Today was their first official class day. For now, though, they were touring the school.

“Welcome to the Grand Library! The largest library in the Kingdom of Toth!” the guide said.

“That won’t do, Sister Amelie.”

A respectably-aged lady appeared behind the guide. The sleeves of her robes were pulled up, and the scars of her arms were showing, boasting lightning patterns that told of the person's immense power.

“Sister Maria!” the guide replied, surprised, “Ah, well, Sister, the children need not—”

“For free, I will offer you all a firsthand look at our operations here in the Grand Library!”

“Damn it, she’s doing it again…”

“What was that?”

“N-no, I mean, are you sure, Sister Maria?”

The lightning-scarred lady grinned. She spun, and her robes fluttered before she courtsied and smiled a soft smile.

“Coincidentally, we were supposed to check out a book today, you see?”

“Oh?”

The expression in Sister Amelie’s face changed. This was something different.

“Now, now, come along, everyone!” she ushered everyone to a mezzanine, overlooking the so-called Checkout Chamber of the Grand Library. For a simple checkout, the size of the room seemed too much. The ceiling was as high as some cathedrals’, and the dimensions of the floorspace were big enough that—Are those blast walls? Those are blast walls, right?

“Everyone, begin the Search Spell!” Sister Maria’s voice boomed. Her order echoed that it was almost like she was right in your face.

A circle of Librarians jogged to their positions in the middle of the chamber.

“Oh, come to think of it, there’s some really light engraving on the floor, isn’t there?” Casa pointed out.

“Woah, really?” Larissa said. She looked and looked, and noticed lines that ran from beneath where the Librarians stood, eventually converging to the middle of the room.

“You’re right!” she excitedly exclaimed, “You’re really good at spotting patterns, huh?”

“Ehe, well…”

Casa remembered the battlefield that was her dad’s home library.

.

Light started to fill the room. The Librarians had finally raised their arms and started the magic sequence.

“Everyone, start your Vertices!” Sister Maria shouted.

Each Librarian had a translucent glow of magic that projected from their hands like a shield, complex glyphs carved into each of them. Some of the glyphs moved on their own.

“Vertex 2, ready!”

“Vertex 3, ready!”

“Oi, Vertex 1! I thought you trained for this?!”

“Ma’am! Vertex 1, ready!”

It seemed that those glowing circular projections each Librarian maintained were called “Vertices”. There were five of them, equidistant from each other and from the center.

Finally, Sister Maria entered the ring, and stood smack in the middle. She raised her arms.

“Everyone!” she shouted.

“Ready!” the others answered.

There, she poured energy into the sky. The concentration of magic was so high that it was white. Instead of dispersing into the air, it was as if they hit an invisible ceiling, spreading into a disk. Again, instead of dispersing into an infinite disk, they were caught and collected into rings that then started to circulate, faster and faster. The outermost ring was tapped by the Vertices, which then sent different amounts of magic in different directions.

Eventually, they formed a giant sigil, about 10 meters in diameter. The magic stabilized into a blue light.

“Woah! It’s just like Miki’s!” Larissa exclaimed.

At this point, Sister Maria started chanting.

“I seek the one that explains the world, for the true seeker that I guide—”

“Now, everyone, watch!” Sister Amelie pridefully remarked, “Sister Maria is imbuing the sigil with the aspects she’s looking for!”

Surely enough, the words that Sister Maria spoke moulded the giant sigil over so slightly.

“Vertex 1 is gaining entropy!” one of the Librarians shouted. It seemed that he was in trouble. That part of the sigil was almost wobbling, and sparks of electricity flickered every so often.

“You! Cast a new schema on it, now!”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Two other Librarians joined the fray. One took over the Vertex for his exhausted coworker, while the other dragged the poor guy away.

Not a few seconds later—

“I SEE IT!” Sister Maria exclaimed.

A flash of light engulfed the room.

Casa, Miki, and Zanderfon had shielded their eyes just in time—thanks to practice from Larissa’s beautiful smile. Larissa herself, however, did not know what it was like to be on the receiving end, and was crying and rolling around on the floor, along with almost all of the other students.

In the end, the only ones left standing were the Librarians and the three new students.

“Oh no!” Casa gasped.

Several Librarians were tending to Sister Maria, who was collapsed in the middle of the formation. There was a Librarian holding a notebook and jotting down notes—from what Sister Maria was saying?

After a while, the Librarian who was taking the notes stood up and raised his fist.

“WE GOT THE CALL NUMBER!”

