Chapter 32: Substitute Teacher
Milo did not fall onto marble, dirt, or runic stone this time.
He materialized already sitting down, his backside planted on a horribly hard, squeaky wooden chair behind a desk covered in chalk dust, a half-eaten apple, and a small brass bell. No fanfare. No golden seam tearing open the sky. Just a chair, a desk, and the distinct sensation of having been rudely repotted.
He blinked, rubbing his eyes. The oppressive gloom of the Vault was gone. In its place was blinding, cheerful daylight streaming through a row of tall glass windows, illuminating a few million dust motes doing lazy pirouettes in the air, blissfully unaware that they were currently the most peaceful thing in the room.
He stared at the environment. Long wooden desks lined up in neat rows. A big black slate mounted on the wall behind him. A groove of chalk sticks, one of them already suspiciously gnawed on.
Milo had never seen a room like this in his life. Where he came from, the King had burned every academy, monastery, and library to the ground three decades ago, on the theory that peasants with access to books tended to develop dangerous ideas — things like indoor plumbing, or rights. The only reason Milo even recognized the room for what it was, was because he’d just read a description of one during his thousand-book sprint through the Vault, in a memoir written by a man who clearly hated his job just as much as Milo was about to.
A classroom, he realized, flabbergasted. I’m in a bloody classroom.
Before he could fully marinate in the absurdity, a sharp golden system window slammed into his vision like a door being kicked open:
[TRIAL OF IMPARTATION: CLASSROOM 4-B]
[OBJECTIVE: TEACH A VIABLE SKILL TO THE CLASS]
[TIME LIMIT: UNTIL THE SEMESTER ENDS]
[FAILURE PENALTY: PERMANENT ACADEMIC DETENTION (DEATH)]
"Teach?" Milo muttered, his voice cracking in his own throat. "What does that even — and what’s a semester, is that like a week? Because that sounds like a long time, and I have a horrible feeling it is not a week."
The Vault, predictably, said nothing back. It never did. It just liked to hand a man a live explosive and then go quiet, the smug bastard.
Milo slowly raised his head. Sitting in front of him were roughly twenty children, somewhere between eight and twelve years old, and they were — to put it as generously as possible — a lot.
A kid with tiny, budding goat horns was mining for gold in the back row with real dedication. A girl with faint blue scales along her cheekbones was aggressively re-braiding her own hair like it had personally wronged her. Two boys by the window were passing a drawing back and forth of a dragon that appeared to have seven legs and possibly an opinion about tax policy.
And dead center, front row, hands folded with the crisp precision of a tiny accountant, sat a boy with enormous glasses, staring up at Milo with the unblinking intensity of a hostage negotiator.
Milo looked down to rest his hands on the desk — and froze.
These weren’t his hands.
His own calloused, scarred fingers — the ones shaped by years of hard labor, dagger hilts, and dungeon grime — were gone. So, thankfully, were another set of hands he’d been dreading, the ones with a certain engagement ring welded on like a bad tattoo. In their place were smooth, pale, absurdly soft hands, currently emerging from the cuffs of a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He looked down at his torso. He was wearing a knitted sweater-vest.
A sweater-vest.
Holy shit, Milo thought, his brain producing a sound not unlike static. I’m a guy, playing a guy, inside a different guy’s body, who is currently pretending to be a third, completely separate guy. I’ve lost count of how many guys that is.
He sat perfectly still for three full seconds, letting the sheer, unfiltered lunacy of the moment wash over him like a wave made entirely of nonsense.
Then he burst out laughing.
It wasn’t a cool, villainous chuckle. It was a full, snorting, wheezing laugh that made the front-row boy flinch like he’d been slapped. Milo had always loved playing characters — the dashing highwayman, the brooding guard, the tragic prince, all lifted wholesale from books he’d stolen off dead men and nobles. But getting cosmically drafted into the body of a middle-aged substitute teacher, in wool trousers, to teach actual children — that was a level of roleplay he had never once dared to dream of, even drunk.
It was ridiculous. It was stupid. He absolutely loved it.
Milo leaned forward, elbows on the desk, slapped on his most authoritative smile, and beamed at the room.
"Alright, kids!" he chimed. "Who can tell me where we left off last time?"
The classroom remained, for the most part, clinically dead. The nose-picker continued his excavation. The girl with scales didn’t miss a single braid.
Only the bright-eyed boy in front sat up straighter, looking thoroughly bewildered.
"Um — teacher?" His voice squeaked slightly. "This is the first class of the semester."
Milo didn’t miss a beat. He jabbed a finger at the boy’s forehead like he was awarding a medal. "Excellent observation! Superb spatial and temporal awareness! I was testing you, and you passed with flying colors."
The boy blinked, profoundly confused, but a small, flustered flush of pride crept up his cheeks anyway. He had no earthly idea why he was pleased. Praise was praise.
Milo leaned in, steepling his soft new fingers. "Now — tell me, bright kid. What do you think this class is actually about?"
