Chapter 14: Training In Cut And Crease

Villin came out of his trance after about an hour had passed. He had studied the feeling he got when casting the illumination spell for the first time all this time. Looking at the changes it made in the web and the specific nodes.

If he wanted to cast the spell now he figured he only needed about thirty seconds time to do so. If he practiced for a while this time would shorten further.

For the time being though Villin decided to go to his room, he felt pretty damn hungry right about now. Once he arrived in his room and opened the chest underneath his bed to find a new, basic meal he was about to indulge when he noticed a small note had appeared inside of the chest.

'If you want to meet up again, I'll be at the Cut and Crease training grounds after classes. Feel free to come and I'll show you how to play. We have another first-year who is interested so you two could be a close match.'

Beneath these sentences was a winky face. This letter obviously came from Amelia, the girl who competed Cut and Crease last time he was there so he quickly ate some food before heading over. He was wondering how she got the note into his room as all rooms were supposedly impossible to break into so he figured he should probably ask her about that later as well.

This time there were some people hanging around the dueling rings but he simply kept walking until he got to the training grounds.

When he got in there were two others there already. One was Amelia who he was familiar with already while the other one was Aiden, the boy she had competed against last time around.

Villin walked up casually while secretly eyeing out Aiden since he wasn't sure what kind of person he was. Even now the boy's messy hair was purple hiding his face a bit, yet despite that, he couldn't really hide the handsome face hidden underneath. He was currently holding a wand and seemed to be writing something in the air with it.

Villin opted to ignore him for the time being as he sat next to Amelia and greeted her.

"Well, well, well, look who still decided to show up, coming over an hour late!" Amelia said while looking at him with a teasing smile "You're lucky you opponent had something to do as well or you'd have kept us all waiting!" She sighed exaggeratedly as she gently shook her head.

Even though he knew she was mostly joking Villin still felt a little bad about making them wait. "Sorry Amelia, it's just that I had just cast my first spell and I felt like I had to use the opportunity to increase my comprehension on the spell."

He awkwardly scratched the back of his head as he waited for her reply, yet she just stared at him with her eyebrows arched up before muttering "Not bad, not bad indeed."

A slightly awkward silence stayed in the air for a while before Amelia said she should probably begin teaching him as waiting for the other person would just be a waste of time. After she said this Aiden seemed to glare at her for a moment, but he didn't say anything as he quickly continued writing in the air.

"Alright so, since you haven't had a 'wandless magic' class yet I'll quickly explain it to you. Remember when you just got your magic and you had to force it out? That was basically the greatest form of wandless magic you could do. In Cut and Crease, you have to use this very same magic but instead of pushing it out of your entire body, you want to use it as you would a limb. You have to let it out of your body without losing control of it, the best way to do so if to always keep a tether between the place you are manipulating and your body." As she said this she manipulated one of the nearby pieces of paper to float into the air in between them.

"The papers we use have a multitude of special enchantments on them. This makes it that you can't actually sharpen or destroy them using pure magic, up till a certain level of course. The only ways you can use your magic is to move the papers and have it change shape. Hence you cannot use magic to make the paper tougher or sharper."

As she took out a piece of paper about the fourth of a full page, she told him what to do. "Try to reach out with your magic towards this piece of paper. If the connection is strong enough, the enchantments will make it so that it will move along with the magic connected with it, as long as the connection is strong enough, the paper will stay in the air."

Just as she finished her sentence and gave him the small piece of paper, the door behind them opened again as a boy walked through.

When Villin noticed who it was, his heart sunk a little. It was the class A noble that had bothered him for just sitting next to him. If he recalled correctly his name was Pierson Skull. Pierson only gave him a sidewards glance before walking towards Aiden, it didn't seem like he recognized him.

It seemed like the rivalry between Amelia and Aiden was in such a way that they both decided to teach someone and have them compete against one another. Even though Villin thought it was a bit silly, it would at least give him an opponent to go against, and if he lost it really wasn't the end of the world.

Villin didn't find manipulating magic out of his body that hard, even though he did lose some magic power the longer he kept it up.

The only problem he faced was that when he arrived, half of his magic power had already been used up and so it wasn't exactly ideal.

Once Villin felt like he had sufficient control of his magic power. He used it to try and form some sort of third arm on his stomach, reaching out towards the piece of paper with his magic power. It seemed that he was at least good enough to have this fourth of a piece of paper float into the air, he stopped it about half a meter in front of him.

Yet even now the paper was swaying from the left to the right unsteadily. Very different compared to the fight between Aiden and Amelia where the papers were absolutely still when they didn't get used.

"It's been two hours already, I have to head to the library and I can see you are running low on magic power. If you come back tomorrow an hour after class you may be able to have a little spar with our friend over there." she said as she nodded her head towards Pierson's direction.

While walking to the door with him, she whispered in his ear "It would be great if you could practice some more. If you win tomorrow I'll give you twenty magic crystals."

With this encouragement in his head, he headed towards the dormitories.