The rest of the fights were nowhere near as interesting as hers, although they did start to become more creative. For Helianna, it ended all too soon and the claim that they would rarely train like this put a damper on her spirits. But it gave her something to look forward to, something she was sorely lacking at this point in time.

Apparently, in her fight with Oblo, she completely snapped his arm, a feat she never thought she’d be able to accomplish. Despite the accomplishment, she couldn’t feel proud of herself as she hadn’t meant to hurt him that hard despite how much he aggravated her. She was also worried that he’d be all the more determined to make her life hell. Contrary to her expectations however, little changed in his behavior to her, almost as if it never happened. When she eventually confronted him about it, he simply brushed her off saying it was ‘just a single spar’. Despite his words, he seemed unhappy she brought it up so she let it go.

The rest of her first year was fairly awful. Her earlier assessment that cooking was the best option continued to prove true as she hated jobs, struggled to accomplish them, or both. Unfortunately, they rarely repeated jobs so most of her time was spent looking forward to the future to avoid paying attention to her current situation. Oblo didn’t change much, but the short kinuze girl who followed him around, who she learned was named Mera, got so much worse, now sometimes seeking Helianna without him. As such, her progress with her own magic was non-existent.

She was able to confirm that she had sovereignty magic, a magic that supposedly only nobles had. While she didn’t exactly live in a city, her town was certainly not rural and there’s no way she should have had this magic even if she wasn’t a null. By now, she was terrified of someone learning her secret, being more careful than ever. If someone knew that a commoner null had sovereignty magic, she had no idea what would happen to her, and her imagination led her down dark paths every single time.

Her first year of academy finally finished with a severe lack of fanfare. Due to the student's school years starting whenever they arrived, every student was on a different schedule, so she moved on by herself. A lack of celebration had no influence on the large amount of change brought on by the start of her second year.

The constant random timing of her wake-up calls was gone, finally allowing her to get reliable sleep. Of all things that changed, that was what mattered to her the most. The now consistent schedule also allowed her to utilize her mornings before class to work on her magic. Her rotation would still come around where she had to wake the first years, but she always knew it was coming and it was less than once a week.

The other change that happened, albeit more slowly, was the push to decide on a job. She was required to narrow it down to three choices and would then work as a pseudo-apprentice for a month in each. After the three months, she would have to decide on a job. The first choice for her was obvious, cooking. She absolutely loved it and she was fairly decent at it. Her second choice wasn’t particularly hard either, but not as ironclad as cooking. She decided to try baking. It wasn’t nearly as fun for her, but it was ok and she wasn’t bad.

Her third choice however, was much more difficult. After spending some time narrowing down her possibilities, she still couldn’t decide from a small list of jobs that were acceptable. Knowing that it didn’t really matter as she was definitely going to cook or bake, she picked one at random. Logistics. Shortly after she made her decision, she started her month-long training for cooking.

It was very nostalgic working in a kitchen for that long. It had barely been over a year since she’d been helping her father in the kitchen, but it felt much longer. Memories continually popped up, sometimes distracting her from her work, but she never created any disasters like catching the kitchen on fire. Those showed up in baking. She had much less experience baking, so when she tried to improvise like she often did in cooking, it didn’t always end well. Working in logistics though… that was boring. She was fairly good at it, but continually found herself so bored that she was starting to hate it, reinforcing her belief that she would be cooking.

Near the end of her third month, something unexpected happened. A member of the staff that she’d never seen before appeared during their morning training to observe. That day, their instructor took them back into the storeroom to work on their ‘environmental fighting’ as he called it. The person observing them never spoke, several times disappearing from her view before reappearing at a seemingly random location to observe someone or something closer.

He gave her a very eerie feeling that she couldn’t quite identify and made her incredibly uncomfortable, especially when he would disappear. After the first few times it happened, she started paying more attention to him and noticed that he was never actually using magic to disappear. He took advantage of momentary distractions and line of sight to move in ways she wouldn’t expect or pay attention to. The eeriness ebbed and she started to become fascinated by it. What he was doing seemed so simple, and she struggled to believe that these simple actions caused him to disappear as it had seemed earlier.

