This Much Is Just the First Steps
After a brief commotion, Candy Star returned to her seat, and the real lesson began.
"Through our last session, you should all have a rough understanding of mana by now. Yes?"
Pop.
"But it seems quite a few of you still haven't gotten the feel for it, so let me give you a little more help."
A surge of blue mana rose into the air.
Mana, floating above my palm. A fluid, slime-like blob of it wandered this way and that around my hand, almost like a living thing.
"This is pure mana — no manipulation, no special shape given to it. All I did was draw the mana resting inside my body out into the open."
"Hmm..."
"Let's start with this much. Including the four of you at the front, I'd like every student here to give it a try. Naturally, that means no skills."
The four students who had witnessed pure mana firsthand each began summoning their own.
It looked deceptively easy, so everyone threw themselves at it without hesitation, and yet...
Fss.
"Why won't it work!"
"...?"
"How is this..."
They thrust their hands up and churned their mana furiously, but all that circled them were faint dregs of it — failure after failure, over and over. With a skill, any of them would have succeeded on the spot; calling mana without one was the sticking point.
In a way, the result was only natural. Unlike the academy students, who had started from nothing, the players had grown so accustomed to the automation called skills that they'd never learned to use mana directly.
In short, they had spent their entire careers pressing shortcut keys that contained none of the process whatsoever. Knowing the method apart from the shortcut didn't mean you could simply switch over and use it.
To succeed at this, you had to be someone who had broken entirely free of that existing mold. Someone like, for instance...
"I did it!"
...someone who wasn't human.
Leo had called forth a mana of four blended colors, its various attributes orbiting in harmony above her tiny palm.
"Well done. At this level, I'd say you can move straight on to the fundamentals."
"Hehe."
Perhaps a little embarrassed, Leo scratched her head and bounced the four-colored mana this way and that like a bouncy ball. For someone using it for the very first time, her control already outstripped the academy students who had drilled through multiple stages of training.
"Ugh... me too! I'm gonna do it too!"
Red energy flickered restlessly in the now-desperate Yena's hands. But it only swirled in the faint shape of smoke — nowhere near the defined form Leo had managed.
Leo snickered.
Whump.
"There it is."
"No way!"
"...What exactly is 'no way' about it?"
The second to succeed was Beriad, a mass of jet-black mana hovering at his fingertips. I hadn't expected much from that one, but he'd pulled it off faster than anticipated.
And a decent size, too, at that.
"Is this enough?"
"For the fundamentals stage, that's more than sufficient."
"......"
Something in the shadows flinched, just barely. Beriad withdrew his mana and leaned back in his chair.
That left only Candy Star and Yena, both sinking into self-loathing. They were straining with everything they had, but success refused to come easily.
Come to think of it, she had dropped the transformation right away out of embarrassment. The mana volume and depth she'd had in that form were considerable — if she actually wanted to, she could surely succeed at any moment.
"Candy Star?"
"...I'm concentrating. Don't talk to me."
"I think you'd do just fine if you transformed."
"Oh, come on."
Utterly exasperated, Candy Star turned her whole body away. That pathetic hunched back was a little hard to watch.
"Hooah... hoo..."
Beside her sat Yena, dripping sweat. She was pushing herself so hard I could practically see her stamina bar draining in real time.
"You don't have to push that hard, you know."
"I can't... be last...!"
"Forcing it isn't how it comes out."
Both of them had iron pride, apparently — by this point they could easily have given up, yet neither stopped summoning their mana. Even Leo had paused her own mana work and was simply watching.
And with everyone looking on, the winner turned out to be...
"GOT IT!!"
"AAAAAGH!!!"
"Congratulations, Candy Star."
Last place, once again: Yena.
Mana usage falls broadly into two categories. The first is Manifestation — using mana itself to produce phenomena akin to magic. The other is Transfer — imbuing mana into a weapon or object and wielding it through that vessel.
"And the first thing we'll be learning is Transfer. You all saw it once last session, remember?"
"Yes~"
Blowing wind into a stick, then transferring that wind out of the stick and into a book — that was the very first fundamental the academy's students learned.
"The reason I had you draw out your mana was so we could learn Transfer with it. Overusing your mana wears down your stamina and health far too quickly."
The penalties attached to mana were already well documented within DeoEn. The most famous examples included Mana Backflow, the side effect of excessive skill use, and Mana Constitution, a condition unique to certain players in the mage classes.
Beyond those, a whole host of other side effects existed — mana rampage, mana corruption, and so on. No matter how strong a ranker might be, if their expenditure grew extreme compared to their recovery, they simply couldn't hold out.
The solution, as ever, was to draw out a fixed amount of mana and use only that. Do that, and no additional mana drain occurs, letting you maintain your condition for a very long time.
Yena, with a mountain of potions stacked beside her, was taking meticulous notes with even more burning determination than before — and Leo had ordered a spirit to ghostwrite for her.
So spirits were errand-runners, huh.
The remaining two, though not exactly engrossed, were at least a little more focused than they had been earlier. I pulled out a wooden stick like before — a stick with no effects and no abilities whatsoever. Holding it in my right hand, I drew a sphere of mana with my left and pressed it against the stick, transferring it straight over.
Before I knew it, a stick glowing blue sat in my hand.
Unlike the chat's reaction, the four at the front didn't look particularly shocked or worried. They'd probably practiced plenty of this on their own already — either through skills, or by layering a little mana control on top of a skill.
Sure enough, after an average of two or three attempts, all four had little trouble drawing out a sphere of magic and turning their sticks into glowing light.
Ah, Yena seemed to be having a genuinely rough time of it. I gave a nod to Yena, who had managed to succeed at last, and tossed a word of praise her way.
"Hah... this much is... just the basics, right...?"
Chugging potions by the gulp, Yena threw up a thumbs-up.
...Would she actually hold out until the end of class, though?
At any rate, since this was all material from the previous session, the result was a given. If these people couldn't even manage this much, they never would have been invited here in the first place.
"Everything up to here has been the first steps."
And then, one step further.
The light of the stick connected with a stone concentration gem that had been sitting beneath the table. The gray sphere trembled as it linked with the stick, drank in all of its energy in one go, and reclaimed its blue glow.
All four faces changed at once.
"That brings the second period to an end. Anyone who can manage this much is free to leave the room right now."