Since Nym wasn’t at the glacier to get in touch with his inner icicle, he saw no reason to suffer. The others could shiver and cope; he’d already done his time with that. Professor Lakton had probably done this trip quite a few times. She already had a personal heating spell going before Nym even turned to look at her.

She was also already cutting through the complaining her students had started up. “Get used to it,” she said, raising her voice. “This is why you’re here. Internalize that feeling of cold. Accept it, and reflect upon what it would mean to never be warm again. Craft your intent from that.

“But that’s for later. For now, there are thirty dorm rooms available, more than enough for everyone. Pick one, deposit your stuff, and meet in the main lecture hall in half an hour. Check the rooms before you just walk in to make sure nothing else has moved in.”

“How do we know where that’s at?” one of the students asked.

“What do you mean ‘moved in?’” another one said at the same time.

“This facility is unmanned when not in use. It should be sealed against any invasive animals entering the building. Confirm this in your dorms, which you can find by following the signs. That is all. Dismissed.”

The grumbling didn’t subside completely, but it dropped in volume and the students trudged off the teleportation platform. Nym and the professor followed them out of the room, though they went straight down the hall instead of turning into the dorm area. Nym sent a scry anchor to sweep the area and make sure it was clean while they walked.

He got the layout of the building and confirmed it free of vermin, not that he was surprised. The kitchen was already stocked and he was betting someone had come through in the last few days to prep it for habitation. The front door was locked and barricaded, and thick enough that Nym doubted he could brute force it open with a second circle spell.

Professor Lakton led him to the faculty wing, which was six suites, each one much, much larger than the student dorms. “Take whichever you like,” she said. “We’ll be the only ones here for this trip.”

Nym didn’t have much use for a full suite. At least, that was his initial thought. Once he got inside and had a chance to examine it, he realized it had rune sequences in it to keep it warm, to cook food, for the bathroom, and even to heat the bed specifically. It seemed the faculty was not as willing to rough it out in the frozen northlands as they were to put students through it.

It was still far more space than he needed. He wasn’t actually an instructor, so he didn’t need to set up an office to work out of. Everything he’d brought with him was in a pack that he unceremoniously dropped on the floor. After a few minutes examining the rune sequences, which also all linked back to a control panel near the door, he returned to the hall.

Noise dampening wards were active around a different suite, one he assumed Professor Lakton had claimed. Rather than waiting for her to come back out, Nym flew through the building to the front gate. If his primary job was going to be keeping everyone safe, he figured he needed to know what kind of protections the place offered.

It didn’t take long for him to conclude that the door was actually more secure than the walls that surrounded it, and those were foot-thick blocks of granite magically locked together in a kind of tongue-and-groove pattern that was actually impossible to separate without reshaping the blocks. The work was professionally done, though it was very, very old. Newer builds used the same principle, but a completely different pattern that was more stable while building.

There were also rune sequences and wards waiting to be activated that would temporarily brace the door with a plane of force while simultaneously repelling invaders. It was a formidable defense, though it seemed designed primarily to keep out things that relied on nothing but physical strength. There was very little in the way of defenses against magic.

He supposed that’s what he was there for. A set of wards, no matter how intricate, would never be half as flexible as a living mage. Things that wouldn’t be stopped by the door would require an active effort to capture, expel, or kill. He could handle that. The list of things small enough to fit inside the training facility but deadly enough to force a retreat was vanishingly small.

His scry anchor at the lecture hall showed him students entering in groups of twos or threes. The professor had turned up at some time too and was standing at a podium, waiting for the rest of the class to show up. Nym spent a few seconds studying the room, noted the empty space around the podium, then teleported himself there. He even took the extra time and effort to work on his precision so that he showed up already standing on the floor.

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There were a couple surprised shouts at his entrance, but he ignored them and asked Professor Lakton, “What’s the plan here? Do you want me standing guard at the back of the lecture hall? Should I go to the front door? Patrol the surrounding area to catch threats before they materialize?”

He could probably do all three with enough air golems acting as mobile scry points that he could cycle through, but he figured it was better to just do whatever the Academy’s faculty wanted him to. It was their field trip, after all, and there was no reason to reveal all his capabilities. His teleportation spell would hopefully be enough to reassure everyone of his status as a third circle mage and keep anyone from questioning him.

