Chương 3: Apha Testing

Ch 3: Apha Testing

"A programmer is an organism that turns caffeine into code," I rumbled to myself.

"But what the heck am I supposed to do in a world without coffee?" Three weeks after being caught in the Riftstorm and trading my notes for a powerful illusion spell, this was by far my biggest complaint about Navar. Well, that and the fact that I was stuck in this language and magic school, my fate for the next three years unless I did something about it. And trust me, I had every intention of doing exactly that. The best part? My plan wasn't just an idea in my head anymore.

Hovering just inches above my writing desk, the only piece of furniture the Greys had given me besides the bed, was a fist-sized orb, something I'd created after three painstaking weeks of studying runic magic at the expense of skipping every single introductory class. It was the first functional, and, thankfully, non-explosive, prototype of the system. It was almost beautiful. A sphere wrapped in a skin of luminous blue mana, vaguely reminding me of a cheap looking orb of scrying. And yet, it worked.

I took one step closer, and an illusion of my own creation appeared before my eyes: a floating window displaying my status, calculated from parameters I had defined myself. [SYSTEM STATUS] Name: Eric Nevermore ATTRIBUTES ‣ Strength: 5 ‣ Agility: 7 ‣ Constitution: 5 ‣ Mana: 11 Yeah, there were no skills, no levels, no upgrades, none of the fancy stuff yet.

But believe me, what I had accomplished in just three weeks after my accidental summoning involved a level of complexity that would probably scare any non-programmer, also known as a normal person. To begin with, the Name field wasn't hard-coded into the illusion spell or stored anywhere among those runes. I had figured out how to make the spell display whatever name the viewer expected to see. After all, making someone believe they were looking at their own name only required a convincing illusion, right?

As it happened, the illusion spell the Archmage Elitha Hearthstrong had given me already came with exactly that capability, neatly documented under the wonderfully unsettling section titled: Target Memory Exploration and Extraction. As for the attributes... They were fucking hard to calculate. I genuinely couldn't think of a less crude way to put it.

As a starting point, I had copied several beginner-friendly target analysis spells from Magica Principia, but in their original forms they merely returned mana vibrations that the caster was expected to interpret through experience. Useful for trained mages, maybe. Yet, completely useless for what I was trying to build.

Converting those vibrations into numerical values and displaying them in a readable interface required sheer stubbornness, a bit of luck, and an entire day spent gently banging my head against the wall until I remembered enough math to convert a sine wave into a number.

Then came several more days buried in the chapters on using mana to perform calculations, designing custom conversion modules from scratch, and burning through nearly all my credits on mana-conductive ink and paper just to inscribe one failed prototype after another. But this morning, as I finished inscribing what I was sure would become yet another disappointment, the latest version simply... worked. And if I were being honest, I only partially understood why. I smiled anyway. Because this was familiar territory.

It felt just like the C programs I used to write back on Earth. Sometimes you spent hours trying to understand why nothing worked. Other times, you spent even longer trying to understand why it suddenly did. Just another Thursday for an overworked programmer. Still smiling, I reached the obvious conclusion: understanding could come later. Right now, I needed to test the edge cases. The first one was obvious. I knew the system worked on a human. But what about other races? What I needed now was a test subject.

Or rather... a friend. Which meant... Sahirah. I sighed, realizing how little we had actually interacted over the past few days. Other than our daily meals together in the food court, our relationship was held together by little more than our shared state of being equally different than everyone else. No deep friendship. No common interests. No shared culture. No real reason for her to help me. Would it really be too much to wait for her after class and invite her back to my dorm to help me test the prototype?

Before I could give that question the thought it deserved, three firm knocks on the door stole my attention. My feet moved on their own. Sahirah's face flashed through my mind, and for a brief moment of hope I dared to imagine that she had come to me by some miracle of timing, just when I needed her most. Instead, when I opened the door, I found a face I didn't recognize.

"Why are you looking at me like that? I'm a teacher. Miss Lathara, to you," the Grey woman said right away, her arms folded across her chest. The green of her sleeves contrasted sharply with the black of the rest of her robes. Her deep blue eyes met mine, her gaze calm enough to make a glacier seem restless.

"I'm here on behalf of Principal Zorik. Today is your twenty-first day in our world, which marks the end of your adjustment period."

"Adjustment period?"

"Riftstorm arrivals typically need time to accept that their old lives are over and that this is their home now." In the same unhurried tone, she added, "Twenty days is the upper limit. You exhausted your adjustment period yesterday." I felt a knot tighten in my stomach.

"What happens now?" She looked at me as though I had asked an entirely unremarkable question. After closing her eyes for a brief moment that felt almost like meditation, she replied, "Now you attend classes alongside the other arrivals from this year's Riftseason." It was exactly as terrible as I had feared. Freaking high school all over again.

