Orrin skipped lunch and searched for Graem. He tried Wren’s room but the door was locked shut. Orrin made his way to the library. Harvey, the librarian, still sat with his legs up reading a different book. He shrugged at Orrin’s question of how to get in touch with the professor.

Just as Orrin was about to give up and make his way to his next class, he turned a corner and saw the man approaching. He held two massive books under one arm and balanced another four in the air with the other.

“Professor Graem, do you have a minute?” Orrin waved his hand.

Graem sighed and shook his head. “Go away. I don’t have time for whatever it is you want.”

Orrin trotted alongside him anyway. He needed answers.

“How far away from the campus can I safely go? I might need to go out into the city to socialize.”

“I don’t know or care. Figure it out.” Graem’s arm balancing the books swayed but he kept them from toppling. “Now leave me alone or I’ll have you expelled.”

“If I send a letter saying how unhelpful you are to Anabella, what do you think would happen?”

Graem slowed to a stop.

Orrin wasn’t stupid. He knew threatening the man was a massive risk but while Graem knew some of what was going on, Orrin felt the man still had a healthy fear of the former leader of Dey. She scared the shit out of Orrin and he barely knew anything about her.

Orrin’s suspicion that Graem wanted to pawn him off and stay far away from whatever was going on since their first meeting grew. It made sense. Plausible deniability that he was involved if everything went sideways. However, Orrin didn’t give a shit. If they were going to play with his life and put him in danger, he was going to start demanding some answers.

“You’re not sending any letters. You’ve been going to class.” Graem’s words were slow as if he was trying to convince himself. “Do you realize who you—”

“As of this morning, she told me that I was doing a great job so far,” Orrin lied smoothly. Anabella’s morning response to his nightly message was two words long.

Work Faster

“Hold these,” Graem said, pushing the stack of books into Orrin’s hands. As Orrin fumbled them against his chest, the professor reached out and tapped the back of Orrin’s neck. “How far afield do you need to go? I would suggest staying away from the main defenses, any barracks, or the town square. Some people saw an uglier version of you die there recently.”

Orrin pulled up his [Map] and zoomed out. The school was a few miles from Sanerris’s house. He weighed the options of pushing Graem and making the entirety of Mistlight available to peruse but the risk outweighed the benefits. He studied the man.

Gone was the drunk imbecile from before. As he adjusted something within Orrin’s collar, the concentration on his face was the same look Orrin’s mom had when she was going over a particularly difficult patient’s file. The stench of liquor was absent and Graem was dressed like an actual respectable professor. The books in his hands had no labels on the spine, which Orrin was learning meant rare. He was doing his job and yet, here he was doing Orrin’s bidding in an empty hallway near the library.

“Make it within walking distance. Maybe two miles or so? I don’t need to go far,” Orrin spoke, watching Graem’s head nod in acceptance. “I’m going to need access to the second floor of the library as well.”

Orrin held his breath.

“Two miles is fine but you don’t need access to the second floor. That’s restricted to accepted studies only. You don’t have clearance.”

“I’ll have Anabella send a letter to you,” Orrin said with a shrug. “I’m sure she’ll love wasting her time.”

Graem smirked as he snapped his fingers. The collar stung for a second but the oppressive feeling of confinement that Orrin hadn’t even realized was there lifted like the sun beating down after a cloud rolled away. “Go ahead. If you’re actually in contact with her, let her know that I’d be delighted to give you free run of my entire collection if that is what she desires,” Grame said, emphasizing the word. “You are playing a dangerous game with me, Casimir.”

Orrin pushed the books back into the professor’s arms. “It’s all a dangerous game with me. My favorite part is I don’t even know the rules.”

Orrin left Professor Graem in the hall and ran to his next class.

He snuck into the back of the room just as Surviving Spell Attacks began. Orrin found a seat at the top of the auditorium-style classroom and sat. Roughly half of the forty students were sitting close to the front, with the rest spread across the back side of the room. In Orrin’s experience in high school, the ones who sat near the front were the ass-kissers or nerds who wanted to learn.

Of course, this was a magic class… Orrin wished he’d gotten here earlier to sit up front.

A door to the professor’s office and likely bedroom sat to the left of the huge chalkboard. Orrin tried reading the multiple equations along the board and was excited to see a few that he recognized. He missed when the professor walked into the room but when a deep bestial voice growled and cleared its throat, Orrin almost cast [Ward].

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Professor Hugh stood behind a lectern with the class book opened. He tried turning the pages but his fingers were too big for the dainty book. Orrin could see frustration mounting in the narrowed eyes behind wide-rimmed glasses. The loud smack of the book being thrown against the wall quieted the last few hushed conversations going on in the room.

“Stupid book is useless anyway,” the orc rumbled.

Professor Hugh was an orc. Orrin had seen a few around Dey but they kept their distance and didn’t interact much with other races. Madi’s explanation was they were scared that people might try to enslave them again. Orcs were used as slave labor for centuries, with the mass liberations of their kind being a recent development. Especially here, in Odrana, where they’d been used as workhorses forever.

“My name is Professor Hugh,” the orc started talking, moving from behind the small desk and nearly knocking it over. “This is my first class as a professor. Survive Attacks is important. There is math. There is thinking. Most important, there is pain. You must appreciate failure. I will administer tests each week. If you fail, you will be in pain. Pain motivates you to learn better than the hunger for power. Pay attention or don’t. This week we will discuss the basics.”