Her own spar came and she was paired with one of the other students she hadn’t interacted with much. He was a decent fighter, but nobody had beaten her in environmental fighting and today was no different. She knew he’d normally beat her but he wasn’t nearly as good in the cluttered room and the spar became one-sided very quickly. It ended quickly, Helianna using the sleeve of a uniform she’d picked up to pin and strangle him. As he started to tap out, she felt something strange that she couldn’t identify. She glanced up and looked around, not noticing the boy kinuze trying to tap out underneath her. Then she noticed it.

The strange staff member was missing. The second she came to the realization, she felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck and whirled around. She grabbed the nearest thing she could, a breakable board, off the stack next to her and held it up threateningly as she turned on the man who’d appeared behind her. He narrowed his eyes before speaking for the first time.

“Could be worse.” He brushed past her and walked out of the room as she tracked him with the board.

“What was that about?” she asked the instructor. He simply shook his head in response and started the next spar, which was the last one for today’s practice. She went to lunch and the rest of the day passed without incident, but the strange encounter plagued her thoughts throughout the day.

The next morning, she was woken up to knocking on her door. After barely over a minute of scrambling, she opened the door looking vaguely presentable. Greeting her was the same man who had been watching the previous day.

“Come with me,” he ordered.

“May I have just a couple minutes to get ready?”

“No.” She sighed, but exited her room to follow him.

He took her to the elevator and brought her to a floor she’d never seen before. In front of her was a very simple and generic hallway which didn’t seem like it belonged in The Academy.

“I’m sorry sir, but why am I here?”

“You have a rare opportunity at another job.”

“And what job is that?”

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

“Ask me again in a month.”

With that curt and overly dramatic reply, her last few days training as a logistician ended as her new training began. She questioned what she was doing many times and throughout the month, she couldn’t figure out what the job was.

During the morning, she participated in the standard martial training, but after lunch, she received some kind of specialized version. Unlike what they normally taught, which was incredibly ruthless, much of what she was learning focused on subduing or incapacitating the opponent instead of killing them. Of course, being in her first and second year of training, she never learned advanced techniques in either form. Regardless, she constantly heard explanations of what she would be learning in the future based off of the basics she was learning now.

The lessons afterwards were what confused her so badly. He taught her how to use make-up better, of all things. It quickly became apparent that he knew how to use it far better than her or anyone she knew, which was already strange to her. But it only got stranger. If she wasn’t also being trained in martial arts, she would have thought he was preparing her to be a performance artist. When she inevitably struggled in applying her make-up the way he directed her to, he picked up the slack and made her look like a completely different person. Pretty quickly, her lessons evolved and after putting on make-up, he started teaching her how to act.

Every day that they did this, she would take a different role. One day, she would be a noble, followed by a merchant the next. Each time, he would give her scathing critiques on her performance. Things got even more confusing when he started teaching her alchemy. She couldn’t figure out the direction he was taking with alchemy as the basics were incredibly difficult for her to grasp and she was moving very slowly. She wondered how this could possibly combine into a singular job. She had a few suspicions and she had little confidence wasn’t sure she liked them.

Near the end of the month, her work started becoming more physical. He started teaching her how to swim, how to climb, and how to track, frequently taking her out into the city, and sometimes even outside the city to do so. Additionally, more specialized combat started replacing her other martial training, and he started teaching her incredibly different techniques. Many of them couldn’t even be classified as combat, focused on ending a fight before it really started. It came to a head at the end of the moment when he gave her a test.

After providing her a standard ithrax uniform and getting her make-up to make her look like an older ithrax, he took her outside the town surrounding the academy.

“Get back into the castle in whatever way you can. You have twenty-four hours.” Without giving her a chance to respond, he immediately dashed off and disappeared. Her suspicions were being confirmed and she was starting to dread learning what this job could be.

Her first thought was just to walk through the front door. If she could show them she was a null, that would make it easy, but she immediately ruled that out. She knew that until they were done training, the nulls never left the academy, at least normally, so getting them to do anything other than arrest her wouldn’t happen. Purposely getting arrested then crossed her mind. If they took her into the castle to detain her, then it would technically count, but she knew she couldn’t rely on that. It would make more sense to detain her within the city itself and even if it worked, she doubted she would get full marks.

Her next thought was to climb the wall. She knew there would undoubtedly be magic helping to monitor the walls, but as a null, it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t register. With that thought in mind, she immediately started walking around the city while remaining far enough away that it wouldn’t be too obvious and suspicious. Once she was sure that none of the gates were in view, she approached and started climbing. To say it didn’t go well was an understatement. They had done a bit of climbing in the past few weeks, but she had just started and this wall was a lot smoother than what she’d been training on. After a particularly nasty fall when she got pretty high, She had to stop.

