carl@fire

"I'm Carl."

"Hello, Becca. Hello, Carl," called all twenty six members of the Magic Theory class at the same time, really giving him the type of warm welcome that was all too rare online.

"Well said!" the teacher bellowed. "I am Magister Bellum Dant, formerly General Bellum Dant of Mocuria. Be seated and prepare for instruction."

Now we're talking. This guy was a general? That's gotta be a pretty high rank in wherever. Guy's probably on Vol's level—Exactly who I'd want to be giving me all the info on stuff. Carl had taken some time to reflect on his adventures—though again, he hadn't been playing a game and had only been having adventures in the course of broadening his horizons to come up with better solutions for that stupid networking non-issue thing that he'd worried way too much about—with his friend, specifically on how easily she'd navigated various tricky situations and taught him about game systems that he'd been misunderstanding. While her ability to explain things had been poor, she'd invariably gotten across whatever point she was trying to make pretty quick, and it was great getting that sort of expert-level knowledge that had absolutely no gaps when he was learning about a new topic.

He followed after Rebecca, who was making for the empty seats at the rear of the classroom, but then he spotted a conspicuously empty desk in the middle of a row near the front. He frowned for a moment as his steps slowed. Huh. Figured she'd have taken the close seat with how interested she seemed in the last one. A new, stranger idea occurred to him. Or did she do it on purpose so I could have the better seat? Not like she could've missed it with how obvious it is. That's actually pretty cool of her.

He nodded to himself as he activated his Dad Stealth to sneak through the narrow gap between the desks and chairs to reach the empty one without being noticed. Maybe I really have been too hard on her. We had that weird, kinda awkward relationship for years, but I guess I just accepted it instead of trying to be an adult and improve things. Not super proud of it now that I'm thinking about things in that way. Might even have been making it worse.

"Right!" called the general in a loud voice that was definitely going to be able to be heard everywhere in the room, unlike some teachers who talked a little too quietly and were going to be tough to understand near the back. "You're all fresh off recruitment, and there's a massive information gap between you and mages you'll be encountering on the battlefield. We'll start with…"

Carl immediately grabbed a notepad and pencil out of his inventory and flipped to the first empty page, writing "Magic Theory" clearly at the top. Ideally he'd find time to go through and add some section dividers for this to make it easier for future referencing—maybe in case Bobby had some questions, for example, since obviously he wouldn't personally need to know any of this—but now at the start he was just trying to keep up. This teacher talked a little quicker than the pompous lady, but he'd readily double back to re-cover something when one of his pupils tripped into a pitfall, and it was all very manageable.

To begin, magic was an innate force that everyone started with some level of talent and capacity to wield—though 'wield' made it seem like this was some finger wave-y thing with no real substance or mechanical sense to it, maybe like someone had just thought it up on the spot and then continued tacking more and more unrelated ideas onto it as they became necessary for events to keep progressing, so he went back and crossed the word out, replacing it with 'utilize' to reflect the more technical sense of the concept. While there was that starting talent—obviously based on the class system, he inferred without needing it to be explicitly stated—continued use and practice was able to expand that capacity to some extent, both in terms of total magic power available to a person and skill in using it.

Magic power was stored in a person's astral body, and it could be brought forth in its raw form by doing this kinda weird exercise where you imagined one of your fingers as being longer than it really was, and then you really focused on it and believed that it absolutely was longer, and your astral body would fill in the difference using visible magic, but it was better not to do that for long periods of time until you got a better handle on stuff. Risks of maintaining a manifestation of raw magic like that included: exhausting yourself really fast if you had low magic capacity; losing control of it and having an astral body leak, which was, despite the kinda funny name, like a poison-type status ailment for magic users; having someone use the magic as a conduit to invade or harm your astral body if you were really noob; and accidentally disintegrating stuff with it, because raw magic power was apparently good for nothing except destroying.

With that safely comprehended, Carl decided that, while he was pretty sure he could perform the exercise as it was described, it sounded a little too risky for him, and so he was just going to leave it in his notes for now rather than attempt it at any point.

But that was just as well, because General Dant just continued to charge onwards across the battlefield of knowledge without stopping for those felled by incomprehension. Now he was sallying forth into the types of magic, and there were… Well, there were a lot, apparently. More than were going to be covered in this lecture, but they'd learn them all in great detail for sure over the coming months.

First was elemental magic, also known as elemental manipulation. This was like the foundation of every mage's toolkit because of how versatile it was. As an example, while there were non-elemental spells which could let you fly, there were a couple incredibly powerful archmages whose skill with elemental manipulation was so great that they could actually create a small surface using wind, position it in the air, and stand on top of it for a short while before it dissipated, which sounded super cool to Carl as soon as he heard it. Specifically he was imagining being able to create a surface using wind—or anything, as long as he could stand on it—that he could then use to safely descend after jumping really high, enabling him to not land on his head anymore.

