A figure scratched out something on a chalkboard behind her: Magic Theory 101. She turned and glanced over at the group and smiled.

  Mal hummed.

  Ah, Professor Igna. No knife to the throat, this time?

  "Circle Thirty, welcome," she said. "You came here just in time. Please take a seat."

  About two or three dozen other students looked over at Mal, in particular. Whispers broke out. Mal ignored them, internally hoping that they would forget about him. He looked for a free seat and frowned when he didn't notice any.

  "Oh no," Professor Igna's tone was distressed. "It seems that we don't have enough seats. How unfortunate. I suppose you'll have to go stand in the back. Is that all right?"

  "Yeah, sure. I'm fine with it."

  "Hold on, Professor, there's some seats in the storage closet. Philo noticed them coming in."

  Mal looked to the back to see Philo standing up. Philo shot Mal a quick look with his eyes, his mouth flickering into a smile.

  Igna's expression remained the same steady smile. "That's excellent. Go ahead and get the seats ready, you four."

  The group went to the back and pulled out the seats. Mal ended up seated next to Philo, with Rolam as far away from Philo as he could get.

  Igna coughed into her hand and pointed behind herself. "Welcome, students, to Magic Theory 101. Now, I know what you're thinking." She paused. "That there's no purpose to magic. Not really. After all, most of what you'll likely be doing will involve practical applications of magic. You don't need an understanding of magic theory in order to spellcast, or cook potions, or build golems, or any of the other myriad magical fields."

  Mal found himself suppressing a smirk. She wasn't exactly doing a great job selling the class to the students.

  "I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that magic theory is essential in order to be a great wizard. That is patently untrue. What I will tell you is that it'll make your life a great deal easier for a number of reasons," she said.

  Igna proceeded to talk for ten minutes about all the reasons magic theory was amazing. Mal tuned it all out—magic theory was the one thing he'd been good at in his first life. He didn't need to be sold on the subject.

  Igna was talking about the basics of mana and what it actually was. Namely, that it was a type of energy manipulated by wizards in order to create what we called magic. Mal was sure this was all very groundbreaking for all the people who'd never heard of this before. He looked over at Philo who seemed to be enraptured by what Igna was saying. Rolam, meanwhile, had fallen asleep on his desk.

  In fact, Philo raised his hand. Igna's eyes flickered over to Philo, and a calculating expression seemed to appear on her face. It was gone in an instant as she nodded with a pleased smile. "Philo, right? What's your question?"

  "Philo guesses…" Philo seemed to grapple for the words. "We're talking a lot about mana as if it's one cohesive type of energy. But that's not true, because unaligned and aligned mana exist. Are there substantial differences between the different types?"

  "That's an excellent question, Philo. I would expect nothing less from a draconid such as yourself." Igna turned her attention to the general class. "For those who are unaware, draconids have a natural affinity for aligned magic. Specifically, fire-type mana. As such, this question is particularly relevant to young Philo."

  Philo squirmed in his seat at the handful of gazes that looked back at him. There was more than one tight frown being sent his way. That was unsurprising, Philo was a draconid, after all. What Mal was surprised about was—what, had they not noticed him coming in at the start of the class? Had Philo seriously managed to evade their attention? Why did they still care?

  "Fundamentally they're the same energy" Igna said. "But there are significant differences that make it all a bit ambiguous. Aligned mana is volatile and unstable. Unaligned mana is predictable and flexible. Most importantly, however, for our purposes, aligned mana is considered different and dangerous due to the repulsion effect."

  She scratched out two arrows pointed at each other.

  "There are two things we must establish," she said. "First, when unaligned mana and aligned mana come in close contact, they push each other away. Second, the core is partially made up of unaligned mana. It has a membrane to protect against the body's small amounts of natural aligned mana, but it can be overwhelmed."

  Ah. Mal knew where she was going with this.

  "A few foolish students once tried to rush through the cleaning process back when I taught spellcasting. Their chests exploded in front of me." She chuckled. "They lived, but their cores were damaged beyond repair."

  Philo paled. "Wait, Philo's been risking death every time he used his fireball?"

  "Has he? A rather interesting question. Malfrasius, do you have any thoughts?"

