I stood in front of a class of thirty prospective bone mages. The minions had removed and or demolished the cubicles and kept only the office chairs and desks. The class was seated nervously, waiting for my next announcement, there was an awful lot of fidgeting, reminds me of simpler times. Except these students were a variety of ages, ranging from 13 to 40 and dressed very eclectically, in a mix of different fashions and styles.

“You’ve all been determined to have an affinity for bone magic, so we’ll start with the very basics of bone magic, bone strengthening a very simple and useful spell to use. As you’re all noobs, I’ll have you practice your skill on some donated bones. Cucumber would you do the honour of providing the bones.”

“Yes dad.” Cucumber said sullenly. That was worrying, it seemed he’d jumped from the mental equivalent of an eager five year old to a sullen 15 year old practically overnight. If this continued, I’d have an adult version to cajole into cooperation in less than a day. Great, more problems to deal with. Still I might not even survive the confrontation with the Devourer, so Cucumber would have to wait for now.

I’d never dealt with one personally before and I didn’t like my chances. I always just let the paladins deal with that nonsense themselves, they were better suited for direct physical confrontations. I preferred to stay in the back during battles, where it was safer, to better manage minions and launch large scale spells as needed.

Cucumber opened his mouth and his teeth fell out and poured onto the ground, rapidly multiplying and lengthening into the size of a forearm bone. There were a few gasps and one girl started dry retching. Disgusting.

“Take one and pass them along.” I said grabbing a bundle of them and placing them all on the table of a concerned male dressed in chain mail armour.

“Is this really hygienic?” he asked.

“There’s no squeamishness to be found in a powerful bone mage, it could be worse, you could be a blood mage and have to bathe in blood.”

“That’s disgusting.” Some loud pitched female responded. She was dressed like an office worker, in an expensive pant suit combination.

“Be that as it may, you should use this chance to practice on the bone, hold it in your hands, feel the weight of it, the shape of it and become one with it, make it yours and strengthen it. When you feel confident with that we’ll move onto bone shaping which will provide a more offensive method of combat for you.”

“But you haven’t even told us how to strengthen it yet.”

I tried to hold in my frustration with the fact that I couldn’t just transfer the memory of how to do it into their heads and be done with this beginner bullshit. I had so many things to do and this was not appealing to me at all.

I let out a non existent breath to keep calm. I didn’t need to breathe, but the act was still calming somehow. “Breathe in mana, while your eyes are closed, you should feel a mild warmth, entering through your nose and or throat, flowing through your chest and to your extremities, when you feel the mana reach your hands, picture the bone becoming harder, stronger, tougher.”

“What if you don’t feel a warmth?” Another annoying person asked, this time a young child dressed in a long flowing robe of some sort. Memories said it was a yukata, odd choice for a child, looked more like nightwear borrowed from an older sibling, it hung loose on him.

“Then you should work on that first, close your eyes think of something peaceful like a lake or a garden or a sky full of clouds. Whatever will help you empty your mind faster of distracting thought and just breathe, until you’ve sunk into your body and can feel the weight of your breaths. Then move on to the next step.”

“That sounds hard.” The child complained.

“It should come easily, you’ve absorbed mana into you naturally, now you just have to focus on the process and externalise it.”

“Can we like fight monsters after we learn this stuff?”

“If you like, you can try destroying some zombies with bone magic later on if you do a good job.”

“Awesome.” And the annoying child finally got to work, closing his eyes and visibly concentrating on the task at hand. Ideally he shouldn’t be concentrating so hard in order to find true meditation but at least he was quiet now and that was progress.

After twenty minutes, another male dressed all in black leather said “I got it.” His motorcyle helmet lay next to his enhanced bone.

“Got what?”

“A notification from the blue box, it said, I had bone strengthening level 1 now.”

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“Great, now you can work on shifting the bone into a weapon that suits you, in a similar fashion as to how you reinforce it. It's an act of imagination and will, using mana to enforce your will upon the bone, allowing you to sharpen the edges to become a blade of sorts, reshape the top to form a blunt hammer or whatever else you might think would make a useful weapon in a fight. Then you should get a new notification from the voice of the world that you’ve gained Bone shaping, maybe even get a weapon mastery skill.”

Someone else, a female in a short skirt and a top that didn’t even cover her mid riff interrupted. “Do we really have to fight zombies?”

“Combat is the fastest way of gaining experience in a timely manner and it’s usually a lot more interesting than sitting around slowly advancing your skills through classroom theory and testing. At early stages progress is fast even with this kind of practice but it slows down very quickly if you’re not willing to work at it in less than risk free environments.”

Another twenty minutes went by before someone else said something, this guy wore glasses and one of those weird conical hats and a green robe “I’m out of mana, now what?”

I was surprised by the complaint, Cucumber was providing a steady supply of mana into the area just by being nearby, increasing mana regeneration significantly. “What have you been doing?”

“I’ve been trying to make a super sword, with the thing about folding the blade like a thousand times.”

I laughed. No wonder he burned through mana so quickly, he was trying to push past the natural limitation of bone, to make it do more than it was supposed to. Very mana intensive work. Honestly I was amazed that he hadn’t overloaded his mana pathways and accidentally killed himself with that stunt.

“You should just take a break for now, let your mana recover, the fastest way to grow your mana regeneration and mana pool is to drain your mana pool repeatedly as often as you can.”

