Sol-Regis Royal Academy – Magic Tower Building. Classroom: Basic Pyromancy.
The Magic Tower of the Royal Academy was a living monunt to tradition—a tradition that had remained stagnant for centuries. Its cold stone walls were draped with ancient tapestries depicting the great mages of the past, and the air within its halls always carried the heavy, cloying scent of frankincense and the dust of ancient parchnts. The Pyromancy lecture hall was built like a circular amphitheater, where every mahogany bench had been smoothed by the robes of thousands of aspiring mages over generations.
In the center of the room, illuminated by a beam of sunlight filtering through stained-glass windows, stood Professor Ignis. He was the very embodint of "high nobility" academia. His long white beard reached past his waist, and his crimson velvet robes shimred with gold embroidery that ford intricate constellations.
"O Fire... hear my humble call... manifestation of the dragon’s wrath..." Ignis’s voice was deep and resonant, putting rhythmic emphasis on every syllable of his chant. "Form from the slumbering heat... gather your light, gather your fury... Burn my enemies into ash that scatters upon the wind!"
Ignis closed his eyes with solemn reverence. His hands moved in complex, circular patterns through the air, as if he were weaving invisible threads of destiny. It took nearly two full minutes for the Mana in the room to coalesce. Finally, a ball of orange fire, slightly larger than a lon, flickered into existence and hovered above his palm.
"Behold!" Professor Ignis proclaid with a tone of triumph, as if he had just created a new sun. "This is art! This is true harmony with nature! Fire cannot be forced; it must be courted, called forth with feeling and respect for its primordial history!"
At the very back of the hall, in a shadowed corner far from the professor’s gaze, Raveena Sudrath was fighting her own battle—a battle against overwhelming boredom.
The sixteen-year-old girl rested her chin on a desk covered in scribbled physics equations. Her eyes were half-lidded, and her mind had drifted far from this stuffy room to Rianor’s laboratory in Northreach, where the air was clean and the equipnt actually made sense. Her hands, hidden beneath a stack of textbooks, were busy fiddling with a small tallic object—a triangular prism made of pure mana-conducting crystal encased in a matte-black steel fra.
"This is taking forever," Raveena thought, stifling a yawn. "Two minutes just to heat the air into a fireball of that size? The energy efficiency must be below ten percent. Brother Rianor could trigger an explosion equivalent to a pound of TNT using a magnesium prir and aluminum powder in less than three seconds. This isn’t magic; it’s a waste of potential energy."
Raveena let out a long, heavy sigh. In the dead silence of the room, as other students sat srized by the floating fire lon, Raveena’s sigh sounded like a small explosion of disrespect.
Professor Ignis stopped mid-gesture. The fireball in his hand sputtered out with a soft hiss. He turned slowly, his sharp eyes locking onto the back row through his thick spectacles.
"Lady Sudrath?" His voice was no longer poetic; it was ice-cold.
Raveena jerked upright, her spine snapping straight. She reflexively slid her prism under a notebook, though the movent was a second too late. "Yes, Professor?"
"It seems my lecture on the Philosophy of Combustion and the Essence of the Fire Soul is beneath your interest," Ignis sneered. He began walking up the steps of the amphitheater, closing the distance between them. "Perhaps it is because your family prefers the noise and filth of steam engines over the subli art of magic that has kept this kingdom standing for a thousand years."
A wave of snickering erupted from the noble students in the front rows. They were children of the old-guard nobility who had long resented the teoric rise of House Sudrath. To them, the Sudraths were nothing but "rust-nobles" who had bought their way into the capital with iron pipes and asphalt.
Raveena took a deep breath. She rembered Roland’s advice to always be polite, but she also rembered Rianor’s creed: that scientific truth should never be compromised for the sake of an arrogant ego.
"My apologies, Professor," Raveena replied, her voice steady and respectful yet firm. "It is not boring. It is simply that, in my professional opinion, the thod you are using is remarkably inefficient in its mana-to-thermal conversion ratio."
The room went deathly silent. No one—in Ignis’s sixty-year career—had ever used the word "inefficient" to describe his ancestral arts.
"Inefficient?" Ignis’s face turned a shade of purple that almost matched his robes. His beard trembled with rage. "You dare insult the heritage of the ancients who perfected this spell? You think your scribbles on the floor are superior to our sacred invocations?"
Ignis pointed a shaking finger at the practice stage at the bottom of the amphitheater. "If that is the case, Lady Sudrath, then please! Step down! Show us, show this entire class, what you deem to be ’efficient’! Show us the miracles of Northreach you boast so much about!"
Raveena hesitated for a mont. She looked at the reinforced stone wall behind the training targets. "Are you sure, Professor? I wouldn’t want to damage school property. My sister Rumina is the family treasurer now, and she’ll have my head if I have to pay for a new wall."
"MOVE!" Ignis barked, refusing to be denied.
Raveena let out a resigned sigh. She stood up, grabbed her bag, and retrieved her "Telescopic Staff"—an object that looked more like a complex circuit board than a traditional wooden wand. She also carried her crystalline prism.
