As the days got longer and warmer, so did their lessons. Sure, school kept its schedule, but this wasn’t your average high school back on Earth. People cried tears of blood or at least an unholy crap-ton of money just to attend the school. Ioha belonged to the tears of blood group, since he hardly had any money. All in all, it meant the students almost broke themselves mentally to master what they learned. Sure, autumn had seen a truant or two, but they were mercilessly expelled from school almost immediately after they got caught.

  For Ioha’s part, it meant early mornings when he either trained the sequenced casting style Ai and he invented earlier or subjected himself to brutal physical insanities to learn exactly where his limits lay and when he no longer could trust his own spell-casting ability. After that, a tasteless breakfast he usually shared with Karaki and Canadena and then a day’s worth of school, which he only shared with Canadena.

  Late afternoons and early evenings saw six of them either in a barn or out on a training field. Genu Levaita, a knightage freshman and third son of a noble family whose most notable achievement was having even less money than Ioha, joined them after very minor prodding from Karaki. The group suited the young knight perfectly, since, except Ai, they were all pretty much outcasts. The last one, Miri, an administration freshman from building two, joined them out of interest before Ai had a chance to make good on her promise to recruit the remaining back line member. Miri, they learned, was born during the chaotic years when what would later become Isekai had evolved from deathtrap to dirty hellhole. She survived her first year until the outbound gate to Nagoya finally became fully functional, and everything changed. How her father, an almost stereotypical otaku high school student, stayed alive long enough to find himself a wife here no one knew, not even Miri, but she was proud of her mixed heritage and adored her mother, who once fled an abusive Wergaist militia family and now managed a small restaurant in Isekai.

  Miri was also an exception among the building two students. She had magic aptitude and an extremely strange set of abilities. An average lapdog would defeat her in combat, but instead of learning how to fight, she was busy mastering a small tactical supercomputer in her brain. It burned through her tiny aura at an alarming rate and usually left her prone and exhausted when they trained, but not once, not ever, had she given an incorrect suggestion while she still stood on wobbly feet and surveilled her surroundings for the information she needed. She was, in short, utterly useless in a group of six, but they all adored her and dragged along their newfound mascot everywhere they went. Thankfully, she didn’t suffer from poor stamina before she burned through her aura in a few minutes.

  Late evenings and the occasional night Ioha spent with Ai. An hour or two, when they tested the limits of independent spell function systems. Could he strengthen a healing fountain she set up so it survived until someone needed it? Could she turn a hard shield he placed into one such fountain? Was it possible to play billiards with persistent magic effects? Could he manipulate his aura extension into something that allowed her to add healing effects into it? If so, what was the range? Most of their experiments failed horribly, a few worked better than intended, and they both learned more applied magic in two months than they were supposed to until they graduated.

  Then, change.

  “It’s been my pleasure having you as my students,” Rede the greybeard suddenly announced one morning.

  “We be taking up an offer we received,” Verina added.

  “It pays better, and we’re getting old.”

  Verina threw her partner a worried glance. “More money be good,” she said and nodded.

  The next morning, they were gone. Also gone were the insane combat healer and Hanna, their aura teacher. When Ioha returned to his theory lessons a day later, he found out that so was the geeky teacher who spread both laughter and maybe too difficult learning around him.

  Another week later, their principal, in a moment of unexpected clarity, realised how old she was and promptly died later the same day. By that time, Spellsword Academy had scraped together replacements for half of the teachers who left the school.

  The woman teaching offensive magic wasn’t especially good or bad, for that matter. If anything, she turned out to be a bit strange for dragging her class out to a training field where they had to actually try out their magic. The downside was her conservatism.

  “Canadena. Bolts, not arrows!”

  Canadena lifted her rapier to her shoulder, aimed along the blade, and fired off a barrage of arrows. They tore apart the training doll.

  “Bolts I said.”

  What’s the big deal?

  “Yes, ma’am.” One bolt flew at the next doll and lodged in the target before disintegrating.

  “Good, that’s a proper bolt.”

  Are you daft?

  “Ma’am, do I get a higher score for damaging the dummy with a bolt?”

  Their teacher gave Canadena a hard stare. “Higher?”

  “Higher than when I make it explode with arrows, ma’am.” Canadena leaned back on one leg and shot a defiant glare at her teacher.

  Their teacher didn’t flinch. Ioha guessed she didn’t even understand. “Good question. Yes, that’s correct, you do.”

  Someone’s got a stick up their arse.

  Around him, classmates looked among themselves. Their teacher was obviously unhinged, but, and for Ioha it was an important but, in contrast from during their classes with the geek, they did apply what they learned now.

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  “Ioha, you’re next.”

  He gritted his teeth. Oh well, whatever. Bolts were out of the question. He simply didn’t know how to create them, but watching an old game back on Earth now gave him an idea. Above him, a round shield, complete with fireworks and all, formed with an acceleration trigger applied. He imagined a curved line between himself and the dummy and let go of the key spell. The shield spun, arced beautifully to the target and sliced it in half. Captain America, eat shit and die!

  “Ioha. Bolts, not… discs.”

  “It’s a shield, ma’am, not a disc.” He wouldn’t get out of this with wordplays, but then he wouldn’t get out of it, no matter what he did.

