Ebony's Fable

Ebony learnt about his classmate’s situation. It felt like something from a novel he used to read.

About a decade after the establishment of Tidal Academy, the Capital stabilised since its construction was mostly complete and the Royals tried to centralise education and maintain certain standards to an extent. It wasn’t possible.

There were too many people.

So to promote growth, they obviously used competition.

He didn’t think it would be any of these children’s concerns but there was a category for Academies with students under ten. There was also one from ten to fifteen or any unclassed above fifteen years old.

The competitions ran over the entire year. Tidal Academy would put up a bracket and each Academy was sent letters to tell them who their next opponent was. This was if the Academy registered with Tidal Academy.

Piercing Tempest Academy was one of them since it was considered a multi-generation school.

The whole competition situation was none of Ebony’s business. Even if there was a category for Grandmasters, he was not interested as of yet. He had better things to do and spend his time with.

Their next opponents were the Arcane Warriors.

Sadly for their Academy, they rose the ranks quite a bit. It meant they wouldn’t only be matched up with other mage schools. The Journeymen and Masters were better off, but pitting mage children against warrior children was just asking to be beaten. It was a trend that everyone knew but could do nothing about.

As for the specific scuffle, it was just plain old bullying on the opponent’s side. The girl they knew nothing about was a well-known bully in the neighbourhood or perhaps in the district. Ebony wondered where these kids were getting rumours from.

Their opponent was the Arcane Warriors. Ebony was somewhat surprised but also nodded in understanding when he recalled their opponents using momentary flashes of body enhancement magic. As a side note for himself, the Arcane Warrior Academy seemed to be one of the top ten Academies for warriors and the top thirty among all registered Academies.

While his old militia captain’s Bludgeon Academy wasn’t very well known as his classmates never heard of it.

“You have to learn how to stand up for yourself. There won’t always be a big bro around to protect you or abide by your wishes.”

“It’s fine if you don’t want to help us, you don’t have to give us the adult talk.”

Ebony could hear mr Targot’s bragging to the other teachers about the kids thanking him for his teachings outside the corridor. Miss Raika chipped in and poured water on his enthusiasm when she said she got the same appreciation from the children who came to class early.

They were confused at the sudden appreciation but didn’t seem to know about the bullying. However, they were not stupid and could tell that their students got injuries, even if they were mostly hidden.

But just like Ebony, going to beat up other schools’ unclassed students wasn’t exactly a sensible or respectable course of action. They were discussing the topic in the corridor in whispers.

“Th-thank you for teaching us the ball tip.” Umar bit his tongue when he finally spoke up.

That got his classmates to bite back their disappointment when he told them he wasn’t going to help them.

“So what are you going to do next?” He asked them.

“What else, we’ll have to avoid going out to play.” Tristan shrugged his shoulders.

“Prepare ourselves from getting beaten and embarrassed in front of our families next month…” Tia whispered.

The rest of his classmates who came early, some of whom weren't present during the scuffle looked like they were about to cry.

“Throwing in the towel without a fight?” Ebony might not have been this shocked before. Even a berg mammoth about to step on him might not shock him as much.

“We can’t beat those brutes big bro, you should’ve seen how fierce that girl, Cerise, was.”

The red-haired girl that beat them up was a child of a Viscount’s family. It wasn’t rare for nobles to attend other Academies since they might only pass down certain lineages and their descendants could still choose their Sub-Class and/or Profession. Studying their family's skills at home and then learning from an Academy during the day was quite common.

Tidal didn’t accept every Noble without regard either, so he could only assume the girl failed to enter or simply chose the Arcane Warrior skill set over whatever Tidal Academy taught. After hearing how Tidal Academy was at the top in every category except a few odd schools of magic, he had a feeling it was the first reason and she simply failed to meet the mark.

“You can start training and get stronger.”

“There’s no way we can beat her in less than a month.”

“Didn’t you say you suddenly fought back well when you all mass hallucinated and recalled your instructors’ voices.”

‘Oops…’ Ebony slipped up.

“What’s mash hootenation?” Faelk blinked twice and asked. Ebony noticed the same question on all the children’s faces and was relieved that he didn’t have to explain himself.

“Back to the topic, you managed to fend them off once in a few minutes of epiphany. A few weeks of dedicated effort should be enough to stand a fighting chance.”

They stayed quiet this time, probably completely ignoring the words that none of them understood.

“Teach us big bro! You’re strong right? Miss Raika said you’re a grandmaster and you can do all those fancy tricks.”

“Huh?” Ebony was assuming they would direct this question to their actual instructors after his advice. He did not expect them to ask him. He even used their instructors’ voices to guide them when they were getting bullied.

