At Professor Thornewood’s command, Kira and Camille Cinnomaire, her best friend, exchanged a brief glance and dropped silently from their trees, along with their other classmates. Fanning out and encircling the Direwolf pack, weapons drawn.

Kira shifted her spiked gauntlets, edging close enough behind the trees to see the pack in major disarray, howling in fear and raising their hackles, and tails tucked defensively. The cause of their distress was slashing and kicking them back as soon as one of them tried to break past a certain point from the group, they earned a deep gash to the face, at worst, they lost their head.

Kira gaped in silent awe at the Night Warden’s deadly dance of speed and agility. Her mind could barely keep up with Valendor’s movements, only knowing where he had attacked when the brightening moonlight and last vestiges of twilight reflected off his antlers, his form otherwise lost to the darkness.

So this was the overpowered monster she had somehow summoned. Getting a spike of jealousy that her professor got to keep him instead.

“Is that your summons?” Camille whispered excitedly, loosely notching her spell arrow. “Can you imagine that thing serving you? You’d be unbeatable in the tournaments,”

“Yeah, well it's too late for that now,” Kira grumbled, clenching her gauntlets in envy, the past few days she spent regretting the summoning forgotten. The Night Warden was summoned by her first, dammit.

“Valendor retreat,” Professor Thornewood shouted. “Class, attack at will,”

Kira and other close combatants surged forward as support units released their spells. Seizing the chance while her enemies were bombarded by spells, she punched the ground with her gauntlet, an earthen spell circle lit up with a brown glow under her fist, splitting the ground and forming a fissure underneath half the remaining pack, although it wasn’t deep, it helped further thinning the pack and buy more time for her classmates.

Thorny vines and dark tendrils erupted from the other side of the battlefield, pinning a few Direwolves, while on her left flashes of spells and blurred forms danced at her peripheral vision. Kira ignored them and focused on the monster in front of her, ducking behind a wall of stone as it appeared and stepped aside to throw a punch right in its snout, spikes impaling themselves in the giant wolf’s muzzle.

It yipped in surprise then lunged at her with its claws, Kira dropped into a roll to dodge a swipe, and shot to her feet along with a push from the earth beneath her feet, and punched its belly with an uppercut.

Kira twisted and pushed the gauntlet along the beast’s softer underbelly, throwing her entire weight against it and making long gashes. She jumped out of the way of the wave of guts and organs that spilled from the dying monster. She sensed a wave of wild mana disperse from the dead beast, released from its soul’s grasp.

Kira greedily soaked in as much wild mana as she could. It was preferable to end fights quickly and cleanly so that the monsters do not use up all their mana clouds with spells so she could absorb more mana, since the cores of the beasts were loot for the professors.

“Kira! Pay attention!” An ear splitting crack of thunder came from behind, a blinding flash of pink plasma lit up the forest right before a heavy thump landed near her feet.

Kira whipped around to give Camille, who glared daggers at her back disapprovingly, an apologetic smile. Her momentary pause in battle caused Kira to almost get shredded by another Direwolf behind her.

“Sorry,”

“‘Sorry’ this, ‘Sorry’ that, you should be apologising to yourself. It’s not my problem, is it?” Camille rolled her eyes.

Kira didn’t dignify a response, her smile only widened as she turned back into the fray, shouting at a nearby wolf and reeling back her fist for another punch.

…

The group of a dozen students and two guardians dragged most of the bodies of the Direwolf pack back with them. Harvesting the soul cores of the corpses they decided to leave behind. Some opted to levitate the wolves while others with stronger physiques dragged them noisily behind.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

They arrivie later than expected back to camp. The temporary tents and protection spells lit up the clearing it was in, bustling and busy with about a hundred students and nine professors plus their familiars.

Theodric’s group hauled their catch to a huge pile of corpses of various creatures. A large chunk of mystery meat rotated on a spit nearby, a professor already perched on a ladder cutting pieces off and passing them to a long line of chattering students.

Theodric dismissed his group for dinner, and he sat down on a log, joining a few professors in skinning and harvesting monster materials, then throwing the carcasses to another pile, where a group of familiars were drooling and barely holding themselves back, circling and bumping into each other to try and get closer. He could see Morvax and Barkly among them, their gargantuan sizes compared to the others, loomed as their half of the circle was actively avoided.