  Mal jerked in his seat. "What?"

  "Well, you looked so deep in thought. I assumed that you were contemplating the subject."

  "Oh, what were we talking about?"

  Her eyes flashed and her grin turned sickly.

  "How do aligned magic users avoid death?" she said. "According to what we just said, they should all have destroyed cores from spellcasting with aligned mana."

  Mal knew the correct answer—namely, that they simply had higher biological resistance in their cores.

  But Mal knew better—he'd done the research and that explanation didn't line up. The core was too delicate, too fragile, and, most importantly, it was the same across species.

  He walked over to the chalkboard and brushed past Igna. His hands reached for a piece of chalk and he started writing.

  "The current model is assuming intake," he said. "But we know that isn't true. Aligned magic users don't really seem to have fatigue in the same way that we do, and the measurements don't line up."

  Equations draped across the board like a blanket. It was half for the class and half for himself.

  "What if they're using a different model entirely?" He drew a crude figure and pointed the arrow away from the figure. "What if the aligned mana is already in the air and never touches the body?"

  "That's ridiculous." Igna scoffed. "The core is the basis of magic. It's the tool used to manipulate all mana. What, are you proposing they move it through sheer willpower?"

  He shrugged. "Maybe. We don't know how the core moves mana, either. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that there are other methods we don't understand?"

  Her jaw clenched. The room was so silent Mal could've heard a pin drop.

  "Thank you for your explanation." She smiled tightly. "Go back to your seat."

  Mal walked over to his chair. The whole time, he could feel the weight of the gaze of every single person in the room bearing down on him like an anvil. He stumbled into his chair and tried his best to look unaffected. He wasn't sure what he'd done, but he got the feeling that he'd made a critical error somewhere along the way in his explanation. Maybe they were experiencing secondhand embarrassment? They were rather slapdash equations. If he were to submit something like that for his third-year thesis, Igna would have killed him. A third-year, and he's not even able to organize his runes? Absolutely embarrassing.

  The rest of the class passed by in a daze, Mal frantically going over what kind of mistake he could've made while writing out his equations. It finally hit him that he probably overstepped his boundaries. Walking up to the front of the class without getting Igna's permission? Not only that, but writing on her blackboard? No wonder the students were shocked! It was a massive breach of etiquette. He'd have to apologize to Igna after the class.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He’d been thinking of this so deeply that he hardly even noticed when he’d been transfered to Central Hall. The stained glass window gleamed from the corner of his eye. A bowl of soup apppeared in front of him with a flash.

  And everyone was staring at him. Philo, Rolam, and Nima. They hadn’t even touched their food.

  …what was Lusia doing here?

  "No, I understand that what I did was rude. You don't have to lecture me," Mal said.

  "What are you talking about?" Philo asked.

  Mal waited for one of them to speak when finally Nima spoke up.

  "H—how did you know all that!?"

  Mal blinked. "Knew what? What are you talking about?"

  "Um, hello?" Philo mimed out scribbling motions in the air. "The theorizing about all of that advanced magic theory? All of those runes? And it looked like they were real, considering that Igna was just as shocked as all of us!"

  Lusia looked between Philo and Mal, her eyebrows furrowing. It was nice to know that he wasn't the only one who was flabbergasted.

  "Everything that I talked about was very surface-level. Not at the level of detail you would expect from an expert. And the runes?" Mal scoffed. "I don't think I used anything past second year."

  Nima squinted his eyes. "Mal, in case you didn't notice, you're a first year."

  Mal opened his mouth to respond when his voice caught in his throat. Mal was a first year. Not only that, but Mal was a first year who'd gotten terrible written exam scores—as Lusia knew—and who had never been a particularly studious person, which Lusia also knew.

  Mal had managed to forget the very minor and unimportant detail that there was absolutely no way that a first-year student would be capable of writing out complex runes and equations and theorizing about aligned mana.

  There honestly wasn't anything impressive about it. Mal had just been shooting from the hip. But you just… would not expect that from a first-year student. The problem was that Mal's perception had been so warped by Igna’s teaching in his first life that he'd forgotten.