He’d clocked this one immediately: the type who read the syllabus twice, alphabetized his own homework, and would frankly be more qualified to run this class than Milo, whose entire teaching résumé consisted of showing street urchins how to lift a guard’s coin purse without a single jingle, and the correct climbing technique for a noble’s private library window.
The boy puffed his chest out, adjusting his oversized glasses with great ceremony. "Well, sir, this is Skill Learning. You’re supposed to teach us a foundational skill so we can unlock our mana."
Milo blinked. That’s a thing? You can unlock mana through learing a skill? I thought mana just showed up uninvited, like a rash. He filed that away for later, somewhere behind seventeen other more pressing horrors.
The boy’s shoulders slumped, voice dropping into a small, disappointed mutter. "But I don’t actually know what skill we’re learning today. I don’t know any skills myself yet. I’m just a kid."
Milo’s smile froze solid on his face.
His heart dropped clean through the sweater-vest, through the tweed trousers, and came to rest somewhere near his left boot.
A skill. He needs me to teach them a skill.
Milo frantically rifled through his own status menu. The Vault had stripped every combat ability he’d spent years bleeding for. Gone. Deleted. Not even a placeholder icon left behind out of pity. And apparently skills needed to be roughly compatible with a student’s class and stats to even take, which ruled out ninety percent of what he used to know even if he still had it.
Which left him with exactly one active skill in his entire arsenal.
One. Single. Skill.
The Tier-B grimoire spell he had absorbed approximately five minutes ago, still warm in his chest like a bad decision: [GOLEM SUMMONING (DOMAIN-BOUND)].
A high-tier, soul-anchored arcanum spell, designed by and for master elementalists and battle-mages with decades of training and at least one dramatic backstory — theoretically compatible with any class, in the same way a chainsaw is theoretically compatible with a birthday cake. And he was, apparently, about to teach it to a room full of twelve-year-olds, one of whom was actively attempting to eat a stick of blue chalk like a breadstick.
"Riiiight," Milo said, his voice dropping an octave as a cold sweat broke out along the back of his neck. "Right, right, right. Golem summoning. Standard first-day material. Nothing to it."
The bright kid’s eyes went round as dinner plates. "Wait — golem summoning?! Teacher, isn’t that an advanced Tier-B ritual? My dad said you need a tertiary mana core just to open the earth-shaping array!"
From the back row, a kid who’d been fully asleep thirty seconds earlier shot upright like he’d been electrocuted. "Did somebody say we get to build a monster?!"
"Yeah!" the nose-picker shouted, flinging his chalk aside. "Can I make mine out of mud and spit?!"
The entire classroom, stone dead three seconds ago, detonated into pure chaos. Kids leapt onto desks, cheering, chanting, demanding to summon giant rock beasts to go smash the cafeteria into rubble on general principle. The goat-horned kid was already trying to headbutt a chair into submission as a warm-up.
Milo sat behind his desk, watching twenty small, screaming children lose their minds over blood magic, as an ominous red countdown bloomed above the slate board:
[TIME UNTIL BELL: 15:00]
Milo swallowed hard, tugging at the strangling collar of his sweater-vest.
"Okay," he murmured to himself, plucking a fresh stick of chalk from the groove with trembling fingers. "Step one of teaching: pretend you know exactly what you’re doing until something catches fire."
He raised his voice over the din, and — against every single one of his better instincts — began.
"Alright, listen up! This spell is special. You can’t just cobble a golem together out of whatever garbage is lying around — it has to match your domain. That’s the whole trick of it. And because of that, you don’t even need a mana core. Your soul acts as a sort of... remote core. Which is very convenient, and also means that if your golem takes a bad hit, your soul takes a bad hit too. Soul damage is no joke, by the way. Enough of it and you’re dead-dead. Permanently. The bad kind."
The room went, very briefly, quiet.
The bright kid’s hand shot up so fast he nearly dislocated it. "I — I really don’t think you should be teaching us that? We’re just kids?"
"Shut up, nerd, that sounds awesome," said the goat-horned kid, not looking up from his chair-headbutting. "We want to learn the soul one."
A ragged chorus of agreement rose up from the rest of the class, twenty small voices uniting behind the single worst idea any of them had ever had.
Milo looked out at his students — at the scales, the horns, the seven-legged dragon drawing, the boy still chewing on chalk — and heard himself say, with the calm, hollow confidence of a man already regretting every word:
"Yeah. Yeah, I can do this. Easy. Let’s just hope none of you have some horrifying, world-ending domain hiding in there."
He cleared his throat, chalk squeaking against slate as he began sketching the first array with a confidence he did not remotely possess.
"And besides," he added, mostly to himself, "the golem’s only as strong as the body and materials you feed into it at the moment of casting. So realistically, nobody in here is walking out with anything too big or too dangerous. Right?"
Fifteen minutes on the clock. Twenty children. One soul-anchored death spell.
Milo really, really hoped he was right.