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"...Is it morning already..?"
I open my eyes and look around my dark room. I usually don't wake up this early, wonder why today--
"Kazuki!!" A female voice shouts.
Ah, right...first day of school. Great. I groan as I stand up and walk downstairs.
"Yea yea I'm coming. I heard you Baba" I say as I enter the kitchen. I see Baba standing at the stove, making breakfast. "It's a pain in the arse to wake you up, stop staying up so late!" she says, it only took her one look at me to figure out how much I've slept.
"Sorry Baba, I couldn't help it.." I yawn.
Baba is like a mother to me, well, Probably because I never had one and she was the only person around that could play the figure.
"Are you excited for your second year at the academy?" She says with a smile, probably thinking I actually am. "Not really, but I'm glad I'm atleast not a first year anymore." I respond. "Oh! That reminds me." She says and turns to the open kitchen door leading into the hallway. "Dan? Dan!" she shouts.
No response.
"He's even worse than you..go wake your brother up Kazuki." she orders. I sigh and stand up, walking to his room.
As I open the door, a strong smell of sweat meets my nose, I look at the windows. Closed. Of course they are.
I look at the messy bed and the messy person sleeping on it. Dan...my 14 year brother. I consider myself lazy but this guy beats me.
He's supposed to become a first year at the academy I go to as well but I don't think he wants that. Well It's too late now.
"Dan..Hey wake up---" I shake him. He groans in response, not looking too happy about being woken up. "Today's the day, you are going to school, come on."
"...Just 2 more minutes.." He says.
"Well, alright." I leave his room and walk to the kitchen again.
I'm greeted by my upset Baba who knew this would happen, as she is about to send me to wake him again, he enters the room, fully dressed and ready to leave. I'll never understand how he goes to barely awake in ready for the day in such a short amount of time.
We eat breakfast and leave the house. Outside we see an old man on a rat the size of a cart, he looks at us, smiling. "Ready for your first day boys?" he says with his big grin. "We don't need a ride grandpa" Dan says, staring at the rat.
"But the city of Lurigo is kinda far away, you'll be late if you go by foot" He frowns. "I'll just summon my own ride rat." Dan says, raising his right hand. "Summoning spell!" He shouts as his hand starts glowing, a red circle representing a portal appears on the ground and a similar sized rat comes out of it.
"Impressive! I had no idea you were already able to summon such beasts!" Our grandfather praised him. "You don't know much about me anyway.." Dan says as he gets on his animal.
"Need a ride?" He offers me a hand. I nod and take it, as I get on the rat it starts running at an incredible speed.
It would take you atleast 40 minutes to reach Lurigo by foot, we reached it in 5 minutes like this.
As we do, we enter the streets of the town. We live in a rural part of the Empire and this place is the largest town around.
Even though it's not that large compared to the cities of the empire, it has a magic academy. Probably because of the fact that there are many villages around it, villages that are almost as big as the city itself.
As we get closer to the academy, we notice many people looking at us. Of course they are, It's a human city after all, they don't want some humanimals like Dan and me here, riding an oversized rat.
We choose to ignore them and soon reach the academy. It didn't change a bit since last year. It was a massive building with a big yard and an even larger training ground behind it, it's surrounded by a high wall and there are already students everywhere.
We are greeted by even more staring. The students look at us, some curious, some upset.
"Well, this is it I guess, dispell" Dan says. The rat we were sitting on disappears and we start walking towards the school.
I see many familiar faces, students I saw last year but also new students. No one really pays attention to me so I just walk to my class as Dan walks to his.
As I enter the classroom I'm greeted by my classmates. Most of them don't pay too much attention to me but they also don't mind that I'm a humanimal.
"There you are Kazuki!" A familiar voice says. "Oh, Vely..long time no see" I answer as I sit down next to him. Vely is the closest thing to a friend I have in this school. He has blonde hair, blue eyes and always looks happy for no apparent reason.
"I was starting to think you won't show up." Vely said while smiling. I didn't really answer since I didn't know what to say, but even if i did, someone was about to join the conversation anyway.
"Kazu! My friend! There you are!" An annoying voice came from the desk behind us. It was Daren, a big douchebag that overestimates himself a lot. Next to him was Baaya, his "sidekick" you could say.
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They never directly picked a fight, I don't know if they are scared or just think I'm not worth the trouble but till now they've only been a bit passive-aggressive. I know they despise me because I'm not a human.
"Daren, Baaya" I turn to them and nod. As I turn back, I notice Nico and Jack sitting in front of us. Nico was always a quiet and calm person, he never gave me the look that most people do when they find out I'm a humanimal, although we never really talked that much so I don't know his opinion on me.
We don't have too many boys in our class, the rest are girls which don't even bother talking to me. The classes usually don't have more than 15-20 students so there aren't more boys in other classes either I guess.
As we are talking and catching up, the bell rings and soon our homeroom teacher enters. I can tell he is a decent man just by the fact that he accepted me into his class.
"Hello kids! I'm glad that everyone could make it. Many of you have managed to reach the second mage rank and develop their skills quite nicely till now, I'm very proud. I hope you'll keep developing like that."
He paused and looked at us.
"I don't really want to teach as much as you don't want to study, it's the first day after all but we could still go over some basics in case some of you forgot"
Most of the class sighs but we still decide on listening. After a while the bell rings and we walk to our next class. Most of the stuff we learn here is theory and we don't get to practice that much but we still have a subject called magic practice where we can train our powers.
