Mother of Learning: ARC 1

6

The large number of rats clustered at the bottom of the staircase he was approaching, on the other hand, was far less inspiring. They seemed to notice his approach, their many eyes tracking him, unnaturally focused and coordinated. He froze in his tracks, his horror at the sight rapidly rising. Their behavior was strange enough, but his heartbeat really sped up when he took notice of their heads. Was that… were their brains exposed!? He swallowed heavily and took a step back, slowly retreating from the stairwell before turning around and fleeing in a full sprint. He wasn’t sure what they were, but those were definitely not normal rats.

He supposed he shouldn’t be so shocked, though. A place like Cyoria attracted more than mages. Magical creatures of all breeds found such places just as irresistible. He was just glad the rats didn’t pursue him, because he had nothing in the way of combat spells. The only spell he knew that could be used in a situation like this was the ‘spook animals’ spell, and he had no idea how effective that would have been against such clearly magical creatures.

Somewhat shaken but still determined to get to the fountain, he tried to circle the rat gathering by going through the nearby park, but luck just wasn’t on his side today. The moment he approached one of the small bridges he had to cross to get through the park, his thoughts were interrupted by an unmistakable wail. Someone was crying on the bridge, loudly, and Zorian’s rich experience with Kirielle told him it was probably a little girl.

Sure enough, as he stepped onto the bridge in front of him, he found a small black-haired girl crying her eyes out and blocking the path. Zorian stopped for a second to observe the situation and, finding no obvious reason for her distress, slowly walked over to see what the problem was.

He supposed he could have just pushed past her and left her there to cry, but not even he was that cold-hearted.

The girl didn’t withdraw at his careful approach, so Zorian simply crouched down next to her and tried to get her attention by softly greeting her. That… didn’t work too well. She just kept crying, ignoring his words. He spoke louder, asking her what was wrong. That did produce a response, but her attempts at speaking were so distorted by her crying and gasping for air that Zorian failed to understand a word she said.

In the end, it took him five full minutes just to get her to calm down enough to explain what had happened. There was probably a better way to calm down a crying child than calmly repeating that he couldn’t help her until she told him what was wrong, but Zorian decided to play things safe. Poking her in the ribs a few times and telling her to stop being such a crybaby worked on Kirielle, but he felt it was a risky maneuver to pull on an unknown child he only just met.

“T-the b-bike!” she finally blurted out between hiccups. “It f-fell in!” she wailed.

Zorian blinked, trying to interpret this. Apparently realizing she wasn’t making any sense, the girl pointed towards the creek running underneath the bridge. Zorian looked over the edge of the bridge and, sure enough, there was a children’s bicycle half-submerged in the muddy waters.

“Huh,” Zorian said. “Wonder how that happened?”

“It fell in!” the girl repeated, looking as if she was going to cry again.

“All right, all right, no need for waterworks. I’ll get it out, okay?” Zorian said, eying the bicycle speculatively.

“You’ll get dirty,” she warned quietly. Zorian could tell from her tone of voice that she hoped he would get it out anyway.

“Don’t worry, I have no intention of wading through that mud,” Zorian said. “Watch.”

He made a few gestures and cast a ‘levitate object’ spell, causing the bike to jerkily rise out of the water and into the air. The bike was a lot heavier than the objects with which he usually practiced, and he had to levitate the bike a lot higher than he was used to, but it was nothing outside his capabilities. He snatched the bike by its seat when it was close enough and placed it on the bridge.

“There,” Zorian said. “It’s all muddy and wet but I can’t help you there. Don’t know any cleaning spells.”

“O-Okay,” she nodded slowly, clutching her bicycle like it was going to fly out of her hand the moment she let go.

He bid her goodbye and left, deciding his relaxing time at the fountain just wasn’t meant to be. The weather seemed to be worsening pretty quickly, too—dark clouds were brewing ominously across the horizon, heralding rain. He decided to simply join the diffuse line of students trudging towards the academy and be done with it.

It was a long way from the train station to the academy, since the station was on the outskirts of the city and the academy was right next to the Hole. Depending on how physically fit you were, and how much luggage you had to drag around, you could get there in an hour or two. Zorian wasn’t particularly fit, what with his skinny physique and shut-in ways, but he had purposely packed light in anticipation of this journey. He joined the procession of students that was still streaming from the train station in the direction of the academy, ignoring the occasional first-year struggling with excessive baggage. He empathized with them because his asshole brothers hadn’t warned him to keep the luggage at a minimum either, meaning he had been just like them the first time he arrived at the train station, but there was nothing he could do to help them.

The threat of rain and bad luck aside, he felt invigorated as he drew closer to academy grounds. He was drawing on the ambient mana suffusing the area around the Hole, replenishing the mana reserves he spent levitating that girl’s bicycle. Mage academies are almost always built on top of mana wells for the express purpose of exploiting this effect. An area with such high ambient mana levels is a perfect place for inexperienced mages to practice their spellcasting. Anytime they run out of mana, they can supplement their natural mana regeneration by replenishing their mana reserves from their very surroundings.

Zorian took out the apple he still carried in his pocket and levitated it over his palm. It wasn’t really a spell, so much as raw mana manipulation—a mana shaping exercise that was supposed to help mages improve their ability to control and direct magical energies. It looked like such a simple thing, but Zorian had needed two years to master it fully. Sometimes he wondered if his family was right and he really was too focused on his studies. He knew for a fact that most of his classmates had much more tenuous control over their magic, and it didn’t appear to be inhibiting them too much.