl, line after squiggle, curls and slashes, stroke by stroke the rune came together on my paper. My earlier practice paid off, dozens of rejects and failed attempts bringing me to the point where I could neatly trace out a single, well-practiced rune.

My dexterity was pulling its weight as well.

I kept an eye on my mana, and rarely I’d see it flicker and lose a point before regenerating it again. It cost mana to scribe, but at such a low rate that it wasn’t worth mentioning.

The last stroke was completed, and I looked over my masterpiece, glowing on the page.

[*ding!* [Runic Scribing] Leveled up! 1->2]

My only surprise was I got one level, not more. But wait, there was more!

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Butterfly Mystic] has leveled up to level 357->358! +8 Strength, +8 Dexterity, +70 Speed, +70 Vitality, +70 Mana, +70 Mana Regen, +70 Magic power, +70 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Free Stat for being Human per level! +1 Strength, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]

YES! At long last! [Butterfly Mystic] leveled up! Flitting around to the School, taking as many classes as I could, learning and practicing new magics was the KEY! The secret to success, the experience for the levels! I wondered how many levels in [Butterfly Mystic] I could get if I was getting one on my first day. I couldn’t hope to get too many, but learning and experimenting with dozens of different types of magics was exactly what the class wanted to do! All my capped skills also leveled up, which was nice.

I had to wonder if [Student] was siphoning off a chunk of the experience, and my knowledge told me, yes, it was. Still, I had high hopes for [Butterfly Mystic] going forward.

Also, wait.

[Butterfly Mystic] leveled?

That had to mean Auri had enough experience to be over level 358. Interesting that the System "counted" stored experience like that. What if she took a class that was wildly inappropriate, and failed to level that much? Would I just stop leveling? I couldn’t imagine my experience getting reverted.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to struggle through the feelings of just how unfair Auri’s leveling speed was. How hard I’d worked to get just a fraction of the way there. She was Auri. She was my little friend. One day I’d be the anchor on her absurd leveling. She’d gotten full experience from being in the fae realm, and [Butterfly Mystic] had probably loved traveling through the fae, all of the experience funneled to Auri once again.

I proudly looked at my rune.

Trying to ignore [Something Doesn’t Look Right] nagging me.

I sighed, crumpled up the paper, and incinerated it with a flash of Radiance. Improperly drawn runes could go bad, and I didn’t want to find out how this rune could go bad. In theory, it couldn’t go wrong without mana being applied, but I wasn’t about to trust that.

"Brrrpt?" A sleepy Auri woke up, asking what I was doing.

"Just doing some practice. Wanna burn my mistakes?"

"BRPT!"

[*brrrring!* Study time’s over! Time to play with Auri!]

Well, having Auri burn my mistakes as she watched was playing with her, in a way. She seemed happy and curious, so…

Five more tries, and I finally got a working rune.

Just in time for past-me to ruin my day.

[*brrrring!* Time to sleep! We’ll regret it in the morning if we don’t close our eyes now.]

Regret, smergret, I wanted to see if my wizardry worked.

I wasn’t quite sure how to activate the rune, but I’d gotten a few lessons earlier today. First things first though, I put my finger on it, trying to ‘connect’ to it like I’d connected with my old armor’s inscriptions, and feed it mana.

No luck.

I took out my wand, looking over it carefully. I didn’t see gem sockets on it, which made me think it was the type of wand that worked with wizardry.

I spent a moment thinking about it, before holding it in my left hand. My right was usually where I held a sword or spear, and I was sure I’d need to fight again. Might as well get used to casting with my left hand.

I focused, this time feeling things ‘click’, and I sent a small trickle of mana through my wand, into my rune. It started glowing brightly, then morphing and changing shape as the magic took hold. The sheet of paper I’d written it on burned up.

I had a quick moment to realize this was my chance to impress Auri. I went with a classic.

"Let there be light." I declared, as the rune finished turning into a bright sphere of blindingly white light.

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 583,290/583,290]

[Mana Regen: 275,561 (+522,957)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 349]

[Strength: 982]

[Dexterity: 2,078]

[Vitality: 14,550]

[Speed: 14,582]

[Mana: 58,329]

[Mana Regeneration: 58,431 (+52,296)]

[Magic Power: 23,089 (+592,233)]

[Magic Control: 23,116 (+592,925)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 485]

[Cosmic Presence: 315]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 451]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 471]

[Sunrise: 412]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 358]]

[Radiance Affinity: 358]

[Radiance Resistance: 358]

[Radiance Conjuration: 358]

[Runic Scribing: 4]

[Nectar: 358]

[Solar Corona: 358]

[Scintillating Ascent: 337]

[Kaleidoscope: 358]

[Class 3: [Student of the Ages - Wood: Lv 32]]

[Wood Affinity: 15]

[Learning Languages: 32]

[Dabble: 12]

[Something Doesn't Look Right: 21]

[Timekeeping: 16]

[Organization: 12]

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning: 14]

[Study: 11]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 300]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[: ]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 315]

[Passionate Learning: 383]

Chapter 29
The Second Day of Class, and the rest

[*brrrrring!* Wake up! Time for class!]

[*brrrrring!* No for real.]

[*brrrrring!* Future me, I swear if you’re not up by now… we made these alarms for a reason!]

I groaned and rolled out on the last alarm, smacking myself with [Sunrise]. Another day, another set of classes. To practice!

"Abjuration is the fine art of protection. Any fool can grab a shield. Any idiot can throw up a barrier. Abjuration is so much more than that. Timings. Attack types. Reflections. Barrier load. There are thousands of aspects to protection, and while attacks might not be used that often, there is always demand for shields. Hence, our field of study."

"Herbalism! The soft breeze carrying the scents of spring, the pure magic that can be unlocked with the right twig and crushed leaf. Let us discuss…

"Magical Botany is a tricky subject, requiring great attention to detail. Take the famous golden apple. Turns out, there are six! Each one only has a fraction of the powers credited to all of them, and…"

"Talismans have the benefit of being single-use items. That is to say, they can skip the entire set of runes required to make an array reusable. There are no considerations on material stress. They take a fraction of the time to write. We will begin with…"

"Golems are the peak of the magical world. Need workers? Need security? Anything you can get another person to do, you can just build your own golem instead!"

"Rituals get a bad rap. We will not be dragging virgins to an altar and slicing them open. No, rituals are a term for skills that require doing a bit more than simply activating them, that require additional reagents, and naturally take longer to cast. Can’t just think of using the skill! The benefits are skills that are stronger than they should be, and can have more power than simply your magic power stat. A common example would be…"

"Companions! This is the class for people who are already life-bonded with someone else. If you’re not bonded with someone, there’s a different class for that."

"Brrrpt." Auri laughed as a half-dozen people sheepishly got up and left.

"Right, now that’s done with, my name’s Ashala…"

"An array is a subtype of enchantment that multiple people can work on at once. Now, the exact difference between an enchantment and an array is hard to pinpoint. There isn’t a magical line where one is suddenly the other, it’s simply a way of denoting the largest, most complex enchantments."

"I can teach you how to bottle fortune, harness luck, brew death and even stopper glory - if you have the patience and wit to follow. Potions. We begin."

"Enchantments! This is a massive field, with hundreds of subspecialities. In this course, we’re going to get an overview of everything enchantments can do. Now, a basic wizard can make most enchantments, but proper [Enchanters] have additional skills to make their lives easier. One example would be…."

"There are tens of thousands of creatures all over the world, and Zoology is the study of them all! The major empires that we divide species into are Elvenoid, Magical, Intelligent Beast, Monster, Minimus, and Plant. Most of these names are self-explanatory. Minimus refers to all creatures too small for the System to grant classes. Within the Elvenoid grouping we have mortal and Immortal subcategories, and from there…"

"This is the medicine practical course. For those of you who are new, welcome! Here’s how things work: Every patient in this building is stable, that is to say, they are not at risk of dying before we get to them. As a group, we will round on each patient, and every one of you will examine them, determine what ails them, and what image you would form to properly heal them. We will then share that knowledge and information amongst ourselves, to better learn and improve. Now. Here is our first patient. Let us silently examine her together."

I looked at the woman lying down on the bed. The fact that she looked slightly pudgy with full armor on suggested that she was a dullahan, and the blackened blast marks radiating from the stump of her left hand told a story of an experiment gone wrong.

It had been some time since I last needed to properly form an image, and I reveled in the chance and the novelty to think about medicine properly again. Gods, why had I ever stopped? This was a blast!

I ignored the little voice telling me I’d stopped because pre-working out my problems with [Persistent Casting] was what kept me alive more than once, and I rarely had the luxury of casually and slowly examining a single patient. Even when I did, I’d been so busy that slapping them with a heal and moving on had been the best use of my time.

Dedicated time to just heal?

Sign me up every quarter!

I had too many things I liked, and not enough hours in the day. Grrrrrrrr. Why couldn’t I get some fancy time-warping powers from the fae?

The first problem was that she was a dullahan, and not a human. My one comparative anatomy course had gone over the skull differences between all the different elvenoids, so I could at least manage to properly adapt that part of my knowledge.

The rest? I’d have to use human anatomy, and eat the efficiency penalty twice over. Once on the poor image, and a second time on my healing being primarily human-focused, with elvenoids being secondary to my skillset.

Reconstructing the hand was almost the easy part. The trick was the dozens of tiny little bones in the wrist that I wasn’t sure of the status of. How many were intact? How many had gotten blown off? Which ones were cracked and broken, and needed an image of piecing them back together, instead of a restoring image?

Were there any shattered bones? Bone fragments lodged in random places that needed to be removed? The blast seemed to have been centered on her hand, which likely drove fragments into her arm.

Ouch.

Each question, each detail that I could answer, would improve my image and my efficiency.

Then there was the alien part of the problem, her armor. What was it made out of? The context clues I’d gathered implied that dullahans had different types of metal armors, and the metal mattered. I was fairly certain that my healing would extend towards fixing her… skin? up, but I just didn’t know.

Then there was how to fix it. Humans, as a rule, didn’t have skin after it was exposed to a large explosion. Our patient did, with blackened, charred parts to show for it.

I had to wonder what happened to her organs and bones. Was the armor protective, or did it pass the concussive shock through her system? Was there internal bleeding?

Well, I could answer that one. There wasn’t any internal bleeding now. She was stable, protected in the hospital environment and whatever skills the people running the place had, on top of being within my own personal rapid-heal aura. Additionally, I couldn’t believe that anyone would risk someone bleeding out just for some students to get a lesson. While a concussive blast like the one she went through might cause internal bleeding, I knew she didn’t have any now. One more piece of the puzzle completed!

Damaged, bruised, or lacerated organs were a risk though, and any image I had would need to take that into account.

"Elaine in the purple robe, would you like to start us off?"

I started and did a double-take, before remembering my blasted manuscripts were my own undoing on the name thing. I gave a resigned sigh, but happily started narrating my thoughts on the matter.

"The obvious injury is to the patient’s hand, likely due to an explosive going off that the patient was holding onto. From there, the most serious injuries are to her hand, with numerous secondary to…"

The nice thing about sharing like this?

I got to find out how dullahan armor worked, and the proper image needed to fix it.

Teamwork away!

"Basic geography. We know the world is a sphere, a spinning marble on the vast tapestry of space. There are two continents, one northern, one southern. We live on the southern continent - well, when we’re not on the island, at least - as you can see here on this map. The world is split into a number of nations…"

"Today we will be discussing sympathy! Occasionally it’s called voodoo, but sympathy is the proper name for the field."

I pushed the pair of sticks on my desk off to the side, hoping for a practical lesson later, but needing the writing room now.

"To start, I want to discuss the three major types of magic, to better understand where sympathy lands. There is sorcery, sympathy, and wizardry."

I took dutiful notes.

"Speed. Flexibility. Power. Pick any two, and you get one of the major magical disciplines." The professor twirled his hand, words appearing behind him, three overlapping circles wrapping up two of the three words.

"Speed. Power. That is sorcery, the System-granted skills that you’re able to immediately fire off with a thought." He explained.

"Flexibility. Power. That is wizardry. Drawing mandalas and preparing spells is slow work, and I’m not even going to touch the education requirements. Needless to say, nothing in wizardry happens particularly quickly, or at least without significant preparation time."

I nodded. How many hours had I spent just to cast a single rune? Jiwa was easy mode to boot.

"Lastly is sympathy. Flexibility. Speed. This branch of magic is one of the weakest, but it makes up for it by being whatever you need, whenever you need it. Imagination is critical, as well as having a ready source of fuel."

He hesitated a moment, and plowed on.

"Some of the professors hem and haw at what’s suitable to teach students. Bah! You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have gumption and grit! In an emergency, your own body heat and fat are an easy, abundant source of fuel. You can easily kill yourself, but it beats getting killed."

My mind raced at all the possibilities.

Fire was an easy, obvious answer. A Fire mage would have near endless energy to use as fuel.

"With sympathy, as you impact one object, a second object is also impacted. Like so."

The professor picked up one of the two sticks in front of him, and threw one up in the air, where it hovered in place. He took the second stick, and showed the entire class the stick in his hand.

He then broke the stick with his hands, and high up in the air, the second stick broke in the exact same spot.

I narrowed my eyes to get a better view.

It had broken in the exact same way.

"Now, let us talk about the basic sympathy construct, and the needed ingredients. Link. Image. Action." The professor drew the three words in front of him, and I made sure I had plenty of space on my paper to take notes on each one.

"Like begets like! The worse the link, the greater the distance involved, and the worse the energy transfer will be." He explained. "A stick broken in half is nearly perfect with each other, while a dustball and a sword share nearly nothing in common. Attempting sympathy with the second will result in a headache at best."

My quill continued to take notes.

"Then you have to imagine what you’re doing to both objects. Also, the better you imagine how the two objects are alike, the better your efficiency."

He waited a moment for quills to stop scratching on paper.

"Lastly, you have to act on the pieces in question."

A student’s hand shot up.

"From what you’re saying, it’ll always be easier to just impact the object you want to affect directly, instead of going the sympathetic route?"

I almost did a double-take at the question, noting the student. He was sharp. I hadn’t picked up on that!

The professor nodded.

"Exactly! Which naturally begs the question, why study sympathy at all?"

He grinned and tapped the side of his head.

"You’ll have to use your imagination to solve that one! If you can’t figure out a reason to use it, then you lack the proper imagination to be good at it."

At the end of the lecture, I was staring at the stick in my hand, trying to form the proper image.

The two sticks were one. The same thing. What I did to one wouldn’t happen to the other, no. I was simply impacting both at the same time.

I was strong enough to snap the stick easily. I took it slowly though, steadily ramping up the amount of strength I was using to get a good feel for how hard sympathy was.

And ramping up.

I gritted my teeth and really leaned into it, applying the full force of my strength to the task. The sticks finally snapped, and I sagged with relief.

I only gave myself a brief moment to pause, before narrowing my eyes at the deceptively hard-to-snap stick. Experimentally, without using [Dabble], I tried to snap the half of the stick again.

It barely took a thought.

I was no expert, but that must’ve been what, 30, 40 times as easy to break the stick without sympathy?

I suspected my abysmally weak [Dabble] skill stretching itself into yet another school was responsible, but I was unimpressed.

The school of magic had potential, but I was getting stretched thin.

"Astronomy! We’re mostly a fun class, watching the other planets. Great for working on your [Celestial Affinity] skill, or getting a [Stargazer] class! Ok, a bit unusually, what we can do is entirely dependent on the island’s schedule. I believe we’re due for a nice set of nighttime classes halfway through the quarter, but until then, this class is more on the academic side."

I wanted to collapse after another exhausting day of non-stop material. Instead, I dragged myself over to my desk.

"I need to study…" I had a pounding headache that no amount of healing was fixing. Just sheer brain overload.

"Brrrpt? BRPT!"

"Wait, yeah. I gotta cut down on classes!" I perked up a bit at that. "And if I cut a class, it means I don’t need to study for it."

"Brrrrpt." Auri was smug with her contribution.

I looked at my schedule, and at the two dozen classes on it.

"Ok my little genius, how do I do this?" Thinking hurt, and Auri was smart and capable. I trusted that her advice would get me thinking in a good direction, if nothing else.

"Brrrrrrrpt! BRPT."

"A ranked list! Perfect! And yes, the companion class is TOTALLY staying." It was one class that both Auri and I had ‘together’, some time to play and learn from professor Ashala.

Wizardry quickly made the cut, along with my Medicine class. Enchanting went on the list, while I ditched Talismans and Rituals. Arrays ended up in the middle of the list, but it shared the same time slot with golems, also in the middle. That would be tricky.

Sympathy ended up near the bottom of the middle section. I was enjoying it, but it wasn’t lighting up my life. Between wizardry and sorcery, I had everything covered, I didn’t need a third school of magic.

Biomancy easily made the cut, divination being terrible. I decided to group herbalism, potions, and magical botany together, the three courses being synergistic, but then I’d be eating into Enchanting.

Astronomy died a quiet death. I was always able to see the night sky on my own, and the Observatory was open often enough. I could self-study it another quarter.

In the end, my major conflict was between the ‘potioneering’ branch of study, and the ‘enchanting’ branch of study. I could pick one or the other, and by memory, both were long tracks, filled with optional courses, side-studies, and little tricks and quirks.

Did I want to focus on making potions, or learn how to properly enchant a sword?

A review of my notes, and my prior desires, made the answer blindingly clear.

My [Runic Scribing] skill was basic, as simple as they got. Wizardry, and the offshoot fields, enchanting, talismans, arrays, and the like, were all about that simple skill. Dedicated wizardry classes or enchanting classes had the skill as their premier skill, and the remaining skill slots were support skills.

Like when I’d seen the professor generate a huge chunk of wizardry in the middle of his demonstration - it was a support skill to the main skill.

It was similar to how [Radiance Conjuration] was my main sorcery skill, with [Nectar] and [Solar Corona] being support skills, or how Artemis had [Earth Manipulation] as her primary skill. I didn’t need support skills, but they made life a heck of a lot easier.

I could get away with just [Runic Scribing], and not have a single shortcut. I could enchant swords, needing to manually engrave every rune. I could cast spells, having no skills to help me remember runes, or to smooth or speed up my writing. It would be hard.

But I could do it.

Potions, on the other hand, would require a full, dedicated class to them. I’d need to evolve [Student of the Ages] into an [Alchemist] variant, and I had to admit, there was some minor synergy between my classes and [Alchemist]. Notably, I was entirely immune to fumes, accidental poisonings and the like, while my Radiance magic and control would let me perfectly heat cauldrons up.

It would be a ton of work and expenses, and I was still hoping to get a hobby class for my third class once I’d figured it out.

Cultivation fit, although I still needed to go do some research on what the catch was, and why everyone wasn’t a cultivator. Problem was time. I had my hands full already just keeping up with everything, and researching higher priority items.

The class itself could tell me what the catch was, and if there wasn’t?

Well, I didn’t have a good cultivation starting class, however, I knew I could direct a class I’d taken in that direction, and side-step into it. Like, if I somehow hit my head and took [Paragon of Patience], at level 32, assuming I did the right things while leveling up the class, I could get a class like [Cultivating Patience], and work from there.

Magical Botany made the cut purely because of [Snapdragon]. It was on my shortlist of classes to take, and I wanted to know more about plants before making a decision.

With that worked out, the rest of my classes fell into place, Sympathy squeezing into an open slot, and I had a schedule.

Companion class

Comparative Anatomy

Practical Medicine

Introduction to Wizardry

Introduction to Biomancy

Introduction to Enchanting

Introduction to Arrays

Magical Botany

Introduction to Abjuration

Cultivation

Zoology

Basic geography

Sympathy

12 classes. Not the worst, and I even got a couple of two-hour windows opened up throughout the week! That should dramatically help depressurize things, and give me a few chances to eat food at normal times, and get some studying in so it wasn’t all last second cramming at the end of the day, or sneaking in some time when the library was quiet.

"Does this look good to you Auri?" I asked my little pyro.

She tilted her head at the list.

"Brrrpt?"

"I want to improve my shield down the line, and it links back to wizardry."

"Brpt."

"I think it’s fine."

"BRPT!"

"Alright, alright, I’ll remove sympathy."

"Brrrpt."

Happy that she’d ‘helped’ me along, Auri fluffed up in her little ‘nest’ she’d made on my desk. One of my top priorities, even before a second set of clothes, was to get her a better nest.

Gods, Auri was the best thing that ever happened to me. My little light in the darkness.

My only friend here.

I stripped, having no pajamas to change into, flopping onto the hard mattress with the thin sheets.

Gods.

I was exactly where I wanted to be, having the time of my life.

Keeping busy.

Keeping myself distracted.

I wasn’t quite tired enough to simply pass out, instead my treacherous brain reminding me of my old, soft bed.

The bed I’d grown up with, shared with my parents in our small home.

The sheets I’d wrapped myself up with in the Argo, the Ranger’s wagon. I’d never asked the story of the Ranger who’d briefly been on their team and died, whose equipment I’d used. It was too morbid, I didn’t want to know.

Now everyone was dead. Everyone except a few people, of which only Auri was here.

I turned over, facing the wall as I wept, my brain once again betraying me in numerous ways.

Focus on Auri.

Focus on my light.

Chapter 30
Interlude - Auri
Burn the tears, burn the world

Elaine woke up thrashing, fighting with her sheets like they wanted to strangle her. She bolted upright with a wild look in her eyes, panting and sweating.

I cracked an eye open, pretending to ‘wake up’. Sneaky Auri! Stealthy Auri!

Quiet Auri. Elaine needs her sleep! All the sleep! She’s always super tired, and see, SEE! Big yawn. Huge ashy spots under her eyes.

Not enough sleep, oh no. My big friend needs more sleep! Maybe that’ll make her happy.

"Morning…" I made sure my chirp was tired, all sleepy like.

I stretched out my wings as Elaine stumbled out of bed, then froze as she started to put on her robes.

"No! Wrong!" I flew up at her. "Burning time first!" If I didn’t remind her, she’d forget!

Burning time was fun. Trying to burn Elaine was funny! She didn’t burn, no matter what I did, and it helped my skills!

She blinked at me, like one of those poor owls.

They didn’t do well with fire, but they were SUPER quiet.

"You sure? There’s just so much to do…"

I made a few little flames hover around me. Reds! Yellows! Whites! Pinks! Purples! Even three blues!

I’d totally destinkify Elaine here, and she knew it. I’d done it before!

She muttered and shook her head. I narrowed my eyes at her hair.

I needed to figure out how to use a "comb". I could carry it in my claws, but I couldn’t get it moving through Elaine’s hair. It kept getting tangled!

No fair!

And I couldn’t even burn the hair for getting in my way!

"Alright, alright, let’s go."

Elaine’s shoulders slumped - weary? Subtle emotions were haaaaaaaard - but she walked across the hall anyways, over to the burning room.

[Immolate]! WHOOOOSH! Flames everywhere, just the way the world should be.

Flames drying Elaine’s tears, the ones she thought I couldn’t see. She was nice, trying to make me feel happy like that.

Ha! Water was evil! I could spot its traces from… very far away! Then burn it away!

Fire 1!

Water 0!

Bridget was very nice. Not as nice as Elaine, but nice! She helped me find some classes! Yes!

One important class told me that I should have offensive skills! Then I can burn TWICE AS MUCH.

Good class.

My juice ran out, and Elaine’s morning burning was over. Elaine went back to her room to get dressed, and I flew through the hallways! Zoom! Zip! Back and forth! Under Varuna’s legs! Over Iona’s friend’s head! Staying far away from Reinhard!

Reinhard was scary. How did the others not see it??

Oh wait.

Only I had [See Magic], because I was the only one smart enough to take the skill!

I had to [See Magic] to [Burn Magic]. It only made sense! Yes!

Hmmm.

I was the smartest, yes.

I needed to make Elaine happy, yes. She worked so hard for me!

It was time for me to solve Elaine being happy, once and for all! It hadn’t worked yesterday, but yesterday-Auri wasn’t a very smart bird. Today-Auri was much smarter! A genius!

Elaine reading and learning lots helped. Bits of knowledge slowly drifted into my mind.

Elaine worked SO HARD! It was impressive, worthy of ME!

Ok, make Elaine happy.

Hmmm.

HMMMMMMMMMM.

Somehow, nothing I’d done so far worked. Who here was happy?

Reinhard - too scary.

Fenrir - YES! But I had already checked ALL THE THINGS he did, and none of them worked on Elaine!

Skye - always looked a tiny bit sad.

Iona - Yes, she was happy.

Iona’s friend, now leaving - Yes, also happy.

Varuna - SUPER HAPPY.

"Auri! Let’s go!"

"Ok!" I flew over to Elaine, in her poofy purple hat! Nice hat!

"My hat?" I asked her expectantly. Hats were fun! Made for people with fingers, which was all sorts of silly. People with wings deserved hats as well!

"Here! Let’s not lose this one." No! Elaine! Why did you remind me! That day was terrible, I lost my hat!!!

I tilted my beak up. Elaine had clever fingers! Snip! Snap! I wanted fingers!

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Brrretty] has gone from 103 to 104!]

"Yay! Levels!"

"Oh yay! High five!" Elaine put her hand up. I flew over, and BAM! Smacked it with my wing!

"High five!"

I landed on Elaine’s shoulder, and we left for the day!

‘Day.’ This place was so silly! It didn’t know when the greatest flame went into the sky, and when it left! Like, duh, just look outside!

Well… that would be hard today, yes. We were flying through a storm! A big, GINORMOUS storm! This place had shields, and I could watch the storm without getting wet! Brilliant! Clever! They should do it for all storms, and not let the nasty rain come in.

Whyyyyyy they ever let that happen, I’ll never know. One day I’ll find out who’s in charge of this place! Yes! And I’ll tell them it’s bad! It should be only dry!

Oh.

Hmmm.

But wait.

Some people liked rain… and there were water creatures…

Maybe… maybe I should be nice and let them have some fun…?

Hmmmm.

HMMMMM.

NOPE!

Only fire and flames! Unless Elaine wanted something else!

The storm was SO COOL though. Black roiling clouds! Lightning! Thunder! Gigantic four-winged shapes in the middle!

"Thunderbirds." Elaine whispered in awe. "I always wanted to see one."

Big birds! LIGHTNING birds!

They were OK.

Would having lightning sparks fly off me make me look prettier?

Hmmmm.

HMMMMM.

YES!

Lightning would make me look prettier! Yes, good, GOOD!

Ok! Back to thinking on ‘how to make Elaine happy again.’

Varuna was happy. What did Varuna do?

She… ate a lot.

Could that make Elaine happy? Was she eating enough?

No, wait, silly bird! This was yesterday-Auri level thinking! I had already done food when checking with Fenrir! He ate food and flew lots! Elaine ate food and flew lots! I needed today-Auri level thinking!

Varuna… also ran a lot? But Elaine also ran lots and lots every day. She ran to class, she ran between classes, she also spent almost an hour running EVERY DAY! There was a whole class for it! First thing in the fake-morning, every day!

This required ADVANCED thinking! I needed a thinking cap!

Oh wait!

We were here!

Bridget! YAY!

"Good morning Auri! How are we feeling today?"

"Good! Elaine’s still sad though."

"Oh no! Here, have an apple." The tree-woman grew a WHOLE APPLE just for ME!

Not quite a mango, but still sweet and tasty! Yum!

"We’ve got a ton of fun activities for everyone today! Excited?"

"Yes! Can we go to the fire range today?"

"The firing range?"

BAH. Fire range! Not firing range!

"Yes!"

"Sure! But we have some other activities to do as well, ok?" Bridget was tons of fun! Yay activities!

"Classes and skills are important. It is critical that you carefully select yours such that you end up being a productive member of society. Now, your parents will be able to guide you more, but I also know some little ears and minds get their own ideas, that you think you know better. Maybe you do. Just don’t take a class like [Wastrel], [Arrogant Young Master], or [Layabout]."

I opened and closed my beak a few times.

A… productive member of society?

Elaine had never mentioned something like that!

But… I knew what that was, because of our shared skill! Yes! The companion skill! She was a SUPER DUPER productive member of society!

But… what did I do? How did I contribute?

I didn’t want to be a [Layabout]! That sounded like a wet class!

I was still thinking about it when I went to the fire range.

The fire range was the best! A place that gave me endless things to burn AND GAVE ME UNLIMITED JUICE TO DO SO!

I needed to work on my skills! Yes! They had to be the BIGGEST NUMBER before I classed up! That would give me the best class possible, which would let me burn even brighter!

I flew over to my special spot, the lightning bolts flashing through the clouds. Boom! Crash! Pretty lights! Only one color though…

My special spot was a pillar of Arcanite! The rock was filled with kindling! So much kindling!

I looked out at the field. Lots of people here! Whizzing blades! Lava whips! Magic missiles! Crackling lightning, beams of Radiance, clouds of dust and more! So much magic!

And things to shoot at! Rocks! Flying birds made out of Brilliance! Not-Creatures that looked real, and burned! Sometimes there was Sand blowing through the area, making it hard to shoot! Or it was Dark! Sometimes things stood still, sometimes they were zippy and zoopy!

Sometimes there were "don’t shoot these" targets, little flat kids with crying faces. Bah! If they didn’t want to get shot, why were they in the shooting area??

Sometimes there were shields protecting things! Had to burn through the shields. It was easy for me, because I was THAT GOOD.

This place was fun! Clever people making a good playground for me!

Today had lots and LOTS of wind going through the arena! Everything was tumbling through the air, going off-track! I was smart though. I watched everyone else fail, because they were not as good as me, and I learned! Yes! I would hit my target! There was one not-sparrow that was TOTALLY EVIL! Yes! We shoot the not-sparrow!

[Burning Orbs]! Three beautiful orbs of resplendent fire popped up around me! Hurray!

[Domain of Fire] made all fire stronger, and everything else weaker around me. Because that was the natural order of things. WHY this wasn’t already a worldwide thing, I’d find out one day. When Elaine read about it, I learned it.

But they were my normal flames! My normal flames were the BEST, but I also liked having ALL THE FIRE! Elaine was smart, bringing me to the museum! I got to see lots and lots and lots of different types of fires, and now I could use [Flame Selection]!

One white, sticky, [Burning Orb]. Naturally sticky!

One green [Burning Orb] with [Burn Magic] attached! Yay clever me!

One black orb with spreading flames!

Three! Three was my limit! For now. One day it would be more.

Sometimes the people here had a whole THING of what to do first. An order to shooting!

I only remembered the IMPORTANT part, the end!

FIRE!!!!

Pew pew PEW pew PEW! Each orb spat out little bullets of their flames! The little crying kid cutout went WHOOSH! The trees exploded in black flames! The people running the place were running over as the green flames started to eat the fancy magic underlying the fire range!

If it wasn’t supposed to be on fire, why did they call it the fire range?

Humph.

My flames were huge! The best! And all the tasty kindling I was on meant I could keep going and going and GOING! Burn, burn, BURN! Burn until my little heart was satisfied!

Or until Bridget came back, and we got lunch. Bah. Time limits!

One day I’d learn how to [Ignite Time]. Then we’d see who the boss was!

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Burning Orbs] has gone from 79 to 80!]

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Burn Magic] has gone from 120 to 121!]

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [See Magic] has gone from 21 to 22!]

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Domain of Fire] has gone from 125 to 126!]

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Flame Selection] has gone from 41 to 42!]

Yay!

My little area of the fire range was now in the right and proper way things should be.

Ok! New skill practice time! Elaine had this skill, and she was taking a WHOLE CLASS for it! I wanted to be like her! Because she was the best! Her learning helped me get the skill!

It was time for my grand new skill to make an entrance!

"[Abjuration!]" I grandly announced to anyone who could understand me.

A flaming shield popped around me! Hurray!

I puffed up, pleased as an ember in dry twigs, and waited for the notifications. Some of the range people were trying to talk with me, but I ignored them. Brrpt! BRRRPT! They’ll never know I’m saying brrrpt and nodding and completely ignoring them! Silly people who can’t understand me! All the important people can. Elaine! Iona! Fenrir! Bridget!

Well, Plato didn’t… but he hurt too much to think about…

SHIELD! MAGIC! Focus on that! Wait for the levels to come rolling in, like the sun rolling across the sky!

And waited…

And waited…

THIS SKILL WAS SO STUPID! AHHHHHH! Why did Elaine like it so much!? It just made a sphere of fire around me, that was it! What was the point??

I turned off the skill, and made a tiny little ‘hand’ of solid Inferno flames. Carefully manipulating it, I twisted the clasp of my hat off, then threw it to the ground! I jumped on it a few times for good measure.

Silly! Stupid! Skill! Who needed a shield of flames!?

[*Rejoice!* Auri the great, the grand, the glamorous, I come to you with tidings of a new Class Skill for your perusal! Oh mighty phoenix, most heavenly of birds, would you like to take the skill [Mage Hand]?]

Hmmm.

HMMMMM.

The notification needed some work! It wasn’t praising me enough! Most heavenly of birds? No! Most heavenly of all creatures! Yes! There we go! Improvements!

Also [Abjuration] was stupid, and I’d just stomped on my hat. I needed to put it back on, because hats made me look [Brrretty]!

I took the skill! Down with [Abjuration]! New skill, make me a hand!

YAAAAAY! I HAD HANDS! It looked like Elaine’s! No more would I get yelled at for burning through doors! No more would I need to melt lids to get into the juice! Nest material could be done in one trip now, not fifteen!

And!

AND!

I could put my own hat back on!

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Mage Hand] has gone from 1 to 2!]

Yes! Getting better skills was the best!

Oh!

I should make ALL my skills better!

Hmmm.

HMMMMM.

I should think about it while shooting targets!

[Burning Quills!] Let’s not burn the magic this time, it made people grumpy and disturb me. Smart Auri! Today-level thinking!

Hmm. [Burning Quills] was only so-so. It needed to be bigger! Better! What was the biggest, bestest burning thing?

Elaine knew! Yes! Sometimes there were big flaming rocks that went through the sky! I should have big flame balls like that! I was the best, yes, but my quills weren’t as big or as great as a sky-fire-rock! I should make them like that!

Wait, not one rock. That was yesterday-Auri thinking. I needed today-Auri thinking. What was better than one rock? ALL THE ROCKS! AND THE ROCKS SHOULD BE FLAMES!!

[*Rejoice!* Auri the great, the grand, the glamorous, I come to you with tidings of a new Class Skill for your perusal! Oh mighty phoenix, most heavenly of creatures, would you like to take the skill [Auri’s Meteor Storm]?]

Good, good! The System was praising me like it should! And YES! One meteor storm coming right up!

Those were screams of joy and excitement at seeing my new skill, right?

"Auri! Time for lunch!" Bridget called me over, a few of the other kids in tow with her.

Food! Yes! Tasty, tasty food! Elaine liked eating SOOOO much that I also liked eating! It was brilliant!

But BOO! Lines! I got swatted at when I tried to fly over them, because DUH, how else do you skip the lines, but even BRIDGET said it was wrong! Elaine complained about lines all the time as well, yes!

Bad lines! Burn the lines!

But that would be burning lots of people… and I could only burn bad people.

But the people were making the line… therefore they were bad?

My logic seemed sound, but everyone kept disagreeing with it. Booooo.

Food time!

Yummy!

Food was great! I liked food! Elaine liked food! Fenrir, Iona, and Varuna liked food!

Oh! Wait!

BRILLIANT TODAY-AURI IDEA!

Maybe Elaine was sad because she was eating the wrong kind of food! Varuna ate hay! Fenrir ate meat! Elaine usually ate mangos, but there weren’t a lot here! Maybe I needed to get Elaine some mangos to make her happy!

She could even have mine!

The chef today had a huge poofy hat!

"Can I get one of those?" I asked Bridget.

"One of what?" She asked me.

"The hats!" I pointed my beak right at the big poofy thing on the [Chef’s] head.

"Well, are you a [Chef]?" Bridget asked all too reasonably. She liked asking fun questions to make me think!

"No…"

"Do you want to be one?"

!!!!!!!!!!

I perked up.

A [Chef]! That was a brilliant idea!

Wait, no, even better! A today-Auri idea! An idea that let me be a productive member of society! That would make Elaine happy! That would get me a poofy hat! That would let me use fire all the time!

Yes! I was a [Once in a Million Years Genius]!

"Can a [Baker] wear one of the poofy hats?"

Bridget smiled.

"Of course! Would you like to learn how to bake?"

"YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!" I screamed my approval as loudly as I could.

After all, Stentor was in my name.

"Auri! Ready to go home? Oh my, you’ve got a cool new hat!"

"Yay! Elaine! You’re back!" I flew over to my favorite perch, grabbing my fancy new hat with my fancy new hand. Life was good!

"Are you a [Cook] now?" She asked as we started walking back.

"No! I’m going to be a [Baker]! I’m going to make you lots of tasty cookies! Because I’m the best!"

I carefully didn’t think about the piles of ash I’d left behind. Nope! That was some bad… [Turn the Cookies to Ash]... water-fish that had done that. Not me.

"Oh my! A baker! I love chocolate chip cookies. I haven’t had one since… well, forever."

AHHA! An idea! A food to make Elaine happy! Yes! New mission! Find the cho-co-late chip cookies!

I needed to figure out ‘chocolate’ first, but I had a goal! A path to success!

We made it back home, and Elaine immediately turned around and went to work. This was my chance!

First!

Fenrir!

"Hey! Hey! Fenrir! Let’s play leapfrog!"

"Humrmn?"

"I stand here! You jump over me! Then I jump over you!"

"Ok." Fenrir growled awkwardly. Little Fenrir! Baby Fenrir! He’ll get bigger and better soon!

Fenrir awkwardly galloped at me, crouching down and leaping over me in a single bound.

"Yay! You did it! My turn!"

I had wings, it wasn’t cheating. It was fun!

Over and over we went, down the hall and back. Play time!

"Hey Auri, Fenrir. Having fun?" Iona asked us as she came back.

"Fun." Fenrir agreed.

"Lots of fun!" I flew up to Iona!

Wait!

MORE IDEAS! Today-Auri was full of them! Today was a good day!

"You make your friends all happy all the time, right, right?" I asked Iona.

She blinked at me. Silly Iona! Be smarter!

"Yes?" She answered.

"Ok! Good! Make Elaine happy, please?"

Iona sat down on the sofa, and put her head in her hands. She muttered something in a language I didn’t know. Unfair!

I pecked her! Ha! That’ll teach her to use different languages around me!

"Alright. I’d love to, uh, make Elaine happy." Iona slowly explained to me.

"Good! You should do it!"

"But Elaine is very busy."

I gave Iona the stink-eye.

"I don’t think she’d appreciate me asking her if I, uh, wanted to make her happy, and it would just add more stress to her. That wouldn’t be very nice of me now, would it? I think she should see a mind-healer. That could help more."

Hmmmm.

HMMMMM.

I continued to give Iona the stink-eye. She… might be right.

Iona sighed at me, and relaxed back.

"Look. Speaking frankly. She’s a complete badass. A badass babe."

Yes, yes, good. I knew I liked Iona for a reason. Keep saying good things about Elaine! And drawing pretty pictures of me!

"I would love to share a bed with her, but if Elaine doesn’t want to and is too busy, shouldn’t we do what Elaine wants?"

Hmmmm.

"Yes… but I gotta tell Elaine all this! Let her decide! Maybe she wants to!"

Iona’s eyes opened wide.

"No, wait, get back here!"

I flew up to the ceiling, where Iona couldn’t catch me.

"Nya nya NYA nya NYA!" I taunted her.

Iona bent her knees and leapt at me.

"Noooo!" I shrieked as I dodged her grab, only for her to pivot off the ceiling and attack again!

Dodge again! Zippy bird!

"I’ll draw you a picture! Three pictures!" Iona shouted, and I hovered in the air.

Hmmm.

HMMMMMM.

Iona’s pictures were super good, showing off the most important person in the world to everyone who saw them, AND let me see myself whenever I wanted. They were good! Very nice! I wanted!

I also wanted to tell Elaine! Make her happy!

Tricky Auri time! I had a [Mage Hand] now! I could cross fingers!

[*Rejoice!* Oh most wondrous of birds, brightest flame in all the lands, you have leveled up a skill! [Mage Hand] has gone from 6 to 7!]

"Ok!"

[Name: Aoife Auri Stentor]

[Race: Phoenix]

[Age: 1]

[Mana: 101370/101370]

[Mana Regen: 94,032]

Stats

[Free Stats: 0]

[Pushing Power: 474]

[Fancy Flying: 636]

[Reactions and Reflexes/Twitchiness: 3,080]

[Zippiness: 3,200]

[Kindling: 10,137]

[New Juice: 10,113]

[Flame Size: 8,928]

[Fire Control: 8,820]

[Class 1: [The Eternal Flame - Inferno : Lv 128]]

[Inferno Authority: 128]

[Phoenix Rebirth: 3]

[Inferno Manipulation: 128]

[Inferno Conjuration: 128]

[True Flames: 128]

[Burn Magic: 121]

[Domain of Fire: 128]

[Auri’s Meteor Storm: 34]

[Class 2: [The Phoenix Everliving - Inferno: Lv 128]]

[See Magic: 22]

[Immolate: 79]

[Everything Burns: 40]

[Clinging Flames: 45]

[Burning Orbs: 80]

[Mage Hand: 7]

[Ash to Ash: 10]

[Flame Selection: 42]

General Skills

[Phoenix's Perfection: 128]

[Incandescence: 117]

[Adorable: 121]

[Precocious: 122]

[Companion Bond between Auri and Elaine: 128]

[Flying: 105]

[Preening: 113]

[Brrretty: 104]

Chapter 31
The Bird’s a Liar

There was something profoundly wrong about dragging myself back to my dorm after a long day of work, with the sun rising on the horizon.

Work had been busy, students hurrying about the library as the quarter was approaching the end. I was also busy, but had no time!

Nothing to do but practice while I walked. Bless the System and the stats it gave me, I could easily walk and draw in my notebook thanks to my dexterity. I was working on my Anaconda. I had worked out which runes I’d needed for the latest assignment, and more importantly, where to place them.

The diagram needed three new runes and two new concepts related to placing them - surprise, surprise, the same three new runes and two concepts we’d just been taught in class - and I was practicing sketching them out. One perfect iteration wasn’t good enough, no. I wanted to be able to whip out the rune practically without thinking, while sleep deprived. I strived for excellence in all things, and I had no plans on becoming a mediocre wizard, who needed six tries to draw a simple runic mandala.

Shame that [Repetition is the Mother of Learning] was capped out. I was getting tempted to class up [Student of the Ages] again just to improve my student skills, but no.

Operation: The Improved Elaine was a go. Marcelle’s biomancy classes were quite something, and they focused on what she called the ‘introduction to biomancy’ - modifying elvenoids. The part that didn’t need to be said was ‘modifying elvenoids to be better.’

I was still working on the full list of modifications I wanted to make for myself. ‘Improving my senses’ was an easy one. ‘Honeycombed bones’ was also on the list, but what type of bone I’d use was still up in the air. There were three options here. The first was sticking to what I currently had. The second was looking around in nature, finding an appropriate already-made, tried and tested, measured and known bone, and borrowing that. The third type was to use my knowledge to effectively custom-construct my own, new type of bone. Each method had its benefits and drawbacks. Using human bone had a whole host of advantages, primarily that it would integrate well into everything I already had, but pound for pound, elven bones were just better in every respect, barring total-body integration.

Then there was the possibility of doing something exotic, like making my bones out of titanium.

Ok, technically, I probably couldn’t make my bones entirely out of titanium. I finished my diagram, and swapped notebooks, flipping over to my ‘bones made out of metal’ project.

The entire human body was interconnected to each other, each piece part of a greater whole. It wasn’t possible to just change one thing, dozens to hundreds of other parts of the human body needed to be changed to accommodate even a single modification.

Changing my bones to titanium was the easy part. The problems came with everything else attached to it. Just like the dwarves and their prosthetics, not having any bone material in my body at all was bad. Depending on how I did it, I’d either end up with no bone marrow, or no blood supply to the bone marrow. If that happened, I’d slowly bleed red blood cells until I was anemic, then have a host of other problems occur.

Healing could fix some of the issues, but the base ‘healing template’ constantly updated as people lived their lives. It was why fat people were fat again after being healed, it was why muscles were returned, heck, it was why old people stayed old and why people didn’t get reverted back to being a baby every time they were healed!

That failed to account for the fact that bones were a store of calcium, and calcium was needed for the brain and nerves. It wasn’t critical that I have bones, but not having them meant I’d need to make sure I was always drinking milk, probably daily.

A honeycomb pattern of titanium laced throughout my bones would make them all significantly stronger, at a fraction of the ‘no bones’ side-effect. However, that wasn’t harmless and without issues either.

One thing I flat-out didn’t know, and I’d need to take some classes on, was if titanium reacted badly with biologicals inside my body. Iron, for example, would interact with the air my blood was circulating around, and rust inside my body, weakening the metal and practically ruining the effect. Titanium I was less sure about. Something to look into in the future.

I smiled at a side note I’d written on that segment - ‘Inscriptions’. Like the dwarves, like what I was learning in my Enchantments class, I could engrave runes onto my very bones, and with my healing, keep them there. That would grant me numerous effects that were part of my very being, enchantments to protect me.

Part of Operation: The Improved Elaine, but for another day. The entire body was connected, and this one simple operation had dangling pieces connecting to other projects all over the place.

Back to the bones! Titanium would need to become part of my diet, to replace the parts that were slowly degrading off as time went by. I’d either need to actively remind myself to eat the metal, or rewrite part of my brain to feel and understand that I was ‘running low’, and needed to eat more. That particular bit of fuckery would then result in my conscious mind properly interpreting the signal, which wasn’t a given.

Eating the metal! I’d need to check that my stomach acid didn’t interact with it in a way to transform it badly, same check with my liver enzymes, then my digestive tract would need to properly pull the metal out, and hand it off to the circulatory system. My bones would need to know to uptake the titanium from the blood - a part that had a GIGANTIC question mark on it - and the rest of my body would have to know not to absorb it, otherwise I’d just give myself heavy metal poisoning instead of strong bones.

To be fair. That particular problem could be resolved by simply healing the toxic metal buildup in my cells, but I was trying to keep toxic side effects to a minimum in the first place. I wasn’t above using it as a solution though.

Happily, my immune system had no idea how to handle titanium, so I didn’t need to worry about retraining it or messing with it, although my poor kidneys would need a serious upgrade to handle the excess heavy metal. A check on titanium and the blood-brain barrier was also needed, because screwing my brain up and going insane would make it difficult to correct the problem.

Assuming I solved all those problems, and took the proper courses to double check that there were no other further problems, then yes. I’d finally have titanium-laced bones be part of my very being, integrated into ‘me’ to the extent that the System recognized it, and boosted it with my generous vitality.

That was just sticking with the mundane human frame though! I could potentially go exotic. Grow a pair of wings from my back, and fly under my own power! Weight to wingspan ratio became a concern there, although roc bones were apparently nearly ideal for that particular modification. Wing shape, feather types, "How to manage wings while on the ground", muscle positions, modifications, additions, and nerves were just the start of playing around with something like that.

Naturally, I wasn’t going to stop at one modification, oh no.

I wanted the best, but there was considerable overlap in problems. A stomach that could eat titanium, for example, might not properly digest taurine, which was needed for eyes to see in the dark. Getting both would require extensive fiddling, although fortunately [Biomancers] and [Researchers] of the past had extensively studied and cataloged creatures from around the world, and did their best to describe how each organ worked.

They hadn’t been perfect though. Looping back to the titanium bones example, nobody had ever checked if a treant could eat metal, or if it passed right through them. How they absorbed nutrients from their roots had been studied, but niche corner cases?

Some were unknown, because nobody had gotten around to studying it, taking notes, and sharing them with the School.

Then there was actually acquiring the materials I needed!

Either I could physically acquire one from an existing member - for example, killing a triceratops to get triceratop lungs - or I could study the creature enough to try and replicate it with a skill.

Of course, poor understanding of what I was replicating would result in a suboptimal conjured version, which would cause me all sorts of issues if it didn’t outright kill me. There were skills to offset that, and allow two normally incompatible body modifications to work together, but that was leaning more into the domain of transformation. Most biomancer clients wanted modification once in their life, then to move on normally, not take a skill or three dedicated to stopping themselves from falling apart. I was half in a similar boat. I didn’t want to take skills just to keep my modifications working, but I could lean on my persistent self-healing to help smooth over any rough edges to my modifications. I was mostly thinking about my kidneys, and how my healing handled most toxins effortlessly.

I’d been peeing clear for years now.

Then there was modifying what I grabbed. Taking a leviathan’s heart and shrinking it down to fit inside my chest was on the easy side of the modifications, while allowing a unicorn’s stomach to process meat was more of a challenge. Getting the best of three different organs was something Marcelle had only mentioned in passing, and even with my limited knowledge, I knew mixing mammal, reptile, and fish organs together would have a new layer of challenges.

And everything then needed to be modified to fit together. Biomancy was hard. The total lifetime improvements that I’d end up with, along with the deeper base of knowledge that I needed to acquire just to walk down this path, made it all worth it though. While I had [Mother of Modern Medicine] waiting for me as a [The Dawn Sentinel] upgrade, the more knowledge I had, the better the skills would be. The overlap in required knowledge from medicine to biomancy was almost perfect.

The last tricky part was when did I class up again? I could class up now as a [Student] and get the class a second time, but that felt risky. I would need to grab [Biomancer] at 128, then biomancy my way from 128 to 256. I felt confident in getting there, but I didn’t want to spend a decade working as a biomancer just to reset my classes. I was hoping to complete Operation: The Improved Elaine while at School, then reset my third and take my final class. Hopefully I’d have a year or two at the School to dedicate towards improving my third class, then be prepared for the world!

I didn’t want to class up right now though. My [Student of the Ages] skills were nice for all my other classes, and the more biomancy I practiced, the more achievements I’d have when I classed it up. The relentless practice and learning would make the difference between me getting [Baby Biomancer] and [Seasoned Biomancer], with a corresponding increase in skill power.

Specifically, I needed the skill to make my changes "permanent". Missing that skill would ruin all my efforts.

That was just one class! I had ambitions in wizardry, enchanting, half an eye on cultivation, learning more about the world, research projects in history, and more!

I closed my notebook in front of my dorm door, and opened it.

Long term plans could wait for an hour and a half, while I worked on my current material. I was starting to fall behind, and there was the eternal temptation to start cutting into my sleep just to catch up.

"Evening!" Auri was posing on the coffee table, while Iona was sketching her. Fenrir and Skye were looking over Iona’s shoulder, watching her draw.

"Brrrpt!" Auri flew over to me, affectionately nuzzling my cheek. I cracked a rare smile for my little flame.

"Heya Auri, I hope you’re being good to Iona. Didn’t threaten to burn her math homework or something to get a picture, did you?"

"Brrrpt!" Auri shook her head, emphatically telling me no, Iona had offered to make her a picture. Three pictures! Her tiny little chef’s hat almost flew off, but a conjured hand - her latest skill, I hadn’t seen it before today - showed up and kept it on her head.

I arched an eyebrow at Iona.

"What did she do?" I asked the tall blonde.

Iona worked her mouth a few times, and I got a little chuckle of schadenfreude. Auri had clearly done something, and I knew Iona couldn’t lie, enforced by her [Vow]. It went further than just technically telling the truth, she had to be honest. I was no great shakes at the social thing, but even I could tell that Iona didn’t want to tell me, but wanted to say something.

"I’m bribing her to keep a secret." She finally confessed.

"Brrrrpt." Auri ‘whispered’ in my ear, at roughly the volume of a purring cat. Iona had clearly heard, and understood, and looked crestfallen.

I facepalmed, and shook my head.

"Auri. No." I waggled my finger at her. "It’s terribly rude to promise someone that you’ll keep their secret, then go and gossip about it to me."

"Brrrpt?"

"I don’t care. Don’t tell me, it’s not nice. You need to think about other people’s emotions, and how they’ll feel." Having this talk in front of everyone was awkward on one hand, but I didn’t want Iona and Skye to hear Auri say "I’ll tell you later! It’s a fun one!", then walk away with her to my room. That just looked bad, and it’d create all sorts of ugly feelings, while Auri was the one causing trouble and making mischief.

Fenrir chose that moment to curl up on Iona’s lap, deep rumbles of contentment coming from him as Iona started scratching under his chin.

"Brrrpt…"

"Yes, it’s important what other people think of you, because they’ll also think similar things about me."

I crossed my arms at Auri as Skye excused herself, slipping away.

Iona sighed, obviously loudly enough for me to hear.

"Why don’t you sit down quickly, and I’ll explain?" She offered.

Well, that was one way to make everything clear!

"Just as long as this doesn’t take too long, I’m behind on work." I explained as I sat down.

Iona and Auri traded looks at that.

"Brrrpt."

"Long story short, Auri’s worried about you. She doesn’t think you’re coping well, and has been trying to find various ways to make you happy again, like it’s that easy." Iona gave me a rueful smile.

"I’m-"

"BRPT BRPT BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPT!" Auri shrieked at me, cutting me off before I could say ‘fine’.

"Brpt. Brpt brrrpt brpt brrpppt. Brrrptttt. Bbrrrrrrrrrpppt, brpt brpt BRPT!" Auri lectured me, rattling off dozens of different examples of me overworking myself, or ignoring her.

"But-"

"BPRT."

[*brrrrring!* Hope we’re sitting down to study at home! Auri’s lots of fun, but we gotta get that work done. It’ll just pile up if we don’t do it now!]

I felt a surge of guilt wash over me as I dismissed the notification. I was supposed to be working, not chit-chatting right now…

"I hate to interrupt," Iona chimed in. "But Auri’s got something of a point. I’m basically uninvolved, and I worry about you. You’re my roommate. When was the last time you took a break? Did something for yourself?"

I opened my mouth, thought about it, and closed it again.

"I did something similar before. Ranger Academy. Two years of physical exercise and classes, designed to turn soldiers into Rangers."

"Brrpt brrrrrrrrrrrrrpt…" Auri was trying to squeeze out some of her crystal tears, a blatant and transparent attempt at manipulating me. I rolled my eyes at her shenanigans, but I was moved.

"Look, it’s like sharpening an axe. I can hack through goblins all day, but taking a few minutes to sit down and sharpen my axe means I can hack through them even more efficiently, and clear twice as many in half the time. You’ve got five years here, if not more, and four sets of classes each year. Don’t blow yourself up, don’t blow your chance."

"Brrrpt!" Auri wanted me to spend more time playing with her. "Brrrrrpt!!!" She also had cool new skills that she wanted to show me at the firing range.

I hesitated. I was falling behind on a few classes, and I didn’t feel like I was properly applying my best efforts in the rest of them…

I stopped and thought about it for the first time in ages. I’d just been mindlessly going from class to class, my life dictated by the schedule the School set and the timers I’d arranged with [Timekeeping]. The more awake and alert Elaine of the past had set them, and I’d been gamely grinding through the classes and work, constantly on the path of self-improvement.

What would happen if I kept going the way I was?

I was on a slow downward spiral. Things continued to slowly pile up in my backlog, unimportant things to be sure, but it was only a matter of time before something important ended up in there.

How important was the world geography or cultivation class, once I’d learned the basics? Did I really need to learn all those details right now?

On the other hand, what would happen if I dropped some classes?

I’d do better in the ones I was still in, but I’d always have this feeling, this sense in the back of my mind that I was squandering my opportunity. That I wasn’t getting as much out of the School as I possibly could, that I was leaving knowledge and opportunities on the table. Having spent most of my new life being denied opportunity after opportunity, I wasn’t inclined to leave a single one behind.

But… people were worried about me. I thought I was holding things together well enough, but the nightmares weren’t getting better. Auri was upset with me. Iona was intervening as well.

What would Artemis say?

Well… she wasn’t exactly a great example, but she was laid back and relaxed, except when she wanted something. Then she didn’t care what laws she broke, people she murdered, or fae she insulted to get there.

Ok, Artemis was not a good example. She would totally go full-throttle, and that suggested I should possibly tone it down.

What about Night?

Well, he had eternity. He’d been around for eternity. He probably didn’t need to learn things, he was there when they’d been invented.

And I also had eternity.

Eternity to read books, to learn and educate myself. Eternity to gather knowledge.

Blowing myself up now would be a terrible idea. I knew I was in a poor place, mentally.

Ok.

Priority reshuffling.

Get my head straight, then work on broadening my knowledge.

"Ok. You two are right." I conceded. "I need to cut down."

"BRRrrrrrrpt!!" Auri cheered as she flew around me, heralding how she was the BEST and helped me! Her excitement was infectious, although I could barely muster a smile at it.

I felt my shoulders relax, tension bleeding out of them as I gleefully murdered all the [Timekeeping] notifications for cultivation, geography, and botany. Huge swaths of time suddenly opened up in my schedule. No need to write that essay on the Han civil war!

I stood up and stretched, noticing Iona looking appreciatively. I thought about her, and realized something.

"Oh yeah! You said you wanted to clear the air, and me needing to take a break doesn’t seem to be a huge secret worth bribing Auri over?"

I paused a moment, realizing what I said might be somewhat insensitive.

"If you don’t want to say, you don’t have to."

Iona grinned roguishly at me. Gods, that grin.

"Well, sure! Auri, in her brilliant little mind,"

"Brrrpt!"

"Noticed that my friends all seemed happy, and in her bird brain,"

"BRPT!" Auri puffed out her chest, the insult sailing right over… her tiny little feathery head.

"Figured that I should also make you happy."

Iona arched an eyebrow at me, as Auri happily brrrpted about how brilliant and genius she was. Also something about today-Auri thinking.

I just chuckled ruefully at the little bird. Of course she’d tried to hook me up with Iona. I knew Iona would jump the bones of anyone who met her standards - and she’d draw a picture of everyone else! I appreciated Auri’s attempt at making me happy though. She cared.

"Of course, I know you’re far too busy, and you probably weren’t interested in spending a bunch of time not studying."

I tilted my head. I knew exactly what Iona was saying and dancing around, but she was handling it in a classy fashion. Wasn’t making it awkward or anything. I knew she was interested, and I was somewhat interested in return, but she was right. It wasn’t the time or the place, nor did I have the energy or bandwidth, and I appreciated that she wasn’t forcing the issue.

"Appreciate it!" I said.

"Anyways, let me know when you get some time and catch up on things, I’d love to show you around the student center! There’s some fantastic wargames in there, and I’m dying to get a reliable practice partner." Iona said.

I had absolutely no idea what the wargames were, and that spoke to another part of the ‘missing opportunities’. If I was always buried in my books, I’d miss the entire thriving culture of the School.

Also, it’d free up some time for side projects, like consulting with [Historians] and [Archivists] over the Medical Manuscripts issue. I bet I could trade first hand accounts of Remus for help, or something. Or maybe they were like me and medicine, and would be delighted to give me a hand either way.

It took me no time at all to think about hanging out with Iona. She was easy to be around, in more ways than one.

"Yeah! I’ll let you know!"

Chapter 32
A Good Hug

I was mediating a war between my head and my heart. A comfortable waiting chair. An antechamber. A door of wood.

A door whose outline I’d traced a dozen times with my eyes, wandering over the meandering pattern traced in wood. The way the grains flowed implied the door had been grown into shape.

I loved magic.

I hated my situation.

Every fiber of my treacherous being was telling me to leave. That I shouldn’t be here. That this was a bad idea. That I was only opening myself up to more pain.

My heart was a traitor.

My mind knew that this was the right thing to do. That seeing a mind healer - a therapist - was just what I needed to do.

No matter how I tried to face my fears, to let them pass over and through me, they stubbornly remained.

It was less fear, and more a raging ball of anxiety, worry, angst, and more than a little bit of anger and rage.

My self introspection was interrupted by the door opening, a polar bear in black robes ducking under and walking out on two legs. He stretched after the door, still confined by the room that now seemed tiny. He was missing the wizard hat entirely, but given his size, and how his head constantly scraped the ceiling, I could see why he’d skipped it.

You know what? Screw it, smart bear twice my height and twenty times my weight, sure. None of my business.

"Elaine, is it? Come on in." A soft, elderly voice wafted from the door.

I bolted upright, ramrod straight, like one of the Ranger Academy’s Drill Instructors had yelled an order. Inspired, I imagined Quintis’s familiar voice yelling at me.

