Sitting next to Brenda the next day felt decidedly awkward. I’d leafed through the book I’d been given, and some of the stuff in there made me just a tiny bit nauseous. I’d always wondered why evil dragons and sorcerers were said to kidnap virgins, that had always seemed like a rather silly detail. I hadn’t exactly looked into the topic before, but I’d never come across something where that was a requirement so far.

Well… now I have. I somewhat wished I hadn’t learned that particular tibit, but I had and I had to live with it. I had a pretty firm stance that no knowledge was bad knowledge, but I wasn’t sure I liked the existence of spells that required the ritual sacrifice and defilement of say, ninety nine prepubescent girls. I deliberately ignored the fact that the pages around that section were particularly worn and filled with tiny notes in the margins. I did not like where that train of thought went.

It was something of a struggle to pay attention to the classwork, especially with how little sleep I’d gotten the night before. I’d spent hours casting additional wards and practicing my spellwork. I knew it wouldn’t help against someone like her, but I’d been badly shaken by seeing her in my room and just… had to do something.

For now however, I had to deal with a particularly clingy Brenda, who seemed determined to sit as close to my lap as she could without actually doing so. I’d accidentally brushed my hand along her thigh when she’d grabbed me today, and she seemed to have taken that as an invitation to be even more physical than usual. I probably should have actually cultivated that a little, if she was comfortable with close contact it might be easier to eventually go in for the ‘kill’, but for now I was too exhausted to bother. At least she’d decided to be quite for once, I wasn’t sure I could have remained calm if she’d decided to pester

I was somewhat dreading my meeting with Janna later in the day. I did not want to deal with her right now, but I wasn’t going to skip out on another meeting. Fortunately, both my evocation and rituals classes passed without issue. The material was interesting, but unremarkable. Unfortunately, that's where the good part of the day came to an end.

I turned the corner and almost ate a bolt of lightning with my face. Only the split second warning provided by my mana sense gave me the time to throw as much mana in front of the attack as I could before it slammed into me like an enraged bull. My hastily formed construct shattered under the sudden strain, much of the mana dispersing into the air. The recoil sent me stumbling backwards as I frantically took in the situation, muscles spasming uncontrollably as the small bit of unblocked electricity washed through me.

Two fourth years and a fifth year faced off in an empty stretch of corridor. Another student, likely a fourth year but I wasn’t sure from this angle, lay sprawled across the floor, a bloody crater where his chest had been. One of the fourth years was on defense, rapidly casting shields and counterspells as his companion did her best to fight back. Despite their obvious experience and surprisingly excellent coordination, they were clearly on the back foot.

The older student was slowly closing the gap between herself and the group, batting aside spells with a spherical shield that encased her left hand and responding in kind with a mix of brutal fire and force spells. Judging from the positioning, she’d killed, or at least horribly injured, the fallen fourth year earlier into the fight and had forced the other two on the defensive ever since.

With a flair of will, I suppressed the lingering shock the attack had left playing across my body and stood up, rapidly shaping a powerful shielding spell as I slowly backed away. My eyes went immediately to the small shield the girl was using to deflect spells. Spells like that lightning bolt. That lightning bolt that could have killed me.

There was some sort of suppressive enchantment I could feel in the air, it was faint but likely the reason I hadn’t felt this fight from two hallways away. It was difficult to hide so much concentrated mana use, it suffused the air and sent shockwaves a skilled mage could easily detect. Whatever enchantment this was, it didn’t eliminate that effect, merely slowed it. This had been an ambush, I would put money on that, though who had ambushed whom was still up in the air.

I should run, I decided after a moment. That's what I’d always done the rare few times I’d run into upperclassmen fighting. I began to cast another spell, something to conceal me while I fled the scene, but had to abort when a roaring wall of fire raced down the hallway towards me. I scrambled backwards, almost botching the elementary ‘protection from fire’ in my haste.

The burning torrent lifted me off my feet, shield and all, and sent me crashing back to the floor. The horrible heat of the flames felt muted, but the fact I could still feel it behind two layers of magical defense sent a cold chill down my spine. Twice. Twice in less than a minute. If I’d been a moment slower…

A shrill scream rang out through the hallway, only to cut off suddenly as a disk of cutting force removed the last fourth year’s head from her shoulders. The other student, the defender, lay on the ground in a smoldering heap. His shields had not been fast enough to stave off what must have been a fifth circle attack spell.

