The Ouija Board and the Chicken Feed Dance
When the first period ended, the next class began.
Class A had four short two-hour sessions scheduled for the day, and the second one was Spirit Magic.
"With fighting spirit! Let's go in with fighting spirit today toooo!"
The name of this man bellowing at the top of his lungs in the middle of the classroom with a booming voice was Umbra Warframe.
His peculiarity was that his body looked faint and blurry compared to everyone else's — and his legs, in fact, had vanished entirely like a ghost's, leaving him floating in midair.
Apparently, he'd been so obsessed with Spirit Transformation magic, constantly crossing back and forth between the material world and the spirit realm, that he'd ended up like this.
On his face sat an ultra-realistic wolf mask.
So realistic, in fact, that rumors circulated among the students — that it was his actual face, that Umbra was half werewolf.
The Spirit Magic that Umbra taught was the study of soul-entities called Spirits. Everyone had expected the class to be quiet, delicate, and meticulous. They could not have been more wrong.
"Not enough guts! Your minds have rotted away! Why is everyone already deciding they can't do it? Come on! Raise those arms!"
Umbra was a hot-blooded professor. For all his floppy, ghostly frame, he brimmed with strength and energy.
Simon would be concentrating, trying his hardest to sense a Spirit, only to be jolted awake by Umbra's bombshell of a voice — this had happened more times than he could count.
At one point, a student asked,
"Professor! No matter what I do, I can't feel the Spirit. What should I do?"
Umbra's reply:
"Feel it! Don't think about whether it's working — feel it! Just feel it, unconditionally! You're still lacking effort! Pour in all your strength and heart! Empty your energy into it!"
...It was not particularly helpful advice.
But what Umbra said wasn't entirely wrong either. Sensing a Spirit wasn't a problem that could be solved through strength, knowledge, or technique.
The Spirit Sense that resonated with souls differed from person to person, and whether one could perceive Spirits with even a faint sensitivity was simply a matter of individual constitution.
And wherever talent was involved, Simon was never far behind.
'...Why can't I feel it?'
Except in Spirit Magic. There, he was hopeless.
Simon was hard at work spinning an occult tool called a Ouija board with the students seated around the round table.
"I think it's my turn to chant the incantation this time?"
Jamie Victoria said in a deflated voice. Even she — the honorary class president of Class A, outstanding in every single subject — had yet to sense a Spirit.
The foundation of Spirit Magic was the Spirit. Unless you could feel one, no lesson meant anything.
So Umbra had split the class into two teams.
The first team followed Umbra's instruction and learned to wield Spirits — the training team.
The second was the preparation team. They hadn't yet sensed a Spirit, so for the entire class period, they did nothing but repeat activity after activity designed to make them feel one.
Spinning a Ouija board all period, wielding occult tools and dancing bizarre dances to perform rituals summoning souls, or climbing into coffins to meditate like corpses (napping or dozing off, of course, earned you a scolding) — they simply repeated these strange behaviors over and over.
"No guts!"
Sometimes, after setting the training team loose on their exercises, Umbra would come over personally to check on the preparation team.
"More fighting spirit!"
Five students had gathered their hands on the planchette to spin the Ouija board when Umbra grabbed the handle with his enormous hand.
"Grip it harder! Like this! Like this! Spin it with everything you've got, with all your heart!"
"Yes, sir!"
He was so strong that spinning it alone, he overpowered the combined strength of five teenage students.
"Your voice is too quiet!"
"Yes, sir!!"
Jamie Victoria squeezed her eyes shut and began chanting the summoning incantation at the top of her lungs.
Umbra nodded in satisfaction and his gaze moved on.
"No, you there! What do you think you're doing!"
This time his eyes landed on Camibarez, who was dancing the ritual dance, sweat pouring down her face.
She flinched in alarm.
"S-sorry, Professor!"
"Lift those legs higher! Up, up! That's it! The ritual to summon souls is no joke! Make those movements bigger!"
"Yessir!"
As she swung her knees up and down, performing a dance of supreme strangeness, tiny tears welled at the corners of her eyes. She was drenched in sweat from head to toe.
Honestly, it was not a dance any girl should be caught doing.
It wasn't even a dignified swaying — her head shook wildly, her shoulders swung back and forth, and her arms coiled into cobra shapes, whipping forward and back. Nobody could quite understand how that was supposed to summon souls.
The students had already come up with nicknames for it: the chicken feed dance, the squid courtship dance.
'P-poor Cami...'
Simon was watching her with a pitying expression when—
"Right! Teaching assistants! Time to rotate!"
"Yes!"
The TAs approached Simon's group, still spinning the Ouija board.
"Leave everything where it is and stand up. We're moving on to the ritual dance."
Their turn had come at last.
Sighing inwardly, Simon took his place at the back of the lecture hall, on the sheet spread across the floor — the very spot where Camibarez had been dancing.
Even this had its positions: the students had to stand facing one another, a short distance apart. And standing directly in front of Simon was, of all people, Jamie Victoria.
"I trust you've all memorized the dance by now. We'll begin."
The TAs started playing strange instruments adorned with skulls.
Screeee~ an odd pipe sound rang out.
'Just empty your mind.'
Frankly, it was not a dance anyone could perform with a sound mind. Simon blanked out his thoughts and moved his body exactly as he'd been taught, stepping through the choreography.