"RANGER ELAINE. YOU WILL MARCH INTO THAT ROOM. NOW!"

It helped me get through the door, but I teared up at the memory of the man, one of my mentors forever dead and gone.

Was there a single living soul who still even knew of him? Was I the only record of his memory? The only one who could still speak his name?

Possibly a little hyperbolic, as Artemis and Julius knew him. The Ranger community wasn’t that large.

He’d died the first time, but as long as I lived, a tenuous grasp, he hadn’t died for the second time.

"Quintis." I breathed his name softly as I entered, keeping him alive in a small way.

The mind-healer was immediately apparent, a tiny, wizened woman in a chair, hair up in a bun as she busily click-clacked away with a pair of knitting needles and endless balls of yarn. A cozy fire smoldered next to her, a small table had a pile of cookies, and there was a somewhat squashed chair opposite to her.

The chair hadn’t been designed to hold a bear.

She looked up as I entered and marched over to the chair across from her.

"Oh. Oh my. It really looks like you could use a hug." She put down her needles, gesturing me over. "Come here."

She was like the avatar of grandmothers, warm and inviting.

I hesitated, not wanting to open myself up. Not wanting to bare myself in front of a stranger, not wanting to feel again.

She opened up her arms, making a small "come here" motion with her hands.

What was the point of being here if I was going to hesitate? If I wasn’t going to take the plunge? I’d forced myself to make the appointment. To come here. To march into the room.

One last step. One last risk.

I went over.

I unabashedly cried as she hugged me, letting her soothe me.

"Now now. Tell grandmother Linnet what’s wrong."

"Everyone I know is dead. Twice. I want to help people, but it only feels like I kill them. I…"

I let my grief pour out of me, into her ears.

I checked over my array one last time. Not having any meta-skills was cramping my style, but I reminded myself that it was long-term optimal for having EVERYTHING.

[Something Doesn’t Look Right] was silent, but that was no excuse for skipping a thorough check of the array. One day I wouldn’t have the skill, and I needed to be in the habit of checking my work. If I leaned on the skill, I’d fall once I no longer had it.

This particular array was using three new runes I hadn’t used before. Akhulad, Fund, and Kewak. I cross-checked each of them against the reference book I’d checked out of the library, ensuring that each one was a perfect match.

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning] was another fantastic skill. After tracing each rune out a few dozen times, I was fully confident in being able to replicate it ‘live’. Not only was I confident in being able to replicate it now, but I had full confidence that I’d always be able to make the runes.

Now, knowing when and where to use the runes was a different issue. Properly picturing mandalas, and placing each rune in the right place, with the right neighbors, was tricky. Like solving a puzzle, although sets of runes that worked in one array would work exactly the same in another. Runes often impacted the runes next to them, creating a sort of language that I needed to speak.

It was difficult and awkward, but I could see that as I improved, it would come easier and easier.

[Learning Languages] didn’t extend to this ‘runic formulation’, but it had offered to evolve into a skill that would help.

I wanted to keep working on my natural language acquisition. I wasn’t happy with my current language abilities.

Satisfied that everything was in place, I started to draw the three-ringed array, aiming for one of the simple target dummies in the firing range. I wasn’t trying to bust through shields or penetrate armor, or do anything particularly fancy. I just wanted to make a water jet.

Technically, I could do it without a three-mandala array, but the point was to test my array knowledge, not to do something fancy.

I took out my wand, and started to trace the sigils and runes in the air in front of me.

First came the three circles, neat as could be. Dexterity was a surprisingly useful stat for wizards.

Three interlocking runes let the rings "know" that they were in an array. A few more runes were needed to connect between each ring, letting mana flow, modulating rates, letting the runes communicate with each other, and more.

Then I placed each rune into the correct place, infusing the ones that needed mana with the proper amount, building a few little ‘mana batteries’ into the array. The mana nodes would spread out, feeding the runes their power in precisely measured amounts. Some runes required careful handling, while I could flood the main circuits with as much power as I could feed it. The more power, the bigger and badder the water jet I’d summon would be. I continued to trace the runes, glancing back at my sketches and practice pieces to make sure I was staying on track, and not doing anything -

I made a mistake. A dumb one. I slashed my wand through the growing array, a cancel command forcefully dispersing the growing runes. I could simply let the skill ‘go’, but that was more dangerous than using a cancel command. No telling if the poorly written mana-charged runes would actually say something in the runic way, and cause an effect.

Highly unlikely. It’d be like shredding a dictionary, picking out a half-dozen words at random, and expecting it to be a complete sentence. It was possible, but not likely.

More likely it’d just explode. Poorly. If the explosion was any measure of powerful or deadly, ‘failed arrays’ would be a top-tier, heavily used weapon. The fact that people still went through the effort to build out full circles for particular effects spoke to the relative weakness of the mana used to explosion size.

When it came to the really big arrays that were eating hundreds of thousands points of mana, exploding as an ‘only’ 60,000 mana detonation was still significant, and could kill the poor wizard casting it.

I hadn’t made any such mistake though. No, I’d made an amateur mistake, one born from simply not growing up surrounded by wizardry.

When I built the mandala, I hadn’t cared too much about the direction, one being just like the other for puzzling out how everything needed to fit together. As a result, when I was drawing it just now, I had it pointing towards me, not towards the target dummy. I would’ve given myself a full-body blasting if I’d completed and activated it.

I totally could’ve skipped laundry day if it went off though…

With the old array safely dispersed into motes of glimmering light, like dozens of fireflies fading into the midday sunset, I sat down and sketched out the entire thing again, this time mirrored. I was fairly confident that I could simply mirror it and go now, but that type of thinking bred hubris and bad habits. It was more time and effort, but I was going to do things right.

I did only trace it out twice though, flipping everything over. There was a difference between being cautious, and flat-out wasting my time.

The second drawing of the real array went swimmingly, the lines and runes coming together in front of me, somehow hovering and staying still.

I put my wand on the central focal point, the area that took in and accepted my mana, and started to pour magic into the array.

I expected an immediate effect, and it only took me a quarter of a second to realize something was wrong. A quarter of a second of pouring mana into the array.

"Mango worms." I swore as I grabbed my hat and threw up a shield in front of me, right before the entire array detonated in my face.

I trudged over to Lathor’s office, delighting that I actually had the time to experiment with arrays, make mistakes, and head over to the professor’s office to ask questions about it.

No matter how much I looked over my array, it looked right. Even the mirrored version seemed to have everything in place! [Something Doesn’t Look Right] wasn’t pinging in the slightest, which helped confirm that, to my knowledge, I’d done everything properly.

The array exploding in my face suggested that reality didn’t agree with my assessment.

I knocked on Lothar’s open door and peeked in, squinting as the light caught the endless ornaments hanging from his antlers and reflected them all over the room.

"Hey Lothar, got a minute?"

"Hrmmmmmm. Elaine. Yes." He pointed at a chair in front of him, which I gratefully sank down into. "What can I do for you?"

"I’ve got this array that went poorly for me…" I quickly explained what happened, while showing him my notes and preparation.

"If only every student were as diligent as you were in preparing new spells. My job would be significantly easier. I’m more than happy to help, you’ve clearly done your legwork. Please give me some time to review."

He picked up my notes, and I was happy to let him look over them. It was much easier to build my own spell, than to read someone else's.

Now, using someone else’s spell without knowing what it did? That was easy.

"Here. Your Akhauld rune is improperly drawn. You’ve got an extra line in the rune." Lothar pointed to the rune, indicating the additional line that didn’t belong.

I scrunched up my eyebrows. I was sure I’d practiced it properly. I pulled out the reference book, immediately using the bookmark to flip over to the rune.

"You’re the professor, but… are you sure?" I showed him the rune in the book, exactly the same as the one I’d draw.

"Hrmmmm. Yes. This book is incorrect. A student-scribe copied something over improperly, a [Prankster] added in that extra line, or something else. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t mind, I will take the book and destroy it, so that nobody else comes to harm."

I opened my mouth in a silent scream at that, my face twisting and contorting at the sheer level of blasphemy suggested. My mind raced in overdrive as I considered other possibilities and alternatives.

"I work at the library, and I checked the book out of the library. Why don’t I take it back? It’ll let them know there’s an issue, and work on correcting it."

Lothar shrugged and handed the book back to me.

With a few further pleasantries, I left, mentally cursing.

Practice didn’t make perfect. Practice made permanent, and I’d just extensively practiced a rune incorrectly. Fixing it would take three times as long, as I tried to unlearn a bad behavior, and I had a perfect memory, making it all the harder to unlearn it.

It was also why [Something Doesn’t Look Right] hadn’t twigged to the issue. As far as I knew, everything had been correct. The skill was limited.

The entire incident simply reinforced what I already knew - knowledge was power.

I didn’t know nearly enough biomancy. Fortunately, I knew enough to know I didn’t know nearly enough, and that was a blessing and a half. If I knew less, I might be tempted into thinking I knew enough, and make some dumb, dumb decisions.

Like class up too soon, and try to make the changes to myself too quickly. That’d be a particularly interesting and elaborate way to commit suicide.

The most obnoxious part about designing for biomancy was how integrated and interconnected everything was. I couldn’t just give myself eyes that saw in the dark, oh no, I needed to make sure I had the entire supporting structure for that, and that none of the supporting structures screwed with each other.

It was no wonder Night’s description of creation had been so chaotic, why the species seemed to mostly be copies.

That, combined with what the elves had said about portals, made me wonder if there was a plane of existence filled with orcs and the like.

Still! Full-body biomancy mods were difficult, not impossible.

Right now, the only thing I got was I still wanted to look elvenoid. Becoming a monster was out of the question, and straying too far from the elvenoid template, or even the human template, would lead to a lifetime of strange looks, nasty whispers, and general ostracization. Being social was hard enough with all the advantages I currently had, shooting them all in the foot was a bad idea.

It didn’t mean that I couldn’t, say, get scales, but if I did I’d probably want to go full dragonling, then I’d need a tail, and all that entailed with that.

Now, subtle modifications like a layer of entirely clear scales over human skin? Possible, extra so since it could look like a skill was doing it.

The other thing I knew for sure was I wanted a full-system upgrade. I wanted everything improved, starting with my senses. Being able to see in low light settings. Sharper hearing. A nose like a bloodhound.

I was aiming for similar things with my bones, muscles, skin, organs - everything. As a compromise, I likely wouldn’t have one aspect be the absolute pinnacle of what it could be, in exchange for a holistic full-body improvement.

Cranking everything up 10%, instead of making my skin impervious to arrows, at the cost of only being able to eat a single type of grass, or something like that.

The other item I was eyeing up were redundant internal organs. I’d still look human with three hearts instead of one, and the added redundancy could save my life.

Remapping the entire circulatory system to accommodate three hearts wasn’t easy, on top of wiring in the proper nerves, and that was before adding in more organs.

Hearts might be a poor example. A second heart was good - if someone speared me through my first heart and kept their skill-reinforced weapon there, I’d survive. A third heart was pointless. The situation where someone magically managed to hit two of my hearts but not the third one, and I managed to somehow survive anyways just because of the extra heart, wasn’t worth all the costs. Like storage space! I only had so much room in my body to cram organs.

Backup brains, or a distributed brain system, was super high on my list though. That was the only organ I didn’t know if I could survive being destroyed.

Gills were circled three times in red. Drowning was a fear of mine, and gills were easy to incorporate. The humble lungfish was an example of using both, giving an easy blueprint of how to merge the two systems.

A secondary stomach that could eat wood and dirt also occasionally made it into my notes, with lots of question marks around how I’d know which stomach to funnel food into, and how it’d reconnect with the rest of my digestive tract. Would I need another liver? Small intestine? Did blood screw with it at all? Did…

Lots of question marks.

Busy, busy…

"Hey Elaine, you busy tonight?" Iona asked me.

I pointedly glanced out the window, with the sun still blazing bright.

Iona rolled her eyes at me.

"You know exactly what I’m asking."

I didn’t have to think too hard about it. I had time now.

"Yeah, sure, got ideas?"

"The student center! There’s tons of things to do there!"

I shrugged. Iona was the social one, and had a better idea than I did what was fun. My work schedule had also been shuffled around to a more reasonable hour, and my evenings were free again.

We arranged a time and a place to meet, and I tackled my homework with renewed vigor.

An outing! A fun time! With a totally cool gal to boot!

"Brrrpt?"

"If you want, but no burning anything." I told Auri.

She looked at me in disgust.

"Brrpt!!" She darted off, and returned a moment later, fumbling her hat with one [Mage Hand] while a second one carried a charred lump.

"Oh my! What’s this?" I asked Auri, gratefully accepting it.

"Brrrpt!" I reminded myself to be encouraging, that it was all too easy to smother the embers of interest in the cradle.

"A muffin! Oh my! How… tasty looking…" I took a bite.

Mmmmm. Burned on the outside, batter on the inside. She was improving!

"A most excellent snack, dearest Auri. Perhaps more time in less intense flames?"

"Brrpt…" Auri was thinking about it.

"Brpt!" And with that, she flew off.

I chuckled, licking the batter off my fingers. Honestly, cooking most baked goods was such a waste when the dough was so tasty in the first place.

"Tell me how this works." I eyed the large table in front of me doubtfully. There were miniature mountains, streams, forests, deserts, towns, the whole works, splayed out on the table. We were in a room with a few other tables like this, a couple of them in use by other students, with a few spectators watching each game. We had a few spectators starting to eye our game up as well.

"Right! This is a wargame. It’s well done enough that [Strategists] can level playing it."

That was pretty cool. A game that could level people up? I wondered if there were any medical games that could help with leveling.

"The makers had all sorts of complicated words describing how it worked that went in one ear and out the other."

Iona grinned at that, and I rolled my eyes at her.

"The long and short of it is, you have your towns and civilians, and I have my towns and civilians. They all make different resources, gems being the big one, and we spend those gems acquiring units. Some units take a long time to get, some are fast, and they have different levels of strength. We then send them at each other, and try to take over all the towns. As units do things and survive, they’ll level up, and civilians who survive fights also level up. There’s tons of other options."

"Are there, like, turns and such?"

Iona shook her head, her blonde hair swaying with the motion.

"Everything keeps going at the same time, but it’s slow, in a way. Oh! Monsters and the like might also attack civilians, so you’ll need to protect them. Can’t make a gigantic army and send them over."

Sounded easy enough. Iona - and a few helpful students - showed me the controls, and we were off!

The game required a good amount of focus and attention, mostly because everything was new. Securing our own territory was first, before we could launch any attacks, and I elected to make a few roaming squads of moderate to high level people to fight off monster attacks.

Hey, it had been a valid, working system for centuries.

Iona elected to get fewer, higher-leveled warriors, and send them wandering around.

And, well, this was a game. A fun game. That called for smack-talking.

"I’m totally going to kick your ass." I teased Iona playfully, making a few more moves. Trying to sneak some marauders into her territory.

"Oh yeah? Can your foot even reach that high?" She bantered back, grinning all the way, focused on the board. She spotted a number of my marauders.

"Wouldn’t you like to find out?"

She locked eyes with me.

"Yes." Her words struck something deep inside me.

That didn’t stop me from letting one of my high-level marauders unleash an ‘earthquake’ on one of Iona’s cities though.

"Hey!" She yelped, getting back into the game. "No fair!"

"All’s fair in love and war!" I declared, sending a second wave of attackers to harass Iona’s territory.

She shot me a quick glance.

"I’ll remember that." The playgirl mischievously growled under her breath.

Chapter 33
School Life I

"Hey Skye, wanna grab dinner?"

The Yuki-Onna looked at me with her large eyes, slowly blinking.

"Sure. What brought this on?"

I shrugged.

"I can finally speak the language well enough, and I figured we should get to know each other a bit!"

"Alright."

"Brrrpt?" Auri flew over, offering us a… well, I’ll be damned. It actually looked like a cookie for once. Skye leaned back, clearly not wanting to be a taste-tester again, but I gave it a shot.

My mouth puckered up at the taste.

"Good cooking." I forced out. "Too much salt."

"Brrrpt… BRPT!" Auri exclaimed as she realized she’d mixed up "teaspoons" and "cups".

We ate lunch in the central park. Varuna caused a commotion every time he went to the cafeteria, and even here we got double-takes as people were like ‘wait, is that a unicorn!?’

Made me thankful that Auri was easily mistaken for a regular hummingbird. Magic was wild.

After some small talk, I asked Skye.

"What’s your story?"

"I was born to the royal family of the Tuvan Tribes. A [Princess]." She only had a small trace of bitterness to her voice. "Then I met Varuna. We bonded, and I got Immortality from the bond." Skye smiled affectionately at the unicorn. "Immortals in mortal lands… you know how that goes."

I froze. Did Skye know? Had Iona leaked something? Was Auri a worse blabbermouth than I thought!?

Skye gave me a look.

"I’m Immortal, I don’t bite."

Oh.

OH!

She thought I was anti-Immortal or something. Or wait, was it the purple-robed healer? This reading people thing was haaaaaaaard.

"Eh, yeah, that’s cool. How’d you end up here?"

Real smooth Elaine. Reeeeeeeeeeeeeal smooth.

Skye studied me a moment longer before answering.

"Working on finding a new path in life. I initially wanted to be an ambassador, figuring a former mortal royal turned Immortal would be able to bridge the mortal-Immortal gap, but there are just too many elves studying to be ambassadors right now. It just doesn’t make any sense, but that’s life. I’m now working on becoming an [Advisor] or [Steward]. While I have a sponsor, I’m unaffiliated, and a School-trained [Majordomo] looking for employment?"

Skye shrugged.

"I should do alright. Just need to class up before I leave."

I tilted my head at her, swallowing a bite.

"Why’s that?"

"Those damn gates still detect I have the [Princess] class." Skye shook a fist in the general direction of the entrance, and Varuna pawed at the ground.

"How about you?"

"Well…" Skye got the moderately abridged version of my life. ‘Military commando-healer, went through a fairy ring on a mission, and pop! Ended up here. Fuck my life.’

I tried to commiserate how we’d both had our lives roughly adjusted and thrown off course, but Skye didn’t seem to really agree.

All in all, the whole thing felt stilted, and I was reminded why I usually liked interacting with people in a ‘defined’ setting. Like when I was a trainee, or a Ranger, or a Sentinel, or visiting a shop, or…

Except with Iona. She was always fun to interact with.

[*brrrrring!* Time to put down the books - yes, books, DOWN, I know, I can’t believe I’m the one saying this either - and find something fun or relaxing to do.]

[*brrrrring!* THAT ISN’T READING! That’s how we got into this mess in the first place!]

I cursed past-me knowing current-me too well, and put the book down. Reading was totally fun and relaxing! It totally counted! Sure, I was reading a wizardry reference book for class but still!

Except then I’d end up buried in books again, and that just wasn’t healthy.

Fineeeeeee. I’d carefully worked out when and why I needed these breaks. Auri was off, either setting the firing range on fire again, "baking", or getting a proper education. Fenrir was dozing in a patch of light though, which implied Iona was around.

I uncurled from the sofa - much more comfortable than trying to read in my room - and wandered over to Iona’s door. I knocked.

"Hey Iona, you in there?"

"Yeah. Come in. What’s up?" I went in, and Iona leaned back in her chair, running her hands through her hair in frustration.

I thought my room was small for me. Iona dwarfed her room, looking out of place. She had drawings of people pinned up on her walls, and I recognized artwork of me, Auri, Reinhard, Fenrir, Skye, and Varuna among dozens of others papering the room. Her room also reeked of sex.

Bless whatever enchantments in this place kept smell and sound from moving around.

"Hey, I was going to go to the flight center, wanna join me?"

Iona pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Elaine. How do you have any time?? It’s finals next week! Shouldn’t you be buried in a book like usual, like the rest of us?"

I gave Iona my best smug smile.

"I have been carefully studying this entire time. I have a few skills dedicated to learning and studying. I don’t need to do any extra studying, I’ve kept on top of things. So no. I don’t need to be buried in books right now, I need to relax. I seem to remember a certain Valkyrie telling me to take it easy? Something about sharpening axes?"

Iona groaned and planted her face in her open book.

"I hate you. So much." She mumbled into her book, with no hard feelings and just a trace of affection.

I stuck my tongue out at her.

"Nyeah! That’s what you get for… having tons of sex instead of studying all quarter…"

I realized my burn wasn’t quite as devastating as I’d hoped it would be, and I bailed before Iona could follow up.

Flying! Woo!

The School’s flying area was amazing, like everything else they had. It was easily the tallest building on the campus, runes etched into the clear glass that enclosed the space. Slowly spinning platforms, thermal uprisings, undulating hoops to fly through, there was even a ‘hostile’ section that would shoot paint!

The most annoying obstacle was all over the course though. Large biologicals that randomly lurched around, occupying the best flying spaces, and generally chattering a bunch.

Other people.

It was finals week, which meant there were legions of students softly sobbing in the hidden corners of the library. It provided a pervasive background noise to the entire place, and all the new library workers had gotten a quick, quiet word to just leave them alone, and not try to [Silence] them or anything.

They were having a hard enough time.

The library presented a clean, well-lit view to the outside world. Most people had no idea how much work went into keeping the library functional and operational. Like my current task.

I was circling through the various levels of the library, fixing or recharging the light runes. For the most part. A few books that caught my interest were under one arm, for later reading. What was annoying was that about half the titles or spines that caught my eye were smut, most of them put back. Why was there so much smut scattered around the library!?

Other people didn’t seem to have the same issue, and I was starting to wonder if I had an erotica-attractor or something. Between Briga the wood dwarf, Lun’Kat’s… interesting… artwork, and now this? I was suspecting a curse.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t read and walk around the library. The librarians would yell at me. Something about it ‘not being a good look’.

Bah. Library workers weren’t Sentinels. We could afford to have a bad look. Still, I liked the job too much to protest loudly.

I spotted a dimmer area of the library, one of the light runes dying. Welp, that’s what I was here for. Recharging runes in the older, less-frequented sections of the library. Great for hiding out when studying, but all the blasted students kept making a mess by hiding books under chairs so they’d have them later, and the like.

"Excuse me." I politely asked a girl who was curled up crying in a chair. The chair was at the end of a row, and the light above her wasn’t working. An experienced look at it suggested that it had simply run out of mana, not that the rune was broken.

She didn’t seem to hear me, just kept slowly writing as tears rolled down her face. I rolled my eyes.

Honestly. Some people didn’t study all quarter, and when finals came around, were surprised that they couldn’t manage ten weeks of studying in one.

The bookshelves were just a bit too close together to be able to properly fly. My wings would hit the edges, and everything would go wrong. I was usually a fast learner, but that particular bit of knowledge took me seven attempts before giving up.

I bent my knees, and deftly leapt over her head, onto the top of the chair. Delicately poised there, I fiddled with the runes.

Fortunately, this was a "newer model" of lighting, which meant it was only a few centuries old. Recharging it was as ‘simple’ as tapping my wand on the right mini-mana nodule, and channeling in the appropriate amount of mana.

The light did have an Arcanite stone in the center of the array, but the draw of the sigil was just a hair stronger than the regeneration rate of the stone, hence needing me to come around now and then.

I had my conspiracy theories about it. An Arcanite stone just too small? And it seemed like half the lights in the library had stones just a hair too small? And they were never the critical ones?

It lent fuel to my "they’re just making jobs for us" fire. Half the jobs and tasks I was assigned to could easily be done by a high-level [Librarian’s] passive skill, and I knew we had a few of those running around. I had my [Cosmic Presence] passive, able to multiply regeneration rates of everyone nearby hundreds of times. I could barely imagine what a librarian with thousands of levels could do.

Or even an arcanite Classer. Take one of the many chunks of arcanite scattered around the campus, get a fist-sized piece of the stuff, and distribute it to all the lights here, so they ran at a slight surplus, not at a slight loss.

I sensed shenanigans, but said shenanigans kept me paid. I wasn’t going to protest too loudly.

I hopped over the still-sobbing student, rolled my eyes again at her utter lack of mental fortitude, reminded myself that I didn’t know what was going on in her life and I’d broken down plenty, found a bit of sympathy for her, and moved on.

I made sure to carefully patrol every set of bookshelves, just in case I couldn’t tell the light was dim from 10 meters away. Mmmhmmm. Yup. That was why. It had nothing to do with me skimming the titles of as many books as I could, trying to find hidden gems in the depths of the stacks.

I was at three neat finds so far, and I’d set my personal limit to six.

Skimming titles was an ok, but not great, way of practicing my other languages. More reinforcing words I already knew, rather than learning anything, but speed-reading dozens of different languages and identifying them was just generally good exercise.

As I skimmed, a title jumped out at me. Rather, part of a single word. The start of Biomancer, which was fairly similar in a number of different languages.

I wasn’t sure which language this book was in, or heck, if I was being terribly misled by a similar word sharing a start. I grabbed the book off the shelf, and started flipping through it.

Anatomical diagram after anatomical diagram flew in front of me. A few two-page diagrams had careful arrows from one elvenoid figure to another one, clearly marking out changes. There were scribbles along each line in a language I didn’t know.

Jackpot!

I closed the book, sticking it with the rest of my loot. I’d need to check with Martin or one of the [Archivists] what language it was in, then try to hunt down a book to translate.

Or bug Iona to do it for me. I didn’t want to ask her to do that often, since it felt like I was using her. The practice and learning parts of another language were useful to boot.

Oh wait, Martin was taking a few days off, not wanting to see the mess all the students were inflicting on his library during finals. To the [Archivists]!

This was totally work, I was getting a book properly classified and into the right place. Mmmhmmm.

"Hey! Question for you!" I stuck the book I found on the [Archivist's] desk, over a little plate with… was his name really Ratcatcher?

Then again, I was in no position to judge.

The wizened old goblin - I wasn’t going to get used to that anytime soon - peered up over his half-moon glasses at me, and grunted.

"What." He put his hands protectively over an ancient scroll he was looking at.

"What language is this in?" I flipped the book open to a particularly word-dense section.

"Not supposed to be a blasted language detector." The goblin muttered darkly under his breath as he pushed his glasses up. "This is Alethi. Old, but not ancient." He pushed the book back to me. "Now shoo."

I debated asking him if he knew where an Alethi-High Elvish dictionary was, but decided that was a better question for Martin. Ratcatcher didn’t seem friendly.

This was the best in I had for asking my authentication questions.

"Hey, how can you tell if a piece of work is an original or not?" I asked him.

He studied me over his glasses for a moment before answering.

"Academic curiosity, or did you stumble on something in the stacks?"

I hesitated. On one hand, I’d need to tell someone eventually. Ratcatcher was a solid start. On the other, I wanted to have some idea of what would constitute evidence, otherwise I’d just get laughed out of the room.

"Nine-tenths academic curiosity, one-tenth I got screwed by a fairy ring and might have an exceptionally old first-hand document from the Remus Empire on me…?"

Ratcatcher blinked, then swore up a storm.

"First hand from the Remus Empire!? Do you have any idea how valuable that is!?" He shouted at me.

I backed up and held up my hands. I was honestly unsure if [Oath] would penalize me if I worked the old man up into a heart attack or not.

"No…? And it’s theoretical…?" I tried to placate him.

He sat back down, muttering darkly under his breath. Again.

"If it’s theoretical I’ll eat my socks."

He sighed at me.

"Verification of old documents. Right. Most of us have skills around preserving documents, restoring them, or telling how old they are. For a fairy ring? Most of those skills are worthless. I’ve got a few accounts that say the fae realm completely… blanks, for lack of a better word, our skills. Never got a chance to find out for myself. Half the accounts contradict that, and if the stories are believed, the fae find it entertaining just to screw with us. Either it registers as a new document, or it registers as an extremely new document. It’ll be hard to prove."

Damn. That sounded like I was completely out of luck.

"Any other ways of proving old documents? Or, like, authorship?"

I got another long glare, and the silent treatment.

Ratcatcher had nothing on the Rangers, and their silent treatments.

"Author signatures. Bless the bloody elves and their obsession with credit. To the novice, untrained eye, a copied signature looks exactly the same as the old signature. That’s entirely wrong. There’s subtle degradation that occurs each time, and it’s passed on every time it’s copied. This lets us build a tree, if you will, of which edition got copied when and where, and lets us trace a map of the book’s history."

Ratcatcher was starting to get more animated as he spoke. He was one of the [Archivists] here; he didn’t make it without passion.

"One moment." He vanished into the labyrinth that was the archives, coming back with a tightly bound scroll. He unraveled it on the table. A tree-like diagram unraveled in front of me, some nodes having names, others with question marks on them. Five nodes were at the top, every other one branching out from it.

"Jiwa. The giant [Runesmith] who invented the wizardry language named after him." Ratcatcher explained, pointing to the five nodes at the top. "He wrote five books detailing the language, and spread them far and wide. Scribes then copied it, distributed them, and copied again." He traced a line going from the node, tapping on it and tracing down.

"These days, when a new copy is uncovered, we can analyze the signature, and depending on how degraded it is, we can determine where it belongs in the history of the book. Lost ruins are fantastic for that."

"Wait, how can you tell how old it is from the signature?" I was getting interested in what Ratcatcher had to say, and keeping a lid on the bubbling excitement I had developing.

"Well, it degrades. If the vibrancy of the lower J is weak, and the top of the A is clipped, that places the providence of the volume about here." Ratcatcher pointed to a spot in his diagram. "If the A is clipped, but the vibrancy is solid? It’d be placed here." He pointed to a new spot. "If the A’s only half-clipped, then that’d be a new node, here." He pointed to a third spot. "However, that’s unlikely, since [Scribes] or [Copiers] rarely only make one copy, they make a bunch, and as a rule, tend to make the same mistake repeatedly with their skill."

I thought I had it.

"The purer the signature, the older the document, the more authentic it is?"

I got another withering glare from Ratcatcher.

"That has nothing to do with authenticity." He growled. "Leave such things to the [Auctioneers]. No, authenticity only matters for originals. We believe there are no originals of Jiwa’s notes. Preservation skills can only do so much in the face of time. Someone dies. Someone takes a vacation. Some damn Immortal blasts a mountain to pieces."

He perked up, and gave me a sly grin.

"Unless you have some originals from the Remus Empire on you. Eh? Eh?"

[*brrrrring!* Work’s DONE! We’re not getting paid to be here anymore, so let’s wrap up, check out the books, and make like a tree and leaf!]

I made some polite noises and fled.

Chapter 34
School Life II

I was both amused and terrified by my zoology’s extra credit question on the final.

The mythical phoenix is said to be a bird made entirely out of fire. Given what you have learned, which Empire would you classify the creature into? Which Kingdom?

The question posed the risk of revealing that I knew too much about phoenixes. In the grand scheme of things, the risk was tiny, and I couldn’t resist the challenge of the question, or the allure of getting a perfect score. One of the next classes in the Zoology course was Mythical Creatures, and I’d bet that the question was more there to incite interest in the course. I could always claim I’d read the book ahead of time.

Some people had it right when they said getting expelled was worse than death. Given that the question seemed theoretical, I could always play my knowledge off as ‘I like reading a ton’.

A phoenix is a Magical creature. However, it fails to meet the definition of an Elemental, due to missing a few key criteria. For example, the…

Finals! I don’t know why everyone was stressing so much about them.

Marcelle gave me a disbelieving look.

"Seriously?" She asked me.

I firmly nodded.

"Seriously."

"The School’s not that dangerous!" She threw her hands up in the air, still holding her grading clipboard.

"It takes days to properly set this up! DAYS! [Persistent Casting] with my best image isn’t quick!"

Marcelle grumbled some more.

"Fine. I can’t give you top marks in the bonus practical self-modification section, but you’re passing the class with a perfect score already."

I tried not to look too pleased or smug.

"While we’re on the subject, I have a question about biomancy and classing up."

Marcelles eyebrows climbed up into her bangs.

"That’s a lot of trust you’re offering. What is it?"

I shrugged.

"You’re my teacher, and advisor. You’re the biomancy expert. Who else should I ask?"

She gave me a curt nod, and looked around the exam room. Heavily warded for privacy, to prevent cheaters, snoops, and the like.

"Ask away."

"When should I upgrade my [Student] class into a biomancy one? What’s the optimal route, and what tasks and activities give the highest quality classes?"

She gave me a strange look at that.

"Like any other class, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. If you practice changing yourself - I would normally never suggest this to a student, but your self-healing makes it possible to do safely - you’ll get a self-transformation class. If you practice changing animals, a stronger class with that angle will present itself. The safe workshops have mice and shuvuuias to practice with. If you practice changing other elvenoids - please don’t, not without careful supervision - you’ll get a class relating to modifying others."

Marcelle eyed me thoughtfully.

"With your build, here’s the track I’d take. Modify yourself extensively. Spend a few million points of mana on it, the gods know the School’s got enough arcanite lying around. Grab a self-modification class at 32, level up to 128. Expand to a class that can modify others there, graduate, then best of luck."

I wanted to snort at ‘a few million points of mana’. For the average student, that might be a reach, but not for me. For me, that was only a few hours of work, but she was right that I could speed things up with all the arcanite the School had. Probably touch the tens of millions of mana inside an hour, if not more. I processed what she said, along with my own knowledge of the System.

"If I primarily focus on changing my legs and arms, I’ll get a stronger class around modifying those than a full-body modification class, right?"

Marcelle nodded.

"That’s right. It’s safer to modify your extremities. Now, I hate to cut this conversation short, but there are still more students I need to examine. Make an appointment if you’d like to discuss this more."

Knowing a dismissal when I heard it, I left, leaving Marcelle to torment - errr - examine - the next poor student.

I’d had a general skill slot open for way too long, and it was time to just pick a skill and be done with it. [Pretty] had merged into [Scintillating Ascent], and I was going to be going a step further with biomancy. At some point, I’d need to sit down and figure out what proportions I wanted to aim for, and what curves and height I wanted.

It was low down on my list, but it was weird to think that I could mold my body like clay, that I didn’t have to just accept what mother nature had given me.

I doubted I’d make serious changes. I liked my height.

Seeing an echo of mom’s face in the mirror was one of the last things I had from her.

No, between biomancy and [Scintillating Ascent] changing my body around slightly every time it leveled up, I was good in the ‘fundamental looks’ department.

I still had that little nudge to take an appearance skill. I spent a whole hour meditating on the issue instead of doing something more fun, like reading or playing with Auri, before deciding that, yes, I was being influenced by our companion bond, but that I’d also taken [Pretty] as a kid and had stubbornly kept the skill for 12 years. I liked being [Pretty], and dirt and dust were my nemeses when trying to keep up my appearance for an entire day. Spilled drinks, someone else’s experiment blowing up in my face, the pervasive ash at the firing range and more all conspired daily to ruin my good looks.

Not anymore!

[Spotless] was here to save the day!

It was a complete luxury skill, but I had hopes that my life would be luxury skills from here on out.

Gods, if only I could sell a single Immortality use.

I banished the thought from my head.

Being a healer in a mid-sized town would be money enough.

I looked over my schedule one last time, triple-checking that I liked it. I was more restrained this time, not massively overloading myself. I’d even noticed that my performance in my remaining classes had improved!

All in all, a win for reason.

Comparative Anatomy - Dinosaur

Wizardry II

Biomancy II

Medicine Lab

Companion Class

Advanced Fire Sorcery

The last class was for Auri, and was her idea. She wanted to see what the ‘real school’ was like. I was planning on getting work done during that period, while Auri would pay attention to the lectures. I’d offered Mythical Zoology as a course, but she wanted fire.

Surprise, surprise.

I was deliberately skipping a medicine class, only keeping in a practical course. Trying to take it easy after my overload, making sure I was grounded and centered.

I gave a sharp nod at my work.

"Looks good, right?" I showed it to Auri.

"Brrrrpt! Brrrpt?"

"Next quarter we might add in a baking course. Isn’t Bridget good at teaching you and the other kids though?"

"Brrrpt…" Bridget was good, but Auri wanted professional classes.

"Walk before you run, errr…" My analogy fell apart as Auri gave me a haughty look. She hopped down onto my desk, and started running all over it, legs moving comically fast.

A frantic knock at my door interrupted our shenanigans. I got up and opened the door, to find a distraught Iona on the other side.

"I failed math!"

My first instinct was to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it, but Iona’s crestfallen face stopped me.

"Here, let’s sit, tell me all about it. It’s not the end of the world. Which math class was it? Math’s a huge field, there’s more than just one class. Plus, we’re on break now! We should do fun things! Once class starts up again, I’ll give you a hand with some studying…"

The grateful look on Iona’s face said it all, sending butterflies careening through my stomach.

I mentally added "study with Iona" to my schedule. Under "relaxation."

I opened the door to the dorms, only to get blasted with Lightning, flames dancing merrily along the ceiling.

I spasmed as the Lightning played havoc with my nerves, jerking like a marionette for a brief moment before snapping up a shield between me and the source.

Half of me was screaming ATTACK! ATTACK! Duck, roll, [Kaleidoscope], Radiance beams! Go for the eyes!

The other half was more politely and reasonably reminding me that this was my home, in a safe place.

They both won out. I rolled around the edge of the door as I started to summon butterflies, noting that the Lightning wasn’t strong enough to punch through my shield. I peeked my head around the corner, squinting at the flashes of Lightning ruining my vision.

Fenrir was in the middle of the room, Lightning arcing from him all over the room, while Auri was cheerfully flying on the ceiling, letting little controlled spirits of flame dance with her.

I wanted to say there was no threat, but there was a threat and I did need to handle it. Just in a more yelly way, not a burny way.

"Aoife Auri Stentor!" I yelled with my best Sentinel Dawn voice, putting my hands on my hips. "What are you doing!?"

"BRRrrrpt!?" Auri did a double-take at me glaring murder at her.

"ENOUGH!" Reinhard stormed out of her room, making a ‘grabbing’ motion with her hands. Fenrir’s Lightning got pulled into a ball in her left hand, while Auri’s flames only swayed briefly towards her. "What are you two doing!? You’ll ruin the entire dorm! Fenrir, there is a firing range for testing new skills!"

She seemed to have the yelling well in hand, and it’d do everyone some good to get some yelling from people not named Elaine. It took a village to raise a kid, and all that.

"Auri! You know better than this! You’re a phoenix, for crying out loud! What would the other phoenixes think if they saw you?"

"BRRRPT!?! BRPT BRPT BRRRRRRRRRPT!!!"

Reinhard paused, her eyes widening. She whirled on me.

"What does Auri mean, she doesn’t know any other phoenixes!?"

I facepalmed. This was going to be a long, long story.

But wait… maybe that meant Reinhard knew where there were more phoenixes!?

"Let me buy you dinner, I think we have a lot to discuss." I told my roommate.

She continued to give me a dirty look, crushing Fenrir’s Lightning with her hand.

Holy shit.

Her shoulders relaxed, and she gave me a curt nod.

"Alright. I suppose I should give you the chance to explain."

"... then we met Iona, who let us know just how much time had passed. Came to the School to try and learn what the world is like now. Given that it’s practically a whole new world and all that."

I leaned back as I finished narrating the ‘short’ version of how I’d met Auri and made it here, leaving a suspicious hole in the "no I totally found her egg in the underground tunnels, just lying there."

Reinhard slowly shook her head in disbelief.

"That’s… wow. Incredible. I’m so sorry. Nobody should have to go through that. Are you ok?"

I shrugged.

"No? But I’m doing what I can. I’m seeing Linnet to help me with all this."

"Brrpt BRPT!"

"And Auri! Who’s the bestest little bird ever, right?"

"Brrpt!"

Reinhard looked unamused at Auri’s antics, but nodded.

"Excellent."

She might’ve wanted to say something more, but I wanted to know more about phoenixes.

"Do you know where more phoenixes live? Could you get us in contact with them?" I’d been sorely lacking on goals recently, just drifting around as I tried to survive. I needed to sit down and work out what I wanted from life, and how to get it. Operation: Find Auri’s Relatives was a pretty good start to things. A goal I could work towards.

Reinhard hesitated, and looked around before leaning in.

"Not here." She hissed at me.

Welp, onto a private area.

Reinhard’s idea of a private area was… the unused suite room in our dorm.

She spent a solid twenty minutes casting, using runes I couldn’t identify. I committed them all to memory anyways. In the future I could try to reverse engineer them… in a safe place.

Better would be to find a reference book for the type of runic language she was using, but I had more important concerns.

Like finding some of Auri’s… distant nieces and nephews?

"Right. Phoenixes. My family knows a few of them. When I graduate I can ask them for information, then pass it onto you."

"Brrrpt?" Auri asked, but Reinhard ignored her.

"How will you know where I am? Can I visit?" I asked her.

She shook her head.

"We don’t let anybody into the Kirin Sanctuary, nor do we let anyone know where it is. With luck, you’ll still be here, and I’ll find a way back. Everyone should get to know more of their kind. Please don’t talk to others about the Kirin Sanctuary. It’s not a big secret, but we don’t like it getting spread around."

With that, Reinhard turned on her heel, and left.

All that prep work for less than a minute of talking.

"Brrrpt?"

"Why don’t we read a book to find out more?" I suggested to Auri.

I hadn’t planned on taking Mythical Zoology, but it looked like I was going to be skimming the textbook.

A quick library raid later, and I’d located the book in question. Being a course textbook for a common class, we had multiple copies of the book. Being the break between quarters? We were well-stocked, with only the most prepared students having gotten a crack at them.

I curled up in my favorite chair - extra springy, in a hidden corner where nobody would bother me - and cracked the book open to the table of contents, looking for "phoenix."

This was something I should’ve done ages ago, but I just hadn’t had the time for it.

I mentally cursed as I skimmed through the entries. I was letting myself get distracted by the other creatures, and the biomancy potential they had.

I was being dumb in a second way. I should take the class as a primer, then dig through the class offerings to see if there was a Mythical Creature Anatomy or something.

From my weak understanding of biomancy so far, I couldn’t become a half-phoenix, half-human woman. There was just something about the magical nature of the beasts that made it challenging to do. Like, I could make my arms into wings, and light them on fire, but that didn’t make them phoenix wings. Just very, very, very painful, and a trip to the local burn ward.

Not all mythical creatures were made out of fire though, and a number of them could have useful aspects or ideas I could incorporate into my own modifications.

While people were more casual with saying ‘dragon’, I noticed a distinct lack of anything draconic in the Museum of All Things’s biomancy and biology hall, nevermind the runes made out of dragon’s blood. I’d gotten to study Lun’Kat while healing her, but my knowledge of her body was poor at best. Dragon scales or dragon’s blood would be cool.

Well, the idea of it was cool. I needed to get the technical details to see if it was any good or not.

My finger skimmed over the table of contents, getting more ideas. I had some basic knowledge of some creatures, while others were unknown to me.

Almiraj - Crazy jumping powers. Could I leap over tall buildings if I incorporated their thigh and knee structure?

Basilisk - Their petrification was skill-based, but their venom was famous. Would a poisonous bite as a backup work? Then was the question of what type of fangs, and which poison. Was mixing and matching possible? Did I want fangs that deployed, or would something more like a coral snake work?

Drop Bears - deadly in the extreme. Was their killing power a skill, or innately part of their body? Was eating leaves useful? I’d need to run the numbers on the calorie efficiency, and if the trade-off was worth it.

I continued tracing down the list, my heart practically stopping on a familiar name, yet one I didn’t know.

Golden Crow.

Papilion had told me to be prepared to be reincarnated as a golden crow, and at the time, I’d begged to become human. I thought it was just some bird. I hadn’t known I was going to a world of magic and myths.

Its entry in this book suggested otherwise. I flipped to the page, a picture popping out at me.

A crow, with golden feathers instead of black ones, with a third leg. Almost exactly the same as what Papilion morphed into. The sun was prominently displayed in the background.

The Golden Crow is one of the most powerful creatures of fire on the planet, behind only dragons. It is debated if their mastery of flames is stronger than phoenixes or not, but most scholars place phoenixes above them, simply due to their quasi-elemental nature. Golden Crows are the light, using a combination of sun-related flames with Radiance flames. Stronger during the day, they are naturally Immortal, and are possessed of a keen intellect…"

I closed the book, trying not to cry.

I could’ve been that?! A mythical, immortal creature!? One innately attuned to fire and flames!?

What was I doing in this shitty human body!?

"Papilion! I WANT A DO-OVER!" I yelled into the air, shaking my fist.

"[Shush!]"

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 583,290/583,290]

[Mana Regen: 275,561 (+522,957)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 349]

[Strength: 982]

[Dexterity: 2,078]

[Vitality: 14,550]

[Speed: 14,582]

[Mana: 58,329]

[Mana Regeneration: 58,431 (+52,296)]

[Magic Power: 23,089 (+592,233)]

[Magic Control: 23,116 (+592,925)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 488]

[Cosmic Presence: 317]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 452]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 471]

[Sunrise: 420]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 358]]

[Radiance Affinity: 358]

[Radiance Resistance: 358]

[Radiance Conjuration: 358]

[Runic Scribing: 55]

[Nectar: 358]

[Solar Corona: 358]

[Scintillating Ascent: 338]

[Kaleidoscope: 358]

[Class 3: [Student of the Ages - Wood: Lv 32]]

[Wood Affinity: 32]

[Learning Languages: 32]

[Dabble: 32]

[Something Doesn't Look Right: 32]

[Timekeeping: 32]

[Organization: 32]

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning: 32]

[Study: 32]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 300]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[Spotless: 5]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 315]

[Passionate Learning: 400]

Chapter 35
Major Interlude - Iona
School Life III

Amy’s leg twitched, and Iona bolted upright. She tore straight through her bedsheet, but her paramour of the prior night just grumbled and rolled over, nestling deeper in the wyvern’s nest that was Iona’s bed.

Curse it all. Iona mentally swore to herself as she carefully extricated herself from her bed without waking up her friend. I was hoping to go at least a week without ruining something.

She eyed the blanket. The rip wasn’t too bad this time, but there were only so many times Iona could stitch it back together before it was more repairs than original. At a point, she’d just need to throw it out and buy a new one.

The curse of being as heavy and as strong as she was, without any skills for keeping linens intact. [Celestial Armaments] extended to her clothing, which was a relief, but not bedsheets.

Towels worked better, because Iona was awake enough to control her strength. The valkyrie looked out the window, mentally working out roughly what time it was.

Early. Reinhard might still be awake, or might’ve gotten up early - Iona still didn’t know which it was - but everyone else would be asleep.

Selene! Lunaris!

Good morning! First day of classes in this quarter! Wish me luck - I need it with math!

Iona heard a tinkling laugh at her request.

Wrong goddesses to get help with math! Lunaris replied.

Yeah, you’re doomed. Selene chimed in.

Good luck! They wished her in unison.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Paladin of the Moons] has leveled up! 54 -> 55! +70 Strength, +70 Dexterity, +112 Vitality, +70 Speed, +60 Mana, +60 Mana Regeneration, +140 Magic Power, +140 Magic Control from your Class! +1 Free Stat for being human! +1 Vitality, +1 Mana from your Element!]

She got a fresh notebook - new quarter, new notebook - and sat down at her desk, spinning in the chair to face her bed.

Iona held out her hand and focused on [Telekinesis]. A pencil snapped into her palm, and Iona bent over and got to work.

Drawing with [Telekinesis] was an exercise in frustration and ruined pictures. Some things were just better to do manually.

The paladin stuck out her tongue and her hand with one thumb out, measuring and getting rough ratios of Amy’s face. Satisfied, she started drawing, art coming to life as her pencil danced over the paper.

Time flew by, and Fenrir poked his head into Iona’s room.

"Breakfast?" He growled at her.

A toothy monster sticking his head into Iona’s room and growling was enough to wake Amy, and she screamed.

"Monster!" She yelled, and chaos ensued.

The dust settled, Iona having gotten the drawing she’d made of Amy to the woman as she fled in a panic, but not her clothes.

Ah well. More fabric for repairs. Iona mused to herself.

She stretched and got up, heading over to the bathroom.

"Morning." Iona yawned at Elaine as she passed her. The short healer’s eyes ran quickly up and down Iona’s body, and the valkyrie suppressed a grin. Being able to make nearly any elvenoid stop and stare was nearly a point of pride, but more importantly, it was fun.

Elaine was diligent as always, already fully dressed in her purple witch’s robes, books tucked under one arm and a bag slung over a shoulder. Auri was perched on her shoulder, and trilled a greeting at Iona.

"Morning! Ready for classes again?" Elaine cheerfully asked, keeping her eyes locked on Iona’s.

Iona gave an overly dramatic sigh, internally chuckling as Elaine’s eyes wavered at her heaving chest, but stayed politely on Iona’s face.

"Alas! The fun part of School’s over, and I need to get back to classes." She said.

"What!" Elaine squeaked. "This is the fun part!"

Iona raised a doubtful eyebrow at Elaine.

"Didn’t you just spend two weeks with your nose in a book?" Iona was glad that Elaine had spent two weeks doing something she liked. Most of the books had been fun reading, although she’d seen a few advanced wizardry titles in the mix. It wasn’t the endless parade of work that had caused her to become a burnt-out husk though, which was nice.

"I did eat." Elaine defended herself.

"With a book in your hands." Iona retorted.

Elaine’s eyes flickered, like she’d gotten a notification.

"Crap, I gotta run. Bye!" The short witch dashed past Iona, out of the suite and off to whatever class she had first.

Iona replayed the conversation in her head as she showered, and laughed in sudden realization. Elaine had only said she’d ate. Nothing about sleeping. Iona would bet, emeralds to rubies, that Elaine had fallen asleep while reading, the book falling on her face as she passed out.

Iona cursed herself for forgetting to arrange math lessons with Elaine. She needed to figure out the magic behind numbers. Reinhard had also expressed a willingness to help Iona, and Skye muttered something about ‘good practice just in case’ in her native tongue when Iona had arranged lessons with her.

The paladin didn’t want to impose too much on any one person. She couldn’t commandeer their time like that, not for free, and not without giving anything in return. She’d showered them in drawings, but there was only so much she could reasonably ask.

"Breakfast!" Fenrir butted into the shower, the cool water turning into a spray of unending ice onto Iona as he flexed his powers. Iona yelped at the unexpected assault.

"Ok! Ok! I’m coming!" She cried out.

"Good." He growled to himself.

This is saving me hours. Iona reminded herself as she walked up the stairs. Three minutes here is like… an hour of normal training. Three and three make six, and then I need to add the 0. Thirty times as effective!

The floors doubled in potency every time Iona went up a level. She paused at the level that was 128 times normal gravity, and hesitated.

Onwards and upwards. She thought as she went up another flight.

The gym was a chore, but a necessary one. There was no other way to stay as strong as Iona needed to be, not without investing hours after hours daily outside of the gym.

Should’ve asked the biomancer for muscles that never degraded. Iona grumbled to herself, not for the first time. Not for the last. Too much damn vitality now for anyone to make changes.

That was if she could even afford them.

Pick heavy things up. Put them down again.

Beat fighting monsters though.

"Painting! Oh, I am EVER so glad that you all could make it here!" The frilly faun at the front of the room proclaimed. "Now, I’d like to make it clear. This is the mundane painting class. No magic here! This is simply for those who wish to pursue the artistic subject."

The professor paused, and half of the already tiny class packed up and left. Iona was one of four remaining students in the class, which didn’t deter the professor in the slightest.

She eyed them up. Two of the three remaining students were cute, and might be a fun fling.

"Great! The first thing we’ll learn how to do is grind ink!"

Iona schooled her face.

"Paint?" Fenrir asked from his spot by her feet.

"I want to say soon, but I’m not sure we’ll get to it today…" Iona raised an eyebrow as jars of live beetles were brought out.

"Vegetables." Iona barked out a laugh at Fenrir’s idea of a curse.

Iona stared at the math problem in front of her, the numbers swimming.

She remembered what she needed to do. Find 0. Put it on the chart. Then chart the rest of the numbers. There was a process, a routine. She knew how to follow the instructions. She’d been told why following those instructions solved the problem.

She just couldn’t understand why following those instructions solved the problem.

One point at a time, she calculated each position, and put them on the graph. 0. 1. 2. 3.

A ninja appeared next to her with a tiny dramatic poof.

"Your 3 is wrong! It’s 25!" He jabbed a quill at Iona’s chart, neatly making a mark in the appropriate place.

"Wait-" Iona started to ask for clarification, but a smoke bomb went off, the ninja vanishing.

Just another typical day at the School.

Iona put her head in her hands. She believed him.

But what had she done wrong? It was a shame Skye or Elaine weren’t around. They’d be able to easily explain this in a way that made her feel smart.

"We’ve realized a potential problem." One of the [Researchers] told Iona.

"What’s that?" Iona was fairly relaxed about the whole thing. Sigrun had made sure that Iona’s scholarship was secured for six years, no matter what happened. The biggest problem Iona could imagine was they liked her too much, and increased the amount they scheduled her for.

"Well, there’s a bit of a schism in old Rewheb. Some of us think silence means silence, and some of us think silence means contempt." He said.

That seemed easy enough for Iona.

"I mean, it means silence, right? That’s what you have me for?" She scrunched up her forehead, unsure of what the problem was. This seemed blindingly obvious to her. Her blessing let her translate, the [Researchers] gave her words, she translated, easy peasy. No problems.

The researchers traded significant looks, and a second one stepped up and cleared his throat.

"Some of us think contempt means silence, and some of us think contempt means contempt."

"That one means contempt - ah." Iona paused, the implications sinking in. "Don’t tell me. You think the word means contempt, and you think the word means silence." She pointed to the two researchers respectively.

The silence was all the answer she needed. Iona thought the answer was obvious, although she wasn’t a [Linguist] like the researchers were.

"Isn’t it possible that there’s shades of meaning to the words that don’t translate well into Altaic? A contemptuous silence, as opposed to a contemplative silence or something?" She asked. "I’m getting shades of both with the word."

The researchers frowned and poured over their notes.

"Well, yes. But which one is it more of?"

Iona wanted to hit her head against the desk. There was being passionate about a subject, and there was whatever this obsession with the tiny details was.

It made her think of Elaine, and while passionate about learning, wasn’t a pedantic twit like the researchers were.

The time to money ratio was unbeatable though.

The training salle was next on Iona’s list, a chance to learn from the best [Fencers] and [Duelists] the School could offer. Dueling wasn’t high on Iona’s list of activities, but learning to be a better fighter?

The worst case she could imagine was bringing the lessons back to the Valkyries, and teaching a new generation of squires the various tips and tricks she’d learned. Even if it didn’t help her, maybe she could teach a squire who’d found a particular affinity with the foil some tricks.

She entered the training salle, a number of other students wearing durable practice clothing with significantly fewer bits of spare cloth than the witch’s robes they all had to wear kneeling on the ground. Iona quickly changed and joined them, ending up in the second row. She grabbed one of the wooden practice swords, disappointed by the lack of axes or glaives. Seven rows of students ended up kneeling and ready, before the instructor burst in.

The kitsune was lithe and intense, radiating a sharp air about him. He strode into the room, three swords strapped to his hip, barking the whole way.

"Attention! I am Yagyu Mitsukata! In this training hall there are no kings! No emperors! No gods. There is only me, and my word is absolute! Do-"

Iona had already stood up, the instructor’s words intolerable to the [Paladin].

You go girl! Selene cheered in her ears.

He’s just barely not worth smiting. Lunaris complained.

"No." Iona declared, ready to face the consequences of her action.

They were swift.

"[Out!]" The instructor declared, and Iona was blasted out of the training salle.

She twisted in the air, landing gracefully to the shocked looks of the students who’d been passing by.

Well, that class is a bust. She thought to herself. More time to practice with Fenrir.

Iona tightened the last strap of Fenrir’s harness around him, stepping back and frowning. The wyvern shot Iona his best set of pitiful eyes… which only made him look more malevolent than usual. ‘Wyvern’s eyes’ did not mix with ‘cute puppy dog eyes’.

"Why?" He asked, pawing at the harness with his wing, stretching his neck one way then the other to try and get it into a more comfortable position.

"Because one day it’ll be armor. It’ll let us fight together, as one."

"Hunt. Pounce. Bite. Blast. Was good." Fenrir said. Iona understood what he was saying - when they’d been leaving Modu together, when he was a baby. They’d worked together as a pair, hunting and fighting together.

Iona carefully thought about how to respond. Fenrir wasn’t wrong on several levels, but he was also missing the point. On how large and dangerous the world was. On what a suit of armor could do, and Iona and him working together in tandem.

She’d never force him to carry her, no. That was all manner of wrong.

"Well, for one, this training harness sucks." Iona agreed. "But it’ll help you get a skill. Do you like me carrying you around?"

Fenrir nodded, his head bobbling sinuously on the end of his neck.

"Do you want to carry me one day? Blasting Ice while I fight from your back, as one team?"

Fenrir looked thoughtful, and Iona was struck by inspiration. She dropped her bag, and rooted through it for her notebook and pencil. She flipped open to a new, clean page, and started sketching.

An adult Fenrir came to life under her pencil, Iona riding on his back. The two wore armor, and some clever tricks made it look like light was gleaming off of it. A storm raged in the background, a few dramatic bolts of lightning against dark clouds, and Iona drew Fenrir raining devastation below him with his beams of Ice, while Iona slew some bird with a glaive from his back.

She wasn’t quite sure how to draw Fenrir controlling the Lightning. Something to work on, given his new element.

Prominently drawn, with great attention to detail, was a saddle keeping Iona firmly attached to the frost wyvern.

"Like this!"

Fenrir studied the image, and growled his approval.

"Alright."

Iona had an open slot in her [Traveling Archer] class, and she hadn’t gotten a good chance to practice her class or improve it. She didn’t have her old springwood bow anymore, and the basic training bows the School had couldn’t handle a fraction of her full strength. Firing the bows at the max strength they could handle before breaking was terrible experience, and threatened to ingrain poor habits.

The archer had seen the value in being able to conjure up arrows during the fall of the Valkyries. She’d privately sworn to herself - in a non magically binding way - to take a skill to get arrows, so she’d never be without ammunition again.

Being without a bow was equally a problem, although Iona was in the best place in the world to get a skill to mitigate that issue.

Finding the right person who could teach Iona how to get a bow-summoning skill was a challenge, but the island the School was founded on was an Oddity. Each Oddity interacted with the System in some strange and unusual way, and the School was founded on the island for many reasons, including its influence.

It was significantly easier to learn skills while on the island.

[*ding!* You have unlocked the Class Skill [Frost Wyvern’s Bow]. Would you like to take this skill?]

Iona marveled at the conjured bow in her hands. Made out of horn and sinew, the skill description had made it clear that this weapon would grow and evolve with her.

Never again would she be unarmed.

Iona took a deep meditative sip of tea, letting the warmth briefly flow through her. The steady click-clack of needles in the background just added to the atmosphere, but the fire was a bit much.

"Well. If you ask me - and you have - I think you keep people too far from you."

Iona sputtered a protest. Linnet just gave her a look over her glasses.

"Yes, I’m well aware of what you do. But tell me this true. Did you really need to let your friend scare Amy off?"

Iona thought about it for a moment.

"No." She freely admitted. "No, two words would’ve calmed her right down, and cleared everything up. Pardon, three, given the language involved." Iona automatically self-corrected as she made the right connections.

[*ding!* [Magnetic Charm] has leveled up! 261 -> 262]

"Now, I know this is sensitive, but do you have any idea why that might be? Why you didn’t work to keep her close?"

Iona opened and closed her mouth a dozen times, each time with a different excuse on the tip of her tongue.

The beautiful thing about her [Vow] though - she couldn’t lie. Not even to herself. A fantastic tool for self-introspection. For digging up painful truths, and forcing herself to confront them.

Iona dredged the ugly truth to the forefront of her mind, and she was able to speak without fear of her [Vow] getting displeased.

"My friends die." Iona’s tone was blunt and brutal. "Lux died. I joined the Valkyries to be a protector. The shield of the weak. I spent years with them, every hour of every day. We were the best of friends, with an unshakable bond forged in training. Nobody who isn’t a Valkyrie can understand that sort of comradery. Then in the span of three days, I got to watch nearly every single one of them die. My friends were hacked apart in front of my eyes. Ripped limb from limb. Infected with a slow poison. Bodies were thrown at us until we were so exhausted we just fell on their spears. And we were left there to die."

Iona spat the last part out with venom, her face twisting in anger and hate.

"For the love of money and power." She got a grip on herself, and slouched back into the chair, letting the emotions run rampant through her.