Grabbing a Direwolf, Theodric pulled out his knife and got to work, separating skin from flesh, musing that the fur would probably fetch a good penny compared to how easily his students took it down.

“Hey Theodric,” A voice called out he recognised as Professor Roswen Copperleaf, head of Artificing, who sat down across from him holding a plate filled with meat. “I see your group was really successful in their hunt, you got a pretty decent haul there,”

“My group happened to be bigger than usual so, I thought they would be alright in bringing down a sizable enemy. But not one that would have more Rings than them,” Theodric multitasked skinning and replying to Professor Copperleaf. “How did your group do?”

“My students mainly wanted to test their little projects, so most of them didn’t get to use their inventions in actual combat, but if they can work out some kinks tonight, I can see a few of them working,” Professor Copperleaf proudly brandished her fork. “This year, this group has managed to impress me a lot. You’ll want to see one of the best devices they cooked up this time: the spell catalyst,”

“Why’s it called a spell catalyst?” Theodric asked curiously. Valendor stirred from his light nap within his shadow, also interested.

“So you know the essence of spellcasting. The initiation step: you draw a rune or a spell circle, which acts as a guideline for how your mana acts as a spell,” The professor recited as if from a textbook, holding up a finger. “The conversion step: to convert the wild mana cloud around your soul or mana from your mana rings into the same elemental type as your spell,”

She held up a third finger. “And lastly, the casting step: where you push mana into your rune or spell circle, and after filling it, you can choose when to fire your spell,”

“Okay…?” Theodric wished she could skip straight to the interesting part.

“So converting your mana takes the most time out of all the steps and is harder the less you understand fundamentally the element you are changing it to,” Professor Copperleaf continued, oblivious to Theodric’s impatience. “So the spell catalyst speeds it up, but not how usual transformers already around that converts your mana for you, oh no…”

“They convert your plain mana, into elemental mana you can’t normally convert!” She wiggled her eyebrows. “Humans need to convert our mana into specific elemental types since our souls don’t do it automatically like other species, and some of us have innate talent for understanding some elements while completely rubbish at comprehending others. So even though we can technically cast any spell of any element, most spells that are either not our innate element or non-elemental, would be too inefficient to use at all,”

“But this is where the spell catalyst comes in and helps you convert your mana efficiently into types you are bad at,” Professor Copperleaf waved her fork excitedly, meat forgotten long ago swallowed by a patch of unnaturally dark shadow. “So this student, who is a fire and earth elemental mage, thought of this really clever technique by using mediums with a type of mana, and you push your wild mana into the object so it gains characteristics of the specified mana, and transforms unspecified mana into specified mana!”

“Wait, are there mediums like that which can withstand such an aggressive method? And wouldn’t it be rather slow?” Theodric questioned, he could see the appeal, but if the transformation speed was slow, he could easily buy mana vials of the specific type he wanted or just buy a precast spell on leather, either way was not cheap, but he would rather save time and waste a few silver coins if it could save his life in a pinch.

“The student managed to cast a windblade that was pretty decent by using aerocrystal that he grew himself, expensive but nothing big for us nobles, and yes it was quite slow: it took a few minutes to transform enough wind mana for a windblade spell, but when he combined it with a transformer,” Professor Copperleaf smiled smugly. “He can automatically get a spell ready just initiating the spell circle they memorised and stuffing the device full of mana, once he works on shortening the time taken to convert said mana-”

“-he’ll be able to cast any element mid-battle by switching out crystals!” Professor Copperleaf's eyes visibly swirled with stars.

While Theodric was finally sold that it was quite an innovative invention indeed, Valendor was silently impressed by the boy Professor Copperleaf mentioned enthusiastically.

For the Lord of Night’s blackwood violin operated on similar principles as well. He had no intention of telling anyone or making any changes to his favourite weapon, of course.

But for this mortal boy to come up with this idea himself was quite a commendable feat, perhaps he should reach out to the boy. Afterall, the Lord of Night needed connections to once again establish a foothold in the mortal realm. Plus, it's always enjoyable to interact with a fellow tinkerer once in a while.

The Lord of Night closed his eyes and drifted off, his new physical body succumbing to its well earned rest.