The other girl scoffed loudly and dispelled her small shield. She threw me a glance, but scowled and looked away when I raised my hands defensively, three fingers held up behind the translucent dome of my own protective magic. I let out a long breath when she looked away and climbed slowly to my feet.

The suppressive enchantment had vanished and I could feel the massively increased level of ambient mana in the air from all the spells the group had been throwing around. It seemed the trio had screwed up their ambush and paid the price. I silently resolved to be even more careful. I wasn’t sure what had convinced three fourth years to work together like that, but I would not have escaped unscathed from such an attack. I could probably take a fourth year? I was pretty sure I could at least, but three of them? At once? Not a chance.

“Mind if I get by you?” I called out hesitantly, “I’m heading that way and the closest detour would be like an extra ten minutes.”

She looked up from where she was kneeling by one of the corpses, rifling through the pockets of the slightly scorched jack he had been wearing. “What?”

“Um, like, just walk past you, down the hallway. Didn’t want you to think I was stealing your loot.”

She laughed and waved me past, “Yeah, go for it. Sorry you got caught up in that, didn’t realize there was someone nearby. Gods, would have been so embarrassing to get purged for accidently barbequing a third year.”

I smiled weakly. Embarrassing. Right, we could call it that. She would have regretted it, but I would have been no less dead then she would have been. That was always a risk at Avalon, but I’d never come face to face with it quite so brutally. Researching better protective spells (and practicing how quickly I could cast the ones I already knew) rapidly rose to the top of my to do list.

I memorized her face, I wasn’t quite sure what her name was but that was something I could work out later, and fled. She was a fifth year I was almost certain, which meant she would be a seventh year when I was in my own fifth year. Well, assuming we both survived that long. It was important to know the competition, and that little bubble shield seemed like a rather unique bit of spellwork.

I made it to the practice room in record time, taking the rest of the journey at a near run. The moment I stepped through the doorway, I collapsed against the wall, heart pounding in my chest and adrenaline still rushing through my veins.

I slowly let the shield I’d been maintaining the entire run drop, wincing as I checked my mana levels. Just over a fifth left, shielding spells like the one I’d used ate mana like nobody's business. A peek at the clock told me I thankfully still had a good half hour before Janna was supposed to show up. That was something.

I closed my eyes and took long, slow breaths as though I was meditating, and slowly felt my tense muscles relax. I mechanically grabbed my bag from the floor beside me and checked it for any damage. The outer leather was charred slightly in a few places where it had been at the very edge of my heat shield, but otherwise seemed to be in fine condition. The materials inside were thankfully undamaged, and the outside was easily cleaned up with first circle mending spells.

With that taken care of, I folded my hands in my lap and hunched forward, thinking over the small bit of the fight I’d run into. What went wrong, what went right, what could I have done better? Professor Costa had introduced us to that particular mental exercise during my first year, and I’d tried to use it after every relevant event.

Immediately, the obvious problem had been my lack of caution and indecisiveness. When did I start rushing around corners again? I’d made a point of not doing that back in my first year, but the habit had slipped at some point since. Secondly, that first block had been embarrassingly crude and ineffective. It was even worse than what I’d done against the demon, and that had been pathetic. If I planned to keep using pure mana manipulation to create rapid shields, I would need to actually figure out a practical technique for it.

Finally, I had been so very slow. I should have disappeared the moment I realized a fight was happening, like I’d always done before. Instead, I’d just stood their gaping for several crucial seconds and almost got barbequed for my effort. Casting the shield had been the correct choice, but I should have immediately left, not stayed to watch the fight and try to cast more spells before fleeing.

Sloppy, slow, and arrogant. The talks with Miranda had left me overconfident, I was still a small fish in a large pond, even if I’d grown larger than I’d thought. I wanted to immediately get to work, to practice and train until my mana reserves were dry and my muscles ached. Train every day from dawn till dusk until I could feel safe again.

It was what I’d always done whenever I was reminded of how puny I was, but that wasn’t an option any more. I had these meetings with Janna, my new mission from Elpha, and oh so many projects that would pay dividends someday, but someday wasn’t today. Someday wouldn’t help me if I died before it arrived.

I stood up, bag spilling onto the floor as I paced rapidly around the room. What research could pay off soon? Something to give me a noticeable bump in survivability. An edge, a means to escape if I ever got jumped by a group of students? My plans on binding new ‘underlings’ wouldn’t do it, that would provide resources but it would take time and wasn’t what I was looking for. My work with Mistletoe was similarly set aside, the milk would be useful for a bunch of alchemical creations but I didn’t even have the ingredients yet and that would all take time even once I did.

