Chapter 21: Visiting the office

Felix Sythias’ POV:

I sprinted down the path at a full gallop. I wasn’t going to make it on time. Class had run a little late—only a few minutes—and now I was going to be late to Fundamental Magic.

I’d been shuffling impatiently while the class ran late and Professor Marchie had noticed and had asked what was wrong. When I told her, she’d asked one of the other students to fly ahead to let my next professor know I was going to be late and they shouldn’t write me up. She would’ve gone herself, but she had to stay back to answer questions.

I didn’t want a write-up right on the first day. Not for something so minor, at least. If you had too many write-ups within a certain time-frame, you were sentenced to help out on the squirrel farm, or any other similarly meaningless waste of time. I much preferred to spend my time doing homework or hanging out with Alex rather than scooping squirrel turds all day long.

When I finally reached the school, I stopped and sat down for a moment to catch my breath; I’d been running near my top speed for almost fifteen minutes. A quick glance at the clocks showed I was only three minutes late. Good, I wouldn’t have missed much.

With effort, I stood back up and rushed inside to the classroom. There were only a few stragglers like me left in the hallways. They too were rushing to make it to class in time. I hoped their professors were forgiving. When I got to the classroom, though, I was very surprised to find it empty.

I checked the door to see if I was actually in the right place. I was, so I walked inside to see if they were maybe around the corner and out of sight for some reason. They weren’t. Weird.

All that was inside the classroom, aside from the obvious things like desks and chairs, was a small stack of thick folders and a board with text on it. In short, it said that the professor was unavailable because of an emergency, that there wasn’t a replacement, and each student should take one folder for self-study until the professor was back, which was between tomorrow and next month.

I sighed. Just great. I was really looking forward to the class too. I knew very little about fundamental magic, but I’d hoped I could use it to help replace the magic the System would’ve gotten me. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as convenient or easy, but I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. I’d have to make do with my normal instinctive elemental magic for now.

I walked up to the table with the folders and grabbed one. It was surprisingly heavy, and when I opened it, I saw it had a small extra textbook, some papers, and a few small metal plates. Well, that explained the weight. But what would I be needing metal plates for?

I closed the folder and placed it in a side pocket of the saddle. I then wrote the message on the board down in my notebook, just in case I wanted to read it back later, and went back outside.

I stood in the entrance, wondering what I was going to do now. I had an extra ninety minutes I wasn’t sure what to do with. I supposed I could start with the Fundamental Magic homework I’d been given, but I didn’t really feel like it. If I’d wanted to self-study rather than follow a class, I would have done just that.

Maybe I could clean up my Aerial Combat notes. They were just ramblings and random explanations listed on the pages without rhyme or reason. I wanted to consolidate them into something I could actually study.

Thinking about Aerial Combat reminded me of something I said to Marchie during the class: I hadn’t seen dad in a while. More than half a week, actually. It was weird. I both missed him and hadn’t really noticed he was gone. I missed his jokes and the interesting stories told during dinner. I missed his laugh and even his bad yodeling. But mostly, I just missed spending time with him. It wasn’t like I saw him very often at home since he was always busy with something, usually work, but he still made time to have dinner together every day, and to spend some time together during the weekend.

Alex had filled that gap pretty well. We had eaten together pretty much every evening, but it just wasn’t the same.

I kind of wanted to go visit dad, now. I knew he was at work, and that the Administration building wasn’t too far on foot. Not if I ran, anyway. He probably wouldn’t mind me visiting, and would tell me if he didn’t have time. Yeah, I would go visit him.

Having made the decision, I tightened the straps of my saddle and pouch so they wouldn’t shift around too much while I galloped—as they had done on my way here—and set off to the Administration building.

As I ran over the paths, I considered talking to dad about Alex, despite my reservations. He probably wouldn’t understand entirely, but he was great with people—he had to be given his position—and might still be able to offer some advice. Except… he’d probably ask if I even knew Alex was gay, and he had too high a level for me to lie to him. It wasn’t my secret to tell—not without permission—even if dad wouldn’t care.

When I got to a bridge, I slowed down and stopped at the edge. Looking straight down still scared me, so I didn’t do that. Looking down at an angle was fine, though. Strange how that worked. My newfound fear of falling hadn’t lessened any, but I’d learned to deal with it better. Which was good, since crossing one of these bridges wasn’t so much a choice as it was a fact of life on campus.