"Uhh... you mean tomorrow, right?" I asked, desperately hoping this place operated a little more like college and a little less like the micromanaged prison that had been high school.

"Incorrect." She unfolded her arms and started walking before I had time to process the answer.

"Follow me. Now." I glanced back into my room out of habit before remembering I was already dressed. The Grey tailor who had mysteriously appeared at my door on the second day, right after I had destroyed my old clothes repairing the library floor, had seen to that. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. With a sigh, I locked the door and hurried after Miss Lathara.

Once I caught up, trying to walk beside her despite having been told to follow, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to ask a question.

"Who's actually in charge around here?" She didn't even glance my way.

"Is it Principal Zorik... or the Archmage, Elitha Hearthstrong?" That name got a reaction. The instant I spoke it, Miss Lathara stopped so abruptly that I nearly walked into her. For several long seconds, she said nothing.

"Disrespect Principal Zorik, and you lose your position or get expelled from the academy." Our eyes met, her serious gaze piercing me.

"Disrespect the Archmage..." she continued quietly, "... and not even the law can save you. Not the city guard. Not the provincial army." Wait... what? My eyes widened. Suddenly, that trade for the illusion spell felt even more significant than I had realized. Without another word, she resumed walking.

"I do not wish to know how a student like you learned her name," she said cautiously.

"As your runes instructor for the next three years, I ask that you never mention the honored Archmage in my presence. Fate forbid she overhears us through the translation spell and takes offense at something a clueless student says." I spent the next several minutes replaying that conversation in my head, wondering whether Miss Lathara was simply overreacting. As intimidating as Elitha Hearthstrong had been, she hadn't struck me as someone petty enough to hunt people down over an innocent remark.

And trust me, I knew a lot about pettiness. Only when we reached an older wing of the academy did my thoughts finally break. The wooden corridors gave way to stone walls worn smooth with age. Mounted beside one of the classroom doors hung a schedule showing daily rune classes, interrupted by only a single free day each week. Just before entering, I asked, "What happens if I skip classes?" Yeah, I knew how shameless it sounded coming from a student talking to a teacher. But I wasn't a kid anymore.

I'd much rather spend my time bringing my ideas to life with this world's magic, maybe even starting my own company, than relive high school. Though, to be fair, plenty of people back on Earth would probably kill for a second chance at school. Miss Lathara paused. Even though she wasn't human, the slight twitch of one eyebrow conveyed her disbelief perfectly. Eventually she answered, "Attendance matters less the higher your grades are.

Perform well enough, and you won't find me knocking on your door again anytime soon. Be warned, however. Other instructors may hold different opinions."

"Grades?" That single word immediately became the center of my universe.

"You'll find out soon enough," she replied in her usual calm voice.

"Your adjustment period happened to end on the very day of my first runic examination for this year's Rift arrivals." With that, she stepped into the classroom, leaving me standing outside with a growing sense of impending doom. Really? If this teacher wanted to screw me over, the least she could've done was buy me dinner first. Seriously, she knocked on my door, dragged me straight to class, and expected me to take an exam without warning? Was that really how things worked around here? What a load of bullshit.

When I finally overcame my bitterness and entered the classroom, I was greeted by an unexpected sight. The room was a circular auditorium with a teaching platform at its center. Behind Miss Lathara, who stood there with her arms crossed, hung two large leather boards. One was titled Overall Rank. The other, Runic Class Rank.

A single sweep across the names below was enough to tell me this school was fiercely competitive, which probably wasn't the healthiest environment when people from entirely different species were competing against one another. As for the students, one glance told me plenty. About twenty pointy-eared people occupied nearly a third of the seats, all gathered together on one side of the room.

I knew nothing about them, not even the name of their species, but the way they looked at me positively screamed arrogant elves. The rest of the classroom was divided between two other groups of roughly ten students each, separated by a narrow strip of empty seats. Between the hard green scales and the fluffy brown fur, I recognized them immediately as the adult versions of little Scales and Furball, the kids who had played their own small part in the library incident on my first day. The rest of the auditorium...

It was almost empty. Well, almost. One lone seat, apart from every group, was already occupied by someone I knew. Sahirah. I smiled as green, blue, yellow, and even pinkish eyes in the case of the furballs followed me as I walked, apparently curious to see where I'd choose to sit. Was it even a choice? Not really. I walked past the scaled people and the furballs before dropping into the empty seat beside Sahirah.

"Showing up to class today?" she asked immediately.

"Not by choice," I replied, making no effort whatsoever to keep my voice down. Of course, that meant I also overheard those damn elves whispering among themselves about the loser human who had spent his first twenty days locked inside his room. Apparently humans were mentally unstable creatures who needed an unusually long time to recover from tragedy. And, being the mature adult that I was, I naturally said nothing.

