Chương 34: Book 2 Chapter 15: Shounen Moment

After Katniss left for class with a hurt look on her face, gods knew why, he'd given her money for better clothes, Jim fell into deep philosophical thought on the topic of going to class while injured. His body… hurt. He was missing… a finger. By all accounts he was more hurt than he'd ever been before, although with the way that he'd turned the tables on Alice, his honour was in fact polished up a bit, even if his bodily condition had deteriorated.

He'd deservedly gotten two elective slots however, and to his knowledge the first class of Introduction to Mind Magic was today, right after Combat Magic 1. Combat Magic 1 he couldn't skip because there were only three lessons before the first group tested out, a group he was now a part of. If he didn't appear for those first three lessons, going to Combat Magic 2 would get delayed.

Introduction to Mind Magic, similarly, was not something he dared skip, no matter his current state, due to mind magic being part of his deal with the lich. It was unclear if doing so would once again surrender the control of his body and Jim would prefer not finding out. Once had been unpleasant enough. So, in the end, the choice was made for him. Going to class in his state would hurt, but not going would, if anything, hurt more.

Thus he pocketed the potions by his bedside table, swallowed the first one, it had been half an hour, right? And made his way towards the colosseum. Most likely he was already late, which was bad because he wasn't really in a condition to do push-ups. -/-"What the hell are you doing here?" professor Kyros asked with a complex look on his face, chiselled pecs glistening in the sun.

"Uh, attending class?" Jim asked as he looked around at the other students, part of whom was collapsed from the barrier annihilation of the first lesson, while the other part was actively learning the skill.

"Randovich sent me a report about your injuries, you had three cracked ribs, bruising on all of your organs and had a finger bitten off by what he said were concerningly human teeth," the professor said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. Jim puffed up, offended, before looking down at himself. His robe was a bit dusty. And his head was a bit bandaged. And his finger was a bit missing.

"So what, just because I'm hurt I'm not allowed to participate!" Jim exclaimed.

"If anything I should be given extra privileges for having actually participated in combat! With Magic!" he shouted, raising the hand with his missing finger and waving it around as proof and getting the attention of the attending students. For the first time in the many months he'd been attending the man's classes, Jim saw Kyros completely speechless. He even uncrossed his disgustingly muscled arms and crossed them again in confusion.

The professor eventually stepped forward and led Jim towards the shadows of the colosseum, dropping his voice a few decibels as he asked.

"Are you high on painkillers?" he asked with an inappropriately concerned voice.

"Painkillers wish they were high on me," Jim harrumphed right back.

"I had to fight for my life yesterday and today I want to go to class. So what? I don't want to not come and delay going forward to Combat Magic 2. I'm too talented to lose even a day, I'll have you know!" Kyros didn't have anything to say to that.

"What were you even doing?" he eventually asked.

"I got kidnapped by an Oberrotten, or whatever they're called, stupid-looking creatures. They chained me up and interrogated me a bit, likely because of my expert knowledge on many topics. Bit off my finger as a part of the torture before I broke free and fought them off. Was gonna keep it alive to get my money back in terms of leather but they committed suicide instead." He paused.

"I got some minor assistance from two acquaintances."

"An Oboroten?" professor Kyros asked. Jim waved him off.

"Who cares, it's dead now."

"They can use magic and are quite intelligent, not to mention physically strong."

"Obviously I'm better." Professor Kyros seemed to give up right then and there, sighing and shaking his head.

"Alright, show me your shield and your missile and we can talk about advancement." Jim nodded and summoned his shield, faded as it was starting to look from his exercises in forming transparent mana. The professor for his part took a few steps back and shot out a series of attacks which disintegrated Jim's shield piece by piece as it spun violently and replaced its fist-sized hexagons. This went on for thirty seconds or so, before the professor stopped, nodded, and summoned his own shield, opening his mouth.

"How do you make it explode?" Jim suddenly asked, interrupting the man.

"That's an advanced application. You'll need to be third circle, two separate directions." the professor replied simply.

"Show me your missiles." Jim nodded, summoned his also mostly transparent trio of missiles and barraged the professor for a good minute or two before he started running out of steam. Professor Kyros called for a stop before Jim ran out of stamina completely, likely afraid of getting embarrassed by his shield finally breaking under the assault.