"Then I made some new friends. They all left, got squirreled away, one tripped in front of a wagon, another betrayed my trust in a small way, it just doesn’t end. Why bother?"

Iona slumped again.

Linnet sipped her tea.

"I don’t have the answer to all of life’s mysteries. I can answer the last question though." She put her tea down with a soft clink.

"Everything that truly means something in life is alive. Plants. Pets. Children. Siblings. Friends. Parents. Family. Either your natural family, or your found family. Life, alone, is miserable. Don’t do it. You’re social, friendly, and young. Try, try, and try again. Let people in. Yes, you’ll get hurt. Yes, it’ll be painful. And I promise you, I promise you, yes, it’ll be worth it. Do not cheapen your worth, or the potential wealth in relationships you can gather, by cutting out everything that gives it meaning."

The two sat for the remainder of the time in contemplative silence.

Iona stared at the maw of the great beast, dread filling her body.

This wasn’t a beast she could fight.

This wasn’t a monster she could slay.

This wasn’t a problem she could punch. She couldn’t rip its throat out.

No, Iona was all out of options. There was only one thing she could do.

She stepped forth, through the door to math class.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Comprehensive Education] leveled up! 300 -> 301]

[Name: Iona]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 156950/156950]

[Mana Regen: 114,482]

Stats

[Free Stats: 145]

[Strength: 35,767 +(450,664)]

[Dexterity: 35,766 +(450,652)]

[Vitality: 65,693 +(170,802)]

[Speed: 39,565 +(498,519)]

[Mana: 15,695]

[Mana Regeneration: 42,102]

[Magic Power: 14,494]

[Magic Control: 14,494]

[Class 1: [The Dusk Valkyrie - Celestial: Lv 520]]

[Celestial Affinity: 520]

[New Moon's Dance: 488]

[Weapon Mastery: 475]

[Strength from the Stars: 520]

[Celestial Armaments: 520]

[Strike of the Twin Moons: 30]

[Stellar Body: 520]

[Gaze of the Galaxy: 420]

[Class 2: [Traveling Archer - Ice: Lv 400]]

[Ice Authority: 400]

[Shortbow Skills: 365]

[Blizzard Shot: 360]

[Chilled Mind: 370]

[Trick Shot: 357]

[Ice Arrow Conjuration: 358]

[Glacial Slow: 370]

[Frost Wyvern's Bow: 2]

[Class 3: Paladin of the Moons - Gravity: Lv 55]]

[Gravity Affinity: 55]

[Telekinesis: 55]

[Lunaris's Gaze: 55]

[Lunar Mass: 55]

[Flight of the Valkyries: 55]

[Eclipse Strike: 31]

[Selene's Grace: 6]

[Harmony of the Spheres: 55]

General Skills

[Drawing: 199]

[Valkyries Valor: 520]

[Adaptable: 385]

[Tracking: 265]

[Vow of Iona to Lux: 420]

[Magnetic Charm: 262]

[Comprehensive Education: 301]

[Companion Bond Between Iona and Fenrir: 128]

Other

Blessing of Selene and Lunaris

Chapter 36
School Life IV

A piercing whistle broke through the din of practice, Shirayuki standing in the middle of the field.

"Everyone! Huddle up!" She called out, the words echoing as they got translated.

Spars ended, arrays were canceled, and we all walked, ran, or jogged over to the middle of the field. There were roughly sixty of us on the team, but there were a number of categories.

"Those of you who have been paying attention are aware that the Island is currently on a northern flight path. Unfortunately, this means we’re going to miss the next tournament. This also means we won’t be getting any new members of the School for some time. I’ve talked with the administration, and we’ll be getting back to the southern continent in time for the Gladiator Gauntlet that year."

The ocean was dangerous, and flying over it wasn’t trivial. The island was a bit of an exception, because it was an entire damn island, but individuals were a different matter.

Some groans of dismay met the first announcement, while enthusiastic cheers met the second one. I wanted to roll my eyes. It was just a game, there was no need to get super worked up about it.

"While subject to change, I have the preliminary teams set. In the unrestricted free for all, we have the following: Hendrik, Floris, Huib, Renior, Bras…" Shirayuki continued to list off divisions and names.

I wasn’t surprised that the entirely unrestricted section was populated by high-level Immortals. Even if I was supremely arrogant and believed that I was a better technical fighter than they were, or had more life experience, they could just crush me with pure stats. There wasn’t a single black or purple-robed individual among them.

Those fights would be quite the show.

"For the under 30 division."

I perked up. That was my division!

Ok, technically, I could participate in the under-100, under-1000, and unrestricted divisions, but I was a bit underleveled. Like, I could maybe take one fight in ten against the weakest School team member of the under-100 division.

"Free for all, Astarius, Suldrive, Notelle, Pascal, Elaine, Vikraina, Viscar, Jorgun, Bayonet, Krugnaier. The backups will be…" I pumped my fist as Shirayuki named me. It wasn’t like I was super pumped to fight in more free for alls, but being on the official A-team meant my scholarship was secure.

I looked around at my fellow free-for-all ‘teammates’, when Shirayuki said my name again. My head whipped back as I frantically tried to remember what she’d just said.

"Lastly, for the singles part of the tournament. Elaine, Noziri, Serah, Dha, Yong-Seo, Xenthe, Samuel, Vivian. Backups are Veroah and Tyrevis. I suggest teams meet up and start discussing. Break."

Without another word, Shirayuki turned with a flick of her tails, and walked off the field. With context clues, the fact that she’d done every division in the same order, and the six people converging on me, I was on the team fights as well.

Welp. Being selected to participate in three events was better than one. While participating wasn’t the height of excitement or something I looked forward to, it was something I was going to dominate.

I was going to be good at this. I was going to show them what being a Sentinel of Remus meant, and why we were the best.

From left to right, there were six people, five of whom were black-robed - black workout clothes here - and the sixth was another purple robe.

Impressive!

"I believe introductions are in order." The minotaur’s speech was more refined than I expected, and he was the only other purple-robed individual. "I am Pak Yong-Seo of the Geum Kingdom. If it is permissible, I will take the team leader position as the highest leveled member here."

[Warrior - 531]. He was likely quite a bit stronger than I was, simply due to having time to mature his third class.

He inclined his head slightly towards me, for some reason.

"Pak, Pak… any relation to General Pak?" The other human asked.

The minotaur frowned a hair, then straightened up.

"He is my father, but I am not here to trade on his name. I have grown up around war and fighting. Conflict is in my blood and bones. I have been on the team previously, seen how it was run, and it is why with your acclaim, I will take the position of team leader."

I sighed. Gods damn it all. I should at least make sure he was more competent than I was before ceding the position.

"Large-scale armies, or small-scale team operations?" I asked him.

"What?" He frowned at me.

"Your training and experience. You mentioned a general, growing up around conflict, yada yada, you’ve got the high level. Is your experience with armies and large conflicts, or leading small teams?"

"I have been a member of the army since I was old enough to hold a sword. My earliest lessons were around the strategy table, learning logistics and troop movements."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. DAMNIT!

"Ok, you’re the expert on armies, got it. You’re also an incredible fighter, with decades of experience, and the levels to prove it. That doesn’t translate into small-squad tactics."

"And you’d do much better?" He challenged.

The rest of the team were going back and forth, watching our verbal sparring with interest.

"Maybe, maybe not. My experience and training revolves heavily around either acting as a solo operative, or taking command of a small squad. I don’t have the same decades of experience you do, nor have I ever seen one of these events before. If you believe your experience outweighs mine, I’m happy to let you be the team leader. If someone else believes they have the right knowledge and experience for the job, I’ll support you as the boss." I looked around at that last bit, seeing at least two other members of the team fired up.

"Level is a poor criteria for selecting a leader though. It’s the knowledge, not the power, that matters." I concluded, thinking of Night and his personal philosophy. I could practically hear him now, whispering in about warlords.

"How’d a healer make it onto the combat team anyways?" The human asked me. Hearing my name used as a noun was still weird. She looked the most normal of the lot.

"Why don’t we finish introductions?" The beastkin suggested, bouncing from oversized foot to foot. "I’m Souphis of Ankhelt. Kangaroo beastkin. Fossil-Sand warrior. [Pocket Sand’s] a favorite trick of mine. Blind my enemies, then give them the old one-two-three-four." He kicked with each foot, and punched with each hand on that.

[Warrior - 433]. I had almost 100 levels on him, but I still didn’t want to end up close and personal in a fight.

"Iris of nowhere. Selkie. Ice-Electric sorcery. I specialize in fighting underwater in either form, although I’m not sure how much of that we’ll get."

[Mage - 180]. I gave a side-eye to that level. Either she was running some type of level obfuscation, or she ended up with an insane class quality, letting her punch like she had twice as many levels. Someone who couldn’t hold their own wouldn’t be allowed on the team, and with her low level, rapid growth was a possibility.

It had been ages since I last saw a selkie, although they looked exactly like humans on land. She was a bit taller than me, with frizzy, wild ginger hair that refused to be tamed. There was one hell of a story behind her level and being on the team, and I couldn’t wait to find out more.

"Elaine of Remus. Yes, the name’s Elaine. If the name’s confusing, Sentinel Dawn or Dawn work. Human. Celestial healing, Radiance sorcery. Third class isn’t going to help."

I got a number of looks, but the next person started speaking, taking the attention off of me.

The next person was using an oversized leaf to float gently above the ground, and had distinct velociraptor-like aspects. Mainly in her long fingers that looked like claws, her slitted eyes, and her too-sharp teeth.

"Ling Li of the Blue Luan Paradise Sect. Saurian. I study the dao of leaves."

[Mage - 450]. Strong. Kind of absurd how high level people could get in this day and age, seemingly easily, but… then again, we had self-selected to be the best of the best, concentrated from the entire world around into a single place, then concentrated again into a small team.

With that a flurry of leaves swirled around her.

"Acidic leaves, right?" Souphis leaned away from her.

"A crude, barbaric description of the elegance I am capable of." She sniffed at Souphis.

The next person, well… I was pretty sure there was a person under all that armor. Most of us didn’t use armor in our daily practice, but this guy was wearing his clothes outside of his armor, and I swear I’d seen him walking around with his wizard’s robes over his armor again.

Even his head was fully encased, and he only spoke a single word.

"Pascal." He introduced himself, morphing his helmet a few times. It morphed from a human, to a snarling wolf’s head, biting and snapping as he put on a show.

We waited a few moments for him to say something else, but it never came. [Long-Range Identify] came in handy, showing him as a [Warrior - 420].

"Bartolo. Yellow Jacket. I like hitting things." The devil said, slapping his oversized mace into his palm. "When can we stop talking, and hit things?"

[Warrior - 462].

It was rare to see an Immortal at such a high level at such a young age. As a rule, they seemed to take the ‘slow and steady wins the race’ approach.

This team was fairly heavy on the "people hit things hard" aspect.

We looked at Yong-Seo, who’d spoken up earlier, but didn’t give his elements or anything.

"Yong-Seo. Steam, Brilliance, Gemstones spellsword. Gems aren’t permitted due to their cost, but being down half a class doesn’t matter when it’s the third." He gave me a short nod, and I agreed with him. Simply crossing the 512 milestone and unlocking our third class was a bonus at the tier we were fighting at.

"How’s a healer work in a fight anyways?" Souphis bounced around me as he asked.

"Like a hydra. Annoying, annoying." Bartolo answered.

"How does that work in a tournament setting?" Iris asked.

"A most excellent question." Mormerilhawn, the Black Rose, master of the arena said, having walked over. "And the answer is - it’ll depend on what the judges rule."

"Could you explain more?" Yong-Seo asked.

Mormerilhawn gave him a superior look, like he’d expected the minotaur to ask that, and he was playing a part orchestrated by the tournament shielder.

"Naturally. Elaine Elaine is a healer powerful enough that she is capable of simply negating all damage that occurs to people near her. This is before we consider her considerable personal combat prowess, which all of you could learn from. I will be taking the position that, while Elaine is on the field with you, the team is entitled to a strong shield, at the cost of mana to Elaine on a per-hit basis. I can’t promise success, or that the other judges will agree with me. I am, naturally, biased. Other judges will be advocating their own interesting positions. At the end of the day, we will attempt to mimic the conditions of a true fight as closely as possible. Questions?"

There were none, but I was getting a different set of appraising looks from my teammates.

"That shield won’t apply for the individual portion of the teamfights, will it?" Iris asked.

The Black Rose shook his head.

"It will not."

"Hang on, the individual portion of the teamfights?" I asked.

"I vote for Yong-Seo to be the team leader." Souphis immediately said. Nearly everyone immediately agreed with his declaration.

I mentally shrugged. Ok, cool, the team had reached a consensus.

"Alright, fine with me, now explain?"

Yong-Seo gave me a measuring look, then relented and explained.

"There are two different team tournaments, and the same team is expected to fight in both. The first is the standard seven versus seven teamfight. Last person standing on the stage wins the round for their team. The second is a single fight portion. Each team sends up their representative, and winner stays on, while the losing team sends up their next combatant. Last person standing wins."

Everyone was nodding along to his explanation.

He closed his eyes and sighed, relaxing his shoulders.

"We should discuss your experience. It is… possible… that your command over small squad tactics is superior to mine, and an important lesson for a [General] is to put the right person into the right position."

I grinned at him.

"That’s all I was asking!"

I thought I might get along with the team.

I was walking back to the dorms, thinking about the team and the teamfights.

I wasn’t going to rush my biomancy to be in time for the event. That was a good way to get myself horribly killed. Plus, it was only the first event! Presumably I’d be in more than one tournament. I was not going to let some freak accident kick me out of the School early. No way.

I knocked on a pillar of Arcanite to ward off the bad luck I’d invoked by thinking about it.

The fun part about the event was I wouldn’t need to change my [Persistent Casting] to only cover my teammates, but I’d still get the full benefit of the skill. I might not get the [Wheel of Sun and Moon] distance penalty applied either, nor a knowledge penalty.

Hmmm.

It seemed unlikely that Mormerilhawn would make that many oversights on his skill.

I was thinking about my [Persistent Casting] as I saw something drop in the flying obstacle course, a brightly-colored light blazing.

It was like something clicked, and I realized I’d been an idiot. Or if not an idiot, unthinking.

[Scintillating Ascent] was my only [Butterfly Mystic] skill that wasn’t capped. While I tried to get in a number of hours flying, I only had so many hours in a day, and I wasn’t in high-stakes, high-challenge situations.

But there was another half to leveling skills up. There was the fast route, which I had taken for nearly everything I’d done, and there was the slow route, which I’d rarely explored.

I had originally eyed [Persistent Casting] to shield myself in my sleep, to protect myself from the elements, bugs, spiders, and attacks. A critical skill when I was operating alone.

Something I hadn’t considered was using it to fly. I hadn’t been in a situation where I could properly check the synergy between all of my skills when I upgraded [Scintillating Ascent], and when I’d finally been able to regenerate more mana than I spent while flying.

Specifically, I could use [Persistent Casting] to hover while I slept. The experience would be terrible, but six hours every night? That would add up.

I chuckled as I realized I’d reached max nerd. I was now literally training in my sleep.

Still, it was for a good cause. Flying!

With a side-dish of making myself prettier every time I leveled the skill up.

What else could I use with [Persistent Casting] that I wasn’t thinking of?

"Hey Book-A-Saurus! I’m going to the gym, you should come!"

I looked up from my book to see a grinning Iona.

"Book-A-Saurus?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah! You always have your nose in a book. You’re a total Book-A-Saurus!"

I opened my mouth to protest, saw the piles of books in front of me - school, to-read, finished, did not finish - and closed my mouth.

"Ok, but then you’re a Sex-O-Saurus." I tried to shoot back.

Iona posed, flexing her muscles.

"Awww yes, I’m a total Tyrannasaurus Sex!"

"Just don’t let it get to your head!"

"Too late!" She flexed some more. "Gym?"

I looked at my books, and back at Iona. Doing things with friends was good, and being in true peak physical shape would help with biomancy. That didn’t happen overnight, although with my skills and abilities I could try to make it happen overnight. Plus, if I just spent all my time reading books, what was the point of being at the School? I remembered my thinking on opportunities.

Plus, Iona had been trying to get me to the gym for ages now.

"Yeah, sure!"

A hop, skip, and a jump, and we were at the gym.

"What floor do we want to try?" Iona asked me after we got changed into exercise clothes. Nobody expected us to run in witch robes.

"You’ll have to explain more." I drily answered.

"Each floor’s got a different gravity multiplier. Gives me a real challenge. Normal on the ground floor, and it doubles every floor until it’s 124x normal."

"Don’t you mean 128?"

"MOVING ON!" Iona blushed. "What floor?"

"Eh, let’s do 4x." If I had known the gym was loaded with magic I would’ve come here earlier! Benefits of trying new things! Cool new magic! I wondered if the ceiling was tall enough for me to practice flying under an increased gravity load.

We climbed the stairs and made it to the third floor. Yellow and black caution signs were plastered along the hallway, and as we walked down towards the door, I could feel my limbs getting heavier. My breath started getting short, and it felt like someone was sitting on my chest. Nevermind that I’d been getting an hour of intense exercise in daily, this was a whole new set of challenges for my body.

I shot a jealous look at Iona. She wasn’t struggling at all. I suppose that’s why she wanted to go to the gym regularly.

We made it to the room. A track circled the room, with a few people diligently making laps. The ceiling was too low to easily fly, which was a shame. A couple of punching bags were gamely keeping their stuffing as people beat on them, while balls of metal with grips were mostly neatly racked. A few had been carelessly left scattered near the storage, and there was an open area where three people were working on stretching, pushups, and lunges respectively. A pair of benches completed the look.

Iona tsked at the sight.

"Lazy bums don’t clean up after themselves." She muttered, heading over to the weights and putting them away.

I looked around, and figured I’d get started with a few laps to warm up. I kept an eye on Iona, curious what someone with her strength would do to keep fit.

It wasn’t like we had a bunch of boulders around, and she couldn’t pull a Brawling and lift them.

I caught her glancing at me now and then, and it made me feel nice. I looked good and I knew it.

I moved over to the weights, finding some that I could pick up with some effort, but not at my max.

Time for the most boring activity. Picking up heavy things, and putting them down again.

Zzzzzz. I spent some time thinking about biomancy and magic. Getting a stable configuration was one thing, but could I get a slightly unstable configuration, letting vitality plug any holes? Alternatively, I’d need to check that any modifications I made wouldn’t fall apart under increased or decreased gravity.

Which got me thinking about air pressure and water pressure. Making myself more resilient to the crushing depths of the ocean or the vacuum of space was surprisingly easy. Chitin, or an exoskeleton, would solve that issue practically without trying.

Now, solving the issue and looking good, or hell, human?

That was more challenging.

The only entertainment here was watching Iona, and as she grabbed some ludicrously-sized weights and headed over to the bench, I saw an escape from picking up heavy weights and putting them down again.

"Hey, need someone to spot you?"

"Yeah sure!"

I got in position as Iona started lifting, and bit my lower lip.

Gods.

What a view. Sweat trickling over rippling muscles as Iona’s whole body focused on the task and activity. A thing of beauty, honed and polished. A perfect anatomy model.

Yum.

My thinking on biomancy, [Persistent Casting], and Marcelle’s advice about modifications led me to the firing range.

I nicked my finger briefly, the blade passing through skin without visibly disturbing it. Good, my [Persistent Casting] on my healing was still working.

It was time to set a second [Persistent Casting].

The lymphatic system was one of the only full-body systems that I could mess with, and if things went horribly wrong, I wouldn’t die. Immediately. I’d have enough time to seek medical attention. Everything I knew said that wouldn’t happen, but what I was doing was risky. It was best to check every risk and mitigate them.

It was why I was messing with my lymphatic system, and not my circulatory or nervous system. Those going wrong would swiftly kill me, while I could probably limp along for a few days or even weeks with goop replacing my lymphatic system. Long enough to make it to the nearby hospital and ask for help.

What Marcelle had said about changing extremities granting stronger classes that worked on extremities resonated with me. If I changed all the different parts of the body, I’d get higher quality biomancy classes when I eventually pulled the trigger.

Add in [Persistent Casting], and the near-limitless mana at the firing range, and I had a formula for experience. I was going to set two of my skills against each other. [Dance with the Heavens] to heal myself, and [Dabble] to try and modify myself. [Dabble] would make a change, and [Dance] would revert it.

My magic power stat was how much mana I could use in a single second, in a single skill. [Dabble] being weaker than [Dance] meant my changes were instantly reverted, which meant the skill could turn around and immediately burn more mana, up until I hit my magic power cap. With 23,000 magic power, that meant I was spending 23,000 points of mana per second on [Dabble], and significantly less, maybe a quarter of that or so, on [Dance].

[Dabble] was horribly inefficient, and [Oath] was only applying to [Dance], because I knew I was just grinding and training my skills with [Dabble]. When I applied biomancy ‘for real’, [Oath] would kick in.

I’d never use the skill to make actual significant biomantic changes. It only made small, incomplete changes, no matter how well I crafted my image, a downside of how incredibly broad it was as a skill. It did, however, count as an achievement and as System experience.

Breathing fast, I focused on [Dabble], working my way through the human lymphatic system, and thinking of the changes needed to make it an elf lymphatic system. With my image in mind, I tied it off with [Persistent Casting], put my hand on one of the arcanite pillars in the firing range, and started to draw mana to replace my rapidly-dropping mana.

[*ding!* [Celestial Affinity] leveled up! 488 ->489]

IT WORKED!!

Chapter 37
School Life V

"Well deary," Linnet sipped her steaming cup of tea, closing her eyes as she did so. I mimicked her.

The tea was relaxing. I’d be suspicious of some sort of skill or drug in play, if I wasn’t constantly running healing through myself, purging any and all poisons. The definition of a poison versus a medicine was entirely academic to my skill, it cleansed everything. Unless this was a potion, which my healing wasn’t geared towards handling. If Linnet was a master [Alchemist] on top of everything else, I’d be impressed!

No, it was just a most excellent cup of tea, combined with an environment conducive towards relaxing.

And Linnet herself!

"I don’t have all of life’s answers. I wish I did! I wish I could just snap my fingers, and make all your troubles go away." The grandmotherly woman snapped her fingers in demonstration.

"But, sadly, I can’t." She gave a melancholy sigh, sipping her tea again.

I was content to just sit and listen. She was usually the listener, a willing receptacle as I poured all of my fears and worries into. Now she wanted to speak, and it was only polite to listen to her sage advice.

"What I can do is make a few observations. You’re a remarkable woman. Driven. Passionate."

I felt like I was getting slightly buttered up, but I didn’t mind. Almost everyone liked hearing good things about themselves.

"From everything you’ve told me, you’ve been striving towards a goal. Had purpose in life, either as a Ranger, or a Sentinel. Had injustices you couldn’t stomach, foes you couldn’t defeat. Now you’re here, and I haven’t heard of a single big goal or ambition from you."

I opened my mouth to protest, to mention my biomancy project, and learning wizardry, then closed it. Linnet just looked at me over the lip of her cup as she took another sip.

Compared to ‘Fight the Formorians’ or ‘Pass Ranger Academy OR ELSE’, ‘Operation: The Improved Elaine’ was small peanuts. I did have ‘Try and find Auri’s relatives’ on my list now, but I saw Linnet’s point.

Finding Night was also on my list, but I barely knew where to begin. The Exterreri Empire was where most vampires lived, and it was my only lead, but that was roughly on par with ‘lots of humans live in Rolland. Let me find one particular one with no idea where they lived, did, or anything.’

I’d managed to secure the basics again. Food, water, shelter, safety. I’d pulled myself out of the pit, but I was on the lost side.

My hopes and dreams had been shattered. There wasn’t much sense in simply surviving. I needed to either pick up the pieces and try to glue together new hopes and dreams, or brush away the old ones, and think of new ones. An aimlessness, a lack of direction, wasn’t helping me.

"It seems I’ve given you quite a lot to think about!" Linnet gently broke through my musings. "Cookie?"

"Oh, yes please." I happily accepted her offering, feeling more ragged than usual.

The one downside I hadn’t properly considered when running Operation: Better Biomancy Classes was how hungry I could get when using that much magic.

"If you’d like to think about it here, you’re welcome to sit and think. If you want to wander somewhere else that’s better, I won’t take offense." Linnet put down her cup of tea, and starting knitting again, her needles going click-clack soothingly in the background.

It took me practically no time at all to make my decision. Warm, quiet, tea and cookies, vs leaving and having one of a dozen other demands start taking up my time?

I was staying here.

Ok!

Life goals!

Bluntly, right now I didn’t have any besides "be happy", but the question was how did I get that sense of fulfillment needed to be happy?

Healing people was the easy answer. It was why I’d picked up the class in the first place. I got a deep sense of fulfillment and satisfaction from doing so.

‘Heal People’ was a solid goal, but a little too ephemeral in a sense. It was part of who I was. Wherever I ended up, whatever else I was doing, I was also healing people. Usually. The School had a poor ratio of medics to patients, and I wasn’t quite able to get all the healing I wanted.

Things like the Formorian war though…?

Hmmm. I wonder what life as a battlefield medic would be like. My brief reading of what the current world was like suggested that conflict was omnipresent, from skirmishes between Tang Sects, to Rolland nobles squabbling with each other or their neighbors, to Vollomond and Lithos raids, Omospondia succession, all the way to the Han civil war, and that was disregarding Immortal wars, which tended to leave great big blanks in history.

I was an Immortal, although a low-key one. I needed to find out more about what one of those wars looked like, because I was going to stay alive long enough to end up in one.

There was more to life than just serving others though. Bouncing around from one battlefield to the next, hoping that I kept my Deception Ring the entire time and otherwise managed to find the basics in life, might not be the best way to live. What else did I want?

…Friends. Family.

I let the loss wash over me, the sharp, ragged edges of pain dulling with time and acceptance. It would never go away, but it was no longer bleeding me raw every time I thought of the word.

I had Auri, who filled a massive hole in my heart, but the idea of fucking off to a mountain cabin and spending life as a hermit with just the two of us didn’t appeal. A romantic partner might be nice, and being able to regularly visit Artemis, Julius, Amber, Iona, and a few more friends sounded ideal.

Hang on, Iona?

It only took a second of thinking before I nodded to myself.

Definitely Iona. She was a friend, no question about it, and I’d be upset if she wasn’t around. I didn’t have enough friends, or an easy enough time making them, to casually lose one.

Friends, family, a job. How about some pleasures in life? A nice little mango grove, and a huge library, filled with books. Books for pleasure, books for magic and wizardry. Books about the world.

Ok. A strong start, but none of those were long, long term things.

My thoughts and feelings would probably evolve as time went on, but was there a cause I could dedicate my life towards? A measurable goal to strive towards. Something to make things better.

I didn’t believe my powers meant I had an obligation towards others. With great power came great power, nothing more, nothing less. It was up to the individual what they wanted to do with that power. Some did nothing with it. Some used it poorly. Some believed they had a great responsibility towards others.

I had a more nuanced view.

I did what I wanted with my power. I was strongly inclined to help people with it, but I wasn’t obligated to. Outside of my own [Oath], of course. I had the ability to change people’s lives with a flicker of thought, and there was no reason for me not to. If I walked through a city? Yeah, sure, why not blast a healing aura around me? It made life better for everyone.

Ok! Back to goals!

Healing-related goals were easy, but also endless. No matter how many people I saved, they’d die one day. No matter how much I pushed back Black Crow, he’d claim his victim eventually, and they just never stopped coming. ‘Heal people’ was a poor goal in that respect, especially as it was already one of my ‘how to be happy’ aspects.

Counting how many people I healed though?

Hmmm. Why not? I could celebrate at big milestones. I’d need to sit down and meditate over my life at some point to get an initial number, or maybe Librarian could tell me during a class-up - ‘people healed’ sounded like an achievement that the System knew - and I could just update the number from there.

It wasn’t like I was preventing wars, so that was out. Measuring who won a war, or if I swayed a war, sounded like a bad path to take.

Ok, injuries were somewhat out. What about disease?

Yeah. YEAH! Diseases were a good thing to tackle! I could try to eradicate a disease! Each one that got wiped out was one less way for people to die, and would have a lasting impact!

Linnet lightly coughed.

"Unfortunately, we’re reaching an end to our time here. I do hope you’ll swing by next week."

I smiled at the elderly woman, getting up from my chair.

"See you then!"

I walked out with a spring in my step, a new goal to work towards.

How did I eradicate a disease?

"Mathosaurus! I brought gifts!" Iona tossed me a pair of mangos as she sat down next to me, dropping a pile of books.

"More like bribes." I wasn’t complaining! Tasty, tasty mangos.

"Brrpt? Brrrpt??" Auri flew over with a sugar cookie, asking for me to ‘trade’ with her. I happily exchanged one of my mangos for her cookie.

Not exactly a fair trade, but eh. Auri was involved. The cookie wasn’t bad!

"Right, now that the mangosaurus is properly satiated, maybe you can help me with this?" Iona pointed to the set of problems she had. I raised an eyebrow at them.

"Why are there letters in my numbers??" The Valkyrie complained.

I looked at the mango. I looked at Iona. Welp. Time to pay the piper!

"Ok, pretend there’s a bunch of Valkyries."

"Alright, I’m following."

"But you don’t know how many."

"Wait, how would I not know how many there are?"

I sighed.

Iona was trying. I believed she was giving it her best shot.

Iona and math just did not mix.

"To this point, we have been discussing wizardry as it applies to immediate casting. You want a spell? Cast it now. Today, we will begin discussing methods of storing a spell for later use."

I took notes, idly thinking that Introduction to Talismans hadn’t been a requirement for this class, and that talismans were a textbook example of ‘storing a spell for later’. Enchantments also seemed to fall in that group, although there were a number of subdivisions.

"There are as many ways to store skills as there are stars in the sky." Lothar explained, the glass chimes in his antlers gently swaying. Made me wonder if he stored spells in them. "The most famous methods are gems and wands, although there are reasonable arguments that a gem-stored skill is not a proper wizardry spell. Bah. The effect is the same. Some methods allow for the spell to be precharged, a most useful trick. Most do not. Any method that allows for arcanite to be embedded in or near the spellform can be precharged."

He paused as my quill flew over my paper, taking notes.

"There is a great variety in spell storage methods, and this overview is by no means exhaustive. Classical enchantments in swords, spears, shields, helmets, rings, necklaces, and the like are the most common method most people will encounter. Please note that enchantments inscribed inside a piece of jewelry are distinct from the jewelry itself being twisted into the proper shape, which is further distinct from jewelry containing skills."

I paused at that, practically feeling my mind expand at the implications. It wasn’t just making the runes into metal, I could make the metal shape into runes. A subtle distinction, but an interesting one.

"Talismans and spell scrolls are another example, and there is the ever classic spellbook. A spellbook tends to have an advantage over a scroll in that arcanite can be part of the spine and the cover, although it is harder to transport, and losing the book loses all of the spells inside, compared to a scroll which bears loss or destruction more easily."

A student raised their hand, and Lothar acknowledged them.

"Can’t a spell scroll have arcanite in the center?"

Lothar nodded.

"Correct. But each spell scroll requires their own source, versus a spellbook where one source can power the spell you want. Any other questions?"

There were none, and he moved on.

"Embroidery is another classic. Who here is studying to be a [Tailor-Enchanter]?" Lothar asked, and a dozen hands in the lecture hall of nearly 100 went up.

"A most useful craft, always in demand." He rumbled.

"Juxe is a wizardry language around knots. It tends to lack both depth and flexibility, but is strong in its narrow confined and predefined spells."

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Runic Knotting]. Would you like to replace a Class Skill with [Runic Knotting]?]

Heck no. I was perfectly content with [Runic Scribing], although I did want to upgrade the skill. Just needed to put in the repetitions with it, then talk with Lothar to find out how I could make the skill better.

"It is excellent for sailors and ropes, or for people with long hair. Braiding hair into the appropriate spell, then pulling to release is a classic, and difficult to interfere with. Yarns, weaves, and other similar methods can be used to cast Juxe. I even knew a [Spaghetti Wizard] once, who made it a habit of eating his spells once he was done with them."

I laughed along with the class at Lothar’s anecdote.

I almost did an about-face with [Runic Knotting], but no. It didn’t fit me, and the language clearly had catches. And loops!

"Tattoos, and other methods to carve spells into the body. I strongly recommend against this. Statues. Nippon-Koku is famous for their origami constructs, although that is another language. Crystals. Spiderwebs. Marbles made of arcanite. Paintings. Dreamcatchers. Nail paintings. Leaves. Trees, grown into the proper pattern. Indeed, the entire city of Ithil is rumored to be one gigantic mandala, the streets themselves painting the pathways of power."

The tip of my quill skipped wildly over my notes, ink drops spraying over my carefully written notes at that. An entire city was a mandala!?

The larger the runes, the more power could be channeled through them. In theory.

In practice, there were rapidly diminishing returns. Asura herself used mandalas that weren’t too much larger than she was, instead having opted to cast more mandalas and spells over casting bigger ones.

Just how much power could a city-wide runic array channel!? And what would it do!?

I added "See the world" to my list of goals.

"These are just a few of the methods I know. Any creative endeavor that lasts for more than a moment can be used to create and store spells, although you may need to become a [Runesmith] yourself to get the spells you want into the medium you’d like. That is a topic for another day. Now…"

I stared at my Biomancy homework, the words not changing no matter how long I looked at them.

The ornithosuchus has the strongest innate immune system, while gnomes have the most robust adaptive immune system. How can the two be merged in an elvenoid (Pick one)? Ignore physical barriers such as skin, eyelids, mucus membranes, and the like.

The question had layers and layers of complexity, and I was surrounded by crumbled-up failed attempts, having put my quill to parchment a dozen times, only to realize an issue with my logic halfway through, and throwing the entire thing out.

There were numerous issues.

First was producing both types of immune systems. My current solution was to evenly swap off different bones between gnome bones and ornithosuchus bones. Fortunately for this assignment, I could simply "handwave" the different modifications that each bone would need to properly fit inside a human, otherwise I’d be writing an extra three papers on how each bone needed to get changed. I also didn’t need to tackle structural issues from half the body being one type of bone, and the other half another, or tendons, ligaments, and a whole host of other issues.

No, I "only" had to deal with the immune system, and even there my ‘production’ method wasn’t ideal.

Fortunately, the innate immune system didn’t rely heavily on the spleen, while the adaptive did. A gnome spleen was the easiest part of the problem, but even then I suspected I’d have issues.

I started to run into problems with the lymphatic system. Each creature had a different way of "recognizing" what was needed, and I was getting a headache with that. Making it accept both gnome and ornithosuchus outputs was a challenge.

Then there was getting the adaptive system a proper challenge. The innate immune system of the ornithosuchus was just too good! Bloody nothing survived it! The adaptive immune system never got a chance to identify problems, then start producing antibodies to combat it! It would just sit there, twiddling its thumbs as the innate immune system did all the work, and if the innate system ever got overwhelmed, the adaptive system would have literally never seen it before in its life! It would never have worked, and the whole point of the adaptive system was it got stronger the more diseases it was exposed to!

I hadn’t even gotten to the thymus or complement system, nor the difficulties of integrating reptile biology into mammalian. There was also the issue of autoimmune disorders, and teaching the immune system that while it was in a strange new body, that this body was correct, and not to attack it. Or any of the other strange things floating in my body. It just had to attack the right strange things in my body.

Screwing up the immune system, like anything else, was a short path to an exceptionally painful death. At least if I screwed up my nerves, I’d die quickly, perhaps without even noticing.

I groaned again at the seeming impossibility of the question.

I was tempted to write a cheeky answer.

Just use the elven immune system.

They didn’t have the best adaptive, or the best innate immune system. They had exactly the right mix to properly train and use both.

I knew one question for homework had been a trap.

It was never too early to start thinking about my third class, and my previous wonderings on my life goals had me reflecting on the classes again.

[The Mother of Modern Medicine] I wasn’t going to take, instead waiting for [The Dawn Sentinel] to class up. I’d take a more healing-focused class then. [Paragon of Patience] was right out.

[Lady of the Dance] was an option, the pure stats appealing. I did enjoy dancing. I had fond memories of Night teaching me how to ‘properly’ dance, teaching fundamental rules of dance that transcended time and fashion.

Plus, the skills had to be something.

Wizardry classes were also on the menu. Wizardry was a blast, and I didn’t see myself putting it down anytime soon. I did have the option of evolving [Butterfly Mystic] into a wizardry class, or at least keeping the skills.

If I kept wizardry in my second class, my third class became awkward. With enough time and prep work, I could mimic most effects, giving me a full range of cool skills to try. It made taking a class like [Jack of All Trades] less attractive since I could already do all that with wizardry.

Somewhat.

Poorly.

But doable!

With that in mind, I put an eye towards my third class, wondering what classes would offer me something that wizardry couldn’t.

[World Traveler] sprang to mind, and I did recently make it a goal of mine to see the world. To travel and explore, to learn. [The Wanderer] was a similar class, but I was an Immortal. I had enough time to see not only the entirety of this world, but all the worlds.

Speaking of goals, [Bookwyrm] and [Snapdragon] completed the ‘trifecta’ so to speak of ‘things I liked and didn’t have a class for.’ [Bookwyrm] was the ultimate in reading classes, while [Snapdragon] was unbeatable when it came to growing mangos.

And other food!

It was a cold fact of war that civilization tended to break down, and famine was endemic. All the power in the world couldn’t save me if there was no food, and I starved to death. The Big Book of Classes had mentioned how a [Farmer] was the cornerstone of civilization, the breadbasket that made everything possible.

I liked eating food more than growing food, but the class was interesting. Nature had also shown just how powerful a similar class could be in a fight.

[Phoenix Immolator] was also nuts, and the idea of being able to take a purple combat class to start was appealing. I’d have to talk with Auri about it.

The last class that attracted me was [Hoard Thief]. I wasn’t terribly enticed by the ‘steal to level up’ aspect of it, but I’d been around illusions long enough to properly respect their power. Going invisible. Making it look like I was somewhere I wasn’t. Displaying and communicating ideas. And that was just the start! The ability to manipulate someone else’s reality couldn’t be underestimated. I’d only be limited by my imagination. [Arcane Trickster] was another possibility, trading power for faster leveling. It could be a tradeoff I liked. A level 400 [Arcane Trickster] was better than being a level 50 [Hoard Thief].

I needed to check what mirages could be mimicked with wizardry, and how easy they were. From what little I knew, living, breathing illusions that seemed like they were another human were terrifyingly complicated, but maybe I was missing something.

I wish I could genuinely put [The Wanderer] on my list, but it was the sad reality that [World Traveler] outclassed it. Sure, [The Wanderer] had a number of useful skills. It had distinct advantages against [World Traveler]. Putting them all on the scale, and weighing the two against each other, [World Traveler] won out. It cut me to the core to admit it, the one purple class I had properly earned under my own power, but I wasn’t one to bury my head in the sand and deny reality.

My mind jumped to wizardry and [Butterfly Mystic], and I realized I was being dumb.

If I took [Stormrider], I could happily ditch [Scintillating Ascent], and get an extra skill slot to help my wizardry. I loved flying, and being able to just spread my wings and soar was so second nature at this point it hadn’t made my list of wants and desires.

It was like saying I liked to breathe air. Innate to the point of being unsaid.

I quickly sketched out a tier list of classes, and how attractive I found them.

[Bookwyrm], [Snapdragon], and [World Traveler] all furthered the goals I’d set for myself.

[Lady of the Dance] was tied with [Asura’s Legacy] and [Nebula Starweaver]. Wizardry or power, each of them dramatically expanding my repertoire without going particularly deep into one thing.

[Stormrider] was in the last tier, along with [Hoard Thief], and [Arcane Trickster]. Classes that were interesting and powerful, that resonated with me but didn’t quite click. I wasn’t discarding them, but life would need to change before they climbed the list.

Progress!

Now, I should stop procrastinating, and finish the damn homework!

Chapter 38
School Life VI

New quarter, new classes! More anatomy classes, cantrips in wizardry, cellular biology, and a class dedicated to useful general skills, and how to get them.

Iona had blessedly passed her remedial math class, but was gamely tackling a second one, reasoning that she needed enough math to work out logistics. I was proud of her!

Comparative Monster Anatomy was a small class, compared to the huge lectures of the introductory biomancy courses. A number of people had gotten weeded out, or took different courses, and we’d gone from a large lecture hall, to a cozier classroom. Instead of rows of desks, we had medium-sized tables, with enough chairs to sit three at a table.

Naturally, most of the students grabbed one chair on either end, leaving the middle open so everyone would have more elbow room.

Just as naturally, the early students grabbed seats as far back in the room as possible, slowly filling in towards the front.

[*brrrring!* Hope we’re sitting down in our chair for Monster Anatomy!]

There were seats further back, but I took the desk front and center of the room, boldly sitting down in the middle seat.

It was a bit of a gamble, but one that I felt comfortable making. If there were several other eager beavers, I could end up stuck at one of the one three-person tables. However, if there weren’t, I’d be at one of the only single-person tables, able to spread my notes around as much as I’d like.

I spread my notes and books out on the desk, hoping to dissuade anyone from sitting next to me. I mentally cursed as two ogres entered the door, and made a beeline for my desk. They each grabbed one of the chairs next to me and sat down as I hurriedly gathered my papers.

The two of them practically squashed me between them, ogres being one of the larger humanoids.

Why me!?

"Hey! You’re Elaine, right?" The one on the left asked me. I eyed him suspiciously, but saw no reason not to answer. Maybe they were just as eager about the class as I was?

"Yes." I answered, then remembered I should probably ask their name. "Who are you?"

The ogre gave me a toothy grin.

"Raith, no w." He offered his hand.

I still smelled a rat. I didn’t know what was wrong here, but I smelled a rat.

There wasn’t anything I could point to though, so I took his hand and shook it.

"Pleased to meet you." The other front tables each had two people on either end, and at this point, if I wanted to move, I’d just be crammed between two other people instead. It’d be insanely rude to Raith as well, and I couldn’t articulate a reason why I should move.

The professor walked through the door, and I dropped my hand, eager to focus on the lessons, and not my unwelcome tablemates.

Hopefully it’d just be one class.

"Can we go stargazing tonight? Together?" Iona’s voice was shaky, like the foundation of her world had been rocked. She was staring at me intently, and I was a bit of a social idiot, but I wasn’t that much of an idiot. She clearly needed me, and the stargazing was just an excuse.

Of course I’d be there for my friend.

"Yeah! Working on upgrading [Celestial Affinity]?" I asked her.

She gave me a stiff nod.

"Exactly. That. Yeah. And a few other things." She added onto the end.

It wasn’t the time or the place to chuckle, but boy did I like Iona’s inability to lie. She was always transparent. There were never secrets, or even little white lies.

"The observatory?" I asked.

She looked thoughtful a moment, and shook her head.

"The lake? Fewer people there."

"Ok! Meet you there at sunset?"

She gave me a weak grin.

"Thanks Elaine. I couldn’t ask for a better friend."

I flushed at that.

"Auri, wanna come to the lake with us later?" I asked my pyromaniacal friend.

"Brrrpt? BRRPT brrpt brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt BRPT!" Auri landed on my desk, starting to roll over in ‘hysterical’ laughter at my suggestion.

I rolled my eyes.

"Would you rather I not invite you places?"

"BRRPT!" Auri shot up, wings thrumming as she zipped up to eye-level with me. "Brrrrrrrrrrpt!"

I folded my arms.

"That’s what I thought."

I met Iona down by the lake as the sun was setting.

Fun that I could figure out roughly where in the world we were, just by the combination of how far away sunset was from the class time ending, and from how warm it was compared to what season it should be.

It was warm, and the sunset was at the same time as classes ending.

Right now, we were on the opposite side of the world from Rolland, and somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

"Your time of day." I remarked to Iona, tilting my head at the setting sun.

She gave a jerky nod, then grinned.

"Have I ever told you how I got that title?" She asked me. The Dusk Valkyrie started to walk along the edges of the lake, navigating along the dirt trail that weaved between reeds, bushes, and trees.

"Nope! How’d you get that name?"

"Well, it was right after Goblin’s Death." She said, naming the famous incident that had seen hundreds of thousands of goblins die, as well as most of the Valkyrie Order. Last I knew it was a sensitive subject for Iona, but she was bringing it up on her own.

Iona’s therapist was doing good work.

"Sigrun titles us all personally, and she was as exhausted as the rest of us. I watched one of my friends get named Goblin Slayer, and the second one Goblin Smasher."

I tried to stop the laugh, I really did. It came out as a barking chuckle instead.

"Oh no!" I said.

Iona chuckled as well.

"Oh yes. I didn’t want to get named ‘Goblin Musher’, and I just knew that was my fate."

"How’d you end up with a badass name instead?"

"Redirected Sigrun. Pointed out that my class was Celestial, which got her thinking about the stars and moons. It would’ve worked better if it wasn’t broad daylight!"

I laughed at the punchline, Iona dipping off the trail and into some bushes.

"Here’s a good spot!" Iona declared, stripping off her witch’s outfit. She neatly folded her clothes up, putting them under a bush. She then backed up a few steps, took a running start, and leapt into the lake, soaring dozens of feet before cannonballing into the lake.

I idly shielded myself and Iona’s clothes from the epic spray, then stripped down to my own underwear and waded in.

The lake sharply but consistently dropped in depth, making it abundantly clear that it had been artificially carved out of the landscaping to provide a water reservoir, and general place for training water skills. All the time in the sun had left it warm, and I started to swim around as Iona did her best shark impression.

It was like she’d been born to swim. In the water, under the water, leaping like a fish, Iona was in her element.

"The mighty akhult strikes!" Iona declared a moment before she dove down next to me.

"Wait!" I cried out as her hand gripped my ankle.

Knowing how futile it’d be, I took a deep breath as Iona dunked me.

A moment later we bobbed back up, Iona grinning at me as she flipped her hair out of her face.

"Rawr!" She growled at me.

I squeezed my cheeks, getting her dead-on with a spray of water from my mouth.

The horseplay continued as the sun set, the full moons rising over the edge of the island like the world’s larger voyeur.

We’d both burned a ton of energy, and we relaxed by the side of the lake. Iona had her arms on the bank, propping herself up, and I was leaning on her shoulder.

Much easier on the neck than the rocks behind me.

"Iona?" I asked her.

"Mmmm?"

"What was wrong earlier?"

The Valkyrie was silent for a long moment, deep in thought.

"The gods." She replied, her tone heavy.

I started up.

"You? The gods? You’re a [Paladin]!" I wasn’t being terribly clear, but Iona seemed to get what I was saying.

"I know." Her words hung heavily. "I found out the great secret today. So great it’s taught in one of the basic religion classes." I was sensing sarcasm.

I gave her a moment to expand, but she didn’t say anything.

Elaine-prompt away!

"What’s that?"

"The gods, all of them. They’re all people."

That… that didn’t seem like a massive, Pallos-shattering revelation.

"Ok, yeah? Am I missing something?"

"I… I always thought they were something special. I believed they were special. Different. Divine. Perfect beings that I could devote my life to. I knew it. But… they’re not. They’re just people."

I was missing something, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t particularly religious. Oh, I knew the gods existed, that they were up there and causing me grief, but that didn’t translate into worshiping them or chatting with them.

"Tell me more about that?" I asked her.

Iona leaned her head all the way back.

"Are you familiar with the level cap?" She asked.

"4096, the way I’ve heard it. That’s still the cap, right?" I asked.

Iona lifted one hand out of the water, shaking it back and forth.

"Kind of. You can argue 4095 is the true cap, or 4096. Hit level 4096, and boom! Become a goddess."

The knowledge crashed over me, shaking my worldview.

The cap wasn’t the end, or maybe, in a sense, it was. Explained why there weren’t dozens of capped Immortals lording over the entire world. Once someone hit that level, poof! They were gone.

I continued thinking about it in silence, letting Iona wrap her arm around me. I huddled up, she was warm.

I frowned as a few things didn’t quite make sense to me. I twisted to lock eyes with the moons, challenging them.

I respected Lun’Kat’s strength. Her ability to annihilate me if she wished. But I’d spent too much time afraid of dragons. Flinching when their name was said.

"Two questions, two things that don’t make sense. One, I’ve heard Creation described to me. The gods predated Pallos. They made Pallos. How could they have come from Pallos, if they created Pallos?" I tilted my head up towards Iona.

Iona looked at me, our nose an inch apart. Awareness of just how close, and just how naked we were, flooded my mind, lending a blush to my face.

With some effort, I banished the thoughts.

"That’s… well, sure, but gods being people who hit the level cap are a thing. I was paying attention in class, and I doubt they were making things up." Iona reproached me.

I gave my head a tiny shake.

"Sorry. I wasn’t trying to say they’re wrong, just that there’s more to it. I think."

Iona looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Yeah. It was only the first class." She said.

"Second are the moons." I said.

"The moons?!" Iona jolted up, and with the way we were entangled, I naturally got dunked again.

I came up sputtering, shaking my hair to get the water out of it. I artfully aimed my splashes to get the most on Iona.

"Yes, the moons." I grumped at her, pointing to the objects in question. "You’re aware they’re a mirage, right? There’s an illusion over them?"

Iona looked up at the moons, then closed her eyes. I reclaimed my warm spot next to her. Her lips moved soundlessly as she prayed.

She claimed that she regularly chatted with her goddesses, and that they talked back, but I wasn’t quite sure how literal that was. Plenty of people claimed divinities talked to them, when there was just a great echoing silence.

Her face morphed through a whole spectrum of emotions, some too subtle for me to properly read, others glaringly obvious. Dismay. Shock. Disbelief. Acceptance. Anger.

"Damn lizard." She muttered after opening her eyes. My own eyes flew open at that.

Okay then. Iona did have a direct line to two goddesses.

"Anyways, I was able to see her level once. It was high. Stupidly high. The highest I’ve ever seen. If 4096 had people ascending, how is she still around?"

And because I couldn’t control my curiosity.

"Why don’t you ask your goddesses about the divine stuff?"

"I did. They told me it was for me to come to terms with on my own." Iona muttered as she looked away.

Elaine to the rescue!

"Well! I can tell you they’ve been around longer than I have. And does their humble backgrounds change anything about them? Have they ever implied they’d always been around? Are there any stories about how the gods were created? Is anything fundamentally different now, than it was yesterday?"

Iona frowned, deep in thought. I did the hardest thing possible, something that all my instincts screamed at me not to do.

I let her be. I didn’t say anything, letting her stew in her own thoughts.

I did make sure to stay in the warm spot though. I was providing moral support, yup.

I did some thinking of my own on the topic. 4096 was the cap? The end?

Well, no. It wasn’t death, and it sounded like I’d survive. Just… changed. Different. It’d take me so many thousands of years to get there, I had plenty of time to enjoy life before that stage. On one hand, it was kind of presumptuous to assume I’d make it, but the other assumption was dying horribly in some ditch, and honestly, I rather liked planning on not dying in a ditch.

Iona’s revelation was like a ray of light.

I wasn’t going to die in a ditch.

I WASN’T GOING TO DIE IN A DITCH!

Ever since I’d witnessed Lun’Kat’s devastation on the wood dwarves, ever since I sprinted into the fight to try and rescue the giant, I’d known a fundamental truth about the world.

One day, I would die trying to save someone else’s life. As an Immortal, there was no other option. Disease couldn’t kill me, and it’d take one hell of an accident to bump me off. The world was a brutal and violent place, and with old age removed from the equation, a violent death was the only thing I had to look forward to. An elegant dance with Black Crow, and one day the music would stop playing.

Now, I had an alternative.

"Thank you Elaine." Iona said. "You’re right."

"Awww yes. What was I right about this time?"

Iona gave a half-hearted swat at my head.

"That it doesn’t matter. They’re the same people yesterday, as they are today. Nothing has changed. My understanding of them is simply more complete."

She bowed her head and closed her eyes again.

All the hair on the back of my neck went up, and goosebumps went down my arm as I felt a mantle of pure power press down on us. Two different hands appeared on Iona’s shoulders, and I didn’t dare look past them to see who they were connected to.

I knew.

"Iona." They whispered in unison, vanishing once again.

My hair started behaving itself again, and I shuddered. My thoughts were entirely swept aside as Iona flexed, drawing me into a hug.

"Elaine! You’re the best! Thank you again! Hey, wanna come back to my place and have sex?" Iona’s excitement and gratitude was infectious, and I was feeling pleased as punch until the last line.

"Buh." I responded, not sure how to politely decline, while also keeping our friendship intact and non-awkward.

Telling someone to take a hike was roughly a twice-weekly activity.

"Ah, whoops, sorry, got too excited there. I apologize, that’s on me." Iona dropped her arm, scooting away from me a hair to get a bit of distance.

I thought about what I was going to say for a moment, then said fuck it, and took a plunge. I was curious, and Iona had brought the subject up first. No better time to communicate about it, and while I was no great shakes socially, communication was key. I refused to lose a friend because I didn’t open my mouth and talk about things.

"Why?" I asked, shuffling a little closer to Iona. Some sort of ‘no no I still like you I promise’ gesture or something like that.

"Why what?"

"Why the casual sex? Why not a relationship with anyone?"

Iona silently pondered over the lake. I wiggled my foot under the water, watching the ripples form on the surface.

"I like sex. The idea of a relationship is alright, but why not have sex? It’s a ton of fun. How about you?"

Ooof. I hadn’t been ready for my own questions to get turned back on me. I spent a moment thinking about it.

"Sex is fine, but I don’t see the point in casual sex. It’s no fun if it’s not in a relationship."

We whittled away the hours discussing relationships as the moons crossed overhead, glaring disapprovingly at us. I almost wanted to shoot them the finger, but Iona might’ve misinterpreted it. We discussed the nature of relationships, and the different types. We discussed sex, and Iona had a ton of insights on the subject, although my takes on consent weren’t things she’d consciously thought about before.

Iona was warm, and I huddled up near her again as we talked, resting my head on her shoulder. Sure, I could warm the water around me with Radiance, but this was more fun.

"We should get some sleep." I rubbed my eyes, letting the tiredness stay instead of banishing it with [Sunrise]. Great skill, terrible for wanting to sleep in a few minutes.

"Yeah." Iona got up, water cascading off her body like waterfalls off a mountain. She offered me a hand, and I took it, letting her pull me up.

"Hey, heal-o-saurus." She continued to hold my hand. I didn’t try to free it.

"Yeah?"

"I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow, panic, and decide this has all been a big mistake. But do you want to try a shortish relationship with me? Us graduating from the School puts us on a bit of a time limit, but during that time, want to try?"

My heart was thudding in my chest as Iona spoke, and I didn’t know what to say.

Well, no. I had some ideas what to say.

"I know we just talked about it, but you’re cool with monogamy, right?" I checked.

Iona nodded, her throat working. Was… she nervous!? Cool, calm, collected Iona?

"And you know it might be some time before I want to have sex. You’re cool waiting?"

"Yes." Her eyes were huge.

I thought about it a moment longer, and couldn’t think of any other pressing issues. I couldn’t think of anything to say either.

Instead, I lifted myself up on my toes, and kissed Iona.

She kissed me back, and we held hands all the way back to our dorm.

Chapter 39
School Life VII

I woke up far before any of my alarms went up, my eyes flying open as I bolted upright. Giddiness bubbled up inside of me.

I had a girlfriend!

I HAD A GIRLFRIEND!

"Auri! Auri! Pssst, Auri!"

Auri poked her head out of her nest, and loudly scolded me.

"Brrpt! BRPT!!!!!" She complained, then stuck her head back under her wing.

"Brrrrrrrrrrrrrpt… BRPT! Brrrrrrrrrrrrpt… BRPT!" She pretended to ‘snore’, not fooling anyone.

The message was crystal clear though. She thought it was too early to be up.

"Sorry." I whispered to the little phoenix, her flaming feathers acting as a soft nightlight.

I had nothing to do here, and I was just too excited! Energy flowed through me like lightning!

I had a girlfriend! And she was right next to me! Blasted walls!

I wasn’t going to wake her up though, that was just rude. Maybe she wouldn’t like me if I interrupted her sleep. Maybe…

Maybe I was overthinking things, and I should just have a nice shower. Hadn’t had one of those in ages, Auri flame-baths being my regular replacement.

I spent way too much time in the shower, imagining how nice it’d be to have company. Almost afraid to ask. I didn’t want to rush things too much.

I facepalmed as I realized I didn’t have a towel. There had never been any need, not with Auri around. I had Iona on the brain.

[*brrrrring!* Wake up! Time for class!]

[*brrrrring!* No for real.]

[*brrrrring!* Future me, I swear if you’re not up by now… we made these alarms for a reason!]

My alarms went off, marking my usual start to the day. Perfect!

I skipped across the hall, back to my room, and grinned at Auri.

"Hey sleepyhead! It’s drying time!"

"Brrrpt? BRRRPT!" Auri cried out in alarm as she saw me soaked with water, most foul of substances.

An eruption of flames later, a hurried packing of my bags and books - I had gotten home so late last night I hadn’t prepacked like usual - and I was out the door again.

"Cuteosaurus!" Iona jumped up from the sofa she’d been sitting on, rushing over to me. "You’re finally up!"

She wrapped one arm around my waist, and I dropped my bag to wrap my hands around her neck. We pulled each other in for a deep kiss, which only ended when I needed to swat Iona’s hand trailing down to my butt.

"Sadly not the time." My eyes were dancing with mischief, and I couldn’t keep a stupid grin off my face.

"Or the place. Shift please?" Reinhard asked.

I flushed with embarrassment, realizing we were blocking the hallway. Iona lifted me up, and took a few steps back into the living room, sinking down on a sofa with me. Reinhard made a disapproving noise as she left, but I only had eyes for Iona.

I cuddled up with her for a few moments, enjoying the snuggles.

"Brrrpt?" A question came from behind me. A growl answered, and I craned my neck to see what was going on.

Auri was on top of Fenrir’s head, the two of them looking expectantly at us.

"We need to get moving." I reluctantly told Iona. I wanted to spend the entire day cuddling with Iona, sitting in her lap with her strong arms around me, getting fed kisses and mangos.

Unfortunately, life called. I was responsible for more than just myself, although Auri was perfectly capable of getting food and going to school on her own. At the same time, skipping classes was a bad path to start down.

"Sure I can’t persuade you to stay here all day?" Iona was looking at me with undisguised longing and desire.

I sighed, and reached up for one last kiss.

"Sorry. School calls."

Iona helped me up, then rested her head on my shoulder.

"Lunch?" She half-whispered into my ear, and I felt tingles running through my body.

"Oh yes." I confirmed. We quickly agreed on a time and a place, and Iona said she wanted to surprise me with something fun.

"Bye studentosaurus! Have fun!" She waved as I left with a spring in my step.

Classes dragged on foreeeeeeeeever. Even my usual favorites seemed to just drag-on, and I found myself doodling little hearts in my notes while waiting for everyone else to catch up on writing their notes on what the professor just said.

Never before had I cursed my improved perception, accelerated thoughts, and speed. I had never been aware of just how much time I had before.

Finally, finally, the last class ended, and I was packed and out the door before the professor had finished dismissing us.

Iona met me at the base of the tower, and gods.

That grin. The sparkle of amusement. The…

I went over to kiss her, only to get foiled by my nemesis.

Our overly large hats.

"Why hello there." I said, not really knowing what else to say. I broke apart, cursing the hats, belatedly remembering that I could just take them off, and Iona snagged my hand with hers. I entwined my fingers, loving the calloused feel of her hands.

Iona winked at me, and hefted a basket on her other arm.

"Do studyosauruses eat, or can they survive off of stuffy lectures?" She asked me.

"Oh yeah. Forget studyosaurus, right now I’m a real dinosaur. A biteosaurus." I chomped in the air near Iona, showing off how hungry I was.

I was hungry for more than just food though.

"Come on! Let’s go!" Iona pulled me along, deeper into the central park that the eight main magic towers surrounded.

The park didn’t have everything. That was for the greenhouse, arboretum, and Museum of All things. It did have a relaxing atmosphere, and Iona clearly had a Plan.

We emerged in a field of blooming flowers, tucked away in a glade.

"What do you think?" Iona asked as she unfolded a blanket. I grabbed it as she tossed it onto the field.

"I think if we crush the flowers, nobody else will get to enjoy them!" I protested.

