Chapter 33: Lesson’s in session
Milo stared at the slate board, chalk poised in his hand, a cold sweat slowly soaking into the back of his tweed sweater-vest.
The class was on the absolute edge of their seats. Twenty pairs of wide, terrifyingly hopeful eyes stared up at him like he was about to hand out puppies. The goat-horned kid had already shoved his books, pencil case, and half a sandwich off his desk to make room for his future mud-and-spit demon.
"Alright, class," Milo began, clearing his throat and doing his level best to channel the confidence of a man who had absolutely, definitely not faked his diploma. "Before we construct a terrifying, city-leveling construct — we must first cover the absolute basics of Domain-Bound Arcana."
He drew a large, extremely wobbly circle on the slate. He had no idea what it meant. He simply thought it looked academic, the way a doctor’s illegible signature looked trustworthy.
"Who can tell me," Milo said, spinning around with a sharp, commanding look he’d definitely stolen from a book about naval officers, "what their active Domain is?"
Silence.
Twenty small faces stared back at him, blank as fresh parchment. The girl with the blue scales froze mid-braid, one strand of hair still pinched between two fingers. Somewhere in the second row, a boy tentatively raised his hand.
"Is — is a domain like my bedroom?" he asked, small and earnest. "My mom says that’s my domain, and I have to keep it clean."
"No, Billy, or whatever your name is, it is not your bedroom," Milo said smoothly, while privately jotting a mental note — Domain = Bedroom? Investigate later — just in case the universe was secretly that stupid. He glanced around the room. "Wait. Do none of you know your own magical domains?"
A slow, collective shake of twenty small heads.
Fantastic, Milo thought, keeping his smile bolted firmly in place. I am a fake teacher, teaching an unteachable skill, to real children, none of whom possess the prerequisite magic to so much as light a candle.
The countdown on the slate ticked mercilessly onward, indifferent to his crisis.
Panic, that old familiar traveling companion who’d walked with him through prison breaks and regicide plots, tapped him gently on the shoulder. He needed a cheat code. He needed an authority figure who wasn’t currently him.
His eyes landed on the front row — on the glasses-wearing prodigy who’d nearly ascended to a higher plane of joy earlier just from being praised for stating the obvious.
Milo planted his hands on his hips, arranging his face into the smug, all-knowing smile of a master strategist several steps ahead of everyone in the room. "Of course you don’t know," he declared grandly, as if he’d planned this from the start. "Because this — all of this — was a pedagogical trap. A test of your honesty! And only one of you was wise enough to look properly, thoroughly confused."
He slammed his palm flat onto the nerd kid’s desk. The boy jumped a clean three inches off his seat.
"Tell me, prodigy," Milo purred, leaning down until he was eye to eye with him. "Explain to these unenlightened souls how a true scholar identifies their domain. Surely you haven’t forgotten the standard method."
The boy’s face went brick red, his oversized glasses sliding halfway down his nose. "U-um! Well! Professor! We’re supposed to use our Primary Domain Registers! The blank rune cards the academy handed out on orientation day!"
Milo’s heart did a small, triumphant leap. Jackpot.
"Precisely!" he barked, snapping his fingers with theatrical flair. "A gold star for — what was your name again, young genius?"
"Oliver, sir!" the boy squeaked, looking as though he might combust from sheer validation.
"A gold star for Oliver! Everyone — take out your blank rune cards, immediately!"
The room detonated into a frenzy of rummaging. Backpacks flapped open. Wooden desk lids slammed. Pencil cases rattled like maracas. Within thirty seconds flat, every single child was holding up a small, glass-like, translucent card.
"Oliver," Milo whispered, leaning low over the boy’s desk, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. "Demonstrate for the class. For... review purposes."
"Yes, Professor!" Oliver said, with the solemn gravity of a knight accepting a royal commission.
He pressed his thumb to the center of the blank glass card. A soft, ambient blue light pulsed up from beneath his skin. The glass shimmered, and glowing golden runes began stitching themselves across its surface, one careful stroke at a time.
Oliver gasped. "My Domain! It’s — knowledge-related! Pens, books, scrolls!"
Milo blinked. Wait. Ink and parchment? That’s basically my domain. This kid is my Kin. He decided, then and there, that Oliver was to be protected at all costs, possibly with his own body, possibly from the other children.
Around the room, light began flashing like a localized thunderstorm as nineteen more thumbs slammed down onto nineteen more cards.
"I got Damp Dirt and Moss!" the nose-picker cheered, brandishing a green-glowing card like a trophy.
"Mine is Sugar and Baked Goods!" a girl with pigtails squealed, clapping so hard she nearly fell out of her chair.
"I got Shiny Pebbles!" shouted a boy, who immediately upended both his pockets, spilling gravel across the floor like he’d been secretly hoarding it his whole life for exactly this moment.
"Awesome!" Milo cheered, and for one unguarded second, he meant it — genuinely swept up in the sheer, adorable chaos of it all. "Now! The instructions are simple. To summon a Domain-Bound Golem, you must gather physical pieces of your domain, align your soul’s wave frequency, and build the construct. Go! Gather your materials!"