  “Bolts, not shields!”

  Sheesh. Go shop for some humour at least. “I don’t know how to form bolts, ma’am.”

  “Then you’ll fail this section.”

  Ioha grimaced and shrugged. He wouldn’t be alone. Around him, almost half his class murmured and exchanged disappointed comments. “I understand, ma’am.” Each of them had a personal contract with a god. Some included bolts, others did not. The world might be some kind of game, or at least work according to game mechanics. There certainly were rules to be learned, but game balance sucked big-time. In other words, this was a real world, and real worlds weren’t fair. And I fucking hate that!

  “Aradi, you’re next.”

  The students failed or passed. Ioha used the time to watch his fellow classmates and hunt insects. Ramming flies dozens of metres from him with his flying shield turned out harder than he thought – that he was able to see them in the first place had ceased to amaze him months earlier. Early afternoon ran its course and ended with the failing students taking tests to prove they were able to use magic distance attacks at all. Ioha shredded another dummy and got a pass. Two sad classmates got a hard fail. They were also among the best acrobats of them all and didn’t really need the ability to attack from a distance they were able to cover in seconds, if even that.

  Ioha didn’t care. He liked his former teacher more, but he learned more in class now. Pass, soft or hard fail didn’t matter. Right now, he struggled to keep up with the other cats, and their northbound excursion lay just around the corner. Good or bad, the teacher was still a first-class pain.

  ***

  “You pass.”

  A swirling band of shields threw the remaining pieces of shredded arrows to the ground, and Ioha released all shields with a new trick he’d trained for a few days. One trigger spell and all shields keyed to each other.

  “Normally, you’d apply a sword barrier, but I guess this is more efficient.” Their replacement for Rede, the greybeard, didn’t have a drop of conservative blood in him, but he also lacked almost everything that made Rede Rede. It was the first time Ioha encountered a truly poor teacher in Spellsword Academy. He’d seen quite a few bigots, but at least they were supremely competent.

  “Any idea how to improve my defences?”

  The teacher smiled. “Sorry, no. I don’t know any shield magic.”

  “And if I want to learn the sword barrier?”

  “You have to try for yourself.”

  No help to be found there. Time was running out, and this was the third time in a row the teacher answered a direct question with a suggestion for Ioha to find the answer on his own. I don’t have that time. Damn! Another week ahead with defence on the schedule, and since he received a passing grade for using shield, field and barrier abilities when he should have learned how to apply his sword instead, it was all for nothing. Sure, his techniques were inherently superior, but they weren’t the cat style of response to an attack. Frustration, building for a few weeks, gnawed at him more and more with each day passing.

  When the remainder of the class received their pass or fail grades, mostly fail, Ioha vented his anger on one of the training dummies. Two swords whirling, he hammered wooden arms and torso at a speed that would have been impossible just a few months earlier, but compared to the rest of the cats, he was still slow. I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! He extended aura into his bokken and gave the dummy another whack. Why can’t I learn something this simple? He kept attacking the dummy without giving it much thought. By now he’d done this exercise so many times he could do it in his sleep, and it wasn’t like the idiocy required his attention in the first place. More aura, more, more, more…

  “Ioha!”

  …

  “Watch out!”

  Canadena?

  The training dummy filled with another aura infusion. Then it burst. An expanding ball of wooden shrapnel spread across the entire training field. Instinct had him throw up a curved shield covering his face and torso, but most of both lower legs got lacerated. Just before his self-healing kicked in, a flicker of movement told him both Canadena and their princess spun two swords each fast enough to shield their classmates from the onrushing wave of destruction. The princess, always at the top of their class, protected herself as well. Canadena wasn’t as lucky. Her uniform sported gashes all over her torso, and soon the green blazer had red splotches.

  What?

  “Get a healer here!”

  What?

  Ioha staggered toward where Canadena lay shaking on the gravel, but while his self-healing abilities had come a long way since he started training them, he was not Ai, and his aura extended self-healing magic was still more busy with removing remnants of the training dummy from his legs rather than actually healing them. Damn! He sank to his knees. The pain was just too much. What happened? Then the creepy feeling when he wanted to scratch himself into insanity, and his wounds closed with muscles and blood vessels reattaching. Need to help her. He tried walking to her on his knees, but while he’d gotten used to the itch from healing his hands and lower arms, legs were a different matter. This was the first time he’d felt them on fire.

  “Barn five.”

  The orders came from their princess, who was the only one who kept calm, or at least relatively calm. Shouldn’t their teacher be in charge? Ah, he’s an idiot. Now Ioha’s knees sucked aura as well, and he gave up on walking on them. As long as he inflicted new injuries on himself, no matter how shallow, he wouldn’t get to Canadena.

  “Good, yes, keep your hands there. Healer is coming.”

  Someone else must have acted. Yes, two of his classmates stood bent over Canadena and a third sat by her side, pressing hands to her stomach. Then the feeling of someone releasing aura in rapid pulses, and a man in his mid-twenties came jumping with inhuman leaps. He landed next to Canadena and put his hands on her torso, the same way Ioha had seen Ai do several times before. I guess we’re good then. Self-healing ran its course, and Ioha sat on his back and watched the healer do what he himself could not.