[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 7 — 11:20 PM[Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302
The lumen-globe was down to its last civilized setting when Hathaway opened the dragon-leather tome again.
A week of being repeatedly struck about the head with other people's genius had done something to her reading speed. The geometric matrix on the third page of [Ovelia's Evil Lantern Cat Sunflare Burst] had not gotten simpler, and it had not gotten kinder, but it had stopped being a single undifferentiated wall. The lines came apart under her eye now. She could see where the load went, where it was carried, and where somebody had stopped explaining themselves on the grounds that anyone reading this far should have kept up.
The cat was still the cat. That module sat behind credentials she did not have, and no amount of coursework was going to hand them over.
The other half was a containment problem, and containment problems were made of numbers.
She unclipped the shock-padded pouch from her belt and set it on the desk beside the tome. Fifteen translucent grey beads, sitting in their padding with the unbothered patience of ordnance that had already been paid for.
Her developer brain turned the bead over against the lamplight, and the comparison finished assembling itself without being asked. Same object. The bead's membrane holds an explosion in. Ovelia's holds one out. The vector flips and everything else is identical.
She pulled a fresh sheet toward her, weighted the corner, and began drawing an envelope that gave instead of resisting: absorb, disperse, vent.
It was ugly. But the number moved.
Force Beads, thirty percent. She capped the ink and looked at the two documents lying side by side on her desk, the ordnance and the heirloom. This one does not have a yield yet. Give it a month.
Monday compiled without a single error and without a single event, which was, on balance, the most restful thing that had happened to her since the term began.
[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 9 — 9:00 AM[Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · Transmutation Spire · Tiered Lecture Hall
The submissions went up onto the podium in a stack, and forty-five students watched them go with the collective stillness of a room that had just heard a pin drop into a bathtub.
Professor Heidi Lucent did not do any of the several merciful things available to a woman in her position. She squared the pile against the podium's edge, drew the top sheet off it, and began grading in front of everybody.
"Beautiful handwriting," Heidi murmured, and the wind-chime voice carried effortlessly to the back tier.
She turned the page.
"Lovely parchment, too. Where did you buy it?"
The student in the fourth row went down in her chair until only the top of her head cleared the desk.
Swipe.
"Retro Eight-School alignment." Heidi tilted the sheet toward the light with an air of genuine, delicate wonder. "I had been under the impression one needed a museum pass."
Swipe.
"You have built a translation interface between two schools of magic, and built it competently." She looked up, and the freezing courtesy in her face was worse than anything she could have said. "May I ask why translation homework has been submitted to a composite spell class?"
Swipe.
Heidi stopped, and held the sheet up at reading distance, and studied it the way one studies a stain.
"Visual budget," she said. "Forty-seven percent."
She let the number sit in the acoustics.
"What did you intend to kill her with? Aesthetic fatigue?"
In the second row Hathaway's heart performed one hard slam against her ribs, and cold sweat came up across her collarbone in a clean line.
Fifty. Her drunken original had put fifty percent into the corona alone, underlined twice deep enough to score the sheet through. She sat very still and sent a short, entirely sincere prayer of thanks to a cousin who had fixed that lying down with her eyes shut, and then told her to eat lunch.
The pile went down. Heidi's patience went down faster. The elegant venom dried up somewhere around the seventh sheet, replaced by a silent, appalling reading speed and a flick of the wrist that put a week of somebody's work on the reject pile without comment, and the tiers stopped breathing in any organized way.
Then she paused, and the overcast broke.
"At last," Heidi said quietly. "Someone who understands human speech."
Across the aisle Yenna did not move by a millimetre. Her hands stayed folded, her face holding the same unhurried stillness she took to a dissection tray.
Atop her head, both golden ears gave one distinct, involuntary, radiantly happy twitch.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Heidi took the next sheet and traced a line of it with her stylus.
"An elegant architecture. Structurally sound." She followed the geometry down to the corner. "You have kept only the load-bearing walls you were certain of, and the result will not collapse under any condition I can construct."
She laid it flat.
"This is an assignment that will not lose a point. It will not gain one either."
The flame at Surtrina's tail-tip guttered down to a low, bruised ember and stayed there, and she did not look up from the desk for a while.
Heidi drew the next roll off the stack and unrolled it. Whatever she found there brought her eyes up to Spectra.
"You erased your mother, and you did it very cleanly."
She turned the page.
"Then you filled the space with Sonia. And where Sonia would not go, Eve Hawkins."
The ink in the well on Spectra's desk grew a thin skin of frost, and that was the only statement she made.
Heidi reached for the next assignment, picked up her stylus, and held it over the parchment.
Then she set it down again, without writing anything, and something moved across the Tenth Seat's composed face that had no business being there: recognition, something older doing a slow thing to her jaw, and underneath both of them a respect she was clearly not enjoying.
"So clever," Heidi said, barely above a whisper, and the hall's acoustics carried it to the last row anyway. "So... provocative."
Hathaway leaned forward a fraction, her threat arrays running hot. What did she submit?
Hathaway watched the Tenth Seat's hand hover and not commit, and the answer assembled itself out of that hesitation alone. She answered it in Heidi's own register, perfectly, and perfect is the signature. You can't dock a point off it without docking one off yourself.