Without Alex, or even Tiki, here, it was much more challenging to cross. Alex was very good at distracting me from the fact there was a several kilometer drop with nothing to catch me but empty winds as I plummeted towards—I shook to clear my head. It was fine. The bridge was very strong, and there was little to no wind right now, so it wouldn’t sway much. I imagined Alex standing next to me, smiling reassuringly, and stepped onto the bridge. And then I took another step, and another. One step after another, I crossed the bridge and was on the other side in no time at all.

I let out a deep breath and gave myself a moment to calm down before I continued on, each bridge being slightly easier than the last.

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The Administration building was as imposing as ever, but a lot busier than usual. Though I supposed this was the new usual now. I made my way through the crowd and once I was inside, entered through an employee-only door. The employees knew me well enough and didn’t try to stop me.

I made my way to dad’s office and the little sign next to the door didn’t say he was in a meeting, so I knocked. He called me inside a few moments later.

He was busy with paperwork, like always. It flew about the room in a chaotic frenzy, and I had to duck a few times to avoid a hit. That was unusual. Dad never hit someone unless he wanted to, and now it almost happened twice by accident. It didn’t bode well.

I sat down in the bean-bag chair and dad looked up.

“Felix?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“I missed you and wanted to come visit. I’m not bothering you, am I? You look very busy.”

He looked around his desk, then back at me with a smile. “A bit, but it’s fine. I needed a break, anyway. Oh! And I wanted to talk to you, actually, so it’s great you came—saves me some time, too. I may have found a lead on the System issue!”

I shot up from my seat. “You have?!”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

He chuckled and motioned me to sit back down. “I have. The archivists found a reference to a small village in the Jostium empire having had a case of an entire generation not having Systems. There was little other information in the scrolls. Not where, or when, or even the name of the village,” he said. He must have seen the look on my face, because he continued, “It’s not much to go on, I know. That's why I will go to the empire and search their archives myself. My hope is that they have better records of the event.”

“How long will you be gone?”

He sighed. “About a month—wait a moment, let me explain,” he said, stopping me before I could protest. “Someone leaked the information about your current state and everything we’ve found so far, so they knew how badly I needed the information.”

I felt betrayed. Everyone who knew was a friend of dad’s, and in some cases, practically family. Why would they leak the information? What could they possibly think to gain?

“Who?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“We don’t know yet. I’ll personally deal with them once we know who it was,” he said. There was fire in his eyes. Literally.

“In any case, they knew, and they were smart about it, too. They’re not accepting money. No, they want me to clear out their highest level bounties, instead. So I’m guessing about a month, maybe a little longer,” he said. He gestured to the surrounding paperwork. “That's why I’m so busy right now. I’m trying to clear as much of the backlog as possible before I go.”

That was a shitty deal. A very shitty deal. It was times like this I wished dad was more flexible with the rules so he could threaten to cut them off from the Academy. It was also a very long time… but they might have a solution, so maybe it was worth it? If there hadn’t been one, I imagined information of this event would be a lot more widespread, in any case.

“Where’s the Jostium empire, anyway?” I asked.

There were a lot of different worlds, and while not every single one was hospitable, enough were that the list of countries was well over two hundred entries long. It didn’t help that some of the worlds were big. Like the one we were in right now—the Boundless Forest. It wasn’t called boundless for nothing. It stretched on for tens of thousands of kilometers, most of it still unexplored. No one had even reached the other side of the world yet; that’s how big it was.

“It’s in the Land of Eternal Dusk. The shadow elf part, not the human part.”

I cringed. There weren’t that many countries ruled by shadow elves.

“Is the Jostium empire ruled by the Conad family, by any chance?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“It is yeah. How’d you know?”

“Fuck.”

If I reported Alfred now, he would get punished, and he would let his parents know. He had without a doubt a communication enchantment capable of sending them a message. And with what little Tiki had said about their parents, combined with what his entitled behavior told me about them, I was pretty sure they’d side with him and shut down dad’s request for access to their archives.

“Language!” he scolded me, and I flinched. “Now tell me, what’s wrong?”

I told him about Alfred and all the awful stuff he said, and the mess that happened with professor Kang because of it. Dad didn’t look pleased. I foresaw a rough time ahead for that man. When I told him my worries about reporting Alfred, dad sighed.

“You’re overreacting, Felix,” he said, “I doubt the empress is so unreasonable as to allow her son to get in the way like that. I don’t think you quite understand just how incredibly unbalanced this deal is. She’s asking me to solve their biggest threats just to look through a few books. But she knows I’m desperate for answers. Right now, she’s probably very disappointed with herself that she didn’t ask for more.”

“Is that really worth the risk?” I asked, “I don’t think counting on people being reasonable has ever worked out well for anyone.”

