The Structuring Spells class was definitely not going to be anything like a traditional class.

For one, the class wasn’t even in a room. Instead, there were maybe seventy or eighty of us seated outside, stadium-style benches arranged in a semicircle around a central clearing.

Professor Lasi was teaching this class. He’d been a lecturer for the initial orientation phase of class, and I remembered him assigning homework during the orientation phase that had not had any significance whatsoever in relation to the lectures he’d given.

Now, though, he looked entirely in his element, standing at the center of a stone square large enough to fit a classroom in, arms folded across his chest. The professor looked more imposing, now, his large frame much more suited to a stadium or a battlefield than a lecture hall. He wasn’t alone on the square, a number of wooden dummies positioned behind him.

People were chattering around me, ignoring the professor and making small talk that was spoken more to fill the silence than anything else.

A geyser of flame rose from the center of the stadium, the wind from the explosion reaching us a moment later. It wasn’t a very forceful one, just warm air moving fast enough to whistle in our ears, but it was pretty effective in startling everybody and shutting the stadium up.

“Many of you have your oaths now,” he boomed. “Some of you may think that that is enough. You would be wrong.”

Professor Lasi projected a lot when he spoke, enough that I wondered if there was a sound enhancement spell or something on the square.

He held out his right arm. In his hand, I could see wisps of flame beginning to coalesce, the hints of a ball of flame clear and bright even in the afternoon sun.

“This,” he said, pointing at the still-forming mass of magical energy. “Is raw, unstructured magic power siphoned directly from my oath to Igni. Any one of you could mimic me right now in this.”

The ball continued growing, threads of magic ever so slowly forming into a crackling sphere of flame.

“I want you all to keep in mind that we are under a fair amount of sunlight, which boosts Igni oaths,” Professor Lasi said, “And that I have been training for longer than some of you have been alive.”

After another awkward ten-second silence, the fiery sphere finished forming. Professor Lasi sent it flying, the makeshift fireball soaring in an arc before colliding into a dummy. Flame and force exploded as it landed, enveloping the wood in red fire raging with magical power.

A gasp arose from the students around me. I guess I could understand, if they’d never seen oathholders actually fight before. It was almost painfully obvious that Professor Lasi had been holding back a lot, and the magic wasn’t really all that flashy.

The flames died down, and there was a mess of ash and splinters where once there had been a roughly human-shaped dummy.

“That took me almost half a minute to form,” Professor Lasi said. “Now, this—“

He held out the same arm. A blink of an eye later, a raging miniature sun formed in his palm and he cast it immediately.

The explosion this time was larger, the flames expanding to cover not just the dummy but also half the classroom-sized square the professor stood on. Even I had to whistle at the sheer force of it, powerful enough to ruffle my hair even sitting halfway up the small stadium.

“—is structured magic,” Lasi finished. “Some of you might recognize this as an amplified classic fireball, a structured construct that projects heat and force taken to another level by my oath to Igni.”

As the residual dust and smoke cleared on the scene, I could see that at least three dummies had completely disintegrated, and a couple others had been shattered to pieces.

“I put the same amount of energy and effort into both of those processes,” the professor explained. “But as you can obviously tell, the structured magic was more powerful.

“Now, structured magic is generally weaker than unstructured magic, as a rule. After all, it forces your oath to work in a predetermined way, limiting the maximum amount of power you can put into it, while unstructured magic doesn’t.

“However, where it comes in use is time and efficiency. What a structured spell can execute in a second might take you thirty or more to replicate by fiddling with unstructured magic. A longer structured construct, that lasts a minute? Good luck making something that complex with nothing but raw oath power in less than a day.

“Colloquially, we refer to structured magic as spells. They are easy to learn, but take years of dedicated practice to truly master. Most of you here should be at the very bottom of class one as an oathholder, so you will not be able to maintain much structured magic, but there are still useful spells that you will learn. Today, we will begin with the Ceretian magic missile.”

This class might actually prove to be useful, I thought. The theory was all stuff that I’d touched on before, but my tutors had emphasized maintaining strong control of my unstructured magic before beginning spells, and we’d never quite gotten around to that before everything had gone to shit. Knowing a spell or two would make me a lot more effective as an adventurer.