I simply filed the whole conversation away for the future, so that once my system became world-spanning infrastructure, certain people might earn the privilege of watching an unskippable ad every single time they wanted to check their status. Always the adult in the room. Never petty. Miss Lathara soon called for silence, walking between the rows of seats as she handed each of us a sheet of paper. At the same time, another silent exchange took place.

I looked at Sahirah with the most pitiful puppy eyes I could manage. She sighed, reached into her purse, and handed me a quill and an ink bottle. By the time our tests reached us, the room had fallen completely silent. The moment my eyes landed on the page, I rubbed them to make sure the area translation spell was working correctly. Surely I couldn't be reading this right. The first question showed the magic circle for a Fireball spell and asked me to identify every rune and explain its purpose.

This was material from the first ten pages of Magica Principia. The test couldn't actually be this easy... could it? Just over two minutes later, I had already finished the first question and moved on to the second, which asked me to complete an unfinished magic circle by drawing the missing rune according to the Placement Law. At first I kept rereading each question, convinced I had overlooked some hidden trick.

But when I finished the tenth and final question before the first half hour had even passed, then looked up to find every other student still bent over their papers, thinking or writing, I became convinced that I had either done something very right...... or very, very wrong. Miss Lathara somehow noticed I was finished. She walked over, picked up my test from the desk, and simply stared at it, frozen in place.

The rest of the class laughed, of course, assuming I had either failed spectacularly or written something so outrageous that even Miss Lathara couldn't believe what she was reading. Meanwhile, I just asked, "Can I go now?"

"No," Miss Lathara replied without looking up.

"You wait here." So I waited. Another half hour crawled by while Miss Lathara collected the remaining tests and graded them at her lectern, reminding me once again that magic school wasn't all that different from ordinary high school. My time was being wasted while I sat there doing absolutely nothing. Only then did the final student, a scaled man whose trembling hands suggested he had already accepted his impending doom, hand in his test. Miss Lathara graded the last paper quickly. Then she faced the class.

"I'm updating the rankings now," she announced.

"I hope you all perform better next time." She raised one hand, and mana-forged runes blossomed above her palm faster than my eyes could follow. It was an astonishing display of inkless casting, the kind of magic I could only dream of reproducing with my current skills. The spell completed in a brilliant flash of blue light. When my vision recovered, my jaw dropped. At the very top of the Runic Class Rank, standing alone with a perfect score of ten out of ten, was a name I knew very well. Mine.

"Who's Eric Nevermore?" one of the elf-looking students asked.

"The human," someone among the scaled students hissed.

"It has to be the human." Oddly enough, I didn't feel proud. I'd spent the last three weeks doing little besides studying runes. Compared to students who had divided their time among language lessons, meditation, cultural studies, and everything else the academy expected of them, outperforming them in this one subject was hardly surprising. That wasn't even counting the years I'd spent back on Earth obsessively teaching myself programming. One glance at the other board confirmed what I had expected.

I wasn't anywhere near the top of the Overall Rank. In fact, I hadn't even broken into the top ten. Unlike everyone else, I had earned exactly zero points from the previous tests in every other subject. But something else immediately caught my attention. Fourth place. On both the Runic Class Rank and the Overall Rank. Six questions out of ten. Sahirah, of course. Ignoring the stares, the whispers, and more than a few rather serious accusations of cheating disguised as idle comments, I turned toward her.

Her mismatched eyes were already waiting for mine. A brilliant idea popped into my head.

"Hey," I said, "want to come to my room now that class is over? I can help you with the questions you missed." Sahirah bit her lip, the tips of her sharp little teeth peeking through, then crossed her arms.

"Let me guess," she said.

"This is really about that side project you haven't been able to stop thinking about since day one."

"No... I mean, yes. But I'm not lying about being able to help you with the runes." I wasn't lying. Though, I just hadn't expected her to see right through me. Was I really that predictable?

"Fine," she said after a moment's thought.

"But I want something besides rune lessons. Think of it as insurance in case you get me into trouble again." I blinked. She wanted my help with something else?

"What is it?"

"I'll tell you later if you accept." A mischievous smile spread across her face.

"So? Do you dare accept the deal, human?" Me, Eric Nevermore, scared of making an ambiguous deal with another unwillingly summoned student? Not a chance. Especially after surviving my bargain with the Archmage. I stood and offered her my hand, a wordless invitation to follow me, even if she clearly didn't need any help standing.

She left me hanging for a long moment, her mismatched eyes drifting across the classroom, taking in the stares of the other students and the calm expression on Miss Lathara's face as she watched us from the front of the room. At last, she took my hand.

"What do I have to lose?" she whispered.

"It's not like I have a reputation to protect here anyway." Under the piercing gazes of the entire class, Sahirah and I walked out together. My thoughts were already racing, wondering how the system prototype would react to her absurd amount of mana. Principal Zorik had called her a living mana battery. So what number would the status window show, exactly?