Orrin caught a glimpse of Rhys and Iona sitting near the front. She was whispering in his ear.

“I’m not going to learn magic from an orc,” a prissy voice near Orrin spat. “The standards have dropped in Mistlight.”

Professor Hugh laughed and pointed at the tall woman who had half-stood to leave. A bolt of energy lifted her into the air and launched her bodily through the double doors at the back of the room. Nobody moved.

The orc slapped his hands together. “I am an orc. This is indisputable. I am proud to be an orc. This too is indisputable. If you wish to leave this class, you may. The school will reimburse you. However, if you plan to survive in the world or if you plan to advance into the higher magics taught here, you will sit down and kindly not insult me. That will be my only warning.”

Orrin could see the unconscious body of the woman through the still-swinging doors. She’d hit the ground and slid into the stone wall, which had probably saved her life given the speed she was moving. A quick check on her status showed she was alive but none of her friends moved to help her.

“We will begin with the formula that calculates the damage a spell can do based on your statistics. After that, we will discuss will and the role it plays in our mana pool. If you turn to the board here, you’ll see…”

Orrin scratched notes as he watched the seven-and-a-half-foot tall green man with arms thicker than Orrin’s waist daintily draw charts and point to equations as he explained will, intelligence, and constitution. Orrin had figured out some of this on his own but having the accepted explanations of the world smoothed out some edges.

For example, constitution played a large part in how much a spell could affect another person. Orrin knew this in theory from the time he’d spent the same mana healing a dwarf that he’d previously used on multiple humans. Professor Hugh explained the formulas for attacks against one another and the different factors that could change the outcome of a fight.

Someone in the front row raised their hand. Orrin could see the man’s hand shaking.

“Hmm. A question?”

“Professor Hugh, you said that a higher constitution could override the deficits of a lower will but I don’t understand what that means. Wouldn’t it be better to increase your will to increase the power of an attack?”

“Name?” Hugh crossed his arms but snapped the chalk he was holding as he did. He brushed white powder off his arm and picked another piece off the board.

“Hazel Jesup, sir.”

“That’s a good question, Jesup. Let’s run a scenario. You have ten ability points to distribute. Your constitution, intelligence, and will are all at ten. How would you build out?”

Orrin sketched out the points on his paper and noticed a gaping hole in this question. If he was going to use a spell like [Lightstrike] that did a base set of damage, putting everything into will would make the most sense. He’d have a larger mana pool and could spam the casting of the attack more times. He had to remember that these magic users likely didn’t have [Meditate] and therefore couldn’t regenerate their spells each day.

However, if he was going to use a regular spell attack with a variable cost like most of the regular mage builds had…

“I would keep my intelligence and will even, likely spending four points to each to maximize the cost decrease from intelligence and the base damage output from will. The extra two points, I’d put in constitution to make myself harder to kill.”

Orrin nodded. He’d only briefly paged through the Surviving Spell Attacks class book last night but it recommended the same slow but mostly even build of will and intelligence with constitution taking a backseat that he’d heard before. Tony had recommended it. Madi had recommended it. Orrin looked at his lopsided stats and grinned. I’m terrible at taking advice.

“That is the generally accepted route. What if we both have the same stats? Who would win in a fight?” Professor Hugh asked.

Orrin had teachers like this before. Instead of teaching, they asked leading questions to make the student find the answer on their own. He hated it.

“Unless only one side had a mana potion or got lucky with a critical hit, they would likely run out of mana at the same time and exhaust themselves,” Hazel answered. Orrin could see why the guy sat up front. He was smart but wanted to understand some small nuance of what the professor had said. Something that Orrin hadn’t even caught or written down.

“If I put five points into constitution and the other five into whatever else, it doesn’t matter what,” Professor Hugh said while writing numbers on the board, “and instead of casting five [Firebolts] at the normal cost, I spend my entire pool on one or two shots.”

Orrin looked at the equation for how much constitution could negate damage from an incoming attack. He’d thought constitution only equated to health points but what Hugh was writing showed an impressive curve up. The more points someone put into constitution, the less damage an attack did in the first place. It wasn’t much at fifteen, as Hugh’s current scenario posited, but Orrin scratched a few equations out.

This wasn’t math class with dumb questions about how many watermelons a soccer mom needed to buy to feed three hundred kids. This was min-maxing. This was finding ways to break the game.

“You wouldn’t kill him but he’d be a lot lower in health than you,” Hazel hesitated. “I think.”

“You’re right. The numbers only get better. You do need to keep in mind the mass that constitution increases on you. Eventually, a higher constitution base requires more strength to hold the body up, as well as more dexterity to keep the body moving in the first place but it’s an interesting mind exercise and shows why class scholars still debate the perfect loadout for classes. We’re not even taking into account the damage to your own body you could do by pushing too much mana into one attack. A higher constitution could let you survive casting a spell larger than anyone else could. Keep that in mind as we move forward. You’ll never know exactly who or what you are up against. The danger is always there. My job is to give you as many tools as I can… as much knowledge as I can… so that when you encounter something different, you don’t die because you did something stupid.”

Orrin realized the entire class was sitting forward, paying attention. He’d thought this was going to be a dumb class but now… Orrin was excited to learn more.