[Arthur Leywin POV]
Today was already the morning after my sister's birthday, it was time for us to finally open the presents with her, and even give her my present. When I woke up, only me, Elijah and Sylvie were in the room, Luz seemed to have woken up early. I went to the bathroom, did all my personal hygiene, and when I came back to get my clothes, my big friend looked like he was showing signs that he was alive, with him going back and forth on the bed, muttering something while, slowly and comically, fall out of his bed from moving so much.
"Aaah?!?" It was the first thing out of his mouth this morning.
"Good morning, dreaming about the women who were only keeping an eye on the kids yesterday?" I said with a few laughs, I remembered well how much Elijah tried to flirt with women, but it turned out that everyone JUST saw him as a cute kid with glasses.
"Grrrr" He growled as he adjusted his glasses and headed into the bathroom after I left.
After getting all dressed up, I went downstairs, already seeing my sister sitting on one of the sofas, totally excited to be able to open the presents. She seemed to be already in an incredible mood, after all I noticed that she was wearing the dress that Luz gave her yesterday, she was really cute in it.
"Good morning... Shall we have breakfast first or open presents?" I said still yawning a few times as I approached my parents.
"Good morning, and you can go have your breakfast, Ellie woke up very early and already had hers." My mother said, with dark circles under her eyes, apparently my sister was so excited that she barely let her sleep.
"No! At least I want her to open my present right away, before I go get something to eat." I said, going to the bag with the gifts and looking around, until I find a small box with an opening.
I open it, revealing two other small boxes, I hand one to Ellie and one to my mother. "This is so special, I got two, one is for you, little sister, and the other is for mom."
"Wow! It's so pretty!" My sister was ecstatic at the precious nacklace inside her little box, though she probably would never know how much it was worth.
"Th-This is gorgeous..." My mother's reaction was actually even stronger than Ellie's, her eyes locked on the light pink gem embedded on the white gold chain.
"Keep it in at all times, okay?" I said directly to my sister, but I also looked at my mother so that she would catch my drift.
"Where in the world did you get something like this, Son?" My father was with a little hancover from the party yesterday, but he was fully functional.
"I'm sure you met Mr.Gideon in the party, right? I and Luz are going to start working for him while he teaches us various things about magic. He gave us this as a token of apprenticeship, but Luz said that would be better just for me to give it to you two." It wasn't a lie, since I was going to work with him at some projects, but it wasn't exactly the full truth either.
"Well, I'll have to greet him one more time and thank him for taking care of you, ma boys! I can't believe you are going to attend Xyrus Academy soon! You're going to kick some butt out there, right? OW!" My mom ended up slapping my dad on the back of the head for the last thing he said.
"Thanks for the gifts, we'll use them all the time, won't we Ellie?" she said hugging my sister tight.
"Yes! They're even matching!" My sister said hugging our mother tightly.
"Yo... I see you liked the necklaces." my brother finally appeared in the room we were in, he was holding a mug he had taken for himself, and how did I know that? The mug had a piece of paper stuck to it saying 'Runes, Spells and Fights, this guy is Me'.
"Where have you been?" I asked, curious.
"No big deal... I did my hygiene and stuff, but actually I couldn't sleep... I stayed with Lilia until the last possible moment.. Seriously, even while she sleeps, she doesn't let go of me at all... I have to ask Aunt Tabitha later if this is some family addiction she got from her or what..." His voice sounded calm and tired, while there were faint black lines under his eyes.
"Oh my god! I thought you slept and woke up early!!" My mother answered.
"Don't worry... It's only been the fourth day in a row that I haven't slept."
"Fourth day?!?" we all said in amazement.
"What? You all thought the dress was easy to make, before the birthday I was having to do the finishing details at times when I was sure no one would enter my study room...." He said pointing to the dress that Ellie was wearing while taking another sip from the mug he had in his hand.
