The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Professor Viridian nodded along as Mirian and Valen reported what they had seen. "How strange," he agreed. "I'll look into it."

When they left, though, Valen said, "He didn't believe us."

Mirian was confused. "But he said… I think he did. And why wouldn't he, anyways, there's a lot of dangerous stuff in that wing!"

Valen gave an exaggerated sigh. "You need to stop paying attention to what people say and pay more attention to how they say it." Ah, there was the Valen that Mirian knew. But before she could come up with a retort, Valen was off, heading a different direction. Mirian opened her mouth to say something rude, then closed it, and headed toward Enchantments. She had an exam, and no time to waste.

Enchantments was in one of the older buildings. It had a complete facade of worked granite, and looked its age. Walking through its halls, Mirian felt like she was one of those ancient arcane pioneers who had risked everything to further the knowledge of humanity. The polished marble floor was worn down with the footsteps of all the students that had preceded her, and it made her feel important, like she was in history.

Well, it usually did. Today, her stomach was in a knot because the enchantments exam was today, and it was purely practical. Classic spellcasting–the kind that didn't involve a fancy new spell engine–was a complex thing. First, they needed to draw from their auric mana using an arcane catalyst. Humans, after all, were not magical creatures. Try as they might, there was no way to access their mana without an object already designed for it. Primitive people had used the magical organs they took from the myrvites they hunted. A chimera's skull, for example, was a great arcane catalyst, but then that involved killing a chimera, and that was dangerous as hell. A wyvern's wing was also a great catalyst, but getting that was also dangerous, and then you needed the whole wing, which was just unwieldy. So after many years of wizards pondering and sorcerers blowing themselves up trying out new and exciting magical materials, society had figured out how to distill the alchemical substances that tapped into an aura.

For this exam, Mirian wielded a scribe's pen. The brass and silver upper shell of it contained dried and powdered cockatrice heart, which was the arcane catalyst. Try as they might, no one had been able to synthesize the magichemicals that made the arcane catalyst work.

It was possible to shape raw mana, but incredibly difficult. The resulting spell was usually just a concentrated blast of energy, and not even a very powerful one. To actually work as an effective spell, the mana had to pass through shaper-glyphs. The scribe's pen had replaceable shaper-glyphs where a normal pen's nib was.

Mirian then had to use these glyphs to… make more glyphs. A complete set of glyphs could form a spell when mana was channeled through them, but this class was all about making the glyphs in the first place. A lot of magic was like that: A lot of tedious work. That was Enchanting 310, and Professor Eld was, in a word, a hardass. His exams were brutal, and he routinely failed students who underperformed. Worse, unlike the other enchantment professors, he only let students use the basic glyphs on their pen nibs. When questioned on this, he went on a rant about "strong fundamentals!" and "kids these days want everything handed to them!" Mirian just kept her head down and did her best.

Near the end of the hour, though, she was only on her eighteenth glyph out of the twenty-four required, and disaster struck: The girl next to her mischanneled her mana, causing a wave of force to burst across the table, sending her pen flying. This interrupted her mid-glyph, and the magical inks she was using splattered, starting a small fire.

Mirian hastily blew it out, then scrambled to retrieve her pen.

As she got up, Professor Eld loomed over her, his beady eyes glaring.

"Sorry. Sorry! The force wave knocked it out of my hand and I was mid-glyph and–"

"I don't want excuses," he snapped. "Do you think it matters if you're sorry if your idiocy blows up a spellbook and kills someone? Do you think your employer cares why your incompetence burned down his factory? Be glad I'm not failing you on the spot."

Humiliated, Mirian slunk back to her seat. She didn't say anything to the girl next to her, but she wanted to punch her.

When Mirian was young, she'd had a nasty temper. It didn't take much to set her off, either. She got in fights at playgrounds, around the neighborhood, at school–everywhere. Her parents had been patient, and also relentless. They taught her breathing exercises, meditation, and more, repeated the rules over and over and over, until Mirian was sick of it. But it had worked: she was very good now about not hurting anyone, and even as the thought came to her, she heard her father's voice: No violence.

So she took a deep breath and continued.

Glyph eighteen was ruined, so she skipped it and worked on the next one.

She was just finishing glyph twenty when the sand in the timer up front finished dropping, and a magical chime rang out in the room.

"Time. Time!" said Professor Eld. "Pens down, now. Now! I see a scribe's pen moving, that's an automatic fail."

Mirian slammed her pen down, and the twentieth glyph, only half-formed, evaporated in a wisp of smoke. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry.

Instead, she turned in her exam sheet and left class.

The girl who had screwed her over came up and said, "Sorry. I'm so sorry," but Mirian just waved her away. She didn't want to hear it.

Exercise always made her feel better. Mirian would have loved to pass the time with a few rapier duels, or run through the Mage's Grove, but there was no time for that. She had a presentation to give, and only ten minutes to get to her next class.

