Published at 24th of February 2024 10:34 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 13

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

My sister was a rare talent when it came to magic, and my father wasn’t that far behind her. I’d tutored four villagers and they’d all performed with varying degrees of competency in different fields. None of them had stuck out to me, but all of them had been able to grasp the basics. To some extent, I’d enjoyed teaching all of them.

I watched Tanner fumble control of the mana again, letting another tendril of it mist into the air and dissipate. We weren’t even using the leech stone yet; that would have been too difficult a challenge for a complete novice. Instead, he was holding the storage crystal I’d broken off the end of the enforcer’s baton and trying to pull mana from it into his own core.

I had hundreds of years of experience teaching magic. I’d taught in universities and academies, had taken on dozens of apprentices for private instruction, and tutored full mages looking to advance their skills in new directions. I knew thousands of exercises to help train every skill a budding apprentice needed to master.

We were on our seventh attempt and I was having a serious internal debate about whether I was pushing Tanner too hard or if he really was just that bad. Usually I could figure out what someone was doing wrong right away and guide them toward a technique that would suit their individual way of doing something. Not here. It was like he was a blank slate with no bias one way or another.

If I’d been planning a long-term apprenticeship for him, I might have considered this a good thing. Tanner had no bad habits to break because he had no habits at all. It was like he’d never, ever manipulated his own mana, not even once. For all I knew, maybe he hadn’t. Leech stones were everywhere, sapping mana from anyone they touched. It was possible he’d never had enough mana in his core to do anything with it at all.

“Alright, this isn’t working. I think we need to take a few steps back to the very fundamentals,” I said.

“Ya think?”

I paused, took a breath, and let it go. Tanner was frustrated and he was a child. He wasn’t trying to lash out at me, and he wasn’t my apprentice. A little more respect would be nice, but that wasn’t part of our agreement. By the same reasoning, I was free to use… harsher training techniques as long as I fulfilled the letter of the deal.

“You said you can feel your mana and move it around in your body,” I said. “Be honest with me. How true is that?”

“I’ve felt it before. Sometimes,” Tanner mumbled. “Usually first thing in the morning.”

That made sense. He had the most mana when he woke up after a night of not being near a leech stone. As soon as the kids went out into the city, they’d be constantly walking past other people carrying money on them. Thousands of instances of casually brushing past someone would slowly eat away at their reserves. I knew that from personal experience. Just coming into contact with someone holding a leech stone was enough for it to start working, and while any one individual stone wouldn’t do much over just a few seconds, they were everywhere.

Even beyond accidental contact with people holding leech stones, mana was money here, and starving street children desperately needed that. It wouldn’t surprise me if they regularly pooled their mana to fill the smaller stones in an attempt to buy the things they couldn’t steal.

It was no wonder Tanner didn’t have even a child’s instinctual control over his mana. He’d never had more than a sliver of his total capacity, certainly not enough to do anything with. That was the problem we were trying to remedy now, but pulling mana from a storage crystal had proved beyond his abilities. I was not willing to wait three days or more for him to fill half a core of mana, and I didn’t think Tanner was fine with being trapped in this room the entire time.

It was time for drastic measures.

“I don’t like that look in your eyes,” Tanner said.

“Don’t worry, there won’t be any permanent harm.”

“W-what?”

“This’ll be easier if you don’t fight it, but if you can’t help yourself, I won’t hold it against you.”

“Hold on a second! Can we talk about this?”

As a general rule, I wasn’t a fan of mind control. It was borderline unethical at best, and some of the worst, most depraved monsters I’d ever had the displeasure of meeting had been divination and enchantment masters who specialized in mind control. If time had permitted, I’d never have considered this, but I’d already spent too much time preparing myself for battle against other mages.

I reached into my phantom space and pulled out my staff. “Hey now,” Tanner said, putting his hands up. “Slow down here.”

“Normally, I wouldn’t do this, but we’re on a tight timeline. If you want to learn how to do this, you need mana and we can’t afford to wait for you to generate it naturally. Without some basic form of control on your part, I can’t help you. So I’m going to do it for you. Pay attention so you can do this on your own later.”

Tanner didn’t have much mana, but even the sliver sitting in his core was enough for my mana puppet spell to grab hold. His eyes widened and he tried to move, but my spell had caught him fully and he didn’t have the first clue how to resist it. He jerked upright. I commanded the mana in his core to flow out into the arm holding the storage crystal and connect to it, opening a channel between Tanner and the mana.

It flowed back into him, draining the storage crystal in a few seconds and filling Tanner’s mana core to bursting. “This is what I was trying to get you to do,” I said. “Now, a few exercises in controlling this mana.”