"And if a little elf can get into a quest and battles four days without sleep, so can I." He muttered that while looking at what was in his mug, I swear I've heard this somewhere, but decided to ignore it after seeing that no one noticed him saying that but me.
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After a while, my daily routine had become very repetitive. As expected, my birthday was quite simple compared to Ellie's. The Twin Horns couldn't participate, being deep inside the Beast Gladers, on an intense exploration mission, but according to their reports in the Guild Hall, they were fine.
The birthday had as participants some people close to the Leywin family and Helstea family, in addition to Gideon who wanted to enjoy and keep in touch with me about some news. Even though the birthday itself was mine, Luz also celebrated with me, because my parents found him a few days before my fourth birthday.
Luz and I had become very close to Gideon over the last few months, and while he was quite eccentric, it was noticeable that he was also someone who was sincere and very trustworthy. With our conversations always boiled down to magical abilities, some of my brother's rune discoveries, and the steamship project I gave him. Apparently The Council approved the idea, and they were building it with the help of incredible craftsmen of all three races.
The trainings were getting a lot more rigid, I was focusing more on the elements of Wind and Earth, because they represent only 20% of my entire move set, it was important that I keep all my elemental training in balance. Elijah seemed to have become even better at controlling earth and metal than before, with his attacks being weaker compared to those intense and uncontrollable situations he had before.
My dad was doing really well, even though he hadn't left the solid orange stage, the assimilation process with Luz being the instructor was seeming to be much more effective than the training we did with Virion, so effective that Luz said there was a chance that by the time we will be in the middle of our first year at Xyrus Academy, it was likely that our father would have already assimilated the Lava Serpent's Beast Will. Luz still found ways to train and try to put into practice the study he was doing, I myself saw some of his experiences, and the one that worked best left me with my jaw dropped.
It was a spell that used 5 runes, according to his research, they were arranged in a specific order and were respectively given by the names of "Unknown", "Black Mana", "Wind-Fire", "Null", "Mobility", this magic allowed Luz to throw a small sphere of gray fire in any direction and, after snapping his fingers, ended up switching places with the sphere. That was really impressive, it was a kind of teleport in which the user had to throw the "teleport device" to be activated. He was still thinking of a name, something like "Blink" or "Wisp Me".
Time continued to pass, the days became more relaxed and out of the routine with the weekly meetings that Ellie had with her friends at home, and my mother always received visits from some women of noble family. I liked to hear more voices around the house, it was good to hear something besides familiar voices, day after day.
What made me the happiest was the big day ahead, it would be a day full of great things not only for me, but for all of Dicathen. It was the day that the ship project that Gideon and I had planned, Dicatheous, would finally be inaugurated and would be sailing on its way to the new continent, coincidentally, it was also the day we started school, which made it so I couldn't see the full grandeur of the event from the artifacts in City Square.
The day before, Elijah and I were looking forward to everything we were going to have, Luz said he was also looking forward to seeing what the school was like, but his face lied, with him being pretty expressionless.
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[Luz Leywin POV]
Today was the day that we would finally start our classes at Xyrus Academy, I had woken up very early, as usual, and was already packing my backpacks. I had 3 backpacks, one with school items and some personal items that were recommended, one with copies of all my rune research, and the last backpack had been modified by me to contain various sweet foods well packaged without giving them a chance to be rotten.
It was complicated, but at the last minute I learned a spell using runes that allowed the food inside that backpack to never expire, it seemed to be a magic involving time, which I wasn't surprised, since Arthur has Absolute Zero, and even so I could move within his magic without any problem. But I still didn't know how to do any other magic involving that rune.
"Isn't it overkill for you to use this type of magic only to bring these foods to the first day of school?" Sylvia asked in my mind.
"There's a chance that I'll meet Claire on my first day... I have to be prepared, I feel like if I don't have the cupcakes she likes, I'm going to get attacked" I mentally spoke to her and took a long breath.
