Ch 50: Gerard Osborne
Lucien turned on his heel and with a streak of his hand wrote Practice Session 101 on the crisp whiteboard in bold black letters, then faced the class again.
Since the room had been deadly silent, Lucien saw no reason to delay any further. His eyes drifted briefly to Patrick, who sat rigid at his desk, his own gaze too afraid to rise and meet Lucien's. Lucien felt a quiet satisfaction at Patrick's reaction, though his irritation had not entirely faded.
The nonsense that boy had spouted about Melissa being his property still rankled him. She was a human being. How could she be anyone's property? Patrick was operating on some entirely different level of delusion.
Shaking away the thoughts from his mind, Lucien turned his head toward his attendant Connor who was silent standing at the corner.
"Connor, give those two modified mana restriction bracelets to student Amber and student Eleena." Lucien said, and just as he finished his order, Connor moved past like a shadow and materialized before Amber and Eleena, placing into each of their desks a set of iron-steel, white-colored bracelets.
"Student Patrick will receive his bracelet tomorrow and will practice with his old bracelet for today, but once class ends, hand that bracelet to Connor. He will return it back tomorrow." Lucien said, and as he spoke he slid a mana restriction bracelet onto his own wrist. His were different from the ones the students wore. Theirs were of Refined [Upper] rank, but his were of Rare [Upper] rank, one full tier above, and they were modified to permit only five percent mana circulation through the body at any given time. Refined [Upper] rank bracelets would not be able to limit his mana as he was in Sky [Mid] rank.
Artefacts and weapons were categorized into ranks that began at Common, which was exactly what the name suggested, ordinary and available in any artefacts or weapons shop. Above that sat Uncommon, a little harder to find but still obtainable for anyone with enough coin. Then came Refined, a genuine step above Uncommon in every measurable way, followed by Rare, which required both connections and money to obtain but was not entirely out of reach for the rich.
Above Rare came Epic, extraordinarily difficult to find and demanding of both wealth and influence, and then Legendary, the cream of the crop, standing apart from everything beneath it. Beyond even that was Mythic rank, so scarce it was like finding a single needle buried in a mountain range of haystacks, yet capable of changing the fate of a person's life entirely. And within each of these ranks there existed a further division of power, broken into the sub-ranks of Lower, Mid, and Upper, each of which carved every rank into three distinct tiers of strength.
"I hope everyone has their bracelet on." Lucien said, sweeping his gaze across the room. He felt a quiet satisfaction as he confirmed that all of them had already worn their bracelets, some of them even rolling up the red sleeves of their coats to put their bracelets on full display, as though they had never once taken them off and had been wearing them since yesterday without pause.
"Good. Since all of you are equipped," Lucien said, beginning to pace the aisle between the rows of desks, "we will be spending the entirety of the next twenty-nine days focused on spellcasting practice, right up until the test day. Most of you, I believe, already have a reasonable grip on the theory, so I will weave in teaching as we go and guide each of you in spellcasting and mana circulation so that none of you ends up bursting their core or shattering their manapaths."
His eyes paused on Melissa, who had been listening with focused intensity. The moment she felt his gaze land on her, she flinched almost imperceptibly, his words clearly pointing back to yesterday's outburst, the one where she had very nearly destroyed her own core and manapaths in one reckless moment. A flush crept up her face and spread across her cheeks with every passing second. Lucien looked away before it could deepen further.
"What are you waiting for?" Lucien said, "Start your spellcasting. Today's goal is simple. Form a ball of mana and hold it for as long as you can."
The students stirred, shifting in their seats with a kind of collective nervous energy, and then slowly began to focus. Some closed their eyes and turned their open palms toward the ceiling in front of them, and one by one they began drawing mana up from their cores and channeling it toward their hands, coaxing it into a small wisp of concentrated energy.
Lucien watched and nodded to himself. Most of them were managing reasonably well, succeeding in forming small golf-ball-sized mana spheres, even if those spheres kept dissolving after only a few seconds. A small number, however, were struggling visibly and badly. The mana would emerge from their palms only to dissipate before it could take any shape, scattering uselessly into the air around their fingertips. They were used to drawing on their full capacity, and now that the bracelets had cut them off from seventy percent of their total mana circulation, they were floundering without the familiar weight of full power behind them.
Lucien said nothing. He intended to let them fail first. He would not step in unless something reckless was happening, something like Melissa's episode from the previous day. Let them taste defeat. Let them sit with the shape of their own failure for a while, because when he would teach them, they would understand not only the correct method but the precise reason they had been doing it wrong, and that understanding would stay with them far longer than a simple correction ever could.
Lucien continued moving through the classroom, and his presence alone was enough to unravel the students who had managed to form a sphere, their concentration crumbling the moment he passed beside them, their mana wisping away as a primal fear gripped their bodies and made focus impossible.
He noticed this and felt something stir with amusement deep inside him, though his expression remained entirely unreadable. Some distant part of him reminded him that these were his students and that he perhaps should not be taking pleasure in their discomfort, but he set that thought aside just as quickly as it had arrived. The more they failed now, the more clearly they would see the right path when he showed it to them. There was no cruelty in it. This would only help them from stirring away from the wrong path.
Lucien smiled to himself at his conclusion and he found his eyes eventually coming to rest on Mark, the main protagonist of the very story Lucien had been born into.
Mark sat with his eyes closed, his average-length brown hair falling loosely around his face, a single vertical vein bulging along his forehead as a single bead of sweat traced its way down and dropped onto the red fabric of his coat. He did not open his eyes. He did not waver. There was something in his concentration that made Lucien pause, something genuine and admirable about the sheer effort the boy was pouring into the task, and for a brief moment Lucien found himself truly impressed.
Then Mark formed a sphere, a golf-ball-sized knot of light-blue energy cupped in his palm, and immediately attempted to divide it into two separate spheres.
But, it dissolved in an instant.
The sphere had already been unstable, visibly crackling from within, and trying to split it before it had even stabilized was exactly the kind of move that looked ambitious and was in practice foolish. One did not build the walls of a house before the foundation had been poured and set. Lucien looked away and kept walking.
Lucien stole a glance at Judy, who sat beside Mark. She too had her eyes shut and her palm raised open before her, clearly following the same instinct as her friend Mark, and she had managed to form her own sphere, its color a soft green that matched the long flow of her green hair. There was at least one difference between hers and Mark's worth noting. Hers did not crackle from within. It sat more smoothly in the air above her palm, cleaner in its formation. But just like Mark, she immediately tried to divide it into two and failed just as completely.
Lucien shook his head. He could not understand why they were trying to do everything at once. One thing at a time. Improve one thing at a time. Better oneself slowly and steadily, building on each small success before reaching for the next. That was the only way. But he said nothing yet, and he continued pacing the aisle until his attention snagged on a face so familiar that it was strange he had almost managed to overlook it entirely until now.
Gerard Osborne.
Lucien’s old bitter enemy. The boy who had spent years being jealous of Lucien, who had wanted nothing more than to surpass him in some meaningful way and had never once managed it. At the approach of Lucien's footsteps, Gerard lifted his head, and for a fraction of a second Lucien saw something primal fear wrapping around Gerard’s black eyes that looked sinisterly close to a bastard who was nothing more than dirt in the world.
Lucien was not surprised by what he saw there, because Gerard Osborne was one of the third-rate villains of this story, a minor antagonist whose entire arc was built around being a stepping stone on the road to the hero Mark's eventual rise and bonding with Eleena.
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