Chapter 305: Learning & Teaching

“Why do you do that?” Selina frowned, looking down at the heading circled in Alex’s notebook.

“Do what?”

“Give everything big, dramatic names?”

“Because I’m also big—” He flexed a muscular arm. “—and dramatic.”

“Ugh,” she groaned, much to his amusement.

He fought the urge to grin.

His little sister was now at the stage where a lot of his clowning made her cringe since she was trying to be more ‘serious’ and ‘grown up.’ Which only made him want to clown her even more. Alex remembered going through the same, “extra serious” stage—as his father used to call it when he teased him. He could picture their dad at the dinner table with that mischievous look his face got when he was fighting a grin from making Alex cringe. And now, here he was with a, ‘I’m fighting a grin from making my growing sister cringe’ look on his own face.

‘This could turn into a family tradition. Maybe if Theresa and I have kids one day…or Selina does…’ A smile like a grinning cat spread across his face as he shot a glance her way.

His sister was watching him. He quickly looked down, dismissing the delightful idea and returning to his spell.

“Speaking of growing up—”

“You never said anything about growing up,” she pointed out.

“Details, details,” he countered, ignoring facts. “Which is exactly what you’re going to have to worry about. I want you to really pay attention to what I’m about to say: you wanted to watch me learn and practice spells, right?”

She nodded vigorously.

After he’d returned from Thameland, Selina had questioned him and Theresa about every detail of their trip: the fights, the Ravener, how things were going in Greymoor, and especially about the Heroes.

When they’d relayed all the news—including that the demons they’d fought on Oreca’s Fall beach would soon be plaguing their homeland—she’d gone quiet. And not too much later, she’d begged him to let her watch his spell practice.

She’d been near him before—more times than he could count—when he’d been practising, but she'd never shown much interest in what he was doing. So, he didn’t need the Mark to tell him what was going on with her: everything that happened back home bothered her, and she wanted to learn whatever she could to protect herself, and their family.

Alex’s eyes fell on her birthday gift from the Lu’s. Carrying the knife had become a habit.

She’d seen a lot, and he understood why she kept it close, but he didn’t want her to lose sight of just being a kid for now.

“That’s great, but I’m going to warn you; you won’t understand a lot of what you see right now. It’ll make a lot more sense later.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and when you start learning spells, you’ll get faster the more you practise. Your first spell’s going to take you a long, long time to get.”

He’d struggled with the spell for forceball for years before he finally got it. A chuckle slipped out. Now here he was, learning summoning spells in a day. A lot had changed.

Looking at Selina, absorbed in studying the spell guide, a warm feeling touched him.

‘You’ll have a hell of a lot easier time than I had,’ he thought. ‘You won’t have to flail around like I did, trying to put it all together by yourself. You'll have proper teachers and your big brother to help you. And since you have that affinity for fire magic, you’ll probably advance even faster, especially if you learn fire spells first…but I’m not sure if that’ll be happening.’

“Hmmm.” She frowned. “How long do you think it’ll take me?”

“Ooooh,” he considered. “You’ll have to train your mana, and they probably won’t let you even try a spell until you’ve learned a lot of magic theory.”

“Aw,” she muttered.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Something wrong?”

“...I was thinking that if I learned magic fast, then I could come and help you, and Theresa and everyone else in Thameland,” she said.

Just as he’d suspected, then.

“Oh no, that’s out of the question,” he said. “Completely. You’re not coming to Thameland to fight monsters at eleven years old.”

“Why?” she asked. “I’ve seen monsters, lots of times. Demons too. I’m not afraid, I want to fight back.”

Her hand had fallen on the knife handle. Alex watched her fingers tighten on the hilt.

“Trust me, you don’t want to go there. Not yet,” he said. “Remember what I told you we saw? What we fought with the Heroes? It wasn’t pretty, Selina. You shouldn’t be there until you’re a lot older, and have a lot of experience with battle magic.”

“You don’t use battle magic,” she said.

“Yeah, well.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Claygon who was standing beside the siblings as they sat in the shade of a flowering tree. “I kinda got a really big, smashy bodyguard. And I’ve also taken Baelin’s class.”

“You could teach me what Baelin taught you,” she suggested.

Her hand closed around the knife hilt, becoming a fist.

“No way.” Alex waved his hand. “I mean…ya sure, of course I’ll teach you what Baelin taught me, but you can’t go into a war zone right now. Not until you’re older and you’ve learned how to fight, but hopefully, you won’t have to do any fighting back home because the Ravener’ll be long dead by then. That’ll be the best thing for all of us. But…look…”

He turned back to his spell book. “If you really want to learn magic fast, then pay close attention to me. I’m about to go through this spell a lot, and it’ll give you a head start. So, just watch, okay? Summoning’s a really useful kind of magic, and you can apply it to all kinds of different things. Watch closely.”

“...okay,” she said.

He glanced at Claygon. “Hey buddy, ya mind raising a fist there? If the sprite does anything hostile, I want you to smash the hell out of it. And if I accidentally summon anything that’s not a sprite, I want you to smash that too.”

Claygon shifted, adjusting his body weight, then curled his upper-right hand into a fist, raising it in preparation to strike.

“Did you just tell Claygon to smush a sprite?” Selina asked, looking at Alex dubiously.

“Listen, sprites aren’t very dangerous but if they get out of control, they can still hurt us with their magic. I’m not taking any chances.”