With all my backpacks packed, I went to my study room closet and pulled out some posters I'd made using thick pieces of fabric and quick-drying paint. I stuffed all these things inside my dimensional ring and walked over to the table, where I had laid out the school uniform we'd received in advance.
My school uniform consisted of a white shirt, having a sort of blazer with the main colors being a slightly gray blue and a vibrant yellow, there was a school emblem in the left chest area. From the waist down, I was dressed in dark blue long pants, they were marked with a lighter line of blue, on each side of the pants, I found them a little loose, so I put on a brown belt to hold it tight. My shoes were boots the same color as the pants, with a line in the front area that matched the lines on the side of the pants.
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I stood in front of the mirror on the door of one of my closets, striking some poses. "The outfit didn't look too bad on me, it even matched my eyes." I thought, as I was leaving my study room, with everything already well prepared.
I went down to the first floor, it felt like I had woken up before Elijah and Arthur. On the other hand, the others were already awake so they could wish us luck before we left. I managed to see people from my foster family and walked over, giving my Old Man a firm highfive, a big hug from my mom and poked my little sister in the cheek.
"Hmm, Luz, can you go with Ellie to wake up your brother?" Alice asked while giving me a light pat, and we both agreed with the idea.
I took Eleanor with me to the room, and I could already hear my friends' voices, but apparently, she didn't, because she was already opening the door with a good kick.
"Brother! Are you awake?" when she opened it, we saw a scene of Elijah already in uniform while Arthur was still getting dressed, being only with his pants, Art's wet hair, together with Sylvie having an annoyed expression, said that obviously he had just left the shower with his bond.
"Yo! Ellie, what do you think of my muscles?" Arthur didn't seem to waste any time and kept striking poses, showing off, I gave a weak laugh while Ellie stared at our brother deadpan.
"Anyway, mom has already prepared breakfast, let's go downstairs!" I warned as I walked out of the front door, along with Ellie.
It took a few minutes for them to come down with us, I was impressed that Elijah was the only one of us who looked more mature wearing that uniform, I mean Art and I are pretty mature normally so I don't think there's any way we could look more grown up at the moment.
We all started to have our breakfast, of course, with some light conversation during. It was pretty weird to me that the things I thought about Art and Elijah were completely opposite of reality. We initially had a deal that Arthur and I would be Battle Mages while the Four-Eyes would be a Scholar Mage. However, the two of them decided to switch courses with each other.
The excuses they had were that Art wanted to be a Battle Mage for the sake of training, but after finding out that the other course has some classes involving practical mana usage, he decided to become a Scholar Mage. Elijah, on the other hand, decided to change courses when he realized that there was a chance he would attract attention and be very popular with the girls if he was a Battle Mage, I tried to stop him and warn him that it was better for him to seek recognition for his great intelligence, but it seems that everything I said on this subject went in one ear and out the other without ever passing through his thoughts. It didn't even seem like he considered me the "God of love tactics" a few months ago.
I thought of Lilia as I was finishing my breakfast, she had also entered the school as a Battle Mage, something that made Tabitha and Vincent angry. But she ended up proving to be the best girl in her class, that didn't impress me, after all I was the one who made her have potent mana veins, the most important thing for a conjurer. Even so, I was proud of her.
During those conversations we were having, one caught my attention, my mother was worried that Arthur or I would cause trouble by hurting any other student, since as far as we know, we were both the only non-nobles to enter the school. In fact, I was considered an elven noble due to my title, but my mother continued to disregard this, as all the students there were noble by birth and not by merit.
With everyone finished eating, we said our goodbyes to everyone present, with Arthur finally telling Alice and Eleanor what the pendants he gave them do, by the way, their pendants weren't set up yet, so Art had to do a little pierce one finger of each and put the blood on the pink gems. Now they would definitely be safe if something happened to them at a time when no one was around to help.
We headed towards a carriage that was waiting for us, apparently mother Alice had packed a bag for each of us, where we would have several personal items and extra clothes, in case we could leave the school and visit the surroundings.