Iona tilted her head at me, then her eyes lit up.

"Ah! Not a worry here! Watch!" She bent over and picked a flower. A new one immediately started to grow in its place. Slowly, not instantly, but it was making progress visible to the naked eye.

Magic at work. Magic letting me roll around in a field of flowers, entirely guilt-free.

I was no [Botanist] - I’d dropped the class! - but I suspected that the flowers didn’t normally all live in the same climate, and have the same flowering time. It was just all too convenient.

Yay for magic! Making romantic moments!

I flipped my hat off, and took a dive into the flowers, happily rolling around and smelling them. Nature’s perfume.

I rolled over one way, then rolled back the other. In the flashes of sight I got, I saw Iona had finished setting up a blanket and the basket. I kept rolling, making small adjustments until my head ended up in Iona’s lap. I wrapped one arm around her, letting the other sprawl out.

I had a goofy grin on my face as I stared up at Iona.

"Grape?" She offered.

I had the tiniest disappointment that she wasn’t offering me mango, but that was hard to feed someone else with. I could just imagine it. Iona trying to cram a whole mango into my mouth, as I tried to unhinge my jaw to accommodate her.

… possibly something to add to the biomancy list. Did unhingable jaws have a drawback…?

Didn’t stop me from willingly opening my mouth, letting Iona feed me grapes.

We continued to eat, and I started thinking. I needed to do something myself!

"Ok, trade!" I declared, sitting up. We quickly kissed again - and a second one for luck, and a third one just because. Then Iona plonked her head in my lap. I dug my fingers into her hair, starting to massage her scalp.

"Mmmm, oh yeah, right there, that’s the spot." Iona squirmed slightly under my ministrations, and I let a mad grin stick to my face.

Gods, wasn’t life just perfect? Iona and I in a field of flowers, the sun at a perfect temperature, some nice shade, a light breeze, and the giddy insanity of a new relationship.

[*Brrrrrrrrrring!* Lunch is over! Time for class!]

My shoulders slumped as I sighed.

"Class?" Iona asked without opening an eye.

"Class." I confirmed. "I have an idea for after dinner!"

Iona grinned at me.

"I can’t wait to see what surpriseosaurus has in store!"

The afternoon started off being a tormented repeat of the morning, then I realized if I crammed in my studying during the small breaks during the lesson, I’d need to study less in the evening.

Our dinner schedules didn’t align in the evening, which was fine. We didn’t need to spend every waking moment together. I spent some time with Auri, who completely approved of me finally ‘making a nest’ with Iona.

"Brrrpt?"
"Of course I’m not going to spend every waking moment with her! You’re still important to me!"

"Brrrpt!"

"Yes, the most important, bestest bird EVER."

"BRRPT!" Auri protested.

"Creature under the sun." I corrected myself.

"Brrpt." Auri nodded, everything right with the world.

"Pssst, want to know a secret?" I whispered to the bird.

"Brrrpt!" Auri was big on secrets.

"There’s a little grove in the park filled with regrowing flowers."

Auri’s eyes started shining.

"Brrrrrrpt….." She was imagining terrible things. "Brrpt?"

I pulled a face.

"Bridget… might not approve." I allowed.

"Brrrpt…"

I nodded in agreement. Maturity sucked sometimes.

"Brrrpt!" Auri blazed out the door, with an equivalent of ‘see you later’ thrown over her shoulder.

I brought my notes with me to wait for Iona outside the building of her last class. I wanted to get as much study time as possible, while also getting to the fun as quickly as I could.

The work was engrossing though, and I found myself absorbed in my studies, drawing out several new rune sets again and again, getting a feel and practice for them.

"What does that one do?" Iona asked as she wrapped her arms around me, putting her head on my shoulder.

My undignified jump was weighed down by the blonde.

"Iona! You made it!"

"I wasn’t going to run off the island." She teased me. "Not with the prettyosaurus waiting for me."

"One moment." I brushed Iona’s arms off, freeing my quill. "I need to finish this rune."

"What’s it do?" She sat next to me, peering over my shoulder.

"By itself, nothing. But, when linked with these other runes, it…" I gave Iona the rundown of the rune I was finishing up, finding it good practice in a dozen ways. Not only did bouncing my understanding of the runes off of another person help solidify how it worked for me, but drawing runes while heavily distracted was solid experience. It was unlikely I’d always be under ideal conditions when making runes.

"Alright! All done! Let’s go!" I packed up and grabbed Iona’s hand, dragging her to the destination I had in mind.

"Where are we heading to?" She asked.

"It’s a surprise! But we need to hurry." I glanced at the setting sun, mentally noting that we’d probably make it.

We wound through the campus, and across the practice fields.

All the way to the edge of the island.

We bypassed a dozen warning signs, until we got to the sharp edge of the island. It simply ended, one moment soft clover, the next nothingness. I peeked over the edge, unable to tell how far away from the water we were from so high up.

We weren’t above the clouds though, which was nice.

I sat down on the edge, my feet dangling off. Iona joined me.

One of the twelve smaller islands that orbited the main island passed - the one that looked like it was nothing but a large lake - and then we had a clear view.

I leaned my head on her shoulder, and we watched the sunset over the ocean, glistening like a blue marble.

Chapter 40
Minor Interlude - Fenrir
School Life VIII

It was a dark and stormy night.

The tempest raged outside, thunder rattling the blinds as Fenrir gripped another shot glass of cheap whisky with his mouth, tipping it back. The liquor trickled down his throat as he crunched the glass, adding a sharp sting to the burn. The stench of smoke hung heavy in his room, clouding the air.

Business was bad. There was no stack of unpaid rent notices on a desk, no final warning that the arcanite would be cut off, but Fenrir Stormrider, Private Wyvern hadn’t gotten a client in months.

Maybe it was time to close up shop. Maybe the world had moved past the need for a private wyvern. Time passed, eras changed, and Fenrir hadn’t changed with them.

It certainly had nothing to do with his office being in a dorm, nor with only a half-dozen people who had access.

The door to his office slammed open at the same time as a crack of lightning, and Fenrir was momentarily blinded by the light.

A dame stood in his door. Pretty, with burning wings and an attitude to match. Usually all her feathers were in order, but right now, she was a flaming mess, practically sobbing into her mango juice. A little birdie, here to dish.

"Brrrrpt?"

She had a case. It stank, but a case was a case, and it wasn’t like Fenrir had clients beating down the door. Her cookies were as tasty as anyone’s.

Someone had thrown up in the dorm hallway, and Auri wanted Fenrir to get to the bottom of who’d done it, and if anyone was going to get ill from it. Not the most glamorous of cases, but the glamorous ones never came to him. Those went to the watch, all pretty and shiny. No, the dark, dirty underside of the School was where Fenrir lurked.

Fenrir put on his hat, and left his office. He took an experimental sniff of the air.

Ah yes. Students. Iona and Elaine had crammed two beds into one room, moving the desk and chair to another. They were enjoying themselves, finding small comfort in each other’s arms as the world fell apart. Skye and Reinhard were out, attempting to better themselves in spite of the bleak prospects that awaited them all off the island.

Fenrir roamed the dingy hallways of the School dorms, walking on his wings and legs, tail lashing behind him. He could fly now, but the hallways were closing in on him, becoming too narrow to easily fly in. The rain could be heard even from here, the gale winds wild and fierce. His nose went to the ground, sniffing and tracing back to the scene of the crime.

It didn’t take him long to find it. Someone had spewed chunks all over the entrance to the dorm, students stepping over it with barely a look of disgust. Typical. Too small for the fuzz to handle, and nobody would pay them off to investigate.

Fenrir gingerly sniffed the… contents… trying to work out who it could’ve been by.

The stench of half-digested booze made him reel, but it should be expected at the School. Nobody could face the cruel realities of life sober.

There were meats and grains, and some brown lumpy things mixed in with the rest.

"Fenrir! No! Bad wyvern!" Iona yelled from behind him.

It had been a setup! The dame had framed Fenrir for the crime! She’d brought the heat onto him. Fenrir didn’t know why, but that was unimportant at this moment. The important part was to escape, before the hired goon could practice for her chiropractic degree.

Fenrir fled through the door, spreading his wings into the storm and letting the gale lift him up. The goon vanished into the mist below.

Fenrir chewed over the pieces of the puzzle, as lightning struck him time and time again.

Who wanted to throw up in the entrance of the dorms? Who benefited from such a senseless act? There was always someone who benefited, gems making a wonderful clink as they changed hands.

Why frame Fenrir? Well, that was an easy one. Only Fenrir’s landlady would miss him when he was gone, and even then the only thing she’d miss was an eviction lawsuit.

There were no answers to be found up here in the clouds. Fenrir dove down, looking for one of the seedy bars that School students were known to set up. Illicit, but a few greased palms had the cops looking the other way.

The place didn’t even have a name.

Fenrir prowled his way to the bar, only for the bouncer to block his way.

"Dude, we’ve told you, you’re not allowed in."

Fenrir growled at the bouncer, making an elegant argument why he should be permitted. It was different this time.

"No." The bouncer crossed his arms.

Fenrir narrowed his eyes, but left.

They were in on it as well.

How deep did this conspiracy run? Who else was in on it?

What was it all for?

Well, the perpetrator always returned to the scene of the crime, and that was where Fenrir was heading to next. The heat should be off by now.

Fenrir fought against the winds, landing by his dorm.

Gone!

The cleaners had come! All evidence of the crime had been removed! Whatever dastardly deed they had wanted to accomplish had been done! Fenrir was too late to stop them!

It was time to admit defeat. It was time to face the music, and call in the big guns.

Head hung low, Fenrir dragged himself back to his office.

"Hey Fenrir, you ok? Auri explained it wasn’t you, I’m not mad." Iona asked him.

Fenrir hesitated, then curled up on Iona’s lap. It was a good spot, with good scratches.

More hands joined in as Elaine sat down next to Iona, the brunette’s hands joining with the blonde’s to get in all the right spots.

Fenrir settled in, growling contentedly. He sniffed the air, Auri’s baking, and his pay, smelling heavenly, mixed in with just the slightest hint of old booze and meat.

His eyes flew open, and he shook off his adoring fans. Stretching his wings, he hop-glided to the hallway, put his nose to the floor, and started to trace the scent.

It took him three steps to end at a door. A door he knew all too well.

Varuna!

The unicorn had done it!

It didn’t answer the why, but the redheaded dame hadn’t asked for a why. She’d just wanted a who. Speaking of, the dame was here now, with the sweet, sweet sound of cookies rattling around.

"Brrrpt?"

"Varuna." Fenrir growled back, barely managing to force the word out.

"BRrrrrpt!"

Fenrir couldn’t believe it either, but who knew what motivated the unicorn.

The case was closed. It wasn’t as closed as he’d like it, but it was the rare case that stitched itself up all neat and tidy. A few loose ends wouldn’t hurt anyone, and more importantly, he’d gotten paid. Paid in the only currency that mattered. Tasty, tasty cookies.

Another successful day for Fenrir Stormrider, Private Wyvern.

Chapter 41
School Life IX

A fine film of sweat coated me as I readjusted my robes.

"We should not have done that." I told Iona.

She gave me one of her roguish grins, slipping her hand into mine, entwining her fingers with mine. She squeezed me, and I squeezed her back.

"But we did!"

I rolled my eyes and pulled her away from the changing room.

"Hang on!" Iona leaned back, snagging an outfit. "I liked this one!"

I rolled my eyes again, but waited a moment.

"Okay! Where to next, nibble-o-saurus?"

"Nibble-o-saurus! That was you!" I protested in outrage.

"Really? Cause I got this bruise right on my-"

"FINE!" I was burning up, then my brain cells realigned and clicked.

"Wait. I healed you of those!"

"Brrrpt? Brrpt BRPT!" Auri asked what we were doing, but then completely disregarded it to flap a flier in front of us.

Madam Maven’s Marvelous Millinery

For your custom-made women’s hats!

"Brrrpt?" Auri plaintively asked.

Iona and I traded looks, practically reading each other’s mind.

"Yeah! Let’s get you a hat!" Iona said, taking off. We left the store, spilling out into the larger mall complex that was the School’s one-stop place for everything that could be bought or sold.

Although, hmmm. This might be the perfect chance to get away, and do some shopping of my own. Iona’s birthday was coming up, and I wanted to make it a stunning event that she’d remember forever. Iona and Auri getting her a hat could be my chance to slip away, and do just that.

The arching hallways between stores allowed for throngs of students to move like schools of fishes, lurching from one store wanting their precious arcanite coins to the next. The entire area was indoors, and while people weren’t supposed to fly here, it was too easy for moving between levels, and, well. It was a bunch of students. Following dumb rules wasn’t high on the list. We were on the second level, able to look down, when Iona stopped, tightening her hand around mine. She squeezed so hard it was almost painful.

"Skinwalker." She breathed, staring down below.

"You’re sure!?" I asked, mostly out of disbelief and not out of any doubt of Iona’s abilities. She could directly see the System, and couldn’t lie. Short of a clever illusionist casting a mirage at exactly the right time and place, Iona’s analysis was correct.

"Yes."

I felt Iona’s weight shift, as her ever-present Mallium started to flow from her back, where she normally kept it, down her arms and legs, encasing her in armor while still looking like a witch from the outside.

"Who? And I know goblins are allowed to be here, is it possible that she’s just a student, trying to lay low?"

Iona hesitated, and pointed to another black hat that was wandering through the crowds.

"Him." She said. "And maybe. The level doesn’t match the robes. 652."

I checked the level.

[Laborer - 130]

I frowned at that. Even I had to wear purple robes, although I could disguise my level. My life would be easier with a hidden level. Fewer dirty looks from mortals.

"He’s using a disguise. Only showing up as 130. What do you want to do?" I had limited experience with skinwalkers, having only briefly encountered them in my zoology class. They were difficult to classify. All shapeshifters were. Iona had fought them before.

"Auri. Get some guards to meet us here. Elaine, let's politely ask him to wait for a moment."

"Brrpt!" Auri practically saluted, then zipped off so quickly she left her hat behind. A conjured [Mage Hand] appeared, grabbed the hat, and zoomed off after Auri.

Iona let go of my hand, and jumped off the balcony. Nobody blinked an eye, and I followed a moment later.

As I fell, I quickly put together Iona’s plan. Have Auri get some guards, and confirm for Iona that the skinwalker was allowed. Stick with the skinwalker, to stop them from slipping away and vanishing. Ask them politely to hang around, and if the guards confirmed everything was fine, nobody would be any wiser. Their secret would be kept.

Iona nearly landed on some poor student who wasn’t paying attention, swerving in mid-air to gracefully land in an open spot, barely bending her knees to absorb the impact. I had to be a little flashier to avoid the same student, and while it was tempting to land on Iona’s shoulders like a trapeze artist, I didn’t think she’d appreciate the goofing off.

It wasn’t the time or the place.

Iona pushed her way through the crowd, following the black hat she’d marked. Her own purple robes helped split the crowd, although one jackass tried to shoulder her as she passed.

He landed on his ass as Iona kept moving, seemingly not noticing him at all. Her boots started to leave light marks on the floor - she was increasing her weight.

"Should I try to clear the crowd?" I asked Iona, uneasily looking at the sheer number of people here. We were in a mall, filled with civilians. The amount of potential collateral damage was making me nervous.

"Would you believe a student shouting to evacuate, and that there might be a monster here?" Iona asked me doubtfully, never turning to look back.

"... Good point. I’d just assume they’d been drinking a little too much, and call the guards. Either way, problem solved."

"And Auri’s already on that." Iona finished.

She reached out and clasped her hand on the wizard’s shoulder.

People moved around us, as Iona was like a rock in the river.

Iona trilled something in a language I’d never heard before. The woman - man? - eagerly looked up at Iona, trilling back, then looking around and gesturing.

Iona shook her head and trilled back, and the skinwalker looked scared, shrinking down into himself and shaking her - his? - head.

Iona’s helmet flowed onto her head, leaving just her jaw exposed, as her gloves and boots snapped on. The characteristic wings of Order Valkyrie popped up, completing the look. I put up my shield, gently expanding it to give us space as students protested us taking up the entire hall.

"HELP! HEEEELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!" The skinwalker started screaming. A few students and at least one professor started moving towards us, but Iona’s frown deepened, and I saw her grip on the skinwalker’s shoulder tighten.

She took a deep breath and bellowed, her words overpowering the frail woman’s screaming.

"Yee Naldlooshii here is a skinwalker! Clear out!"

Quite a lot of things happened quickly, my improved thinking speed from my companion bond with Auri coming in handy.

The witch shedded, her skin peeling in half right down the middle. The skin slumped to the ground as a polar bear erupted from the inside, ripping apart the flimsy witch’s robes he’d been wearing.

Iona had maintained her grip as the skinwalker shot up in size, already punching his head with her spike-knuckled gauntlets.

People started to scream and run away, but they were all so slow. I could move faster in a vat of jello.

The skinwalker wasted no time, paws larger than my head wrapping around Iona, trapping her arms and trying to crush her in a bear hug. I snapped my wings open, repositioning myself around Iona to blast Radiance through the skinwalker’s eyes.

I wasn’t going to try and dig through all the layers of a polar bear’s fur and fat just to hit the intestines. Not when there were eyes to boil and pop, brains to vaporize.

Iona opened her jaw wide, sinking her teeth into the skinwalker’s neck. She ripped her head away, spitting out a bloody chunk as arterial spray baptized the mall.

The screaming went up a few notches.

The skinwalker released his grip on Iona, the warrior kicking off his chest and doing a backflip to gain distance. As she tumbled through the air, the skinwalker neatly punched out with his paw, skewering Iona through the chest with his seven-inch claws. With a roar, he flung her to the side. The valkyrie was thrown so fast she blurred.

I had the presence of mind to drop my shield in the general direction she was thrown. There was no way my shield could take that sort of hit, I’d just blow a ton of mana for it to break anyways. I flew on an intercept course, arriving a moment after Iona left an imprint in the wall.

Massive internal trauma, dozens of broken bones, punctured lungs, perforated stomach, collapsed airways, skull fractured in a dozen places, and if I wasn’t mistaken, an entire chamber of her heart had gotten obliterated. I ignored her body being one massive bruise, that was a given, and it didn’t really matter that more of her blood was outside of her than inside.

That could’ve been bad without armor.

I tapped Iona, bringing her back to full health right as the bear roared at us, a wave of nasty red liquid crashing over us.

Iona shoved me out of the way, her armor twisting under her will as she moved to a full-head helmet, a weapon forming in her hand. A nice thing about Mallium was Iona could have no joints, her armor eggshell smooth all around. No holes for liquids to penetrate. I didn’t get to see what weapon she was forming before the supernaturally fast wave crashed over her.

The skinwalker had no thoughts about mitigating collateral damage, and the deadly acid splashed everywhere. I had a clear shot though, and I could multitask. I spared a quick thought to summon a beam of Radiance, again going for my classic ‘burn the brain through the eye socket’ move, while summoning my [Mantle of the Stars] along the weaker side of the chemical wave. I didn’t think I could stop the stronger side of the acid as it splashed and sprayed through the mall’s throughway. Instead, I launched myself over it, flying through the fine mist.

My clothes were eaten, burning away. Any acid that hit my skin sizzled and smoked, but I’d never dropped my [Persistent Casting]. I healed as quickly as my flesh melted.

I was going to be insufferable the next time Marcelle and I had one of our meetings.

My Radiance beam cleared straight through the skinwalker’s head, burning a black hole in the stone behind him.

No notification though.

Behind me, like a vengeful goddess, Iona exploded through the acid, wielding a glaive. The polar bear’s skin split in half and sloughed off, a triceratops emerging from the melting skin.

He lowered his horns and charged Iona. I snapped my head forward, away from the fight, and focused on the casualties.

The smart ones, the quick ones, had gotten out of the way enough. Most of them were still in the hall, running away - they weren’t that quick - but had dodged the bulk of the splash damage. I was left with the weak, low-leveled ones who’d gotten the worst of it. My aura, [Cosmic Presence], was always on and working. It was hard to point to any one thing my aura did, any one person it saved for sure, but it was putting in subtle, powerful work, a hundred tiny parts of the body already healing before I even touched anyone, reducing the cost of my healing.

It would be optimal if I could simply collapse the ceiling, letting sunlight stream in, and hit everyone with [Wheel of Sun and Moon] at once. I didn’t know how easily I could blast through the ceiling, how much mana it would take, what angle the sun was currently at, which parts of the mall would be lit up, the current cloud cover situation, or if falling debris would kill anyone, adding to the mess.

Hell, blasting the ceiling to pieces and killing someone with falling masonry was likely a major [Oath] violation.

No, I was fast enough to hit the victims before anyone died from their current injuries.

The first victim had gotten drenched. Her face was melting, and the stubs of her arms waved ineffectively as her hips were eaten by the acid. I imagined her legs were the patch of slightly discolored acid near her.

I ignored the screaming. Everyone was screaming.

Triage time.

I healed her up, which only did so much good as she was still sitting in a pool of acid. Her screams took on a different pitch as nerves were regrown, only to start life in agony.

Eh. She’d live, and right now that was my primary concern. I couldn’t guarantee that everyone would live, not without me putting forth my best effort. She’d gone from triage red, to triage green.

I darted from patient to victim, healing the worst of them while ignoring the ‘moderately’ injured ones. By my definition.

A crash came from behind, and I spared a moment’s attention to see what was happening. The triceratops had charged Iona, but my girlfriend dodged the attack, opening up triple bloody lines against his flank with a single strike of her glaive.

Totally a skill going on there.

One human roared and tried to grab me, I assumed to force me to heal him. He wasn’t that badly hurt, just a mild spray across his body. Getting tangled up could do worse things for me and everyone than simply ignoring him.

I jabbed out a punch at the grabby person, landing square on his face and breaking his nose. Critically, it also pushed him away from me, letting me continue to dart to the people I thought needed the attention now.

Sadly, it also healed him, rewarding the bad behavior.

A half-dozen people later, and I was diving back into the fray. The triceratops split, having turned into some tiny, high-speed flier. Iona’s glaive was terribly unsuited to hitting a zippy creature like that, and it flat-out went through her shoulder. Iona staggered as her arm went limp, but the skinwalker was now in range.

And Radiance was perfect for hitting high-speed targets. As long as I could see them, and they were close enough, I could hit them.

Instead of going for the eyes, my Radiance attack was large enough to entirely annihilate the skinwalker, and I tried to simply vaporize it whole. There was no coming back from getting turned to dust, right?

Sadly, that wasn’t the case, the monster almost instantly splitting off and shedding its latest skin. A little horned baby fell to the acid-coated ground, and started to wail. I reached Iona, flipping around so I’d land on her feet-first. My knees bent as I connected, pulsing my healing magic through her, and I springboarded off, giving her room to keep fighting.

I was hesitating to laser a baby to death. With my luck, the guards would come right as that happened and would jump to the natural conclusion.

Iona didn’t hesitate, splitting the infant in half with a single cleave of her weapon. The baby split again, shedding its skin as a monstrous allosaurus erupted from the remains, roaring and chomping down, attempting to bite Iona in half.

A green vine snaked through the mall so quickly, it was like it teleported into existence. A sharp crack followed it, and what glass there was in the mall blew inwards, turning into a deadly hail of razor-sharp pieces.

Greenery exploded all over the mall. A tree grew to support the second floor, which was threatening to fall over. Leaves covered the acidic pools, wilting as they absorbed and neutralized it. Bushes exploded out of windows, growing fast enough to catch all of the glass shards before they rained down on people cowering in stores. Fine vines, smaller than the lines on my skin, wrapped around me. They were entirely unyielding, and held me in place. I could only move my eyes. I saw that Iona, the skinwalker, and a few students who were trying to flee had been similarly restrained. A flower, larger than a person, bloomed at the end.

Out of the flower stepped a sprightly, elderly woman in white robes. My blood ran cold as I threw an [Identify] her way.

[Artisan - 3584].

"Begone." My heart skipped a beat as she spoke in Creation with an achingly familiar accent, and the skinwalker simply dissolved into a flurry of flower petals, a breeze coming from nowhere and scattering the monster to the winds.

[*ding!* Your party has slain a [With it, He Goes On All Fours (Forest - 652), Like a Tide He Comes, Scouring the Land (Acid - 611), Where it Skitters, Hunger Follows (Void - 577)]!]

The lady looked around with crossed arms, one finger tapping unhappily on her robes as she slowly turned. A dozen flowers sprouted from her feet, blooming with an explosion of pollen, and a breeze scattered the spores throughout the building.

She took one more look around, and stepped back into her flower. The vine vanished so quickly I heard the air crack behind it.

Iona and I looked at each other, right as Auri trumpeted her arrival with the guards.

"What the fuck." I said.

A second Classer popped in through the ceiling, parts of the roof melting to let him in. He was wearing yellow robes, and Iona glanced up at him, her helmet melting away.

With a wave, all the remaining Acid laying around the mall zipped up to him, forming a neat ball floating in front of the elf. With a second gesture, the Acid vanished.

The guards were still moving through as Iona waved the elf down. She started babbling in High Elvish.

"You were at the Wobby pass! With the goblins! You saved us, I never got a chance to say thank you, I’ve never forgotten that day, I-"

I didn’t get a chance to hear the rest as the guards ushered me away.

The guards took control of the situation, and Iona and I both needed to spend a lot of time explaining ourselves to the guards. A letter, written on fresh bark and delivered by a blooming flower, took care of most of the issues, and everything from there was variations of "what were you thinking" and "leave it to the professionals" and other such nonsense.

I tended to like guards, but these ones were getting on my nerves. I missed being able to flash my badge and make the pesky problems go away.

I did get some levels though!

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Butterfly Mystic] has leveled up to level 369->370! +8 Strength, +8 Dexterity, +70 Speed, +70 Vitality, +70 Mana, +70 Mana Regen, +70 Magic power, +70 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Free Stat for being Human per level! +1 Strength, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]

[*ding!* [Celestial Affinity] leveled up! 512 -> 513]

FINALLY capped the skill again.

[*ding!* [Cosmic Presence] leveled up! 318 -> 319]

I still believed in the skill, it just hadn’t gotten the right time and place to shine. Of course the moment I took the skill and left a warzone I wouldn’t find myself in one again.

[*ding!* [Center of the Universe] leveled up! 454 -> 457]

Thank the System for my anti-pain skill, I would’ve been a screaming mess with all the little acid droplets.

[*ding!* [Mantle of the Stars] leveled up! 473 -> 474]

Save a mall full of people, get one level. Yaaaaaay.

[*ding!* [Spotless] leveled up! 32 -> 70]

That was more like it, but [Spotless] was a shit [Pretty] substitute. I wasn’t happy with it. I was strongly leaning towards dumping the skill entirely, and trying again with something new. The only thing holding me back was I wanted to work out my third class first, to see what holes or synergies I might want to cover.

[*ding!* [Persistent Casting] leveled up! 350 -> 352]

Figuring out how to upgrade my skill was on my todo list. I knew there were classes around metaskills like [Persistent Casting], but other classes had taken priority. I didn’t want to burn out again.

After chatting with the guards for what felt like an eternity, I was finally free to go.

"Between you and me." The guardswoman who’d been interrogating me leaned forward across the table. "Thank you. You saved more lives than I thought was possible for an incident like this. Please, swing by any time!"

With that, she got up and left, and I was left with a warm glow. Another person in black robes came in, and sat down at the table across from me. I stifled a groan.

Now what?

"Hi, I’m from the student council, and -"

"Nope. Not interested. I’m off to kiss my girlfriend. Bye." I ignored the outraged sputtering from the student, striding out of the room on a quest to find Iona.

I was going to get some kisses, then I was going to find Marcelle.

I couldn’t wait to rub it in.

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 22]

[Mana: 591,690/591,690]

[Mana Regen: 282,222 (+548,368)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 361]

[Strength: 1,078]

[Dexterity: 2,161]

[Vitality: 15,390]

[Speed: 15,422]

[Mana: 59,169]

[Mana Regeneration: 59,283 (+54,837)]

[Magic Power: 23,824 (+611,086)]

[Magic Control: 23,851 (+611,778)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 513]

[Cosmic Presence: 319]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 457]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 474]

[Sunrise: 430]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 370]]

[Radiance Affinity: 370]

[Radiance Resistance: 370]

[Radiance Conjuration: 370]

[Runic Scribing: 77]

[Nectar: 370]

[Solar Corona: 370]

[Scintillating Ascent: 370]

[Kaleidoscope: 370]

[Class 3: [Student of the Ages - Wood: Lv 32]]

[Wood Affinity: 32]

[Learning Languages: 32]

[Dabble: 32]

[Something Doesn't Look Right: 32]

[Timekeeping: 32]

[Organization: 32]

[Repetition is the Mother of Learning: 32]

[Study: 32]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 376]

[Immortal Recollections: 305]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 128]

[Spotless: 70]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 352]

[Passionate Learning: 420]

Chapter 42
School Life X

[*brrrrrrrring!* Exam time! We did leave when the earlier alarm went off, right? RIGHT?]

I spared a thought to curse all the past-me’s who set the snarky alarms as I sprinted across the campus.

Of course I had set alarms to remind myself when I needed to leave for class.

Of course I had carefully timed everything to get the maximum amount of cuddle time before I needed to leave for class.

And of course I went in for one last, long, lingering kiss before heading off to class.

So of course I was late for the anatomy test.

I skidded to a halt outside of the room, smoothed my skirt, and quietly cracked the door open. Raith and his friend were sitting in their seats, their elbows practically touching. The professor gave me an unimpressed look, and held out a blank test for me to take.

I grabbed it, and not quite trusting Raith, wanting some space, and seeing an open table near the back, I went back there, sat down, and started writing.

All my studying was paying off. This was easy.

"You got the cake?" I asked Auri.

"Brrrpt!" She confirmed, flying over her confection. It was huge, and Auri had worked hard on it. I needed to feed a lot of people. She’d even drawn a half-dozen crude flowers in frosting! Something light blue and blooming… I didn’t know my flowers the same way Auri did. I suspected the flowers were more Auri wanting flowers to burn, than anything about Iona.

I didn’t associate the warrior with ‘soft and flowery’.

I eyed the cake, chewing on my lip as I worked through my latest problem.

Was… the cake any good? Auri was getting better with her baking, but accidents still occurred. I couldn’t exactly slice into the cake and check though, it’d ruin the look.

Although, maybe I could slice it all up, and quietly have a slice before presenting it… it would ruin the artwork though…

"Brrrpt." Auri cheeped reproachfully at me, and a pair of hands, stylized with little wings at the end, zipped off to another part of the kitchen. She grabbed a tray, and flew it back over.

A second, less decorated cake was on the tray. Auri had anticipated my lack of faith in her baking. With a small amount of chagrin, I took a fork, and had a bite.

"Mmm, ok, yes, this is perfect." I had to talk around a mouthful of delicious cake, but it didn’t make it any less true.

"Brrrpt!" Auri puffed out her chest, proud as a peacock. "Brrpt BRPT!"

"You know for a fact that your baking isn’t always perfect. Remember teaspoons and cups?" I reminded Auri of that particular misadventure.

She just gave me a dirty look, conjured up a pair of hands, picked up the cake, and off we went.

Iona was hosting her birthday party in the cafeteria, just her and her 200 closest friends. I was exaggerating a bit, but there had been significant turnout for her birthday. Iona knew how to throw a party, and it wasn’t like it was just a who’s who list of people she’d hooked up with. No, Iona knew details about every single person there, and it just boggled the mind.

"Ready?" I asked Auri.

"Brrrpt!" She confirmed.

We exited the kitchen together, Auri putting on her best fire show. She hovered over the cake, a burning pillar of multicolored flames erupting from her, nearly reaching the ceiling.

Gasps and noises of appreciation came from not only Iona’s birthday party friends, but most of the other people in the cafeteria. I slowly walked the cake over to the birthday girl, everyone else getting out of the way.

There were benefits to carrying a pillar of fire around.

As I approached the party, we started to sing. The song was new to me, but when in… a magical flying school, do as the magical flying school.

"Oooooooh, it’s someone’s birthday here! Whose birthday could it be?

……"

Auri turned off the flames as we finished singing, her little chef’s hat somehow perfectly untouched by her inferno.

"Brrrpt!" She puffed herself out, receiving the compliments and adoration of a job well-done. Between the cake and the fireworks, she was briefly the darling of the show.

I slipped into my spot next to Iona. Being the girlfriend had certain advantages.

"Happy birthday." I murmured to her.

She slipped her hand into mine and squeezed, then stood up.

"Hello everyone! Thank you for coming to my birthday party!"

"Cake!" Someone heckled Iona.

"Sion, you don’t need cake. They’ll have to cart you out in a wheelbarrow if you do!"

There was a collective "oooooooh" at the burn, and Iona proceeded with her speech uninterrupted. The cake got sliced and passed around - I snagged one of the coveted corner pieces, extra frosting - and I gamely stuck through the entire party, keeping a smile on my face.

Iona’s mere presence helped bolster me, but big parties weren’t my jam.

Auri was having the time of her life, bobbing her head with her oversized hat at everyone who came to grab a slice, getting the adoration she so desired and deserved. Some people had brought little trinkets or gifts, depending on what culture they’d come from, but it wasn’t a universal thing.

Names flowed in one ear, and right back out the other. Out of boredom, I checked my own status, blinking at a number.

[Age: 23].

Well then. According to the System, my birthday was around Iona’s, give or take a few days. I didn’t check my status every day, I wasn’t sure when it had last been updated. The timing suggested that I’d been in the fae lands for almost exactly a year, and if I had to bet?

I’d been in exactly a year, give or take a day. That was just the sort of thing the fae would do.

"Hey, wanna hear a cool math fact?" I asked Iona, still half-cuddled up to her.

She groaned at me.

"It’s my birthday, do I have to?" She whined. I got a mischievous grin.

"When you have 23 people in a room, there’s roughly a 50-50 chance that two of them will share a birthday."

Iona gave me a disbelieving look.

"You’re shitting me."

I shook my head.

"Nope! Wanna do the ma-"

I got interrupted by Iona kissing me.

"Nope!"

At long, long last, things started to wind down. I claimed my spot on Iona’s lap, straddling her legs and stretching my spine so I could be eye to eye with her.

"Presents!" I told her.

She grinned at me.

"Presents!"

I switched to English, the language great for having private conversations in public.

"Ok! First! This one I can’t quite give to you right this second, but it’s something we’d need to plan and work on for a bit."

"Oooh, is it a vacation? Somewhere warm and sandy?" Iona asked. "For when we’re done with School?"

Oooof. She just had to mention the end of School. We had no idea what was going to happen once one or both of us graduated, and we mostly steered clear of that conversation.

"Biomancy!" I told her. "I’ve been consulting the most dark of arts, math, and as long as we properly plan and stage the changes, I think I can do a full body set of modifications for you."

Iona’s grin slowly faded, her serious wyvern rider face making an appearance.

"You’re serious." She said.

I nodded, afraid I’d said something wrong. Iona had never asked about me doing biomancy on her, and while I didn’t know of any social taboos against it, I was concerned I’d stepped on some sort of landmine.

"By the goddesses Elaine, that’s huge. Just… wow. How can I ever repay you?"

"With kisses!" I flippantly replied. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but Iona clearly had different expectations around biomancy.

She wrapped me in a crushing hug, dipping me into a deep kiss. Whoops and cheers came from her friends who were still around, and I wrapped my hands in her voluminous hair as the kiss went on and on and on.

I tapped Iona when I’d had enough. She undipped us, and I found myself on her lap again.

"That was just the first present! Fenrir?" I looked at the not so little wyvern, who tilted his head at me. His eyes widened as he realized it was time, and he scampered off to retrieve the present I’d prepared.

"Conspiring with my companion are you?" Iona teased me.

"Like you haven’t conspired with Auri ever?"

"It was just the once!"

"At least four times!"

"Those didn’t count!"

Fenrir bounded back with a book. Not a library book, this one I’d had to buy from a student [Scribe] looking to make a few extra coins. It had only cost one obsidian coin!

"Here!" I presented Iona with the book. "I hope you haven’t read it before. It might’ve been required reading for all of you. History of the Valkyrie Order, by Dulinniel."

Her mouth made a perfectly little O of surprise as Fenrir dutifully dropped the book on her lap.

"I didn’t know this existed! You’re the best!" Iona looked torn between wanting to crack the book open, and hugging me. I made it easy by sliding off to the side so she could enjoy her present.

"And I have a third one." I did my best to purr into her ear, but who knows how well that was working.

"I’m all ears." She said.

"There’s this [Tailor] who works absolute miracles with lace. I’m currently wearing something red of hers. Wanna see?" I subtly grinded on Iona’s legs.

Iona bolted upright.

"Thanks everyone! Need to run!" She shouted out, then grabbed me and threw me over one shoulder to hoots and hollers.

I had a stupid grin on my face all the way back to the dorm.

[*brrrrring!* Wake up! Time for class!]

[*brrrrring!* No for real.]

[*brrrrring!* Future me, I swear if you’re not up by now… we made these alarms for a reason!]

[*brrrrring!* We can’t skip another day.]

My back arched one last time, and I reluctantly put my hand on Iona’s head.

"I need to get going." I told her.

She looked up at me and pouted.

"You sure?" She asked.

I gave a sad nod.

"I already skipped an entire day. I can’t do it a second time."

Iona gave me a quick squeeze, and we untangled ourselves.

"Hey Elaine?" Iona asked, flopping back on her bed and closing her eyes.

"Yeah?" I paused at the door.

"You’ve made this the best birthday of my life. Thank you."

I cracked a cheeky grin.

"The best birthday of your life… so far."

I found I had time for one last quick kiss, although Auri gave me an absolutely disgusted look when I needed my morning flame bath.

Off to class!

Our exams were being handed back in Anatomy. Naturally, I was wedged in between Raith and his friend again, which was no fun.

I got my exam back. Perfect score! Wooo!

I wouldn’t consider myself nosy, but my two unwelcome table mates were right there and annoying me.

Low, low marks on both. Ha!

The professor started droning on, pointedly ignoring the one poor student who still gamely rose his hand to ask questions in this class. The professor was exceptionally thorough, but never stopped to answer questions or clarify.

My opinion was he was some mix of shy, and just wanting to get through the material as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Eccentric, but he was good.

"Today we will begin the next segment of our studies. We’ve covered terrestrial monsters, large and small, and winged creatures. Now we will begin our studies of the creatures of the deep. Broadly speaking, there are three categories. Those that breathe air, those that use gills, and lastly, creatures that neither breathe air nor have gills, and subsist through other means. We begin with air breathing animals, as their anatomy has clear parallels to creatures already covered…"

I was interested in gills, and this was the perfect class to figure out what set I’d like to add to Operation: The Improved Elaine. The location was also up in the air, but drowning was one of my big weaknesses right now. I had no plans on becoming a deep sea diver or anything, but I'd almost drowned too many times.

The end of class had a plot twist. I was spending a moment skimming over my notes, arranging them for easy studying later, when Raith turned to me.

"If you ever stop me from cheating off of you again, I’ll stab you." He threatened, then walked out.

That was so out of the blue, such a surprise, that I just sat there a moment trying to process how stupid and blatant of a threat that was. Admitting to cheating, openly threatening violence, and doing it in front of the professor!? Had he been repeatedly dropped on his head as a child or something!?

Did he not see the purple robes indicating I had twice as many levels and an extra class on him!?

Either way, I wasn’t going to let that stand. Oooooh no. Nobody threatened me with a stabbing and got away with it. Like, it wouldn’t even do anything! How stupid of a threat could he make!?

I approached the professor after I finished arranging and packing up my notes. I did have my priorities in order, after all.

"Did you hear that?" I asked him.

He studiously ignored me, like he ignored all his students asking questions. I crossed my arms and impatiently tapped my foot while I waited.

Eventually I wore him down. He glanced up from his notes to give me a withering look, and removed an earplug from his ear.

My jaw dropped open.

"What?" He grumped at me.

I soundlessly worked my jaw for a moment, dismissing him from my mind as a potential witness.

"Raith - ogre sitting next to me - both admitted to trying to cheat, and threatening to stab me if I stopped him again." I reported like I was back from a mission, or scouting for Julius.

The professor grunted at me.

"Attempting to cheat isn’t the same as succeeding at cheating. Plus, all these exams and assignments are for you, not for me. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how well you do or don’t do in this class. The reports are your business. The only thing that matters is the final examination for your track, and that’s impossible to cheat. Anyone cheating in this class is simply artificially inflating a number that’s meant to let them know how well they’re doing. If he wants a good grade, tell him to grab a crayon and write it on his own test paper for heaven’s sake. As for the stabbing? Talk to the guards, don’t talk to me about it. Good day."

I narrowed my eyes at him.

Fine. I see how it was. My opinion of him was cratering.

Off to the guards!

"Good evening miss. What can we help you with?" The [Guard] asked me after the usual round of preliminary ‘who are you’ questions.

"Well, someone threatened to stab me, so I’m here to report it."

"Right then. Name, location, other witnesses and the like, and we’ll get on it. Do you currently feel safe?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel safe going back to your home?"

"Yes."
"Excellent. Now, about those details."

I started to explain everything that had happened.

"Ooooh, let me just punch him!" Iona cracked her knuckles.

"No punching idiots. It’s not worth thinking about them."

"You’re not going to let him get away with it!" She protested.

"Of course not! I’m letting the guards give him a hard time. Hopefully they’ll arrest him, then expel him off the island once we get back to the southern continent. I’m not too vindictive, they can give him a parachute. I’m not going to let him cheat off of me, and if he even flinches towards me with a knife…" I mimed blasting him with my wand.

"If you’re sure…"

"BRRRPTTT!"

"The same goes to you! No burning people to death!"

"Brrrpt!"

"He hasn’t deserved it yet!"

"Brrrrrrpt… brrrpt…" Auri muttered darkly to herself. Something about accidents and how flammable the dorms and robes were. One day she’d act on those impulses, and I’d have my hands full.

Iona clapped her hands.

"Okay! Enough of that! Presentosaurus, when’s your birthday? I want to knock your socks off, like you did for me!"

"I don’t actually know. It’s around yours, give or take a few days."

"Hmmmm. Why don’t we throw a party on the Summer Solstice then? Or is it the Winter Solstice while we’re in the north? Finals will be over, be a great time to celebrate."

I frowned at that.

"Not the solstice. I… have other plans. What about the day after?"

"Sure! Auri, have you ever wanted to make a three layer cake?" Iona whispered conspiratorially with the little bird.

"Brrrpt!? Brrrpt…" Auri was intrigued, and wanted to know more. I gave Iona a quick peck, and gracefully exited, letting them plan away.

I was in class when the entire building shook. The entire class paused, the professor dispelling the mandala he’d been in the middle of demonstrating.

My first thought was ‘earthquake’, but no. That didn’t work here.

When the building shook a second time, we abandoned our materials, left the room, and most students found a window to press themselves up against, to see what was going on.

My training kicked in, and I took a different tact.

I had no interest in being in a building with questionable structural integrity. If it went down, I’d die. No freedom, no information, and while not relevant here, a ton of civilians packed nearby were all things I wanted to avoid.

I took flight, soaring over the crowds. Frowned upon, technically against the rules, but I’d face the piper later. Apparently, threatening to stab someone over a test that went nowhere was worth a slap on the wrist and a stern talking-to.

Apparently, there was a second witness to the whole altercation who claimed Raith was entirely innocent, and I’d been the one shooting threats at him. The other witness was naturally Raith’s friend, and suddenly it had been two people claiming I was the one making threats versus one.

If Auri ever figured out how to [Burn Lies] or [Burn Liars], I’d let her go nuts. Until then, all I could do was fume impotently at the whole situation.

I missed being a Sentinel. Properly, I missed the privileges and backing of being a Sentinel.

I flew out the door, and as soon as I realized what I was seeing, my blood went cold. I stopped flying entirely, and just hovered there, uncaring that I was blocking the flying exit. My throat went dry, my heart skipped a beat, and I started sweating.

Up in the sky, barely visible past dozens and dozens of layered shields, was not one, but two dragons.

The first dragon was long. Cyan-colored scales, it was wrapped around the entire island multiple times, like an insanely long snake. He had five claws, and flowing whiskers from his nose. I wasn’t sure if I was larger than the individual scales or not.

The second dragon was a bit harder to see. I could only catch glimpses of him between the coils of the first dragon.

That one looked a bit like Lun’Kat, with scales of red. He was flying around the island in long, slow, lazy spirals, roaring at us. He was distinctly smaller than Lun’Kat as well. A young dragon maybe?

I snapped out of my dragon-trance, and moved. Sitting still wouldn’t do anything, but being free-flowing and moving might. I dashed over to the firing range, the best place to find Auri.

The School was in chaos, people moving and yelling everywhere, some professors trying to restore order. I ignored them entirely. I’d never been one to put my fate in someone else’s hands when I could avoid it, and I had too many stories echoing in my head of ‘people who followed bad instructions and died as a result.’

I’d eat any penalty thrown my way, assuming they even bothered to try.

I threw out a pair of [Long-Range Identify’s] to see what I was dealing with.

[Long Zhi, the Cerulean Scholar - 3072]

[Malheur, the Crimson Ravager - 894]

Well, the dragon possessively guarding us like a treasure was a higher level, and-

Wait.

Hang on.

Was that a tiny red hat on his head?

The School had a freaking dragon on staff!?

Or… hang on, no. More likely we were part of the hoard, the world’s greatest collection of knowledge. This standoff was above my level, but I knew we had at least one white-hatted protector of the School.

It wasn’t going to stop me from finding Auri, and the little fireball zipped up from the firing range as I approached.

"Brrrpt BRPT!" Auri fluttered protectively near me, zipping all around me like she wasn’t quite sure which direction would best protect me. "Brrrrpt brpt brrrrpt BRPT brpt!"

Her words brought a tear to my eyes. She was completely willing and ready to throw herself in front of any attack to protect me, since ‘she’d be fine.’

"You won’t need to." I promised my little pyromaniac.

I took stock of the situation.

People first. I’d located Auri. I didn’t know where Iona was - I knew her schedule, but not where she’d try to find Fenrir. She was also competent and able to take care of herself, and the best thing I could do for meeting up with her was continue to fly high, with my distinct wings.

Where was safe? Nowhere was safe.

Fine, what were the dangers?

The dragons, obviously. I couldn’t do much about them.

Other people.

Defensive measures.

I briefly thought about the prayer my parents had stitched for me, and felt a pang of regret that I was keeping it ‘safe’ in my dorm. If I had to bail, I’d lose it.

My lightning-quick thoughts weren’t nearly as fast as the dragon’s, and they thought and moved faster than I could. With some sudden motions that I could barely follow, the larger dragon blurred in a whipcord of motions, and by the time I could process what I was seeing again, the smaller one was a fleeing blur on the horizon.

I spent a desperate moment trying to study its flight. The chance to upgrade my flight by including a dragon into it? Yes please!

As quickly as it’d started, the crisis was over.

"Elaine!" Iona waved to me as she dashed over, and I dove down to meet her. She couldn’t fly like I could, and while the shields were up now, I didn’t want to get caught when they went down and the wind started howling again.

"Iona!" I found comfort in her arms, hugging her waist. Fenrir curled around my - goddesses, almost my waist, he was getting big - while Auri zipped around, brrrpting that she had driven away the dragon… with a little bit of help.

She wasn’t entirely delusional.

A triumphant roar ruined our reunion, and we looked up at Long Zhi. The dragon circled the island, scales twisting all around us, then he shrunk down to a fraction of the size we’d seen, and flew to one of the smaller islands orbiting the main one. I tried to study his flight as well. He vanished into the island that had a small mountain on it.

His home? The size-shifting made sense why we hadn’t seen him before, and yeah. If a dragon wanted to live nearby, I’d be doing everything I could to give him the premium real estate.

"I feel a bit silly now, but I grabbed this." Iona pulled the stitched cloth with my parent’s prayer out of her bag.

I teared up as I grabbed it and clutched it.

"I think I love you. Just a little."

The Summer Solstice. A day that would forever be burnt into my memory. The day where I lost nearly everyone. The reason I didn’t want to have my birthday today.

It was a day of loss, of sadness, of grieving. A day to remember.

A day to wear cold iron, and carefully measure each step before I took it.

A day to visit the Tabernacle. To find a quiet corner to pray in.

Or something. I didn’t know what god would help.

I knelt in a private room, my knees against the cold stone floor. I carefully laid out the prayer my parents had given me.

Tears slowly rolling down my face, I forced myself to recite each name out loud.

The list felt endless.

"Julia. Elainus. Themis. Lyra. Origen. Maximus. Arthur…"

Chapter 43
School Life XI

"Close your eyes!" Iona announced.

"Brrrpt!" Auri was making sure my eyes were closed.

I dutifully closed them, but what was the fun if I didn’t try to use my other senses to figure out what was going on?

We were inside, the Island having wandered into a blizzard. It was winter in the northern hemisphere, and I wasn’t terribly social. A small party, just me, Iona, and our companions, in the suite’s living room, was all I wanted.

The room was warm, and I heard Auri flitting around. Didn’t hear a sound out of Iona, but the massive Valkyrie could be incredibly stealthy when she wanted to.

A wave of cold washed over me, then I felt it subtly radiating right next to my knees.

Fenrir had built some sort of Ice thing?

Auri was trying to be quiet, but I could hear her flittering around the room, occasionally letting out a soft "brrrrpt" as she gave instructions to Iona… and Fenrir?

Okay, okay. Multiple trips were being made, and whoa that smelled amazing. Fresh bread, crusts, cheese, meats, vegetables, and-

Oh goddesses yes, there were mangos involved in this. I’d recognize that smell anywhere.

I felt myself starting to involuntarily drool. I heard a whispered countdown.

My hearing was orders of magnitude better than Auri’s or Fenrir’s. Anything whispered loudly enough for them to hear, I could also hear.

"Three… two… one…"

"Happy Birthday!" The three of them cried out in various ways.

My eyes flew open, and I smiled at the spread.

Iona, Auri, and Fenrir were all sitting around an Ice table Fenrir had made, the furniture creaking under Auri’s baking. Pies and scones, bread and croissants, Auri had outdone herself this time. The pièce de résistance was a four-layered cake in the middle, mangos circling the entire base.

I teared up at the cake topper. A little Ranger eagle, delicately carved out of frosting.

Iona draped an arm over my shoulder.

"I know it’s not much, but I hope you like it."

I gave her a quick peck.

"Are you kidding? It’s perfect."

What else was there to say?

We were enjoying the party, and I was enjoying being the woman of the hour. Did anything top a birthday surrounded by loving and caring people?

The celebrations were interrupted by a knock on the door. We gave each other a quick four-way glance, then Fenrir went off to investigate. He opened the door, the clever magic allowing a thumbless creature to work it, and three people were waiting outside.

The one in the middle was clearly the important one. She was wearing black robes, but she somehow managed to make them a fashion statement. Gold thread was used as the stitching, it clung to her in a way that left nothing to the imagination, in spite of her being fully clothed, and if I wasn’t mistaken the entire thing was made out of silk. Her hat was precisely tilted, and tasteful makeup was framed by sparkling earrings, filled with dozens of tiny gemstones.

"Greetings. I am Iya, of the Sahel family. May I come in?" The naga asked.

We traded looks, and Iona gave a small nod.

"Uh, sure." I was slightly trapped behind the Ice table and pile of dishes. Iona shuffled over, letting me shuffle over as well. Iya gracefully slithered in, her two friends remaining in the hallway.

"Is there something we can help you with?" Iona asked.

"No. Indeed, I’ve come here to offer Elaine an apology." The naga said.

Iona shot me a puzzled look, and I shrugged. This was news to me, I don’t think I’d ever seen Iya before, let alone interacted with her.

She gestured, and one of her friends - an orc by the look of it - walked into the room, handing her a small ornate box.

"Raith is one of the retainers of house Sahel. I had encouraged him to perform well in his studies, and he took to the assignment with a little too much enthusiasm. You ended in the crossfire, and for that, I apologize. I can see that you appear to be busy, and so let me leave you with a small token, and my best wishes. I do hope we can be friends."

She deliberately extended the box out to me, and Iona and I traded looks again. I shrugged. I didn’t see the harm in it.

I took the box.

"Once again, I wish you all the best." Iya said, then politely backed out and closed the door.

"Weird." Iona said.

Fenrir nosed at the box, wanting to know what was in it.

"This might end up in my top five weird stuff, yeah."

"Brrrpt?"

I opened the box, and my eyes practically bugged out.

It was filled with tiny loose gems of nearly every sort, piled together like they were a kid’s beach rock collection.

My eyes bugged out, and I looked up at Iona with my jaw dropping.

"Think I can get Raith to say more dumb things?" I asked her.

Iona kissed me instead of answering, pulling me into her - our - bedroom.

Life?

Life was pretty darn good right now. I don’t know how long it would last, but I was determined to wring out every last drop of fun and enjoyment.

Classes came and went in a blur of studying, notes, and exams.

Practical studies at the hospital was a constant, keeping myself sharp and in practice. Seeing dozens of patients from around the world, getting practice with the various quirks of different races.

Mythical and Magical Anatomy. Bioprocessing. Maintaining Homeostasis. Wards for Homes, Forts, and Palaces. Formal Logic. Advanced Radiance Sorcery. Microbiology. Pharmacology. Fantastical Organs. Elemental Interactions. Structural Biology. Magical Ailments and Diseases. World History. Offensive Radiance Skills. Biomancy Ethics. Formations. Transforming Yourself Into Another Species. Potions, Their Uses, and Side-effects. Cross-Cultural Medicine. Countermagic. Dangerous Places and Beings. Breaking Illusions. Flushing Out Waste. Spell Integrity. Putting the Body Pieces Together. Bioalchemical Processes. The Oddities of the World. Epigenetics. Psychiatry. Gods and Religion. Bioengineering. Enchanting. Advanced Metabolic Processes. Abnormal Psychology. Global Abnormalities. Jiwa Runes. Advanced Augmentations. Rituals. Biosculpting. Therapy. The Great Groups and Guilds. Octagon. Substance Editing. Prosthetics. Synergistic Modifications.

Brain Modifications. I learned enough in that class to know I only wanted to make one change - a backup brain in case my head got obliterated. Even that was going to be an exercise in weirdness. I did not want to touch or modify my ‘original’ brain though.

Wizardry Metamagics got me evolving [Runic Scribing]. The School was a fantastic place for picking up skills, and [Butterfly Mystic] was all about evolving skills. I wasn’t able to get everything, or even a small fraction of all the different meta skills that existed - most witches and wizards required a full class with multiple supporting skills for what I was trying to cram into a single skill - but I hadn’t picked an evolutionary class for nothing.

I managed to get the skills commonly known as [Spellchecking], [Mage’s Eye], [Enchanting], and [Serene] merged into [Runic Scribing], which turned into [Lepidoptera].

None of the meta magics were particularly amazing or world-shaking - [Enchanting] was easily the best one - but they were improvements.

My Radiance classes made me see the light on an issue I’d somewhat known for ages, but hadn’t properly confronted and thought about.

I wasn’t getting a lot of mileage out of [Radiance Conjuration]. I used it primarily for two things. Making light, and making deadly beams of Radiance to fight people with. Rarely would I be doing something else with it.

Wizardry gave me access to light, and if I was using [Radiance Conjuration] just to do a single thing, instead of enjoying the full breadth of possibilities?

I might as well get a dedicated skill, with bonuses and trade-offs.

I picked up [Light Beam], and spent hours at the firing range. [Persistent Casting] plus near-unlimited Arcanite plus being able to get my studying done there made for effective, if terribly inefficient leveling. Combined with Offensive Radiance Skills, I upgraded the skill time and time again.

[Nova Lance] joined the team!

Nova Lance: Focus the power of the shining sun into a fine beam at the tip of your fingers of searing consumption, destruction and devastation. Increased control, distance, and destruction per level.

The skill alone was a significant upgrade over ‘simply’ conjuring the beams up, and that was before [Solar Corona] kicked in. The only ‘downside’ was I’d managed to work in a ‘tip of my fingers’ restriction. While technically a downside - no more laser eye blasts for me - it acted as a restriction, improving the overall power of the skill. There were downsides, but I believed it was a net positive.

[Kaleidoscope] got an upgrade, without a name change. The butterflies were even faster now, and the skill leveling up was tied to acceleration, the whole effect was compounded.

[Persistent Casting] finally evolved, letting me pre-store up to six different configurations of skills to remember, with the promise of more in the future. I could now reasonably toggle my healing on and off!

Auri classed up, got some new skills, and immediately capped again. Notably, she got [I am the Brrrettiest], which summoned a number of flaming clones of her, all able to cast weak skills. She also grabbed [Baking].

A tournament came and went. We did alright, although Bartolo managed to throw the match against the Yellow Jackets team. One of the risks of taking students from places all over the world - old loyalties were sometimes stronger than the temporary one.

The crowd utterly loved it though, and nobody talked about anything else the entire time. In a way, that was almost better than winning. ‘The School wins again’ was just another ‘ya, ya, whatever’ moment, while ‘The School got betrayed by the Yellow Jackets’ was good for gossip for months, if not years.

I thought it was a little weird how in-stride everyone took it, but it was just a sport in the end. Well, everyone except Shirayuki, who was understandably pissed.

None of my friends were at the next stop the School made near Rolland, deep in the Empire of Xerius, although a consultation of a map showed dense, ancient forests between Rolland and where we’d stopped. I was banking on that being why Julius, Artemis, and Amber hadn’t been able to make it. It sounded close in theory, that’s why they thought they could meet up, but in practice it was too difficult to traverse.

I felt better. Whole. In control. I believed that while I’d never truly come to terms to losing my entire family a second time, that I’d properly grieved.

With all that said, I was still seeing Linnet every week. It was good for me.

Iya continued to be a confusing presence in our lives. Iona was naturally suspicious. She was from the Omospondia Confederacy, and never had the world seen such a den of backstabbing, political snakes. According to the rumors, it was the only country where professional assassins were able to make a living.

Which had me arguing that maybe she’d never gotten the chance to properly socialize, and was somehow worse than I was at making friends, and was following some guide or another.

23 came and went, and my 24th birthday rolled around. Checking carefully, it was indeed the same day as Iona’s birthday, and I fulfilled my promise to her that her 23rd birthday had been the best birthday of her life… so far. I had bittersweet dreams of Lyra upon realizing our shared birthday.

24 rolled into 25 far too quickly, the year passing in a flash of notes and strewn clothing, of burning wings and the sharp smell of the hospital.

One day I found myself in Marcelle’s office, sharing a glass of wine with the vampire and having one of our discussions.

"[Persistent Casting] is totally worth it." I gave our traditional greeting as I sat down.

She groaned and poured herself another finger.

"You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?" She asked.

I grinned at her.

"Nope!"

She scuffed and rolled her eyes.

"Well, you did save a lot of people, so I’ll let it go. How’s biomancy going? Medicine? The rest of your studies?"

"They’re going well. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say I know everything, but I’m running out of elvenoid related courses in the two."

"Mmm. Any interest in plant related biomancy?"

I hesitated and took the plunge.

"I think I’m going to primarily stick with elvenoid. My research into other creatures has mainly been for aspects that can be used to modify elvenoids further."

"Well, no chimeras from you at least! Cheers to that!" Marcelle offered her glass, and I delicately clinked my glass against hers.

We spent a few more minutes discussing the rest of my classes, and how I saw myself going forward.

"Now, as you may know, the School’s about to slow down again. We’re going to be over Ankhelt, and your biomancy studies have progressed well. Perfect marks across the board. It’s my understanding that you still have a [Student] class. Yes?"

"Yes. I’ve been keeping it at 32 because, politely, I don’t believe I’ll be sticking with biomancy for my entire life. It’s been wonderful learning about it, and I’d like to make modifications to myself, but I hope to get the skill to make changes permanent, then reset at 128."

Marcelle’s lips puckered unhappily, but she gave me a nod.

"A crying shame. You’d be the best in a generation. However, if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. Do you know what you’ll take instead?"

"Still working on it."

"Well, I’m always here to help. Anyways, I was asking because, if you’re looking for a time and a place to class up, now works. I’m happy to give you permission to perform biomancy in a limited way in the fairgrounds we set up when the School slows down, and that sort of practical, on-hands experience should be good for you. The firing range is nice, but I’m convinced the System knows when biomancy is done for practice, and when it’s done for real."