At the front of the class stood a straw training dummy reinforced with low-level defensive wards.
"A Fireball spell," Ignis commanded, crossing his arms. "Perform it with a full chant. Invoke the elental spirits. If your fire is smaller than my fist or fails to ignite that straw, you will spend a month cleaning the Salamander pits in the dungeons."
Raveena stood five ters from the dummy.
She didn’t take a dramatic magical stance. She didn’t raise her hands to the heavens or close her eyes to commune with nature. Instead, she reached into her cloak and produced a piece of chalk.
With rapid, practiced movents, Raveena began drawing on the stone floor around her feet. The other students leaned forward, confused. Instead of a magic circle or elental runes, the floor was being covered in advanced physics equations.
X = V.t ½at²...
Refractive Index: n1 sin θ1 = n2 sin θ2...
Mana Compression Ratio: 90% at 0.05ms...
"What in the na of the Gods are you doing?!" Ignis shouted, feeling his sanity being insulted. "Where is the poetry? Where is the prayer? Why are you writing aningless numbers on my floor?!"
Raveena stood up, ignoring him. She clicked her prism onto the tip of her tal staff. There was a satisfying chanical clink as the components locked into place.
"Professor," Raveena said, her voice dropping into a calm, authoritative tone that sounded eerily like Rianor’s presentation voice. "Fire is simply a chemical reaction—a rapid exothermic oxidation that produces heat and light. We do not need to ’request’ or ’worship’ nature to produce it. We simply need to create the exact physical conditions for Mana to react forcibly."
Raveena aid her staff at the dummy. Her index finger hovered over a small pressure sensor on the hilt. She didn’t scream a chant. She whispered, as if talking to the air itself.
"Focus. Compression point. Fire."
Raveena funneled her raw Mana into the staff’s internal conduits. Instead of letting the Mana expand into a wild, unfocused fireball, she forced it through Rianor’s "Focusing Lens" prism, which she had personally recalibrated for high-intensity output.
The compressed Mana particles collided within the narrow space of the prism, heating up to thousands of degrees in milliseconds due to artificial resistance. And then...
ZIIING!
It wasn’t a fireball that erged. It wasn’t a noisy explosion.
It was a needle-thin beam of brilliant orange-blue light. It was so intense that the air around the beam distorted and shimred. A Thermal Mana-Laser.
The beam shot forward without a sound. Its velocity was far beyond anything the human eye could track.
In a fraction of a heartbeat, the beam pierced the chest of the warded dummy.
It didn’t stop. It punched through the mahogany blackboard behind it.
It didn’t stop. It sliced through the thirty-centiter-thick stone wall of the Magic Tower.
The beam continued out of the building, severing a branch of an ancient oak tree in the outer gardens before finally dissipating into the sky.
Thwack.
The tree branch fell to the ground with a perfectly clean, cauterized cut. anwhile, in the classroom, the straw dummy slowly split into two perfect halves. The edges of the cut were glowing red and molten, as if the straw had been turned to glass by an unimaginable heat. There was no roaring fire, no thick smoke. Just a clean, smoking hole where a wall used to be.
The room returned to silence. A silence far heavier than before.
Professor Ignis stood frozen, his mouth hanging wide open. A few strands of his long white beard were actually smoking and singed—he had been standing far too close to the heat displacent zone of the beam. The students stared at the small hole in the stone wall that now allowed a clear view of the gardens outside.
Raveena lowered her staff casually. She blew on the glowing red tip of the prism.
"Reaction complete," Raveena said flatly. "Mana efficiency: ninety-eight percent. Execution ti: 1.8 seconds. Target neutralized with zero collateral fire damage."
Raveena looked at the paralyzed Ignis. "May I be seated now, Professor? I find myself quite thirsty."
"YOU..." Ignis trembled, his finger pointing at the hole in the wall with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking. "YOU HAVE DESTROYED A HISTORICAL HERITAGE BUILDING! THIS IS NOT MAGIC! THIS IS AN INSULT TO THE ARTS! YOU ARE USING THE POWER OF DEMONS!"
"Dih, you asked for efficiency," Raveena muttered under her breath, though she knew she was in deep trouble.
One Hour Later – The Headmaster’s Office.
The atmosphere in the Headmaster’s office was a stark contrast to the chaos of the classroom. The room was vast, lined with bookshelves that reached the ceiling, and slled of calming jasmine tea.
The Headmaster, an elderly mage nad Mada Seraphina known for her wisdom and blue eyes that could seemingly pierce a soul, sat quietly behind her massive desk. Opposite her, Professor Ignis was still pacing, clutching his singed beard and fuming. Raveena sat silently in a hard wooden chair—the chair usually reserved for students awaiting expulsion.
The door to the office opened with a soft, lodic chi.
Sir Rianor Sudrath walked in with hurried steps. He was still wearing his signature white lab coat, and there was a smudge of black grease on his left cheek. He looked out of breath. He had arrived from the Sudrath Capital Branch office, where he had been overseeing the installation of a new telegraph tower for the royal communication network.
