"Fuck it, I give up."

In a moment of desperation, Fen dropped all the attempts at controlling the fires on his hand. Unwilling to bother with anything in this world anymore, he simply dropped to the back, instantly hurting his buttocks the moment they faced off against the combined mass of the entire world.

"Keep going. You can't improve your control without trying hard!"

Sitting on a nearby bench, Mark took another, long sip from the bottle, only for his face to twist in the grimace of annoyance. Pulling the piece of glass away from his mouth, the middle-aged man turned it around, only to see the last drop of the see-through liquid slowly trickle down the corking part before falling down on the grass.

'Talented my ass…'

Back when Stiel claimed that control was one thing that didn't correspond to one's innate talent, Fen thought that reaching the absolute top of the world might pose some minor challenge. When the young man saw how some of the students, Keisha included, managed to finish the training exercise in one instant, he thought that he wouldn't face any major troubles doing the same.

As regretful as it was, the reality was often disappointing.

Not during the lesson, not while he was going back to the archarity after the lessons concluded, not even after spending hours within the garden behind his new home trying to achieve it. No matter how much Fen tried, he was simply incapable of wrestling the control of his own damned flame from the influence of the natural forces!

"Eh…"

Ignoring his previous sentence, Fen once again gathered his thoughts before expelling them from his mind altogether. If he wanted to grow stronger and become independent from both the school and the archarity, he had to at least learn the basics of the control, otherwise, he would be forever stuck on the initiation stage!

Surprisingly enough, forming the core itself didn't pose any challenge for him. Even despite Stiel claiming that his talent appeared to be on the far end of the scale in terms of potential while oscillating around the lowest types of the talent in terms of endurance, just by focusing himself for a moment Fen could feel his fires gathering somewhere near his heart as if every beat of this important organ of his was designed to work as a pump fueling any arcanist spell that he would attempt to form.

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'Maybe that's what he meant by the endurance?'

Coming back with his thoughts to his teacher's explanation about the problems with his bloodline, Fen once again tried to finish the exercise.

Create a fire on top of your finger. That was simple. Just by thinking about them appearing, the flame would obediently exert itself from under his skin and explode right on top of his finger.

Limit it to the point where it looks like a candle's flame. That step was easy as well. Just by slowly limiting the amount of fire that could escape from the confines of his body, the raging inferno above his wrist would slowly subsidize, shortening into the desired length and width.

Make the fire sharp like an arrow's top and completely motionless.

This is where all of Fen's trouble's started. At first, the young man thought that it was due to his heartbeat constantly providing his fire with more energy due to the early creation of the core. Yet, even after diffusing his core back into his bloodline, the problem didn't disappear!

No matter what Fen tried, no matter how hard he pressured himself, no matter how relaxed he was, nothing seemed to allow him to keep his fire from wavering on the wind!

"Aren't you supposed to help me a bit?"

Deriving this conclusion from how Mark reacted to Nadia nagging him to keep an eye of the young man, it was clear that his saviour had some sort of obligations to him. The old Fen would feel too shameless to ask for any help from his saviour, but the new one couldn't help but connect the dots.

With how he was supposed to pay back an immense sum that the archarity had to invest into his education after he would finish it, it only makes sense that this archarity would do its best to help him succeed!

Once one would add all the other events that took place before Fen's enrolment, then the situation would become even more clear! Yet, despite all of that, despite Fen being a damned apostle, Mark couldn't be bothered to give him even a hint of advice!

"I'm telling you once again. Control is not something that I can help you with. Rather than that, with my talent being so much weaker than yours, even if I were to tell you what worked for me, it would only limit your own growth in the long turn!"

With a flick of his hand, Mark somehow created another bottle filled with transparent liquid out of nowhere, not wasting any time before opening it. Just this alone was enough for Fen to realise that he picked this garden for the young man's practice not because it was comfortable or relatively safe, but because he had to have a stash with alcohol hidden somewhere inside the ever-present bushes!

"Can't be helped then, I guess."

With this moment of extreme frustration passing, Fen once again attempted to focus, only for Nadia to break his immersion the very next moment.

"Fen! Come here! A girl came with a visit."

As sudden and unexpected as this announcement was, the look of distress and anger on Nadia's face was the thing that attracted Fen's attention.

"What happened?"

Being as disoriented as the young man was when his immersion was suddenly broken, he was too slow to hold back his tongue. Yet, it was the reaction to this question that made him truly worried.

"Your arcanist partner is a damned priest apprentice and you didn't think it was something we should know about?!"