Welldark

I would have lied if I said I was happy about my decision to throw my class on gravity magic to the last slot of Monday. Certainly, I wasn’t looking forward to doing anything during these hours. The summer sun outside was setting. Even it bid adieu to the day at this hour. Meanwhile I and two other students were stuck inside a small chamber in the outer areas of the magic wing of Welldark.

This specific branch of the university did generally possess smaller chambers than the rest. Unlike alchemy, where most kinds of concocting still utilized the same instruments, training magic was best done in facilities specialized to the specific sub-type. Not only was it necessary for all of these facilities to find space under the same roof, the amount of people requiring them was also quite small. Magic classes, despite being in the most popular branch of the entire campus, were therefore typically small.

What made my class even smaller was that gravity magic was among the rarest types of talents to have. Everyone formed an affinity for certain elements during puberty. Usually that was in accordance with personality type or life experiences. Consequently, fire and water magic were most common, closely followed by wind and earth, the four basic elements in most conceptions. Following them were the more unusual but still widely known varieties, such as light, shadow, lightning, and so on. Gravity, while still an element people recognized, was not one people usually felt an affinity for.

Personally, I liked to pretend that mine came from my attractiveness.

While people were not shackled by their affinities, it was difficult to expand beyond them. A psychological inclination had created a mystical one, not the other way around, so the motivation to try was typically low as well. I was no exception to this and stuck to what I was good at.

Back to the topic of the small chamber, it was barely larger than the living room of a family home. The windows of the room were stained glass, depicting planets and lesser celestial objects in their sphere of influence. The entirety of the walls was covered in a deep purple, wave-like pattern that was clearly meant to symbolize the pull of gravity. Each branch of Welldark had its character imbued into its architecture and the magic branch was steeped in mystic and esoteric depictions. The air was pregnant with the smell of incense. A faint tingle of mana filled the lungs on every breath, remains from generations of students practicing and exuding trace amounts through inefficient usage.

I stood in front of one of the specialized training apparatuses. A pole that went up from the ground to the height of my shoulders, its surface covered in the kind of trenches one knew from screws. The density of the spiral winding could be adjusted magically. Orbs were kept along the walls, varying in their weight. Together, the number of turns and the weight made for the difficulty of the exercise.

The teacher, a stern man in his thirties, paced up and down between me and my two fellow students. Both of them were women, yet it wasn’t just the teacher’s challenging gaze that kept me focused on the task put before me. Simply put: neither of them was my type and with Esther at home, flirting outside my preferences was just a waste of energy.

I exhaled slowly to gather myself. After the long day, my mind and body were tired, but my Astral Capacity was mostly untapped. As I had done several times already, I put both hands on the lightweight sphere on the top of the pole and let my magic flow into it. The Astral Capacity was formed by my magic channels into the specific shape I wanted it to have. As soon as it left my body, the magic increased the pull of gravity on the sphere, causing it to slowly descend down the windings. I gathered myself and waited until, inevitably, the magic I had pushed into it was consumed.

Gravity magic, in terms of combat application, was a peculiar thing. Typically, the basic attack spell of a supernatural art was to conjure a bolt of it. Gravity magic, instead, was applied through direct contact. Any such contact could weigh the target down or, at a much higher cost, lighten it. Freeing people from the grasp of gravity was harder than to reinforce it. Fortunately for the enemies of us gravity mages. Being weighed down may have been incapacitating, but becoming weightless to the point that one started drifting towards the sky was almost impossible to deal with for most people.

Aside from range and cost, the main drawback of gravity magic was its short-lived application. Repeated hits with gravity magic increased and lengthened the effect. Failure to re-apply caused the effect to fade entirely. For that reason, gravity mages had to keep forcing direct engagements, if they wanted to take full advantage of their magic. It was also one of the reasons why I preferred gauntlets as my battle equipment.

The sphere came to a stop. The mundane pull of gravity was not enough to overcome the resting state. I put both hands on it again, channelled, and let it go. I didn’t bother to measure. The goal of today was not to check on my progress, it was to exhaust my magic channels. Like muscles, stressing specific magic channels widened them. The more I cast gravity magic, the more the magic channels utilized for that endeavour were stressed, the more Astral Capacity could flow through them, the stronger my spells could be. This class allowed me to utilize all of the additional mana the Astral Cultivation class put at my disposal.

