Chương 40: Chapter 39: Back to Basics

++The brewing war with Iruchi was not something I thought about much to start with, but it would go on to define much of my early rise to power. Conflict breeds opportunities for the strong and influential, that much has always been the truth. However, I would be lying if I claimed that anything other than simple luck motivated me to prepare for it as well as I did. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A.

E Doctor Brown was already setting up a new set of rooms to teach us in when we entered, but that did not stop him from peering over at myself and Agrian with a broad smile on his face.

"There you are," he grinned, then made his way quickly across the room to stop before us.

"Isabel, Agrian, you've both grown so much! Especially you, Agrian."

"Why do people always say that?" I asked him.

"Every time an adult sees me again after some time has passed, they tell me I have grown. Why. Are you surprised? Are you somehow unaware that children grow over time? Or did you simply think that I, somehow, would be unaware of it myself?" He seemed to find this terribly amusing, like always.

"I missed you," he said. Then froze as if he had just allowed some terrible secret to pass his lips.

"I mean to say, you are my two finest students, you understand."

"Right," Agrian nodded.

"We read that book you wrote about us." The Doctor winced.

"Ah, did you…like it?" That reminded me of another thing.

"You described me as being of average maturity for an eight year-old by the time we parted ways," I growled.

"Yes…I think that was about right, right?" The Doctor, of course, did not have the context to know why I found this so offensive, and I could hardly tell him.

"We are here to learn more magic," I told him abruptly.

"I know," he grinned.

"It's been years since I've taught anyone you know, mostly just been making a living off the royalties from the book. I might be a bit rusty, and I don't think I'd ever have compared to a Winzorth instructor even at my best."

"We don't care about that," Agrian told him earnestly.

"We want you." The boy didn't meet his eye after saying that, clearly embarrassed, but he did not take his words back either and I could see the Doctor was deeply touched. I, for one, did care about my educational quality, but I also could not do anything about it right now, so there was no point in complaining.

"Well anyway," Brown began, "this first session should just be spent on getting up to date on what the two of you have learned at the Winzorth Institute. You know the fields of magic now?"

"Yes," Agrian answered before I could.

"Evocation, illusion, conjuration, transfiguration, enchanting and alchemy. We've only started learning the first four though."

"And we do not actually know how to conjure anything yet," I cut in irritably.

"Our idiot Professor is letting reactionary fearmongering get in the way of true progress." The Doctor laughed, finding my latest expression of anger as funny as he apparently did all the others.

"Nor have you been lectured on the minor spheres of magic, either. That's fine, they won't be relevant for a while anyway. Let's get started." I must admit to enjoying the next few hours, even though I did not progress much in regards to magic. Doctor Brown had been telling the truth when he warned us the session would only be set for finding our new abilities and limits, but his shock at just how advanced they were was more than a little satisfying. By this point, I had more raw power than even he did.

Agrian was weaker than me, but still at worst comparable, and more likely slightly superior, to the Doctor. Our technical skill was more varied, with me enjoying an edge over the Doctor but Agrian falling slightly short of him. What we still lacked was his experience in teaching, and his outside perspective. Agrian and I could give one another pointers, but neither of us had taught children as much as Doctor Brown, and there were different methods you used to develop a juvenile's magic than an adults.

Granted, I had experimented with training children myself during a brief period three thousand or so years after I attained lichdom. In the end I had decided that they were too irritating to justify the extra power, a mistake, in hindsight, given how my eventual confrontation with the Gods ended. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. Which was why I put up with Victoria and Agrian in this life.

"I…don't know what more I actually have to teach you both," the Doctor said at last.

"To be frank. Anything I can do, I'd expect you both have the raw abilities to master at this stage. I can show you uses of magic, applications and such, but beyond that you won't really be getting more skilled or powerful under me. Sorry. The best I can manage is to expand your bags of tricks."

"That's fine," Agrian said quickly. I kept myself diplomatically silent, just allowing my brother to comfort the man.

"What would you say is the first of these tricks then?" the boy continued.

"Do…" Brown hesitated for a moment before replying.

"What do the two of you remember of your kidnapping, a few years ago?" Agrian's face fell instantly, and he started mumbling out some mindless trauma-response or another. I cut in to spare us all from the wasted time and embarrassment.

"I remember it all," I told him.