Cheers erupted from the other Librarians. Even Sister Amelie was clapping.

“Sister! Will she be alright?” Casa asked.

“What a worrywart you are! Of course she’ll be fine! She’s just fatigued, after all,” she replied.

After the students were calmed down, Sister Maria was seated with them, offering free interviews of the experience. It seemed, though, that some of the students had begun to reconsider their career choices—but not Casa or the others.

After a while, a man came in, looking like he woke up to the Third Isthmus War every morning. The back of his robe read: "In somno nulla pecunia".

“Rise and grind, brother,” Sister Maria greeted. She and the man shared a secret handshake.

“Out of the ring so soon, sister?”

“Heh, after you see the client’s request—ain’t my problem anymore, brother!”

He received a card from one of the assisting Librarians.

“Tsch— Why’d it have to be the Reference Section?” he complained. His sister just laughed.

“Very well, then,” he continued. He rolled up his sleeves, and there, a pattern of lightning scarred his arms, even worse than Sister Maria’s. “Let’s get this done.”

.

Brother Dominicus stood in the middle of the chamber. This time, over a dozen Librarians surrounded him.

“Vertex 4, ready!” “Vertex 8, ready!”

One by one, the Librarians readied their Vertices. Each one looked bigger than the ones that Sister Maria’s assistants used.

The students gasped. By the position of the Librarians, Brother Dominicus was going to summon a 20-meter-diameter magic circle! “Look at the size of that!” “What an absolute unit…”

But both Miki and Zanderfon knew this wasn’t impressive. A bigger magic formation only meant that the input energy was very unstable.

Certainly, a second unit of Librarians was going around, projecting multi-layered barriers over people and key structural points. For the students, more than 20 layers of barriers were deployed.

“This is it, boys!” Brother Dominicus shouted, “Claude bless us all!”

In a flash, he unleashed his magic.

A roaring white flame smashed into the disk of the magic formation and completely filled it in an instant. The Librarians who supported the Vertices strained to contain his power, but they held.

Meanwhile, a storm gathered over the magic formation. Clouds of multi-colored magic rubbed together and made lightning, which struck randomly. Indeed, some barriers were struck, but this was low-grade magic lightning, one strike of which wasn’t enough to break a properly-made barrier.

The students were amazed, and some were hyped.

The magic circle started to rotate in its entirety. It lifted up into the air, revving into a full-on spin.

The storm intensified. The low-grade lightning soon upped a level, and magic rain finally manifested. Each droplet was moving at such a speed that being hit by one felt like a strong, hateful flick.

Such were the echoes of the raging storm. The wind howled as bullets of rain made it sound as if war had come indoors. Lightning struck and broke some magic barriers, as if artillery rained death on poor infantrymen. People could no longer hear each other without shouting, nor could they even stand on the floor without a combination of Adhesive Magic and Orientation Magic.

Larissa was a person sensitive to colors and lights, and that’s how she spotted something off about one of the Vertices.

“Hey, that one’s off by a shade!” she shouted, pointing at the Vertex in question. Sister Amelie nodded and smiled, thinking it was just some hallucination from a new student. Sister Maria, however, looked a bit closer—though she couldn’t see the off-hue color, she did notice that the Vertex’s spin timing was off.

She immediately got on her feet. She almost collapsed, as she was still tired, but she pushed herself up. Her assistants noticed and helped her up.

“Idiots! That Vertex is about go red!” she shouted.

It was too late.

The Librarian who had been hosting it had lost control. A book flew out of the Vertex and struck the Librarian and destroyed his barrier, knocking him back several meters. A unit of Librarians inched their way towards the runaway Vertex, but no matter what new schemas they cast upon it, it wouldn’t stabilize.

More and more books shot out of the runaway Vertex. Each one had as much power as a magical lightning strike, if not more—besides inflicting magical damage on barriers, they were still physical books flying at ridiculous velocity. If anything, they were the true artillery of this chaos. The advancing Librarians suffered more and more damage, forcing them to retreat.

Brother Dominicus tried to pour energy into the runaway Vertex to correct it. It was his fault that so many Librarians had to support him for a simple Checkout Spell, anyway, so it was his responsibility—was what he thought. No matter what he did, however, the Vertex wouldn’t stabilize. In fact, it might have gotten worse.

Amid this chaos, Casa noticed something strange.

That Vertex… wasn’t the same type of Vertex as all the others.

She couldn’t tell how she could tell.

She only felt that if she were to make a Tree Diagram right now looking at this scene, that she wouldn’t, in the name of any god, lump in whatever that was in with the rest of the Vertices.