"Good, good," the man muttered.

"You know what, advance to Combat Magic 2 now. Take the next two classes off and then join Quatzel's lessons. There are more things I could teach you, but I won't have the time with the hopeless students getting pushed through this year. I'll have my hands busy with remedial training for the whole semester." Jim nodded, remembering that he himself had been the recipient of the remedial training the first time around. An unpleasant thing, that.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"If the family of the Oboroten comes for revenge, they are quite close-knit after all," Kyros suddenly said.

"I'd suggest learning some ice magic. They're surprisingly vulnerable to cold, likely due to the thinness of their real form." Jim paused, nodded.

"Thank you." And left the class under the adoring and stunned looks of all the other students. Diamond, as always, shined through. That was a fact he'd learned long ago. -/-"How did you do that?" Were the brusque words with which Dew greeted Jim when she found him standing in front of the mind arts classroom a few hours later.

"Hello, how are you doing, well, and you, also good, nice," Jim said to the blue-haired and red-faced girl.

"First you spill that your family put you in a magical vow, then you're late to class and come all beat up and test out immediately. Three missiles! Are you secretly at the third circle?" Dew asked with a piercing glare, getting a bit too close to comfort. Jim, almost instinctively pushed her away with his right hand, before cringing as she stumbled back and looked down. Bandaged, mangled, healing very slowly.

"Fuck off you gnat!" he cursed angrily as the girl glared at him.

"You think I owe anyone an explanation? The great Jimothy Savant has always been better than you, you just focused so much on the trivialities taught in the first semester that you thought you had a chance."

"There's something suspicious going on," Dew insisted.

"What are you even doing here? Weren't you already taking divination and external mana sensing?" Jim asked in an exasperated tone of voice. Dew paused, looked at him blankly.

"Who told you that?" she asked more calmly. Jim simply gave her a disdaining look.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" he asked, before waving his hand dismissively, barely managing to not cringe at the motion.

"Now shoo, don't you have a professor to harass somewhere?"

"It's called having an inquiring mind, not that you'd know!" Dew explained, but nonetheless turned around, throwing him one last suspicious look as she did so.

"What a dumb bitch," Jim muttered under his breath before leaning back again to rest. Jim had come here early, primarily to avoid the healer who had been waiting for him in front of the dorms with foam frothing from his mouth. Something had made the man angry and be on the lookout for him. Gods knew what. It was because of this earliness that he was surprised when a voice from behind him suddenly chided him.

"Language, if class were in session I'd make you stand in the corner," a frigid male voice said, causing Jim to turn around and see that an older man dressed in black pants and a black coat had opened the door to the classroom.

"What did the corner do to deserve the pleasure?" Jim asked confusedly, receiving a withering glare in return.

"A comedian, the heavens have blessed me today I see…" Jim narrowed his eyes.

"Are you calling me a bard?" The man rolled his eyes.

"Banish the thought," he muttered, before stepping back but leaving the door open.

"You may as well come in," were the final words spoken before Jim entered the classroom and promptly found a seat to lounge on. A few minutes passed in silence as the man looked through a stack of papers on the desk in front of the circular raised desk arrangement. Eventually the black-haired man finished and looked up at Jim.

"You look like you lost a fight against a hyena," he observed.

"I did not lose!" Jim exclaimed, getting a raised eyebrow in return.

"So you don't deny it was a hyena?" Jim paused and furrowed his brows.

"It was an oblabra, or something." The professor simply looked at Jim with his black eyes.

"Pretend I didn't ask," he eventually said. Then he sighed and swung his hand to the side, closing the door to the classroom.

"You may as well sit in the front," he told Jim who'd sat down in the third row. Jim sighed, stood up and plopped himself down in the first row.

"What about the others?" he asked.

"I'm Professor Cinci, and there are no others." Was the answer to that. Jim didn't reply and simply leaned back in his chair.

"I won't stand up for this lecture, no real point," the professor muttered.

"Be my guest," Jim said.

"I wasn't asking for permission, I was talking to myself…"

"That's weird!" Jim informed the man.

