Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotional Incompetent [A Magical Academy LitRPG]

It had been the tenth time Severa Montreal demonstrated Serastra's Ember Waltz to Fabrisse, and the pattern still hadn't made sense to him.

She never explained anything—just cocked a hip to the side, gave a perfunctory 'watch closely,' and launched into another blinding sequence of movements that blended elegance with complete pedagogical chaos. Each time she finished, she'd frown as if he were the one being unreasonable for not understanding her unspoken logic.

"Again," she said, and did it again.

Fabrisse's eyes narrowed. He tried to watch her aether shaping, her wrist angle, the direction of her aether pattern. However, she moved too fast, each gesture flowing into the next with no pause to analyze. There was no commentary, no breakdown, not even a remark about the resonance balance between the initial bead and the split-phase ignition.

He tried it himself. Pinch, focus, ignite—his bead flared too hot, cracked apart into a ragged spark, then died.

"Mm. No," she said, as if that were instruction enough. Another perfect Ember Waltz from her fingers.

He shifted his stance, adjusted his breathing, and attempted a more controlled ignition. This time, the bead formed, but when he tried to split it, it collapsed into a puff of smoke.

"Still no."

She wasn't so much teaching as demonstrating at him, and Fabrisse was already cataloguing what he could steal from watching her—the angle of her elbow, the way she seemed to pull the firewheels inward at the apex of their arcs—but there were gaps in the sequence he simply couldn't fill by sight alone.

"Have you ever had to teach anybody, Montreal?" He asked.

She actually paused at the question. "You'd be the first," finally, she said as she formed yet another beautiful bead of flames.

No wonder . . .

"Though I am having to soon impart my knowledge on some younger students too." Her tone was light, but there was a shadow of calculation in her eyes. "It will be . . . instructive, to see how they grasp it. Perhaps I'll test different demonstration methods. Some learners, I hear, require slower—" A faint crease formed between her brows, then smoothed again as she straightened her posture. "—require more structured pacing," she amended.

Severa? Instructing others? That sounded like a recipe for disaster already. Was she planning to become an Instructant, like Lorvan? That'd explain the effort she was making not to insult him outright.

"Now, again," she conjured yet another bead of flames without forewarning.

He stepped back, rubbing his thumb against his palm, feeling the faint warmth from his failed ignition still clinging to his skin. The rational part of his mind—the part that had survived Lorvan's 'teaching' style—told him he should just ask Severa to slow down, to explain her sequence, maybe even walk him through the shaping pattern in discrete phases.

But the other part of him, the part that had spent the past two years cataloguing every twist of her smile, every little tightening at the corner of her mouth when she smelled incompetence, knew exactly what would happen. She'd tilt her head, give him that perfectly polite, scalpel-sharp look, and say something like, Of course I can explain it, Kestovar. If you think you can keep up.

Another demonstration flickered in his peripheral vision: five flawless firewheels, looping in serene unison.

He exhaled slowly as he attempted to replicate her stance. Maybe I just need to watch her doing the skill for another 400 times.

"Your first stance is wrong," Severa suddenly said.

He blinked at her. "My what?"

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She rolled her eyes, drawing a sharp breath she didn't let turn into a sigh. "Feet apart, left shoulder forward. You're holding yourself like you're about to shelve a book, not split an ignition. Reset."

For a moment he just stood there, caught between surprise that she was actually telling him something useful and suspicion that she was only doing it because she'd reached the limits of her tolerance for watching him fail. He wasn't going to say that last part out loud, of course.

Still, he adjusted, planting his feet the way she showed him. The shift in weight made his balance feel tighter, more deliberate.

"That's step one," she said, as if bestowing a royal secret. Then, without further elaboration, she conjured another bead of fire.

He sighed.

A bell later, that was as far as he'd gotten. Severa had technically tried to help, but her 'instructions' consisted mostly of saying like this over and over and performing the spell again—each time perfectly, infuriatingly—without a single concrete explanation of what she was actually doing. It was a miracle he comprehended that much, if at all.

Severa lowered her hands and stilled. She kept a blank face, except for the faint tightening between her brows. It looked like annoyance, but he couldn't tell if it was aimed at him, the bell, or something else entirely.

"It's late," he said, breaking the quiet.

"It is indeed past dinner time," she replied, glancing toward the high windows. Maybe she's just hungry. "Perhaps we should conclude here for today," she said, brushing an imaginary speck of ash from her sleeve. "Are you going to be absent next practical as well?"

". . . Yes."

"Is this going to be a common occurrence?"

"My private lessons get in the way of official classes." Then he blurted, too quickly, "But I've gotten clearances from the Synod."

Her lips curved into a smile as she heard him. "Ah. So you are capitalizing on this 'unfair advantage' of mine as well, I presume?"

Oh no. He'd just told himself to not tell her that. Of course she would use it against him.

He studied her in mild panic, trying to read past the curve of her smile. At least it didn't look like she was holding any actual bitterness toward him, like back then when he refused to unbind with the Eidralith in front of her father.

For a second too long, Severa just looked at him. Not with her usual disdain or thinly veiled amusement, but with a focused sense of assessment. It wasn't so much hostility as it was curiosity wearing the wrong expression. Her eyes moved, as if scanning him for something he couldn't name. After a while, he just turned away, unable to return her intense gaze.

"What I said was not meant to be critical," she finally said.

He just nodded.

"Do you want to get better, Kestovar?" she asked, after what must have been twenty seconds of staring.

He frowned. "At Thaumaturgy?"

"At Thaumaturgy."

". . . Yes," he said, slower this time.

She inclined her head slightly, considering. "My schedule is, admittedly, rather occupied," she said, the words carrying that unhurried refinement she used when she knew she was offering something valuable. "But I can make time, if you can make time."

He stared back at her for a moment, uncertain he'd heard correctly. Severa Montreal, volunteering to help him? That was new. Very new.

Something was definitely off.

After that longest stare just now, it seemed as though she'd just made a decision about him that he hadn't been informed of yet.

"If I were you, I would use the precious time you have with your mentors on spells that further your personal goals, not the ones that let you scrape through your coursework," she said. "That would be a far better use of your time. You are guaranteed to pass classes, Kestovar, if you master the spells I teach you."

He hated to admit it, but what she said made a lot of sense. Rolen kept teaching him Fire spells to sustain basic controls, and as useful as they were for affinity, he wouldn't use those in an exam environment.

"I have Wednesday's evening off," he muttered.

"Have you taken weekends into account?"

Of course. Weekends for her would probably just be another weekday.

". . . Saturday evening."

Severa nodded once. "Very well. I will contact you via your glyph when the time approaches."

She turned then, her cloak sweeping behind her as she headed toward the door. The faint shimmer of residual aether still clung to her hair, catching the glyphlight like threads of emberglass.

Fabrisse stayed where he was, staring after her retreating figure.