The Artificer's Tower was actually four stout towers connected by a network of skybridges. The architect was, apparently, Persamian, so the building featured elaborate arches and geometric designs. The distinct red and white stripes on the arches and skybridges made it stand out sharply among the more muted colors of the nearby buildings.

Artifice Design 425 was Mirian's favorite and least favorite class. Favorite, because she loved creating. She loved sitting down and calculating where each glyph should go, and the process of assembling the copper wire and fired clay. She loved working in the metal and wood shops. There was a sense of accomplishment that came with artifice, and nothing rivaled it.

She hated it because she had to make do with donated materials that had come out of a scrap yard because she was too poor to afford the nice stuff. While her tuition covered access to the alchemical labs and spellforges, materials were her own responsibility. When she saw the silver filigree and crystal nodes on her peers' devices, she couldn't help but feel a deep envy.

The presentations, thankfully, took place in the labs, which meant there were only twenty-some students staring at her, rather than a lecture hall of a hundred. Still, it was mortifying. Mirian hated drawing attention to herself, and giving a presentation meant she had to. She did her breathing exercises, then walked to the front of the room and plopped down her cube.

It was about three inches per side, and about as unimpressive to look at as anything. She had written herself notes, but realized with horror that she had left those notes in her dorm in the morning rush. So she launched into a rambling speech based on what she remembered.

"So this is a force turbine. It uses rashak and quetoban glyphs, uh, primarily, at least, to generate force, and it's a spell engine, which was the assignment. You, uh, well, it's a basic spell engine because…" She paused, not wanting to say the real reason it was copper and clay. "--because it attempts to demonstrate cost-efficiency in design, and here's the back end where you put the fossilized myrvite. Then it just needs a quick channel in the rouve glyph and, yup." Realizing that the force moving above the cube was invisible, Mirian snatched a pen from the podium and placed it over the cube. It turned in lazy cartwheels while Mirian stared out at the class and bit her lip. Then she turned it off and launched into an equally eloquent description of the design she'd used. By the end of the presentation, she wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Instead, she asked, "Any questions?"

Thankfully, the room was silent, though that was equally nerve-wracking.

"Thank you, Mirian," Professor Torres said. She was the youngest professor Mirian had, but only one student had made the mistake of thinking that meant she wasn't knowledgeable. Professor Illiyia Torres had helped design a military spell engine that was being used by the Baracuel artillery. That had been her final design project here at Torrviol Academy, as a student. She was still learning how to teach, but her expertise was unrivaled. "Did you consider using caudicite to narrow the mana flow along the first glyph exchange?"

Mirian had, but then she'd seen the cost of caudicite in the store. Apparently, it only came from fire drake eggs, and a tiny vial was five silver drachms. That was her monthly food budget. "Yes, but the project sought to demonstrate cost-efficiency. If I was aiming for efficiency, I would have used the caudicite and silver wire between the fifth and sixth nodes, and a brass furnace chamber with corundum input channels."

Professor Torres nodded at that, which was high praise. Then she said, "If you really wanted to reduce cost, you could do without the third and forth sections." She then outlined a completely different design, one that made Mirian's head spin. It was using principles they'd barely touched on in class.

Mirian just nodded along, doing her best to follow. As far as she could tell, Professor Torres critiqued everyone's design, and no one had managed to make something she didn't have at least three problems with. Thankfully, after only a few more minutes of back and forth, Torres said, "Good, you pass. Next presentation, please."

And that was that. Mirian hadn't expected her project to be graded right then and there, but, hey, at least one thing had gone right today.

Mirian's final class of the day was Arcane Mathematics 572, which was just after the lunch hour. It was the sole class taught by Professor Song Jei, who was also the only lecturer in Torrviol Academy who was from the distant land of Zhighua. Professor Jei had an ageless look to her and was impossibly stern. Her thick accent made it hard to understand what she was saying, but thankfully, she spoke the language of math like no one Mirian had ever seen. If Professor Torres was a genius, Professor Jei made her look like a novice. She was a pioneer in the field, and rumor had it she was working on a special project for the Academy, though no one could agree on what.

When asked about the project, she glared at the student and said, "I once heard there are no stupid questions. That was a stupid question. Do not ask stupid questions."

What was clear was that no one else had the expertise she had, hence the special invitation. Mirian looked up to her like no one else. Her confidence and mathematical fluency was inspiring.

Today's lecture was about turning the measured flow of a mana stream at different points into the best-fit equation. It was mind-blowing stuff, and seriously complicated. This was the one class she didn't hesitate to ask questions in. Unlike her other classes, she figured if she was lost, at least half the class was, and so every so often her hand would shoot up. Professor Jei was not necessarily great at teaching, but she could always explain a mathematical transformation or the concept behind an equation. And she never said Mirian's questions were stupid. Mirian wasn't sure she could survive if Professor Jei ever said that about her.

By the end of classes, it was four o'clock, and she felt the exhaustion creeping up on her. But there was just no time to be tired. She had a study session with Nicolus to attend.

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