We continued with some small chit-chat, and ended the meeting.

The Medical Manuscripts were still on my todo list, but after being at the School for a few years, I had the perfect time and place for them.

They were going to be my Healer Track thesis. My biggest issue was going to be in providing enough evidence to the panel that, yes, I was Elaine, but nothing I needed to start working on right now.

"VampFoodOSaurus!" Iona jumped up to greet me. Even after more than two years, her face still lit up every time she saw me.

"Iona!" I let her sweep me into her arms.

"Everything good? Vampy didn’t want a pint of blood or something?"

I rolled my eyes at her.

"Yes, Marcelle demanded tribute of a gallon of blood for advice, otherwise she was going to throw me off the island." I sarcastically replied.

Iona gave a dramatic gasp and dropped me.

"Alas! Fenrir was right! The School’s a blood collection front for the vampires!"

I picked myself up off the ground, the wyvern in question poking his rapidly growing head out of his room.

"Vampires?" He growled, one of his skills letting him form words. Dude was getting big enough I was starting to question if he could get out of the suite. That was going to be a bad day in the future.

"Yes, vampires. Marcelle thinks I should grab [Biomancer] at this stage."

"Brrrpt?!" Auri asked.

"What do you think?" Iona also asked.

"Eh, she’s right. I’ve gotten a ton of advantage out of my [Student] class, but the longer I stay a student, the less time I have to work on my final third class. It’s a tricky balance, but I’ve gotten a ton of use out of [Student]. She’s probably right."

Iona licked her lips. "And…?"

I gave her a quick kiss.

"Yes. I’m still planning on doing upgrades on you. I’ll see if I can get a class to include Fenrir, but no promises. I’m unsure if I even know enough about wyverns to make safe changes, forget about significant enough."

"Brrrrpt…?" Auri plaintively asked.

"There isn’t even a book on phoenix anatomy. Plus, aren’t you already perfect?"

"Brrrpt!" Auri nodded to herself at that. ‘Brrpt BRPT!" She scolded herself that she’d ever forgotten her perfection.

"When are you classing up?" Iona asked.

"Eh… now? I know exactly what I want and I should qualify."

"Brrrpt!" Auri flew out the door, trying to get some frantic last-second cooking in for the surprise celebration.

"Alrighty! This calls for a party!" Iona exclaimed.

Reinhard popped her head out of her door.

"My deepest congratulations on advancing your class." She withdrew her head after that.

Most words she’d spoken to us all week, but then again, she was practically the perfect roommate. She didn’t get in our business and we didn’t get in hers, and we all kept things clean.

I went to my room, and without any great ceremony, closed my eyes and entered into the world of my soul.

I opened my eyes to see Librarian there, wearing a poofy set of School robes.

"School robes now?" I asked her. I didn’t think that they were integral to my identity.

She pulled down the top of the robe, showing me what was under it.

"Over armor." She grinned at me. "Remember?"

It took me a moment for it to click, then I laughed.

"Yeah, I remember now! Shall we?"

She gestured for me to lead the way, and I walked over to the staircase, walking up to the next level.

"Looking for a biomancer class that’ll let me modify myself and others, and make the changes permanent. It’s fine if it’s extremely narrow. Practically speaking, I have two projects that need to be completed, then I’m done. I hope I can get a class that’ll let me draw runes in bones. It’d be nice if I could also modify Fenrir, but that’s not mandatory."

Librarian shook her head.

"This is a level 32 class. There’s barely one class that fits your requirements, including the rune bones, but forget Fenrir. We’d barely qualify for a non-elvenoid modification-only class if we wanted that. Didn’t practice enough."

I clicked my tongue in disappointment. The lack of options was disappointing… but also freeing.

Also, I’d gotten a class that entirely met my needs. I didn’t need to make compromises. I’d been concerned that I’d need to choose between modifying Iona, and making changes permanent.

Granted, with the ‘permanent changes’, I could pay another biomancer for that. It was an easy decision that I didn’t need to make.

"Let’s see it!"

I made it to the top of the stairs, and a single book was waiting for me on a reader.

[Better. Faster. Stronger. - Forest]

Better. Faster. Stronger.: You can rebuild yourself, and anyone else you’d like. You have the magic. You can make yourself more than you are now. Stronger. Faster. Better. +50 Magic Power, +50 Magic Control per level.

Not exactly a class to get my heart beating, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. I anticipated I’d have it for a quarter, tops, while I worked on finalizing my plans and modifying myself and Iona.

"Well… guess I need to take it." I reached out and grabbed the book.

"That you do. Just remember, most of the power in this class is in its skills, not the stats." That was a good point. Just like when I’d built [The Dawn Sentinel], I had gotten the option to trade stat power for skill power. Seemed like this class was an example of going to the skill extreme, where I was getting a number of absurd, top-tier skills that wouldn’t go amiss in a level 256 class, at a level 32 class.

I didn’t need stats, not for what I was planning. I needed skills, and this class was perfect.

I checked the book out, opening my eyes to a dozen notifications.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [Student of the Ages - Wood] has upgraded into [Better. Faster. Stronger. - Forest]!]

[*ding!* [Better. Faster. Stronger.] has leveled up! 32->128! +50 Magic Power, +50 Magic Control from your class per level! +1 Free Stat for being Human per level! +2 Magic Control per level from your Element!]

[*ding!* [Wood Affinity] has evolved into [Forest Affinity]!]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Biological Manipulation]!]

Shame [Dabble] hadn’t evolved into it.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Runes of Flesh]!]

[*ding!* [Something Doesn’t Look Right] has evolved into [Warning Bells]!]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom]!]

Ok, wait, what? The rest of the skills explained themselves, but not this one.

Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom: Sometimes we make little oopsies that we didn’t know would happen. Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom will fix the tiny, minor holes that we make, ensuring everything works properly. After all, are we sure that we properly know all of the Kun-Peng’s liver organelles? -300 Mana Regeneration.

Oh, thank the System. A minor fixer-upper skill. It didn’t mean I could slack off, but I could be a little more ambitious with my modifications.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Analyze Organ]!]

Iona was going to make jokes about that one. For sure.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Elvenoid Visualization]!]

[*ding!* Congratulations on reaching level 100! You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Permanence]!]

None of the skills were particularly epic or grandiose. A simple class, with simple skills, for someone who’d frankly only been dabbling in the subject. It wasn’t like I’d grown up around biomancers, helping out as a lab assistant for years before taking my first class up, then having adventures of my own.

No, it was close to the starting line. It was arguably a normal class, the type most people living in the world had.

… Although, given the skills, maybe my perception of what was ‘normal’ was completely skewed. I should see if there was a book or some classes I could take to see what a ‘normal’ person was like now.

Oh gods. I wasn’t becoming like an out of touch noble, was I?? Did I know how much a loaf of bread cost? How about a banana?

… Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I’d never gotten a chance to recalibrate myself after my fairy adventure, and there was no way the School had normal anything.

Speaking of bread - the smell of freshly baked bread reached my nose, and I rolled out of bed, leaving the room.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of Auri’s heavenly baking.

"Sleeposaurus! I’ll let you analyze my organs anytime!" Iona wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at me.

I laughed and sat down.

I’d try out my new skills.

Tomorrow.

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Human]

[Age: 25]

[Mana: 613,390/613,390]

[Mana Regen: 299,431 (+616,377)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 488]

[Strength: 1,326]

[Dexterity: 2,374]

[Vitality: 17,560]

[Speed: 17,592]

[Mana: 61,339]

[Mana Regeneration: 61,484 (+61,638)]

[Magic Power: 29,899 (+766,909)]

[Magic Control: 30,142 (+773,142)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 513]

[Cosmic Presence: 322]

[The Stars Never Fade: 11]

[Center of the Universe: 470]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 492]

[Sunrise: 470]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 401]]

[Radiance Affinity: 401]

[Radiance Resistance: 401]

[Nova Lance: 401]

[Lepidoptera: 160]

[Nectar: 401]

[Solar Corona: 401]

[Scintillating Ascent: 401]

[Kaleidoscope: 401]

[Class 3: [Better. Faster. Stronger. - Forest: Lv 128]]

[Forest Affinity: 128]

[Warning Bells: 128]

[Biological Manipulation: 1]

[Runes of Flesh: 1]

[Smooth as a Baby's Bottom: 1]

[Analyze Organ: 1]

[Elvenoid Visualization: 1]

[Permanence: 1]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 380]

[Immortal Recollections: 333]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 256]

[Spotless: 111]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 431]

[Passionate Learning: 450]

Chapter 44
Biomancy I

For the fourth time, I cursed the organizers of the School’s Fair.

I understood needing to sign up for a slot. I was fine with being told where to go, and what dimensions I needed to work in. Charging a nominal rent for the supplies I wanted to use was only natural. It couldn’t work otherwise, not with the hectic two weeks of controlled chaos that was the School’s fair as the island slowed down.

But I needed to make my own enchantments? Really? Not a single person had ever returned a set of privacy runes back to the Ring that ran the Fair? They hadn’t thought to make some themselves, for alllll the people who wanted some privacy?

No. The easy answer was they were jerks. The more practical reason I’d dug up was they wanted to make sure students were displaying their skills, and not leaning on someone else’s.

None of my complaining mattered as I finished burning enchantments into the last piece of wood, setting up a proper privacy ward for my tent.

Three checks of my runes later - [Warning Bells] only applied to biomancy now, not everything - and I was satisfied that I’d done them correctly. I inserted an Arcanite crystal into the right place, and with a flex of will, powered on the wards.

Instantly the clatter and clamor of everyone else setting up their stations, along with a few early eager beavers dropped away. Blessed peace and silence so I could think.

I looked around.

Large backup arcanite crystal - check. My biggest expense was renting the spherical crystal to use, because running out of mana mid-operation could literally kill someone. I was planning on asking people to bring some of their own to help, but there were no guarantees.

Tent walls - check. It looked and felt like a fortune-teller’s tent, but I was working with the supplies I’d been given.

Two chairs and a desk - check. I was only missing a crystal ball to complete the fortune-teller’s look…

Hang on.

I eyed the arcanite crystal, softly glowing with mana.

Screw it.

[Fortune Teller] Elaine was here! Not the most professional of looks, but I wasn’t trying to make a huge fortune as a biomancer, nor did I particularly care about getting a reputation as one. This was probably one of my only times that I’d be biomancying other people.

I didn’t want to call it practice patients… but yeah, they were practice, and I was hoping I could get enough people to visit in two weeks that, when combined with my magic stats, I could cap my skills before starting to biomancy myself and Iona.

I put the crystal on the table. The ground was at a slight angle - downside of setting up in a field - and the ball wanted to roll off the table.

I frowned, grabbed the Very Expensive ball before anything bad could happen to it, and popped my head out of my tent.

"Hey Auri, could you…" My voice trailed off as I saw what the little bird was up to.

She had a half-dozen different hands working a dozen stations. Mixing, mashing, kneading, opening makeshift oven doors and stirring bubbling pots. A whole rainbow of different colored

flames lit the various places up, and Auri was sitting high up in the middle, her chest proudly puffed out with a tiny little chef’s hat on her head.

Sparks were practically flying as she glared at a student across the way, baking cookies. A rivalry for the ages… or the next two weeks.

Aleesia’s Famous Cookies a crooked sign proclaimed.

The witch in question was glaring at Auri just as hard.

I wasn’t getting involved in this mess at all.

Either way. Auri was way too busy to give me a hand.

I popped back into my tent, forcing myself to think about the problem.

How would [Archmage] Elaine solve this?

Well, that was easy. A sticky rune on the table would keep the crystal ball - errr - arcanite ball from rolling off.

A rune later, and that problem was solved. A dozen runes after that, and I’d lit the interior of the tent with a soft purple-blue glow, completing the look.

Iona had helped me with the local language, and I set up the two-ringed array needed for my advertising, projecting slowly spinning letters in the sky that advertised what I did.

Cheap biomancy!

Pay in mango or coin!

My marketing-fu had gone down in the absence of practice and Amber, but I did at least know how to advertise.

I settled into my chair, cracked open a book, put my feet on the table, and started reading, waiting for the first patient to come in.

The tent flap opened, and I started, stashing my book and taking my feet off the table. I quickly put one hand on the crystal ball, and one on my forehead.

"Welcome!" I did my best ‘booming voice’ impression. "I can see the future! You’re here… for BIOMANCY!"

"Um." The woman at the door suddenly looked uncertain. "Yes? Are you sure you’re a biomancer?"

I dropped the act.

"Yes, please, come on in. What can I help you with?"

I glanced at the dogkin’s level.

[Laborer - 194].

That was pushing it. It wasn’t an issue of her vitality defending itself against my magic power, I could overwhelm that. It was an issue of mana. In my little stall out here, I didn’t have the gigantic reserves of mana that would be required to perform a large-scale operation on someone with that much vitality and weight.

My plans for Iona included access to the firing range’s prodigious reserves. Or whatever system the School had for large-scale projects like the one I was eyeing up. My rough calculations suggested I was looking at six billion mana for Iona’s modifications.

Before making them permanent.

Fundamentally, biomancy wasn’t part of the few ‘safe’ skills the System recognized, like buffs, potions, and healing. Even then, buffs got horribly abused now and then to practically cause debuffs on people. No, the System considered biomancy to be offensive, giving me roughly the same difficulty that I’d have modifying someone’s heart, as a Dark mage would have deleting a heart.

Given that I could biomancy a major blood vessel closed and kill someone that way, I completely understood. It made biomancying adults a challenge.

Focus. Patients were here and now.

She pulled in a skinny young kid - practically still a toddler - and I mentally breathed a sigh of relief.

Kids were easy to work on. Their vitality was practically nothing, which meant I could manipulate their flesh with minimal resistance. They also didn’t weigh much, meaning there was less I needed to manipulate.

The details were harder, and kids had their own separate set of issues that adults didn’t have, but most biomancy focused on kids anyways, being the primary patient base.

"His face is… weird." His mom struggled to explain, gesturing at the obvious problem.

His lip was split in half, going all the way up to his nose. A classic cleft lip issue.

Thank whatever divinities were watching over me that my first case ever was a softball.

I smiled at the kid, who was shyly clutching his mother’s skirt. I stood up and walked around the table, pulling the patient chair out.

"Come here! I don’t bite!" I patted the chair. "What’s your name? You must be very brave to come here!"

"Amam." He said quietly.

"Amam! Well, that’s a great name! Tell you what Amam, after this, go to the stall next to me and ask Auri for a cookie. Tell her Elaine said it was alright!"

His eyes went wide and he looked at his mom. She chewed her lip.

"It’ll be free, we’re friends." I reassured her.

"Alright! Cookies after!" Her mom declared.

With some encouragement from his mom, and the promise of a cookie after, he climbed up into the chair.

"Okay, now let me take a look." I put a finger on his lip, and he shuddered and brightened up. Bet my healing just cleared something up!

With some effort, I used [Elvenoid Visualization].

[*ding!* [Elvenoid Visualization] leveled up! 14->15]

I obviously hadn’t come here with no practice using my new skills.

A mental image popped into my mind, a full 3D visualization of what was going on with the kid’s lip.

It had never finished forming. It hadn’t properly stretched all the way across his face, and he also had a tiny cleft palate. I bet when I’d healed him a moment ago, it had been an ear infection. Extremely common with the problem he’d come with.

Ok! Cleft palate and cleft lip, in a young male dogkin! Go!

The entire issue was as simple as it looked. The lip and palate had never met, and they needed to. I simply needed to create the necessary flesh in the gap, hook up the necessary nerves and blood vessels, then tell the body that it had always existed that way.

One step at a time.

For safety’s sake, I blasted another wave of healing through Amam. I wanted to make absolutely sure that he didn’t have anything dumb like a skinned knee, that I could accidentally include in his ‘perfect body’ image. Otherwise, if I did, anytime he got healed in the future, he’d regain the skinned knee.

I then turned off my [Persistent Casting]. I had the image stored, I could turn it back on at any time.

Heart pounding, mouth dry, I focused every bit of attention on what I was doing. A mistake here would haunt this kid for his entire life.

There was a little cough in the background, but I redoubled my focus, tuning everything out.

I carefully built an image of what I wanted. The [Elvenoid Visualization] skill was putting in serious work, giving me a direct reference of what I needed to make. It combined with my knowledge, and I was able to ‘flicker’ through the image, checking different layers. There was the skin layer, the flesh layer, the nerve layer, the capillaries… it was all there.

I had the image.

I checked it four times.

I was stalling.

Gritting my teeth, I opened my eyes and pulled the trigger on my skill.

The gap in his lips was there one moment, and gone the next.

[*ding!* [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] leveled up! 1 -> 11]

I broke out in a cold sweat over that. I’d done something wrong, something that the skill had needed to fix. My hours of messing with my fingers at the firing range to cap [Biological Manipulation] hadn’t caused the skill to level.

What had I done wrong?

I heard a dramatic gasp beside me.

"Please let me focus, I’m not done." I snapped at the woman. She had to know how important this was.

I recast [Elvenoid Visualization], flicking through a dozen different views, looking for any difference. Any imperfection.

I didn’t see any.

I wanted to smack myself. [Warning Bells] hadn’t gone off. Whatever issue [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] had fixed, I just didn’t know it.

I made a mental note to talk with Marcelle about it, to see what I had done wrong. However, my fix was better than nothing, and to the best of my knowledge, everything was better.

I cast [Permanence], engraving the changes on the kid. My mana dropped at that, but it was done.

[*ding!* [Permanence] leveled up! 1 -> 2]

I opened my eyes, the kid beaming.

"Are you done? Is everything ok?"

"Yes. No." I answered in reverse order, then hurriedly corrected myself.

"Sorry! Everything’s ok! I’m not done yet, that was just the first step!" I explained. "I’ve fixed his lip, but he’s got a secondary split in his palate. One moment."

The second time was much faster than the first. I’d already looked at the kid. I’d already studied him. The split was significantly smaller than the lip, and I followed the same procedure. Checked over what I was doing, made the image, filled in the flesh, checked again for any issues, then made the entire set of changes permanent.

[*ding!* [Permanence] leveled up! 2 -> 3]

I turned my [Persistent Casting] back on and touched the kid, blowing some of the most powerful healing he’d ever experience in his life through him. I then used [Elvenoid Visualization] again, going over his lips and palate to make sure nothing had changed, that the changes were indeed permanent, they’d grow alongside him, and my healing hadn’t goofed something up.

If I found out now, I could fix it.

If he found out in three years, he’d be in trouble again.

Everything was set.

Everything was there.

Everything was in place.

"Done!" My knees creaked as I got up. Just how long had I been kneeling there!? No more kneeling, more comfortable chairs.

The mom took a look at her kid, and burst into tears.

Chapter 45
Biomancy II

Amam left with his mom after she paid me what she thought was fair. It was far too little, and far too much at the same time. I didn’t think she could afford the number of coins she was trying to shove into my hands, and it simply wasn’t what the biomancy operation was worth. I accepted about a quarter of what she wanted to give me, reminding her that it was cheap biomancy, and called it a day. I poked my head out after them to make sure Auri gave him a cookie for being so brave. She gave me a little look as his mom explained, I nodded, and a cookie got handed over to him.

His bright smile made my day.

The crowds were starting to pick up, although I was just one of a hundred wonders. I settled back in to get some good reading done, waiting for my next client.

It didn’t take long for a grizzled… sharkkin? To hobble through my door.

He had a tight leather vest, looking like beaten armor, and a club at his hip.

[Warrior - 240]. Potential trouble.

I stashed the book and assumed my [Fortune Teller] look.

"I predict you are here… for biomancy!" I dramatically proclaimed.

The sharkkin gave me a grunt, pointing to the stump his leg ended on.

"Can you fix this?" He growled at me.

I dropped the act, and leaned over my desk to peer at his bloody stump.

"It depends." I carefully qualified. "Can you tell me about it?"

A moderate leveled warrior missing a foot from birth? That was bloody?

"Got caught in a line. Biomancers can fix this, right?"

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t even bother hiding it.

"Yes, but why not, you know, a healer?" I asked in disbelief.

He shrugged.

"Hard to find one that can fix limbs and is affordable."

I rolled my eyes at him, leaning over the table to poke his shoulder. I blasted my normal healing through him.

I wanted to practice biomancy. I also wanted to use the right tool for the right job, and it felt flat-out unethical to use him as biomancy practice when I could just heal him normally.

"You’re fixed. Now pay up and get out of here."

He looked down.

"Huh. So I am. Thanks."

He tossed a few coins onto my desk and lumbered out.

I had an education problem. The average person wasn’t quite sure what the difference between a biomancer and a healer was. They should, but they didn’t.

It was sort-of my problem, but it was far easier to poke them and get them out of my tent, than to painstakingly explain the difference between [Biomancer] and [Healer], then explain I was also a healer, then heal them and get them out.

"Biomancy?" An elephantkin bowed as he ducked into my tent, the room suddenly feeling tiny. Dude was huge in every dimension. The edges of the tent caught on his tusks, then slid unnaturally off of them.

I know I’d want a [Stop Getting Stuck On Things!] skill if I had tusks like this dude.

We were in Ankhelt, kingdom of beastkin. It wasn’t too surprising that every other patient of mine was one, although it did have me mentally flipping through my various comparative anatomy courses.

I didn’t even bother checking his level.

"Only if it’s tiny." I warned him.

He trumpeted amusement. Somehow.

"Healer told me that. Healer told me only way I could beat the sugars is with a biomancer. Otherwise, have to keep going back. Every day, sometimes twice a day."

Ah. Diabetes. Type 2, if a healer couldn’t fix him. Given what he’d said, and his surprisingly robust knowledge of his own condition, I believed he was correct.

I eyed him.

"Alright, here’s the deal. How much do you know about your disease?" I asked him.

"Too big. Too fat. Organ couldn’t keep up." He said.

I nodded.

"That’s mostly correct. Also, your body is more resistant to what your pancreas produces. Similarly, if I fix the organ now, you’ll continue to degrade it. However…" I paused and looked him up and down, running some numbers in my head.

"How much do you weigh?" I asked him.

"Two tons."

FUCK. I was considering shaving off a few pounds to give his pancreas a fighting chance when I restored it, but two tons? Forget it. Even if his vitality was low, I could barely make a dent.

Ok. First principles. Let’s tackle this top to bottom.

The pancreas. Among other things, it produced insulin, which regulated how much sugar was running around the body.

Diabetes came in two types. Type I, and type II. Both were failures of the pancreas, but the root cause was different. Type I came from a virus or some other external factors causing the pancreas to shut down. Annoying, terrible for people who had it, but easy enough for a healer to fix up.

Type II was worse, from a magical perspective. The pancreas in type II had simply… given up. It couldn’t keep up with how much person there was, which usually was a result of being too damn fat and large. His mention of regular, daily visits with the healer suggested the second type. Healing wasn’t going to fix the back-image the System had of his pancreas, which was ‘I’ve given up trying’. A full modification somewhere was needed.

Now, if I simply gave him a new pancreas, restored it to life and gave it motivation again, things would be great for a few weeks, months, or even a couple of years. But the sheer size of the dude in front of me suggested that, in time, it would fail again.

Restoring his pancreas and taking off the few pounds I could wouldn’t work either. It’d be like throwing a cup of water into a house fire.

He wasn’t quite at a healthy weight either.

"Can I use a skill to look at you?" I asked, trying to be polite.

"If you can fix me, please." He agreed.

[Elvenoid Visualization] popped up, and I zoomed in on his pancreas. A tiny, shriveled little thing, confirming my suspicions.

Right.

I had a plan.

"Ok, I’d like to tackle this in two, arguably three ways. I would like to get your permission before starting."

"You have it!" He enthusiastically agreed.

I gave him my best Look.

"You need to know exactly what I’m doing and changing about you. Otherwise you don’t have informed consent."

He frowned, and leaned forward.

"You’re the expert. Alright, tell me."

"Step one is fixing your pancreas. I’m going to give you a new one."

"That’ll fix my problem?"

"Not completely, no. Just temporarily. Let me finish." I gave him a second Look. He got the message.

"Step two is like step one. I’m giving you a few redundant pancreases. The hope is by sharing the load, they’ll…" I trailed off and cursed.

"Nope, sorry, nevermind, that won’t work." I grimaced. "Each one will attempt to work like it’s the only pancreas, not knowing about the rest, and the first time you eat something sugary, they’ll flood your body with insulin, causing hypoglycemia and probably killing you. No, I’ll have to supersize your first pancreas."

The elephantkin was looking nervous.

"Are… you sure you’ve done this before?"

I snorted at him.

"Cheap biomancy, at a student clinic. What do you think?"

He made a motion to get up, then slumped down.

"I’m screwed either way." He muttered.

"Good! Glad we’re on the same page! Now, after one extra-large pancreas, I’m going to fiddle with your stomach nerves. The goal is to mess with your satiety cues, so you’ll eat less and lose weight, letting your new organ work. Losing weight will also be good for you. It’s imperfect, there are better solutions, but you’re just too damn big for the other solutions, especially after I’ve fixed up your pancreas."

I paused, my mind catching up with my mouth.

Pancreas. Average weight on a human - 91 grams.

Elephantkin. Average scaling up factor per organ of 20x.

About 1,800 grams. For a regular sized pancreas.

I wanted to double it in size. Then add in a nice safety margin.

Weirdly, my mana was my main bottleneck, not my power or control.

"If your vitality is over… 130… you’re going to need to get me some arcanite to work with." I told the elephantkin with a wince. I had the arcanite ball full of mana, but that was partly an emergency reserve, and more importantly, didn’t contain a fraction of the amount of mana I’d likely need.

Some kids had a vitality over 130, promptly after unlocking their System. It was rare, but it wasn’t impossible. The previous kid had been tiny, and had a vitality of four, so I hadn’t needed to even run the calculation.

There was a damn good reason that biomancers primarily worked on young kids, or people who’d just unlocked, and even then, made the smallest changes possible. I was fairly sure the [Biomancer] that had visited Iona when she was a kid simply tweaked her testosterone production.

"How much arcanite?" The man rumbled.

"What’s your vitality?" I asked him.

He hesitated, not wanting to give away that sensitive information.

Just a moment though.

"7,523."

I closed my eyes, and he must’ve seen my face.

"I’m sorry." I whispered to him, slouching in my chair.

He rumbled disappointment.

"Can you do the thing with the stomach?" He asked.

I wiped away some tears. Not being able to help someone who’d come to me for healing was more devastating than I’d expected.

I knew I couldn’t fix everything with healing. But with biomancy, somehow, I’d allowed myself to think it was different now. That I could do it all.

"Yeah. Let me see."

I traced the nerves around his stomach, working out between a mix of theory and practical ‘see what’s in front of my eyes’ which nerves where, and what signal, were responsible for satiety. Ok, technically not satiety, but fullness.

Feeling full was only one part in the staggeringly complex equation that dictated satiety, which in turn helped dictate eating habits and amount. There was more to it than that. How often did people eat for pleasure? For fun? Because they had a problem?

This was only going to give Mr. Elephantkin a small leg up on his weight problem.

It was better than nothing.

I explained what I was doing, and he seemed to understand, although he sounded as disappointed as I felt.

There was a chance on a small adult I could’ve fixed their pancreas, especially if I just needed to spruce it up, instead of also enlarge it. My patient was simply too large and too high leveled, and had lost out as a result.

I debated doing a partial fix on his pancreas, and doing everything I could to restore it to its old healthy operation, but no.

Down that path lay flat-out murdering my patient, when the operation inevitably stalled out mid-change. There was no telling what a partly healthy, partly ‘naturally diseased’, and partly ‘dear gods what is going on here’ pancreas would do. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Nerves were small and relatively easy to play with, although he might be getting conflicting signals. I wasn’t screwing with all the nerves, just 80% of them, such that 80% of his nerves endings in his stomach would always report being full, and the remaining 20% would report some degree of ‘hungry’ to ‘full’.

The brain was one big mystery, one that we hadn’t cracked, and it was possible that it would rewire itself to only pay attention to the remaining ‘operational’ nerves, and entirely ignore the modified ones.

[*ding!* [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] leveled up! 11 -> 14]

[*ding!* [Permanence] leveled up! 2 -> 3]

Biomancy was hard.

Some biomancy was easy.

Colorblindness when the issue was a lack of cones in the eyes. Gave my patient a splitting headache afterwards, and I was forced to run him back to the School proper as an emergency. The [Healers] descended on us, fiercely interrogating me as to what I’d done, but after extensive, exhaustive analysis, I’d done everything perfectly.

His head was just struggling with the information overload. He’d gone an entire lifetime missing the colors, and his brain wasn’t coping well with the new inputs.

A good lesson.

I was regranted permission to continue working on my biomancy.

Changing someone’s hair to a ‘natural’ ginger was simple, and saved them a lifetime of hair-changing appointments.

Extra eyelids.

Stopping hair growth.

Starting hair growth.

[*ding!* [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] leveled up! 14 -> 19]

[*ding!* [Permanence] leveled up! 3 -> 7]

Tattoos.

I hadn’t previously put together that I could use biomancy to make permanent tattoos, but I had more than a few guards politely make the request, each one bringing a small heap of Arcanite with them. It was something of a thing here, and the guards knew both the mana requirements, and that ordinary healers could easily destroy normal tattoos on accident.

There were a number of workarounds - permanent paint being a semi-popular one, a very expensive [Tattoo Artist] with something of a monopoly on the truly permanent tattoos in the city - but getting young biomancers to do the work was just well-known in this particular circle.

Cheaper to boot.

Some biomancy was hard, when not flat-out impossible.

Changing a dullahan’s metal composite. What a dullahan was made out of had major cultural implications, and a pair had traveled from the Han empire just to get a chance at finding a biomancer to help them out.

They’d brought fully formed suits of pure adamantium armor that they’d wanted to ‘replace’ their old armored skin with, and when I’d explained the problem - metal armor and skin weighed a ton - they’d drawn swords and almost immediately shaved their old armor off, practically down to nothing.

It was like a human peeling their own skin off with a potato peeler, one strip of flesh at a time, and I watched, utterly horrified and fascinated.

It did make the operation possible, since their innate vitality didn’t apply to the new armor, not until I’d attached it. They stoically put on the ‘new’ armor, and I ‘latched’ it to them, then made the changes permanent.

[*ding!* [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] leveled up! 19 -> 30]

The large jump was concerning, and I’d never taken the Magical Metallurgy class. It wouldn’t surprise me if not everything was entirely correct, and I told them so.

I was [Oath]-bound to.

They stretched and jumped and generally made a huge ruckus, and declared that they were happy with the results. It made me uneasy, and I suggested they get a follow up with a specialized biomancer.

They gave me sixteen diamond coins for my work, and I was getting a really, really bad feeling about the whole thing. A single diamond coin was worth the same as a ruby coin, and each one was worth 10,000 arcanite coins, the smallest coin. Way more than enough to pay for a normal biomancer… so why did they come to me? An out of the way nobody?

Strange. I wonder if they were trying to also buy my silence or something? Not that I needed it, I was already sworn not to reveal confidential patient information, which this qualified for.

The downside of that was I could only complain to Iona at the end of the day in vague terms about what had gone on.

Chapter 46
Biomancy III

I had to decline a few requests. They just weren’t possible or practical for me to do, or they’d cause serious harm to the patient. Giving someone the ability to eat grass. Give someone wings - that was a full-body set of modifications, on top of large, heavy structures. Extra arms required so much work and arcanite I couldn’t even begin the attempt. Replacing lungs with gills would just flat-out kill the person asking for them. Someone asked me to remove their refractory period, and while that modification was in theory small enough for me to change, it involved serious messing with their brain, and I was not going there.

Some of the declines burned me deep inside.

I couldn’t fix someone who was seeing hallucinations and hearing voices. I could only refer them to an apothecary, who might, might be able to brew up a potion to stop the voices. Temporarily.

I couldn’t split apart conjoined twins, not at the age they were at and level of fusing. Fascinatingly, they had two Systems, one each, but their physical stat adjustments to their body was the sum of the two stats. There was no line in the middle, nor did the stats multiply each other. The stats also summed with each other before getting refactored into the multiplier.

I did escort them to the main School hospital though. The people working there would love a project of that size, and I foresaw dozens and dozens of levels for numerous people in the future.

I swung by Marcelle’s office on the way back.

"Hey Marcelle!" I knocked on her door. "Got a minute?"

She put down a paper she was grading.

"A quick one, yes. Found something you can’t handle?"

I nodded.

"Yeah, conjoined twins. I sent them to the hospital, that’s why I’m up here. Anyways, noticed their System was additive on their body, which was a bit of a surprise."

Marcelle gave me a tired look, and broke out a bottle of wine. I scurried forward and grabbed a seat, slightly disappointed as she only poured one glass.

"I am not sending an even slightly tipsy biomancer to work. Not in a thousand years." She glared at me.

"Ah, fair enough." I wasn’t about to say "Hey, I can purge it out of my system, I’m totally not a lush, can I have some free booze please?" I was bad at social stuff, I wasn’t a complete idiot.

"Anyways, quick version. Congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon one of the slightly darker biomancy secrets. You might’ve noticed that conjoined twins weren’t covered in any of your classes, and that’s on purpose."

I thought about it, the puzzle immediately clicking. I pulled a face.

"Ooooohhh… because anyone inclined towards power, regardless of the price, is going to start grafting heads to themselves."

"Exactly. Usually takes the form of a cabal or a cult, where the people whose heads get removed and attached to the greater whole are voluntarily joining."

I shuddered at the image.

"Since they’re willing, they’ve got all the skills available."

"Quick study. You’re correct. The Exterreri Empire has a standing bounty on them, along with most other nations. They technically don’t violate a divine decree."

Marcelle shuddered, and tipped the entire glass back, immediately refilling it.

"Right. I need to work, and you’ve brought back a number of terrible memories. Please don’t spread it to other biomancers. The fewer people that figure it out, the fewer monstrosities are made."

I left, fully onboard with Marcelle’s suggestion. I could imagine it now. A vast flesh-blob, a huge mouth in the middle, and dozens upon dozens of heads grafted onto it, each one with their own skillset.

Interesting that it didn’t apply to hydras. Maybe that was a case of "one being, many heads", as opposed to "many heads, many beings."

I made it back down to my tent on the fairgrounds, waving to Auri as she continued working her half-dozen baking stations, luring in customers with the delicious scent of baking food.

Which, ironically, seemed to be frustrating Auri somewhat as her rival-in-baking was also making brisk sales off of her delicious smells wafting through the air.

I grabbed her attention as I dodged the line filled with students and tourists.

"Hey Auri!"

"Brrrpt!" A pair of mage hands flew over with a delicious smelling pie. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I’d gotten a little too deep in the zone, and I’d been neglecting food.

Again.

"Thanks!"

With that I went back to work.

As with every single invention, people used it for weird sex things. SO MANY weird sex things. Every third client of mine wanted modifications for sexual gratification. Bigger penis. Smaller penis. Hooked penis. Extra penis. Larger breasts. Smaller breasts. Perky breasts. More breasts. Extra nerves. Extra sensitivity.

Tentacles.

Dear gods and goddess, why. Why would anyone want to graft tentacles onto their body just for sex?

Enlarged prostate. More accessible prostate. Extra lubrication.

No levels in [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom]. I was hitting areas that the System seemed to think I knew perfectly.

Requests to render people sterile, both male and female. Those were both easy, and incredibly hard. Easy in the sense that I just needed to snip exactly the right place, hard because I needed to do a deep dive and investigation to make sure they knew what they were getting into, and more importantly, that they weren’t getting coerced.

Vibrating… everything.

Split, longer, ridged, bumpy tongues.

Fluid… manipulations…

The less said on that topic the better.

Rewiring nerve clusters in unusual positions to trigger massive responses. I was judging some of these people, a few of them quite a lot, but I did quietly file that one away for Iona. I bet she’d love something like that, and the ethics of it were fine.

There were a few more ideas that I quietly filed away in my mental filing cabinet.

The entire thing wanted me to pour bleach into my ears so I’d never have to hear the weird requests again. If I had to explain to one more overly cocky teenager that nobody wanted a 20 inch by 4 inch penis anywhere near their parts, I was going to scream.

I raised my eyebrows when a scrawny teenage girl came in. Not my usual demographic, but hey, practice was practice. Plus I could do my little part to help people.

I was not going to fast-forward puberty though. I checked her level.

[Laborer - 32]. Probably waiting for the right circumstances for their next class. If they were an [Apprentice] right now, and they got promoted at their job to [Journeywoman], then their next class up would offer a stronger [Journeywoman] class.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Kids, almost the world around, still started working at 8 when they unlocked the System.

"I can see the future!" I proclaimed once again. "You need… BIOMANCY!"

She flinched at my pronouncement, and I immediately felt bad. She looked around, like she was going to bolt.

"Come on in, sit, sit." I gestured to the chair in front of me. "Tell me what’s going on?"

Like a skittish colt, she sat down in the chair across from me.

"I, well, you’re a biomancer, right?"

I was no good with small talk, but I could see gigantic flashing mirage signs and everything.

"Yes."

"Ok, well, um, I…" She trailed off, clenching her fists and looking down.

I let her be, my mana rapidly ticking up from my last patient. Finally, she found her courage.

"I don’t think I’m in the right body." She whispered, eyes darting back to the tent flap.

"Can you tell me more about that?" I asked her.

"I’m a boy." He whispered. "I feel like I’m a boy. I should’ve been a boy. But I’m stuck in a girl’s body."

Oh fuck this wasn’t going to be an easy one. Not by a long shot.

"Alright, what else can you tell me?"

Encouraged, he started to get some steam.

"Everyone around me says I’m a girl. They say I should act like one. Dress like one. But I don’t want to! I’m a boy. Can you fix me?"

"How long have you felt like this?" The only thing saving my inexperienced butt were all the classes I’d taken, and more than a few checklists I’d read. I was mixing and matching hard here.

"All my life!" He brightened up. "I’ve always known. Now my body’s changing, and it’s becoming even more icky, and I just can’t stand it!" He practically burst into tears at the end.

I tapped the table with all my fingers, thinking.

He was definitely transgender, no question about it. The question was, what did I do about that?

A proper transition was mana-intensive, among other things. It wasn’t quite a full-bodied transformation, but it was close. I’d need to impact nearly every part of his body, although…

Hmmmm…

I could cheat on a large number of changes. Benefit of working with kids.

Okay, time to work through a few more questions.

"Do your parents know you’re here?"

He looked terribly guilty for a moment, then nodded.

I gave him my best incredulous look.

"Really?"

He shook his head.

"Please?" He begged.

It wasn’t changing my decision, but I still gave him a hard look.

"Alright. Things you need to know. First off, I don’t want to get your hopes up too high. You’re a lightweight, but any changes I need to do are going to be massive. It’s entirely possible that your weight and your vitality combined are going to be too much for me." I said.

"If I had less vitality, it’d be easier for you?" He said.

I nodded.

"Yes, but-"

A cold flash of horror went over me as the classic classing-up lights started dancing around his head, and he smashed his head onto the table.

"No no no oh no don’t do this to me." I scrambled out of my chair, healing him and readjusting his body to be more comfortable.

"FUCK!" I swore, confident that my privacy runes would stop the noise from escaping the tent.

There was no way in hell I wasn’t going to give it my best efforts now. Not after watching him torpedo his entire class just for a chance.

I popped my head out of my tent, catching Auri’s eye.

"Brrrpt?" She asked.

"I need, like, two of everything. Stat."

"Brrrpt!" She gave me a little salute, and I got dirty, dirty looks from the people in line.

I shot them the finger as I retreated back into my tent, feeling much better.

Significant calories were going to be applied to this problem. Half stress eating from me, half the sheer amount of work I was about to do was going to be hungry, half making sure the kid had a solid meal in him before I did major work, half the kid looked poor in the first place and needed a meal.

If I ended up with as many people halves as I did food halves, I’d be in trouble.

Hands flew into the tent, loading the table up with pies, breads, scones, biscuits and more.

It didn’t take long before he jerked and gasped in his chair, looking suspiciously at the food once he reoriented himself.

"Okay. A few things. First, don’t do stupid shit like that without talking with me first."

He meekly nodded his head.

"Second, let me finish everything I wanted to say!"

I debated throwing the rest of the biscuit I was nibbling on at him, but that would be overly mean. Kid was jumpy enough.

"Now, what’s your name?"

His mouth twisted in a grimace.

"Desi. I hate it." He was looking at the food longingly.

"Right, ok. I’ma call you kiddo." Oh gods kiddo was a terrible nickname. What was I doing? Where was Iona when I needed her to bail me out of awkward social situations? I did know if I tried to defuse the awkward I’d probably just make it worse, so instead I aimed for professionally solving his problems as quickly as possible.

"Kiddo, you should eat up. Grab a bunch. It’s free, don’t worry. Let me give you the rest of the speech."

I took a deep breath.

"If - IF - I mess with your body, it’s practically irreversible," I mentally cursed as his eyes started shining, and I just knew almost everything I was about to say was going to go in one ear, and out the other. "Technically, another, stronger biomancer could come along and reverse the changes I’m going to perform, but we’re a rare breed, and usually cost an arm and a leg. Permanent. Forever. Unless something happens that I’m not expecting, you’re likely going to never have kids. System might come along and offer you a skill that solves that problem, but expect no kids."

The kid nodded, and I started to doubt myself. I’d met him all of fifteen minutes ago, and I was about to perform life-changing magic on him.

"I have no idea what your parents will say," I did know I wasn’t afraid of them trying to absolutely murder me, but that was only because of my levels. "But there will be people out there who’ll be unhappy. Because life is filled with idiots, and there’s no pleasing everyone. Someone will always find an excuse to dislike someone else. Heck, I got grief once because my hair is brown! What a dumb thing to complain to someone about." I was rambling, and I shut up.

"Yeah." He quietly agreed.

"Right, also…" I went over every aspect I could think of. He seemed to follow, and without ceremony, I found myself touching his hand, using [Elvenoid Visualization] to start flickering through a dozen different views of his current body.

Early puberty meant hormones had started to ramp up, but not necessarily make huge, sweeping changes yet. The hormone production and their effects was one of the biggest ways I was cheating. Instead of going through and reversing every single change that had been made so far, then making the changes that should’ve happened, I was going to adjust the hormonal balance and let that do most of the talking. Right now, the body wanted to produce more estrogen and progesterone than testosterone, and I needed to make tiny, subtle adjustments so it’d produce more testosterone, and less estrogen and progesterone.

Kids were easy in many ways, but one tricky part was I needed the body to still give off the ‘we’re done with puberty’ signal. Otherwise, kiddo would never stop going through puberty, and down that path lay a quick heart attack after a short life as a giant.

It was one of the most well-studied biomancy phenomena. After all, most biomancy was done on young teens, exactly like kiddo. It was tricky, but the answer was a well-worn groove in my memory.

There might be some tiny traces of the earlier hormonal balance, but I was able to impact things early enough that it wasn’t a huge deal. Add in a bit of vitality, almost any general appearance skill, and everything would come right out in the wash.

No, the tricky, mana-intense part were the parts. He had female reproductive organs, and I needed to turn them into male reproductive organs, even if they were semi-decorative. As a fetus developed, they made proto-organs, which quickly developed into the male or female equivalent. For example, the proto-organs which turned into ovaries on a girl, would turn into testes on a boy. It was ‘easier’ to change the organ into what it ‘could have been’, than to simply force everything into a correct position. ‘Easier’ meant ‘a better image that saves mana’, and I wanted all the mana I could manage.

The clitoris needed to expand, and combine with the urethral opening, which I needed to elongate. The labia minora and majora would turn into the scrotum, and the entire pelvis needed serious rearrangement.

The sacrum was going to be widened along with the coccyx, effectively closing off the former birth canal. The Iliac crest needed to lose its flare, while the ischium went from a boxy shape to a smooth shape. The pubic bone was going to get filed away from a fat bone to a skinny bone, which all in all made the pubic arch go from wide to narrow.

The fallopian tubes were turning into the vas deferens, and the list went on and on.

I wasn’t touching head size or height. I was going to let puberty handle those. The worst case of leaving it alone was he’d end up shorter. Oh no. I was going to play around with the thorax, torso ratios, femur thickness, and spinal angles, along with the hundreds of thousands of tiny other extra changes I needed to make.

I started flicking through the different views I had of his body, making adjustments to my rapidly expanding mental model each time I noted a different place that needed an adjustment. I felt him occasionally moving under my hand. I ignored the distraction. My other hand was on my arcanite ball, ready to pull in extra mana.

View after view, system after system went through my mind as I continued to check and double check my work. I mentally laid over my new system over the old system, and realized I’d neglected a few minor veins, mentally unhooking them from old places and reattaching them to new ones.

Only after I’d exhaustively checked every system, from sweat glands to nervous three times without making a single change did I pull the trigger.

The kid screamed. His face contorted as he writhed under my hands, and I immediately recast [Elvenoid Visualization], furiously checking what was wrong.

I also wrapped him in [Mantle of the Stars], not letting him move while I looked into things. Last thing I needed was for him to run away screaming in agony. That’d cause problems, problems that would stop me from fixing what happened.

I immediately sprinted to the nerves, using the pathways of what had lit up to trace where the problem was.

Everything I touched was on fire.

I made a snap decision.

I was fully confident in my abilities as a biomancer, and as a healer. I was fully confident nothing I’d done was lethal, or would kill him.

[Permanence] flashed through him, making what I’d done stick, then I blasted him with healing. The screaming immediately stopped.

I opened my eyes, kiddo squirming uncomfortably in the chair.

"It itches." He complained, scratching furiously.

I shrugged.

"Eh, it’s the new nerves. They’re complaining that everything’s new. You ok? Everything good?"

He checked in his pants - crude kid - and looked up at me, eyes shining.

"I’m a boy now." He gasped.

I snorted at him.

"You always were."

The little shit tried to strangle me with hugs.

Chapter 47
Biomancy IV

I barely got a breather after the kid left. I needed to restore my mana after the latest session, but I hadn’t gotten the chance.

"Hello!" A jackalkin entered almost as soon as I reentered my tent. "I was wondering if you could give me eyes in the back of my head?"

I gave him a skeptical look, but on the surface, his request wasn’t too unreasonable or unmanageable.

"Let’s have a long discussion about that." I settled back into my chair. "I need to recharge my mana, and you need to know what you’re getting into."

He frowned a bit, but took a seat on the other side of my table.

"I’m certain I know what I want." He griped as he took a seat.

I shrugged.

"Sure, you might. I need to recharge my mana though, and going over the details will help both of us get on the same page. What if I thought you wanted black and white vision that could see underwater, while you were thinking of eyes that could withstand the sun’s high glare?"

"You can’t do both?" He asked.

I snorted.

"Everything’s a tradeoff. There’s no perfect eye. Look at an eagle’s eyes, and a deer’s eyes. One’s good for seeing far, the other’s great for a wide range. Eyes that can handle the pressure of the deep ocean are radically different from the ones that can fly high. Plus, we’ll need to reshape your skull to accommodate the additional orbital sockets."

I was starting to get into it.

"Alright, unless you want your eyes dangling uselessly, they need sockets. Bone to protect them. Now, I can’t drill into your skull, your brain’s in the way, so we’ll need to extend the bone out, and drill a hole in your skull for the optical nerves to hook up with your brain. Weirdly, the occipital lobe is at the back of your brain, not the front, so we don’t need to wire the nerves around your skull, we can just hook them up. Now, the rest is fairly straightforward. What kind of eyes do you want? What’s needed? I can mix and match lenses, although I recommend an off-white sclera. Don’t go for red or anything, you’re going to look freaky enough. I can make your iris any color, and no, eye color doesn’t matter at all. I do recommend keeping it the same. Next, we have…"

I continued to go on in great detail about the eye while my mana recharged, my patient looking greener and greener the whole time as I talked about considerations like ‘do we include a fake nose to make things look better’ and ‘helmets are going to be difficult in the future.’

He eventually walked out without getting extra eyes. A shame, it was an interesting problem. As I went over all the parts that I needed to change though, I was suspecting I didn’t have nearly enough mana.

The patients kept coming. A crocodile beastkin wanted different colored scales. A smart kid, burning with passion, wanted improved muscle density and retention. He offered the entirety of his meager savings, and I was happy to help him.

If he didn’t die young, he’d go far in life.

A woman wanted to know if I could improve her color vision. After checking over what I knew on the subject, along with a deep scan of her eyes, I added in a fourth set of color cones, granting her a richer experience.

I noted that particular modification for myself. It was an easy addition, and the entire world would be more vibrant.

I hesitated at, then declined, making someone’s claws venomous. There’d be a lot of blood on his hands. Too many accidental deaths, and I didn’t want to feel responsible for it.

Turning down a modification I could do felt weird. I reflexively healed people all the time, and there was never a reason to turn down a medical request.

Armored scales. Extra nictitating eyelids, to keep out the blowing sand. I marked that one down for personal use as well, although I’d need to do some mixing and matching.

Someone wanted to be fat. I pointed out that I’d charge more per pound than she would spend just buying food and eating it. I happened to know a marvelous baker, just next door, if she wanted to spend her coins there…

Someone wanted to be skinny. I was a little more open to that request, since losing weight was hard. I wasn’t able to get too many pounds off of her, but she was delighted.

Allergies and fertility problems were hard. Each one required careful tracing to see what had gone wrong, then fix that. It was tiny, finicky detailed work, and I had some moments of quiet introspection where I wondered if I was out of my depth, and if the line about admitting when I didn’t know the answer to a problem was relevant.

In the end, after checking over my work, I convinced myself that it was a confidence issue, and not a knowledge or skills issue. [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] didn’t level up, bolstering my confidence.

I hadn’t had a confidence issue on my work in decades.

Someone wanted the ability to eat grass, and I happily pulled out my calculations on the subject, showing them that it just didn’t work.

"... as you can see, you’d end up spending six hours a day shoving grass down your throat. I get that if you’re starving, it’s better than nothing, but you could be spending that time doing something else to get food. Plus, I’d need to rearrange way too much of your digestive tract. It’d either need to work in parallel, meaning I’d need to shrink and modify almost every other internal organ to make it work - not pretty - or change your current system to accept it, at which point you lose the ability to properly extract nutrients from a number of other foods. Then we’re back at ‘spending hours every day eating’, which is no fun. Especially since it’d be grass. Or hay. And to cinch it, I flat out lack the mana to make the modifications."

I got a pouty look at that, and I crossed my arms.

They left.

Making nails more claw-like was on the menu, with the patient in question already having related skills.

Silky hair. Perfect beard line. Fixing overbites and underbites.

Heterochromia. Giving, not fixing. She thought it’d look cool, and had the money to pay.

A dwarf entered my tent as I took a deep drink of water. He was classically stout, with a black beard in rings that practically looked polished. A deep green reflective layer to his clear eyes over a thick brow suggested a Forest element, and his shirt was tough and well-traveled. Practical and loved.

Hadn’t seen a dwarf the entire time we’d been here. Ankhelt wasn’t terribly close to Khazad.

The two weeks of the School being set up here were coming to a close. New students were admitted. Graduates who wanted to be dropped off here had left, and were going to their various homes.

I was pleased with my efforts and practice. I’d capped nearly all my skills, and felt ready to take on the larger, full-body project that was modifying myself and Iona.

I could afford to be picky about my patients at this point. I mentally made a bet with myself if the dwarf wanted to become taller, shorter, or have his beard modified.

I put my hands over my eyes, and dramatically called out.

"I can see the future!" I declared. "You want… BIOMANCY!"

"Nope." The dwarf grunted, hopping up onto the patient chair. "Not in the slightest."

"Oh." I was a little disappointed at that. "Well, I think you’re in the wrong spot then."

"Heh. You’d think that. Nah lass, I’m interested in you."

I immediately grew wary.

"Why?" I asked suspiciously. There’d been more than one incident of someone getting the wrong idea of a high level healer in the School’s fairgrounds, entirely forgetting that the School was allowed to have Immortals and the like running around.

Not that people knew I was an Immortal, but the same idea applied.

"Ah, let me not get off on the wrong foot. I’m Goki Kotir the 523rd. Pleased to meet you." He offered a coarse hand, and I shook it across the table.

"Elaine. What can I do for you?" I kept my generation out of it. I was tempted otherwise, but no.

His bushy eyebrows went up at my name, but didn’t comment. That, or he just thought I was giving my profession.

"Elaine’s my name, just to be clear." I corrected anyways.

I should start going by Dawn. It’d save me a world of headaches.

He grunted acknowledgement.

"Well, we dwarves are the best craftsmen in the world." He proclaimed, and I let a lopsided grin split my face. The more things changed, the more things stayed the same, and dwarves were still bragging about their craft. "I’m a biomancer myself, and I must say, your work is fantastic."

I wasn’t great with people, but some quick mental math indicated he couldn’t have seen more than one or two patients. That, or he’d been stalking me for days before coming to say hi.

"Thank you." I was wary.

"Now, I’m going to swing straight to the gem in the rock of the matter. No bantering about. This here’s a long shot, with you probably having some fancy patron or another you get back to, but are you at all interested in an apprenticeship after finishing up with the School?"

I opened my mouth to reply, but Goki immediately plowed on.

"Now before you go collapsing the shaft on me, I know a few biomancer graduates from the School. No better place in the world to learn the craft, that’s for sure. It fails miserably at teaching you how to be practical about it. How to make the connections. How to sell your skills to those who can pay for it. How to establish safe circuits to ride on. How to handle nobility, and manage money. How to travel. An apprenticeship is solid for learning the ropes of the profession. Leave whenever you feel you’re ready! But it’d do ye a mountain of good. It’s a dangerous world out there."

Poor Goki didn’t know what he was getting into. I was far from a shrinking violet, forget about the fact that I didn’t intend to be a biomancer long term.

But the situation was too perfect. Too well set up. My resistance was crumbling.

"I’d like to apologize. Let me properly introduce myself." I had on my best cheshire cat grin. "My name’s Elaine. Elaine the 94th."

He glared at me.

"Yer lying."

My grin widened.

His glare slowly softened into horror.

"By every ounce of gold…" He gasped. "Yer not lying."

He bolted out of his chair, the poor furniture crashing into the side of my tent as he sprinted out of the room.

I held it in a moment, then just laughed and laughed and laughed.

I needed to find more dwarves to pull that on.

A few more simple cases, a couple of people who just needed healing, not proper biomancy, and the most horrifying case stiffly walked into my tent.

A high, high level mess of a teenager, who had to be under 20. By a few good years.

[Laborer - 478].

I sucked in air between my teeth as I used [Elvenoid Visualization], an absolute mess appearing in my sight.

"How the bloody fuck are you still alive?" I wondered out loud, not caring about the lack of professionalism. What I was seeing was just… no.

"I’m too pretty to die." He flippantly explained, not revealing a shred of the pain he must be feeling. He had to have pain-management skills. Possibly more than one.

My question hadn’t been entirely rhetorical.

"Right. Normally I’d give a great big speech about what was going on, and what I needed to do, but uh. I think you know better than me what’s going on, and what I need to do. Given the extent of… everything… I’m going to start operating on the most critical parts, then we’re hustling you over to the main hospital."

He frowned at that.

"I can’t pay."

"You’ll be a great case study. We have more healers than patients. You’ll pay us in a dozen levels apiece."

He shrugged.

"Sure, I can be a test subject for healing. That’s fine."

Great.

Without further ado, I got to work.

He had Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, which was a whole mouthful of words to describe an incredibly rare condition. Long story short? His body didn’t form scars in connective tissue. Instead, it grew new bones.

But not always. No, sometimes the tissue just changed into bone anyways. His body was a mess of random bones where bones didn’t belong. His spine was fused into a solid column. His shoulder blades were one with his shoulders. His elbows and knees still moved, but they had a jagged edge where he was clearly breaking them himself just to move around. A tendon in his neck had turned to bone, locking his head. He had bone spikes growing into his lungs, he was stuck looking forward as his bones grew into his extraocular muscles. One of those bones was creeping towards his eyeball.

My question of how he was alive hadn’t been a rhetorical one. I literally did not know how he was still alive.

I stopped counting at two dozen growths that could possibly kill him. There had to be some serious skills at work.

Ah. I bet he had a class dedicated to staying alive and fighting this. It’d explain his level - permanently stuck in a life or death fight against his own body? With a class solely dedicated to the fight? That would explain most of what I was seeing.

I went for the important parts I felt like I could do on my own, mostly hitting around his lungs and heart. I only managed to kill a few slivers, his own vitality fighting against my skills. With my mana pool mostly emptied - only leaving a bit in case of a medical emergency, like his aorta getting pinched between two bones - I scooped him up, and brought him to the hospital.

I descended back on one of the many ferries the School had going between the flying island and the fairgrounds they’d set up, wondering if I should start packing up. Our time here was coming to an end, and it felt like a high note to end on. I didn’t want some weird sex thing being my last memory of this trip, and working on somebody with a rare and fascinating disease, being able to improve their life?

That was a pretty good end to the trip.

Classes had continued their endless march while I was down here to boot. The professors understood wanting to get practical work in, along with all the benefits of visiting a city, and didn’t hold it against us. They didn’t stop assigning work and giving lectures though. I could use the time to start catching up on the missed work, instead of increasing my backlog.

First things first though. Raiding Auri’s stand for some food.

"Brrrrpt!" Auri called out from her high up perch as she saw me, a mage hand pointing down at the crowd. "Brrrrrrrrpt!"

"Wait, really?" I cried out as another hand appeared over me. I pushed through the crowd, Auri’s pointer finger moving as I did.

I got more than a few dirty looks and curses as I shoved through the crowd, but I didn’t care.

The ground rumbled, and a wave of dirt crested ahead of me.

With Artemis surfing on it.

She used the wave to finish pushing through, landing right in front of me.

She grinned.

"Heya healy-bug, how’s it going?"

I tackle-hugged her, throwing my arms around her waist.

Chapter 48
Old Friends

"Artemis! I missed you!" I broke my hug, looking up at her ever-present grin.

"You missed me? Elaine, how many times have I told you to work on your aim?"

I rolled my eyes and punched her arm.

"Where’s Julius?" I asked, frowning.

I got tapped on my shoulder.

"Right here. Some of us don’t make a huge spectacle - oooof." Julius was interrupted as I tackle-hugged him around his waist, not caring about decorum or anything.

"You’re alive!"

Julius patted my back.

"A dozen rounds as a Ranger, and you’re still surprised I’m good at keeping my head attached to my shoulders." He laughed as I broke the hug.

"Oh, it wasn’t the monsters I was concerned about." I told him with a straight face. "It was extended proximity to Artemis that had me concerned for your life."

I ducked the predictable swat from Artemis, dancing back as I stuck my tongue out at her.

"Can’t touch this~" I teased her.

"Oh really?" Artemis’s eyes gleamed dangerously.

"Brrrrpt!" Auri saved… someone… by taking that moment to land on my shoulder. "BRRPT!"

"Auri! It’s been ages! How are you?" Julius expertly diffused and redirected the situation.

"Really? You sure?" I asked the bird.

"Brpt bbbrrrrpt. Brpt brrrpppt brppppt." Auri confirmed.

"Auri wants to close up shop." I translated for Julius and Artemis. "She figures that hanging out at the School will be more comfortable, and I agree."

The couple glanced at each other.

"Sure, why not." Julius agreed. "Let’s find Amber and head over."

"Amber’s here!?" I shouted. "Why didn’t you tell me!"

Artemis viciously ambushed me from behind, managing to swat my hat off as she cuffed my head.

"Because you haven’t given us more than three seconds to say hello! Honestly, Sentinels these days." She teased me.

Knowing when I’d lost the verbal sparring, I picked Auri up with one hand.

"Ready?" I asked my little bird.

"Brrrpt!" She nodded, ready for the stunt.

I flipped the bird at Artemis.

We met up with Amber - her one good eye was now faceted instead of starry, and I recognized the Gemstone element - and made our way at maximum hobble speed back to my dorm.

"Auri, how did you manage to take payments from so many people at once?" Our - well, Amber wasn’t a little girl anymore, she was a fully grown woman at this point - resident merchant interrogated Auri, eye blazing purple with swirling mists.

"Bbrpt?"

I stopped and stared at Auri.

"No. No way!" I protested.

"Brrrpt!"

"Compliments don’t buy ingredients!"