“Er, whatever you think is best,” the professor said, clearly taken aback.

“Okay. What’s the schedule like? Is everyone going to be in here for the next few hours?”

“Only for long enough to give out instructions before we go outside.”

Nym gave her a sharp look. “What’s wrong with in here? Seems cold enough to me.”

“No.” She shook her head. “There are a few places nearby that have always been very… inspirational, let’s say. The class will visit one each day for a few hours, then come back here to reflect on what they felt there. I’ll be available to help them refine those thoughts into an intent filter.”

“I see,” Nym said. “I guess this is why you wanted a chaperone then. This place is secure enough to sleep in, but you’re going out into the wilds with twenty kids and need to make sure nothing sneaks up on us.”

He was fully aware of the irony of calling the students kids. Most of them were at least as old as he appeared to be, and there were three or four that looked to be in their early twenties. Only one was around thirteen. That put Nym solidly in the middle, age-wise. He had no doubt he’d be a topic of gossip among the students during their free time.

Damn the sanctum for having such a good library.

* * *

After giving everyone their instructions, Professor Lakton led them out into the biting cold. Unlike the facility they were sleeping in, there were no walls to protect against the wind and snow being driven up into their faces. Some of the more prepared students had scarves that they pulled up to cover themselves with. Others were less fortunate and had to suffer through the sting of snow and ice pelting their exposed skin.

Nym had no such protections, but other than the physical sensation of the snow hitting him, there was no cold behind it. He could ignore that easily, and in fact barely even noticed it with his attention on the chain of scrying spells he was cycling through to get a look around him. As soon as he’d found out where they were going, he’d created an air golem and sent it to check the route. Now he was doing a more thorough investigation of all the little caves he’d spotted and scanning as far up a trail leading higher into the mountains as he could.

Nym was almost positive that trail was a bighorn yeti trail, but he hadn’t actually spotted one yet. Still, it was six feet wide and the snow had been flung as much as twenty feet away from the trail when it had been broken, which he guessed was within the last day. If it wasn’t a snow yeti, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what else it could be.

Either way, if it got too close, it was getting a lightning bolt to the face.

He followed along behind the students, who were for the most part flying over the snow, albeit not very well. Their flight was unstable and few of them could keep it up for more than a few minutes. The ones who’d cast some sort of reduced weight or water alteration spell to walk on top of the snow were performing far better.

It was getting harder to keep an eye on everyone as the group spread out, with the stragglers getting farther and farther behind. Professor Lakton was at the front, and Nym was sure she was competent enough to keep her students alive long enough for Nym to fly over and assist her, but if they were attacked from both sides, it would be a disaster.

He lifted up the half a dozen students at the back and started flying them forward, though he had to grab one three times when he kept squirming and breaking the air cushion around him. Nym plopped them back down solidly in the middle of the line and moved forward so that he was behind the slightly faster students that were now at the back.

“I don’t suppose you could do that again?” one of them called up.

“Every time I have to group you back together because you’re moving too slow, I’m going to talk to your instructor about lowering your grade for this class. Are you sure you want me to ferry you around?”

“You don’t have to be a jerk about it,” the student said.

“My job is to keep you safe. It’s hard to do when there’s a half a mile between the ones at the front and the ones at the back.”

The group quickly overtook the ones Nym had moved anyway, since they still weren’t moving any faster, but by that point the lead students had reached their destination: an ice cave that supposedly glowed brilliantly when the sun hit it from certain angles. The theory was that the striking tableau would help cement the memory in their minds, a visual representation of how cold they’d felt when they saw it.

Nym’s air golem was already there and scanning the interior. It only went a few hundred feet into the glacier, and there didn’t seem to be anything dangerous living there. He’d still keep a careful watch, of course. He was concerned about something invisible in there, something he wouldn’t see until he checked the place himself and confirmed there was no arcana in there.

He was probably being overly paranoid, but he wasn’t going to take the job lightly. If anything happened, he would feel ridiculously vindicated for all his scrying. He was spending a ton of effort on it, after all.

That was probably the reason he was so damn annoyed when a rumbling sound filled the air and a small avalanche came barreling down the mountain above them.