She felt someone clutch her arm. She looked, and—

“Sister Maria?” she mouthed.

“What do you see?” Sister Maria asked her, shouting over the storm.

Casa’s mind cleared up, and she heard the storm's howl again.

“It’s not the same! It’s not the same as the others!” she shouted in reply.

Not the same?—Sister Maria looked towards the runaway Vertex. How was it not the same?

But she thought about it. When she had first noticed the Vertex going red, it had a different spin rate— all Vertices spun as a way to “pump” magic through different filters and channels. Certainly, all of the Vertices had the same filters and channels, as they wouldn’t have been able to interact with each other, otherwise.

However, if the part of a Vertex’s sigil that allowed it to do the pumping were to be altered—somehow corrupted during inscription, maybe—it would pump at a different rate from the others and desynchronize the whole formation!

Perhaps, the Vertex wasn’t unstable in the first place—it was the wrong type of Vertex to begin with!

This girl—Casa Ley—Sister Maria had read about her enrollment exam performance. It was a buzz topic among the faculty of the school, but to think that her Classification Magic went beyond the simple invocation of it…

“You! And you!” she barked orders at her assistants, “Tell my stupid brother’s people to reapply an Aurelian Pump on that Vertex!”

On her command, several of her assistants went running. The violence of the storm, however, took out two of them before they reached Brother Dominicus’ backup squad. Nevertheless, the message was relayed.

“You want us to do what?!”

“Sister Maria’s orders!”

“Tsch, can’t help it, huh? Let’s go, boys!”

Once more, the battered unit advanced. The storm had intensified since their last attempt, and they were taking more and more casualties for every step—but they had to reach that Vertex, or else this room would be wiped out.

Or worse—they’d never check out that book.

“Gorran! Lay a barrier at our one-o’clock and two-o’clock! Larry, take a hit for the team!” “Right away, section chief!” “Yes, sir—what?!”

By tactically using magical and human shields, the section chief was able to reach the heart of the Vertex, along with one other of his squad. They were the last two. If they weren’t able to stabilize the Vertex here, there was no second chance.

“It was nice knowing you, section chief.” “Me too, Gordon, me too.”

Replacing a Vertex’s pump while in operation had never been attempted before, but here they were. Taking out the current pump would give them a 0.1-second window to replace it with a new one. Otherwise, with nowhere left to go, the magic buildup would cause the Vertex to explode, taking out this entire chamber.

That’s why, this was something only the squad’s magitechnician could do.

The madman connected a Bypass and a fresh new Vertex together. Normally, this would make no sense, as bypassing a Vertex was the same as pretending the Vertex was never there.

But, this was a pivotal moment in Library Magic history when the newest high-magic, “Plug-in Vertex Bypass Technique”, was born.

He slapped the crude formation together, and then smashed it into the runaway Vertex. In the next moment, the Bypass completely drained the old Vertex of its magic flow. However, this meant that magic was now flowing unregulated throughout that portion of the magic circle.

In the next moment, the Bypass was ripped away. Because the Bypass and the new Vertex were originally connected together, the magic flow was diverted into the new Vertex.

Magitechnician Gordon, proud of his work, promptly passed out.

From here on, it was the section chief’s turn.

“That’s quite an idiot section chief I have there…” Brother Dominicus mused, “With this, I can focus on the checkout!”

For god, country, and library, he cried a war cry, and with a last great effort, saw the book with the correct call number in his mind.

.

All that any in the room last remembered was a great flash of light, and a terrible explosion.

.

Brother Dominicus collapsed with the book in his hands. The standby teams outside the chamber rushed in.

“Get this… to the patron…”

One of the responding Librarians heard his request, and promptly took the book out of the chamber. Sister Maria, assisted by two of her subordinates, limped over to her half-conscious brother.

“This is why I keep telling you to focus on practicing control instead of working out at the magic gym, damn,” she chided.

“The Reference Section—is a tough one, huh?” Brother Dominicus said with a weak voice.

“I really don’t understand why you can’t just walk over there,” Sister Maria shook her head, “It’s just upstairs!”

“Have you seen… the height… of the ceiling… sister…”

At that moment, Brother Dominicus passed out. She slapped him, and he woke up. Well, it was true that he was tired, but a certain sister wouldn’t have it.

“Then work out at an actual gym, you fool! Do you see how many people have died?!”

“No one’s actually… died… though…”

.

And so the four were introduced to the daily life of a Librarian—probably? Was this normal?!