The day after the metal-cutting exercise, the Elite Class faced a new trial: Water Wards.

  The instructor had set up several heavy mechanical devices around the training hall. They looked like catapults, specifically designed to hurl stones of varying sizes and speeds at the students.

  Before activating the machines, he explained the theory.

  "Water obeys the law of resistance to momentum," the instructor said, running his hand along a transparent, water-filled cylinder to demonstrate. "The faster an object moves, and the denser its structure, the more violently water reacts, and the higher its resistance becomes."

  He pushed his hand slowly into the water. It yielded effortlessly. Then, he struck the surface with a lightning-fast, open-palm strike. The water cracked loudly, feeling as solid as concrete.

  "If you strike water slowly, it gives way," he explained. "If you strike it fast, it becomes harder than stone. Yesterday, you cut metal by utilizing density and highly directional pressure. Today, you must learn the exact opposite: how to distribute kinetic pressure across a wide surface area."

  The task was straightforward, yet incredibly difficult: we had to conjure a spherical dome of water around ourselves, maintain its thickness and uniform flow, and successfully block stones fired from multiple directions.

  The stones would start off slow. Then, they would accelerate exponentially.

  We lined up across the hall. In front of each of us, an automated activation crystal glowed dull red.

  "Begin," the instructor ordered.

  I conjured a dome of water around myself with perfectly even density. Without needing to think about it, I established the three necessary parameters: thickness, uniform internal circulation, and outward directional pressure.

  Princess Elinia did the same. Her dome was thin, rotating smoothly, and incredibly dense.

  Lucille Arvent raised a perfectly spherical, almost completely static barrier without a single ripple.

  When the machines launched the first, sluggish volley of stones, the initial blocks went smoothly for almost everyone. The water absorbed the low-speed impacts easily.

  But for the rest of the class, the structural flaws in their magic became obvious immediately.

  Finn's dome fell apart on the second impact. He was pumping far too much aggressive mana into it; the water kept boiling into steam, drastically lowering the density of his shield.

  Edgar had the opposite problem. He made his barrier far too 'solid,' instinctively trying to force a metallic, rigid structure into a fluid element. The stone punched right through the brittle water layer and only stopped inches from his raised forearm.

  The swordsmen—Siren, Tara, Miella, and Kairen—managed to keep their domes up, but they were highly unstable. They were instinctively reacting to every single stone individually, shifting their mana toward the point of impact. Because of this constant over-correction, their domes kept losing their overall spherical shape.

  Reynar's dome was too light; the water cushioned the blows but didn't have the density to fully stop the faster stones.

  Noah's barrier flickered in and out of existence like a mirage. Clumps of water kept dissolving into mist and reforming a second too late.

  The instructor watched strictly, but did not intervene. This was part of the learning process.

  Then, the machines accelerated.

  As the stones began flying at blistering speeds, the barriers began to shatter.

  Miella and Kairen's domes ruptured simultaneously, resulting in both of them taking several painful hits to the shoulders and back.

  Edgar's rigid dome collapsed completely, forcing him to cross his arms and physically block the stones with his hardened muscles.

  Finn suffered the most; his boiling water offered absolutely zero resistance to high-speed kinetic impacts.

  One by one, the students began taking hits. According to Academy regulations, this wasn't considered an 'injury'—the stones were magically softened and wouldn't cause deep tissue damage or break bones—but they still left vicious, painful bruises.

  By the time the machines reached their maximum speed, only three domes remained standing, blocking every single projectile perfectly: the Princess, Lucille, and me.

  When the lesson finally concluded, I was immediately surrounded.

  Finn, Edgar, Siren, Tara, and Miella marched over to my station. They looked battered, bruised, and incredibly frustrated.

  "How are you holding your dome?" Finn demanded, rubbing a red welt on his shoulder. "Yours didn't even ripple."

  "I tried reinforcing the exact spot where the stone hit," Edgar grunted. "But there are too many of them. It's impossible to track them all."

  Siren narrowed his eyes at me. "You weren't even watching the stones. How did you anticipate the angle of impact?"

  I looked at them calmly. "Tell me... how exactly were you trying to block the stones?"

  They all started explaining at once. "I reinforced the point of impact." "I concentrated all my mana on where the stone was going to hit." "I tracked every stone individually."

  I sighed. "And that is exactly your mistake."

  They fell silent, listening intently.

  "You are trying to work locally and reactively," I explained. "You need to work structurally and proactively."

  I held up a finger. "First: do not track the stones. Water cannot restructure itself fast enough to chase multiple high-speed projectiles, and neither can the human eye. Second: you must create a mana-shell inside the water."

  I conjured a small sphere of water in my palm to demonstrate. "A barrier must possess internal pressure, a stable mana gradient, and distributed density. If you create a solid mana-shell beneath the surface of the water, the kinetic force of the stone will hit the water, compress it against your mana-shell, and the water will instantly harden to absorb the blow."