Not that mana was the best word for this. It was an archaic term, used broadly to describe ‘magical energy’. It was accurate enough for general conversation, just as ‘fuel’ was accurate enough to describe the various kinds of petrol. Astral Capacity was specifically the variety of magical energy exclusive to those that knew the Dimensional Truth. It was similar to regular arcane power in that one could use it to conjure various supernatural effects. What differentiated us from regular mages, warlocks, shamans and the like were our Astral Bodies, the capacity to freely travel between dimensions, and Anomalias. Of course, mages, warlocks, and shamans also had their individual differences. Their energies were, respectively, arcane, demonic, and naturalistic in origin, each coming with their own attributes. Not all fuel made all engines go.

In summary, magic was a complicated matter.

And I was trying to distract myself from the boredom of repeatedly moving this sphere up and down by mulling over all of it. It was effective and necessary, otherwise I would have quit already. I still would have much rather been at home lying in Esther’s cleavage.

___________________________________________________________________________

“Today, we’ll do a classic exercise: king of the hill.” The teacher told all of us. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a strong jawline, a short beard, and barely stylized brown hair. In short, he was the kind of ‘generic’ handsome man that covered the front of magazines. “For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, a quick explanation. I have marked the arena with three flagpoles…”

I looked behind the teacher and scanned for the positions. We were inside one of the three major training halls of the Battle Branch of Welldark. They were marvelous pieces of magic engineering. The floor was made from a dense network of hexagonal tiles, which were themselves further subdivided into six triangles. Each of those tiles could individually be raised up to ten metres, the triangles slanted at various angles, and a limited selection of textures created on the surface.

Inert, the hall would have looked like a square kilometre field of grey. As each tile had to be adjusted manually, setting up a battlefield was a tremendous amount of work. Through generations of dedicated teachers and students chasing extra grades, a vast catalogue of pre-sets had been created. As I had seen, they were saved on card-shaped pieces of crystal that looked remarkably similar to electronical circuitry.

Brilliant and ambitious as the engineering behind this whole system was, there were still limits to it. For a start, each of the three major (and ten minor) training halls were limited to a theme. We were in the one dedicated to mountainous terrain. Brown and grey rocks dominated all around, rising as slopes to peaks or sharply as cliffs. Patches of grass and small bodies of still water existed between the rocks. Flowing liquids were too much to simulate for this one.

There was a distinct artificiality to all of it. The angles all around were just a bit too uniform to be natural, as much work as had been done to alleviate that problem. More outstanding was that the sides of the tiles were still completely regular grey hexagons, as the magic only adjusted their upper areas. Consequently, the sides of the cliffs stuck out like sore thumbs.

The area we stood in was flat rock, the elevation rising steadily towards the back of the artificial mountain slope. I spotted a yellow, red and blue flag up there, each further away and each at a higher place.

“…when you reach the flag, you slot in one of these devices,” the teacher gestured towards a basket full of rectangular pieces of metal and plastic, numbered and coloured in various ways, next to a table with an empty list on it. “It tracks the time your team has been in control of a point. To take over a point, you remove the opponent's device and slot in your own. These things are sturdy, so feel free to chuck them as hard as you can to delay your opponent’s counterattack. Do not destroy them though. The further away a flag, the more points each second is worth. You fight in teams of two. Any questions?”

I raised my hand. A simple gesture gave me the go-ahead. “Teams of our own choice?”

“Yes.” The answer caused some sighs and chatter by my fellow students. By the size of the crowd, the chatter rose quickly in volume. This being a mandatory class at a reasonable hour, from 18:30 to 20:30, attendance was high. Over fifty people mumbled and the teacher had to clap to retain their attention. The voices ebbed away as he spoke over them. “I know that some of you feel like you have no chance whatsoever. However, there are three capture points. You can engage wherever you feel is best, and you can be sneaky about it. All that is mandatory for this class is that you have a chance to win. It is on you to take it. First place gets 100 Dark, second place 50, third place 25. Now, form your teams.”

I agreed with that whole methodology. Usually, the combat games we engaged in were balanced with fairness in mind, pitching people of equivalent strength against each other or compensating with numbers. That was a poor representation of reality and I had wholly expected that circumstance to change as the weeks and semesters continued. It was good for people to learn they were inferior combatants. It either motivated them to try harder or to specialize in something else.

To be fair to my critics, I was making these statements from a superior position. To start with, I was arguably the strongest person in class. I had earned much of that through hard work, but it was also true that I had natural advantages. Beyond that, I was squeezing the ass of the arguably second strongest person in class.

The only argument to be had was which one of us was which.