Chapter 5 Part 1 of 2 (Patreon)

Chapter: Day One of Class

The next morning, after Erik and Rugrat splayed out for a few hours of rest, they were eating from their storage rings, telling Storbon about their entry test and their training. Scribe formations recorded everything.

“Here are your schedules.” Storbon passed them both a box.

They opened them.

“Another emblem, shit, should start a collection for these,” Erik muttered, pinning it to his shirt. He checked the papers.

“We said that we were your retainers to get those and get posted outside your classes. You have one that everyone gets, a history of the Ten Realms. The rest are up to you to pick. Classes here are like our Expert classes in Alva.”

“So we can go into whatever class we want, listen to them, ask questions and use the facilities pretty much, just develop on what we have already.”

“Pretty much. There are basic courses on different subjects, but they’re just golems going over the information. Be faster to go to Alva and learn it I’d think.”

“Four hours until we have history.” Erik checked the time against the schedule. “Library?”

“I think I’m going to go to the lecture on smithing in twenty minutes.” Rugrat finished off his toast and washed it down with coffee.

“All right, see you in history then.”

***

The Special Team members were allowed to hang around their quarters and were free to leave, but they weren’t allowed to go anywhere inside the academy, which left the city surrounding the academy for them to discover and wander.

They left Rugrat to enter the smithing lecture hall by himself. It was smaller than he expected with only a handful of people in a room that could fit around a hundred.

Rugrat took out a pad of paper and a pencil, sitting and waiting.

Others glanced over, stealing glances at the school emblem hooked to his shirt then making remarks to their friends or looking away, uninterested in talking to him.

The lecturer walked out onto stage, a young man with a smudge of soot on his cheek, his skin tanned by fire.

“For those of you that don’t know me I am Master Wolff. Pleased to meet you. I am a Star Level smith and this lecture will be about going from Expert to Master smith.” He stretched and leaned on the pulpit.

“When you go from Expert to Master it’s like answering your ‘why’ question, at one point you are a Seventh Realmer and the next you can enter the Ninth. One moment you are an Expert smith, then you make something and become a Master. You can copy something another master has made but this will not increase your overall rank. You need to make something that is original to you. It doesn’t mean it has to be original in the Realms.”

He moved to the board and wrote “Life, Work, and Enjoyment”, circling them to make a Venn-diagram. At the intersection he wrote “master works”.

“Life.” He tapped on the board. “Your life experiences, your roots, these are the things that have changed you, molded you, made you who you are. Work, well that’s what you’re going to do, in this case smithing. Everything that you have learned in your profession from teachers, on your own, everything. Enjoyment. If you do not enjoy your work, if you do not enjoy your life, then it will be hard to do either. You will not be motivated to do more.”

He underlined “master works”.

“To make a master-work you must have a combination of all three. An enjoyment in what you are doing to go further into the subject and dive into the depths of knowledge. The more you enjoy it, the greater you will be inspired and the more you will learn and retain. Your work, well, to break rules you must know what the rules are first. You must have developed techniques to the point where you can manipulate them to your needs. Life, what you have done, what you will do in the future, that changes everything, go back to your roots. You like to draw, then draw out the sword you are working on. Look, you have combined the work, the sword, with your life interest of drawing, and enjoy it.”

He threw the chalk into his storage ring and looked around the room.

“When you find out why you fight, you gain a greater control over yourself. If you find out what you enjoy, why you smith, and why who you are makes you want to smith, then you gain control over these areas.”

A student raised their hand.

“Question?”

“So the answer is inside us?”

“Nearly all of the answers to the important questions are. That said, these three can be out of balance, if they are, then figuring out the foundation they are laid upon will make it easier to see where you are lacking.”

No one else raised their hand and he cleared his throat. “An exercise to think about and look into—examine how you smith, examine how you fight, see how you can combine the two. See the connections within yourself, follow them and test them.”

Rugrat raised his hand. “What if you don’t fight?”