"Brrrpt?"

"Not even really good ones." I cried out in despair.

Amber patted my back.

"There there… now you know how I felt most of the time watching you work."

I gave her a foul look, then cracked out into an evil grin.

"Oh no. I don’t like that look." Amber backed up from me.

"I love it." Artemis said. "Just need Julius to feed me a few grapes, and it’s the perfect entertainment for the evening."

"Of course you would. If it’s not chaos and mayhem, you’re not happy." Julius said.

I looked back and forth between the two, momentarily distracted.

"How did you two end up shacking up anyways?"

I caught movement in the corner of my eye, and I glanced over to see Amber trying to make good time away from me.

"Oooh, no you don’t." I easily caught back up to her. Something about having a few hundred levels, a speed advantage, and a lack of a limp did wonders.

"What did I do?" Amber protested.

"Absolutely nothing! However, if I remember correctly, you’re still my apprentice, right?"

Amber froze for a moment, then nodded. I recognized the look she was shooting me. Desperate, frantic. For some reason.

"Right! I’d be neglecting my duties as your master if I didn’t ensure you had the best education and knowledge possible."

Amber eyed me, her fears melting away.

"You’re not going to insist I join the School, are you?"

I shook my head.

"No. Just some light reading."

"Why do I sense this light reading is a dozen books?"

"Just sixteen! For the first set. Then there’s a couple… dozen… no, wait, a couple of dozen… more books for you."

"Each one dense enough for a smith to use as an anvil?"

I gave Amber an exaggerated wink. "You got it! On a more serious note, I’m looking to acquire some bamboo scrolls, and charcoal. They’re not easy to find, since who would use them when there’s better stuff around? But I’m sure you can find it… and I’ll even let you get a modest profit!" Money was how to motivate Amber.

She huffed at me, but grinned as a thought came over her.

"Of course! Naturally, as my master, you’ll be funding all the purchases, right? I only take the highest quality vellum, and embossing is mandatory."

I snorted at her.

"They’ll be ink on paper, and you’ll like it." I retorted.

"Well, I guess you don’t want the presents I got you then." She crossed her arms.

I threw my arm over my eyes, and dramatically reached out like one of the [Thespians] Iona and I occasionally saw at the theater.

"Alas! I have a treacherous apprentice! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" I cried out. "Is this the part where you throw me out of the highest window in the tower, or is that later?"

I peeked at Amber, who was rolling her eyes at me.

"Puh-lease, it’s not like I’m done stealing all your secrets. Poisoning you in your sleep happens after I’ve raided the secret library, not before."

"Ahha! I’m safe! For as long as I don’t build a secret library, you can’t raid it!"

"Booooo!" Artemis called out. "Booooooooo! No secret library? What sort of half-baked evil sorcerer are you anyways?"

She hooked her arm in Julius’s, who grinned at her.

"You’re thinking what I’m thinking, right?" The Lightning mage asked the speedster.

He nodded.

"We need to construct the secret library for Elaine. Then Amber can raid it, then we can overthrow Elaine."

"Brrrpt?"

I groaned at Auri’s question, and decided to play along.

"Yes… you can help Amber overthrow me…"

"Brrrpt!"

I was ganged up on. Surrounded on all sides.

I knew when a battle was unwinnable.

I paused at the door of the dorm, suddenly realizing a critical detail.

I hadn’t told any of my friends from Remus that I was dating Iona!

I had a brief flurry of thoughts and anxieties run through my mind. What would they think? Would they approve? Had they liked her? What-

I shook my head and banished all that from my mind. Worrying about it was pointless. It wouldn’t change anything about what was going to happen, it’d simply wind me up for no good reason. I was dating Iona, and that was that. What would happen would happen.

Plus, Iona was in class right now.

I knocked - only polite to warn anyone who was around that I was coming with guests - and entered.

"Hey Reinhard!" I greeted the Kirin, still in elvenoid form. "I’ve got some friends over for a bit, hope you don’t mind."

She got up from the sofa, and gave us a look.

"I don’t. I’ll be in my room."

We all sat down, and I eagerly leaned forward.

"So! Almost three years! Tell me everything that’s happened!"

"... now keep in mind, Julius was still naked and juggling the eggs while hanging from the ceiling. You know, standard Hunter’s Guild position."

They were still working there, and while they hadn’t said it, their stories implied they were among the top hunters of the organization. Granted, each Hunter’s Guild was more or less self contained within its own city - there was no grand, overarching, intercontinental organization or anything like that - but it was still impressive. Lyon was the capital of a nation, and it wasn’t a small city.

The man in question groaned.

"Why does that have to feature every time you tell the story?" He mock-complained.

"Shush, because it’s funny." Artemis retorted. "Anyways, we hear this sound."

"Pffffffffffffffppppt." Julius blew a raspberry, doing his best impression of the noise.

"And I realize the monster is farting in its sleep."

I saw where this was going.

"Oh no." I managed to get out around a laugh.

Artemis slapped her knee.

"Oh yes! One little spark, and-"

"Ka-boooooooooooom!" Julius mimed the size of the explosion.

No matter how old I got, flaming fart jokes didn’t stop being funny. We spent a moment chuckling, then Artemis carried on.

"Anyway, from there it was easy." Julius said. "Killed the monster, harvested the parts, and got out of there."

Iona chose that moment to enter.

"Elaine! You’re back! And with friends!" She gave me that huge grin that I oh, just so loved.

I patted the spot next to me.

"I am! You remember Amber, Julius, and Artemis, don’t you?"

Julius and Artemis looked at each other.

"Pay up." Julius insisted, holding out his hand.

"Nuh-uh! We don’t know they’re dating yet!"

Julius didn’t say anything, just motioned his fingers in a ‘pay up’ gesture. Iona grinned as she plopped down on my lap, looking down at me.

"Do you have to pay more the longer we kiss?" She asked over her shoulder.

She kissed me without waiting for the answer.

"I didn’t expect to see the Moon Cult here." Julius remarked.

"They’re like mosquitoes, they’re everywhere." Artemis complained.

"Moon Cult?" I asked them. Iona looked very interested in all this.

Amber nodded. "They’re obsessed with the moons, and they seem to have more money than any three gods combined. I know we’re new here, but it was like they popped out of nowhere, and were suddenly everywhere, recruiting and paying silly amounts of money to anyone who joined up."

I gave her an alarmed look.

"You didn’t join, right?"

Amber snorted.

"Please, my mind isn’t made out of money. The deal’s too good to be true, and nothing good comes out of cults."

I gave Iona a… well, I thought it was a subtle look. She met my eyes and gave me a slow shake of her head.

Nothing from the divine then.

"We keep talking about ourselves, but Amber, what have you been up to these last few years?" Iona asked my apprentice.

"I upgraded my class! Kind of. Similar to the old one, but it’s a Gemstone element now!" Amber enthusiastically explained. "Turns out I had the right idea, and trading skill-infused gems is exactly what my class wants to do. Plus, all coins are now gemstones."

Julius coughed while Artemis shot Amber a murderous look. She colored.

"Ok, ok, not the small coins, but-"

"Amber, you might want to stop digging yourself into a hole." Iona advised, and she closed her mouth, then opened it again.

"You know what I mean!" She threw her hands up in frustration. Artemis smirked at her.

"Yeah, but it’s fun to yank your chain. Anything else?"

"Being a gemstone, or rather skill, merchant is great! Traveling around, meeting new people and seeing interesting skills. People are generally pretty willing to charge gems - for most of them, it’s free money! When things go wrong, I have dozens of powerful skills I can use to save my life, and I can even recharge some of the skills I use to still sell them! I don’t make as much, but my life’s worth more than the gems."

I was nodding along. That did sound handy!

"Anyone interesting?" Iona asked.

Amber scrunched up her eyebrows.

"There’s Seigmund. I swear he follows me around, trying to snipe deals from under me. Another flea-bitten werewolf scavenger lowlife with no nose for business and-"

Amber went on in that vein for quite some time, as the rest of us traded looks.

"Who’s betting they kiss?" Iona asked.

"I’m in. No kissing." I said.

"They’re totally going to." Artemis said.

Julius shook his head.

"I’d love taking more of your money, but…" He trailed off.

"It’s mine anyways!" Artemis gleefully said.

"Anyways, I’ll happily take some of Iona’s money when she loses."

"Stop betting about my love life!" Amber squeaked.

"Alright, alright. Say, since we’re all trading stories, Iona, have you heard of the time Elaine got spitroasted over a fire?" Julius asked with a grin. Artemis was rubbing off on him.

I paled in sudden horror as Iona looked way too interested, turning to me with a devious smile.

"Noooo… no I haven’t. Why don’t you tell me more?" She asked.

Like it was rehearsed, my former Ranger teammates stood up and offered Iona their elbows.

"Why don’t we take a walk together? We can tell you allll about her."

"I’m doomed. Doomed!" I cried out as Iona happily slipped her arms into theirs, and the three of them left the suite.

"Brrrpt." Auri agreed.

"Tell me more about your adventures, Amber."

The woman’s eyes lit up.

"Sure! It all started right as I left the island. While my class is about trading intangibles, selling goods is still money. With that initial seed capital, I…"

I smiled and relaxed as Amber told me all about what she’d done.

I wasn’t great with the social stuff, but I wasn’t totally dumb. I knew why Artemis and Julius had dragged Iona off, and it wasn’t to regale her with embarrassing stories about me. I wouldn’t be nearly embarrassed enough if they weren’t telling them in front of me. I hoped Artemis and Julius weren’t going to interrogate Iona too badly, or try to scare her off. I liked everyone involved too much for things to go wrong.

Nothing for it but to wait and see.

"One moment, keep talking I’ll be right back." I told everyone. I grabbed a fresh notebook, my favorite quill, and drew a two-ringed array for privacy, keeping our conversation extra-confidential.

"Hey, since everyone’s here, I’ve got a question for you all." I asked my five closest friends after a few more hours of catching up. Julius and Artemis had returned Iona entirely unharmed, the three of them laughing, and Julius had flashed ‘approval’ in Ranger hand-talk to me.

Interesting question. Did Iona’s blessing apply to hand-talk? I should teach her if it didn’t!

"Sure, what’s going on?" Julius leaned forward, intently staring at me.

"I’m trying to work out what I should take for my third class."

"The reading class." Iona flippantly answered.

"How - what - I never told you I had a reading class!" I protested, outraged.

She just gestured at the communal living room, with a half-dozen of my books splayed on the coffee table.

"Bookosaurus. You’re telling me you didn’t get offered a reading class?" She raised her eyebrows doubtfully.

I grumbled and agreed. And wrote it down in my notebook… leaving plenty of extra space near Iona’s name for more notes and suggestions from her.

"Anyways, here are my classes…" I listed out all of the options I thought even had a remote chance of making it, along with a few thoughts I’d had. Everyone grew thoughtful at the list, thinking it over.

"Biomancy." Amber was the first to break the silence. "You already have it. It synergizes well with your healing class. Your [Oath] is a powerful multiplier on it, letting you perform feats way above your level. Most importantly?"

She rubbed her fingers together, and we collectively groaned.

"Money! It’ll make you rich!"

As much as I wanted to complain, she wasn’t wrong. I wrote it down.

"You’re part of a team now, and you need to look after the people around you. [Phoenix Nurturer] would help Auri, kicking the can down the road. Who knows, maybe the ideal solution will present itself to you later." Julius said.

"Nah, forget that. [Phoenix Immolator]. Immune to fire? Immune? [Inferno Spirit]? You could literally turn yourself into a being of fire, and just…" Artemis mimed a dozen different things I could do as a quasi-elemental, of which I got like three.

She did have a point.

"Brrrrpt!" Auri’s suggestion was [Hoard Thief], although her reasoning and motives were suspect. Mostly related to me having stolen her as an egg.

Looooots of notes.

"Well, does anyone have pros on [Mother of Modern Medicine], or can I safely axe the class once again?"

"Yeah. The power is insane." Julius said. "If you’re happy with your existing classes, which it sounds like you are, the class would be a perfect stat-stick. Just kick back, enjoy watching the levels go up with minimal effort on your part, and use it to fuel your remaining classes."

Iona shook her head.

"Even though the System loves that you wrote the Medical Manuscripts and basically everyone forever has used it, you want a class that you’ll love. That’s you. A fame class that you just sit back on? With how enthusiastic you are every time you’ve got a new rune or spell to show me? Please, you need the extra skill slots to do things you enjoy."

Iona’s serious analysis was utterly ruined by her eyebrow waggle at the end.

I had a feeling this notebook would end up fully used.

"Elaine, can your biomancy make a permanent tattoo?" Julius asked.

"As long as they’re small enough, and your vitality isn’t too high, yeah. Why? Got something in mind?"

He nodded.

"I’m married to a woman who keeps losing her engagement ring, and I was wondering about more permanent methods."

Artemis threw her hands up.

"That was one time we had to dig through monster guts, and I’d lost my hand! We got it back!"

Julius raised an eyebrow at her.

"One? One? I distinctly remember four."

Artemis poked her tongue out at Julius.

"Those don’t count."

He just gestured at Artemis, looking at me pleadingly.

"You see what I’m dealing with here?"

Iona laughed at the whole thing.

"Tell me what you want, I’ll draw it out, and Elaine can make the tattoo. How does that sound?"

"An eagle holding a thunderbolt!" Artemis bounded over to Iona, sitting next to her. "And a mountain behind it! Ooooh, let’s get some details in, like…"

I looked at Julius and shrugged.

"Do you want it on your front or your back, because I’m not sure anywhere else is going to fit the design Artemis is imagining."

He smiled at his lover.

"They both work for me. I’ve got some ideas for Artemis’s tattoo…"

Sadly, they had too much vitality for me to do any real changes. As it was, it took a few hours of slowly etching the designs into their skins just to get the tattoos done.

I didn’t feel confident in giving them full body makeovers, not without a few weeks of prep time, along with potential permission to use the School’s mana reserves. Just a few obstacles too many - and they weren’t interested.

I did get Amber interested in meeting Marcelle.

"Hey Marcelle! I’ve got a fun one for you!" I dragged Amber into Marcelle’s office.

"Elaine. Who’s this?" She asked.

"Amber! A friend of mine. Her leg and eye are… interesting. I’m willing to bet, oh, 50 arcanite coins that you’ve never seen anything like it before." I held out my hand to Marcelle, who cheerfully smiled at me and shook my hand.

"Easy money. And if I haven’t seen it before, 50 coins is a cheap price to pay. Now… what do we have here…"

Marcelle smiled at Amber and squinted, eyes flickering over details I couldn’t see.

She didn’t say anything, but while staring at Amber, rummaged around in her desk, slapping five obsidian coins onto her desk. I gleefully swept them up.

"Ahem." Amber fake-coughed, holding out her hand.

I gave her one of the coins.

She pocketed it, and wordlessly held her hand out again.

I gave her a second coin, and glared at the proffered hand. Amber sheepishly withdrew it.

"Right, you two have fun." I said.

"5,000 coins and the chance to study me further if you can fix my leg." I heard Amber start to negotiate as I closed the door behind me.

"Nonsense, my work is worth…"

I whistled on my way back to the dorms. Amber could find her way back, and I wanted to keep hanging out with Artemis.

"What are your plans for the future? After the School?" Julius asked over an extravagant dinner. Not prepared by Auri, because we wanted her around to chat.

Iona and I traded devastated looks.

"I… don’t know." I freely admitted. "I want to help people. I want to heal them. Always have. But I also need to think of myself. Be in a safe place. Preferably not annoy the local guards too much. That means Immortal lands, but from what I’ve seen of the world so far, there’s just so many more people that need help in mortal countries. Plus…"

I reached over and grabbed Iona’s hand.

"I’ve got Iona."

She squeezed back.

"I don’t know what we’ll do after we graduate the School either." She admitted. "I need to return to the Valkyries in Rolland, but Elaine’s presence is… awkward… to say the least. I doubt the Valkyries would welcome her, but they wouldn’t try to hurt you."

Artemis beamed.

"Perfect! Rolland it is! We’re still stationed out of Lyon!"

Chapter 49
Operation: The Improved Elaine I

I knocked on Marcelle’s closed door and waited.

"Please wait." Her voice came from the office.

Blah. Waiting… at least there wasn’t one of the dreaded lines.

It was a shame Artemis and the rest had to leave. At the same time, they had their own lives. While they were currently living in Rolland, it didn’t sound like they had particular attachments to the place, and had even complained about quite a few cultural issues. Like needing to treat royalty like they were something special, and not just people with a fancy title.

There were stories there, and the awkward looks Julius had given Artemis suggested there might be a few shallow graves involved, a noble or two who’d gotten into a ‘hunting accident’.

After what felt like an eternity - three, maybe four minutes - the door opened, and an upset student left Marcelle’s office.

"Elaine. Come on in." The professor sounded tired, and I entered, sitting on the chair. Her collection of modified animals was smaller than usual, and the paperwork on her desk was piled higher. She didn’t offer me the customary glass of wine, but I wasn’t going to complain.

"What can I do for you?"

I swallowed a tiny nervous lump. I didn’t need Marcelle’s approval, but I realized in the moment that I wanted it just a bit.

"I’m hoping to take no classes next quarter, and I’m hoping you’ll sign off on it." I succinctly explained.

Her right eyebrow went up.

"Indeed? What do you plan to do with all that time? The max length you’re allowed to stay at the School doesn’t change, even if you do nothing with some of your quarters."

I gave her a nod.

"I understand. I’ve been wanting to do a full biomancy workup on myself, and I believe I’m ready. I want to use the quarter to carefully go over my plans, draw out the diagrams and references, do my research, then give myself a few days at the end of the quarter to adapt to my new changes."

Marcelle snorted.

"Pencil in at least two weeks, if not more, to adapt to whatever large scale changes you want. You absolutely have my permission. A full-bodied system change is one of the final exams for the biomancy track, and it’s common for students to take an entire quarter to work on their graduation project. I trust you’re not leaving us anytime soon…?" She asked.

I shook my head.

"No. I don’t believe that biomancy is right for me in the long term. I do want to make modifications to myself though, while having enough time to practice my third class."

Marcelle sighed.

"Ah, what a shame. You’ve gotten brilliant remarks on all your classes, and I believe you’d be one of our finest."

I licked my lips, not wanting to draw attention to the problem, but feeling a sense of obligation.

"Are you still alright with me taking the quarter off if I’m dropping biomancy after?"

Marcelle waved her hand.

"Yeah. It’s no problem. You can attempt to get certified for a bronze grade in the biomancy track in the end anyways, and trust me, the more certifications you have, even unused, the better off your future prospects will be. Who’d you want to hire? The gold healer, or the gold healer with an additional bronze biomancy?"

The question was clearly rhetorical.

"Now, if there’s nothing else, I have a pile of work." Marcelle picked up a quill and one of the papers, and I recognized a dismissal when I saw one.

The first step was to find a study zone, and prepare my supplies. Just because I hadn’t signed up for any classes this quarter didn’t mean I had nothing to do. The School’s combat team still had its regular meetup every day at the same time, and it wasn’t something I could skip. Similarly, I wanted to keep my job at the library, although I did change which hours I was working. I made them end of the day, enforcing a mental break. They did provide nice bookends to my day, activities to help regulate me. Otherwise, I’d probably start pulling all nighters, then collapsing for a few hours, then starting all over again. My internal cycles would get screwy, and I knew where that ended up.

Massively inefficient.

No, better to keep to a schedule. It would also keep me seeing Iona and Auri, and not turn into some sort of hermit.

I bought four new notebooks, and a dozen new quills just for this. It was a bit wasteful, but this felt significant, and acquiring supplies just for this felt right somehow. Plus, I could afford to indulge a bit. I also had a significant collection of old notes from various biomancy and medicine classes, along with all of my scribblings over time. All my musings on Operation: The Improved Elaine.

Heck, I’d even kept most of my old homework assignments!

The library was next!

"Hey Martin!"

The demonic librarian grunted at me.

"What?"

"I’m looking for a copy of the complete set of the Medical Manuscripts that I can borrow for the quarter. I’m also looking for Metallurgy and Meat by Jin Pinyin, Carving Your Enemy’s Bones into Runes and Power by Amina Tagreb, Advanced Octagony by Lotus Alder, A Short Guide of Jiwa Runes by Tithos Realmshaper, and A Collection of Useless Organs and Muscles, and Proposed Forms and Functions by Theodwin Heathertoes. I’m also looking for a dozen creature anatomy books, starting with Dinosaurs of Dairalt by Inkarr Herder…"

Martin eyed me.

"A Collection is by Gilbert Labingi. Theodwin tried to steal credit for the book, and if you’ve found any by his name in my library, I would ask that you draw my attention to it so I can correct the issue."

Faun politics. I didn’t want to get anywhere near them, I just wanted to get the blasted reference book.

"Understood. I’ll let you know if I see any. Until then…?"

"It’s a large number of books you want to check out, over the limit. You know this." Martin reminded me.

"I’m hoping to keep them all in the library for the entire quarter. In the room on the sixth floor, seventh corridor, the one almost tucked behind a bookcase that you need to squeeze past to get into. They’ll never leave the library."

"Books lost in the library in an unknown location are as surely lost as they’d be if you lit fire to them." Martin reminded me.

"Yup. That’s why I’m telling you where they’ll be!" I replied with a cheeky grin.

I got another side eye from Martin.

"What happens when you are gone, and another student decides to rearrange your study space?"

"I plan on being there most of the quarter, with occasional breaks to work and eat."

Martin nodded.

"Alright. You have been an exemplary worker. Simply know that you must return the books at the end of the quarter, and you will need to track down where the books have gone if you fail to return any. On your own time."

"I understand Martin."

"Medical Manuscripts. Grab a copy from the second floor medical section, not the first floor. Those are the reference copies. Metallurgy and Meat is in the first basement level…"

Armed with a list, I went book hunting. I knew most of the content, had it memorized with [Immortal Recollections]. When a mistake could literally kill me? When I’d skimmed some of the texts? When I’d never read Metallurgy and Meat?

Getting a pile of reference books was the ticket. Plus, as I wrote out my notes and plans, I could find the page reference in a book I knew the location of, and add that note in. That way if I asked anyone to look over my notes, I’d be able to tell them that, say, human nerves were in volume 4, page 76 of the Medical Manuscripts, and have a copy to show them, as opposed to my personal recollection of the Medical Manuscripts, which I never read the page numbers on, and could have nerves on page 68, due to a font size difference or the like.

I hauled it all to my study room, one I’d found in my endless rounds of the library and that never seemed to have someone in it. A room, forgotten by the student body at large but not the librarians or staff. We didn’t advertise its presence.

The perfect mini office for me, one that I didn’t need to spend a single arcanite coin to rent for the quarter.

Empty notebooks to my bottom left. Reference books on the top right and center. Old notes on the top left. A clean area to my right.

I put the first notebook in front of me, and opened it up to the first, clean page.

[Drawing] was a skill, one I didn’t have. I’d needed to sketch plenty of diagrams for class, but I wasn’t a master like Iona was.

This was important enough, and I wasn’t a huge fan of [Spotless]. On my first page I started drawing some crude figures with my black quill, hoping to get a skill.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Drawing]! Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Drafting]! Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Anatomical Design]! Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

There we go! That skill looked narrow enough, and hence strong enough at low levels, for my purposes.

I replaced [Spotless] with the skill. I then tore out the first page of the notebook - the one with the bad ‘just draw something to get the skill’ - crumpled it up, and threw it over my shoulder.

The first issue? Skeleton design. It was the fundamental underpinning to how I’d look. It was the structure that everything would need to hang off of. It was the optimal starting point for this project, although I’d need to go back to it a dozen times, a hundred times, and make small changes and adjustments as various changes cascaded through my designs.

I wanted to look mostly human at the end, so I started with my own human skeleton, carefully drawing bone after bone. [Elvenoid Visualization] helped, giving me a perfect mental image of how I currently looked to start.

Every once in a while I felt my fingers shift slightly, correcting a minor mistake I didn’t even know I was about to make - but I’d sure know about it once my quill was done with the stroke!

[*ding!* [Anatomical Design] leveled up! 1->2]

I was making changes almost immediately. First off, my teeth. I’d been lucky with my wisdom teeth, but my teeth weren’t exactly perfectly straight. Practically nobody had perfectly straight teeth.

Well, that was going to change. A tilt here, a tilt there, a minor twist on my second molar, and a quick ‘make my teeth lock perfectly’ later, and my teeth were fixed. On the initial pass.

I didn’t need to make layers of teeth to regrow when the first ones broke, like a shark. It was a fun design, but I’d just heal anything I broke. With that said, humans didn’t exactly have the hardest, toughest teeth around. I took mixed inspiration from snow leopards and tyrannosaurus rex to make my teeth harder and tougher - although the shape stayed the same!

The coccyx was mostly vestigial, but too many muscles anchored to it. I’d been debating removing it, but I’d wait and see if I could anchor the needed muscles somewhere else instead.

I’d also looked at getting a tail, but that was more for fun and experimentation than any real desire to have a tail. It’d utterly ruin the ‘trying to look human’ look.

The human spine was a bit of a disaster, but almost every fix I’d found involved becoming a quadruped. A scrawling mess of a design involved completely redoing the entire concept of the spine from the ground up, doing something like having flexible internal scale armor with a cushioning layer of something absorbent, along with multiple strands that…

I stopped after losing almost half a day trying to redesign the spine from the ground up, and returned to well-tread basics and fundamentals.

The elven spine design was optimal, and I once again mentally cursed how advantaged they seemed to be.

I could just select ‘elf’ for everything I wanted to do. Elven skeleton. Muscles. Heart. Nerves. The whole nine miles, and the System would recognize that I was now an ‘elf’. Possibly after a class up, although the ‘hop’ was small enough that it might not be needed.

I’d get the grand feat stats, and moving forward, I’d also get the racial stats, along with their curse. I’d get their leveling speed. In nearly every way, I’d be an elf, although I’d also select what kind of horns I wanted.

I would lack the cultural and familial ties though, along with the mindset of being raised an elf. Practically, biologically speaking though, I’d be an elf.

I had no small amount of hubris. I believed I could do better than an elf. I had a few advantages I could lean on, primarily my constant self-healing which would let me make some sacrifices for improved performance.

A similar story existed for becoming a dragon. I could try to replace every part of my body with the draconic equivalent, and turn into a human-shaped dragon. The comparative anatomy mostly supported it.

I’d also turn into some sort of freak, and it was entirely possible that I’d become a dragonling instead of a dragon, or a true dragon would take offense to what I’d become. Given that one seemed to live at the School, and I frankly felt no desire to become a scaled abomination, I was sticking with ‘mostly human’.

Breathing fire did sound cool.

I could skip the ‘human-shaped’ dragon, and just go full dragon. I suspected the body dysmorphia would be rough, and I liked the benefits of being able to live in an elvenoid society.

And, stupid as it sounded, kisses. I liked kissing Iona. Dragons didn’t kiss.

Knees were a second point of poor design. Hitting a knee from the side was a great way of breaking it, and there was an argument to making it a ball-and-socket joint, not a hinge joint.

I’d lose dramatically on performance for a reduced chance of breaking the joint, and it was the first place where my magic was tying into my design choices. I could, with a thought, simply fix a broken knee. I didn’t need to make a sacrifice to prevent injuries when my ability to cure injuries was amazing.

The human pelvis sucked for childbirth. It was just too narrow, and our skulls were too large. Having no desire to ever have kids of my own though, it was easy enough to ignore that design ‘flaw’. Instead, I looked at it critically, seeing if there was any way to improve strength and performance, while sacrificing the birth canal.

Granted, that was committing to never ever having kids in an Immortal lifespan, which was something of a tough call to make. I knew I didn’t want to have kids… today. Was I sure I would never change my mind?

I was leaning yes-ish. I didn’t see a reason to make sacrifices on a ‘maybe one day i’ll change my mind.’ If I did change my mind, I’d need a powerful biomancer with access to a ton of mana to make the changes, but… I’d be Immortal, I’d have the time to acquire that much arcanite and find a willing biomancer. I wonder if other biomancers saw the same flaws with the human body that I did?

It was like I was making patch notes for the human body. ‘We’ve found that wisdom teeth aren’t needed anymore, and we’ve removed them. Fixed the issue of teeth not always being straight. Fixed the issue of the knee being too breakable. Fixed…’

My feet had big circles around them. I’d drawn them as they were now, but I was going to fix them. I was unsure which design I was going to use. All I knew was the human foot had way too many bones and moving parts, half of which weren’t used at all. A design for climbing trees, but we didn’t climb anymore.

Horses, cheetahs, and ostriches were high up on my list for initial design choices. A few dinosaurs made the list, and I added in deinonychus for its terrible claw.

With a few modifications, it would easily be hidden in a shoe, while permanently granting me access to a knife.

I was less sure on which creature to model my feet and legs after. There was an argument for webbed feet helping me swim. Maybe if I could manage it without compromising my ability to run - or wear shoes! The rest I had a few more ideas for.

My neck took inspiration from owls. Humans have two socket pivots, while owls only have one. That would let me look directly behind me, or even further! Plus, breaking my neck by twisting it would be a pain in the neck.

It did overall weaken the area in some respects, but the ability to look behind me was worth it, even if I’d look like a monster while it happened. I wanted to mostly look human, but I wasn’t going to sacrifice incredible practicality that wasn’t immediately obvious.

I yawned and stretched, then froze.

"Unpicked mangos, what time is it!?" I jumped up, out of my chair, and dashed through the door. I spotted a clock, and cursed again.

I was late to work. I’d spent too much time relying on [Timekeeping] to tell me when I needed to do something.

Good thing I was already in my workplace!

Chapter 50
Operation: The Improved Elaine II

A few hours of mindless library work, and a quick dinner with Auri, Iona, and Fenrir, and I was back in my mini office, continuing to work on my skeleton design.

I’d picked up the crumpled paper and brought it to Auri for disposal.

"Brrrpt!"

She liked my new project.

I was happy with my design, but something was nagging at me. I leaned back at my picture, trying to work out what was bothering me about it.

Eventually I flipped open the Medical Manuscripts, and started going through various diagrams. I groaned when I got to the elvenoid anatomy section.

My design was a few hairs off of the elven skeletal design. And with a few exceptions - like being able to entirely rotate my head - their design was better.

With some difficulty, I swallowed my pride and made a few corrections to my design. I wasn’t going to let hubris sabotage the rest of my life.

I checked my earlier notebooks on various skull designs I’d toyed with over the past three years. I remembered them all, but there was nothing quite like double checking things to properly center and frame my mind.

The pachycephalosaurus, or ‘pachy’, was a mid-sized dinosaur, which was to say its head, when bent over, was just a hair under mine. It was known for its incredibly robust skull, which it used to headbutt predators, and each other. The two pachys would line up, then charge at each other, colliding head to head at insane speeds. Their weight meant there was a significant amount of momentum that their skulls needed to absorb, and their entire heads were about being hard, thick, and with the right amount of padding for their brains so that they didn’t get rattled around.

It was perfect. I wasn’t going to take their skull wholesale - I didn’t want to look like a dinosaur head - but there was significant inspiration from their design. Even better, there was a type of saurian that was modeled after the pachy. One of my biggest fears was head injuries, and their protection was just what the doctor ordered.

That was enough for one day, and I called it quits, heading home a little earlier than I planned.

Time to unwind with Iona and the rest!

The next day was the details and practicalities of the skeletal system. I had the design, but that didn’t mean I had the materials.

I was throwing things at the wall and was going to see what stuck, and what modifications and compromises I’d need to make once everything was in place. For my initial run through, I elected to use Kun Peng bones. They were light enough for the titanic creature to fly through the air, while strong enough to survive the crushing pressure of the deep ocean. For bone marrow I was eyeing up unicorn marrow, which had a list of fantastical properties long enough that I couldn’t believe it was classified as a non-magical material. The biggest one though? The blood cells produced carried 50% more oxygen than most other blood cells. The marrow could absorb tremendous amounts of shock and impact, and just bounce right back, which meant blows would sort of get ‘absorbed’ into it, and stop propagating through my body. Other biomancers had noted that it easily took to small modifications, without needing to make significant tradeoffs in other areas.

Almost every part of Auri, for example, was classified as magical. In other words, it just didn’t work without some sort of special magic making it possible. If I tried to give myself wings of flame, I’d just get a brief burning smell, then a pile of ashes. There was something intrinsically magical about a phoenix that my level of biomancy couldn’t replicate.

I put a star next to the unicorn marrow, and added a note.

Confirm with Marcelle and two other professors that Unicorn Marrow is mundane, and the reference book I acquired didn’t have a typo in it.

Just to be sure, I checked the reference book in question, paging through it until I found the section on unicorns. This book agreed that it was commonly listed as a mundane material.

A consultation with Metallurgy and Meat was next, and bless the author. He’d listed the best metals and alloys to use in an elvenoid body at the very front of the book.

A number of magical metals started the list. Mithril was the ideal combination of strength and weight, while Adamantium was practically unbreakable. Orichalcum wanted to float, and Purium leeched impurities and toxins, acting as a panacea for poisons. Terrarium’s density was unbeatable. Starsteel amplified magic, while Lusterite had no weight.

I was practically drooling over all of them, but they had three problems.

The first was getting any magic metal in the quantities I wanted was insanely expensive.

The second was working them into something resembling the complex shape I wanted.

Those two issues were bad, but I could work with them. I’d be willing to work and save up to get the metals to ensure I could have the best future possible.

The third issue made me sigh and pass over them entirely.

Magic metals weren’t conjurable. If my arm got cut off, [Dance with the Heavens] would dutifully restore my arm, modifications and all - except for the magic metals. I’d have a gaping void there, with all the structural compromises, pain, and the rest involved.

It had to be mundane, and I facepalmed as the first mundane metal made the list.

Titanium. Specifically, a titanium alloy with a metallurgical notation that I didn’t understand, but I would. Most bodies didn’t react at all to its presence.

With a different colored pen - silver - I started to delicately trace a hexagonal pattern over all of the bones. I was tempted to take a shortcut here. After all, I knew what I meant, and there was no way the skeleton diagram wasn’t getting redrawn a half dozen times.

Down that path lay sloppiness though, and sloppiness in this project would get me killed.

Done properly was the name of the game.

I did make a note in a different color.

While the designs for my own body require frequent quantities of low-level healing to maintain, another reader may find replacing titanium with Purium to be a worthwhile trade, as most of the healing I am planning is to cleanse my body of toxins that are otherwise unhandled. The proposed titanium structure is simply for strength and durability, and the structure will take to a different metal with minimal fuss.

I circled the note, and added a note to the note.

Note to self: This is for my current plans. If I change how I want to use my healing down the line, this note needs to be modified to show how Purium may or may not work.

Once the titanium was drawn on the skeleton, I switched to a red quill.

My joints were up next. I spent far too long waffling between titanoboa and basilisk joints. Titanoboa’s were a bit more flexible, while basilisk;s were a bit more durable, and ‘held’ things together better. It’d be harder for someone to, say, get me in a joint lock and dislocate my arm.

I wanted to imprint some runes on me. Runes that I’d have access to, no matter how badly my life went, no matter what weirdness I came across. It’s why I picked up Carving Your Enemy’s Bones into Runes and Power by Amina Tagreb, a complete primer on ‘how the heck do I put runes on my bones’. Granted, the author had been assuming dismembering your enemy before whittling away, but the principles were transferable.

My rune philosophy came into play here. I wanted runes that would be with me for a lifetime. That would be useful forever. Combat-related runes were almost entirely out. A runic shield wouldn’t be as good as my [Mantle], and more importantly, the rune and array wouldn’t scale with me as I leveled. Sure, there were a dozen ways to mitigate it, but at the end of the day, they just weren’t worth it.

No, I wanted runes that would be as useful to me at level 4000 as they were at level 500. Utility runes were primarily the name of the game.

The first was a simple one, drawn in Octagony. Pure water conjuration. If I ever got stuck underground, or in a desert, I could conjure up some water and get a drink. An isotonic solution would be marginally better, but unfortunately, it exploded in complexity. The marginal utility from a slightly different solution wasn’t worth the dramatically increased cost of space for the runes.

I sketched them into my pelvic region, the mix of bones in an excellent arrangement to take the spherical shape Octagony mandalas formed.

The language was more complex to write than Anaconda was, but it was more compact. It would let me draw the runes even larger, giving them more time before they burned out.

I did need to look up a standard water conjuration rune set in the Overflowing Stack at some point, but that’s why I was doing this in the library. Bonus - anything I didn’t know I didn’t need to work out. I could just post the problem near the Overflowing Stack, and post a bounty of a few dozen coins on the problem. One of the more brilliant wizards could tackle the problem and provide me with the solution.

I worked hard at wizardry, but I wasn’t a genius at it. Octagony constantly gave me headaches to boot, and while I was confident in my ability to write anything I wanted in Anaconda, I knew when to back off and let the people truly passionate about the subject tackle a difficult problem.

Runes burning out was a problem for another day. I hoped [Lepidoptera] could adapt to refresh my runes. I hoped that [Dance with the Heavens] would properly restore the runes when I used it. However, if both of those failed, [The Dawn Sentinel] evolving into the insane healing class I’d been promised should fix the issue. The last backup was [Butterfly Mystic]. The class was all about acquiring skills, and I was sure with dedicated practice I could get another ‘engrave runes into my body’ skill.

After water was an almost pure oxygen bubble for my head. Pure oxygen could potentially poison me. This rune set was also going to be in Octagony, and I was centering it on my head. It made the construction of the mandala easier, since it needed to be centered where the rune was centered, and not displayed.

Air. Water. The third was food.

Anaconda was the language of choice here, and anything ‘biological’ and ‘wizardry’ immediately scaled to absurd complexity, for no good reason. Almost 60% of the bones in my body were dedicated to summoning sugar, a simple compound with an acceptable calorie density. Part of the issue came in that multiple bones were a piss poor way of constructing a proper mandala, and instead I needed to draw hundreds upon hundreds of small arrays, each one connected to each other.

That one I simply starred as a "To draw later" set of runes. I hadn’t even started and I could feel a migraine coming on. The complexity made me think there was a wizardry language dedicated to organics, and I put a post in the Overflowing Stack asking for a compressed way to generate sugar at a range. While also mentioning the runic bones aspect to it.

The fourth rune was a shelter rune. It would make a small metal "half egg" that I could barely curl up in. The longer I ran the skill, and the more mana I put into it, the thicker the walls. The idea was simple. If I was stuck in the middle of a sandstorm or something, I’d need some minor shelter to properly cast the right spell for the situation, but that could require some time, effort, thinking, or simply being able to peruse a spellbook to find the right spell for the situation. The runes I was making would let me have all that.

I put the runes on my spine.

Next up was a set of buffs, similar to Origen’s Inscriptions. Runes that slightly improved my strength, speed, dexterity, and vitality. There were two ways of going about it - a larger flat bonus, or a smaller percent-based bonus.

I went with the smaller percent based bonus. It was worse than the flat bonus - for now. As I leveled up though, the percent based bonus would scale with me, and continue to be useful, while the flat bonus would eventually get lost in the noise.

I was thinking of eternity with my build.

Food. Water. Air. Shelter. Buffs. My Radiance magic provided some minor heating, but more in the ‘melt something and use the residual heat to warm myself’ more than anything else. It was one area I was less concerned about.

No, I had a tiny amount of room left. I’d left my sternum clear just for this.

Jiwa was a solid language for highly specific runes with no flexibility whatsoever. It was no good for conjuring water, for example, because it’d conjure the water at the focal point of the rune - inside my body.

Jiwa was excellent for the next rune I was looking at, a skill that I’d danced around wanting almost my entire life. A skill I’d constantly grabbed gems for, and now I’d be able to use on my own.

[Greater Invisibility]

An upgrade from even Magic’s [Invisibility with Eyeholes], [Greater Invisibility] had it all. It muffled outgoing noise. I wouldn’t occlude sound, so echolocation couldn’t find me. It softly removed footprints. It removed my scent. It emitted light exactly the same way and amount my eyes absorbed, letting me continue to see without any telltale hints I was there. It was exactly what it said on the tin - Greater invisibility.

Getting all that done in another language would be dozens of linked rings at a minimum, each one densely packed with hundreds upon thousands of tiny runes. Jiwa did it all with a single symbol.

Studying the rune, and all the different ways it removed my presence from the world was embarrassing. It neatly laid out a dozen ways Lun’Kat could’ve detected me, painting in excruciating detail just how naive I’d been.

My skeleton was basically inscribed and layered twice over at this point. I had one small spot on my chin, where the Octagony air runes wouldn’t reach, and they wouldn’t be close enough to interfere.

There wasn’t anything super practical I could fit there, but there was a fun little rune I could include. It would rarely be practical, not with my skills and Auri, but why leave any space unused?

In a homage to my old love, my old skill, and my old element, I squeezed in [Fireball].

One system down! Just the rest of the body to go!

Chapter 51
Operation: The Improved Elaine III

The days flew by as I continued to work on my project.

Muscles were next. The first part was the design, and A Collection of Useless Organs and Muscles, and Proposed Forms and Functions, along with notes from old biomancers who’d worked on the human system in the past were invaluable.

Humans had a few useless muscles. Occipitalis Minor. Palmaris Longus. Pyramidalis. The Plantaris muscle in the leg brought back some fond memories - almost half the students in my anatomy class had misclassified its tendon as a nerve!

While not quite a muscle, humans also had extra focal fat mounds on the torso, where nipples might’ve gone if elvenoids had more than two mammary glands. Similarly, humans had what I was calling ‘whisker anchors’ on the face.

I drew those in bright yellow, marking them as something I was including for the moment, but was unsure about. There were distinct pros to including tiny, nearly invisible whiskers on my face, along with significant cons. I was planning on tackling that more when I got to the senses.

The muscles themselves were a bit of a curious mix. I’d gotten it hammered into my head that insects were a terrible basis, and the only reason they were able to perform so well in a mass to weight ratio was they were so tiny. Trying to scale their muscles up to human size always ended in disaster.

I’d looked for other places for inspiration instead, and the notes of biomancers past came in handy. After checking their work, cross-referencing different designs, and just plain looking them up on my own, I ended up with an interesting mix of giant, vampire, and elven muscles over the majority of my design, with some minor centaur inspiration on my legs.

I’d done some research on fast twitch versus slow twitch muscles. My natural inclination had been to make nearly all of my muscles fast twitch. Those were the quick, strong muscles without staying power or endurance. [Sunrise] would fill in that gap! Whenever I started to flag, whenever I got tired, I could just use the skill to energize myself, giving myself the best of both worlds.

The problem?

It didn’t work.

Unless I went deep into screwing with my muscles, and only let my body grow fast-twitch muscles, I’d just equalize back to however I used them. I’d only done medium research on how to ‘fix’ my muscle ratios before realizing I’d need to make uncomfortable sacrifices in other areas. I didn’t want to need to rely on mana to run for more than a few minutes either - I’d spent too many years working on my physical fitness to nuke that.

The other aspect worth noting was when I examined myself with [Elvenoid Visualization], most of my muscles were slow-twitch. I was built like an endurance runner, not a sprinter.

I was willing to listen to my body on this one.

I hadn’t forgotten that I was also helping Iona improve her body, and her main focus was on power and maintenance. I ended up with a similar mix on her design, sacrificing a hair of performance to let the body know that, no, she didn’t need to degrade her muscles if they weren’t always in use, while also drawing them as large and as compact as I reasonably could. I leaned a little towards fast-twitch muscles for her, while still keeping a strong layer of slow-twitch muscles.

Hey, if I could help my girlfriend skip literal years of bulking at the gym, why not?

I estimated that she might be able to lift almost 1,000 lbs before stats kicked in once I was done. She’d need a similarly reinforced skeleton, but I was going light on the rest of the modifications. Mostly because I needed to do it ‘right’ on her - no cheating with skills! - and I was already making some changes to accommodate the skin changes she wanted. Otherwise, she’d be human, through and through, on everything else.

Just like she’d requested.

I then needed to work on connecting the muscles to the bones themselves. The design wasn’t entirely the same. There were small, subtle modifications that I made, allowing for increased performance. Like athletes of old, from Earth. The material was the question. There were a dozen creatures with different and interesting tendons and ligaments, although arachnids consistently floated to the top, and they were the most-represented ligament used in the notes of other biomancers I’d found, although they only made up about a third of total ligaments used.

They were a tough, black material that could stretch and twist, while being practically impossible to break. Like a biological spider silk.

I briefly entertained the thought of having some way to generate and sell the material in bulk. Some sort of cow, with enough internal organs rearranged to make the spider silk?

I started to doodle the design when a cold wave of terror washed over me.

At best, I was designing a chimera, which the School would expel me for.

At worst, I was designing a new species, which the Inquisition would take a dim view of.

Okay, if nothing else, I needed to replace biomancy with something else before I became tempted to… experiment. I knew enough to be dangerous, and potentially invite divine disfavor.

It’d suck if Iona got marching orders from her patrons to eliminate me.

I crumpled the paper up, then incinerated it myself with Radiance. I’d take getting yelled at for starting a small fire in the library over potentially getting smited.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 19 -> 20]

"Only" drawing in safe conditions didn’t exactly promote rapid leveling. Better than nothing!

The heart was the last muscle, and it was special in more ways than one. To start, it had its own muscle type, and it wasn’t easy to modify the heart without considering the arteries it was connected to. Everything in the body was connected.

My musings and logic on a second heart had never been fully refuted. I’d heard strong arguments against it though.

Primarily, the heart was there to move blood around the body, and blood existed to provide nutrients to everything. The critical one was oxygen.

My primary heart was located near my lungs, and if my heart got blasted to pieces, there was a strong chance my lungs were also in serious trouble. No lungs, no air repository for blood to grab and continue circulating with.

There was also the massive drop in blood pressure I’d experience with a blown heart, but the blood-related modifications should help.

The thing I was hoping to do with the second heart, if it came to that, was to keep pumping the remaining thick blood - I had plans for that - around my head, dramatically expanding the amount of time I’d remain conscious, and able to extract myself from the latest monster trying to kill me.

Nor had I ever found a reason not to use a second heart. The first one was in my chest, and my second one I located in my lower abdomen, right near my belly button.

It sucked that I couldn’t protect it with a second rib cage, but I’d lose too much flexibility if I did. Gut punches were going to hurt more than before, but I’d have a second heart. Didn’t matter if someone cored me like an apple, and somehow stopped my healing. Heart number two was there to save the day!

Normally, rapidly dropping blood pressure would be a major issue after getting cored. The blood would just… drop right out of me, like someone splitting a barrel of mango juice in half, and with how blood pressure worked, it would leave my head and brain first, causing me to pass out.

The modifications I was making to my blood would make that a long, slow process, letting my brain remain oxygenated long enough to make a difference.

I’d thought it would be super cool if I had two different hearts, but that logic rapidly fell apart. There was an optimal heart configuration, and it’d be foolish not to take it.

Two leviathan hearts, sized down to fit inside my body, was my heart selection. While I didn’t have the size ratio of a leviathan body-to-heart, I had shenanigans planned for my blood that would make it difficult to pump. It roughly balanced out, but I’d need to start running extensive calculations once everything was in place to properly balance everything.

One tricky one I dreaded was the relative oxygen uptake. Both second chambers needed to pump blood to the capillaries around the lungs, then both third chambers needed to reuptake the oxygenated blood, before the fourth chamber pumped the blood around the body. Except the different hearts had different volumes to handle, but the same circulation to work with, and the third chamber had the same problem.

I marked the problem in red. I needed to work with Marcelle on this problem. None of my research into other animals had similar systems to work off of. At best, creatures with multiple hearts tended to have dedicated gill-hearts, on top of main circulatory hearts.

Speaking of gills - the math behind them didn’t work, not with the other modifications I wanted. Lungfishes had been good inspiration, but the size and ratio constraints, along with my planned shenanigans, had made gills a net loss of oxygen.

Gills worked by osmosis. They exposed oxygen-poor blood to water with high oxygen concentrations, and let the oxygen pass through.

My blood shenanigans included taking inspiration from beaked whales, of all creatures. Part of the reason whales could dive for so long was they used their blood as an oxygen repository. The rest of my shenanigans were around the exact composition of blood, along with the red blood cells. Hence the unicorn marrow. While I was modifying the composition - technically, I would be modifying the bone marrow to produce what I wanted - I cut down on platelets and eliminated white blood cells, increased red cell production, and cut down my plasma as hard as I felt I could. My blood would be thick and sluggish. It wouldn’t want to clot easily, nor would it be good at fighting off diseases. It was going to be a harsh strain on my hearts to pump. Which looped back around to why I’d wanted leviathan hearts. They were strong enough for the demands I wanted to put on them.

My blood was another area where my skills came into play. My own healing would handle cuts and injuries - I hadn’t had a scab in years, no matter how many scrapes I got into. Similarly, I purged my body of any disease or toxin the moment I was infected. Designing an immune system that worked, and didn’t attack my own body, would require huge amounts of work, and force me to make performance compromises in other areas I didn’t want to.

I wasn’t entirely axing an immune system, that’d be stupid. But I was only going for a basic, simple front-line system, like what crocodiles had. I didn’t bother with an advanced system like gnomes. Nothing I ever got hit with ever reached that part of my immune system in the first place! The only thing it could do was make mistakes and attack me.

Best of all, I’d only need the smallest trickle of mana - a few points a day - to keep everything running properly.

It wasn’t pure upside. If I ever got entirely cut off from mana, if a powerful canceler got to me and held me in their grasp for days or weeks on end, I wouldn’t be able to fight off any infection that made it past my meager front-line defenses. At the same time, that was just a pointlessly elaborate way to kill me. Anyone that could keep me powerless, with no access to mana for weeks on end, was strong enough to kill me anyway.

There was a minor concern about getting trapped in the fae lands for years on end again, but I was determined not to let that happen.

There wasn’t a single fairy tale that involved anyone getting so much as a cough while in the fae lands. Disease worked differently there, just like everything else.

Artery and vein design was up next. This one I was practically writing from scratch. The circulatory system was an excellent example of ‘good enough’, nowhere close to an optimized design. Vessels looped all over the place, came too close to the surface in some areas and crossed organs awkwardly in others.

None of that here.

The main vessels were designed close and tight to bones, while steering clear of joints that might pinch them shut. I arranged an extra artery to go to the circle of vessels at the base of the skull, wrapping near the spinal column. I was overengineering a bit here - I was confident that I could heal a slit throat, and even if I was prevented from healing, the extra oxygen in my blood would keep my brain working for dozens of minutes, instead of seconds, and that was before my redundant brain plan came into play.

I did cheat on drawing the capillary design. Plain and simple, they needed to be everywhere. It was a given.

I’d investigated a few pseudo-heart designs, but none of them worked well enough to incorporate. They came at a performance cost, and didn’t add anything. I didn’t want a blood cushion in my feet like a horse, as interesting as it sounded.

For the arteries and veins themselves, thunderbirds happened to have a fantastic design, although rocs were a close second. The magnificent birds subjected themselves to some of the highest forces of all the creatures I’d studied in Zoology. The Museum of All Things had a wonderful set of them that I could study, and I was anticipating more than a few trips to the Museum once I had my designs set to properly examine and [Analyze Organ] every piece I wanted to use.

It was possible that another creature had better veins, but if there was, I didn’t know, and no biomancer had ever made a note of it. The same was true of most everything I was doing. I’d never studied the thousands of different species of flies, for example. I simply had to trust that I was standing on the shoulders of giants, and that what they had brought forward was the best.

I wanted to continue onto the torso-related organs, and I cursed as I immediately needed to redo my circulatory system design. I needed additional blood-brain barriers. I needed to reroute an artery to go through the singular kidney. I needed to… do a ton.

Biomancy design was an iterative process. I debated redoing the circulatory system now, but decided against it. I’d see what other compromises and redesigns I needed to do, and make multiple all at once.

The brain came first. I’d studied mine extensively, and I knew for a fact - my brain was screwy. I didn’t pay attention properly, and bounced around more than normal.

It was also me. If I wasn’t bouncy and flighty, was I even Elaine? Who would I be if I did extensive brain surgery, all in the name of becoming ‘better’?

Heck, there were advantages to being bouncy and flighty. My attention snapped to different things more easily, I made decisions faster.

I didn’t know who I’d be, but I knew I wouldn’t be me anymore. I wasn’t touching my brain, even though I knew my norepinephrine was deficient. Or maybe my dopamine.

With all that said, I was willing to clone my brain, and create multiple ‘backup’ brains throughout my body. Very, very small backup brains, with as little as possible to ‘count’ as a brain. I was going to play this carefully.

The only thing I needed the backup brains for was to count as "still alive" if my head got obliterated. While I was "still alive", [Persistent Casting] was active, and it would regrow my head, keeping me alive.

If my head got obliterated with [Persistent Casting] off, that was it, game over, I was dead.

The worst-case scenario was each brain would spin off into their own person and consciousness, and there’d be five people in a single body. Even worse would be if each one gained their own unique System.

That would be one hell of a mess, and I drew red skulls all over the diagrams to MAKE SURE I’d double check this with Marcelle, and anyone reading my notes in the future would know what I was looking at and thinking was dangerous.

The best-case scenario was all the brains seamlessly integrated together, multiplying my thinking and processing speed by five, while removing my vulnerability to headshots entirely. Indeed, getting decapitated would only cost me a fraction of the mana to restore, as I could simply regrow my head, as opposed to needing to regrow my entire body!

Best case, of course.

The backup brains I was a little more willing to be… experimental… with. I didn’t need sensory processing, for example. I did need a brain stem to connect to the rest of the nervous system, along with higher functions.

It frankly terrified me to make the proposed changes.

As for storage? I just knew I was asking for trouble with everything I wanted to cram in my body, and my torso and head were already stuffed. There wasn’t a lot of storage space left in my body. The only thing I could modify were some of my fat stores, and to hollow out a small cavity for a miniature brain. Places close enough to my spine to cleanly hook up into the rest of the nervous system.

The more I looked at my diagram, the less I liked it. I did not want to carve out some fat in my butt to store extra brains.

I hunted down two fat textbooks on brains, and started reading. After three days of research, I had a tentative solution.

I could rearrange the pseudo-brains to be more like braided rope, and thread them through my torso. I’d go down to two extra brains, but that would have to be enough.

Brains led to nervous systems, and drawing the nerve diagram was just as fun as everything else had been. It did give me a chance to fix issues such as the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve, which started at the brain, looped down around the heart, and went back up to the voicebox. For no good reason.

I got seven strokes into the nerve diagram before calling it quits. I needed the rest of the organs in place before I could start hooking everything up together. I’d just leave the nerves trailing off the brainstems for now.

I did want to use kirin nerves, and I was going to ask Reinhard if she’d be willing to give me a hand with that. [Elvenoid Visualization] wouldn’t work on her, she wasn’t an elvenoid. I didn’t need to dissect her or anything… just… chop a few pieces off, heal her back, and examine the bits I’d chopped off. Much better than an old sample from the Museum!

On second thought, she might not be too willing to let me study her. I put a star next to kirin nerves.

I’d also have to loop back to the bones, and make sure they properly stored the elements required for nerve transmission.

It never ended!

Chapter 52
Operation: The Improved Elaine IV

For the life of me, I couldn’t work out a way to practically harden the nerves against electrical shock. Fundamentally, a weak enough shock playing over my nerves looked exactly like a normal transmission, making various muscles contract or relax. Nerves were simple. They received a signal, they passed the signal along. I worked out a few designs that would analyze the length and intensity of signals, then throw them out. Technically, it would work.

It would also murder my reflexes to dust, and make it feel like I was moving through life on a half-second delay. Imagine. Wanting to lift up a mango to take a bite, and watching my hand perform the action an eternity later.

Starting to dodge half a second after seeing an arrow. It wasn’t a feasible design.

Another thing to ask about. It wasn’t the end of the world if I couldn’t manage it, although the ‘hardening’ design might be useful at the nerve endings…

I was slapping things together without checking full-body integration. That came after the initial designs.

I started with the lungs. I’d waffled between whale and mosasaurus for some time, but currently the wind was blowing towards mosasaurus. Both helped deep dives, and while I wasn’t interested in taking up deep sea scuba diving, between my blood, my air spell, and now my lungs, I’d be able to survive hours without an external air source. I wasn’t planning on needing to use it, but right now suffocation was my biggest weakness. I would be shocked if I didn’t become immune to suffocation next class up.

Which would be weird. Being able to mostly survive on pure mana? That just felt… wrong. There wasn’t anything I could point to, and it didn’t include still needing to eat and drink.

I’d always be vulnerable to having a large enough rock dropped on me, even if it eventually needed to be the size of a mountain. That small reminder of my mortality was weirdly comforting.

Also, globally it seemed useful. If a forbidden Miasma classer attacked me with deadly gas, I could hold my breath for an hour, use my air bubble spell, and get at least another hour or so.

The only shame was the creatures I was emulating were able to spend nearly four hours underwater with a single breath. I wasn’t willing to make the compromises needed just to spend that long underwater, but I could get to an estimated respectable hour, no problem.

After searching far and wide, I’d landed on the vicious deinosuchus, a crocodile relative, for my stomach. Critically, its stomach acid was powerful enough to dissolve metal, which was needed for my titanium bones. Also, being able to melt metal meant it was strong enough to digest anything else I could eat. It was a bit of a shame in a way - I was making myself nearly immune to ingested poisons, toxins, and foodborne illnesses at the same time, but I simply didn’t need the protection.

Pairing nicely with the stomach was the deinosuchus’s liver. It produced the right type of neutralizing enzyme, letting the rest of my digestive tract go to town. The only downside?

Absolutely terrible alcohol neutralization. I was already a bit of a lightweight, and I was going into the featherweight category. Not the end of the world, not when I could purge myself into sobriety with a moment’s notice, and needing less alcohol to get drunk wasn’t exactly a loss. Harder to walk the fine line between ‘tipsy’, ‘buzzed’, and ‘sloshed’ though.

I consulted Metallurgy and Meat in a perfunctory manner, simply checking that I wasn’t getting thrown any twists. Unfortunately, according to the text, I was going to be in for a fun time.

When stomach acid dissolved titanium, the metallic titanium would become coated in an oxide layer, and that oxide layer was called "sapphire", which was completely insoluble. I needed to reverse the process, get the titanium back into a useable form without it binding to anything else, then having it pass through the digestive tract.

I suspected the liver wasn’t going to be recognizable by the time I was done with it.

The small intestine was where nutrients were picked up, and deinosuchus was entirely wrong for that task. It was fundamentally a meat eater, and its digestion showed.

Humans and other elvenoids were weirdly good at digesting food, but we were second to the king of eating, the biggest hog on the block.

Pigs.

I made a little purple star next to ‘pig small intestine’, noting that I’d need to confirm that I wouldn’t develop an allergy to onions as a result of using their small intestine. Biology was weird at times, and I needed to look up the mechanism of pig allergies to onions to make sure I could still eat them.

I couldn’t develop allergies without white blood cells, but there was always a chance the professor who’d mentioned it once off-hand in a lecture hadn’t used the proper technical term. An entire species being allergic to something sounded like an intolerance, not an allergy.

My large intestine was performing some of the same function as my kidney, and my search for the right one had led me down a bizarre path.

The large intestine was primarily for water uptake, and frankly, almost everyone absorbed water just fine. There were almost no important differences between any animal, or how they handled it. The only fun part was the colon, where I could do something like grab a wombat colon to poop cubes.

Thinking about it from a water uptake perspective had led me down a different path. Who drank weird water?

Practically nobody. Animals drank freshwater, and saltwater fish had their own mechanisms for separating water out. Even sea snakes and similar animals didn’t drink seawater! They swam to the top of the ocean when it rained, and drank out of the ‘puddles’ on the surface of the ocean!

Sea otters and sea lions were almost unique in the animal kingdom for being able to drink saltwater. I happily stole their design for both my large intestine, and for my singular kidney.

One kidney, because sticking an entire second heart in my stomach needed to shove other organs out of the way somewhere.

Speaking of my kidney, it was my biggest weakness by a long shot. I was shoving a ton of different organs and body parts together. Everything gave off different waste products, and it was the job of the kidneys to scrub everything out of the blood and move it to the bladder.

Problem was, I was generating a lot of waste, and there wasn’t much overlap between the toxins generated. A proper set of kidneys that could handle everything coming in was one of the major sticking points of any chimera.