There was a lot to cover in elemental manipulation, but being that this was the master-level track—which was apparently just describing the level of proficiency that the students would have when it was done, and it managed to do so even though it started in the same place as the less advanced tracks by going way faster—they were all going to be learning tons about that in other classes, so it would be wasted effort to go into more detail now.

Aside from elemental manipulation, there were glyphs, obviously, but that was another topic that was going to be covered in a separate course. Given that Carl didn't recognize everyone from the previous class, he assumed there were a bunch of these classes going on at once, which explained why the ordering of stuff was a little off between them and made him feel like it was lucky that they'd apparently come just as this semester or whatever was starting.

Another form of magic was mnemonic magic, which was the more traditional type where you had a chant or something that you used to invoke magic in a certain way. It was called mnemonic magic because the chant didn't actually do anything and was sort of just a trick to force yourself to invoke magic according to a memorized pattern of channeling raw magic through your astral body to yield the desired effect, with each word or syllable of the chant representing a location that magic was being channeled through. With enough experience, the general stated, it was even possible to reach a level where a handful of spells might be able to be cast without any form of chant, purely by using a sort of "muscle memory" that the astral body developed when you cast the same spells over and over. At the same time, however, doing that made it more difficult to cast the rest of the spells you knew, and it made it super hard to learn new spells, so this was usually the type of thing that was reserved for battle-type mages who knew exactly which spells they wanted to master to augment their fighting styles. This was also going to be the topic of another class, so there just wasn't going to be a ton of detail at this exact moment while they were covering the basics.

At this point, Carl felt like he was reaching his limit—like he needed a notepad for his notepad. There was way more depth to this stuff than he'd thought, and he really…

Well, it didn't seem like there wasn't going to be any break or anything, and he imagined that future-Carl would appreciate the effort he was putting in now, so he gamely soldiered onwards into the fusillade of new knowledge that was raining down on him.

Next there was necromancy—a classic—which involved circulating magic from the astral body into a corpse, or, if you were high level, some kinda composite corpse-thing where you combined parts from a bunch of strong monsters to make a super-monster minion. When Carl immediately asked whether this could just be more mnemonic magic, the answer was that no, there was no way to get muscle memory for it since apparently every corpse had a different feel to it, and there was a certain level of expertise required to know exactly how to properly affect a corpse such that it would reanimate. But then also necromancy wasn't just about making zombies and stuff like that. No, it was apparently a vast field of associated utility magic—like partial reanimation, where, for example, you could just revive an eye and use it as a more low-key method of spying which used less magic than more obvious methods of magical spying—which used more magic and thus were more easily detected and blocked.

At some point during the discussion of how it was possible to remove the bones of something to revive just the skeleton instead of the whole body—because obviously it would smell less bad—Carl managed to overcome the mounting fatigue that had been building since he'd sat down in this class, and his interest had reignited itself, becoming something that was ignited, like maybe…

He was too focused on the class to come up with something at that moment, but he'd circle back to it. The lesson next marched along into the separation of internal versus external magic, which was the divide between spells that you could cast solely by circulating through the astral body and spells that needed an external component to channel through. With his new, enlightened mindset, Carl grasped that all these 'types' of magic were really just an attempt to describe the infinite possibilities of something that could do pretty much anything if you thought about it the right way, which put to rest a number of questions that had been building up since it seemed like probably there were just going to be derivative types that were extensions of the more basic concepts that had been covered, and as he thought about it further, he realized that it was actually really clever of the general to structure his lesson so as to lead his students to this conclusion naturally when they thought about it rather than beating them over the head with it.

There was no time to keep thinking about any of that though. Now they were battering down the gates of magic exertion, which was the idea that any time you did any of that magic-circulating with your astral body, even if it was a strictly internal type of magic, you were going to have some leakage that resulted from not being able to completely control every little piece of magic you were moving around. More experienced mages would have better control, which led to a greater endurance in casting magic, and that supplemented a person's natural and developed capacity. External types of magic were naturally going to have way more leakage, especially at lower levels, so stuff like necromancy was really hard for noobs. Also this was the reason why elemental manipulation was preferred whenever possible, since it only needed enough magic to perform the manipulation and achieve the desired result, which was way the heck faster, easier, and cheaper than creating the whole effect from scratch by circulating your astral body's raw magic in whatever more complex way was needed.

In the next moment, Carl chanced glances to his sides to see whether everyone else was appreciating the lesson like him, but it seemed like kids were going to be kids no matter how incredible a teacher was. These freaking kids were just sitting there, barely taking any notes, and not even showing the sort of eagerness in their expressions that was likely to provide further motivation to any teacher who saw it—something that Annie had always complained about when she taught certain topics that her students found boring, claiming that it was hard for her to stay interested when it seemed like everyone was falling asleep on her.

Also, a lit match.