Hugo came to the surface of the small pond sputtering as if the fall had been a surprise. The cold water encouraged him to get out of the pond as soon as he could. He looked up to see Elise jump across the final two sections and wait at the end of the green section. Hanna encouraged him to run to the back of the line with a few choice swear words.

As he waited for his turn, Hugo regretted his decision. Not the choice to let Elise have a win. She needed that. She was obviously feeling the pressure to succeed. It didn't cost him much to make her day. Hugo just regretted not thinking of this sooner. He could have consistently fallen at a sooner point, and not gotten himself all wet.

Still, he wanted her win to seem believable. She knew his dexterity was high and would be suspicious if he never succeeded. So a few falls later, Hugo joined her at the end of the green course. She gave him a wide smile and stepped away from his dripping form. Hugo refrained from pushing her off the edge of the platform into the water. He was trying to be nice.

Several minutes passed in silence. Hugo looked down at the people trying to complete the course below. It was pitiful, really. Many of them couldn’t pass the first three sections, something that Hugo was sure he could have done at twelve. It was good that there would be more training before any of them went out and culled monsters.

Now that he thought about it, he realized that that was probably a secondary purpose of the obstacle course. The agility training was important to keep everyone alive out there, of course. But in addition to that, the course would uncover the most inept, clumsy students. Those students could be assigned additional training before they went out into the forest with a deadly weapon. The course probably cut down on the number of student injuries and deaths all around.

“It’s nice having a break up here when they are all still running around, right?” Elise said.

Hugo shrugged, “I guess. I just wish that I hadn’t gotten wet first.”

“Yeah, it’s a tricky course. I am sure all of us will spend some time in the water this year.”

“Yep.”

A cold wind blew by, causing them to shiver. Hugo more than Elise.

“Some of them really aren't cut out for this, huh?” Elise said as a boy fell and dragged down two more with him.

“Yeah, there is a wide distribution of talent here. I never really noticed it before. I thought we were all kind of around the same level.”

“It’s easy to see who deserves to be here, and who just got lucky.”

He turned to her and said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, just by looking, it is clear to see which ones have good breeding and training. The common born are consistently at the back of the pack.”

Hugo bristled. She was right. In athletics and academics, the nobles always had a leg up on the rest of the class. Still, he said, “I am common born.”

“Oh! I’m sorry. I thought...”

“Whatever. Just know that who your parents are doesn’t determine your worth,” Hugo said.

“Right, right. Of course,” Elise said, embarrassed.

They spent the rest of the class in awkward silence.

...

Hours later, Hugo was clean and dry, wearing a light jacket to ward off the chill. One of the disadvantages of having barrier class outside was that it got cold sometimes. At least it rarely snowed in Reval.

Hugo found himself looking forward to Sage Parem’s class more and more each day. Of his five classes, it was the only one with something new, something unexpected. Sage Hanna just pushed him harder in her athletics class. Sage Lasik’s monster class was boring the first time around, it was only worse the second time around. Sage Ioana’s history class was diverting because the etiquette parts were still difficult, but she was a bad teacher. Sage Marta was a great teacher, but she was covering concepts he had long since mastered.

Parem’s class was by far the best. Part of it was that Sage Parem was a good teacher. He genuinely cared about his students and taught in a way that helped them understand. The other part of that equation was that the Barrier domain was truly new, something completely novel.

“Today we are going to have a bit of fun with experiments!” Parem said as he walked into the class today. He had a few different things set up on the stadium stage. “I mentioned the wave particle duality earlier and we are going to do some experiments so you can understand that fact, then we will discuss practical applications.”

He walked up to a clear tub of water. He plopped a small ship on one end.

“What is a wave?” Parem said as he started a wave on one end of the tub and they watched as it moved forward then bounced off the edge of the tub and returned. The ship stayed where it was and he said, “The correct definition of a wave is a transport of energy without the transport of substance. That little dingy represents how the water isn’t moving, it is just the energy that is moving.” He started another wave on the opposite side of the tub and the waves passed through each other. The toy boat stayed put.

He held out his hand and a glove of mana appeared on it. “Mana is a wave. It starts in my core and passes through my body to end up on my hand here. My body doesn’t move as the mana passes through it, only the energy passes through,” he said then knocked his hand on the desk with a clunking sound, “But it is also a particle. It can interact with objects, push them around.”