"It's pretty insane when I think we're going to be living in the school... I think it's been over 100 worlds since I've had the experience of living in a school dormitory..." I thought, as I saw Elijah excitedly pointing to the sky, as if silently declaring to the world that we would now officially be students at the most prestigious school on the continent.
I soon got into the carriage, along with my two colleagues, while Sylvie jumped towards us and sat on Art's lap. It didn't take long to arrive at the grandiose Xyrus Academy, as it is in the same city, but honestly, the time it took from entering the property to arriving at the entrance gate was considerable. I knew that Xyrus was a huge flying city, but for the only school in the city to be that big, it really was a place for the elite. I still don't know how that detail escaped me the last time I was here, maybe it was because Curtis and I were always focused on talking.
I looked to the side, noticing the other carriages nearby, all of which were very luxurious and were pulled by low-ranked mana beasts. I mean, the carriage we were in was also very nice and comfortable, but if you compare it to all the others, we were clearly the "most commoners" there.
"Master Luz, Master Arthur, Master Elijah. We have arrived." Said the driver as he opened the door for us to get out.
"Hmmm, this is all an insane show-off... And... The smell of the air in here doesn't look fancy." Elijah was saying, with him being the first out of the carriage.
"Idiot, don't say something like that, it's not because we're in a prestigious place that the air is cleaner, we're still in the same city." Arthur said, being the second out of the carriage, with Sylvie on top of his head.
"Well, I also expected cleaner air here, like Director Goodsky is a wind mage, so I figured there was a huge wind shield surrounding and filtering the air all over the place." I said playfully as I was the last one out of the carriage. I'd made that comment because neither Art nor Elijah knew I'd been here before with Curtis.
Now we were walking on a shiny marble path, there were some students next to us, I looked back, seeing that our luggage was being delivered to a school official, possibly he had been informed about our names and everything would be delivered to our respective dorm rooms.
"Holy mother of..." Elijah said that, making my attention go back to the front, that's when I finally noticed the big white building in front of us, I had to put my vision all the way up so I could see the whole front part. I honestly didn't remember that place being this big the last time I was here with Claire and Curtis, but maybe it was just my memories teasing me again.
"Guys? Let's go!" I was talking to my two colleagues, who seemed to have been entranced by the grandeur of the place, but at least they woke up from it.
We followed some students who, apparently, were also having their first year, there were some people pointing the way for us newbies. But wow, there were so many people in one place, there was so much conversation going on around us that I felt forced to create a sound barrier around the three of us. I noticed that a few students around us noticed that barrier, and they stared at me confused, but I ignored them.
"Let's find a place to sit, as Lilia warned me earlier by letter, we have to go to an auditorium to be welcomed." I said it calmly, as my companions could hear me calmly within the sound barrier.
As we walked through the auditorium that some older students indicated to us, I could notice the large amount of newbies who were elves and dwarves in the corridors, inside the auditorium itself was no different, I could see several humans, but most of the audience at the moment was of the other two races.
"Wow, I've never seen pure elves before... Actually, this is officially the first year this place has all three races isn't it?" Elijah commented as we took our seats, luckily they were next to each other, so we didn't get lost in the crowd.
Arthur seemed to look around as well, impressed by the number of non-human students there. I, on the other hand, even understood their shock, after all, before, there were only hand-selected representatives of each race, now several different nobles could participate in the school. From the looks of some of them, I could guess that there were some nobles over 13 years old there, possibly because it was the first year of Xyrus Academy fully accepting nobles of all races, there were some newbies who were already in their mid-teens, perhaps they would take adaptive tests, to be placed in classes that corresponded to their grade level.
"Yeah, that must be it, it would be a little embarrassing for someone to be 17 and studying in the first year class of this grand school." Zalgnity commented on what I was thinking.