"Say that again," was the frosty response. Jim furrowed his brows, wondering which part had offended the man.

"You're weird?" he eventually asked.

"I am at a loss for words…"

"Does that mean the lecture is over?"

"Just tell me what you know about the mind arts and stop talking about anything else, I'm about to put you in detention and I don't want to do that to myself…" Jim hummed, thinking back on what Quatzel had told him.

"One of the aspects of mind magic is memory extraction, memory copying and memory viewing. At a high enough level it is theoretically possible to copy the memories of someone else and perhaps store them if they are ever to be lost, and then return them." The professor blinked at him.

"So you don't think the mind arts are supposed to teach how to read someone's mind, how to defend your own?" he asked. The student stared at the professor. Wasn't this guy a bit… slow in the head?

"No, why would I think that?" Jim eventually asked.

"It's a common misconception. You'll see if you attend the class longer that there will be students who will leave the moment they find out the mind arts will not allow them to find out if the girl they like likes them back. I'm glad at least that you're starting from scratch instead of bringing up unfortunately wide-spread superstitions." Jim thought that was a very weird thing to say for someone who looked like they'd studied mind arts in the hopes of finding out if a girl had ever liked them.

"That's dumb," he said.

"The way to get girls is so much easier than that." The professor sighed, seemed to be questioning his life choices and looked up at the ceiling of the classroom.

"Illuminate me."

"Just pay them!"

"Your wisdom… it is terrifying," the professor replied slowly before closing his eyes and bringing up a finger to rub at his temple.

"Regardless, you are right in the sense that mind magic does involve, amongst many other things, the study of memory manipulation, although the copying and re-insertion of someone else's memories is a topic much too complex for an introductory course. At first we will primarily focus on two aspects of mind magic. First is the partition of the thinking process into two parts to allow two independent patterns to emerge.

This, if you didn't know, is one of the solutions to the third circle problem, how two strands of many behave independently from each other." Jim nodded along, he'd been working on making his mana move in two separate directions for a while now, to no avail.

"The second thing we will cover is, as you mentioned, memory extraction. Once we move past that, we will work on the viewing of extracted memories, any questions so far?"

"Out of curiosity's sake, why is reading someone's mind not possible?" Jim asked.

"Reading someone's mind implies entering it first, and if there is one surefire way for a powerful mage to lose to a peasant who can't even spell mana, then it's entering their mind where they have an absolute power advantage over you due to it being their territory."

Reading itself is the wrong verb here since the mind is not a book to be read, but rather a complex ever changing sequence of patterns and pathways which are hard to decipher due to the fact that the intruder and the defender will inevitably have different methods of interpreting and encoding reality. Mind invasions cannot even be used on willing participants because their subconsciousness may not be as agreeable and harm anyone who attempts it."

There are always those who think they've cracked the code, that they figured it out. They all fail and can sometimes be found in the infirmary slobbering away before they are done away with, presumably as feed for farm animals, which is the only way they could have contributed to society anyway. After all, there is no ethical basis in invading anyone's mind. Does that answer your question?" Jim furrowed his brows.

"What's an ethical and why is it based?" he eventually asked. The professor looked up at the ceiling again.

"I see that you are not just a clown, you are the entire circus," he said sadly. Jim looked up at the ceiling as well, wondering what the man was saying.

"There's no one up there, are you talking to yourself again?"

"..." -/- The lesson with the weird professor eventually ended, at which point Jim returned to his dorms where he'd arranged to meet Katniss, who thankfully arrived promptly, dressed better for once.

"Good to see you in a new cloak, I hope you gave the other one to a beggar, they could use it to wipe their ass," Jim told the girl in lieu of a greeting. Katniss looked down instead of meeting his eyes, likely admiring her new, unfrayed and unholed brown cloak.

"The healer was looking everywhere for you, said you weren't in any state to attend classes. How did you evade him?"

"I was in the last place anyone would look," Jim said.

"The classroom for Introduction to Mind Magic, the professor's a complete moron."

"I see," Katniss said slowly, before shaking her head and not inquiring further.

"Let's go meet these… Ezengerdians of yours."

"They don't really belong to me, you know," Jim informed her as they started making their way downtown.

"You don't say…" Katniss muttered.