The Academy's Genius Mage

Both offensive cadets closed the last of the distance with their attention fully forward, the spheres right there, almost in reach, caution thinning with every step the way it does when something looks too good to question.

One of them reached out first.

Fingers touched the surface.

The other followed a half second later, securing the second sphere with both hands.

A beat of nothing.

Then Lucas’s voice slipped out from the undergrowth, quiet and certain.

"It’s about manipulation."

The moment the spheres settled fully into their grasp, both cadets felt it.

Wrong weight. Wrong texture. Wrong everything.

"...Wait," one of them muttered, looking down, brows pulling together. "This feels—"

His expression snapped.

"These are FAKE—"

He didn’t finish.

Lucas came out of the brush fast and low, crossing the distance to the defensive cadet before the shout had fully left the air. His foot came up clean and connected with the cadet’s midsection — not brutal, just enough — and the impact drove the air out of him instantly. The grip on the hemisphere loosened in the same breath.

Lucas’s arm was already moving, catching it before it dropped an inch.

The cadet staggered back. Lucas was already running, hemisphere secured, putting distance between them without looking back.

On the other side of the clearing, the second defensive cadet had not moved. More like couldn’t move.

Lightning coiled around him in tight precise loops — arms, legs, locked. Sylvia stood directly in front of him with the specific calm she had when something had been handled and she was simply finishing it. The current pulsed through the bindings at intervals. Not painful. Just present and very clear about what would happen if he tried anything.

He tried to speak but the bindings pulsed.

He stopped trying to speak.

Sylvia reached out and took the hemisphere from his frozen grip with one hand Gently. She looked at it briefly, checking it was intact.

"Thank you," she said lightly, as if he had offered it himself.

Then she turned and walked.

Behind them, the illusion shattered.

Tool 1 and Tool 2 — who had been standing there so convincingly a moment ago — flickered once and dissolved entirely, their forms breaking apart into drifting fragments of mana that scattered and disappeared before anyone could blink.

The offensive cadets stared at the empty space where two people had just been.

The silence lasted exactly as long as it took for the full picture to arrive.

"We got played," one of them said, voice going tight.

The other had already turned. "After them. NOW."

Two pairs of cadets launched forward together, moving fast.

Ahead, Lucas and Sylvia ran through the trees, each with a hemisphere, the distance between them and the pursuit not comfortable yet. The forest floor moved under their feet — roots and uneven ground, the canopy filtering the light into shifting patches.

Fighting would have been easy. That wasn’t the concern.

One wrong move, one slip on the ground, one moment of divided attention — and either hemisphere could crack. Everything they had just pulled off would be worth nothing.

So they ran.

"Lucas." Sylvia’s voice came in beside him, controlled despite the pace. She glanced sideways. "The mana construct — the core sphere. The one we were training together back then."

Lucas kept moving. "The rotation one?"

"Yes. Form it and pass it to me." Her tone was quick but certain, the tone of someone who has already decided what comes next and just needs one piece. "I’m going to try something."

He didn’t ask why. He’d learned by now that when Sylvia said she was going to try something in that specific voice, questions were a waste of the next few seconds.

He raised two fingers slightly and shifted his focus outward — not inward the way he usually formed it, but directed, toward her free hand, guiding the mana across the gap between them with the careful control that months of late-night practice had made possible.

A faint gold glow sparked at her palm.

It gathered slowly at first — circling, layering, compressing — and then settled into something dense and warm that sat in her hand with a weight that felt more solid than its size suggested.

Sylvia felt it arrive and kept her eyes forward, but something moved through her expression for just a second. She could feel the quality of it — different from anything elemental.

’That was fast... He doesn’t even have an element,’ she thought, the realization not new but landing differently now that she was holding the proof of it in her palm. ’And yet he has something I don’t.’

Despite everything — the running, the pursuit still behind them, the hemisphere in her other hand — a small smile found its way to her lips.

’I’m actually a little jealous.’

She looked sideways at him for just a second.

"Alright," she said. "Leave the rest to me."

She tossed her hemisphere at him.

Casually. Like throwing a basketball to someone across a room.

Lucas’s eyes went wide in real time.

"Are you OUT of your—"

The hemisphere dropped into his arms and immediately started going wrong. He grabbed for it, overcorrected, nearly lost the first one, caught it with his elbow, the second one tilted sideways, he bumped it back with his wrist, his footing stuttered on a root, he lurched forward, caught himself, pinned both hemispheres against his chest with his forearms and stood there for a moment breathing.

Both hemispheres intact.

Neither of them shattered.

He looked up from his arms.

"ARE YOU INSANE," he said, voice going places it didn’t usually go. "That was THIS close — what exactly was going through your head when you decided to just THROW it—"

Sylvia wasn’t looking at him.

She had already slowed to a stop, turning to face the direction of the pursuit, the golden core sphere hovering just above her palm, lightning beginning to coil into it in slow deliberate threads. Her focus had gone somewhere that didn’t include the conversation behind her.

Lucas stared at her back for a second, then closed his mouth.

Two figures appeared beside him from the treeline, slightly out of breath.

Tool 1. Tool 2.

"Sir Lucas." Tool 1’s voice had the energy of someone calling in a favor they were owed. "We did exactly what you asked. So we’ll be on our way now. Once you give us what you promised."

Lucas looked at them.

Blinked once.

"...Who are you?"

Complete silence.

Tool 2’s expression did something complicated. "...What?"

"I think you’ve got the wrong person," Lucas said, adjusting his grip on both hemispheres, already moving forward. "I don’t know you."

"HEY—"

"WAIT—"

"YOU ABSOLUTE—"

Their voices followed him into the trees and then faded as the distance did what distance does.

Lucas kept walking.

Behind him, Sylvia stood in the space where the pursuit was about to arrive, the golden sphere in her palm now threaded through with lightning — blue and gold moving together, the two types of energy braiding around each other, something that hadn’t existed before taking shape between her fingers.

The footsteps were getting closer.

She exhaled once. Let her shoulders settle. Let everything that wasn’t this moment go somewhere else for now.

The smile was still there, the smile she had when she was about to do something she’d been working toward and was ready to find out if it worked.

"Alright," she murmured, watching the trees ahead.

"Time to try my new spell."