What We Do to Survive

“Cold!” barked Professor Shrike, brandishing the long staff he was holding in front of him.

Weavingroot, the current student being assessed, jumped to comply. He was a tall, slim elf, one of the few left in our year, with long silver-white hair streaked with dark green lines. Strands of mana sluggishly formed the outline of what I recognized as a simple cold wave spell, one of the first we’d learned this year months ago at the start of the semester.

Then he flooded the spell matrix with an absolutely unnecessary amount of mana, nearly causing the entire thing to collapse before he could finish the spell. Still, he did manage to salvage things and a moment later a massive blast of arctic winds rushed towards our Professor. The wave of cold was so intense that the moisture in the air flash froze, leaving patches of frost on the room’s sandy floor and specs of snow-like frost floating in the air.

Professor Shrike met the spell with a slash of his staff, and the icy winds vanished as though they had never existed in the first place. A number of runes along the length of the staff flared like miniature stars, far brighter than anyone else had managed so far, and Professor Shrike hummed thoughtfully as he stared at them.

The elf smiled arrogantly, clearly pleased with his performance. The staff was a rather famous artifact created by a long-dead alum that he had gifted to the Academy after his death. In life, it had made him a terrifying battlemage, able to absorb almost any spell under sixth-circle with barely any effort from the wielder. Now, it had been repurposed into a teaching tool, the many gauges along its length used to assess the power of student’s spells.

I wrinkled my nose in distaste. I really hoped that Professor Shrike wasn’t grading us solely on the amount of mana we could put into a spell. The stupid elf clearly hadn’t learned the spell properly, simply brute forcing his way through it with his naturally massive mana reserves.

Though I’d barely ever interacted with him myself, I’d heard nothing good about the silver-haired elf. He was said to be something of a layabout and a whoremonger, like the worst of the useless nobles that was planning to bail after their fourth year, but even worse since his innate abilities meant Avalon’s first few years were not nearly as challenging for him as they were for many others.

I’d also heard from Camille that he apparently had a thing for poor human women. He frequented the lowest sort of brothels in every city we visited and had propositioned several of the most vulnerable scholarship students during our first year. I had no real evidence to suggest that he was the one behind a number of their disappearances, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if he was.

Perhaps Weavingroot wasn’t quite as much of a wastrel as Mistletoe had been, but it still made me seeth inside to see someone squandering their potential the way he was. He was consistently average among our year, not exceptional, but not a pushover either.

There had been a very public fight at the tail end of our second year where he was ambushed by a third year and absolutely massacred her and one of her companions who jumped in half way through the fight. Though I hadn’t seen the fight first hand, I’d viewed a partial memory of it and his spellcasting had been slow and decidedly subpar, with his elven speed and magic resistance saving his life a dozen times in the span of less than a minute. Had his ambushers been properly prepared, he never would have stood a chance.

“Now, fire!” Professor Shrike called out loudly. Once again, Weavingroot slowly formed an appropriate spell matrix, then flooded with almost enough mana to cast a fifth-circle spell, much less a third circle flamethrower like the one he was using. A billowing torrent of orange fire filled the air between them, the flames seeming to pour out of his hands and flood directly into the staff.

After nearly thirty seconds, the spell finally cut out, only the noticeable bump in the room’s air temperature left to show that it had ever been there at all. Professor Shrike spent several seconds studying the runes on his staff, then gestured vaguely towards the clipboard and fountain pen floating behind him. The pen flew across the paper, seeming to make a number of notes but leaving the page completely unmarked. Either Professor Shrike had forgotten to put ink in his pen, or this was a way of stopping people from peeking at their grades. Probably the latter.

“Good. Mr. Weavingroot, you’re free to go.” He turned towards where the rest of us were standing in a loose clump at the edge of the training hall and his eyes panned across the group until they met mine. “Come on up, Mr. Hunter. You can be next.”

The elf dipped his head towards our Professor, then spun around and marched out of the room. “Good luck, Orion!” Brenda whispered loudly, then leaned in and pecked me on the cheek. “You’re going to do great!”

“Thanks Brenda,” I whispered back, then hurried over to the spot Weavingroot had just vacated. My breathing was slow and even, my mana core spinning gently at the center of my chest and my circulations thrumming under my skin. I wasn’t in perfect form, but it would be enough for this. It would have to be.

The structure of the practical portion of Professor Shrike’s exam was very simple. He would call out the name of a spell-form and you had to perform an evocation spell that used that spell-form as its primary component. He’d given us a list of the spell-forms he would be testing us on several weeks ago and I was confident I could at least cast something for each of them, even if some would definitely be more optimal than others. He hadn’t given us a specific rubric, but I assumed that we would be graded on speed, casting precision, power, and spell complexity just like we had been in Evocation Fundamentals One and Two.

“Ready?” Professor Shrike asked. I nodded. “Good. Force!”

I almost grinned. That was about as good a start as I could get. A few months ago I would have hesitated to show something like this off in front of an audience, preferring to save it in case I was ever in trouble, but after my unfortunately public fight against Kwesta and the outsider ritual, using it as both a deterrent and to get a good grade was probably more valuable.

Mana poured out of my fingers and I smoothly shaped it into the outline of my most practiced spells. Then, with a force of will that made my mana core twinge unpleasantly, I twisted the entire structure, warping my mana into the mind-bending state required to emulate higher-dimensional segments of spell-forms.

A moment later, my fourth-circle force lance blasted towards Professor Shrike, a nearly invisible pale line surrounded in an expanding shockwave as the coin-sized tip shattered the sound barrier. I winced slightly at the mana cost, my core was dense enough and my reserves sufficiently large to cast a fourth circle spell safely, but only barely and that one spell took a not-inconsiderable amount of mana. Thankfully, the exam was only going to be three spells, but I was probably going to need to sit down and rest for a bit before leaving the room.