I decided to look at another place, still studying the environment, and soon I noticed the stage where there was a small podium and a lady approaching it, looking closely, I realized it was Cynthia Goodsky, I barely recognized her, because she wasn't with the big witch hat I saw her wearing the last time I was here. She was also wearing a different uniform than when I saw her in Sis Tess's training room.
"Maybe that was her regular battle outfit, and now she's wearing the most formal uniform she has." I thought as I watched her.
She had her eyes closed at the time, but as soon as they opened, I felt that instantly, she was staring in our direction, as Art and I were next to each other, she could easily look at both of us at the same time, with the help of my essence vision, I knew full well that Arthur was doing the same thing I was, we were staring back at Cynthia. I could see a soft smile on her face.
Other newbies seemed to notice Cynthia's presence there and began to speak even louder, others clapped for her presence. But that soon seemed to end when she put her hand next to her forehead. Everything was pure silence, I could see that several students were still moving their lips, but no voice came out of them, making only Cynthia's voice heard by everyone.
"Sorry for this rude act of mine. But I can't speak too loudly, it's really bad for my throat." the Director said as she slowly coughed and started a speech, her voice was soft, really that of a sweet granny in my opinion.
"I welcome everyone here, the future leaders, scholars and powerfulhouses of Dicathen, to this humble academy. I am Cynthia Goodsky. Please call me Director Goodsky and do not be afraid to say hello when I walk around campus. I am no good with speeches so I stand here before you mages today to say hello and introduce to you the Student Council that repreeents this academy and takes part in making important decisions along with me. Please give them a warm welcome." She waved her raised hand and one by one, members of the council started walking out.
First, we saw two guys walking there, one of them was a pretty boy that made a lot of girls scream as if he was the most elegant one. The other behind him, was a very playful, cherry guy that came out waving at the audience and beaming us a bright smile.
"Look, look! There's Lilia! We need to cheer!" Elijah stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs and Art followed him, yelling her name as well. Her shy and cute demeanor was nowhere to be seen as she walked calmly towards the center of the stage, where she gave small bows in each direction. There was no way she could see us or make out our individual cheers. So I wanted to tease her a little.
I used a sound spell, to make a type of sound channel that only Lilia would hear me, I whistled at her and stood up like Arthur and Elijah did, clapping my hands. Her face got quite red when she noticed me, but it looks like she managed to hold the pose. I chuckled slightly after deactivating my magic, but then I realized that Cynthia was still around and now she was looking at me, with a smirk in her face, this made me blush a little.
"Did she notice? Of course she did, she is considered one of the most experienced mages and has a mastery of sound magic." I thought, hiding my face a little with one hand, but then I stopped.
Behind Lilia, walked out a tall student with long, parted bangs. His face was frozen into what looked like a stern grimace with a sharp gaze that seemed to be looking down on everyone, giving him a rather pompous appearance. While the cheers for him wasn't as loud as it was for the first two guys, he, nonetheless, strode with practiced grace.
Finally, the last member of the Student Council arrived, causing everyone in the audience to fall silent. That silver hair that was impossible to have any equal, seemed to reflect the light of the auditorium giving a serene glow to that person's cream-colored skin, this made several boys around me look silly. She turned to face the audience, her turquoise eyes capturing the heart of every boy there, but I knew very well that her heart already had an owner.
Speaking of which, I looked at my brother, he was looking silly over there analyzing the girl, I mean, his eyes showed complete extreme concentration as if he was organizing his thoughts, but his mouth was also slightly open.
"She's really gained a mature body... But isn't she just thirteen?" I thought, a little confused by that.
She stood between Lilia and that serious boy, showing that she was taller than Lilia, but shorter than the boy. However, if it weren't for the habit of seeing that pose she was striking, I would have thought she was grander than anyone in that place. Taking a deep bow, she came back up while tucking part of her hair behind her pointed ears, it wasn't wrong to say that her face was like a doll's.
"My name is Tessia Eralith, and I am honored to stand here as this academy's Student Council President."