“Why don’t you ask Miss Raika or Mr Targot?”

“We can’t tell them we got beaten by our opponent academy before the ranking battles even begin!” Bilal yelled out.

“The instructors are busy with our senior’s training…” Esme whispered considerately.

It seemed obvious that the school was placing more of their hopes for ranking on the Journeymen and Masters competition. Even Raika and Targot were a participant as a student of this Academy. They had their own training to do and their results were technically far more important for the general public compared to some children play fighting’s rank.

The Piercing Tempest’s overall rank seemed to be top eighty. He would have to search for the ranking list to find out how good that is relative to all registered Academies since his classmates were not well-informed enough to tell him.

“Please big bro, you got to teach us more of these tips!”

“We only managed to hit them back thanks to how easy it was to maintain a ball of lightning thanks to you big bro! Helping us beat them up is cheating but surely teaching us is not.” Fabian exclaimed as if he found out why he wasn’t willing to help them. The naive child was not too far off the mark.

“You got to train us big brother.” Yusqly who had her hair braided up tightly instead of letting it hang loose tugged his sleeves.

“Train? Are you sure?” The magic word perked him up. At this point, he couldn’t reject his classmates, could he?

He was running through thousands of training simulations for his classmates when they were cheering after a momentary silence. He even ignored the two giggling instructors outside the classroom who heard the commotion and didn’t step in to save him from the predicament.

❅❅❅

Umar, with an injured back, listened to his friends bugging their largest and newest addition to the class. Unlike most of his classmates, he was already capable of manipulating lightning mana to some degree.

The large classmate’s tips did help as a form of practice but he didn’t put that much importance in it since he could directly gather lightning mana on his wand. Forming a sphere of mana and trapping lightning mana instead of forcing it to his bidding did help increase the amount of lightning mana he could keep contained temporarily.

Hence, he was rather optimistic about asking for his newest classmate’s help. With both parents as mages, he was absolutely stunned by his newest classmate’s magic performance. How could one control so many little dolls each with their individual movements all at the same time?

Barrage spells could allow one to maintain many separate casts but they do not have flexibility or accurate control over each individual projectile. The feat of moving dozens upon dozens of sculptures that all had different motions at the same time was mind-boggling.

His parents didn’t even believe him when he told them. They thought he was exaggerating and showed him they could create dozens of tiny lightning dolls but when one moved its feet, all would follow the same action. Making three dolls move differently was their limit and from the fourth, the dolls would move awkwardly and stiffly.

Although it was harder to stabilise lightning and give it shape a difference of dozens upon dozens of dolls was huge. Not to mention that none of his old classmate’s dolls had any stiff movements. He hasn’t even gotten to the wave of hand that transformed all of them into flowers in an instant. An instant! Without a staff or wand!?

Umar was a magic lover and he believed what his eyes saw. After all, he managed to land a hit with enough lightning mana on Cerise. He secretly thought the girl only bullied them because Yusqly was cuter than her but that was his opinion.

It wasn’t the first time they’d met and gotten beaten up. Probably every single one of his classmates had a bad run-in with Cerise and her underlings. Umar didn’t believe it when Ebony didn’t know that the Arcane Warrior Academy was in the same district.

After all, when they told him the address he went ‘Oh that academy is the arcane warrior’s academy.’

The way he acted stupid was almost insulting but Umar kept that to himself.

His classmates tried to get more tips and tricks from Ebony who was reluctant.

That was until some idiot, he suddenly forgot who despite hearing the voice just moments ago muttered the word ‘train’.

Umar didn’t understand why he felt the whole room become silent when it was so noisy. It was only a split second but he was sure every one of his classmates that came early felt the same eerie silence.

Tia fell down on her butt, and he could feel his knees lose strength despite sitting down.

‘Why am I shaking?’

Then, his classmates cheered when their eldest classmate agreed to help them. Umar snapped out of it and looked around but all his friends except Yusqly and Faelk were too excited at the chance to play. He wondered how many of them were serious about this.

Yusqly, Faelk and he looked around and finally made eye contact with each other. They were scared.

‘I have a bad feeling…oww, my stomach hurts. Bathroom…urg, my back.’ Umar put his head on his desk in pain.

Ebony seemed to be in his own world nodding at his friends’ excitement from time to time without paying attention. The others who came in later quickly joined in and the word spread that Ebony said he would train them. All those who were enamoured by his performance quickly jumped onto the chance and he was in too much pain to warn them of his gut feeling.

To be fair, he was a little afraid they would think he was trying to get ahead of them even more. He was not the most well-liked as the top student. He was already glad he managed to fit in a group before he was ostracised and didn’t want to make himself a target.