He shook his head. “You’ve got a point, but I’m not counting on her being reasonable. I’m counting on her being greedy. See this building we’re in?” He gestured to the walls. “I could have had one build for myself with the kind of money and resources these bounties should’ve gotten me. Like I said, this deal lies in their favor by a landslide. She’d have to be mad if she let something get in the way. Especially something that insignificant.”

That was… a ludicrous amount of money. I tried imagining a pile of coins that big, but literally couldn’t. This building was the administrative headquarters of a worlds-spanning organization, and it was big. And not only that, it was also made of rare and expensive materials, plus the building was filled with permanent enchantments. You couldn’t walk a meter without running into one. It was expensive. Very expensive.

I started to get an idea of just how ridiculous this deal was and felt guilty for making dad through it. I knew he did it for me, and that he chose to do it himself, but that was a lot of resources he was missing out on, as well as the time he would be wasting.

“Hey, now, don’t look at me like that. I’m choosing to go, so don’t feel guilty about it. Besides, I’m not missing out on anything. There’s a good reason there were so many of these bounties; they weren’t willing to pay nearly enough, so no member thought it was worth the effort. So I’m not missing out, since there’s not really anything to miss out on in the first place.”

That helped, but I still felt a little guilty. How could I not? He would still be putting a massive extra workload on his shoulder by being gone for a month.

He rubbed his chin in thought. “As for the boy himself… You should report him, anyway. That kind of behavior is unacceptable. I’ll take care of Kang myself, though feel free to report him as well.”

I sighed. “I already promised I wouldn’t.”

He frowned. “Right. This isn’t like with Jake, right? You need to remember that it’s okay to say no and set boundaries. It’s okay to do something you don’t like to support a friend, but you can’t just say yes to everything. If they can’t handle that, they probably weren’t your friends to begin with. Don’t let things get as far as they did with Jake. I don’t want to see you in tears again, if I can help it.”

Things hadn’t gone well with Jake. I’d thought he was a friend and was afraid to lose him. So I’d agreed with whatever he wanted to do, despite knowing he was only being nice because his father told him to. Over the few months we spent time together, I spent a lot of money on him and did a lot of things I didn’t actually like doing, such as shopping. That wasn’t what finally broke me out of the habit—no, the deliberate obliviousness—though. But I didn’t want to think about that now; the memory was still too raw, even though it’d been over two years already.

“It’s not,” I said, now unsure.

Was it like that now, too? I said yes to Alex a lot, didn’t I? I let him move in when I didn’t want him to… except that wasn’t really true. I did want him to move in—I just didn’t want to admit I wanted that. I shook my head to clear the thoughts. It just wasn’t the same.

But with Tiki, though… I only had the one big example, but did I say yes because I didn’t want to risk the friendship? I didn’t know. It was damaged either way by the breach of trust, so it rationally shouldn’t have been. But emotions were hardly famous for being rational.

“Alright, if you say so,” dad said. “Just be careful, please. Now tell me, how was your day? Did you enjoy the classes? Aside from math, obviously.”

I told him about my classes, and that Fundamental Magic was canceled. All in all, today was fine. Math sucked and mundane physics was boring, but helping Alex with the problems had been fun and I’d learned a lot in Aerial Combat.

Dad then explained to me why my Fundamental Magic professor was gone. Apparently, one of the branch locations of the academy had had a critical failure in an important enchantment meant for sewage treatment. It needed replacement as soon as possible, and the professor, being a professional enchanter outside of teaching, was the only one around who could repair such ancient magics. It made me wonder why they didn’t just replace it.

We talked about various things that happened last week for half an hour, but then dad had to continue working. I had originally planned to ask him to fly me back, but with my new knowledge of the deal with the Jostium empire, I decided to just walk back to the dorms. Dad needed the time to work on that backlog. The bridges still were a challenge, but the image of Alex smiling reassuringly helped me get past them with relative ease.

When I got back to the dorms, I noticed him sitting outside in the garden, scribbling in a notebook beneath a tree with a concentrated look on his face. There were a lot of other students around, but Alex stood out with his dark scales, long tail, and the fact people didn’t sit too close to him. I stood still for a moment and just stared at him; the sun hit him in just the right way, and he looked great with the glittering scales. While I was still uncertain how I felt about him, I couldn’t deny the fact that I found him attractive. Intrusive thoughts flashed through my mind and I shook my head to clear them out before I continued walking towards him.

With all the students around, it was very noisy and I wondered why he didn’t just go back to our room to study, especially since we now had the table I ‘borrowed’ from outside. Our room had great sound dampening enchantments. so it would’ve been a lot more peaceful there.

I froze mid-step and frowned at the thought. When had it become our room?