“Follow me closely,” the professor said. “This missile is an exceptionally basic spell, but mistakes in even the weakest spells have led to the deaths of many an incautious student.

“Over time, the patterns etched in the world that your magic needs to fill will become natural to you. Eventually, you will be able to cast without a single word or motion. First, however, you must learn this the hard way.”

Professor Lasi made a hard slashing gesture with his left hand, from his right shoulder to his left hip, then brought it up sharply, reaching his left shoulder. Where his hand travelled, sparks of orange magic followed. “Picture this pattern exactly. Push your magic into its shape, and then release.”

He shouted a word in oathtongue, and I noted down the syllables in my mind. I was pretty sure it translated roughly to “force”, but my knowledge of the pseudo-language was rusty.

A dull red projectile shot out from Lasi’s hand, trailing magic behind it and exploding into a dummy with a muted thud almost immediately.

“It’s not very strong,” Lasi said, pointing at the slightly-singed but still very intact dummy. “But then again, neither are you. Anything more powerful than this is likely to hurt you.”

I was wondering whether or not there was going to be anything else to the lesson when Lasi called out to us again.

“Everyone out of their seats. We’re going to do a little bit of practical practice.”

All seventy or eighty students were standing on grass now, the stone not large enough to fit all of us. He had ordered us to disperse in a general curve, ensuring that every student had a clear line of sight in which to fire.

“I have a particularly gifted student here with me today to assist with your practice,” Professor Lasi said. “Lukas Noben, if you could.”

I started a little, at that. That was the oathholder I’d met in my last class, wasn’t it? He’d seemed friendly enough, and he had said that he had close connections with a noble…

If he was powerful enough for even the professor to notice, then maybe he was someone that was worth looking into more.

From the other end of the line, Noben stepped forward, releasing the hand of the boy next to him. Was that the noble he’d spoken of earlier?

“Hello everyone,” he said, waving. “I’ll be making your targets. Please do not move too suddenly.”

He started casting, chanting almost inaudibly in the oathtongue. As he started to draw a complex pattern in the air, the ground around us started rumbling. Shouts and gasps were met with a firm order to stop moving from the professor, and the class slowly quieted.

The earth a couple meters in front of each person cracked, dirt falling into at least seventy slowly forming divots in the ground.

I could see the tip of what looked to be a head emerging from each hole, and I was finally able to pinpoint what he was doing.

Construct creation was a fairly standard spell under the Ceretian school of magic, but it was also only really usable even on a small scale if an oathholder was at least class three. Noben, who might’ve been a Tsau oathholder given his manipulation of the earth, was maintaining seventy. I watched as the makeshift dummies rose from the ground, and I kicked “connecting with Noben” a couple of notches higher on my priority list. Even if they weren’t going to be animated, this was still an incredibly impressive feat for a recent graduate, let alone a first-year.

“Each of these should be good to take a number of magic missiles,” Noben said, addressing Lasi. “They’ll last an hour or so.”

“Thank you,” the professor said. “Now! I demonstrated how to cast the magic missile already, but if you failed to follow it then the instructions are present in A Beginning Oathholder’s Spellbook, which is required reading for this class and should be with you right now.”

I studied the dummy in front of me. Noben had all but confirmed that he wasn’t going to put in the extra effort of animating them, so it was just a chunk of human-shaped earth, albeit reinforced some through magic.

“You have twenty minutes to break your target,” Professor Lasi said. “Ask me if you need help or if you run out of magic power. Come find me when you finish. That is all.”

With that, he stepped aside and waited.

For a few moments, nobody did anything, the entire class not wanting to be the first one to make an attempt and potentially humiliating themselves in the process.

Someone far in the distance shouted in the oathtongue and fired a dull yellow beam into their target, knocking it back a little.

Most of the rest of the class took that as their cue, and they followed suit in beginning their spells. There were more people who failed to produce a spell the first time than successes, but there were a decent number of the latter. Different colored beams emitted from each person that succeeded, most of them leaving an impact on the target but not doing much damage. A few managed to miss completely.

One bright yellow beam, intense enough that it left spots in my eyes even when I viewed it from an angle, tore into a dummy, punching a hole wider than both my fists put together through the center of the construct. A scattering of applause came from around the oathholder that had fired it.

I picked the spellbook out of my bag, noting that a number of people around me were doing the same.