The hub of excitement and talks about zapping their opponents like how their seniors did continue until Miss Raika walked in to take them out for their practical lessons.

Umar was re-energized, practical lessons were all their favourites. He was even more happy because he secretly thought that his mana was regenerating faster than it used to. The tiny growth excited him as it meant he could play with lightning mana more.

Ever since the term started, it felt like he could focus better and gathering and controlling mana felt slightly easier.

However, the lesson today had him on edge. He kept feeling an eye on him throughout the lesson. Looking into the classroom, he could see Ebony with the usual blank look on his face. His eyes which were darker than the winter moon were piercing right into…all of them at the same time. Umar could feel the focus on him, but he also felt like the focus was on all of them.

Umar shuddered in the middle of practice and his wand’s stream of lightning connecting him to the metal ball in the centre of the field sparked. The spark almost redirected onto his face before the stream of lightning hit him in the face. Of course, he didn’t even know he was about to get hit until after the fact.

“Umar! Are you okay?” Miss Raika ran up to him. Even she was not as fast as lightning, it was the field’s defensive magic circle that protected him.

It honestly wasn’t a big issue, he zapped himself multiple times before. The amount of lighting mana they could control couldn’t hurt themselves. Hence, it took a lot of time before he gathered enough to hurt their bullies.

Befuddled, Umar didn’t hear his instructor.

He could only focus on the one watching them from their classroom. The moment Miss Raika shouted and ran to him, Umar felt Ebony’s focus intensify on him.

At the age of 8, Umar pissed himself and fainted.

❅❅❅

‘Perfect timing, I can see how targeted lightning mage training goes.’ Ebony listened to the briefing and stayed in class while the children ran out to the field.

He would adjust what he thought was best for them if what they wanted was how to fight with their greatest strengths.

He quickly set out some goals, it needed to be a short, intense and directed training. Only meant for physically weak young children against strong, well-trained children. It was not too difficult, he had been brought up under the impression that he was physically weak and was trained to go against stronger opponents without losing out.

This might as well be his speciality.

He looked at them carefully while running thousands of simulations in his head. Changed them for each classmate who expressed interest in getting stronger. Or at least, in beating their competition.

Gauging wasn’t enough so he ran Calculated Hunch on every individual’s physical capabilities along with their mana capacities, mana gathering speed, and mana movement flexibility. The information on physical capabilities was rather little as they didn’t do any physical exercise but it honestly wasn’t hard to guess since he saw some of them ‘fight’ already.

He was in a state of half trance, simulating mental battles for the unclassed was rather easy.

‘Oh, his concentration slipped. Did he feel how intensely I was looking at them?’ Ebony saw the spark of lightning from Umar’s wand going haywire after he suddenly turned to face his direction.

The sudden change in focus made him run all his mental simulations for Umar alone instead of over twenty students.

‘Huh? Did he just faint?’ Ebony put the mental simulations to the back of his mind.

Raika started to panic even more when one of her students fainted for no reason.

“It’s okay, he just fainted. I’ll watch over him.” Ebony stepped over the window still and carried Umar to the side of the field.

‘He peed himself. Why?’ Genuinely confused, Ebony's head started to spin.

‘Oh…this is my fault isn’t it.’ Ebony suddenly came to a possible reason but he waited for Umar to wake up before he came to any hasty conclusion. From the boy’s heartbeat and breathing, there shouldn’t be any urgent health issues. The Academy didn’t cancel out Tidal’s healing either so it was rather convenient.

Ten minutes later, Umar’s eyelids shook. He opened his eyes and blinked thrice, “WAAH!” The boy sat up and scrambled away in fear.

‘Okay, probably my fault.’ Ebony’s weird Pseudo-Imitation Roar had a passive effect, ‘Existential suppression is passively 5% more likely to cause mental trauma to anyone who stands before you.’

Although it was only a moment of shock from the boy, Ebony had a strong feeling it was his fault. There was no other plausible reason he could come up with from the information and situation at hand.

‘I’m pretty sure I sent all the excess vitality and mana into the ground. Is he that sensitive or is this beyond my control?’ Ebony needed to observe Umar for a longer period to confirm. Now he wasn’t even sure if he should send his mana to calm the boy down.

His mental simulations of thousands of training sessions running concurrently stopped at this point since it was the first time he observed this passive effect taking place. He was extremely interested to prove that this was the effect in question at this moment in time.

Ebony’s interest was diverted instantly as the moment his training simulations stopped, Umar’s shaking died down.

“Fascinating.” He muttered while staring closer to observe the boy’s condition.

Umar fainted once more.

“Uh oh.” Now he felt bad.