"First…" I relayed everything that had happened, as told from the perspective of the little girl I was supposed to have been at the time. The only details I spared were those involving my own part in how events turned out, and where I could I credited Agrian for those as before. He had heard it all before of course, but this was as much to reiterate my story as anything else. Consistency over time would keep me from being noticed, inconsistency over that same time might expose me.

"Your memory is absurd," Brown said at last.

"Almost inhuman." I had to stifle a wince. There was nothing 'almost' about it. I had not considered how suspicious it might be for me to showcase that, in the future I would have to pretend to recall less. Let people attribute the difference to my aging brain.

"Do you remember what I did with my magic, while defending you?" he asked.

"Or rather, did you see?"

"I remember you guided magic missiles with strings of aether." I had copied that technique myself, and idly worked on improving it, but I still had yet to master it to quite the extent that Doctor Brown himself showed. This was something I was actually eager to discuss.

"And you, Agrian, do you remember that?" he asked. The boy swallowed, and his gaze fell to the floor.

"No," he admitted.

"I was…uh…" He was too busy panicking and frozen with fear to have noticed much of anything. Well at least he had the decency to be self-conscious about it now, and to have served me much better a few years after when the issues arose in that dungeon.

"That's fine," the Doctor cut in.

"You can learn it now either way." He showed us the trick to it, and I had to admit it was one I may not have thought of myself. I had been weaving a spell matrix specifically for the purpose of recognising and binding the magic missile to my aether rails, something that reduced power due to the extra mana needed to form it. Doctor Brown's method was simpler—magic missiles with matrixes trapped in the centre of those rails that were allowed to expand to overlap around them.

The aether was so thin that they still detonated on impact without issue, and it saved power. The Doctor had prepared a number of clay targets for us to practice the spell on, and I enjoyed myself almost as much as Agrian did as we both did so. Experimenting with different spell matrixes to cause different effects. Spell matrixes are limited in complexity by their caster.

I could manage maybe two or three significant effects in any given one, with each one taking up power that could be used by the others, but this being almost entirely a physical trick with the rails, I was using each effect with almost as much power as if it had been fired out on its own. The clay was tragically no match for that sort of magic.

"Could we make these go round corners?" Agrian asked. I could see him trying even then, working the aether he made into different forms and shapes, different textures, the mana behind it wrapped up with a slightly altered form each time. None of them were working just yet.

"Not to my knowledge," Doctor Brown replied.

"But it might be possible. A lot of specific spells like these aren't widely known."

"Why?" my brother asked. He really was innocent, still, despite all the growing I had seen him do.

"Because magicians don't like giving up an advantage over other magicians, once they have it," the Doctor explained.

"Someone invents something like this, they tend to keep it to themselves. Maybe one day, if their children are magicians, they teach it to them, and maybe in the future those children teach it to any of theirs born with the gift. One day, someone tells it to someone who can't be trusted with a secret and it spreads like wildfire from there. Not always though, a lot of powerful techniques have been lost outright because their creators hoarded them until the day they died."

It was a good explanation, and very much the same as things had been back before my rebirth too.

"But that's stupid!" Agrian snapped. It was a good explanation, and very much the same as things had been back before my rebirth too.

"It is what it is," the Doctor shrugged.

"If you don't like it…well, you're in luck. With talent like yours, you'll no doubt be inventing plenty of powerful new spells over your life. You can feel free to share them with everyone, let friends and enemies alike use your new tricks." My brother got rather quiet, at that, and I could not help but smile. At least he understood when he was wrong, that was quite a rare talent. Especially among magicians.

"What about you Isabel?" Doctor Brown grinned.

"Will you be sharing your powers?"

"Yes," I replied. Of course I would. Once I had finished conquering humanity and uniting them under me, I would have no reason not to ensure all of my subordinates were as powerful and effective as they could be. And once I had seen to that, the Gods would be able to see just what a properly motivated human being could do. But I was getting ahead of myself.

"What else can you show us?" I asked him. For whatever reason, Doctor Brown seemed willing to share his own secrets with me, and I was not complaining. He hesitated at the question, apparently giving what he said next a great deal of thought.

"I do have one more spell," he murmured.

"But it's dangerous, you understand? This one isn't my own invention, and you could learn it from other places, but you must promise to use it responsibly no matter what. It's…a magician-killer." There was almost nothing else he could have said that would capture my attention so thoroughly.