Parem picked up the boat with his shielded hand. “We used to think that mana changes state, flip flopping from energy to particle. And frankly, that would be simpler. It doesn’t though. This next experiment shows that it is both at the same time.”

He walked over to the next experiment. A metal sheet stood in front of a white board. The sheet closest to him had two vertical slits in it. “Let’s put our minds to work here. Mana always travels in a straight line unless acted upon. If I expel raw mana in front of this lead sheet, what will the other board look like?”

When no one answered, Parem said, “Come on, come on. Be brave, participate in class.”

Elise raised her hand. Hugo held back a sigh. Even after their conversation, she still was trying to be at the top of this class too. When Parem called on her she said, “Two blue lines will show up on the second board.”

“Correct! I push out some mana, it spreads out in straight lines and two stripes of mana should appear on the second board. But watch what actually does happen.” He held out his hand and a blue light glowed in front of his hand. Instead of two lines appearing on the other board, three fuzzy lines appeared. Once he was sure everyone had seen what happened, he stopped pushing out mana.

“Now, I know all of you have been practicing the pushing out mana part in Marta’s class. Let’s have two more people come up and do the same thing, see if we get the same results.”

Hugo volunteered, curious if the sage’s mana was different from his own. Elise must have felt the same way, and both of them came to the front of the class. Three fuzzy lines greeted them both.

“So what exactly is happening here?”

Hugo was stumped, he looked at the lead sheet, wondering if it was a trick somehow. It wasn’t. Just two thin slits.

Elise said, “Is it because mana is a wave? Are the waves of mana creating interference?”

“Almost!” Parem said with a smile. “Waves just pass through each other as we saw earlier. So if mana was only a wave, it wouldn’t interfere with itself. If mana was only a particle, it would travel in a straight line, bouncing off the other end. The only way we get three lines is if mana is a wave and a particle, interfering with itself.”

This wave/particle duality of mana made Hugo’s brain hurt. Magic made sense to him, but this paradox was infuriating. Eventually, he just decided to accept that was the way things worked.

Parem smiled and looked out over the class as they thought about this. He stopped at one of the students in the back and said, “I can see that some of you are thinking, ‘so what? Why does it matter?’ In fact, Mark, go ahead and say, ‘so what?’”

It took a little more prodding but Mark eventually said, “So what?”

“Glad you asked, Mark. This new information helps us apply our next section of the barrier dial,” Parem threw his hands up and yelled, “Wards!”

Parem waited for a reaction, and didn’t get one. Eventually, Hugo let out a little, “Yay!”

This must have been what Parem was waiting for because he smiled broadly and said, “That’s right. Wards are just huge invisible barriers. We can tune them to go through solid materials like waves, and still detect monsters and hit them like particles. It also answers the question of why wards can only detect soulmarked and monsters. Mana interacts with mana, not the unawakened.”

He created a large blue tower shield and said, “If I am staying the night in a cave and I want to be alerted when monsters come near, I can put a small ward at the entrance to the cave. It goes off, I wake up, and I fight off the monsters with a smile.”

“However, what if I am trying to get some shuteye in the forest? Do I create a series of wards blocking off all the paths to get to me? No! I just tilt my ward,” He moved the tower shield to the floor, “And use my knowledge gained in this class to push the ward through the trees, and out a few hundred feet. That way I still get a good night’s rest, without emptying my mana pool.”

This was fascinating to Hugo. He had heard of wards of course, but since most wards were invisible, it wasn’t something he knew much about. The rest of the class was full of a more detailed explanation of wards. There wasn’t any practice though, no one had unlocked that part of their magic yet.

“After the break, we will be going on our first culling trip and everyone will rank up to eight. You will all have a choice. Either unlock the lowest frequencies so you can create wards. Or the higher frequencies, which we will discuss in the first class after the break.”

Hugo was lost in thought as they walked out of the azad stadium after class. He had assumed that wards were the domain of runists, but it turns out, they were creations of barrier mages. It made him wonder how many other assumptions of his had been wrong. He had grown up assuming that barrier mages were all like the ones in “Knights of the Arc Court” wielding their power for armor and weapons. But wards were something else altogether. He had seen them on the walls to the school. They were part of the security system the shimmer corps used around the mana core he had stolen. Wards were everywhere.

This opened up things for Hugo. Instead of a martial carrier full of violence or guard duty, the idea of wards opened up new career ideas for him. He just had to make sure the city survived the year so he still had a place to work. Over the next few months, he needed to figure out how to stop the city from exploding. He might need some help with that.