He would have preferred to conjure the sprite in The Cells, but Selina wasn’t exactly supposed to be in there. So he’d come up with a compromise: Claygon would smash any nasty monsters that appeared, and he was also practising his summoning outside, so running was a strong option if anything went wrong.

At this point in his training, he was pretty confident he wouldn’t screw the spell up anyway.

Not catastrophically, at least.

Probably.

Alex took a deep breath, looked over the incantation and spell-array one more time, then jumped right in. The Mark’s interference appeared without fail, trying to break his concentration, but he slowly and carefully guided himself through until he made a mistake. He promptly cut the spell.

“What happened?” Selina asked.

“I made a mistake,” he told her. “So what I’m doing now is writing down exactly what I did wrong, which part of the spell-array I made the mistake on, and how to avoid it next time. I had to learn to do things this way because of you know what.” He whispered.

“That’s a lot of stuff to write,” she said. “No wonder you have so many notebooks.”

“Exactly, but it’s worth it.” He now had so many stacks of notebooks in his room, that they formed a small wall on one side of his bed. “It takes a lot of time doing it this way, but what that’ll mean for you is you'll be learning your spells in a lot of detail. Which’ll mean you’ll be able to learn them a lot faster if you put in the work, and you might even be able to design your own spell arrays. Wouldn’t that be cool? You could even modify or make up spells with enough practice.”

She looked at the spell array. “Because…you learn more about the spell array from all the detail?”

“Exactly!” he said. “Now juuust watch me quietly for a bit. Need to concentrate.”

He threw himself into the spell again.

And again.

And again.

Each time he recorded what happened to make him stop the spell.

Five. Ten. Twenty tries. With each casting, he crept a little closer to the part of the spell array responsible for contacting an elemental plane…and then…

There it was, and the Traveller’s power smoothly took over.

With a sigh, Alex felt it wash over him, touching the elemental plane of earth.

And suddenly, in the air before him, a little creature materialised hovering on tiny wings, shedding a green light from its small body. It blinked large black eyes as they adjusted to the sunlight of its summoner’s world while Selina gasped, clapping her hands at the sight of it.

“Hello there,” Alex greeted the sprite and took a deep breath.

Its eyes briefly moved from him to Selina before spotting something far more interesting on the ground below; after all, the two siblings had no affinity for earth magic. Its tiny face brightened, then it fluttered to the grass, sliding its hands through the green blades brushing its waist.

Alex observed the earth elemental while sweat beaded on his brow from both exertion and nerves.

He quickly made a note to remind himself:

Make sure to get enough rest.

You can learn spells fast, but you’ll screw things up if you’re exhausted.

“So, what do you think?” He asked a beaming Selina.

She tore her eyes away from the little sprite and read his notes detailing his observations. “It’s like when I’m building,” she said. “When I make towers or other buildings and they fall over, I have to find the reason they fell, or they’ll keep falling.”

“Exactly,” Alex said. “And if you apply everything you learn from your mistakes, you can make adjustments to your spell array. Each mistake gives you a clue about how a spell can be changed.”

“Got it,” she said. “What kind of changes can you make to spells?”

“Oh, all kinds of things,” he said. “Imagine a spell as being kind of like…a building. No wait, better example. Imagine a spell is a golem, like Claygon. You need a body and a golem core, but other than that, you can build a golem in just about any shape you want, within a limit. You can add more arms, you can add magical items, you can make it any size, you can add anything you want, but in the end, the golem core has to be able to power everything you put on the body.”

He tapped the spell array. “It’s the same with spell arrays and the magic circuits they create. You can’t turn a forceball spell into a summoning spell, just like you can’t turn a golem into a cerberus. But you can change it to use more mana and make a stronger forceball; change how much light a forceball gives off, or just about anything like that. In the end, a forceball is still a forceball no matter how much you change it, just like a golem is a golem or—”

“—a tower is a tower,” Selina supplied. “You can make it tall and thin, you can make it short, fat and round, but if you make it like a long rectangle, then it’s a house, not a tower.”

“Exactly,” Alex said. “So that’s basically the limit, as far as I know. You can’t change what a spell is by changing parts of its spell array, but you can change what it does a bit, and you can really change how it does it.”

“That’s so cool. I can’t wait to learn more of this stuff,” his sister said eagerly, reaching toward the sprite. Before she could pat it, it glared at her and darted away.

With the magic of subjugation style summoning, Alex could technically have ordered the sprite to let his sister pat it…but doing so felt wrong.

“It’s not part of our family like Brutus is, Selina,” he said.

“I know that,” she said, turning red. “So, what next?”

“Well, I’m gonna take a break for a bit, and then I’ll try summoning sprites from the elemental plane of air. Then we’ll call it a day.”

“Awwww,” Selina said. “I wanted to watch how you worked through more spells.”

“Well, that’s the thing, even if I interrupt a spell, casting one over and over and over again, uses mana. Less mana than if I’d completed the spell every time I cast it, but it all adds up,” he explained. “There’re techniques I can use to help regenerate my mana, but they take time to use. So, I can’t regenerate mana forever. You’ll be learning regeneration techniques if I have anything to say about it. They’re tough, but they’re really valuable, and really important to know. And the more advanced the mana regeneration technique, the faster you can regenerate your mana.”

“Are you going to learn a better technique soon?” Selina asked.

“Funny you should ask that,” he said, glancing at his notebook.

There was a time schedule written on a page: Professor Val’Rok’s office hours. His former Mana Manipulation teacher should be able to show him a new technique or two.

It’d be another step in his plan to catapult himself to third-tier magic.