“Well, then you wouldn’t be here. This is a realm for fighters.” The teacher lowered an eyebrow before another person raised a hand. “Yes?”

“What about techniques, if we were able to make items with a different technique could that get us to a master work?”

“Possibly. Many develop their techniques in a moment of epiphany, but it’s what you make with that technique, the merging of ideas, imagination and reality that creates a master work. It is your life and work smashing together.”

Rugrat listened to the other questions. Do they really care about fighters so much that they’re not willing to let crafters into the Ninth Realm? What kind of broken system is that?

***

Students bowed and moved out of the way of David Mueller as he nodded to other teachers and students he knew.

With new students entering the academy it made classes chaotic. Mueller was assigned to general history, the only class that everyone could take without costing them points. To teach the younger generations the truth about the ten realms and the purpose of the Imperium and its supporting associations.

And two of his newest students hadn’t shown up in over a week. Emperors from a first realm sect. Mueller’s wrinkles deepened into a frown. The Sects were annoying at the best of times, a liability and a blade in the dark at the worst in his opinion.

He walked through a common area, hearing a group of friends laughing, heads together, taking in the day’s sun with a collection of books around them.

The corner of his mouth lifted, thinking of easier times. Seems a lifetime ago I was one of them with Mercius and Namia.

His throat tightened as the smile faded. He swallowed, there wouldn’t be another time he would hear Namia make one of her bawdy jokes or Mercius pulling him along, running from the latest trouble he’d gotten himself into, laughing all the way.

Forty years.

“Some marriages don’t last that long.” He slowed down, looking at a familiar classroom door.

A part of him wished he could go back in time, walking through that door, nervous, excited, and determined, the third son of the Mueller family, fourth generation Fighters Association. He’d thought back to when he had just made it through his first fight and going to his own history class. He’d found a seat next to Mercius, who introduced himself, even though the next day they might be opponents. His first friend at the academy introduced him to Namia in their formations class.

They had retained their positions, reaching into the top two thousand of their generation and passing out after their five years of training.

His smile grew bitter as his stomach twisted. Mercius’s and Namia’s faces frozen in shock, fear and pain. The blood, like a stain upon his memory. David pressed his hand to his stomach, a wound long healed, yet he still felt it, even now.

He cleared his mind, trying to calm and clear his thoughts. He forced his feet to move, walking down the hallway.

The classroom was no different from the other lecture halls, but this one was full instead of the few that would attend other classes. A quick scan of the room with his domain told him that nearly everyone was there.

Two men walked into the classroom. Unlike the others who wore their association affiliation alongside their school emblem, these two only had a school emblem.

Two from the sects come to try and get what they can out of us.

“Nice of you to join us… Erik West and Jimmy Rodriguez, I assume?”

“I go with Rugrat instead of Jimmy, sir.”

“I am here to teach history, not figure out your name, Mister Rodriguez. Please take your seats.”

Three more entered the room behind them, filling up the classroom.

“Okay, we were talking about the third Incursion. Once the Ten Realms were unified and secured, the Devourers needed to change their tactics. Depending on their strength they could create tears into the Ten Realms to send their Sworn over vast distances. The stronger they were, the further away they could create the tears. The unification made this impossible, leaving only the Tenth Realm within their reach.

“Can someone tell me what advantages the Elves and Gnomes at this time, remember the Humans had only just joined the Ten Realms, had against the Devourers?” He glanced around the room trying to make his target less obvious. “Erik?”

The man shrugged. “No idea.”

“Have you not looked into the history of the Ten Realms.”

“Thought that was what this class was for.”

David glowered at him, turning his gaze to a lady in the front. “Miss Jung?”

“There are several. The Devourers compete against one another as much as they competed against the Realms to become stronger. While the Imperium could focus on training and building. We had the home advantage, formations to move people across the Realms at a moment’s notice. The mana in the Tenth Realm is so dense that it adversely affects the devourers who only have a limited amount of mana, reducing their overall power.”

“Unless they can get used to it,” David interjected, waving for her to continue.