In the same vein, most of my older research was similarly set aside. A lot of it had to do with enchanted items and magical manufacturing, fields that had already served me well but wouldn’t provide any immediate boosts. Runecrafting and alchemically transmuted objects had proven invaluable, but they were slow and I didn’t have the materials to craft something like a shielding amulet. The bindings I’d crafted so far got around those issues by draining the mana of their wearer, but I was just a normal human and couldn’t waste that much mana on something so inefficient.

What else was there? I was making good progress on copying circulations, but I still wasn’t confident in copying from Mistletoe and Miranda had proven to be a dead end. I didn’t really have easy access to any other magical creatures I could copy. I could technically just learn new circulations from books, but that came with its own downsides.

Learning circulations purely from books took a while, especially since it was hard to know if something you were adding would conflict with what you already had without just trying it out. It didn’t help that I was still mostly a novice with the skill and had yet to manage unconscious mana circulation. As such, adding more circulations on top of what I already had would cost me even more of my attention dedicated to keeping them running.

I stopped. Oh, right. I was missing the obvious answer here. Circulations that did not require constant attention from the user? A shortcut to a large, immediate power boost? The answer had been staring my right in the face, I was taking a class on it for gods’ sake.

Ritual magic, though somewhat clunky and delicate, could provide massive benefits faster than many other forms of magic. By casting a spell as a ritual, you could sidestep the massive complexity condensing the same effects into a typical spell would necessitate, allowing the caster to achieve magic multiple circles above their skill level.

It was what I had done with Miranda back as a first year, no first or second circle binding would have been powerful enough for my purposes. Instead, I’d painstakingly prepared and executed a fifth circle binding ritual typically used for animal familiars. That shortcut had its own costs and shortcomings, but it had been good enough for my purposes at the time.

The main downside was that rituals were much harder to standardize than regular spells. Whereas anyone could cast basically the same spell using the same spell matrix, rituals had to be carefully adapted for the user. However in this case, I already had most of that work done. It was the entire goal of the class after all, to conduct an enhancement ritual of some sort by the end of the semester. It wasn’t really finished yet, but I was sure a few more weeks of preparation would be enough to have something workable. We weren’t supposed to be ready to execute the rituals until the last month of the semester, but I was sure professor Williams wouldn’t have any issues with me doing it a little early.

Unfortunately, that brought me to the main issue that had been holding back my progress on the ritual. I still wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted it to do, or how it would accomplish it. I knew I wanted some sort of physical enhancement, but that didn’t really narrow things down much. It was a very vague goal, with a countless number of ways to approach it.

Hells, I wasn’t even sure what type of enhancement ritual I wanted to use. Enhancement rituals could be broadly separated into two types, trait theft and sacrificial enhancement. The first, like what we’d seen Professor Williams’ protege, typically used the sacrifice of a specific creature to take some of that creature’s attributes or magic abilities for yourself.

The second was slightly more finicky but much more versatile, by using some sort of sacrifice, you could achieve a much more variable effect. They ranged from simple things like small blood sacrifices, just a slashed palm and a cup full of blood, to power up an enchanted object, to much more intricate and gruesome workings like the ninety-nine child sacrifices I’d found in Elpha’s book that was intended to grant temporary invulnerability to the caster.

That was another snag in that particular plan. If I wanted to achieve something powerful, I needed something significant to sacrifice, regardless of which type of ritual I used. In the case of trait stealing, I needed whatever creature I was using as the trait ‘donor’. In the case of the sacrificial ritual, I also needed something powerful or valuable to sacrifice. It didn’t have to be a living creature, though those tended to be the simplest forms of sacrifice, but I didn’t have very many valuable or powerful objects just lying around either.

The ritual framework I had designed so far was meant to be a very minor thing, using the sacrifice of some sort of meat animal for a minor physical improvement of some sort. Sacrificing something you planned to kill anyway and had no emotional attachment too wasn’t a particularly good source of power, but it would have been enough for something like slightly improved senses or reflexes. That would not be enough for the boost I was looking for now, not nearly, and fortunately what I’d created so far was general enough that it could be adapted for something more impactful.