Darkness was approaching and she knew that being outside the walls at night was risky. The wards around the walls would probably keep away any predators, but she didn’t want to risk waking up to a bite through her neck. She thought of trying to sneak through the gate, but quickly shut that down as she knew she’d be caught. After giving herself time to rest, she eventually tried climbing again, albeit much slower. The uneven light from dusk did not help her see in any way, but the extra caution combined with her previous attempts seemed to help somehow. After a few more tries, she found herself atop the wall. Fortunately, getting down was much easier as she just had to walk around the wall until she found some stairs.

Despite being tired, she decided she’d check out the inner wall and try to figure out how to get in. It’s not like she had a place to sleep anyways. It took her longer than expected to get to the center, the darkness making it harder to navigate. Regardless, it was still the middle of the night when she got to the wall and started analyzing it. Supposedly, this wall had tremendous power due to the endless runes covering the entire thing. It was a little over 20 feet tall and with each rune written small enough to pass for plain writing, she didn’t want to imagine how long it took to make.

She had been told that it glowed for most people, with the hue constantly shifting between each of the different colors of magic. Being a null, runes sometimes had strange effects or didn’t work on her, this shifting color being a perfect example that she couldn’t see.

Its first defense was its power over the mind. As people got closer to it, they would find themselves compelled to move away. For those that could resist, their own gravity would shift, pushing them away from the wall like a magnet. To compound this issue, the amount of distance the person would have to travel to get to the wall would also be much longer than should be physically possible. If a person somehow managed to get to the wall, it would somehow grow impossibly tall, growing as they neared it, making it impossible to scale.

While all this is happening, their surroundings would flash between light and dark, as well as hot and cold, causing pain and disorientation. This effect would become both faster and stronger as they approached the waking, eventually making a possibly deadly combination. Fortunately, she was a null, and none of this applied to her.

She simply walked up to the wall and put her hand on it. Pretty much immediately, she could tell that there was no chance she could climb it on her own. While far from smooth due to the runes, there was nothing in terms of handholds. She turned away to find something to help her climb it, it was only about twenty feet after all, when she ran into a problem. Standing in front of her was a group of ithrax, a clearly older group that was well trained. Her mind instantly raced, trying to figure out how they knew she was here. She wasn’t aware of any runes that affected nulls, so it couldn’t have been the wall. But before she could go down a rabbit hole, she tried to come up with the best way out of the situation. After a few seconds of thinking, she surrendered, not wanting to instigate a fight or lead a chase through the city.

If they were surprised by her easy surrender, they didn’t show it and quickly apprehended her. To her own surprise, they didn’t take her into one of the jails in the general city, but took her within the academy walls, a decision that she felt was rather stupid. If someone was trying to get into the wall, why bring them in yourself even if you are putting them in a cell? Regardless of her silent thoughts, she found herself in a cell within the academy and held there. Finding herself alone in her cell, she took the opportunity to sleep. The next morning, she was awoken by loud clanging on the bars holding her in. Clearing the fog from her eyes, she found the same man that had left her outside the walls.

“You got arrested.”

“I did.” Clearly expecting more of a response, he gave her a deadpan look. “I got in though, did I not?”

“You did. Considering the way you take advantage of your surroundings when fighting, I had hoped you’d be more creative but it seems it doesn’t translate outside of the fight for you. Your methods left a lot to be desired, but that can be taught. Come, I have another test for you.”

He opened the door and walked off without waiting for her. She quickly caught up and he led her into the elevator, where he led her down to a floor she didn’t know existed. She quickly noticed that they were going underground, prompting her to ask him a question.

“Where are we going?” she asked. He didn’t respond, instead staring at the elevator door. She knew that he liked to make her uncomfortable so she didn’t outwardly react, but it still made her nervous. When the door opened and they exited, the elevator immediately went back up, making her feel trapped. He led her towards a room further in the back and when he opened the door, she stared in shock. Sitting in front of her was a man, tied up, with several weapons and deadly objects surrounding him. Her instructor spoke up, startling her out of her trance.

“This is your final test. You have endless options for your method, but there is only one requirement for you to pass. Kill him.”