Once his core was full, mana puppet took him over fully. I had more than enough mana to work with to control his whole body, but I made sure not to move his body. Mana puppet could do that, but it wasn’t ideal and the spell had a tendency to cause tears in muscles when the victim resisted, and they always resisted. Even willing volunteers couldn’t stop themselves from fighting the effect when they started losing control of their limbs.

“Pay attention here. Hopefully you can feel your own mana. See how I’m moving it through your limbs? You need to be able to do this, too. Invocations are essentially more complicated versions of these movements. You want to be able to run three times faster than normal? Jump ten feet into the air? Lift a stone the size of your body? This is where that all starts.”

Mana puppet was an expensive spell to run, and the ten seconds of tutorial I gave him drained my core eight times over even with my staff helping. I released Tanner, who stood there staring, mouth agape.

“That… that was… so amazing!” he said. “Can you show me more stuff like that?”

“No,” I groused. “I used way more mana than what you’ve got in that shard doing just that much.”

“Awww…”

That was a weird reaction, especially considering how timid he’d been before I’d cast the spell. I supposed there was no need to worry about any lingering mental trauma. Tanner might just be the first person I’d ever tutored who’d thought it was fun to be subjected to mana puppet.

“Do you think you can replicate what I did with your mana?” I asked.

In response, mana surged out of his core and down to his knees. It pulled itself back just as quickly, causing Tanner to scowl and try again. That attempt didn’t make it any farther, but it was a start. If this was what it took to get him making progress, I was going to run out of mana long before he could actually cast any spells.

Mana coursed through Tanner’s body again, stretching just a little bit closer to the goal this time. It wasn’t much, but it was progress. At this rate, he’d master the exercise in a week. I tried to be reasonable about it. He’d started way behind. I was demanding a lot. It wasn’t fair to expect perfection from him.

“We’re going to have to make some hard decisions,” I said.

“About what?” Tanner asked. He shook one of his legs as he sent mana into it. Whatever he was trying to achieve, it didn’t work.

“Ideally, we’d spend a month or two, maybe more, working on your ability to sense and control mana. There’s only so much I can do to help you, and the better you are at controlling mana on your own, the better the results of your ignition ritual. If we do it right now, you’re going to get at best four times your current mana generation rate.”

“That’s bad?” Tanner asked.

“It’s not ideal. With a week or two of practice, I think we could bring that number up to ten times instead.”

“But you don’t have a week or two.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I know the agreement is I teach you some spells and you show me the smuggler’s passage. I can ignite your core for you and show you what you need to practice, but if we do, you’ll be crippling yourself in the future. I can’t wait long enough for you to learn how to do this right.”

“But if I show you the secret tunnel now, there goes my leverage,” Tanner said.

“Exactly. It’s a question of how willing you are to trust a stranger. I could give you my word that I’ll come back and honor my side of the deal, but…”

Tanner laughed. “Yeah.”

I couldn’t blame him for that reaction. Trust wasn’t something starving street orphans had in abundance. They couldn’t, not if they wanted to survive. Trusting someone introduced vulnerability. It had to be earned through shared hardship and repeated testing. I wasn’t part of their crew, and I wasn’t interested in joining even if I had the time. I was always going to be an outsider.

“That’s the offer,” I said. “We take a few hours today to practice your mana control and I’ll do the heavy lifting for your ignition. You’ll be a mage, but an extremely weak one. Or we take some time and do it right, but I need to go attend to my other business first.”

“Let me think about it for a bit, okay?”

I nodded. “For now, let’s just keep practicing. When this circle runs out of magic, we’ll go our separate ways and meet back here tomorrow. You can let me know what you’ve decided then.”

It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Tanner was a weak mage. I didn’t see a love for magic itself in him, just a fascination with what the power it represented could do for him. I’d been in his position, and I remembered the feeling of wonder that had come over me when I’d seen works of magic. Tanner didn’t seem interested, other than his odd appreciation for the mana puppet spell.

He hadn’t asked me what spell I’d used to disarm the enforcer, or what had caused the explosion. He wasn’t interested in the circle I’d used magic to carve in the stone. Considering how rare any form of magic was here, I would have expected a nominal amount of interest from any random person, let alone a child who’d deliberately sought me out and asked me to teach him.

I’d met plenty of mediocre mages who appreciated magic only as a tool. The ones with that kind of attitude never had the drive to reach the true heights of power humans were capable of. Tanner was that kind, and with the constraints he’d labor under being a mage in a place like Derro, I doubted he’d ever advance past what I considered to be apprentice rank.

I kept him doing mana exercises for a few more hours until the circle ran out of magic, then sent him back to the rest of his crew while I returned to my own hideout. Tomorrow, one way or another, I was getting a peek behind that wall.

Share