Exceptionally clever biomancers could find ways that one organ’s waste was another’s input, allowing internal self-cleaning, a modest efficiency gain, and importantly, lower stress on the kidneys.

I was cheating.

My healing properly recognized what was a waste product, and what belonged. As long as my healing was going strong, as long as I had [Persistent Casting] up or remembered to heal myself once a day, I was fine. The mana cost was tiny. Single digits a day, I wouldn’t even notice the drop. It did loop back around to the immune system problem. If I found myself denied the System for extended periods of time - like, half a weekish at my initial estimate - renal failure would kill me.

The list of symptoms for normal human renal failure was a real treat. Swelling was the mildest symptom, quickly escalating to internal bleeding, confusion, seizures, coma, and death. Fun stuff.

It was the price I paid for the absolutely fantastic, out-of-this-world performance the rest of my body would get. Otherwise I might as well go full elf and be done with it.

It was a risk, but everything in life was. I looked at my life, at the world around me, and the criteria needed to be utterly screwed.

I went back to the skeleton design and added in a note.

Find a place to insert arcanite. Protected? Hard to lose? Possible to reinsert after dismemberment.

Can use multiple spots!!!!!

There. With just a few grams of arcanite scattered around my body, I could always pull a tiny trickle of mana to perform dialysis, and keep myself alive. I’d still end up sick as hell, but I’d live.

That’s if I managed to survive whatever captivity was denying me mana.

I snorted.

I was taking the smallest, babiest steps towards becoming a magical creature. It was roundabout, but fit the broadest definition.

The only awkward part about places and locations was, politely, replacing the arcanite when it inevitably got obliterated. My skull was out, but my hipbones worked. I’d just need to knife myself, crack open the bone, shove an appropriately-sized crystal in, then wash healing over it.

Hmmm. I’d have to check if [Oath] was cool with that. It’d require a meditation session or two, but it was far better than nothing.

Since I wasn’t using my kidneys for their primary function, water extraction and management became the key feature I had them for. This looped right back to the sea lions, and something I could use kidneys for.

Salt management. Not a toxin, not something my healing would easily or properly manage. Sea lion kidneys were the second part of the puzzle that would let me drink salt water like it was normal water.

Everything in the body was connected, and I was reluctant to modify my brain. All of my instincts would scream at me when I drank salty water, saying it was bad. My stomach might even rebel, my little lizard brain convinced that it was bad for me. I needed to override that with my sure knowledge that I could drink the water safely.

Retraining myself wasn’t going to be fun.

On the kidney note, I was unsure if the sea lion kidney would be able to properly process the extra-thick blood I was aiming for. Another place for extensive math and calculations.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 24 -> 25]

My kidneys drained into my bladder, and there weren’t any modifications I wanted to make here. The short urethra women had resulted in higher than expected instances of urinary tract infections, but my healing reared its head again.

There was no need to make any changes. It worked just fine. I didn’t need a super sized bladder, an extra stretchy bladder, and heaven help me if I decided to go for a small bladder.

I didn’t want to be an old lady going to the bathroom every other hour at 25. No way.

On the organ reduction note, I had no desire to have kids of my own. None at all. I could make some careful trimming to my ovaries and the rest of my reproductive system. It was the other piece of the ‘how do I make room for the second heart?’ puzzle.

There were more organs, many of which were either kept the same, or upgraded to the elven equivalent. My esophagus… okay, fine, that one needed an upgrade to handle the new and improved stomach acid I was dealing with. Just another example of how everything was tied together. Gallbladder. Lymph nodes were part of the practically-defunct immune system and I didn’t need mammary glands if I wasn’t going to have kids. My pancreas was going to need an entire overhaul into something brand-new to help regulate the concoction my blood was turning into, and my pituitary gland was going to require careful, careful calibration.

If [The Stars Never Fade] trolled me and I massively overshot, I needed to make sure whatever young body I turned into could survive, and grow back into adulthood.

I flipped back to my skeleton diagram and crammed a note into the margins.

Growth plates.

My spleen was once again part of the immune system, and I made sure to show it crossed off in my notes. I didn’t want to accidentally include it, then have it faithfully produce an immune system that would go berserk on my new body.

Dozens of glands.

The pituitary was another place for angry red circles, for the same reason as growth plates. I was fine with its current status, but I needed to ensure it’d work if I ever became a kid again. Again, I had no plans on using [The Stars Never Fade] hard enough to become a kid, but the skill had shown targeting an age was tricky. I’d be damned if the dice rolled and I became eight years old again, and I had no way of growing up.

That would suck.

I was tempted to play with the adrenal gland, but I couldn’t figure out what direction I wanted. If I increased adrenaline production, I’d go fight-or-flight more often and harder. When it worked, it’d work well.

At the same time, I’d go into fight or flight more easily, in inappropriate situations.

If I tuned it down, I’d keep a cool and level head in all situations. I’d also lose the benefits of adrenaline flooding my system and helping my strength and reflexes in do or die situations.

I mentally shook my head. I was thinking of a human body with that. The new body I was designing wouldn’t need adrenaline to make full use of everything I had. There wouldn’t be an adrenal boost to my performance.

I added in a tiny muscle that could directly stimulate the adrenal gland, letting me control it when I wanted to, but otherwise left it untampered with.

I was slightly putting off the next step, and I turned to my skin to keep delaying.

My skin was interesting. I’d gone over dozens of variations and possibilities. Poison dart frog, for bright colors and deadly poison? Chinchilla to have the softest fur in the world?

I went with standard human skin for the epidermis layer. One of my goals was to keep looking almost entirely human, and my skin looking like it should was a major component of that. No matter what clever tweaks I thought I was making, it just didn’t look human anymore. At a glance, elven skin was the same as human skin, but I suspected the longer someone looked at me, the more wrong I’d appear. Better to take no risks with the external appearance.

The remaining layers I was going to have fun with.

The shade of skin was another topic of debate. There were pros and cons to every shade possible, from skipping melanin entirely to be albino, to packing it in as densely as possible. None was objectively, measurably the best possible combination.

In the end, my own vanity carried the day. I liked how I currently looked. No need to make any external changes.

Chapter 53
Operation: The Improved Elaine V

Internal changes to my skin were a different story. The skin had quite a few layers, and the epidermis was the main layer people saw.

The dermis was a different question, and something I could play with.

For Iona, I elected for tightly packed hexagonal shaped ankylosaurus plates. She’d lose a little bit of flexibility, in exchange for practically having a second layer of armor. It was the only major modification I was making to her body, outside of the norm.

I spent a fruitless afternoon digging into honey badgers. Their skin was amazing on the defense. It was like a quarter-inch of rubbery defenses.

Careful examination, and a trip to the Museum of All Things, proved an unfortunate truth.

It worked well because of how thick it was. If I tried the same thing myself, I’d lose a ton of flexibility, definition - I’d look crazy fat - and I’d practically be relegated to waddling around, like a penguin.

Instead I investigated my plan B.

Rainbow serpent scales. I’d seen them up-close with Galeru, and they were striking. Sadly, I could only show them off if someone was peeling the skin off my body, but they weren’t there for their looks. Less defense, more flexibility. Like a layer of gambeson, instead of heavy plate.

I couldn’t replicate Iona’s wyvern-blood infused skin. I could bribe Fenrir like hell to get a few liters, heal him back up, and bathe in that.

Nobody said getting wyvern blood had to be hard.

Skin was also where I could be [Pretty]. Also known as surgical hair removal.

It was a permanent look, but I was happy with it. A fleeting thought went to makeup - I could make my skin permanently have something like ‘natural’ makeup going on.

Intellectually, I decided not to - it would make applying a different style of makeup harder, and I never knew when my tastes would change down the line - but I still caught myself making small modifications to my face.

The math around photosynthetic skin didn’t work out again, and I was getting frustrated with all these cool things in nature that I couldn’t stick into my body. The surface area to time in the sun to energy produced and carbon dioxide broken down just didn’t end with happy numbers, not when I needed to kill all other functionality in the parts of the skin that were photosynthesizing.

Given how many different functions I could possibly cram into the skin, I put aside my diagrams, and started sketching an entirely different set.

Set 2.0 had no armor layers, but went hard on the iridophore/chromatophore cells for full-body active camouflage. In short, I could always blend into my surroundings.

Assuming I was entirely naked.

I’d also need a new way of triggering vitamin D synthesization… which happened in the kidneys, which I would need to loop back around to see if the kidney I’d selected would work still for that - and I’d want to be naked often enough to use the ability, and for some reason didn’t want to use the greater invisibility rune I’d carved into my sternum.

Skin 2.0 was looking like a bust. I put aside the half-completed design, with a reminder on skin 1.0 that it existed. There was a chance I’d circle back to it.

While I was on skin and hair, I had a few vanity items I wanted to address. I toyed with changing my hair color. What would I look like as a ginger? A blonde? Blue hair? Pink hair? Silver hair?

A full rainbow of every color?

The possibilities were amusingly endless, but at the end of the day, I liked my current color. I’d never dyed it before, and I always could dye it in the future.

I did make it silkier, and fixed it so it’d tumble down in a wavy way without ever having to curl it into that style. I tweaked the growth rate as well, and tightened up how hard my scalp held onto hair.

There was no way to make my hair not knot. I blamed the gods for making hair work like that.

I did make a few minor body shape modifications here and there, studiously ignoring the source of my inspiration.

The last vanity item I tackled was smell. Sweat was an important cooling mechanism, and I had no intentions of stopping it. However, I could mitigate how I smelled to a certain extent. Sweat smelling came in two parts - the actual sweat itself having trace amounts of waste products in them, and bacteria interacting with the sweat. With my waste handling, I didn’t need to smell bad. I could modify the composition of my sweat to kill most of the extraneous parts of it, not giving anything to the bacteria to eat, along with axing the parts that smelled bad. I didn’t want to ruin my love of mangos by constantly smelling like them, so I picked a few flowers.

When I sweated, I’d smell vaguely of lilacs and roses.

Perfect.

Everything tied into each other. Speaking of smell, it was time that I finally tackled my senses.

Eyes were bluntly the most important sensory organs to humans, and I recognized I was being biased by placing so much importance on them.

I was a greedy guts, and I wanted everything. I couldn’t have everything in my eyes. If I packed more rods into my eyes to improve my night vision, I’d have to shove cones out of the way. If I used an eagle’s pupil to zoom in on far away sights, I’d lose the broad side-view that deer had. If I made an eye capable of seeing in the deep, my flying vision would be terrible.

If I crammed fifty different eyeballs into my skull, I’d have mobs with pitchforks and torches trying to burn me at the stake. Not at the School, of course, but in the broader world. No fifty-eyed abomination for me!

It did remind me of Night, and him telling me the story of Creation.

I wanted to find him again.

I needed to find him again.

I had faith, backed by no reason at all, that he was still alive and out there somewhere. He’d survived since Creation. He’d survive the few years I needed to find him.

Back to eyes.

Form followed function, followed form. I was sticking with the standard human design, which meant a pair of close-set eyes facing in the same direction. A predator’s eyes. Something like a herbivore’s wide-vision would be largely wasted as the fields of view overlapped with each other.

I started to write eye pro-con lists, along with annotating eyes with ways I could improve them. Eagles for flying and distance vision, deer for a wide field. Predators to spot movement, grazers to scan through fields.

I had a minor breakthrough when I realized how many creatures gained massive benefits from a third eyelid. Humans even had vestigial remains of a third eyelid! I didn’t need to make complex changes.

The breakthrough let me axe huge chunks of my eyeball list, and one family in particular rose to the top of the list.

Cats.

Fantastic prey and movement vision, excellent color, able to see in the dark and mildly underwater, cats had some of the best eyes in the animal kingdom. Somehow, the performance stats were better than an elf’s. Why the gods hadn’t given elves cat eyes, I’d never know. What was nice was how they saw in the dark. They didn’t cram more rods into their eyes. No, they had a reflective layer called the tapetum, which acted a bit like a mirror, letting them focus better.

It’s why their eyes shone back in the dark. The first clear sign I’d have that I wasn’t strictly human, the first sign that anyone could see.

In the dark.

Looking right at me.

With a light.

Ehhh… it was acceptable. Even though Auri was a perpetual light source.

I did modify the pupil back to a human look, and I did manage to squeeze in two more modifications.

The first was restoring the third type of eye cone that humans had, and tigers lacked, then adding a fourth ‘flavor’ of eye cones, which humans rarely had. It’d make the world richer in color, for lack of a better word.

How did one explain blue to a blind man?

How did one explain super blue, to one who could only see normal blue?

The second was borrowing inspiration from eagles again. Humans had one foveae. Cats had zero. Raptors and other birds of prey had two.

My eye diagram was looking a little cramped, and I suspected I’d need to make sacrifices down the line when I polished it all up.

After the eye was adding in a third eyelid. The question was - frogs, or camels? Frogs were better for underwater, while camels were better for a desert and sandstorms.

I elected for the clarity of being able to see well with my third eyelid closed, and figured I’d try to thicken it as much as possible, to allow for high speed flight and the like.

I also needed to dig into why I shouldn’t keep it closed at all times… seemed useful.

Smell should’ve been easy. Too many darn rabbit holes.

I started with bloodhound, and went digging.

Sharks had better smell than bloodhounds did, but going through notes and reference books, elephants had an even better sense of smell.

Looking up the mechanism was disappointing though. Their sense of smell was better because they packed so many receptors into their nose. It was a sheer size issue, as opposed to a quality issue.

A note on the elephant reference page on their sense of smell had me looking up the male silk moth. They could smell a single pheromone source from seven miles away.

Their scent organ was a gigantic antenna though, annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd I looped right back around to sharks. I was happy enough with their sense of smell. Assuming their sense of smell worked as well on land as it did in water - it had been designed to smell fish in the ocean, not mangos in a forest, or cookies in a dorm.

While I was on sharks, I wanted their extra sense. In particular, their ability to sense electrical fields, finely tuned towards the ones living creatures gave off. I did look at mantas, who shared the sense with them, but sharks had a more developed and refined electrical sense.

That was easier than I imagined to include! I wondered if it would give me the ability to detect Artemis. Probably not, since she’d need to be using the Lightning for me to sense it.

I had two last notes on smell.

The first was taste.

I wasn’t touching it. I liked how food tasted as-is, and I didn’t want to mess with it more. What was the point? Plus, smell and taste were so closely linked already. I toyed with the idea of making titanium ‘tasty’, but that was mostly in the brain, not in the receptors.

The second was an interesting little organ, called the vomeronasal organ. It was a vestigial… extra sense of taste?

I was curious about turning it ‘on’, but I just plain couldn’t find any notes about how to turn it into a functional sense, and I didn’t have a great interest in adding another ‘dimension’ to my taste buds.

While not smell, the human sinus cavities were poorly designed, and could use tweaking. Specifically on drainage patterns. It was the small things in life.

I had two plans for hearing.

The first was echolocation. I’d started with bats, but as I went digging, I realized that they were finely tuned towards hitting small, fast moving creatures, and required large ears on swivels.

Until I’d taken the marine biology class, I’d thought dolphins would be a good source of echolocation-related hearing. Except they didn’t do it with ears, it was more a large fat-filled cavity that they used to take inputs, and processed from there.

Echolocation would limit the rest of my hearing somewhat.

Hearing version 2.0 was going wide. Combine elephant hearing of some of the lowest frequencies with the greater wax moth’s ability to hear the highest frequencies.

Sensory overload was a significant concern. I’d be able to hear everything, like I was always in a crowded room trying to pick out a conversation. I should adapt with time, it wasn’t a good reason to axe the design.

Hearing version 3.0 was a disorientation-oriented choice. A simple chimpanzee inner ear would let me always know which way was up, and I’d never be disoriented. I wouldn’t have hearing that was the envy of the world, but it couldn’t be weaponized against me, nor would I ever get lost flying in a storm. Worse hearing than an elf, but better at knowing which way was up.

The pro list wasn’t thrilling me, but it was a valid option.

I tentatively marked down hearing 2.0 as my preferred design. If I couldn’t adapt after my initial biomancy design and pass, I’d stuff cotton in my ears, cast [Shush!] on myself, and try again.

I was adding extra senses with an electrical sense. Pit vipers had a heat sense that let them sort of see in pure darkness, and that was relatively easy to add.

I did want to cross-check it against my visual sense, since I wanted to see in infrared as well. There was no point in duplicating organs. My initial look said that pit vipers had a much stronger, much deeper heat sense than what little expansion of my infrared vision could manage, but the range brought me up short.

Roughly a meter. That was nothing. A sense that only let me know if something was practically on top of me when there was no light - so no Auri, no Radiance, no wizardry - wasn’t as useful as I thought. My stats would improve it a bit, but the initial distance was so pathetic it wasn’t worth making sacrifices and rearranging nerves for. I could use that space for other things.

All that work, probably down the drain.

My sinuses were getting a little cramped, but my eye structure was something of a mess as well. I might shift the sense to where it made the most sense.

I toyed with a few more ideas.

I currently had no allergies, and the paring down of my immune system should entirely remove that concern.

Poison - and venom - was off the table, and I reluctantly axed the ability to give a small electrical shock like some eels did. The difficulties managing it, just to lightly shock people, wasn’t worth it.

Similarly with becoming spider woman. It was a full-body commitment to have multiple large-scale spider spinnerets that I could shoot on demand. It did look technically possible though…

I cleaned up that section of my notes and explained what I was thinking. Perhaps, one day, a new bright-eyed and bushy-tailed biomancer would come across my notes, and be inspired.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 29 -> 30]

Geckos could stick to walls easily, but how they did it wasn’t replicable at larger sizes. Part of it was due to their small size, like how water bugs could skate on water. Runes could copy the effect, but I was running out of bones to engrave. How often would I want to stick to the ceiling of a room, or climb a cliff, instead of just flying? It didn’t feel worthwhile.

There were a dozen, hundreds of other considerations that I needed to get into my initial notes that didn’t have clear and obvious locations like the rest of my organ systems.

Most creatures had an anti-choking mechanism. Elvenoids had a voice box instead, the ability to speak more important than avoiding choking. Well, I was here and making changes and fixes, and the two weren’t mutually incompatible.

Humans couldn’t make vitamin C on their own, they had to get it from fruits and vegetables. Most other creatures could make their own vitamin C, and at first blush I didn’t even need to make modifications to make my own vitamin C. My organ substitutions had done it for me already!

Some things I just couldn’t change, and I had to sigh and accept them as terrible flaws.

Who put a recreation center next to a waste processing plant?!

Chapter 54
Operation: The Improved Elaine VI

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 29 -> 30]

Simply sketching and resizing all my organs, muscles, joints, bones, etc., to fit inside my body was merely the first step. Nothing played nicely with each other, and it was my job to figure out what compromises were needed to get everything running smoothly.

Things went from as complicated as blood pH, to as mundane as ‘what temperature did my organs want to be at’. I had a mix of warm-blooded and cold-blooded organs, and I needed to do things like check if the excess heat from the warm-blooded parts would destabilize the enzymes and reactions that the organs used to operating at a lower temperature would try to perform.

The unicorn bone marrow needed to produce a slightly different type of blood cell. My small intestine needed to properly process titanium.

My liver needed to un-fuck titanium digested by my stomach.

My kidney got significant attention, or rather, waste management.

Life was full of risks. There were dozens, hundreds, thousands of different ways I could die. My modifications were going to make me faster, stronger–better. It was the name of the class after all. I firmly believed that my changes would help me survive in hundreds more places that I wouldn’t normally, while opening up a few niche scenarios where I’d be in more trouble than before.

Close seven hundred holes. Open three. It was worth it to me. The ability to improve myself in nearly every physical way, from being faster, stronger, quicker, improving my reflexes, letting myself eat anything, giving myself hours of air, giving myself not one but two new senses, extra brains to dodge my headshot weakness, freaking armor under my skin - I got all that, for a vulnerability to getting cut off from the System for days on end.

Not even mana! The Arcanite I was designing into my skeleton would handle that. It mitigated the threat of a powerful curse eating all of my mana regeneration. While curses could zero out my regeneration, they only rarely hit a target’s mana pool, and even then my ‘use mana to cast’ took priority over a curses’s ‘drain current pool’. Assuming both were instantaneous.

No, it’d have to be a massively powerful Canceler who wanted me dead, and like.

If they were that much stronger than me, and had me in their power, and wanted me dead? I was dead.

The other weakness was getting blasted to another world, one without a System, and I considered that prospect to be vanishingly unlikely. I did make a second tiny hollow in my body, and aimed to put in a pendant of the five gods, wrought out of cold iron. It might not work the way I imagined it would, but either way I was determined.

No more fae shenanigans. I wasn’t going to let them screw with my life again.

I considered the trade off to be worth it.

One aspect I hadn’t thought all the way through - my vitality helped extend how long I could be without my healing magic. Instead of days at my baseline, I was probably weeks before the build up started to cause significant issues.

That was assuming I got my mana cut off, and I wasn’t cut off from the System entirely. Only way I knew of that happening was getting yoinked back to the Fae realm, and I was taking permanent precautions against that happening again.

That was my kidney baseline, and it assumed my current design did nothing. I wanted to make modifications to expand it further, but it was at the bottom of my list.

Other math was less fun. My hearts were a big issue.

If I tried to run them in parallel, I needed two full designs of arteries and veins. Not the end of the world, since I could ‘layer’ them next to each other, while having capillaries constantly exchanging blood between the two to maintain equilibrium. The downside was a spacing one - everything was just so cramped already! I wanted to run my arteries and veins as close to my bones as possible, which required finagling at my joints, and if one heart got taken out, I’d ‘lose’ most of that circulatory system. Lung oxygen uptake was also tricky. That was the main sticking point of having them in sequence, and each capillary system would need to ‘dance’ around each other, dramatically cutting my total oxygen uptake. Half my air-related efforts would get shredded. My body would also adapt over time to having both systems ‘live’, and at the end of the day, it started to look like I’d be doubling my weak points while decreasing performance.

If I ran them in sequence, I encountered an entirely new set of problems, namely around the lungs, and secondarily on blood flow. Two hearts pumping was a lot, while only one heart pumping wouldn’t be enough.

It was a mess, and none of my calculations were coming out with a happy face. I started a new notebook for questions I’d ask Marcelle.

I wanted to do them in one big go, instead of constantly wandering over there and seeing if she was in her office.

Amino acids were next.

They were much easier than I’d feared. Initially, I’d been concerned that some of the species I was mixing and matching from would use a different set of amino acids, but no. Out of the thousands and thousands of potential amino acids that existed, all life consisted of the same 20.

My essential amino acids - the ones my body couldn’t produce - had changed around a bit. It called for the most minor shift in my diet, and I’d loop back around to them later. With a bit of work, I could make all amino acids nonessential.

Amino acids set, I had the raw materials to build any and all proteins my body needed. The trick was now to ensure my body could produce those proteins. The arachnid spider-silk tendons and ligaments, for example, relied on a substance produced in their ampullate gland.

I could potentially make it on-site in the tendons themselves, but that would require dissecting exactly how the ampullate gland worked, and finding out why it was being produced in a specialized organ and not on-site.

Humans didn’t have an ampullate gland. Hells, I couldn’t even find a comparative structure!

Fortunately, they could be tiny, and I had evicted my spleen earlier in the design process.

That was simply the start of my protein woes, and that was with all the amino acids present and accounted for!

Then there was every other nutrient required. I got two organs in before taking a step back, and listing out the requirements for every single part of my body.

Then it was off to the stomach and digestive tract!

Fundamentally, I’d still need to eat all the nutrients my body required. I wasn’t handling exotics, like poison or venom, so I didn’t need to eat special beetles for venom production or anything like that. A benefit to keeping things simple!

Of course, some creatures generated the toxin wholesale, and didn’t need a specialized diet, and…

I was keeping it simple.

Instead, I needed to tackle the digestive tract, specifically the stomach and small intestine.

The small intestine got a pass. I’d picked pig specifically because it could absorb everything, and absorb it well. If there was something it couldn’t do, well, I’d simply replace it with a small intestine that could. That was its only job.

The stomach was trickier. Specifically, vitamin K1 was giving me a hard time, while K2 was properly passed through. Why on Pallos K1 wouldn’t work while K2 did, I’d never know, but the two were practically interchangeable.

Bloody hell this was a pain.

Item after item, cross-compatibility after cross-compatibility. Weird, random problems.

Like, how did I handle my rainbow serpent skin layer when it shed? It would shed between two layers of skin, would I peel off my entire epidermis every time it wanted to shed?

The trick happened to be approaching it sideways. Snakes shed their skin when they grew, and they were almost always growing. Turning off the growth mechanism stopped the shedding problem entirely…

… unless I ended up overshooting when using [The Stars Never Fade]. I was happy with Immortality, but boy was it screwing with my biomancy designs.

I went back to fiddling with the snake skin growth mechanism. Instead of entirely disabling it, I had it trigger only when the pituitary was sending out the ‘grow grow grow’ chemicals. It didn’t stop the ‘shed-explode in a gory mess and temporarily become a snake lady’ problem, but fuck it.

It wouldn’t kill me, and the problem was niche enough that I wasn’t worried about it.

Lifespan calculations. How long did each part last? When did I need to get worried enough about my body to use [The Stars Never Fade]? I knew how long a human lived, but what was the average lifespan of a tiger?

Correction.

What was the average lifespan of a tiger, after adjusting for their typical vitality? Reference books gave a typical lifespan, but there was no way of knowing what the typical vitality, and therefore lifespan multiplier, of a tiger was.

The same went for every single body part I was using, with an added twist.

I was looking at frog’s third eyelids for my design, for example. Frogs tended to have a short lifespan. But would their third eyelid degrade at the same rate, or was it something like their little froggy heart giving out after just a few years? Or were the numbers utterly skewed by the sheer number of creatures in the world who found frogs delicious?

There wasn’t an answer to my question, not in any reference book I could find.

Design after design. Compromises and solutions. Clever fixes and janky hacks. One issue was solved, and it broke three fixes. I’d feel pleased as I finally wrapped up the nerves, only for my electrical sense to turn into a dumpster fire.

But.

One by one.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

I was getting there. My list of active issues had more items taken off than added on.

I was getting there.

"Evening, love." I dragged myself in through our dorm door, Iona studiously going over her books.

Not math, thank goodness.

"Here." Iona grabbed a mug from the coffee table and held it out to me. Bless my girlfriend. I never asked for it, yet she unfailingly always had a cup or a snack or a treat waiting for me after a long day of working.

"Bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt!" Auri attempted to dive-bomb the exposed mug. I flickered out [Mantle], protecting my drink.

Auri faceplanted right into my shield.

"Thanks, you’re the best." I grabbed the drink from Iona, sitting down next to her and leaning in.

"Rough day?" She asked as I sipped the mango juice.

"Oh yeah. Massage?" I gave Iona my best puppy dog eyes.

Drat. That’s what I should’ve done. Puppy dog eyes, not tiger eyes.

She leaned back and patted her lap, and I splayed across her, carefully keeping my mug upright.

"You’re the only one I know who can get sore sitting in a chair all day." She teased me as her fingers sank into my sore butt.

"Mmmmm. You know it." I said.

"Do you want to talk about it, or have a break?" Iona said.

"Brrrpt?"

"When I’m done with it, Auri. Talk. Somewhat. I’m almost done. Tomorrow I’m going to Marcelle, and I’m going to ask her my question list." I took another deep drink of my juice.

"BRPT!"

"Fine, here." I extended out my nearly finished mug, Auri diving beak-first into it.

"Oh! Oh! Is my question going to be on there?" Iona asked.

I was going to lose all credibility with Marcelle when I asked Iona’s question. Her gentle massaging fingers, and the fresh mug of mango juice she had waiting for me made it all worth it.

"Yup. I’m not messing with your brain if that’s the answer though." I said.

"Not even for thirty minute-"

"Nope." I interrupted, knowing the rest.

Iona clicked her tongue.

"Drat. Hey, do you want me to redo your diagrams and drawings for you?"

"Yeah! Please, that would be amazing."

"Two days from now I’ve got the day free. It’s a date!" Iona said.

I gratefully kissed her.

"Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrppppppppppt." Auri made a disgusted noise at our antics.

"I had an idea about Fenrir." I sighed with relief as Iona’s wandering fingers undid a knot.

"What’s that?" Iona asked.

"I should make the whole thing into a mystery, and give him a ‘case’ to ‘solve’. Have some sort of, I dunno, evil blood sucking lair or something. He’ll happily give up some blood if it’s for his ‘case’."

Iona laughed and spanked my butt.

"Whoo!" I jerked up, my mug jolted up, and a juice-soaked Auri went flying across the room.

"BbbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppppTTTT!!!" She complained as she let herself get catapulted across the room.

She could easily open her wings and catch herself, but she had a sense of humor.

"Fenrir would totally go for that! Let’s see, first we need a victim…" I straightened up on the sofa as Iona animatedly described the perfect "mystery" for Fenrir.

Chapter 55
Operation: The Improved Elaine VII

I wrinkled my nose as I knocked on Marcelle’s door.

"Please wait, I’m with a student." She answered from the closed door.

Welp. Nothing to do but wait. There was no sense in a last second review of everything, I’d done it three times already and I was more liable to trip myself up and make a mistake at this stage, than find a true error.

I’d gone shopping for the items we needed for Fenrir’s ‘case’ ahead of time, and I’d underestimated magic.

People committed to making stinky socks could make really stinky socks. The bear trap had been expensive, but I considered it an investment - wyvern’s blood was priceless.

I did think Iona was yanking my chain slightly with the ball of yarn and a red lunchbox, but eh. It’d be fun. The drums were going to be loud though, I hope we wouldn’t annoy any of our neighbors.

The door opened, and I got out of the way of the black-robed student who left.

"Elaine! Come on in." Marcelle waved me in, and I sat down at her desk.

She reached down to where I knew she kept her wine bottles, and paused.

"Are we discussing real biomancy that you’ll be performing, or not?" She asked me.

I grimaced.

"Real biomancy. I’ve got some questions on my project, and I was hoping for you to review what I’ve got so far. Tell me if I’m doing anything stupid."

Marcelle nodded.

"I’m happy to help. Shoot."

"First question is about multiple hearts. I can’t work out if they should be in parallel or in sequence. Here’s the issues I’ve found with each…"

I explained my issues I’d run into while I pulled out my heart diagrams, passing them over to Marcelle. Her eyebrows steadily climbed up into her bangs as she read over my notes.

"Ambitious." She finally replied. "But it’s been done before. You want to have them in sequence. Look up Hryng’s formula, it’ll give you the pieces needed to adjust the two hearts so they’ll work together. You’ll also need Yolico’s Spacing, both of which can be found in Hearts and Healers."

I scribbled down what Marcelle said.

"Alright, next question. I was wondering about unicorn marrow…" I said, moving to the next problem I had on my list.

"... Akres’s Binding." Marcelle answered my last question. "I’m getting quite excited to see what you’ve cooked up!"

I grinned, seeing the moment for what it was.

"I was hoping you could take a peek!" I pulled out two full notebooks of details, Iona having helped me neatly draw and compress everything down.

It was a full body redesign. Those weren’t small, short passages.

Marcelle’s eyes went wide.

"I thought you were doing one person." She said as I planted the notes in front of her.

"This IS one person. Well, ok, technically there’s a second person, but they’re a small, fairly standard to-mostly-elf modification. Actually, I had a question on that first." I said as Marcelle picked up my notes, starting to idly flick through them. Not nearly slowly enough to understand the details on each page, more getting a high level overview of the whole thing.

"What is it?"

"I ran the calculations needed. It’d take me around seven billion points of mana to fully make the changes I want to on my friend. Do you know if there’s some sort of special permission I need to ask the School for to use that much mana at once? Any paperwork or anything?"

Marcelle slowly put down my notes, and stared at me in silence.

"Do you even have enough magic power to perform an operation of that size?" She finally asked.

I bit my lip and nodded.

"I think so. Roughly 800,000 magic power while healing - and performing biomancy - puts me at a little over two hours total cast time."

"Two hours is a long time. Are your calculations before or after you do the biomancy in a roundabout way?"

Shit. I didn’t even know what her question meant.

"I’m unsure what you mean." I honestly replied. Marcelle sighed.

"Take the heart. With the numbers you’re giving me, you’d need to spend a few minutes on the patient’s heart alone. You can’t simply enlarge an eighth of it, and assume the entire thing will remain functional long enough for you to finish modifying it. In those few minutes, your poor patient will be undergoing multiple cardiac events as you modify that segment. For each one, you’ll need to instantly diagnose the symptoms and cure only the symptoms, not the root underlying cause, which will slow your modifications down. If you over-heal, you’ll revert the biomancy changes you’re making. If you fail to heal, you’ll kill the patient. You see the issue?"

I reluctantly nodded.

"How do I fix them?" My heartrate was slowly going up. I didn’t want to have the conversation with Iona ‘oops, sorry, I know I promised biomancy but I can’t deliver.’

Although… pure muscle enhancement, and nothing else, wouldn’t run afoul of the problems Marcelle described.

Marcelle frowned.

"Generally… you don’t. This is why biomancy is targeted for small changes at adults, large changes at children, or self-improvement. However…" Marcelle signed, and gestured like she wished she had a glass of wine. "The healing students at the School might enjoy the challenge and working with you. The School would like it if you gave them a heads up when planning to use that much mana, talk to some of the [Clerks] in administration. They’ll give you details."

I nodded, my spirits raising once again. No awkward present revoking!!

"Is there a chance you can review my main design?" I asked her.

Marcelle picked up my notes, and started flipping through them again.

"No." She answered as she flipped another page. I raised an eyebrow. It looked like she was reviewing my notes. "This is too complex for me to properly review here and now, or broadly. I do have other students, classes, and responsibilities, and telling you I’ll review it will also make me ethically responsible for your outcome."

I pulled a face, but didn’t say anything. She was reviewing my notes. I wasn’t going to interrupt her.

"However," She said, and I refrained from pumping my fist. "Your notes and methods are good enough, and detailed enough, to present as a final thesis. Schedule a time where myself and four other professors in Biomancy or Healing are free for at least two blocks, and be fully prepared to defend your build. You’ll kill two raptors with a single stone. Not only will you get the undivided attention of five professors trying to poke holes in your proposed plan, but if you succeed, you’ll meet one of the Biomancy Track graduation requirements. We can schedule your personal biomancy examination at the same time. If you pass, congratulations! You’ll officially have your first School Track completed."

Whoa. I wasn’t super interested in having the Biomancy Track designation, but it would be nice. Much more important was getting five of the foremost experts in the world doing nothing but tearing my build apart for four hours straight. That was invaluable.

"While I’m glancing over your notes, I’m noticing a few problems already." Marcelle frowned at my notes. "I’m all for you presenting, but they’re going to need to be in better shape than this. I’m only seeing half of an immune system? You’ve cut down to one kidney, and a quick look is telling me you’ll die in… I’d estimate a month. In your shoes, I’d entirely remove the second heart, it’s not going to perform as well as you hope, and run a half-dozen small kidneys in parallel, each one dedicated to handling a different set of toxins. It’s also clear you never took Senescent Studies. I would know, I have to approve everyone taking the class."

I had answers to most of that.

"The build is for me. Remember my [Persistent Casting]?"

Marcelle dramatically groaned.

"Not this again. I thought you’d stopped teasing me about it. Yes, yes… oh! Yes! I can see how that would work well, clever use of leaning on your skills to close holes, and open up new possibilities. Your lack of Senescent Studies is still showing."

I was obviously missing something big, and Marcelle was all but begging me to ask her.

"What’s Senescent Studies, and where’s it causing me issues?" I asked.

"It’s all about how bodies age, and what, exactly, is going on, along with how to pause or reverse aging." She put down my notes and stood up, entering an all-too-familiar lecture mode. "Now, I believe you should delay a quarter, and take just a few more classes before trying this out. Specifically, in your design, you’re pushing temperature tolerances."

I gave a slow nod, but Marcelle was waiting for my response.

"Yes. I’m a little more vulnerable to temperature fluctuations, but everything should operate perfectly fine at 98.8 degrees."

My brain had been the big derp moment when working out temperatures. I had to obey its thermal range. Everything else was tweakable. I would run hot, but I’d also carefully and systemically made sure all my organs had blood vessels go to the surface and back, letting physiological reactions act as a cooling vent when needed. I was a little more vulnerable to the cold, but at the same time, I had Radiance magic, Auri, wizardry, and a high metabolism.

"Right, but you’ve got three organs where 98.8 is the top end of their thermal range after your modifications, if your notes are correct." Marcelle said. "On paper, it’s healthy. In practice, your organs will age faster. I also see sea otter organs here, and they have a baseline of 15 years of adult life, since you wouldn’t be dumb enough to use a juveline’s. I understand that you’re a high level, but even if you had a four times multiplier to your lifespan, that’s only 60 years left. Your thermal shenanigans will cost you, and cut that down to a third, if not less. As a pure human, with your healing, you’re looking at closer to eighty baseline, which at a four times multiplier is 320 years left. You’re committing a slow suicide here. Are you really ready to say your life is half over?" Marcelle finished her lecture by slamming my notebook closed, and handing both of them back to me.

"Revise, and make sure everything is perfect before presenting your thesis. I can also give you permission to attend Senescent Studies. I was just waiting for you… to… ask…"

Marcelle’s eyes narrowed as she looked at me, her fingers thoughtfully drumming on her arm.

"Everyone - everyone - asks to join Senescent Studies. You’re one of the brightest students I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching." She was slowly listing off points, and the look on her face was making me nervous. "You’re a healer, you know old age is how you’re going to die. You’re a purple robe…" Marcelle suddenly grinned at me.

"Why, Elaine! You never told me you were an Immortal!"

Chapter 56
Operation: The Improved Elaine VIII

I froze at Marcelle’s question, like a deer in the headlights.

Honestly a pretty stupid reflex, and not one I could exactly biomancy out.

"No - noooooo?" Even as I said it, I knew my protest sounded weak. "I’m only 25 years old!"

Marcelle snorted.

"Age has nothing to do with mortality, although congratulations on seizing it so young. And you’ve been at the School for a few years to boot! That is one heck of an accomplishment, you should feel proud."

Welp, the cat was out of the bag, and I doubt continuously denying it would endear me to Marcelle.

Marcelle sat back down at her desk, and pulled out two bottles and two glasses.

"Ah, before we continue." She fiddled with something under her desk. "There! Privacy wards are in place. No eavesdropping student will be able to hear your secrets. I apologize for saying it out loud before turning them on." She poured me a glass from one bottle, and herself three fingers from the other.

"Bloodwine." She explained without me asking. "Vampire delicacy, I imagine the taste wouldn’t be to your liking."

I nodded and took a sip, as Marcelle toasted me and had a drink herself.

"Ahhh… ok. Immortality. Congratulations again. Makes sense now why you were asking about what advice I’d give a vampire back when you first showed up." She gave me a toothy grin, and I responded with a weak chuckle.

"Thank you. You know, I thought I’d been good at hiding it."

Marcelle nodded.

"You’re not bad. I’m fairly close to you, and you did give me a detailed, in-depth blueprint of how your ideal biology would work. Putting all the pieces together wasn’t hard. Keep in mind, the biomancy department has the highest rate of mortals seizing Immortality of any place on campus."

I nodded, not daring to believe things were this easy. This smooth. This… lack of blackmail and extortion.

I suppose I hadn’t mentioned I could grant it to others. That probably helped.

"That makes sense." I didn’t know what to say, and I was just going to let Marcelle talk.

"Now, full transparency here. I’m half taking off my advisor hat, and putting on my recruiter hat. With that said, I do genuinely believe the advice I’m about to give you is what’s best for you, otherwise I wouldn’t give it to you."

This sounded fascinating.

"Go on." I took another sip of the wine, partly to let Marcelle know she could keep talking, and partly so I wouldn’t have to say anything.

"Vampires tend to all work together. There are some exceptions, like the Immortal Company, but even then those are all vampires, working together." Marcelle explained. "With that said, I also work together with other vampires, and the Exterreri Empire is where we call home. Now, I’m a [Biomancer]. Getting to work at the School as well is my life’s dream, everything I could ask for. With that said, part of my job is trying to recruit talented individuals. You would thrive in the Exterreri Empire."

I gave a slow nod. Marcelle had done a lot for me, and she seemed to truly believe what she was selling. Didn’t mean I’d bite, but with everything she’d done for me? I was willing to hear her out.

I had to imagine the School knew she was recruiting for Exterreri… and probably other people were recruiting for their various groups as well.

"As you should know by now, every vampire has the ability to grant Immortality. Yet, people don’t chase after us the same way they chase after healers who can grant Immortality. It’s because we all work together, in a cohesive whole. That same protection is extended to our citizens. You go to a mortal country? You’ll start all manner of bickering, and they’ll never leave you in peace. You go to an Immortal country? Unless you’re in the Penujuman Necrocracy, someone will snap you up and make you perform. The nicest will be Jurcor, where you’ll end up signing a contract that you’ll regret. The harshest would be Urwa, where they’ll throw you in chains and silks and sell you around. Unless, of course, you’re a citizen of the Exterreri Empire, famous for protecting their citizens."

I was thinking about what Marcelle was saying.

"And if I say no?" I asked her, figuring I’d get all the details.

She sighed and eyed her glass, like it’d personally committed a terrible crime by being empty. She poured herself another small splash.

"Then I’ll be sad that a talented and brilliant woman such as yourself is going to encounter unnecessary hardships, and I’ll hope you survive long enough to make your way to Exterreri. If you have a sponsor or a job offer, I’ll wish you the best, and pray to all the gods that it works out well for you."

I nodded. She’d given me a lot to think about.

"Do you know a vampire called Night? A progenitor, one of the first?"

Marcelle shook her head.

"I wish. Someone you knew back then?"

I nodded.

She gave me a sad look.

"The odds are good that he’s dead. Nobody - nobody - survives that long. Not even the best of us."

Her words washed over me like water on a duck’s back. I completely disregarded them.

He was alive. I had nothing supporting that but faith, but I was going to find him.

I didn’t know what I was doing after the School. My Deception Ring would help me travel mortal lands, and I was getting a good lay of what the world looked like, while in a safe place. Finding Auri’s family was still on the list, but I had only the faintest of leads to go off of.

I’d like to stay with Iona… but all that was a problem for another day. I’d have to consider Marcelle’s offer carefully.

Heck, it was barely an offer. More like ‘this country would be perfect for you’.

"Thank you. Before I go, I have one last question for you. Please don’t judge me too hard for it, my girlfriend wanted me to ask."

"What’s up?" Marcelle asked.

"Well, she’s got this question about pigs…"

"Two weeks off? Why?" Shirayuki’s tails lashed behind her, flickering back and forth like a displeased cat.

"I’m going to be performing biomancy on myself, and doing a full-body change. Recovery and physical therapy to relearn my body is going to take time just to learn how to walk again."

She gave me a curt nod.

"Acceptable. Do you have your baseline numbers?"

"Baseline numbers?" I mentally reviewed everything I knew of biomancy, coming up blank. Marcelle hadn’t even mentioned it.

Shirayuki sighed.

"I swear. Nobody does this properly. Nobody measures the impact of a new skill they get. Nobody tests exactly how much they improve. We will do this properly for you, so both you and I know what you’ve done. You will run. You will jump. You will throw things. You will fly. You will swim. We will carefully measure and record each of these items, then once you are done, we will do them again."

I grinned. This was a great idea! I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it in any of my classes. I suppose the dwarf that offered me the apprenticeship vaguely had something of a point. My classes taught me the academic methods, but there were practical, real-world aspects of my skills and the implications that I’d need to learn on my own.

"We begin with running."

I was starting to run into serious traction issues when I pushed myself as hard as I could on the ground. Especially when there was some morning dew, pure physics were conspiring to slow me down, to try to get me to slip and slide instead of run. Flying eliminated most of those issues, but then I wasn’t testing my physical body anymore.

Most physical classers had a skill or two to help themselves, and I eyed [Anatomical Drawing] as a potential skill slot to gain [Traction] or some related skill to help me out.

It took a full day of testing, but at the end of it, I had some numbers. I mentally translated them around to more familiar numbers, the Pallos standard distances being completely different from Earth’s.

I skipped the short dashes. There were too many confounding factors that made it difficult to perform, and the data was entirely useless as a result.

3200 meter dash: 38 seconds. I felt like I spent far too much of the distance accelerating.

3200 meter dash flying: 51 seconds. It was tied to my jogging speed, not my all-out sprinting speed.

Obstacle course: 28 seconds. All the extra grips made navigating through it easy.

I was moving at speeds that would normally require skills like [Traction], specially enchanted boots, or biomancy-modified feet to get a proper grip on the ground. With the weight and the forces I was applying on the ground, I should be ripping through dirt like I was running along a sandy beach. It should be slipping and sliding under my feet, making my footing as treacherous as wet ice.

Dexterity was here to save the day. I didn’t know how it worked, just that it did, the stat allowing supernatural movement over the ground. It let me run on the dirt like it was, well, dirt, but at normal speeds.

Some classes went deep into the dexterity stat. With enough points in the stat they could run on falling leaves, treat a piece of string like a metal pole, and balance on a spiderweb. It was neat, but not a direction I was particularly interested in exploring.

At the same time, I was getting unbalanced again. My speed was outstripping my dexterity, and I was just a hair over the proper 8:1 ratio required to properly control myself. I was starting to feel the tiniest loss of control, little almost-slips, my feet only staying stable because the ground was flat and maintained. Forget about anything like running perfectly on sand, and I was eons away from running on raindrops or other utterly absurd feats like that.

It usually wasn’t an issue. When I needed to move, I generally took to the skies. What I lost in ‘peak running speed’ I made up for by being able to take the direct route. I wasn’t going to mess with my free stats with my impending biomancy changes either. I wanted to see what was going to happen, but right now my dexterity was up for further consideration.

Deadlift: 600 lbs. My strength stat wasn’t nearly as well developed as my speed. No issues with my dexterity here!

Bench Press: 440 lbs. Fortunately, there weren't nearly the same issues as my speed was running into.

Ok, technically, I wasn’t benching 440 lbs. I was benching 110 lbs in the 4x gravity section of the gym. Same thing.

I’d proposed throwing a ball, but other factors made that impractical. Something about wind and air pulling on balls harder the faster they were thrown, making the length nonlinear when measuring. Also, technique mattered a ton.

I could see the words a kid without a System unlocked could see at 15 meters away from 180 meters away. I couldn’t wait to see what would happen with my new eyes!

I was back at the grind. Marcelle had answered dozens of my questions, giving me pointers and telling me which books I needed to reference. Of course, I then needed to track the book down in the library, find the reference, and crucially, understand the reference.

Being a good biomancer was a skill.

Being a good researcher was a skill.

Being a good author was a skill.

It was rare to find all three skills in a single person, and most of the people writing these small niche books had the first two skills, and utterly lacked the third one.

I needed to get dozens of professors’ schedules from the administration building, and of course that wasn’t easy either. I’d gone to the big admin building first, who’d told me it was in the small admin building. The small admin building had insisted it wasn’t there, and to go back to the big admin building, who’d given me precise instructions where in the small admin building I needed to go. I did get to see a copy of all the schedules, but they wouldn’t give them to me, so I had to blow a ton of paper redrawing all the schedules, before I could even start to try and find five professors who had the same four hours in a row free.

My request for using a large amount of mana for a single project was equally tedious. I needed to get forms filled out in triplicate, then get each one of them signed by a dozen people, most of whom didn’t respect their posted office hours.

That, or the office hours were from a few decades ago. I caught one peeling off a wall, and the paperwork called for a particular signature of a fellow who’d retired a few years ago. The [Clerks] either hadn’t updated the paperwork I needed to fill out, or were still using old written forms.

Untangling that kafka-esque mess hadn’t been fun.

"You need Professor X’s signature."

"He retired.""Well, the form says you need it. Get Radras to write you an exemption."

"But… he’s the founder of the School’s current iteration. He’s been missing for centuries, presumed dead."

"Yeah, it sounds like it’ll be tricky."

Also, who the fuck was named X? Did his parents hate him or something? Was he their 24th kid, or whatever number X was in their native alphabet?

I forged onwards.

Technically, this was extraneous, and I didn’t need to have anyone do a full systematic review of everything I was trying to do, nor did I need to get the Biomancy Track certification.

But I was playing it safe.

Time passed, notes were prepared, and I’d gone over them a dozen times with Iona.

"Alright, one more time." I told my girlfriend.

"Nooooo, please spare me." Iona begged.

"I’ll do the thing with the ropes you like so much." I shamelessly tried to bribe her.

Iona shook her head.

"Nope. Not worth it."

I gave her my best pouty eyes.

"But-"

"Nooooooooope. I’ve done this eleven times with you." Iona put her hands on my shoulders, and earnestly looked me in the eyes. "Believe me, you’ve got this. Nobody knows this stuff better than you do. Seriously. Have faith in yourself. You’ll knock them out of the park."

"Brrpt!" Auri landed on my head, drumming her little flaming hummingbird feet on my hair. "BrrrPT!"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence. I guess I’ll try to get some sleep."

Iona gave me a sudden grin.

"Wait! We all know that tomorrow’s a super big deal for you, yeah?"

"Yeah?" I agreed. Iona knew all this, but was going somewhere with it.

"Well! I know you, you’re going to be up all night with butterflies. You’re going to get a terrible night’s sleep right before you get grilled for hours. That’s no good."

I wrapped my hands around my lover’s neck, looking up at her with mischief in my eyes. I knew Iona too well, I knew where this was going.

"Oh? Would you happen to have some guaranteed sleep remedies?"

She waggled her eyebrows at me.

"You bet!" She swept me up in her arms, skirt and hat going flying all over.

She leaned in a bit, and I pulled myself up to kiss her as she started to walk over to our bedroom.

"BrrRRRRRrrrRRRRrrrPPPT." Auri made retching noises in the background.

I slowly woke up, the ephemeral joy of a long, deep night of sleep radiating from my bones, the soft light slowly brightening up the room.

Wait.

The soft light brightening up the room!? The island was in the wrong spot for that!

"I’m late!" I cried out to nobody in particular, throwing off the sheets and scrambling over the end of the bed to get out the door.

I stopped at the door, dashed back, grabbed a purple robe - mine or Iona’s, couldn’t tell, oh well being the short one had benefits - and dashed back through the door.

"Whoa, Elaine, where’s the fire?" Iona asked me.

"Deftheisthing!" I stumbled out a half dozen words. "LATE!" I shrieked as I tried to…

Hang on.

Iona was way too chill about this.

I paused a moment, and looked, really looked, at Iona. And Auri. And Fenrir. And the groaning coffee table filled with food.

I finished waking up.

"I’m… not late am I?" I asked.

Iona shook her head.

"Island picked up some speed last night. Block and a half until you need to present. Auri enlisted us to make you a good breakfast."

"Brrrpt!" Auri puffed out her chest, pleased as punch with herself.

I looked down at how disheveled I was, and awkwardly laughed.

"Heh. Hah. Alright. Auri, why don’t we do a little flame bath?"

"Brrrrrpt!!!"

Two minutes later, I was sitting down at the table, Iona having already helped herself.

Auri had helped get all my favorites. A half-dozen mangos. A few pitchers, orange juice, water, milk, mango juice. Some sunny side up eggs and toast. A suspiciously clean plate near the end of the table with some grease stains on it, and a content looking Fenrir.

My own little found family, right here.

"Smartosaurus, mind if I come and watch?" Iona naturally asked right as I took a big bite.

"Hmmm?" I asked around my mouthful of food.

"Your presentation! I think it’s super neat."

I could use the support.

"Sure!"

Everyone had come. Auri, Iona, even Fenrir had squeezed himself into the halls of the Wood Tower to the room in question.

We filed in at exactly the minute in question, finding a set up just like the entrance exams. Five professors on a high desk, in a half-ring around us. Marcelle was in the middle, and she gave me a cheerful wink as I entered. There was an elf, a devil, a human - I knew for sure, because I'd been talking with all of the professors to get this arranged in the first place - and a minotaur.

I knew their names, but I was mentally referring to them by their species, except for Marcelle. It was easier, fewer things to mentally juggle as I tried to perform.

"Elaine… Elaine?" The elf’s eyebrows drew together.

I chuckled at that, getting the stacks of copied notes passed out to each of the examiners.

"It’s a long story, but yes." I confirmed. Four of the professors picked up my notes and started reading through them, while the minotaur left his untouched. He was one of my lowest picks of professors, being focused on emergency field medicine, triage, and the logistics of getting injured soldiers to healers. But, his schedule fit with the other four.

"Elaine. Which organ drives the cardiovascular system, and what can you tell me about it?"

I raised a single eye at that. I guess we were starting easy, and going to get harder as we went along. The open-ended nature of the questions was interesting as well, and I was guessing a partially complete answer would see me dinged.

But if I took too long to describe everything about the heart, we’d run out of time.

An interesting method.

I glanced at Iona, barely in the edge of my vision. She gave me a small, tight smile and a tiny nod. Auri flared a little brighter, and Fenrir?

Well, he seemed to be dozing.

"The heart. It’s a unique muscle, and a unique muscle type. In most elvenoids it has four chambers…"

"Phoenixes are famously creatures of magic and flame. What changes would you perform to a specimen, such that their great great grandchildren are creatures of magic and water - or ice - instead?"

"I don’t know. The best I can give - I believe the definition of a phoenix is intrinsically linked to their fire nature. Making one of water instead isn’t a phoenix. There is a potential violation of the Divine Decrees if one succeeded." I promptly replied. The questions had indeed steadily escalated in difficulties, until I was taking a few minutes to think about it before answering. I realized I was burning the valuable ‘analysis’ time, and nobody wanted to hear me stumbling through questions I didn’t know. Instead, I was giving a concise "I don’t know", along with a few minor facts on the situation.

The minotaur just looked at me and grunted, then peeked down at his list of questions.

"I am satisfied that Elaine Elaine knows her biomancy to the point of being awarded a bronze grade in her Track from the examination portion." He formally stated to the rest of the examiners.

"Agreed." Marcelle quickly said. The rest of the professors only took a moment further to agree.

"I will pass this over to you." The minotaur formally said, leaning back in his chair.

"Elaine Elaine. I am quite concerned about a number of aspects on this proposed diagram." The elf said. I started to sweat, glancing at Iona then to Marcelle.

Iona gave me a little, silent round of applause - Auri mimicking her with mage hands - while Marcelle smiled and nodded encouragingly at me.

"Please let me know." I straightened myself and looked the elf in the eye.

"Your immune system and dialysis simply have the note ‘covered by a skill.’ Do you intend to cast a skill on yourself, every single day? A fast acting infection, a bad piece of meat, and you could end up delirious while you sleep, making casting a skill difficult if you are not in the proper frame of mind."

I took a deep breath. There was no way I wasn’t letting some of my skills out of the bag here.

"I have a meta skill called [Persistent Casting], which I keep running with my healing at all times."

"That seems a hair excessive." The devil said.

The minotaur snorted.

"Good sense on a battlefield. I’ve seen you on the School’s combat team, correct?"

I gave him a grin.

"You have! And yes, much of my experience before attending the School was attached to a military organization. I’ve been attacked in my sleep before. It might be a hair paranoid, but it’s saved my life a few times, and I just don’t see myself ever dropping the skill. On a related note, it’s great for surviving decapitation."

That casual little factoid caused a predictable stir, and I felt myself grinning with energy. Iona had been right. This was my jam! I totally had it!

"Since it’s integral to my life already, I saw an opportunity to use it in my personal biomancy build, dramatically improving my performance over what is normally possible."

The elf looked vaguely impressed, which was practically impossible. Nobody impressed the arrogant elves.

"I’m looking at your proposed kidney design, and your choice of using a modified sea otter base is confusing me." The devil said. "Your notes state the why of the chosen organ, but to my understanding, flamingos are superior in every respect I know of. Can you explain your choice? Additionally, can you explain your reasoning for a single kidney, instead of eight kidneys working in tandem?"

I bit my lip, hating to admit it, but knowing I had to.

"I was unaware that flamingos had comparable, if not superior, properties than sea otters for the aspects I wanted them for." I admitted. "I will examine my design after, and make adjustments as needed." With two biomancy professors thinking I’d made a stupid mistake not using multiple kidneys in tandem - and more possibly silently agreeing - I needed to revisit the entire section and idea.

With how linked together everything was… it meant an entire rework of all the systems. Hopefully I’d be able to free up some compromises I’d made in other places, and task the kidneys to them.

Just needed to find room in the body for it.

The devil waved his hand at me. "No matter, no matter. The interest was largely academic, as your proposed kidney design works. How much utility do you believe a second heart will give you? I see the logic written out, but no numbers on how many seconds or minutes extra you will gain in a fairly niche situation. Is your heart regularly ripped from your chest?"

The questions started to come fast and thick.

"Why a tiger eye design basis over an elven one? Or, more importantly, why call it a tiger eye? It’s so modified as to be unrecognizable."

"Well, I started from a tiger, and figured I’d keep the original inspiration and reasoning for anyone consulting my notes in the future."

[*ding!* Congratulations! You’ve unlocked the Class Skill [Analyze Diagram]. Would you like to replace a skill with it? Y/N]

Analyze Diagram: Ability to examine a biomancy blueprint, and spot errors and flaws in the design. Improved sensitivity per level. -50 mana regeneration.

I wasn’t in a great spot to carefully examine my choices, but [Analyze Organ] had gotten its time to shine in the Museum of All Things. I’d taken a detailed look at each body part I wanted to use with the skill… and that was it. I couldn’t imagine any other use to the skill, especially not when I was at the end of the road here. I dropped the skill for [Analyze Diagram], resolving to test the skill out later.

"What is the purpose of these… pseudo-brains? They don’t appear to be powerful enough to process on their own, they won’t generate a new system, and they’re too far separated to be added brainpower." The human asked.

"[Persistent Casting] along with my healing and magic power currently allows me to survive decapitation. However, I am unsure if I can survive my brain getting crushed. The distributed brains should allow my body to be considered ‘alive’ even after my head is incinerated, allowing my skills to kick in and keep me alive."

That got a round of impressed muttering.

"No shielding on your second heart?"

"I considered flexibility to be more important."

"Then why not do away with ribs entirely, and optimize along that angle?"

"They do continue to provide support."

"You’ve given yourself new senses, but you haven’t made any corresponding changes in your brain to be able to use them. Instead, it looks like you’ve hooked the new sense up to… I’m unsure what I’m looking at here."

I grimaced at that.

"I traced the comparative anatomy section in the human brain to the respective species’s brain. Granted, the part of the brain is quite a bit different, but the brain is also famously adaptable. I should be able to, after time and practice, be able to use the new senses."

I got some frowns at that.

"You’re signing up for weeks, if not months, of blinding, debilitating headaches." Marcelle said.

I nodded.

"Yes."

"Why not simply modify your brain to accommodate the new senses?"

"I believe down that path lies madness. My brain is me, and I’d very much like to not start being arrogant enough to modify my brain."

That line wasn’t well-received. Two of the professors snorted dismissively, while Marcelle and a fourth rolled their eyes. Only the minotaur didn’t give an major outward sign of disapproval, simply raising one eyebrow.

"Speaking of senses, how do you plan on handling the overload?"

"Time and practice."

"Why a small percentage based rune buffs, instead of a larger flat increase?"

"As time goes on, I believe the percentage increase will outperform the flat boost." I was skirting dangerously close to the Immortality reveal with that question.

On and on the questions went. A few minor flaws or mistakes were pointed out, but I started to smile.

The bulk of my design was getting no questions or comments. Either every single one of them had skipped my circulatory system, my muscles, my nerves, and more, or I’d done them right.

The aging questions came, of course, and I simply sweated through them. Marcelle kept shooting me amused looks at my discomfort, but I wasn’t going to admit to a bunch of random people that I was Immortal.

Our time came to an end mid-question.

"Elaine, what do you say about -" The human asked, as Marcelle interrupted.

"That’s time. I know we all have things to do after. I propose with the inventiveness and thoroughness of the design, along with how Elaine has pushed new boundaries and cleverly integrated her skills to push performance, that she be awarded gold for this portion." Marcelle said.

"Nonsense." The elf said. "The number of minor flaws can’t be ignored. I agree that her design is inspired, and worthy of praise, but the errors clearly indicate a silver grade."