  I spun the sphere slowly. "Third: create a vortex. The easiest way to distribute kinetic force is to give the water a circular rotation. Centrifugal force naturally reinforces the walls of the dome, equalizes the internal pressure, and distributes the impact of a single stone across the entire surface area of the sphere."

  I let the water splash to the floor. "Fourth: if you lack the fine control for a thin, high-density dome, just make it thicker. A thick, slow-moving layer of water is highly effective if your control isn't perfect yet."

  They stared at me for a moment, absorbing the information. Then, they immediately went back to their stations and re-cast their barriers.

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  The results weren't instantaneous, but the improvement was drastic.

  Finn managed to hold his dome together against three high-speed stones before it boiled away. Edgar stopped trying to make the water rigid and achieved a highly dense, thick wall. Siren and Tara quickly grasped the concept of the rotating vortex, creating highly stable, spinning barriers. Miella and Kairen reduced the number of hits they took by more than half.

  As the healers moved through the class treating the bruises, I overheard one of the students whisper, "His explanation makes more sense than the actual textbook..."

  I pretended I didn't hear it.

  The next lesson was a direct progression into offensive applications.

  "Today, you will master the foundational offensive technique of water magic: the Water Spear," the instructor announced. "In other schools, it is called the Water Arrow or the Jet Pierce. The objective is to penetrate a solid target with a single, high-pressure strike."

  In front of each student sat a massive rectangular monolith of solid stone, roughly a meter wide and nearly half a meter thick.

  "You must conjure a thin, incredibly dense, high-velocity stream of water," the instructor commanded. "It must strike the stone dead center... and pass completely through it, leaving a clean, perfect cylindrical hole."

  When the signal was given, three people completed the task immediately. Elinia, Lucille, and me.

  The Princess conjured a perfectly tapered, needle-like stream that pierced the stone like a hot knife through butter. Lucille concentrated her mana into a line thinner than a thread, executing a strike so fast it left a perfectly smooth, circular tunnel through the rock.

  I simply directed a short, brutally fast, highly pressurized burst. My stone was pierced cleanly through the center without a single hairline fracture on the surface.

  For the rest of the class, however, it was an absolute disaster.

  Finn's water kept boiling from his overheated mana, losing its shape before it even reached the target. Edgar tried to make his water "heavy," resulting in a spear so thick that its kinetic energy completely dispersed upon impact. The swordsmen had the shape right, but completely lacked the necessary velocity. Reynar's stream was too light, shattering upon contact with the dense stone. Noah's stream kept turning into a harmless optical illusion halfway to the target.

  They experimented frantically. Some tried increasing the pressure. Some tried making the stream thicker. Some tried making it thinner. Some tried throwing it with a physical jerking motion.

  Nothing worked. They left shallow craters, scratches, or minor fractures, but no one could pierce the stone.

  Eventually, they all stopped and began to study the three successful students. They slowly realized that Elinia, Lucille, and I were all using the exact same fundamental structure.

  Edgar was the first to vocalize it. "Wait... so it's initial velocity... plus a sharpened point... plus rotation?"

  "And a form that doesn't buckle upon impact," Siren added analytically.

  Finn shook his head, a wry smile on his face. "So I shouldn't be trying to crush it... I should be trying to drill it."

  They all returned to their stones.

  An hour later, the breakthroughs began. Siren executed a clean, precise puncture. Tara followed shortly after. Edgar blasted a hole through his stone—it was slightly diagonal and violently messy, but it went all the way through. Finn finally managed to cool his mana enough to produce a rigid stream, piercing the stone near the center. Miella and Kairen achieved stable forms. Noah finally produced a physical stream of water, chipping away a deep segment of the rock.

  Even Astra, who was dead last, managed to bore a hole through her target. She smiled for the first time in days.

  When the final student succeeded, the instructor stood up from his desk and, for the first time all year... began to clap.

  "Excellent," he praised genuinely. "You have not merely mimicked a technique; you have grasped the fundamental mechanics of high-density water pressure. From here, it is only a matter of practice."

  I smiled inwardly. Not because they had succeeded, but because the class was actually beginning to understand the true nature of magic.

  The final stage of the week was the transmutation of water into ice.

  "This is one of the most complex disciplines," the instructor warned, placing a simple cup of water in front of each student. "Do not assume that simply 'cooling the water' is sufficient. Cold is merely a byproduct. The true secret is structure."

  He began his lecture, his tone strict and academic. "Ice is not simply 'frozen water.' Its molecules arrange themselves into a crystalline lattice, very similar to the atomic structure of metals. Therefore, simply projecting 'cold' mana is a slow, crude, and highly inefficient method."

  He hovered his hand over his own cup. "You must feel the ambient heat of the water. You must feel its vibration—the kinetic movement of its molecules. And then, you must either expel that kinetic energy outward, or meticulously absorb it with your mana."