Only one student in the civilization had the nerve to hand a Grand Witch her own thinking back as a solved equation, and Heidi had graded that student's work before.
She actually went to Evangeline.
Heidi lifted her eyes.
"These sections are not yours."
"They are not," Victoria agreed.
Heidi flipped back to the first page. What was left in her voice when she spoke had not been put there by anyone in the room.
"The rest of it. Why did you not use that?"
"Because this problem has no standard answer."
Victoria said it the way she would have named a melting point, and then stopped talking.
The silence went on a beat past comfortable. Then Heidi picked up the stylus, cut a clean maximum across the header, and set the sheet aside without another word.
She drew the last submission off the pile.
Heidi read the first page. Then the second. Something at the corner of her mouth gave up, and what surfaced was the helpless, exasperated amusement of a woman looking at a very large and very well-organized mess.
"This assignment," she said, "is a crowd scene."
She raised her eyes and let them rest on Hathaway, without any weight in them whatsoever.
"Nine people."
Hathaway choked on her own saliva.
Professor Nino, I swear on the treasury I tried to cover for you.
She had recopied the entire thing. She had sat down with the master sheet, and transcribed a hundred and forty-six nodes onto fresh parchment in one uniform hand, so that nobody would recognize the seven altered pathways as somebody's sister's. It was the cleanest document of her academic career: nine irreconcilable design philosophies, and not one blot or hesitation anywhere on the page to suggest a single mind had ever argued with itself while building it.
I optimized the wrong variable. Her developer brain filed the result with a kind of horrified professional admiration. I laundered the handwriting and shipped the commit history.
Heidi marked it, dropped it on the finished stack, and stepped out from behind the podium, and the grading was over.
Hathaway watched Heidi wipe the slate and reach for the day's module, and the joke she had been standing inside all week finally rendered.
She had spent seven days watching the brightest people of her generation break themselves against the problem of getting two schools of magic to occupy one spell without one of them eating the other.
Heidi Lucent's Draconic Polymorph fused four.
It had been so comprehensively successful for so long that the entire civilization had simply stopped filing it as a composite spell at all.
A skeletal wing ignited across the front of the hall in azure light, thirty feet of it, every joint annotated.
"Today," Heidi said. "Partial Draconic Polymorph. Dragon Wings."
Hathaway's spine came up off the seatback.
Premium loot.
She had been eyeing this module since the moment the five went up on the board. Flight, first, real biological flight with no cast time and no upkeep. Second, the endurance property, a bottomless reserve bolted straight into the shoulders, which for a witch whose entire combat doctrine consisted of standing still and out-damaging the problem was less a bonus than a structural repair. And third, bundled in at no additional charge, two spell-like abilities wired directly into the reflex arc: [Gale Sweep] and [Force Breath].
Mobility, survivability, and two free instant-casts. Her inner accountant was already costing it out in ink. There is no version of this I decline.
Heidi took the wing apart joint by joint, and Hathaway wrote until the side of her hand was grey. The architecture carried the same obscene economy as the Tier-3 wireframe, scaled up and given teeth: nothing decorative anywhere in it, every node arriving exactly where the one before it had implied it would.
With twelve minutes left in the block, she got to the bill.
"Two hundred and fifteen minutes of continuous processing," Heidi continued, and the wing gave way to a multi-stage brewing array. "Composite method, start to finish. The tolerance on thermal variance is zero, and I would like you to understand that I am using that word literally and not for emphasis."
Hathaway's quill slowed.
"Do not let the modularity mislead you." Heidi's gaze went along the tiers without hurry. "The foundation remains the Tier-8 working, and the material resistance is unchanged. Under perfect execution, by a competent hand, the yield on this draught does not exceed twenty percent."
Hathaway stopped writing altogether.
Twenty.
Sunday morning she had been quietly proud of thirty percent, and that had been ninety minutes of straightforward work. This was two hundred and fifteen, composite method throughout, for a worse number.
This is a gacha banner, the reagents are the currency, and the pity counter has been removed as a design choice. Her inner producer looked at the projected material spend and went silent. I could run this eight times and come out the far end with a very expensive pile of ash and no wings.
The great bell tolled through the spire.
Hathaway sat looking at the reagent list, and then turned her head to the left, and deployed the look. She simply opened her eyes to their maximum working aperture and channelled the full, unfiltered pathos of an under-levelled DPS standing outside an endgame instance, watching the server's top-ranked support walk past.
Victoria was securing her inkwell.
"Leave it to me."
Hathaway blinked.
That was fast. Her spectator thread sat up. That was extremely fast. I hadn't finished the face.
The inkwell went into the bag. The bag closed with two fingers.
Then the arithmetic caught up, and Hathaway stopped feeling clever.
Two hundred and fifteen minutes at a tolerance of zero, one success in five, and Victoria needed a vial of her own. Somebody was going to stand at that bench ten times over to get them, and had signed up for all ten in four words, before Hathaway had finished making the face.
Hathaway swung her bag onto her shoulder and followed Victoria out.
Ahead of her, Victoria held the corridor door and did not comment on how long it had taken Hathaway to catch up, which was, in the dialect they had settled on, roughly the warmest thing available.