Honestly, today had been anything but peaceful. Even long after the whole homeroom fiasco came and went, things still did not calm down. In fact they kept getting worse, and I was not referring to all the bullying my classmates did in the name of their “Great Goddess Suzuki.”

No, if that was all that happened, I could have swallowed it. Due to my lifestyle, being picked on by others who viewed me as weird or inferior was a common occurrence. I won’t brag and say that I had become unfazed by their scathing remarks, I guess you could say that I had just grown numb to it.

What really made me feel overwhelmed was the fact that each of my teachers had resigned from their positions to go chase some passion of theirs. Of course the replacement was no surprise, that’s right, I was going to be seeing a lot of the “Great Goddess Suzuki” in the coming days.

To make matter worse, I was now staying behind after class to discuss with “Ms.” Suzuki about my carrier form. Well, that was the excuse that “she” gave at least. It took a while for all the students to leave the classroom after finishing their cleaning duties. Many had wanted to stay and bask in their beautiful teacher’s presence.

This dilemma was resolved simply by a few sweet words of plea, no magic needed. I’m not exactly sure what those people saw, but I know for a fact what I saw. The sight of a giant muscular man puffing his chest outwards in a sexy manner while batting his eyelashes innocently is something that cannot be unseen.

While everyone saw some extremely pretty woman, I saw an old man with enough muscle that he seemed more like a gorilla than a human being. Once my shock subsided, it was pretty clear that he had cast a spell on himself to fool the others.

After making sure that the coast was clear, “Ms.” Suzuki waved her hand as a curtain of light draped around us. If my memory was correct, this should be the same spell that Rurika cast at the book shop. I believe it was called Shroud. This left just “Ms.” Suzuki, Rurika, and me in the classroom.

Not wanting to let them dictate the flow of the conversation, I took the initiative to ask, “Why are you here?”

My new teacher let out a hearty laugh as he stepped forward and placed his hands on my shoulders. “First off allow me to apologize for my granddaughters actions, sometimes she can be such a jokester.”

Jokester? What is so funny about indirectly trying to make someone explode?

Noticing that I wasn’t buying into his bullshit, he let out a strained cough. “Anyways, when Rurika informed me of your rapid comprehension of the breathing technique, I knew I just couldn't let you go unsupervised.”

I backed away a little due to his last sentence. “Why? Did you decide to keep watch over me to better gather data?”

Rurika seemed upset by my outburst, but her grandfather raised his hand to silence her before she could say anything.

“You don’t have to worry about being treated as a human test subject. If I really wanted to experiment on you or observe you for study, I wouldn’t do so in such an uncontrolled environment.”

“Seems pretty controlled to me.”

“Please believe me Yuta when I say that this is all for your own good. With us here, you can focus on the breathing technique in class without fear for the reprecaussions.”

“What repercussions?” I asked.

Letting out a sigh, some of Mr. Suzuki’s muscles twitched as he bowed his head slightly. “I guess Rurika failed to explain things thoroughly enough. To put it simply, when you breathe via the technique, it causes a drain of mana in the air. Although normal people can not use or even sense the presence of mana, it is still important to their daily life. At the bare minimum, the people around you would become lethargic. I won’t go too into detail for the time being. However with us here, we can use simple spells to attract mana to your vicinity in order to help make up for the absence of the proper amount of mana. The only real downside is that in order for the spell to work, the caster has to be near by the person in training.”

“If you say so. However, why couldn’t we have just met up after school?” I asked. Not that I would have wanted to meet up with you both.

Stroking his beard, Mr. Suzuki smiled at me and said, “Yuta, where is the one place that a proper teenager must go to no matter how much he or she might hate it?”

So that is how it was. He is holding my school attendance hostage. If I choose to not go to school, than the faculty will inform my parents. All I can say is that some things are worse than death.

My parents are actually very liberal in how they treat me. As long as I maintained good test scores, things such as living expenses and extra spending money would be provided. They made sure to base everything on merit. This also meant that if I performed poorly, I would end up having to tighten my belt.

“Alright, enough with the small talk, let’s get down to business, said Mr. Suzuki as he passed me a stack of books. “These four books here are basic spells that you should be able to cast with a little practice.”

Taking the books, I examined the cover of each one. Two were light purple in color and the other two were pale blue. The purple books were titled Confusion Palm and Drunkard’s Breath. The blue ones were called Wave Steps and Water Bullet.