"YAAAY!"
It was pure, unfiltered madness. Twenty children scattered across the classroom like a litter of overexcited puppies let off the leash for the first time in their short lives.
The Sugar-and-Baked-Goods girl immediately began raiding her classmates’ abandoned lunchboxes, liberating half-eaten cookies and one deeply unfortunate jam sandwich. The Damp-Dirt boy dumped an entire potted fern onto his desk and began enthusiastically spitting on the soil to work it into proper mud, with the focus of a man building a cathedral. The Shiny-Pebbles boy dumped forty smooth river stones onto the floor and began stacking them into a small, wobbling cairn, muttering measurements to himself like a tiny, deranged architect.
Milo watched them with a soft, helpless, entirely unprofessional grin. They were so earnest. So loud. So hopelessly, catastrophically doomed to fail.
Poor little guys, he thought, leaning back against his desk, arms crossed, shaking his head with the fond, pitying warmth of a man watching puppies attempt algebra. It took me an hour of deep structural analysis, powered by a Tier-B Insight skill, just to grasp the mana-weaving formula behind this thing — and that was with the book practically holding my hand. They’re going to spend the next ten minutes piling garbage on their desks, wondering why none of it stands up, and then I’m going to have to console at least four separate crying children before the bell rings—
"Professor Milo?"
Milo looked down.
Oliver was standing beside his desk, notebook balanced carefully on one arm. On top of it sat a small, meticulously organized pile: two blue fountain-pen ink bottles lined up like soldiers, several neat scraps of torn parchment, and a scattering of discarded textbook pages, all arranged with the tidy precision of a boy who almost certainly alphabetized his sock drawer.
Oliver pressed both small hands flat against the pile. His mana node hummed to life — a tiny, fragile pulse of blue light, barely brighter than a firefly.
Surely not, Milo thought, his smile freezing solid on his face. There is no possible way a twelve-year-old—
WRRRR.
The ink bottles uncorked themselves with violent, gleeful abandon. Dark fluid surged out, defying gravity entirely, curling up into the air in ribbons of liquid midnight. The scraps of paper fluttered upward, wrapping themselves around the floating ink like a delicate, folding skeleton. Paper folded. Ink bound. And with a soft, polite little pop, a four-inch-tall knight made entirely of folded textbook pages and gleaming ink-black armor stepped neatly off the desk’s edge.
It raised a tiny paper sword. It bowed — to Oliver, specifically, with the crisp formality of a soldier reporting for duty.
Every thought in Milo’s brain briefly filed out of the building.
Oliver peered up at him, eyes huge and shining behind his glasses. "I — I think I did it, sir? Did I align the spell matrix correctly?"
Milo stared at the tiny paper knight. Then at Oliver. Then, slowly, at the merciless magical clock on the wall, still ticking away like it had somewhere else to be.
His mind shattered into a thousand small, screaming pieces. I spent an entire ordeal in an existential void. I lost an argument with a talking room. I read a THOUSAND BOOKS to learn this spell. This child did it with four scraps of paper and a bottle of ink in under thirty seconds.
"I... uh..." Milo croaked, his voice cracking horribly in the middle. "Yes. Outstanding, Oliver. A-plus. Gold star. Several gold stars."
"WOAH!" the rest of the class gasped in unison, abandoning their mud piles and pebble cairns to swarm Oliver’s desk in a wave of pure, unfiltered awe.
"Oliver made a tiny paper man!"
"Teacher! Teach us how to make ours move like that!"
"Show us, Professor! Show us how a master does it!"
Twenty small faces turned back toward Milo in perfect unison, eyes shining with the kind of complete, uncritical adoration that only children and very small dogs are capable of producing on command. The clock kept ticking, refusing to end, refusing him any kind of mercy. In the corner of his vision, the failure penalty pulsed a soft, patient, deeply unsettling red: PERMANENT ACADEMIC DETENTION (DEATH).
Every rational fiber of Milo’s being screamed for a tactical retreat. A trapdoor. A well-timed fire drill. Anything.
He took a slow, shaky breath instead, and pulled his tweed jacket tight around his shoulders like it was armor.
He couldn’t just scrape by on Oliver’s coattails. He had to prove he belonged up here. He had to show these little monsters — these sweet, horrifying, adorable little monsters — exactly what a true Fool could conjure when backed into a corner with nothing left to lose but his dignity and possibly his soul.
"Alright," Milo said, a slow, dangerous, entirely theatrical grin spreading across his face. "Settle down, tiny mortals."
He reached into his pocket and drew out his own translucent Domain card, pressing his thumb hard against the glass.
The card didn’t glow gently, the way the children’s had. It detonated — a blinding halo of shimmering, pale-silver light, washing over the classroom in the combined brilliance of a thousand absorbed books, a thousand borrowed voices, a thousand quiet, devoured nights.
Milo raised his soft, tweed-clad hands into the air, his eyes lit with wild, unhinged magic as he reached down into the endless library humming inside his soul.
"Pay attention, class," he purred, as the very air around him began to bend and fold like the pages of a book caught in a rising wind.
"Lesson’s in session."