  Igna had never mentored Mal. She’d never taken him under her wing or anything like that. But as he went higher up in the courses, she expected more and more independent thinking and theorizing. She turned it into a force of habit for her students. It was almost unconscious. By the time Mal had left school, it had served him well throughout his time pursuing self-study.

  But again, first years weren't supposed to be able to do that.

  Mal looked between the different eyes staring at him. He couldn't make up something about him being studious and about him studying ahead of time. Lusia would know, and it would result in a number of questions that he wouldn't be able to answer. Was that a big deal? It might be a worthwhile gambit, frankly. He doubted the other three would believe Lusia, even if she presented the evidence to them. And she wasn't going to do that, anyway.

  However, it might breach her limits of disbelief. This vast of a change? Not only had he changed in character, but he'd somehow picked up advanced knowledge far beyond his years? Forget gaining her trust, she would think that he'd been possessed.

  Given her dedication to her duties, Mal was half worried that he would wake up with a knife to his throat if that's what she ended up thinking. Hard pass.

  He needed a good lie, and he needed it yesterday.

  “Honored leader?” Rolam asked. "So where did you learn all of that from?"

  "I…" Mal trailed off. "The hospital!"

  "Oh yeah, you were injured, I remember," Rolam said.

  “Some fifth-year student had left their notebook there, and I ended up reading through the whole thing while I was waiting for them to call me up. Really, I was just sort of parroting what that guy had said when I was writing all those things down." He paused. "And I think you guys are misunderstanding how complex what I was doing was. The runes were super basic, and all of the things that the notebook talked about—not me, because I was just repeating what they said—were just applications of first principles."

  Rolam scratched the side of his head. "Really? It sounds so complex, though."

  "We’ll be learning about most of what I talked about soon enough," Mal said.

  Philo shook his head. “Philo needs to study magic theory further. It seems that my book has a number of basic things lacking in it."

  "Y–yeah," Mal said. "It's crazy how much is missing from those early primers, you know?"

  Nima opened his mouth to speak when he paused and looked over at the sun through the glass. "Combat class is in 15 minutes, we need to get moving."

  Mal adjusted his robes and let the spring breeze flow in between the flaps of cloth and his skin.

  "Combat 101," Mal muttered. "Like we talked about earlier, Vigil—he's the one who spent 30 years in hell."

  And the one who would die by a demon assassination. He let his guard down because he was in the school, and he paid for it.

  "Do remember it's just a rumor." Philo adjusted his textbooks in his hands. "It's a fun rumor, certainly, but at the end of the day we don't know that for sure."

  Rolam snorted. "It makes sense to me. What's so dishonorable about it?"

  “For starters, the idea of someone surviving in a land inhabited entirely by demons is a little bit unbelievable."

  "I know it might seem unbelievable to you," Rolam said. "But I think it's perfectly possible."

  Philo's gaze darkened and he shot a glare at Rolam. "It's hell. Literal hell. Even if it's a fraction as bad as it's described in the books, it would be an utterly terrifying place to be. Philo's sorry, but the idea of someone surviving in another dimension is just absurd—"

  Mal perked up. "Other dimension?"

  Philo looked back at him and gave him a confused look. "Yes. Another dimension, that's where hell is, right?"

  "No, it isn’t,” Rolam said. “It's underneath the surface of the earth, directly below us. How do you not know that?”

  "You're being absurd. It's clearly a metaphor."

  "No, it's not."

  The words escaped Mal's mouth before he could stop himself.

  Philo looked over at Mal and rolled his eyes. "Great, Philo's surrounded by the superstitious. What's next, you're going to tell me that heaven is a puffy cloud palace in the skies?"

  Mal raised his hands. "Hey, don't get metaphysical on me. I don't know anything about heaven or where souls go after death. That's an open question. But hell, as in the land inhabited by demons? That's a real, physical place, and it's located directly underneath us. Why do you think incursions always happen with demons sprouting out of the ground?"

  "That's just the method they choose to attack. They teleport in from another dimension and insert themselves into the ground," Philo said.

  It would be so easy for Mal to put an end to this argument by stating that he had visited for about five minutes, but that would invite a number of questions that he wasn't prepared to answer.