“Are these, spells?” I asked thoughtlessly. My hands trembled at the thought that these

“Of course they are. They are only rank one spells, why are you drooling?” said Rurika as she stared at me in disdain.

“Calm yourself Rurika. These are merely part of the compensation that I wish to provide for almost causing your death and an apology for my unruly granddaughter.”

I gripped the books so hard my knuckles became white. Maybe this old man is not as bat shit crazy as I thought. At least he knows how much trouble he’s caused me.

Mr. Suzuki smiled at my response. “Do you want to start learning them?”

Still unable to formulate words from the happiness that flooded my brain I nodded.

“Alrighty then, hold onto your hat boy. We are about to go for a little trip,” said the old man as he snapped his fingers.

Immediately after the sound dissipated, the room began to spin. If I had to compare it to anything, it would be like those less than legal whirly rides at a street carnival.

When the world became clear again, what filled my eyes was not my familiar classroom. Instead I saw a almost picturesque landscape. Teleportation was the only reasonable explanation for the sudden change in scenery.

The three of us were standing in the middle of a lushious meadow. Surrounding the meadow was a forest to the east, what seemed to be a crystal clear lake to the west, a vast garden of flowers and other types of vegetation to the north, and south had a barren desert. On top of all this beauty, the air was rich with mana. I did not even need to use my breathing technique to take in miniscule amounts of unrefined mana.

“Welcome Yuta, to one of the Suzuki clan’s private properties.”

Still taking in all the sights, I muttered, “Where are we? This isn’t Japan is it?”

“Wahahaha! That is correct my boy, this place is not Japan, heck this place doesn’t technically even qualify to be a part of Earth.”

Those words shifted my focus to the mysterious people that brought me here. It was like a bomb went off in my head. I would be a failure of an otaku if my imagination wasn’t dancing about to come up with a passable theory. I could currently be in a private pocket of space, a terraformed planet, or in some astral plane.

Mr. Suzuki continued with his explanation. “Do to past events, magicians are unable to practice magic on Earth freely. So in order to be able to continue to study and pass down the magical arts, our forefathers worked with other talented beings to create a dimension that existed between our dimension and the rest.”

I cocked my head to the side in confusion. The general idea that this was a completely different dimension from my home world was not that hard to believe, but it left me with so many questions. Why can’t we practice magic on Earth? What did he mean by ‘the rest’?

Not able to hold my curiosity for much longer, I lifted my hand as if I was in class. Once my hand was in the air, Rurika shot me a glare, but held back from saying anything. I guess that even someone as snobby as her could understand what I was going through. Over the past twenty-four hours, I had witnessed a handful of spells being cast, and yet none of those experiences combined could match this moment. This moment will become one of the memories that will stick with me for a lifetime, I am sure of it.

“I can tell from the look on your face that you have even more questions that you want to ask. However, I encourage you to hold off on those for now.” Said Mr. Suzuki as he began to stretch his hips. “Just remember that this place is called the Slip, and it is the only relatively safe place to practice magic.”

Relatively safe? Those words did not exactly give me a good vibe, and only added more questions to my ever growing list. “You want me to test out these spells that you passed to me? I am willing to cast stuff, but is it really fine to do so? I would hate to mess anything up here.”

Hearing my concern, Mr. Suzuki patted me on the back and gave me a thumbs up. “Relax! I brought you here so that you could get a chance to grasp some spells. After all, what kind a magician can’t use their own mana?”

Finally calming down from all the recent excitement, I put down three of the books while holding still holding Confusion Palm. It is probably my inner otaku alarms going off, but I felt an affinity to this book in particular.

Opening it to the first page, to see a bunch of bizarre symbols. They appeared to be a blend of runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Over the years I had accrued quite the amount of data on the various forms of ‘magic’ in the world. However, this was my first time coming across a language like this one. The tiny pictures seemed to radiate an ancient sort of feeling.

Noticing my confusion, Mr. Suzuki provided some clarification. Apparently this was the universal written language for all intelligent magical beings. In order to read it, one did not have to learn the actual language. By injecting mana into the words, they would glow and download the information in my brain. More importantly a small rune would begin to be drawn within my mind. Once I fully comprehended the spell, a complete spell rune would take shape in my mind. All I had to do was activate the rune would be to properly chanel mana and say the name of the spell to cause the spell to activate.