Despite the spell’s immense speed, crossing the distance between us in the blink of an eye, Professor Shrike still almost negligently caught my force lance on the tip of his staff, his body moving before I had even finished casting. He nodded slowly, his fingers tapping out an irregular rhythm against the dark wood of the staff. “Impressive. How about… heat next.”

Oh, this was shaping up to be a very good performance. Working with Briella on her spellcasting had given me a lot of recent experience with fire and heat spells and there was one spell in particular that I quite liked and was very familiar with.

A very similar spell matrix as I had used previously formed in front of me, only with the force component replaced by a section of the heat spellform and a few other minor modifications. I didn’t attempt to cast the fourth-circle version this time, I didn’t really have that much mana to spare right now and I had never actually learned a more powerful variation of this spell yet.

Instead, I focused on speed. Only a few seconds after he had told me what spell-form I should be demonstrating, a hazy ray of scorching heat lanced towards him, visible only from the heat distortion it left in the air. The heat ray moved slower than my force lance had, but only slightly and without a keen mana sense it was nearly imperceptible until it hit something.

Once again, Professor Shrike caught the ray on the tip of his staff. “Good. Perhaps something a little different now, hmm…” he hummed. Almost as an afterthought, he twirled his staff and sent a gentle wave of refreshingly cool air washing out through the room, bringing things back to a more pleasant temperature. “Let’s see… earth.”

That was slightly inconvenient, it was one of the spell-forms we’d covered in his class that I had focused on the least. Spells that used the earth spell-form tended to be rather clunky and large-scale in my experience, and they didn’t really work very well in most of Avalon since the walls and floors of the Academy were made of heavily enchanted and magic resistant stone.

For the other typical uses of such spells––terrain alterations, erecting barriers, and similar earth-shaping effects––I much preferred to use transmutation instead. Between all-material and all-form, you could do basically everything that you could accomplish with earth-based magic except with considerably more finesse.

Still, that didn’t mean I didn’t know any such spells, simply that I didn’t really use or practice them very much. I mentally ran through a short list, then decided on the one that was least similar to my previous two spells. He had said he wanted something a little different, and this would hopefully do a better job of displaying the breadth of my abilities.

I carefully shaped the mana for my next spell, working slowly but making sure that every single line, twist, and curl was exactly right. Messing a spell like this up tended to be very lethal and very messy. It took me nearly half a minute, but when I finished casting I dropped soundlessly into the ground, the earth parting around me like water as I vanished from view.

Continuing to channel more mana into the spell that now surrounded me I walked slowly through the ground. It felt somewhat like swimming through honey, the hard-packed dirt parting around me but only when I focused on moving that specific part of my body.

I couldn’t really see anything, but my mana sense was not at all affected by a few inches of dirt above my head and so I could still clearly feel where everyone was. I stopped when I had crossed about half the distance between Professor Shrike and I, then lifted my hands up and brought them forcefully down at my sides while focusing on where I wanted to go.

I shot out of the ground like a dolphin diving out of the ocean, rising several feet up above the ground. Then I let the spell disperse and landed in a low crouch. I took a long, deep breath, enjoying the feeling of cool air rushing into my lungs. I could easily go the twenty-or-so seconds I had spent underground without breathing, but it still wasn’t particularly pleasant.

“An unusual choice, but well executed,” Professor Shrike told me quietly. “Well done on the fourth-circle force lance. I’ll make sure to mark you down as having completed the year-end requirements.” His pen flashed across a new line on his clipboard, then returned to where it had been floating while I was demonstrating spells. Raising his voice, he loudly called out, “Good. Mr. Hunter, you’re free to go. Mr. Floris, you’re up!”

I bowed my head politely. “Thank you, Professor.”

He grunted at me and I made my way back to where Brenda was waiting for me. The moment I was close enough, she grabbed me in a tight hug and stood up on the tips of her toes to kiss my cheek. “That was amazing, Orion!” She kissed me again, the feeling of her painted lips like sandpaper against my cheek. “I didn’t know you’d managed a fourth-circle spell already! We don’t need to be able to do that for almost six more months and you’ve already got it down!”

Of course I hadn’t told her. If I had, half the Academy would have known by the end of the day and this felt like it was a much better way of revealing it. Still, something told me that Brenda wouldn’t like that answer. No, there was a much better way of phrasing things.

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and pulling her up against my chest. “Did you like it?”

Brenda grinned. “It was so cool! Like, boom! Vwoosh! Can you do any others?”

“A few, I can show you some other time.” I leaned in and gently brushed my lips against her forehead, “Not in front of such an audience, okay darling?” I felt almost dirty just saying it, but it was necessary. Whether I liked it or not, Brenda was a task that required constant tending.

Brenda blushed. “Okay Orion.”

“Now, it's almost your turn. Are you ready?”

“I think so. I practiced really hard this weekend, just like you said I should.”

“Very good dear, I’m sure you’ll do great. I’ll be right here cheering you on.” I kissed the top of her head. That at least wasn’t caked in the layers of cosmetics she always wore for some reason. I was going to need to wash my mouth and lips with soap after this, but the rosy blush visible through her makeup and the way she slumped against my chest told me I was on the right track.

Maybe I could make some time to visit Lea again tonight. Yesterday, she’d ended up falling asleep after we’d spent half an hour talking and cuddling on Miranda’s bed, but there were still a few things I wanted to talk to her about. I still needed to figure out a more permanent solution to her living arrangements and I wanted her to step up her magic practice. At the moment, Lea was basically defenseless, and that wasn’t something I could tolerate in the long term. It was a lot to worry about, but spending time with Lea always made me feel better. She was my… best friend. She was worth it.