R-S Chapter 07 (Patreon)

The healer class wasn’t special. The teacher was a plain-looking woman, maybe slightly overweight but it was hard to tell with her thick padded robes. She wrote her name on the board. Miss Dawson before letting us know. “The first year of this class only those who have chosen healer or picked it as their secondary will even practice healing. Everyone else will be put through the motions, taught about the history, and learn everything about healing except healing with your own magic. That is because you are far more likely to cause harm than heal the person. You’re second-year teacher has a different opinion than me but you’ll be learning how to kill people in other classes, not mine.”

She was completely honest as we didn’t learn a single thing about practical healing only the history of priests, the next class we would learn more and more until we got to modern times. I regretted the mage teacher talked me out of canceling my secondary and tertiary choices to only focus on mage work. At least I could have learned how to heal if I kept it, one of the safest classes out of all of them to fall back on.

The final class was for support magic. As I hadn’t selected it as my secondary or tertiary, I’d only take the class once a week instead of twice or every other day. We walked in and the man who had his head on his desk and didn’t move finally spoke. “My name is… Mr. Cullman and there are some books over there to learn support magic.”

Most students didn’t even bother to get up, already having better or didn’t worry about support-type magic. I got up and looked at all the books available. Warding, magic smithing, magic item creation, and support magics. How was all this being taught in only one class? Is this why warders were charging more and more and the quality of magical equipment was going down?

I grabbed one of each book as he made eye contact with me. “You! Why couldn’t you have picked my class, huh!? You know how many students signed up? Three, you know how many I needed to not get my budget cut? Four! And you picked the mage class instead of something like this because it doesn’t seem useful. Then why did you grab every single book, huh!?” 

He had tears in his eyes as he yelled at me. The other mages began to snicker at me as I took the books and sat down. The man went back to almost catatonic as I began to read. As difficult as practicing my mage spells was, I still had plenty of downtime as my mana regenerated. Having something to read, something to work towards would go a long way to growing my foundations.

I regretted how I was solely focused on mage spells, I could tell that it was mostly spinning my wheels and the few spells I could cast weren’t getting much easier just constantly using them over and over again. I should have gained a wider level of knowledge, being good at everything but not great at anything. I was already the weakest mage, why would I focus on the impossible task of catching up with everyone else instead of widening and varying my pool of knowledge?

At least right now, I could barely cast. The pain from having my mana capacity expanded still felt like a full-body rash, prickling annoying pain anytime I tried to do anything involving magic. At least right now I was upset by how slowly I was learning. I had watched everyone in the class learn, cast, and get better at the spells they’ve learned while I could barely cast mine.

I had to stay resolved though. Out of everything, I needed to focus, put my nose to the grindstone and just try to not get kicked out so my life would end. Another week passed and the pain finally started to lessen. If the nurse didn’t guarantee me that I didn’t fuck myself over by drinking that, I’d have assumed my teacher hurt me on purpose. A week after that was the first class battle of the school. Because it was optional I decided to skip out which was probably for the best. The mages didn’t win, being limited to not casting lethal spells the magic warriors were the ones who won.

The prize wasn’t very impressive. Points for purchasable items at the school's store and one person(the MVP) got a bottle of Ambrosia. The mages were the only ones who got Ambrosia once per year. It meant, if I could stick it out and get the double drop Ambrosia my mana capacity would reach seventy-eight as long as I didn’t start developing a resistance to the Ambrosia.

Most people didn’t for about ten capacity but there have been some instances of people developing resistance or even immunity to the capacity-increasing effects of the Ambrosia. Buckling down, classes became a blur. Every day felt pretty much the same, just less pain until everyone started talking about the attack on the bank on the other side of the city.

A week or so after that rumors started to spread that the princess who was visiting went missing. It was impossible to verify if that was the truth as the rumors got worse and worse eventually ending with the principal coming to our class to squash those rumors. Finally, something changed about the classes, but it wasn’t a good thing.

I was walking my way towards class when four of the students stood outside. I had expected to easily bypass them but as they noticed me, two moved to block the door while heir to the Blaire family and his number one lackey came up to talk to me. “You should quit already.” He said it as a matter of fact. The blatant out-there approach put me off a little because he had barely said more than a few words in the past two months.

“I can’t.” I give him an equally short and curt answer. He just kept looking at me before speaking again. “It’s a waste of time and resources for you to be here. We all know you’re going to fail this upcoming quarterly test. Why punish yourself by staying in this class you shouldn’t have been a part of in the first place?” Still, I couldn’t see the angle he was coming at. He hadn’t bullied me, no one really had, at least not to my face.

He took in another deep breath before speaking again. “It’s just a piece of friendly advice. You are clearly not designed to be a mage, you should think about dropping out. I’ve done my part to warn you but if you want to waste your life it’s not my job to protect you from yourself.” With that, all four piled into the room. I was still weirded out by it.

Soon, we’d be taking part in the second monthly class-wide challenge. This one was focused around building teams, each team picking a single person from every class, except the support magic class because there weren’t enough people. I was planning to ask Brutus to join his group, which I didn’t doubt he was already forming before something else questionable happened.

Almost half of the mages dropped out all at once. Every single named noble family from Blaire, to Ash, to Oak, all quit on the same exact day. The second event of the year was canceled because of the sudden dropouts as people tried to figure out what was going on.