His leg swung forward, then his knee shot up until it nearly touched his chest. His limbs rippled in waves, his torso thrust out, and he writhed head to toe like a mollusk.
Students who cracked their eyes open to sneak a look at Umbra's reaction took one glance at Simon's passionate dancing and let out hollow laughs.
'What is with that guy... he's even earnest about this?'
'Anything done with the body, he's good at.'
Simon, thinking of nothing at all, danced with body and mind as one.
Essentially a state of self-forgetting unity.
Watching him, even Umbra chuckled in satisfaction.
"Excellent! Splendid! It doesn't matter if you can't feel a Spirit — with that kind of tenacity and effort, you'll go far!"
Umbra was thinking he should take Simon to the Goliath Death 50th Anniversary event scheduled for the weekend and put him to work as a dance-for-spirits hire. The boy really was astonishingly good at dancing.
'...I think I'm being praised, but I feel absolutely no joy.'
Simon danced on diligently, then cracked an eye open.
Class president Jamie Victoria was performing the chicken feed dance with clumsy, floppy gestures. The instant their eyes met, her face flared scarlet with embarrassment.
"P-please, for the love of everything, stop looking at me..."
At her plea, Simon quickly turned his head away.
It wasn't as if the students had no complaints about being made to do this. But none dared protest to Umbra directly, so they timidly vented to the TAs instead.
Whenever they did, the TAs' responses were all roughly the same.
They politely danced around the sentiment of, 'If you don't like it, feel free to graduate to the training team yourselves.'
Truthfully, the preparation team was only there because their own skills were lacking, so they had no real room to complain.
What was strangest of all, though, was this: every single class, one or two students would be doing the chicken feed dance or spinning the Ouija board, actually sense a Spirit mid-performance, and throw their hand up in triumph.
"Congratulations. You'll be joining the training team."
The students who finally escaped this embarrassment-hell for the training team celebrated like they owned the world.
By this point, a rumor had spread among the students: the occult rituals weren't effective so much as students simply gritted their teeth and pushed through out of sheer shame, and ended up sensing Spirits.
And so the grueling Spirit Magic class came to an end.
'Uuughh...'
Having completed the full preparation team circuit, Simon was walking down the corridor, limbs swaying like a mollusk's.
"Hey, are you seriously okay?"
Meilin asked, astonished. Simon raised a wobbling arm and gestured that he was fine.
"What did you training team folks learn?"
"Attack magic, obviously."
Dick, walking on his left, said it with an arm folded behind his head. Hard to believe, but even Dick had managed to sense a Spirit on the very first day.
"Because of the Duel Evaluations, every professor is skipping theory and teaching only attack spells you can use right away. The other classes are probably the same."
"Hmm, what was our next class again?"
Dick grinned.
"Hemomancy."
The very class that had been postponed again and again, Silaje's mission schedule and personal circumstances colliding every time.
Today was Class A's first session.
The Hemomancy class took place in a building called the Magic Bullet Shooting Training Hall.
The professor was the infamous Silaje Bisavar — the very middle-aged professor who had carried Simon aboard the Underworld Whale and brought him to Kizen.
His face was still pale as a patient battling illness, his cheeks hollow. By now, white hair outnumbered the black, and both his hands were yellowed.
Simon thought his condition had worsened since the first time they'd met.
"Hk-hm. Hemomancy is the dark magic that employs blood as its medium."
Seven students, Simon among them, stood at the firing line. Two hundred meters ahead of them, target sheets were posted.
"The world at large believes this to be a discipline that merely reproduces the secret arts of vampires and the Bloodclan — but hah! That is not the truth. Since the substance most compatible with Jet-Black is the caster's own blood, it boasts a long and storied history."
The students at the firing line readied their aim, while the rest took their seats and listened to Silaje's lecture.
"Jet-Black, and the blood of the one who wields it, are a match in every sense of the word. A necromancer can 'artificially' blend Jet-Black with blood to produce a wide variety of magical reactions."
Silaje spread both hands. From one, a droplet formed of Jet-Black; from the other, blood trickled forth.
The moment the blood and the Jet-Black met in midair, they reacted violently, exploding outward and splattering everywhere at tremendous speed.
The students gasped in admiration.
"Hk-hm! Setting aside my position as professor of Hemomancy, I can say this with conviction: a necromancer who refuses to use 'blood' is wasting his own power. It has the drawback of consuming the caster's own stamina, yes — but Hemomancy can become the fastest and most powerful weapon in a necromancer's arsenal."
Under the TAs' direction, the students at the firing line curled one hand and extended only the right index finger, aiming at the targets.
Each of them wore a device like a ring-mounted rig on their arm. When the TAs activated it, a magic circle unfolded in front of the student's fingertip — and the circle flushed red with blood.
This was the Blood Bullet, the fundamental technique of Hemomancy. The rig, simply put, was the Hemomancy version of a 'magic circle calibrator.'
"Hah. Class A's schedule was delayed considerably, as today is your first session. In today's class, we will determine what properties your blood possesses and what aid it can offer you — and finally, we will practice deploying the Blood Bullet in the field."
Delayed schedule or not, just how many things were they doing at once?
Simon looked out at the target two hundred meters away. It wasn't just one sheet — behind it, ten more stood in a line.
Silaje turned his head, hands clasped behind his back.
"Now then. Live practice."