  He didn't just explain; he demonstrated. As he moved his palm, the water in his cup grew cloudy, then thick, and within a single second, crystallized into a flawless, perfectly clear cube of ice.

  "Replicate this," he ordered.

  For three people in the room, this was laughably easy. Me, Elinia, and Lucille. We simply sank our mana into the water, and it froze instantly, as if time itself had stopped.

  But then... my inner demon, the one that harbored a millennium of sheer arrogance, decided it wanted to 'play.'

  I didn't just make an ice cube. Using microscopic mana threads, I instantly sculpted the freezing water into a flawless, highly detailed miniature human. Perfect proportions, tiny articulated fingers, intricately carved hair, and perfectly defined eyes.

  I heard Princess Elinia's eye twitch from across the room.

  "You..." she hissed quietly.

  And, naturally, her royal pride refused to let that stand. Her water froze instantly as well. She furiously began to carve her own miniature human out of the ice.

  But I could see the flaws immediately. The face was slightly asymmetrical, the arms were uneven, and the hair looked like jagged stalactites.

  At that exact moment, the ancient, petty Demon King inside my soul took the wheel completely.

  Oh, you want to play? I thought. Fine. Let's play.

  "Alright," I whispered. "How about this?"

  In less than sixty seconds, I transmuted the ambient moisture in the air and sculpted an exact, 1:1 scale replica of the Academy dormitory building. Every single window. The intricate railings. The exact correct number of steps leading to the main entrance. A flawless, meter-by-meter architectural model made of diamond-clear ice now sat proudly on my desk.

  The Princess was boiling. Literally. Actual steam was rising from her scalp.

  She began to cast frantically. Her water swirled, sparked, and vibrated violently. Ice formed and shattered in rapid succession. She looked as though she were trying to exert enough force to freeze the entire ocean.

  Ten agonizing minutes later, she finally produced... a castle.

  Well, almost a castle. It was highly lopsided. The towers looked like inverted buckets. The grand portcullis looked remarkably like the gaping maw of a confused troll.

  But Elinia slammed her hands on the desk and declared proudly, "There."

  I looked at her lopsided troll-castle. And I smiled. A wide, deeply satisfied, infinitely arrogant demonic smile.

  The Princess looked ready to commit a war crime.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the class was suffering immensely.

  Swordsmen, mages, orphans, and nobles alike—they were all hitting the exact same wall. Their water trembled but wouldn't freeze. Or it turned into slushy snow that melted instantly. Or a thin film of ice formed on the surface and immediately cracked.

  They simply didn't understand the underlying physics. They didn't understand kinetic energy, molecular vibration, or how to properly 'subtract' heat using mana.

  Finn walked over to my desk, looking utterly defeated. "Hey... how are you doing that? I hit the water with my mana, and it literally just exploded into steam!"

  Edgar trudged over next. "I'm just getting a cup of slush!"

  Miella sighed. "I made snow..."

  Astra looked like she was about to cry. "It just keeps melting... I don't understand..."

  Even the Princess eventually drifted over, trying desperately to look as though she were just 'casually observing' the peasants.

  I let out a long, heavy sigh.

  "Alright," I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "Listen closely. It's actually much simpler than you think."

  And then, I gave a lecture. Yes. Me. The former Demon King. Lecturing human prodigies.

  I explained everything I had intuitively understood during my centuries of existence. I explained what molecules were. How they moved. Why heat was simply a form of kinetic movement. How mana could act as a friction-brake to halt that movement. I explained that the crystalline lattice of ice was merely an orderly arrangement of particles, and that they shouldn't be trying to 'freeze' the water, but rather 'align' it.

  The mages listened with rapt attention. The swordsmen actually started taking notes. Edgar was nodding so vigorously it looked like I was handing him the sacred blueprints for an unbreakable hammer.

  And Elinia... she maintained an expression that clearly said, 'I already knew all of this, obviously,' while listening more intently than anyone else in the room.

  I happened to glance over at the instructor.

  His eyes were wide, burning with absolute, feverish awe. He looked less like an Academy teacher and more like a mad alchemist who had just been handed the Philosopher's Stone.

  After my impromptu lecture, the students returned to their cups.

  Within five minutes, the breakthroughs occurred. Finn produced a chunk of ice as clear as glass. Edgar forged a solid, dense, indestructible cube. The swordsmen managed a thick, armor-like layer of frost. Astra created a delicate, perfectly transparent ice petal. Noah froze the surface of his water into a flawless, reflective mirror.

  Even if some of the ice melted shortly after, it was an unprecedented leap forward. Mastering the transmutation of ice usually took months. They had taken the first genuine steps in a single lesson.

  I looked over at the instructor again. He was staring at me with an expression that heavily implied he was currently drafting adoption papers.

  I quickly looked away.

  I really need to be more careful, I thought in horror. If I keep this up, they're going to pin an 'Academy Teacher of the Year' medal on my chest.