  "Besides," Philo's lizard-like eyes flickered behind his glasses. "If they’re actually below the surface of the earth, how does it make any sense for groups like the Bird Eaters to summon them?"

  Lusia’s footsteps halted at the mention of the Bird Eaters, then she kept walking.

  Odd. Why such a strong reaction?

  "It's kind of funny," he said, redirecting the conversation. "You know that demons aren't actually that dangerous, right?"

  Rolam nearly stopped in his tracks and shot Mal a dirty glare. "That seems like an awfully insensitive thing to say. Even coming from me."

  "No, I'm not dismissing the threat per se," Mal said. "I'm just saying that if you pitted your average lesser demon against a graduate from Exodi, the lesser demon would get slaughtered every single time. They’re only grade 2, after all. Greater demons are grade 1, and archdemons are grade EX, but they’re rare enough that they’re a nonfactor.”

  "So why are they considered so dangerous?"

  The voice had come from behind them. Mal turned to see Lusia, stiffened as if shocked by her own question.

  A small smile crept its way up on Mal's face.

  "An excellent question, Lusia," he said. “Lesser demons have three things going for them: their shape-shifting ability, their sheer numbers, and their ability to strike at random times."

  "I know about the last two," Philo said. "But shape-shifting?"

  "It isn’t talked about much, and for good reason," Mal said. "Demons are already terrifying enough. The idea of adding paranoia due to being unable to trust that the person you're talking to is a demon or not? That would create a vast amount of chaos. The powers that be have deemed that the information isn't one that should be widely disseminated."

  "How do you know about it, then?" Philo said.

  "It's out there." Mal pointed at one of Philo's textbooks. "It's mentioned. It is just not widely talked about."

  That seemed to be enough for Philo and he nodded. "That's interesting."

  The actual truth, of course, was that he'd lived through a demonic incursion in his fifth year. But that was neither here nor there.

  “So, Lusia, have you managed to grasp the idea?” Mal asked.

  “I don’t understand how one could grasp an idea,” she said.

  “It means to understand something.” Mal hummed. “Funnily enough, Demons only have two major weakness. The more well known one is their own Inferno-type mana."

  "They're weak to their own mana? How does that make any sense?" Rolam asked.

  Mal shrugged. "I don't know. Why does mana work the way it does at all? Why is it a miracle energy that we can manipulate? Who knows?”

  Philo looked at the textbooks in his hand. “Philo will find out. One of these days."

  Mal shrugged. "Good luck with that.”

  “And what about the second weakness?” Rolam asked.

  “Blood-type mana. But it’s even more uncommon than Inferno-type, so it’s not particularly relevant.”

  Mal looked back at Lusia to see that she was staring at the back of his head. He could almost see her mind working behind her eyes, cataloguing all of the information that she'd been learning.

  "Are you interested in magic, Lusia?" Mal asked.

  Lusia was silent for a few seconds. He could see an internal debate going on inside of her head before she gave a hesitant nod.

  "I've always wondered about it, master."

  Mal was about to continue the conversation when he heard Rolam speak in confusion.

  "Wait, this is the classroom? That can't be right," he said

  Mal turned his head away from Lusia and back toward the front. They arrived not at a building, like the last classroom, but at a large, open field. In fact, it was the same field that the examinees had been teleported from.

  In the middle of this field, Vigil's sharp, steel-like eyes roamed over every single one of the students around, as if he was taking notes on all of them. Mal followed the man's gaze and noticed him linger on a particular student: Savaly, the second S-rank core in the school. After he was done watching her carefully, Vigil continued his stare down.

  Vigil's eyes came to Mal and his gaze lingered for several seconds longer than necessary.

  Mal's eyes narrowed. Did he know? Why was he looking at him like that?

  There was a small nod from Vigil, as if he liked whatever he had seen in Mal's face. Vigil's gaze turned to the other students before they snapped forward and he crossed his arms.

  "Welcome, students," his voice was grizzled and rough, the texture reminding Mal of sandpaper. "This is combat class 101."

  A grin crept up his face, his eyes wide and shining with an eerie light.

  "Or as I like to call it," he said. "The most painful thing you'll ever experience in your life."