It hurt.

The ball of fire flew swiftly into his chest, burning his only nice jacket and his favourite button-up. The fire licked against his bare chest, but his skin glowed orange and the fire subsided. The heat hurt and his skin was slightly singed, but the heat was nothing compared to what he felt internally. The pain ate away at his regained clarity and the anger threatened to overwhelm him again.

The sight of the fireball barely phasing him appeared to frighten the remaining wizards, more of them began to raise their hands.

“Enough!” Henrietta cried out as a large wave of water crashed into the group, sending everyone toppling to the ground.

Danny was the first to get back to his feet, water quickly evaporating off his heated body. The coolness of the water helped subdue his rising anger.

“Stand down everyone.” A male voice called out. Danny looked to the source of the voice, finding a man almost as tall as himself, but far more muscular, standing next to Henrietta. His exposed forearms were riddled with scars. Henrietta looked peeved.

“Why didn’t you stop them earlier! Danny could have been seriously hurt!”

The man snorted. “I was more worried about the sorry excuses for guards than the kid, it was good experience for the lot of them.”

The man then walked up to Danny and clasped his shoulder. His grip felt like iron. “You’ve got some serious potential kid, you’ll make a fine combat mage. Come find me when you’re done with this introductory crap.” He then looked at the so-called-guards who were still scrambling to their feet. “Get out of here, this was a disgraceful performance.”

Soon Danny was left, practically shirtless, sopping wet, standing in the training room with a fuming Henrietta. She stomped her feet grumpily before walking over to Danny. “Are you okay? You took that fireball like a champ.”

Danny shrugged. “This was my favourite shirt.”

Danny had no clue what had just happened to him. The heat, the orange glow, the strength that he had felt. Then the anger, it was all consuming. It was all a bit too much to process at once. He looked down at his chest through the hole that had been burnt in his shirt, his skin was red, but otherwise fine. How odd.

A figure came rushing into the training room, trailed by the nine students that had been left behind.

“Henrietta, the place is in chaos, Smith gave the all clear, but nobody has any clu-” the staff member gawked at the hole blown in the wall, then their jaw dropped further when they saw the state Danny was in.

Henrietta stepped in front of Danny, which did nothing to obscure him from view considering their almost half-a-meter difference in height. “Dismiss the classes for today, we will pick back up tomorrow morning. It was a false alarm.”

The staff member nodded and went to usher the students out of the room. De Waal stepped forward. “I would like an explanation of what happened.” The other students all nodded, they were looking at Danny with confused eyes.

“There was an accident while training, that is all.” Henrietta replied.

De Waal didn’t look sold. “Look at the state of Danny, is this training safe? How could we be expected to-”

“Mrs De Waal, I assure you, what happened here is incredibly unlikely to take place with anyone else. You have nothing to be concerned about. Mr Skala has some very unique circumstances and we failed to accommodate them.”

De Waal looked like she wanted to say more but the staff member got the que from Henrietta and ushered everyone out. Danny got a concerned look from Jack but Danny gave him a thumbs up. Henrietta then turned to Danny, “We should debrief.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Danny laughed. “Yeah, perhaps. Could I get a shirt?”

Twenty minutes later he was sitting in Henrietta’s private office, in a borrowed shirt and pair of slacks. Apparently a lot of the Madley’s wizards chose to live on the Academy’s grounds, so someone had been willing to give him some of their spare clothes. He also found out that the entire block was owned by the Academy, with most of the buildings interconnected, only appearing to be separate from an outside perspective. Checking google maps, Danny found that there were no streets that led into, or through, the block, it was just that, a solid block.

“So,” Henrietta handed Danny a cup of coffee before sitting down behind her large desk. “That happened.”

“Yep.” Danny nodded, taking a long sip from the mug.

The air hung awkwardly for a time. “I’m going to be frank here. I’m not sure what happened.” Henrietta sighed.

“Glad we’re in the same boat.”

The woman chuckled. “It’s obvious that your mana isn’t operating like your average person’s. It seems like your condition is more than just an enormous mana pool.”

“Yeah.” Danny began to feel a little nervous, he increasingly felt that whatever the glowing zombie-blood-mana-stuff was, it was far outside the norm.

Henrietta then had him describe in detail what had happened for him as he had created his mana cannonball. She immediately paused him as he described the feeling of his mana pool. “That… that’s highly unusual.”

“Is it?” Danny tried to be as calm as he could, his heart thumping wildly in his chest.

“Definitely. Mana pools are usually a singular location that we can draw upon, for example, mine feels like it is within my heart. I can connect to it by focusing on my heart. That is, from what I know, normally how it is. Whether it’s the heart, the brain, or the diaphragm. Some people from certain cultures experience it somewhere outside themselves, usually floating above them, or alongside them. What you’re describing…. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of such an embodied experience.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s not my actual heart that I draw mana from. It’s just a place that feels like it is somewhere within my heart. There is a level of disconnectedness associated with the feeling. You have to remember that the mana pool is a metaphysical construct, it is not something that exists physically. What you’re describing sounds like the opposite, that your body physically is your mana pool, which makes no sense.”

Danny paused. “Why does it make no sense?”

Henrietta sighed. “Because we humans are not mana-born.” She held up a hand to stop Danny as he went to ask what that meant. “There are two classifications of beings we are aware of, mana-born and not mana-born. The first are creatures that are born with a connection to their mana, they use magic the same way we use our eyes, or lungs. The second class is what we as humans are, our mana still exists, we are just not naturally connected to it. We must be connected to it by other means. The usage of mana isn’t natural to us, but we can learn to wield it.”

The informan made Danny’s stomach drop. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he had an inkling that there was something deeply wrong with him. He had seen the state of the creatures that had likely done this to them, their mana, much the same as his, definitely wasn’t a purely metaphysical construct. The heat of the zombie he had encountered haunted his mind. That heat was very much physical. What had Zoryana told him? His mana was hot, a rare physical manifestation as she had described it.

He started to think that perhaps his experience with mana was more than just rare, it was something entirely different than what a human had felt before, or at least any of these nerdy wizards.

Henrietta seemed to mistake his source of fear. “Hey, Danny, don’t stress. We’ll work out what’s going on. I’ve just had an idea for helping you handle your unwieldy mana.”

Danny was happy for a distraction. “Yeah, what’s that?”

Henrietta got up and walked over to her bookshelf. “Your highest affinity was earth, right?”

“Yeah.”

She took a book off of the shelf. She turned to face him with a mischievous grin. “Want to skip to the end of the curriculum?”

Danny couldn’t say no to that. Soon he found himself back in the training room, there was another man in the room, assessing the grey stones around the hole Danny had made not long ago.

“Hey Retta, how did this even happen? The amount of mana needed to destroy a single one of these plates is insane, let alone this many of them.”

“Danny let me introduce you to our resident engineer, Todd. Todd, let me introduce you to the young man who did this, Danny.”

The man’s eyes widened. “OH! It’s the mana-boy. That explains some of it. Must be even more mana than we thought. Christ, you must have what? Two, three, hundred SMUs? At least.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying, but it’s nice to meet you mate,” Danny held out his hand.

“Christ, and you don’t even know a thing yet.” The man shook his hand. “Zoryana was right, you’re definitely one to keep an eye on.”

The man then collected up the broken grey stones, piled them onto a trolley, and left the two of them in the room.