As the official guardian in the capital while Duke Lucian remained in Northreach, Rianor was the first person the academy had called.
"What happened?" Rianor asked, adjusting his glasses. He looked around the room, his eyes finally landing on Raveena. "Veena, what did you blow up today? I was just about to have lunch."
"Master Sudrath!" Professor Ignis lunged toward Rianor, pointing at Raveena with pure vitriol. "Your sister is a nace to magical education! She is a vandal! She blew a hole through my historical classroom wall! She refuses the curriculum! She uses heretical chanical devices to mock the art of pyromancy!"
Ignis grabbed Raveena’s confiscated prism from the desk and shoved it toward Rianor.
Rianor didn’t imdiately respond to the outburst. Instead, he walked to the desk, picked up the prism, and examined it with clinical precision under the light.
"Hmm... the focal lens is slightly cracked at the refractive angle," Rianor murmured technically, as if he were in his own workshop.
"MASTER SUDRATH! ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ?!" Ignis roared.
Rianor turned to Raveena, completely ignoring the professor’s existence. "Veena, what was your output percentage in class?"
"Only fifteen percent, Brother," Raveena answered in a small, fearful voice. "But I think the refractive index formula you gave yesterday was slightly off. The back-heat spiked when the Mana reached peak compression."
"It wasn’t the formula," Rianor said, pulling out a chanical pen and scribbling calculations on the palm of his hand. "You forgot to install the secondary Heat Sink behind the prism. You have to rember, if you compress Mana into a needle-thin laser, the local temperature reaches three thousand degrees instantly. Standard brass alloys won’t hold the thermal load."
"Ohhh..." Raveena nodded, her eyes brightening with realization. "That explains why the staff was vibrating so much."
"Next ti, use a ceramic-insulated inner layer. I’ll have the materials sent from Northreach by tomorrow morning," Rianor said casually.
Professor Ignis and Mada Seraphina could only stare in disbelief. Instead of being scolded for destroying a wall, Raveena was receiving a weapon-upgrade tutorial right in front of them.
"AHEM!" Mada Seraphina cleared her throat loudly, breaking the technical trance.
Rianor finally snapped back to reality. He turned toward the Headmaster with a polite, neutral expression.
"My apologies, Mada. I got carried away," Rianor reached into his coat and pulled out a personal checkbook. "So... what is the total for the damage to the wall and the blackboard?"
"This is not about money, Master Sudrath!" Ignis shouted again. "This is about the fundantal principles of education! Your sister has defiled the purity of magic! she has turned the subli arcane forces into... into a crude, soulless cannon blast!"
Rianor looked at Ignis. His genius-level eyes, usually calm, now radiated a sharp, cold offense that reminded everyone of Duke Lucian’s own steel-willed resolve.
"Professor," Rianor said, his voice low but filling the room. "Magic is, at its core, Energy. And the duty of a Scientist—and a Mage—is to find the most efficient, fastest, and most precise way to utilize that energy to achieve a goal."
Rianor pointed at the photo of the hole in the wall sitting on the desk.
"The thod you teach takes twenty seconds to summon a fire that can barely lt a knight’s plate armor. That is enough ti for an enemy to decapitate you ten tis over."
Rianor wrote a very large number on a blank check and slid it toward Mada Seraphina.
"My sister’s thod takes less than two seconds and could theoretically punch through the hull of a modern Iron Empire tank. If you call effectiveness an ’insult,’ then I believe it is your curriculum that is in question, not my sister’s intellect."
Rianor stood tall, straightening his lab coat. "Write whatever amount you need for the repairs, Mada. If it is insufficient, bill my office. And please... do not stifle my sister’s creativity simply because it outshines your antiquated ways."
Rianor gently patted Raveena’s head, a small smile finally appearing on his face. "Co on, Veena. Let’s get so air."
Raveena bead, imdiately standing up and grabbing her brother’s hand. "Where are we going, Brother? Back to Northreach?"
"In your dreams, you still have classes tomorrow," Rianor chuckled as he led her out. "We’re going to the Capital Mansion. I’ll install that ceramic layer tonight so your staff won’t overheat. And I’ll treat you to lunch before you go back to the dorms."
"Yes! Can we have the spicy Rendang-flavored instant noodles?"
"Fine. But don’t tell Riven, or he’ll beg to ship him a whole crate."
They walked out of the Magic Tower, leaving two old mages staring at a hole in a wall and a check worth thousands of gold coins.
In the sunlit hallway, Raveena whispered, "Brother, am I really not in trouble with Dad or Mom?"
"In trouble?" Rianor laughed, the sound echoing through the stone corridor. "Veena, you just discovered the first practical application of a Mana-Laser in this world. If we were back in our old world, you’d be nominated for a Nobel Prize. I’m incredibly proud of you. Just... next ti, try to aim at a target that’s cheaper than a historical stone wall. I’m getting tired of writing checks."
Raveena laughed, her burden lifted.
In this school, she might be considered strange, dangerous, and soulless. But to her family, she was the brilliant light of the future.
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