The professors clearly had places to be and things to do. There was no long discussion, Marcelle immediately moving it to voting.

"All those in favor of gold?" Marcelle raised her hand.

Nobody else did.

She put her hand down after a moment.

"All those in favor of silver?" She asked again.

Four hands went up.

"Bronze on the knowledge examination, silver on the practical. Final grade of bronze Biomancy Track to be awarded to Healer Elaine, after three and a half years of study at the School. All those in favor?" Marcelle asked, and five hands went up.

Marcelle produced a scroll and a large, ceremonial quill. She signed it with a flourish, and passed it around. All the professors added their signature to the scroll, returning it to Marcelle.

"Congratulations Elaine, on your first graduation from the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft." She leaned forward, handing me the scroll.

I could only grin at the applause I got. Iona was particularly enthusiastic, pounding her hands together like she was trying to make enough noise to burst my eardrums. Auri didn’t want to be outperformed, and had a round dozen pairs of hands clapping furiously.

I was more than happy to shake everyone’s hands.

Chapter 57
Operation: The Improved Elaine IX

I skipped back, happy as could be. The sun was shining, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, I was a graduate once over, and my biomancy plans had gotten thoroughly analyzed by a panel of experts.

"Elaine! Iona!" A familiar voice called out to me, and we turned and looked at who’d called me.

It was Iya, the familiar naga flanked by a pair of retainers.

We swerved and headed over to her.

"Iya! What’s up?" Iona asked.

She slowly blinked at us.

"I heard that Elaine was taking her Biomancy Track examination. I wanted to offer my congratulations."

I grinned.

"Just passed! Bronze in biomancy!"

She gave a small half-bow.

"My deepest congratulations on your success. If you do not have plans to celebrate, perhaps you will permit me to arrange for a small celebration?"

Iona and I glanced at each other, and I shrugged.

"Sure!" Iona said. "We’d love that!"

Iya beamed at us.

"Excellent! My mansion, after the final class today?"

"Sounds like a plan!" I agreed.

Iya had one of the fancy accommodations that some incredibly wealthy students could pay for. An entire house, just for her.

Well.

House was a bit of an understatement.

Mansion was correct. And Iya’s was nice. Silver linings to the whole Raith incident!

We kept going home, Fenrir slinking into his office.

"Should we do it now?" I asked Iona.

"Yeah, why not. Could even put Iya’s party as part of the mystery. A great big revelation during a fancy celebration? Right up his alley."

"Brrrpt!!" Auri was thrilled with this idea, and the three of us got to work.

It only took a few minutes to get everything in position. We’d planned and prepared ahead of time.

With the scene set, the socks in position and the bear traps armed, I was ready to get to work.

I dramatically burst into Fenrir’s room.

Wait.

What the fuck?

How was it storming?? It was pouring outside, with the occasional thunderbolt punctuating the steady staccato of the storm. And where had he gotten the bottle of whiskey??

Eh. Whatever.

"Fenrir! It’s terrible! You’re the only one who can help me!" I dramatically cried out, pretending to swoon over his tail.

It was a dark and stormy night…

"Hang on, we’re doing this now?" Iona was nervous, fidgeting with her hands.

"I mean, why not?" I asked her. "We got the wyvern blood, your design got thoroughly signed off on, and this takes a while."

"Well, the guards might want to talk to us about last night…" She said.

I dismissed her concerns with a wave.

"We already told them it was a dramatic reenactment on campus."

"And they yelled at us for not using the proper venues!" Iona said.

"I mean, yeah, but why would they follow up more? Iya already said she was fine."

Iona grumbled.

"Fine, my butt. Nobody loses a wall of their house and is fine with it."

"Sure, but that’s irrelevant to what we’re doing. If you’d like, we can stall, but… why?"

Iona blew a raspberry.

"Yeah, you’re right. There’s no good reason to stall. Let’s go get this scheduled."

It wasn’t quite that easy. We needed to circle back on the mana use request form, then talk with the hospital staff to get a team ready. I was a little nervous on the sheer number of student healers involved - it only took one person fucking things up to make this much harder than it needed to be - but that was the price I paid. It was otherwise free, and how else would I get a team of healers doing nothing but watching over Iona for hours on end?

While we waited, I went back over my notes, seeing how my new skill worked.

It was disconcerting at first. I sat down with my notes, opened them up, and started reading.

As I read each word, as I studied each diagram, everything was cast in a faint shade of pink.

Not good.

[*ding!* [Analyze Diagram] leveled up! 1->2]

With the level, the red highlights on the words and pictures got a little darker, a little richer.

At the same time, I knew it wasn’t a complete and total disaster, like the skill was highlighting. I continued reading, the skill leveling up in the background, and the faint pink turning into a dark crimson.

An early page about my skills, and how I was relying on them for various aspects, turned green when I read them, instead of red.

Interesting.

I was about three quarters of the way through reading my notes when a dozen words on the page I was looking at snapped from deep red to bright green. Something had changed.

I flipped back to my first page, my skeletal design, noting that most of it had turned green, from the prior red.

My initial guess was it had to do with how much of my blueprints I’d ‘read’, letting the skill form a ‘structure’. Kind of stupid that I had to reread all of my own notes - I had perfect recall of them in the first place - but magic was wonky at times.

I didn’t go into great experimental depth, figuring I’d see what happened after I completed my reread. More and more words snapping to various shades of green and yellow, with a few reds still mixed in.

When I read the last word, nearly everything I was looking at turned various shades of green, with a few yellows in the mix.

My best guess? My notes used a combination of what I knew, plus what I’d read, in order to indicate if an aspect would work or not, and how poorly it would go otherwise. Skills rarely ‘gave’ knowledge, but instead highlighted aspects and drew attention as needed.

I flipped to a few aspects the panel had pointed out, finding most of them in various shades of orange or red.

One of them was highlighted in green still, and that was going to cause me a headache and a half. The items we all agreed on that were wrong were easy. They were wrong, and I needed to correct them.

This item?

It said that, as far as I knew, I was correct, but the professor had said it was incorrect, and gave his reasoning for it.

Well, shoot.

I had hoped to perform my biomancy immediately after Iona’s. Looked like I still had some work to do.

First things first though.

I was replacing my much-beloved second heart with additional kidneys. The panel had been right about that.

Which meant an insane number of items were going to need to be changed.

And double checked. Seven times.

"Ready for your big day?" I asked Iona over breakfast. I’d gotten her favorites from the cafeteria.

She nodded.

"Nervous, but yeah. I have faith in you."

That meant a lot, coming from the [Paladin].

"Thank you." I grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

She squeezed back.

"So, about the pig thing…" Iona asked me.

I threw my hands up in exasperation.

"We are not doing the pig thing!"

Fenrir emphatically shook his head in agreement with me.

"Thanks." He growled, his word barely understandable.

Time flew by, and we found ourselves in the hospital.

I was familiar with the head medic, and I recognized a few of the students from the rounds I’d been doing.

"Elaine! Glad to see you’re still around, thought you’d graduated or got kicked out!" He told me.

I shook my head.

"Nope, I was working on my biomancy thesis."

"Excellent. Healer Winug, Healer Lippe, if the two of you would check in with the patient please?"

The two healers nodded, and I squeezed Iona’s hand. The two of them led Iona away to have a private conversation. Fairly standard stuff, making sure she wanted this of her own volition, that I wasn’t coercing her or pressuring her, et cetera.

"How’d your biomancy thesis go?" He asked. It felt a little awkward to be small talking in front of so many people, but we needed to burn a bit of time before the operation began.

"Graduated bronze! I had them tear apart my own plans. If everything goes well, I hope to be your next patient."

"Excellent! When do you plan on doing that?"

I shrugged.

"Right after this? Figure we could keep each other company in the hospital. With that being said, I should probably start working."

He nodded at me.

"Right. Follow me, we have a room with the proper access to the main mana stores prepared."

We walked through the familiar halls of the hospital, the student-healers trailing along like a line of ducklings in black hats. Before long we ended up in the room in question.

The entire floor was a solid piece of arcanite, and I knew from my reading most of the arcanite on the campus were simply a few, solid, gigantic pieces, cleverly fused together to form the bones of the campus. They were in different segments just to prevent one idiot from draining the entire campus dry, but there was a scaling effect present with arcanite. A single 10 kilogram block held more mana than two 5 kilogram blocks combined. It encouraged large works.

The arcanite floor was hooked up directly to the campus’s main reserves, the idea being that if a healer needed the vast reserves on campus, they should be able to access it. Faith in the profession.

The firing range had another large piece, but it wasn’t hooked up to anything else important. Once a year or so some idiot bird would drain the entire thing.

There hadn’t even been anything left to burn! I had no idea what Auri was trying to do with that.

The room was atypical for a number of reasons.

The room itself had a single bed, entirely flat and not particularly designed for comfort, in the middle of the room. Plenty of space was given around the bed for a dozen or two healers to cram in. It was the major operating room, and it was assumed that anything that required the School’s massive reserves was also likely to require more than one healer.

It didn’t hurt to have the space just in case.

"I need a chair." I pulled out my notebook dedicated to Iona’s changes, and started reading. One of the students got the nod from the head healer, and scrambled to get what I’d requested.

The head honcho in question clapped his hands.

"Right! Everyone, this is a rare opportunity. Healer Elaine is about to perform massive, large-scale biomancy on an adult warrior who is not her. I myself have only seen a half-dozen similar operations in all my decades here, and outside of the School? I know of no facilities that are capable of performing the same operation. Perform your diagnostic skills. Watch. Learn. Level."

He’d captured everyone’s attention, and they were hanging onto his every word.

"For this operation, Healer Elaine is the boss. She says jump, you jump. She says to get out, you get out. If I tell you the sky is blue, and she says the sky is green, the sky is green. She knows what’s going on here better than I do, and if we screw up, we could kill the patient. Does anyone have an issue with this?"

Heads shook, but one hand went up. A student I didn’t recognize.

"Healer healer? What’s up with that?" He forced a laugh, but nobody laughed with him. We just gave him a stare.

The head healer coughed.

"Elaine was… unfortunately named." He said, but I was more than a bit mad.

This was a delicate, high-powered, high-risk operation. I didn’t need jokesters, pranksters, funny people, or people who couldn’t stay serious and on-task here. The more healers present, the higher the risk of someone fucking something up.

"Out." I ordered. "If making jokes is your idea of what’s appropriate in the operating theater, you’re not welcome."

"But your name is funny." He whined, and wilted under the combined glare of everyone else in the room.

He slunk out as Iona came in with the two healers.

"Everyone good?" Head honcho asked his two minions.

They nodded.

"Healer Elaine, I’m turning this over to you." My chair arrived as he said that.

I directed it next to Iona’s bed, then stood on it so everyone could see me.

"Hello everyone! Let’s get right to it. Today, we are performing a full body biomancy operation on Iona here. Our relative magic power to vitality ratio means I can transform 12 grams a second. Iona weighs enough that this operation will take roughly three hours once I begin. Now, you’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it again. Do not blast unimaged heals at Iona. Do not try to simply fix an area. If you do, you’ll end up reverting the changes I’ve made, and worst case, we’ll need to start over from the beginning. Does everyone understand?"

I got a round muttering of ‘yes’ and ‘yes healer’ and ‘of course’.

Worked for me.

I clapped my hands together to refocus everyone.

"Excellent! I will now start preparing my image. This might take a significant amount of time. I will let you know when I begin casting. Iona, the skill’s off, right?" I asked her, referring to her vitality-boosting passive.

She nodded. "It’s off."

I sat back down in my chair, grabbed my notebook on Iona’s build from my bag, and started skimming, rebuilding the image in my mind.

I had all of this memorized, checked, and cross-checked. The skimming simply helped form it in my mind properly.

Also, I was able to blatantly cheat.

I built the image in my mind, designing it to move from Iona’s extremities in, and made sure I was only targeting her. Then tied it off with [Persistent Casting], but using [Biological Manipulation] instead of my more common [Dance with the Heavens]. I opened my eyes.

"Everyone ready?" I asked.

There were some starts and jumping, and a new healer ran out the door to get a few of the other students who had left.

I didn’t blame them. Everyone was busy, and someone closing their eyes for an extended period of time wasn’t interesting, not when there were other things to do.

"I believe we are ready to assist." The head honcho confirmed after a few minutes.

Iona raised her hand, and closed her eyes, her lips silently moving as she prayed to her goddesses.

"Hey." Iona cracked her eyes open and turned to me, looking deep into my eyes. "I love you."

I gave her a crooked grin that was meant to be reassuring, but I’d be lying if I said my heart wasn’t racing.

"I love you as well."

Instead of grabbing her hand or anything like that, I leaned back in my chair, and stuck my right foot out, laying it across Iona’s legs. My left foot was touching the floor, and I started to draw mana in as quickly as it was leaving.

I could feel the burn as I channeled so much mana through my body. It was a well-studied phenomenon, but no biomancer or healer had ever found physical damage from channeling mana like this. It was simply uncomfortable, and the discomfort slowly increased with time.

"Whoo! Tingles!" Iona shuddered slightly.

"Yeah, legs, arms, lower torso, face, skull, then upper torso. Most of the issues will happen there."

"And you’re just… sitting there?" Iona asked. I was getting some looks from the other healers.

I shrugged.

"Yes? I’m channeling my entire mana pool every second. This is difficult from a biological building standpoint, and from a mana and power access perspective, but the actual changing is fairly simple with all my skills."

That wasn’t a surprise to anyone here. The only reason this room was used was for major operations that required enormous amounts of mana. The only part that raised a few eyebrows was my magic power to mana ratio being high enough that I could instantly dump my entire mana pool.

It was somewhat anticlimactic. The preparation had been the hard part, but the execution was straightforward.

"Right. All of you should start casting diagnostic skills. Nothing should be going wrong at this stage. This is a good opportunity to see the ‘normal’ problems that biomancy is causing in your diagnostics." I told the assembled healers.

I followed my own advice and pulled up [Elvenoid Visualization], the tiny trickle of mana it required entirely inconsequential to the overall operation. As I watched, the very edges of Iona’s toes subtly changed, indicating my skill was working.

The ones who needed to touch Iona to work their magic jostled around a bit, and even my chair got bumped around. There was a reason I’d made my skill work on only Iona - I foresaw other people touching me, and that would cause issues.

"Leveled." One of the healers tersely reported. I lifted an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t disruptive.

"Leveled!" Another one called out, and I grinned. My next words would set the tone.

"Levels for everyone! Let’s stay focused, but we’re going to be here for a while. Any bets how many levels total, across everyone we get today?"

I flipped through the [Elvenoid Visualization] again, checking on the various layers of progress. So far so good.

"Eight!" The first call came in.

"Two levels already? Nah, we’re all getting a level. 14." A second prediction was made.

"Ummmm…" Iona looked at me nervously. "Is this alright?"

I gave her a shrug as I leaned back in my chair more.

"It’s when we’re all doing nothing but talking about you and how you’re dying that we have a problem. If we’re chit-chatting about normal life? It means everything’s fine, and everything’s okay." I told her.

The blonde gave me a stiff nod.

"Alright. Talking about normal life. I like that. Let’s talk about something normal. What about your third class?" She slipped into English for that last part, a private language only the two of us spoke.

"I’m still unsure, but yeah, I need to decide, don’t I." I replied back in the same tongue. "Which one’s your favorite?"

Iona shook her head.

"My favorite doesn’t matter. I still think [Bookwyrm] is the best class for you. Think about it! What does the world of your soul look like?"

"A library." I promptly replied. We’d shared this ages ago.

"A library." Iona repeated. "With your guide being a librarian. Not an orchard, with your guide being a gardener."

My mind instantly flashed to having a world of my soul being filled with trees and mangos, and needing to harvest the right one. Sounded fun.

"Not a zoo, with your guide being a keeper. Now granted, [Bookwyrm] is a reading class, not a librarian class, but it’s quintessentially you. It’s where your soul is most comfortable. It’s why I was delighted to see a [Paladin] class when my soul is a temple, and my guide a priestess. It just fits, in a way like nothing else does." Iona brushed some of her hair out of her face, her hand spasming as parts of it got changed.

I stopped and thought about that. I wasn’t sure why Iona hadn’t brought it up before, but it made sense. I was in an intellectual bind. My classes all had powerful arguments for and against them on an intellectual level, but few on an emotional level like Iona was proposing.

"That… yes, that could work. Tell me more." I told Iona.

She gave me her patented grin. Gods, that grin.

"Well, your love of reading and books is obvious, plus the Spatial element always comes with fun goodies. I think…"

We chatted away, the comfortable talk of two people who’d been together for a few years, and had caught up on most of each other’s history already. Who could almost read each other’s minds.

Occasionally Iona would twitch or grimace, as one change or another caused a type of discomfort that her [Chilled Mind] didn’t interpret as pain, and didn’t mute. The changes slowly marched through her body, 12 grams a second.

Time slowly tickled by, and light conversation surrounded us as the procedure continued. I was burning through a prodigious amount of mana, and I was starting to get an idea of just how crazy all of this was.

Assuming an absolutely perfect image, and no large penalty due to my range, and average sized people, I could heal six to twelve decapitations a second. That was how much mana I was pouring into Iona every second, and I was going to do it for two, almost three hours straight.

If I didn’t know for sure that the hospital had way more healers than patients, that everyone here was well looked after, and that the levels I was helping provide all the healers would go on to help them save more lives, I’d feel massively guilty over the whole thing.

Similarly, I was getting an idea just how insane it was that the white-robed witch was able to fully disintegrate the skinwalker with a single word, a single skill. She’d channeled as much mana, with the power to match, in a single second as what was taking me three hours.

It made me think of Destruction, the sharp pang of loss dulled somewhat by time and therapy. It would never go away, but the edges weren’t as jagged, weren’t as raw. I might’ve been able to accomplish something similar by grabbing [Channel] and working on it for… some 450ish days straight.

Nevermind.

"Healers! Look alive! We’re going into the final segments! Call out when you see a problem and that you’re fixing it, don’t wait for me to assign an issue!" I called out as my [Elvenoid Visualization] showed that we were creeping into her upper torso, along with the spinal column, neck, and other critical parts.

"I’m scared." Iona whispered to me.

I leaned forward, awkwardly juggling around so I traded from my feet being on her, to holding her hand, all without ever losing contact with my girlfriend.

"I know. It’ll be ok." I clasped her hand with both of mine, practically in a prayer pose.

She squeezed my hand, then squeezed my hand as her eyes went wide. Blood welled up as she bit her lip, her improved teeth combining with her biting skill in an unfortunate interaction.

She wasn’t screaming though, which was great for our focus. The other healers stopped chatting entirely, simply calling out when they spotted a problem and what they were doing to tackle it.

I felt the bones in my hand break, [Center of the Universe] dulling the pain. I didn’t say anything about it. Iona must know what she was doing, and I wasn’t going to give her grief over it. I could bear it.

[*ding!* [Center of the Universe] leveled up! 470 -> 471].

We sat there, locked together, in a private world of our own. Blue starry eyes staring unblinkingly into green starry eyes as my biomancy finished, controlled chaos all around us as the healers kept Iona alive through the procedure.

With no fanfare, just like that, we were done.

I pulsed [Permanence] through Iona once, twice, five times before the skill finally stopped ‘taking’.

"How do you feel?" I asked Iona.

"Weird. Hungry. Terrible about your hand."

"No aches? Nothing feels wrong? No impending sense of doom?" I flicked her visualization back up, running through everything again.

She shook her head, the motion exaggeratedly large.

"No - whoa! - but I could eat an entire cow."

I smiled at her.

"That’s normal. Now, as you’ve noticed, you’ve been improved. Small motions only until you’ve worked out your new body."

"Understood." She confirmed.

I let go of her hand, mentally throwing a lazy ‘heal’ at it. My bones snapped back into position, the bruise vanishing like it’d never existed. I shook it out once, then started talking.

"Excellent work everyone! Do we have a total level count?"

"Thirty three, plus whatever you got!" Someone called out. "Leveling in both classes counts as leveling twice!"

I grinned.

"Zero levels for me! My biomancy class is capped at 128."

There were some boos at the announcement, predominantly from the person who’d bet 35 levels total from everyone, and was now losing to the person who’d bet 32. The stakes were simply bragging rights, but it was a fun team building activity.

"We need to move Iona to a recovery room. That’s all people, thank you for coming! Hope the levels and experience were worth your time. I can’t say how much I appreciate it."

A few of the healers left, immediately off to other tasks. There were a few more rounds of self-congratulations, and the crowd dispersed. Four healers stayed back with a stretcher, and I carefully directed moving Iona from the bed to the stretcher, and off to a room.

"You know, I could get used to this sort of treatment." Iona said. "I’m still hungry, and I’m under healer’s orders not to move much…" She fluttered her eyes at me.

I snorted at the blatant request.

"Yeah, yeah, I’ll feed you your whole cow." I said.

Iona wriggled her eyebrows at me, asking another question. I decided to half ignore it.

"You should be drawing again by the end of the week." I told her. I was being extra-generous on the timeframe. Nobody got mad when they were told a week to recover and it took them three days, but if I told Iona it’d take a day and it took three instead, that just caused bad feelings all around.

I got pouty lips, but we were in a recovery room already.

It was the rare ailment that a healer couldn’t just wave a hand and fix, especially with the sheer number of different types of healers we had present. Occasionally, a problem would arise that would require moderate recovery times. Like some of the biomancy patients I had brought back to the hospital.

Or like having a nervous system rewired, and muscles dramatically strengthened. Iona would need a few days of physical therapy before she was in control of herself again. Her dexterity, and to a lesser extent, her vitality, would be helping, along with there being fundamentally nothing wrong with her, but changing all of her muscles wasn’t the same as simply leveling up and getting more stats.

I fed Iona, carefully slicing each piece of food into small, bite-sized pieces, and ladling a hearty stew into her mouth. At first she was awkward, her mouth opening too large and grinding too hard, but as I watched she quickly regained control of that one small portion of herself.

The [Physical Therapist] came as we finished up.

"Oh, I’m sorry, am I intruding?" She asked as she poked her head around the door.

I shook my head.

"I was just finishing up. I’m going to grab a few things, then I’ll probably be your next patient." I cheerfully told the therapist.

I got a doubtful look from her.

"Don’t hurt yourself." She told me, then turned to Iona.

"Hi, I have some students with me today, do you mind? I’m healer…" She started to give her usual speech.

I mouthed the words ‘I love you’ to Iona, and got a cheeky would-be wink in return. It was more like a comical grimace.

I left to get some supplies for my own biomancy operation.

Chapter 58
Operation: The Improved Elaine X

First stop: The library. I was going to be laid up, potentially for weeks, and I wanted to have some light reading. What Marcelle had said about the Exterreri Empire was interesting, and I wanted to get some reading done on the subject. I didn’t want to be trying to work while I was convalescing, and the topic was interesting.

Ok, fine.

Everything was interesting to read about, if done well.

Second was home, where I’d previously bought a few pounds of powdered titanium. I was doing biological manipulations, and the skill didn’t extend towards conjuring up metal. The plan was to slowly drink a titanium-smoothie mix over the next few days after my biomancy operation, and let my body properly process and deposit it into the right places. It would also let me know if I’d done that part of the operation correctly, and if I needed to make adjustments. Far easier to make changes now, while I still had the biomancy class, than discover it wasn’t working in a few years!

It was one of the quirks of healing magic. See, the body continuously updated what it ‘should’ look like to the System, and healing magic checked on what the body ‘should’ look like when making repairs and fixes. It’s why normal healing magic didn’t handle age or starvation. The changes made to the body updated the ‘template’ to the new look. Fat people got healed back to being fat, and skinny people got healed back to being skinny.

It got weird with things like cancer not updating the template, but brain injuries did - after a short period of time. Seven different types of funky.

When I finished with [Biological Manipulation], my bones wouldn’t have any titanium, although my body would ‘know’ what to do with any ingested titanium. Similarly, my template would be updated to not have any titanium in the image. As I drank the titanium smoothies, and as the metal was deposited onto my bones, my image would get updated, just like it would if I ate thirty pounds of cake and gained a dozen pounds. If my arm got broken, [Dance with the Heavens] would restore my arm, metal hexagon pattern in my bones and all.

Speaking of cakes.

Third was the cafeteria, where I loaded up on food. I made sure Auri and Fenrir had access to everything they needed, and I was back at the hospital.

I quickly found healer Lippe.

"Hey Lippe!" I called out to the suspected noble.

"Elaine. Is something wrong?" She asked me.

"Eh, not really. I’m checking myself in."

I got a skeptical look. Fair, because I hadn’t explained my plans to biomancy myself to the facility yet. I just hadn’t needed to make a big announcement ahead of time or anything. This was me letting them know about my plans.

"Why?" She asked.

"I’m about to biomancy myself, and I’m going to need the works. A healer in case I screw up and pass out with a bad build, living assistance, physical therapy after." Biomancy changes on the scale I was performing always came with a significant amount of ‘how do I walk again?’ occurring after, as all the nerves got scrambled and rewired. It wasn’t a big deal, but it would make for a few annoying days. It was why Marcelle had suggested I plan on two weeks for recovery after performing the biomancy. The recovery in question was figuring out how to walk again, and the like.

Lippe shrugged.

"If the experience and levels are anything close to your earlier performance, everyone will be banging down the doors to participate. Can you wait a few hours to get a group together?"

I could push the issue, and just do it now, but why bother? I could help a dozen students level and learn, just by being patient.

Pun intended.

A hop, skip, jump, and two hours later, and I was in a bed next to Iona’s. We weren’t using the fancy arcanite high-mana room for this, since it was a self-operation, AKA it was only going to cost around 80,000 mana - and that was with a generous margin of error.

"Alright everyone, thanks for coming. I see a few of you are still around from this morning." I winced. This was so much more awkward than directing things.

"Anyways, this is going to be a little different. All of my changes are going to happen at once. Nothing should go wrong, but you never know. I’m likely going to end up with a blinding headache, so if I scream and clutch my head, ignore that. After that? Well, I’ll be done, and hopefully I won’t need anyone to help. With that being said, I can’t hold onto my image once I’ve made it. It’s far too complex for me to get distracted by anything. I estimate two hours total to build everything, and you’ll know when I’m almost done when I get to the last page of my notebook." I tapped the book in question. "You might want to find something else until that happens. Oh! If I pass out, get help from some of the other biomancers. They’ll be able to use my notes to figure out what went wrong, although I did have a number of professors sign off that the build should work. Although that was before the edit I put in." I was rambling, and shut up.

Most of the healers wished me luck and walked away.

"You got this brainosaurus!" Iona cheered me from the other bed. "You’ll totally knock… uh… you’ve got this!"

I gave her a thumbs up, then focused.

I wanted to also use this time to make my new [Persistent Casting], but the issue with making my heals was I also included all the ways I could be harmed, and how to optimally fix it. That would make this take tons longer, and I couldn’t take up everyone’s time like that.

However, I did have the time to do this properly. I isolated my left hand, and focused on everything I was going to do to it. Bones, joints, tendons, ligaments, capillary system, blood, nerves, the whole works. It didn’t neatly tie back to the rest of my body, but that was alright.

I focused on building the image just for my hand, took a deep breath, and executed the change. My hand briefly writhed in front of me, but critically, [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] didn’t level up. I immediately blasted a normal heal through my hand, reverting the changes.

Excellent. The System didn’t think I’d made any correctable mistakes with the design of my left hand. Time to do the left foot!

Round and round I went, slowly performing biomancy on a single part of my body, checking it for errors, then reverting them back. I started with my extremities, and slowly worked my way in.

I felt comfortable enough to do my - calling them minor organs felt wrong, but organs that I could survive going haywire for a minute or two - internal organs as well, ensuring that I hadn’t made any mistakes, that nothing had been critically overloaded.

I could handle some small changes with [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom], but if too many things went wrong at once, that was a message to me to go back to the drawing board and figure out what had gone wrong.

I had done my research. The skill wasn’t leveling.

After checking my lungs, then reverting them, it was time for the main event. I flipped back to the first page of my notebook, and started to build the full-body, full-system image required to completely transform myself. One piece. Two pieces.

Three pieces.

The hundred, thousands of tiny pieces that made up a single, functional human body. I pictured it all, in every detail I’d written down, all the modifications and changes. I’d been doing nothing else but working on this project for months now, and the picture came easily to me. Heck, I’d just formed the image for every single part of the puzzle!

Repetition was the mother of learning, even when I didn’t have the skill.

Time flew as I completed the image, and without fanfare or announcing it - every bit of focus on keeping the complex structure in my mind - I triggered [Biological Manipulation].

I was instantly slammed with a blinding headache. I was torn with a moment of indecision - to use [Permanence] or not. I erred on the side of caution, holding off on the skill. I gasped for breath, but it didn’t feel like anything was happening.

This was expected, but unwelcome. My blood was super thick, and my skills didn’t have much about creating oxygenated blood. My old blood was still there, simply transformed, but the relative oxygen saturation had dramatically dropped, due to the dramatically increased capacity.

It was rapidly reoxygenating, my lungs doing work, but it took time for it to reach every part of my body.

No, worse was the assault on my senses. I could hear everything, every pin drop like a cannon in my ears, the softly glowing lights like my attempts at blinding someone with Radiance. I could smell what someone three floors away and seven rooms over had eaten two days ago. I had sensory input I couldn’t interpret, that I’d need help understanding.

And all that was pain. Terrible, horrible, vicious pain. Like spikes going through my brain, like a hangover I couldn’t heal, like the worst migraine of my life.

I closed my eyes and just rode it out.

What else was there to do?

"Elaine?" A whispered word went off like a bombshell in my ears. Iona had noticed me stirring.

I tried to open my eyes, my arm shooting up towards the ceiling instead.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

"I can see you’re up. Good. Can you eat?"

I tried to open my mouth, and wriggled my right toes. I tried to lift my left arm up, and arched my back instead. I tried to lift my right leg up - figuring nothing was hooked up to the right thing anymore, and I should just skip my right arm entirely in my question to figure out how to do things again - and my eyes opened.

I tried to wiggle my toes, hoping to open my mouth.

I peed myself. In front of Iona. I wanted to die of shame.

Fuck me, this was going to be a long recovery period.

"Hey Elaine, you doing okay?" Iona plopped down next to me as she whispered. The heavenly scent of freshly cut mangos accompanied her.

I could also smell the slightly sour smell of the mango skin, now gone. Iona had been handling them herself, personally, and the faintest metallic scent came to me. I think it was steel, reacting with the subtle oils on her skin, telling me what type of knife she’d used to cut the mangos.

There was a depth and subtlety to scents and smells that I was learning, an aspect I hadn’t considered. I knew the coppery smell of blood - as a human. I was entirely unprepared for the raw depth of scent that simple copper had, and I needed to learn and catalog everything in multiple new scents now. A long trip to the Museum was in order. Maybe a dedicated class to handling powerful senses.

I groaned, and lifted a hand. I’d figured that much out.

I used [Mantle] to draw words.

Too much everything. Might’ve overdone it on the senses.

Iona shrugged her now extra-massive shoulders.

"Well, that’s easy. Just get a skill to help you out."

I frowned, or tried to. I kicked the side of my bed instead. I then remembered the new way I needed to frown, and properly did it. I didn’t want to blow a skill slot just to manage my senses. That felt like a terrible idea, I’d lock a skill slot permanently. I was getting better and better at processing the world around me every day.

But, the idea had some merit. I should investigate it before dismissing it out of hand, especially since it came from Iona. I did have a practically free general skill in [Anatomical Drawing].

Alright, give me some time to work through it. I wrote to Iona.

"Cheers, enjoy!" I heard her relax against her chair, the wood creaking slightly as she readjusted. Not that anyone else would’ve heard it.

I took a deep, bracing breath, and mentally prepared myself for the incoming anguish. I then focused on my senses, on controlling them, and getting everything I could from them.

My headache spiked, like five pickaxes being driven through different parts of my brain - my main brain - and I was rewarded with a series of System notifications.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Sharpened Senses]! Would you like to take this skill?]

Heck no.

Well, okay, maybe one day in the future I might. It was a fairly solid skill, but right now my problem was my senses were too sharp, and I was having trouble adapting.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [Dulled Senses]! Would you like to take this skill?]

Ugh. This was almost as bad. It’d be a crutch, and I’d either have to undo the crutch in the future, or just live with worse senses. It didn’t fix my problem. If I wanted to dull my senses, I didn’t need a skill. Blindfolds and earplugs would do it.

[*ding!* You’ve unlocked the General Skill [The World Around Me]! Would you like to take this skill?]

It wasn’t obvious from the name what the skill did, and I dug a little deeper.

The World Around Me: You’ve dug deeper than most to extract every little detail of the world around you. You’ve honed and trained your senses, then brought them to the peak of performance. You’ve deepened the spectrum of colors you can see, you’ve given yourself the ability to see in the dark and underwater, to focus at great distances. You’ve improved your sense of smell beyond what any natural creature has, along with allowing your hearing to hit upon the full range of possibility. You’ve added new senses to yourself. Bring them all into a cohesive whole, and know what is going around you. Larger sphere of awareness per level. Awareness and details dependent on senses and knowledge. -222 mana regeneration.

Wow. I wasn’t sure if that would fix my sensory issue, but I was happy to see what the skill could do for me.

I took it, dropping [Anatomical Drawing] - no nausea!! - and the world… changed. For the better.

Before I was interpreting what I could filter out of my sensory overload to pick out details, like tuning into a single conversation in a busy marketplace. Yeah, I could hear everyone chatting, but I was only focused on one conversation, only operating on one bandwidth.

Now, in a small sphere around me, I knew everything that was going on, with perfect clarity. It was like I could hear every conversation in the marketplace, and tune into it, and somehow understand and follow what everyone was doing. Within the small sphere I had.

This was a powerful skill. My radius was small, for now, but I knew everything that was going on under my bed. I couldn’t see under my bed, but my skill, combined with my senses, could.

I didn’t know what type of wood the bed was made out of, but I suspected if I took the time to smell different woods, different oils and glues, that I’d get a fantastically detailed look at what was going on.

Outside of the sphere, it was the same mess of fishmongers yelling about the latest catch after a tsunami had dumped an ocean’s worth of fish into their stalls.

But the skill was taking the edge off of it.

"Everything alright?" Iona whispered to me, the noise now manageable and bearable.

Well, I just decided that I need to sniff glue. My [Mantle] told Iona.

Without looking, I could tell that she was putting on a pout.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [The World Around You] leveled up! 1->2].

Leveling the skill up had one of the more obvious effects of any general skill I’d used. My sphere of awareness expanded, and the floor was now included. I could tell every swirl in the wood, where the moisture was bending and warping things, how long ago it had been since it was last mopped, the fact that it hadn’t been cleaned properly since the last time a female human had bled on it.

I was far too intimately familiar with the stench of blood.

"Definitely feeling better." Iona muttered. "Right, I need my cuddleosaurus back. The more you practice, the sooner you’re coordinated, and the faster you’re out of that bed and back into ours."

I rolled my eyes - successfully - at Iona’s comment. I tried to stick my tongue out, but that was connected to the flail-bone instead.

"I invented a game!" Iona brought out the bag of mangos, like she’d had any hope of hiding them from me. "It’s called, we’re both going to practice moving!"

She plucked a mango cube out of her bag, and using her [Telekinesis], gently hovered it over my head.

"Good luck!" She cheerfully called out. I’d gotten practice eating, and I thought about the new, proper movements I needed to make. Shark-like, I snapped forward and up, only to watch with dismay as the mango cube floated away from me.

I gave Iona the mightiest pout I could.

She lightly tutted me.

"Going to have to work harder than that for your mango."

Never had I been so motivated.

Recovery was slow and painful. Iona was done in less than a day, only needing a single session with a physical therapist to readjust herself. The changes I’d crafted were relatively small, after all.

Mine were not. I was like a baby, although I had quite a few advantages over one. I knew what the heck walking was, and that I wanted to do it, for example. I had a mature body, and wouldn’t get self-sabotaged by muscles not working.

A few days had gone by with no unexpected problems, and I felt comfortable enough to use [Permanence] on myself to lock in the changes.

My senses had been one of my largest stumbling blocks, but [The World Around Me] had neatly taken care of that problem, while also giving me a sphere of complete awareness. I was rapidly becoming a huge fan.

Lying in bed wasn’t helping me, and I spent every waking moment working on regaining control. There was no way to make titanium-dust smoothies taste good, and I simply elected to drink them in the most concentrated way I could, to just get it done and over with.

Unfortunately I couldn’t drink them all in one sitting, my body couldn’t process that much metal at once. Had to sip a little every day. It was going to be worth it.

There were more enjoyable exercises than drinking metal.

Reading books, for example, was great for practicing my fine motor control. Mmmmhmm. That was totally the reason, and not my need for a mental break from the frustrating betrayal my body constantly performed.

[Mantle of the Stars] could slowly move, and it was solid enough to hold a book. I could read as soon as I’d worked out how to open my eyes again, and how to focus with them.

I could even read in the dark, the tiny glimmer of light coming off the [Mantle] enough to see like it was bright as day!

The first few books were boring treaties on how the Exterreri Empire currently worked. Lots of vampires, predominately in cities, used clouds of ash over cities to prevent the sunlight from reaching them. Humans were the predominant farmers in the ashless countryside, and honestly the whole thing was dry enough that I nearly fell asleep.

A Nearly Complete History of the Exterreri Empire was written more like a novel, and dramatically more enjoyable. It started with their creation myth.

The one known as the Roadbuilder, Titanslayer, Faminevanquisher, Dragonfriend, and more has more titles and stories to his name than we can possibly describe. The gods blessed the birth of Maximus Atius Draconis, showering the humble cottage in which he was born with rainbows, an eagle alighting on his crib. For he was a direct descendant of one of the gods themselves, foretold to greatness.

I snorted - now connected to the fart bone - in disbelief.

Divination and prophecy didn’t exist. Full stop. Not even the gods could do it.

As a babe, he strangled a venomous snake that had slithered into his crib, demonstrating the strength of arms he would be known for. He was talking by the time he was six months old, and was writing poetry at nine. As a child, before his System unlocked, he cleverly designed a trap for an infamous man-eating lion. His first class was [Paragon of Perfection]. He joined the colosseum young, and boasted a record of 251 wins and 7 losses in his time there.

I remembered what my fellow Rangers had said about the colosseum. Someone was always ‘supposed’ to win.

When the barbarian invaders came, he led his fellow countrymen in fighting them off, campaigning across the land. He fell in love with their princess, but alas, cruel fate tore them apart. She was promised to another tribe, and his love moved mountains and diverted rivers. He fought the barbarian’s champion in single combat for her hand, and when their vile treachery caused his spear to break, an elemental of Lightning, said to have taken the form of the most beautiful woman in existence, gifted him the legendary spear Culexabri.

Barbarians, as a general rule, didn’t have the society or culture needed to have a [Princess]! Honestly.

He saved a dragon from certain death, and the creature, wisest and greatest of the god’s creation, who saw the nobility of his soul and entrusted his youngest child to be a companion to Atius.

I was smelling bullshit. Quite literally, the stables weren’t too far from the hospital, and the wind was blowing in the right direction. I bet with more practice, I could even figure out what the bulls were eating!

Having fought for the peace of the land, his fellow countrymen wanted to crown him king. Thrice did he refuse, for he was a simple man of the land, no great [King] or [Emperor]. Thrice more did the people of the land come to him, insisting he wear the crown, that he lead them and protect him.

Eventually, he bowed to their wishes, and accepted the crown, naming himself Emperor Night, First and Last of His Name.

My blood ran cold at the last sentence.

All this time, I’d been looking for hints of Night. For details, information. Anything.

All this time, it had been right in front of me, in the history texts of the Exterreri Empire. I knew they had a number of vampires. I hadn’t done more than a cursory glance at the current leadership structure, not seeing his name anywhere.

Finally, I was seeing his name - untranslated from the Creation original - in a textbook about the history of the Empire.

And I didn’t believe a word of the rest of it. Especially if Night was involved, head of the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ Sentinels. Now that I was looking for it, the fingerprints of his propaganda were all over the pages.

Not him, personally, but his brand.

I knew I had to go to the Exterreri Empire.

With Iona greatly motivating me, along with my physical therapist, and nothing being fundamentally wrong with me, I managed to regain my faculties in two weeks. It took another two - burning through the remainder of the quarter, along with the break between quarters - for me to get to an acceptable level of performance and control over my body.

What I considered acceptable wasn’t what most other people had in mind. I still thought of myself as a Sentinel.

"Ready. Set. GO!" Shirayuki called out, and I was off sprinting as she started to say go. My reflexes had been enhanced, the brain-ropes along with the kirin nerves getting me off the starting block in a time measured in hundredths of a second.

I was forced to dig into the ground as I ran, flinging clods of dirt behind me as I sprinted the length of the field.

The issue hadn’t been as pronounced earlier. The difference here was my fundamental speed had dramatically increased. It was like walking on sand, versus running on sand. I had gone from ‘walking’ on the dirt, to ‘running’ on the dirt, and my dexterity couldn’t handle the increase.

Putting it another way:

If I had no stats at all, if it was just my body running like this on dirt, I would be causing the same problem. Since my dexterity was slightly out of balance, forget negating the effect, it was getting amplified.

Traction was now an issue. Maybe I should get [Traction] as a skill?

If I was on stone, I wouldn’t have any of these issues.

For now, I sort of ‘skipped’ as I ran, the air blasting around me and causing significant drag. I closed my third eyelid, the membrane acting like goggles against the wind.

I had my sphere of awareness, but I was moving too damn fast for it to be useful. The sensory input was there one moment, gone the next. As the skill leveled, as I got used to it, I imagined it would become more useful.

Runes on the bottom of my feet were the first idea, but it had problems. All things for me to sort out after I was done with this dash.

And I was done. I put on the brakes, plowing a pair of long furrows in the dirt as I tried to stop myself.

"Time!" Shirayuki called out, then was silent.

I didn’t need to pant or catch my breath or anything. The run had been nothing, barely a light warm up.

What was taking her so long to announce my time?

"Elaine. 3200 meter dash, 18 seconds!" She eventually called out from across the field.

I mentally ran the conversions, then staggered as the implications hit me.

I’d been slowed down by a dozen physical factors. Poor traction. Wind drag. It was one of my first full out sprints since getting a handle on myself, and I knew as I got better at moving at high speeds, I’d shave off quite a few seconds. Three to five. A huge number.

I wasn’t quite there yet, but I was eyeing up the sound barrier as a target.

"Frankly amazing time, Elaine." Shirayuki spoke from across the field, but I could hear her, no problem. "You’re faster than nearly any other physical classer I’ve seen in your age division. Work on your control, get a skill or two to manage the impact you have, and you’ll be unstoppable. I recommend enchanted boots. Ready for the next test?"

"Ready!" I called out. Shirayuki’s suggestion of enchanted boots made me feel like an idiot. Of course those would be the perfect solution to my traction problem! I focused a little too much on myself, and all the things I could do to fix my problems, forgetting that sometimes, other people had useful, powerful skills as well, and could simply make a solution to my problem.

It was an issue with my mind set. I needed to readjust my thinking, and consider reaching out a hand to others and asking for help, instead of insisting I do everything myself.

Physical stats weren’t linear. Doubling strength didn’t mean I could lift twice as much. There was quite a lot of research done on the topic, and best as the [Scholars] and [Researchers] had figured out, there was a cube-root factor to strength. It was mitigated by the physical stats multiplying each other.

My biomancy had done great things for me though. It had multiplied my baseline, so my strength stat had a better base to work off of, for example. Going from 5 times my normal strength to 10 times my normal strength would usually require getting my strength stat about 8 times as many stat points as it currently had invested.

But by dramatically improving the base, I got all those ‘stats’ ‘for free’, and they’d always stick with me. The biggest winner was my speed.

I was almost as fast as the physically-focused, vow-boosted Iona was.

Well, before I’d made similar changes on her.

3200 meter dash: 18 seconds.

3200 meter dash when flying: 19 seconds.

Obstacle course: 11 seconds.

Deadlift: 1200 lbs.

Bench Press: 900 lbs.

I could see an individual blade of grass from across the stadium. I could see the little patterns on an ant crawling up the stem of a clover.

I could rotate my head almost completely around.

Best of all, I felt like I was filled with energy. Like I could move and jump and run for days on end, and never slow down.

Frankly, I was thrilled. Operation: The Improved Elaine was an unqualified success, and the changes would stay with me for the rest of my life. I could now grab a different third class, and enjoy the best of both worlds. It was almost like having half of a fourth class!

First things first though - anti-friction runes on my skin. They were going to be skin-colored, and only light up when in use, which I thought was pretty cool. The ability to ‘slip’ through the air, and ignore wind resistance, would be a nice utility that could last for the rest of my life, and wasn’t exactly a good spell to stash in a spellbook.

I was back in the world of my soul, resetting my third class. Grabbing my real third class.

Librarian was smiling as I came, a single book waiting for me on the table. I shook my head as I looked at it.

"How did it take me so long to realize?" I asked her. "How could I have made any other choice?"

She didn’t say a word. She simply gestured around, at the tens of thousands of colorful books that surrounded us. That reminded me of the hours, the days, I’d spend doing nothing but perusing them, because reading books in the library was fun. Of spending hours curled up in a chair, reading about the adventures of maybe-Elaine.

Of the fact that my world, the inner me, was a library. That books were my thing, that they’d always been my thing. From reading extensively in my first life, to raiding libraries just to learn how to read, telling tales to Rangers for a chance at life, to writing scrolls and trying to invent books. When I’d found myself stuck in a dragon’s lair, the treasure I’d been most interested in were her books, not her gold or weapons. I’d spent hours browsing, desperately trying to find any book that I could crack open and read.

I was a [Bookwyrm], through and through.

Chapter 59
Interlude
Around the world

Iona woke up to a punch in the face.

It was a mostly harmless punch, the fist having no direction or intent behind it. The Valkyrie opened her eyes, but stayed lying down, grabbing Elaine’s fist as it flailed again.

She was having another nightmare. One of the hazards of sharing a bed with Elaine. She was whimpering, her face twisted in anguish and longing.

Iona wrapped her arms around Elaine, and the woman immediately calmed down. She shifted in her sleep, putting her head on Iona’s chest, then settled down. Her breathing slowed into long, deep breaths, and Iona watched the tension leech out of her muscles.

A small smile crossed her face, and she kissed the top of Elaine’s head.

"Love you." She whispered. "Sleep well."

Iona closed her eyes, and was well-trained in the art of falling asleep whenever, however. She was back asleep in seconds.

[*ding!* [Eternal Artist of Living Flesh, Blood, and Life] leveled up! 830->831!]

"Again?" Marcelle remarked to nobody.

Vampires were lucky to level once a decade. This was the seventh time she had leveled in three years.

Something is going on. Something big. Marcelle thought to herself as she let the saber-toothed rabbit escape from her grip, back into its cage.

She couldn’t ignore it any longer. She had to find out what was generating all those levels.

First things first. See if the other professors had noticed a similar phenomenon… or if the other vampires had.

Tolthor, son of Lamae, was the most famous, highest-leveled [Postman] in the world. He accepted letters for delivery, any time of day or night, and had the power and skills to simply teleport the letter or small package to its intended destination.

His prices weren’t cheap though. He averaged a single letter a week, and was paid so extravagantly, he was able to live in the lap of luxury in a manner mere mortals could only envy. His postal territory generally only covered the Immortal lands, but on rare occasions he was called to send a letter to mortal royalty.

A package, anywhere in the world, in an instant.

It was a far drop from the greatest [Postman] in the world to the more common ones. The best reasonable message delivery was the Ceaseless Circuit, their bags and powerful [Couriers] marked by a scroll with wings. The Immortals who found themselves working for the Ceaseless Circuit were the best, fleet of foot and untouchable. They were not quite as instantaneous as Tolthor was, but they boasted they could get a letter delivered anywhere in the world within three days.

If one read the fine print on their boast, they specifically meant the southern continent, and messages delivered to the northern continent weren’t guaranteed, nor were messages to the School.

Flying fortresses were right out. The target needed to have a fixed, non-moving address.

Within the Ceaseless Circuit were multiple levels of priority, from high-value, as quick as possible delivery, to the more mundane mailbags that tracked from town to town, the cheapest letters delivered in bulk when one of the organizers got an entry level runner to move the mailbag.

That was, of course, the well-organized Immortal organization, who had the time, and more importantly, the stability to form a wide-reaching network.

Mortal lands were trickier. Oh, they attempted to mimic the Ceaseless Circuit. Express Parcels Unlimited attempted to make similar claims to the Ceaseless Circuit, but not even the most fanatical supporters believed they were close to the same class. No, the post in most of the world worked on a town or city level. If a villager somehow knew how to read and write, knew another person who could also read and write, and somehow had the spare coin to send and receive letters, they would need to travel to the nearby town just to drop a letter off, and hope that the post would move it along, that enough coin had been attached to the letter to make it worth it.

Nobody wanted to deliver a letter across multiple mortal lands, and there frankly was little communication across those lands. Who needed to talk with someone more than a county or two away? Who knew anyone more than a county or two away? The life of the average citizen of Pallos didn’t include much travel, and most travelers were looked upon with a degree of suspicion.

Multinational letters were a tricky thing.

Take the letter one Vitus had written in Rolland, postmarked for Sangino. 30 arcanite coins had been attached for its delivery. The trip was a long one, and a [Courier] picked it up along with a few other long-distance letters as she delivered an urgent message to the Blade of Grass Sect, located in The Great Tang. She took 5 of the 30 coins for herself, a meager amount made worth it only because she was making the trip already.

Now the letter had gotten closer to its destination, but there were only 25 coins left. It stewed for some time, no mail heading towards the Forbidden Four users of Nime or the tribes of Tuvan. Eventually, enough westward bound mail piled up, that a courier finally was interested in hopping across the Tuvan Tribes into Lithos. He took 10 of the remaining coins - excessive, for the length the letter still needed to travel. There, it was snowed in for a winter, with no couriers interested in making the trip through the snow for the paltry amounts offered.

The letter’s lurching journey continued, the pay regulating the letter to the bottom of the pile, only taken up by runners bundling enough letters together to make the trip worthwhile for themselves. After all, 15 coins to travel a third of the way around the world? It wasn’t close to enough.

Still, piece by piece, hop by hop, the mail system did work, getting the letter to its destination nearly four years after it was postmarked.

Nowhere close to the record for longest delivery. That record belonged to a letter in a watertight safe that had sunk on a ship, retrieved 200 years after sinking. Once it arrived in Sangino, with a single coin attached for delivery to the door in question, the street runners practically fought over who’d get to deliver it.

The address was well-known for its generous tips. A fact, if known to the couriers halfway across the world, would’ve gotten the letter delivered much more quickly.

"All rise for her majesty, the Golden Lioness, Queen Aimee Morgans the Fourth!"

The dukes and duchesses of Rolland stood attention in the chamber off to the throne room as Queen Aimee swept into the room, in the appropriate ceremonial dress for the occasion, the golden lion stitched huge. A rare sight, compared to the usual armor she was known to wear.

It wasn’t just the highest levels of nobility in the Crown’s discussion chamber - her most trusted advisor, the hand, was present, along with the treasurer, and a number of other high ranking members of the court.

The queen glided to her seat and sat down, everyone else continuing to stand by their chairs.

"We permit you all to sit." She declared after a moment, and seats were taken. "We would like to thank you all for attending this year’s tournament, and for bringing matters of the realm for us to discuss. Duke Ector Connors. I believe you mentioned you had an urgent item?"

The duke made a fist so tight his fingernails turned white. He snarled.

"The Han empire’s civil war continues to spill over our borders. We…"

On and on the conversation went, matters of the realm discussed before the council of the highest peers.

"Duchess Marie Argent." The queen called.

She shared a look with Duke Montalembert, who gave her a small nod.

"The Valkyrie Order." She said. "They are simply unable to hold their land. They are unable to protect their serfs. It is causing unrest. It is breeding monsters, who then lash out at my vassals. They simply do not have the forces needed to support and sustain the area they cover. Famous or not, their sparkling reputation no longer matches the reality of the situation. They are not one of us. I move that they be declared Outlaws, such that their holdings and wealth can be used to properly recompense those of us who have suffered, and proper management over their territories can resume."

That sparked an argument, an old one. One that had been discussed many times in drawing rooms and dance floors, but never brought as a petition before the Queen.

The Queen sat back as her nobles argued. And oh, what flowery arguments they made. Fundamentally, it came down to wealth and power. The Argent and Montalembert families would be enriched, and become more powerful if the Valkyries were outlawed, and argued as such that they should. The Watsons, Barnetts, and Connors argued against it, not because they believed they were right, but because it would empower a rival.

Such was the petty politics of the kingdom.

Queen Aimee needed to walk a fine line, balancing the various powers among each other. As lands and powers went, she could simply be considered a duchess with a slightly larger holding, and had nothing close to absolute power. She needed to balance the various desires of her nominal vassals, such that they would continue to listen to her. Continue to keep her in power.

Speaking of power. Outlawing the Valkyries would gain her nothing, but make it look like she was weak, the other duchies able to simply seize power and give her nothing in return. There was a type of power in that, in people petitioning her for the solution, but down that path entirely ended… poorly.

After all. The royal name being Morgans was a relatively new - only 300 years old - development, and everyone here knew it.

Siding with Argent and Montalembert would annoy Watsons, Barnett, and Connor, but it wasn’t that simple. Fundamentally, they were correct in that the Valkyries, who were nominal vassals of the throne but only just, weren’t pulling their weight. Agreeing to their demands in full would enrich them too much. But the status quo wouldn’t be allowed to stand.

Naturally, they knew this, and had asked for far more than would ever be granted, letting the Queen demonstrate the ability to restrain them, in exchange for them getting what they actually wanted.

Politics. A delicate dance that everyone here knew how to play, a game that the members of the table loved to play.

As the Queen started to softly speak, everyone else immediately shut up, Duke Ector cutting off a word mid-shout.

"The Valkyries were reduced in number performing their service most admirably." She said. "And there is not a single person here who denies it. Their history is long and storied, and nothing can come out of declaring them Outlaw. We do not wish to paint Sigrun into a corner where bloodshed is her only option. Indeed, we believe a celebration in their honor is due! Their current lands and holdings are undeniably unprotected, and they have stubbornly clung to holding them. We can not permit this, and we shall reassign their lands to lords more capable of holding them. The Valkyries are permitted to remain in Rolland, and will continue to enjoy all the protections and privileges awarded to them."

Unsaid was that without a tax base, a land base, they’d have no money, and wandering knights didn’t make nearly enough to cover their expenses, especially for a full organization like the Valkyries.

Even if they were permitted to keep holding Castle Valkyrie and the attached town, it might be barely enough for the reduced size of the organization, forever strangled and unable to grow more.

In essence, they were very politely being shown the door, and in a manner they couldn’t even complain too harshly about.

Naturally, they could join the retinue of any current lord or lady of Pallos… fully trained, fully equipped, high level knights were difficult to acquire, and there would be a number of open arms.

"We do not wish for a repeat of the Valkyries, however, and overtax the poor counts and barons who live nearby by suddenly doubling the size of their holdings, without the appropriate manpower to protect the lands. We believe that will have us here again in a few years, discussing which poor lord or lady should have their lands stripped once again."

There were delighted looks on the pro-Valkyrie faction’s faces, while the duke and duchess who wanted them gone looked like they’d eaten a lemon. They knew what was coming next.

"There is ever a shortage of lands for promising young lords and ladies who wish to hold their own. We request that each of you submit a few candidates for baron, along with proposed holdings that the Valkyries currently protect."

The Queen, naturally, had a number of retainers who could be brought tighter to her with the promise of land. Oh, by the numbers, the distribution would be fair.

But the richest parts?

All but one would go to those would go to those loyal to the Queen. The crown jewel of the Valkyrie holdings, however, would go to the Montalemberts. It would mollify them, let them believe it was recompense for handling the fallout of the Valkyrie’s territory becoming unmanaged. Naturally, there was a knife in the offering. They were getting too powerful, and such blatant favoritism would cause the others to scheme against them, instead of the Queen’s loyal retainers who would be able to quietly grow richer.

The witch in white robes sat in her garden, smelling the ever-blooming flowers.

It was a place of peace. Of calm meditation. A place where she could sink in for a few minutes, or a few years, and simply… enjoy the easy beauty of nature.

Work called though, and the witch got up, the pollen falling off her clothes. The flowers regrowing where she’d sat, springing back like she’d never been there.

The white-haired lady walked over to where the latest graduation reports lay, a list of everyone the School could claim was an alumni. She liked to keep tabs, know who was going through the School she helped direct. The knowledge was occasionally useful.

Flora of Arminium scanned the lists, freezing at a name.

At the place.

Elaine of Remus.

Jaclyn walked into work, and began her usual morning curses.

Silently. No need to let others know her true thoughts.

When she had accepted the offer for Immortality, the conniving vampire had left out one critical detail.

Immortality meant retirement was impossible.

Mortals could retire. They could read the writing on the wall, and know they were going to die soon. There was a whole structure in place to allow them to gracefully age, supported by their family, then die. It only worked because they died.

Immortals couldn’t. One day they’d run out of money, and be forced back to work. Jaclyn had tried at one point. Scrimped and saved and managed to take off a whole century, doing nothing but relaxing and enjoying herself.

Then her money ran out, and she was forced to work once again. This time, in a much less prestigious, much lower paying position. She’d needed to work her way up the ladder once again. Difficult when half her superiors were vampires, and as disinclined towards retirement or leaving their jobs as she was.

Jaclyn had worked her way back up to the highest position that didn’t include mandatory retirement every 40 years - to prevent stagnation at the highest levels, and stop power structures from crystallizing - and stayed there.

Which meant paperwork. Reams of paperwork, every day. It was her job, and she’d even taken [Paper Pusher] as her third class. The worst part was, with literal millennia of experience doing it, she was good at it. Exceptionally competent, as Night would put it. Which meant trying to cross train out of it into something new, while keeping her standard of living was hard. Not impossible, but the barriers were high enough, and the work to pay ratio generous enough, that Jaclyn simply… stayed.

She sat down at her desk as the sun rose, its System-denying rays blocked by the thick clouds of ash the mages kept perpetually shadowing the capital, and started to work through the newest pile of paperwork. Requests for funding. Forms that required approval.

Mentions of Rangers lost, and who city team leaders believed they could use to replace them.

It was a bad month. This was the second mention of a lost Ranger out of the thousands in the Exterreri Empire, and Jaclyn cleaned up the request, filled out the appropriate form, and put it in her "out" tray to deliver to the correct person later.

A wrinkled, weather-beaten letter waited for her at the bottom of the pile. She opened it like all the rest, the years jading her response to the words inside.

To Command,

I have encountered a human individual, using the name Elaine, who has claimed to be a Sentinel. She speaks the vampire tongue, and is preparing to be admitted to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft.

The evidence she provided of being a Sentinel was entirely incorrect, and she gave the title Dawn. I believe that she originally grew up in Exterreri, possibly as the daughter of a servant of a high-ranking citizen, and acquired the tongue simply by constantly hearing it as she grew up. She then fled to Rolland, hoping to lose herself in the crush of humans present, and lean on the reputation of the Sentinels for her own personal gain.

I do not dare presume to suggest what Command does.

Sincerely,

Vitus of Minervia

Jaclyn thought back to an Elaine she had known. A fierce and proud gladiator, a peerless fighter and warrior she had loved. Jaclyn had convinced the powers that be to Turn her, but she didn’t survive the early years, having picked a fight before she’d known deep in her bones that the sun stripped everything away.

She shook her head at the memory from when she’d been a young, 700ish year old vampire, and processed the request. A request that technically would need Command to approve, but in practice would be followed. They usually listened to the [Head Clerk] who’d been on the job for centuries, while they were limited. There was no Sentinel Dawn, the title not having been used in almost a thousand years.

Generally, titles were retired until everyone who’d known the last Sentinel with that title was gone.

Type: Impersonator

Location: School of Sorcery and Spellcraft

Recommendation: Deploy the roving Ranger team. Attempt to bring back alive for public trial and execution.

Thank you all! Please read!

Hello everyone! After months of blood, toil, tears, and sweat, I'm pleased to have delivered the eighth installment of Beneath the Dragoneye Moons to all of you! I am so grateful to all of you for making this possible.

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