You could say it's something like P.E. in regular schools. As we go to the training grounds behind the school, we see our teacher who waited for us there. A man in his 60's named Duke, he had barely any hair left and looked clumsy but was full of energy and quite agile.
"Welcome youngsters! Hope you're ready for the first magic practice class of the year! Today we won't do anything special...unless you want to challenge the new students to a match" He grinned.
He was always like this, he loves being competitive and competitive students. He always encouraged classes to do magic matches which were basically 4v4 duels under supervision. He would host a so-called "Magic Tournament" where each class would form their own team and fight against other classes each year.
The participation is optional so many didn't even want to do it but the ones that did, really went all out. Even though we were first years, our class won last year. I wasn't even in the team, I just sat and watched, being there as a "reserve".
"Well, a friendly match won't hurt" Daren says, smiling. "Well then, here are your opponents!" Duke says as 4 guys walk up to us. They must be the first years. They look confident, too confident. They are like mini Darens.
"Oh, you must be the famous 2/B class!" One of the boys say. "We heard so much about you, please go easy on us!" He continues.
I assume that one is their leader. He has brown curly hair and looks like he's mocking us.
"We'll try but don't think we'll let you win just because you're the new kids" Daren says with his stupid grin.
"Wish us luck" Vely winks as he, Daren, Jack and Baaya get ready. Nico and me sit down on a bench, we both looked at the field. The match is about to begin and Duke seems as excited as the participants themselves.
"Begin!" Duke shouts.
"Water blast!" Vely raises his hand and a blast of water comes out of it, it flies towards the challengers.
They jump out of the way rather easily. Well, anyone could've done that. "Moving wind wall!" The next attack comes from Baaya who creates a massive wind spell, it's a wind wall covering a big part of the field, it flies to the challengers but they just get faster, avoiding the attack.
"What?? No way!" Baaya shouts, shocked by their moves.
"Let's do the swamp!" Daren says.
"Lets do it!" Jack answers as he raises his hand towards the enemy who was standing still now.
"Shockwave!" Jack shouts as an almost invisible wave comes out of his palm. To the naked eye it just looked like some short airwave but it paralyzes the opponent so that Vely can do his thing.
Vely then smashes his fist into the ground. Water comes out of it, creating a pit that is moving towards the enemy. The enemy doesn't react.
"This isn't regular water, it fused with my energy, you can't move even without the paralyzing effect of Jacks shockwave!" Vely says
We look at the boys who are struggling to move their feet out of the water. "Now let's finish it! Speed Up!" Daren shouts as he starts glowing, he moves towards the boys at impressive speeds and goes for a punch.
All of this happened too quickly. The swamp is one of their most effective tactics. They worked a lot on it, timing it perfectly, it just takes a few seconds to do the whole thing and the enemy doesn't even get the chance to react. The kids had no idea what was coming---
..Wait...Daren stopped..did he land a blow?..There's some sort of energy armor between him and the kid he tried to hit..Now that I look at them, all have the armor.
"W-what..??" Daren says in shock
"Is that everything you got?" The boy with the curly hair says as he starts grinning.
"Well then boys, time for the counter!" As he says that, the energy armor on them moves to their fists and feet only, leaving the rest exposed. The boy with the curly hair uses his energy punch to knock out Daren with one punch and the other boys run at the rest of our team.
Unprepared for such direct attacks, no one from our team could even cast a spell. I never saw someone get destroyed so quickly. 2/B fell, just like that.
Everyone stared in shock, even Duke couldn't believe it. "..The winners are..the first years from 1/C.." Duke says as winners cheer and laugh.
These kids didn't just meet today..they all used the same spell. An impressive one at that..it might as well be a rank 3 spell..who are they?
"Is that everything 2/B has to offer?" The curly haired boy says. "Disappointing...now where's that humanimal we heard so much about?"
Even though most humanimals are usually humans with animal features, my family never had those, we look like normal humans so he couldn't know it was me.
"I'm here." I say "What do you want?"
"Oh, no need to be rude humanimal...my name is Eiden, nice to meet you." he grins. I stay silent.
"Don't you want to avenge your friends humanimal? Come on, let's do a 1v1 right now!" he shouts.
"That's enough!" Duke interrupts.
"You've won your match, that's it. Class is about to end, go and get changed." He continues.
"Pfft, fine..see you around humanimal" Eiden stares at me as they leave. I sigh and look to my classmates.
They aren't really injured but their pride and confidence is destroyed. As they get up they just look at the ground, not saying a word.
"They caught us by surprise! Who could've expected something like that out of nowhere!" Daren breaks the silence. The rest looks at eachother, ashamed.
Right after that, the bell rings. It was the last class so I headed home with Dan. What a first day. As we enter our house, our Baba greets us, as usually lunch was already on the table and Grandpa was already stuffing his mouth.
"Mmmmm! Mm---" The old man says. "Oroshi! Atleast swallow before you talk!" Baba says. He does so and starts talking "So...how was your first day?" he smiles.
"It was okay." Dan says. "Found any missy yet?" Oroshi grins at Dan. "N-no! Shut up grandpa!"
We all start laughing at Dans unexpected reaction. We then talk a bit more and eat lunch. I spend the rest of day in my room reading my novels, I don't have anything else to do anyway.
Before I realize it, it's night. I go to bed and start dozing off, thinking about what happened today.
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"..Ah, there you are~" a sweet familiar voice says.
"Sorry, it took me a while.." I say, as I enter the dark room and sit next to her.
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