“What should I do while I wait for that?” The wannabe wizard asked.

“I’ll tell you about the ways in which bone magic can be used. Bone magic can be used offensively, either through long range attacks like bone spears or through close range attacks such as bone shattering spells. Defensive spells focus on reinforce your own bones, making you much harder to kill or raising walls of bones to block attacks. Another use for bone magic is crowd control, where you trap your enemies in bone prisons, limiting their movements. At higher levels you can trap your enemy forces in mazes of bone, which is always good for a laugh.”

“Can we cause them to explode from a distance like in games?” The yukata child asked.

“You can, it’s very mana intensive due to the mana within their body countering your attempts to adjust their bones. There’s a certain default setting for people that’s bound to their blood, soul and mana. It’s easier for a bone mage to fix someone’s bones than to break them as one works towards restoring something to their original form, while the other seeks to unbalance something. It’s like water, mana follows the path of least resistance unless forced to through external methods. Bone magic can also be used for healing, not as naturally as blood magic, but blood magic works better for simple injuries whereas bone magic tends to work better for more extensive injuries such as broken bones or missing limbs. The easiest bones to manipulate are your own, though there is a cost to that, it can be dangerous if you’re starting out and if you’re not undead, there can be a lot of pain involved too.”

“So if they’re already dead then you can corpse explosion them and have their bones go off as a shrapnel bomb?” The child asked, his pitch rising in excitement.

“Indeed you can, something to look forward to.” The child’s enthusiasm for violence was endearing him to me, just a little. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Haruto Ukumazi sensei.”

“I look forward to seeing your efforts on the battlefield Haruto. I shall demonstrate some different techniques for how to use bone magic in a fight. First is to strengthen your bones in your fist.” I made a fist pointing it at the students. It faintly glowed with the amount of mana I pumped into it. “This is useful for close quarter combat if you’re so inclined or if you get rushed at during a fight. You can also use it for any other bone in your body such as your feet or your knees for kicks and strikes.”

I could tell they were trying to emulate the method on their own fists. Haruto was the first to succeed. “Like this?” He asked, his hand faintly glowing with mana.

“Correct.” I waited a few more minutes while I waited for the others to get to Haruto’s level. As a child, he was more open to new ideas and he was lucky to have a high affinity for bone magic as well. He’d make an excellent bone mage, presuming he survived the upcoming battle.

I fielded several other questions about whether their methods were correct or not and they received nods or a shake of their head accordingly before we moved onto the next technique.

“Second method is bone shaping, you can use a bone weapon like this.” I raised my bone staff to demonstrate and I threw it up in the air one handed and caught it with a reverse grip and flipped it so that the skull was at the bottom and used Bone Shaping. “This way you can turn a blunt weapon into a bladed weapon” The ridges of the Skeleton General’s spines blurred and formed into a hardened sharpened edge.

“That’s so cool!” Haruto exclaimed.

“Ideally you should try and avoid close combat and focus on combining both types of spells into one, so you can throw a sharpened, strengthened piece of bone at your enemies from a distance either using strength or spell power. Which gets you bone spear.” I threw the bladed staff up at the ceiling. “You should make sure not to use your primary weapon because once thrown into a battlefield, it becomes harder to reclaim, hence you should make a habit of collecting bones to shape and strengthen as often as you can for practice and ammunition.

Midriff girl “I’m not doing that.”

I simply shrugged. I didn’t really care whether they followed my advice or not, they’d serve a purpose one way or another. “Be that as it may, you can also use other forms of magic to enhance your bone magic. For example air magic is a nice complement to bone magic, at least for enhancing the effectiveness of the bone spear and the like.” I tugged the impromptu bone spear out of the ceiling using a bit of air magic and it promptly returned to my hand.

I’d have to make sure to get some earth mages to reinforce the building, I sent through a message through the Lich Network to have that dealt with while I continued teaching.

“How do we use air magic?” Haruto asked.

“That’s a subject for another time, for the moment, you'll just have to use bone spears like a javelin, using your own muscles. I think it’s time to work on defensive bone magic, so that you'll stay alive longer. I’ll have you work on your reinforcing your own bones for the next hour, then we’ll break for lunch, followed by practical assessments of your skills so far and see what areas we can improve upon.”

Elsewhere other Liches were running classes on other forms of magic. In blood magic classes, the students learned how to use blood as a weapon, shield or medium for healing.

In body magic classes, they learned how to use their magic to amplify their body’s natural abilities, making them faster, stronger or more durable.

In Mind magic classes, they learned how to invade a weaker mind in order to plant mental suggestions or outright control their actions if the power disparity was in their favour. They also learned the Telepathy spell, allowing for silent short and long distance telepathic communication.

In soul classes they learned how to empower their own souls to protect themselves from soul damage and how to drain energy and power from another’s.

In other classes, they learned to summon and or control the five elements, earth, fire, wind, water and lightning. Nothing too thrilling there, I favoured earth and ice magic, though I had no particular affinity for either. I found it useful for mass control spells, sinking an enemy army into a quagmire or subjecting them to frost novas to slow their movement and leach warmth from their living bodies.

The Unaffiliated were undergoing self defence classes under the tutelage of death knights to help prepare them for future training.

I was eager to see how my latest students would fare in their practical assessments.