I would also need to take a closer look at the book, I’d seen several ritual spells detailed within its pages already, so it might have something useful for me right now. That still left the difficult issue of a powerful sacrifice though. Humans and other sentients made for particularly powerful sacrifices, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take that step so soon. I’d done some pretty nasty things over the years, killed, kidnapped, enslaved, but ritual human sacrifice was taking it a step further than I’d ever gone.

I sat down at the table and flipped to a clean page in one of my notebooks. This would take some planning and contemplation, but I had somewhere to start. I refused to be defenseless. Not now. The fire roared higher, screams and shrieks slowly dying down inside the festively decorated building. He watched from his far off balcony, a smug grin twisting his elegant features into a hideous mask. Not ever again.

Elpha Lifebane was not used to feeling tiny. She was not the strongest mage in the world, not by a longshot, but she was powerful enough that few people dared test her resolve. Here and now though, sitting like a naughty schoolgirl in the headmaster’s office, she could not help but hunch down in her chair, instincts screaming at her to hide in the presence of an apex predator.

Ivius Ambrosius signed his name with a flourish, then pushed the stack of papers in front of him to the side. Leaning forward onto his elbows, he steepled his fingers and frowned down at her, the dark voids that had replaced his eyes swirling hypnotically behind his glasses. “You broke the rules, Elpha.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but he cut her off before she could say anything. “Yes, I know you did not physically enter his room. The use of astral projection to enter other member’s rooms is not explicitly banned under Avalon’s codes of conduct, but I think we both understand that it sets a… poor precedent.”

She huffed, but did not say anything, face twisted into a scowl. The air in the room was heavy with mana, the presences of the two ancient mages clashing silently without them directly suppressing them. The Myrddin waited for a few moments longer, then let out a long sigh. “Fine then. We’ll do this the hard way.”

Elpha’s eyes widened and her chair almost tipped back as a tangible pressure crashed down around her. It tore and crushed her presence, smothering it until she could feel the stronger mage’s mana pressing up against the surface of her skin. She gasped loudly and looked up to see the Myrddin sitting motionless in his seat, staring down at her with his impossible eyes.

“Now then, let's try this again. Elpha Lifebane, I find you in violation of the codes of Avalon. What are you going to do about it?”

Fighting through the overwhelming weight with every movement, Elpha slowly bit out, “I. Already. Paid him. Weregild. For. For the violation.”

Ambrosius hummed thoughtfully. “Did you though, or was that payment for services rendered? It doesn’t seem like you to flaunt the rules like this without an ulterior motive. Or pettier motive, whichever the case may be.”

“Gave him. Grimoire. Enough for both.”

The pressure eased marginally and Elpha took several gasping breaths as he studied her once again. “Interesting. Yes, that is a fair payment, but I have a feeling you did not make that clear to the boy. I do not want more of our cabal graduating with poor impressions of how we do business.”

Reaching into one of the bins that littered his desk, he pulled out a formal document bearing the Academy’s crest. To anyone with the smallest hint of magic perception, the simple looking piece of parchment would blaze like a tiny bonfire. He pushed the paper across the table to Elpha, setting a tiny silver knife down beside it.

“Twenty thousand pieces, five to the boy, the rest to the Academy. An oath to keep any secrets you might have seen within his room secret.”

She balked slightly at the price, but grit her teeth and scanned the contract. This was not a place where she could bargain or negotiate. She hadn’t expected him to be so… uptight about it, but she was lucky he hadn’t decided to press the issue.

Once she was certain there were no other hidden clauses in the agreement, she pricked her finger and signed her name in blood at the bottom of the paper. “Excellent. I will expect the transfer by next week. Remember Elpha, you may not be a student any longer, but that would not stop me from taking you over my knee. We have rules for a reason, and as long as I am Myrddin, we will hold to those rules!”

Elpha swallowed heavily and nodded. It had been too long, and she’d forgotten how tightly the current master of Avalon guarded his precious students. Avalon had strict rules about how members could come into conflict with one another, but those were not enforced nearly as tightly as the rules about interfering with students.

She’d thought it would be fine, he was only a third year after all and Myrddin did not tend to look at the younger students closely. Even as strong as she was, she would not have dared test his patience by trying to creep on one of the sixth or seventh year students. It was just her luck she’d managed to run into one of his pet projects.

She wondered what a third year had done to catch his attention, but quickly decided that was a hornets nest best avoided. She would have to deal more evenly with the student in the future, but perhaps that was not a bad thing. It was always good to have an established relationship with the most promising up-and-comers. The Myrddin had a keen eye for those that would survive long enough to graduate.