Ceretian Magic Missile (difficulty class: 1)

In order to cast this spell, follow the diagram above and speak the indicated chant. Visualize a tear in reality, one that you will fill with your oath. Next, visualize your target. This spell will almost always hit the target you designate. The particular effects of this spell are highly variant, depending primarily on the focus of the god you swear an oath to, but it will always produce force in direct proportion to the amount of magic power you input.

Depending primarily on the focus of my god? Inome’s focus was uniquely destruction-oriented, as Jasmine had pointed out the night before our last job had gone to shit, which meant that any spell I used with it would probably be a lot more lethal than it should be.

Oh well. Maybe I’d be finished with this activity earlier, then.

I set the spellbook down and breathed in deeply, tuning out the sounds of oathholders casting magic missiles and the impacts of those spells around me.

Left hand from the right shoulder to the left hip, then up. I imagined my hand carving a hole through reality as I dragged it, replacing it with the nothingness of my god’s domain. I started pulling magic in, and…

I sighed. I’d instinctually begun to gather a roiling black mass of unstructured magic, ready to be placed into a weapon or thrown. I let it dissipate.

Again. I forced myself to suppress instincts honed by years of practice, picturing my unstructured magic filling a mold rather than creating something unique and malleable. I stemmed the flow as much as I could, minimizing the magic power I put into the spell. It wouldn’t do to accidentally kill someone here.

“This is so much easier than I thought it’d be,” the boy to my right said. I turned towards him, tempted to throw an insult his way.

“You think so?” I asked. “It’s a little uninstinctive to me.”

He seemed a little taken aback that I’d spoken. I felt the tiniest bit offended at that. I didn’t come off as that shy, did I?

“Uh, yeah,” he replied. “I tried unstructured magic before, and it was so slow. This feels more natural.”

“Huh. That’s interesting. To each their own, I guess?”

We turned aside, resuming our respective efforts.

Forming the spell felt inherently wrong, like I was trespassing somewhere that I really shouldn’t be. Going against years of training wasn’t easy, and completing the spell felt like fitting a round peg in a square hole. Doable, yes— I hadn’t undergone mental training since I was born to not be able to change my perception of things—but it felt like I was unnecessarily craning my head to see something. It was irritating, to say the least.

But I got the job done, a faded black pattern forming in the air in front of me. I enunciated the spell’s command phrase in the oathtongue, the words alien on my tongue.

The bolt I fired was dull and black, and it made it halfway to the target before arcing downward into the dirt, sending a small plume of dirt flying where it landed.

The boy I’d had a quick exchange with earlier finished his spell, loosing a sparkling blue beam that carved through the figure like a kick through a child’s sandcastle. He left the line almost before their spell connected, off to speak with the professor.

He waved at me. I couldn’t tell if he was being disrespectful or just acknowledging me, but either way I nodded back.

I could see a few others finishing already. Not a majority by a long shot, but maybe five or ten people had already reduced their targets to dirt and residual magic, and it looked like Lasi was instructing them in another spell as they arrived.

I breathed in, out. I didn’t have to be the best person in the class, but it’d be embarrassing if I ended up on the tail end of this class when I’d talked down the difficulty of this school so much.

I’d missed the step where we visualized the target. Right.

Again. I focused again, trying to ignore the deep awkwardness I felt at forcing my magic into a rigid construct. Again, the pull back on the power, again the command phrase. This time, I pictured the target in front of me, visualized my spell making contact.

The bolt was just as dull as before, my magic’s trademark darker-than-black attribute barely visible. It made contact, this time, at the center of mass of the dummy.

The impact it made didn’t even warrant being called an explosion. A handful of dirt fell off the construct, a shallow fist-sized divot forming.

Alright. I knew my magic was generally all-or-nothing. In my experience, if the amount of magic I used couldn’t absolutely bring something to ruin—an enchanted suit of armor, for instance, or maybe even a construct of earth and mud— my magic would do a little damage and not much more.

Fine then. The same procedure, with a little more power. I felt the magic power within me dip a little as I fired, though not nearly to the exhaustive extent that I felt when I had drawn on unstructured magic.

I finished the casting procedure again, and it was a little easier this time. It was still irritating, and I really didn’t want to do this too much, but I was getting the hang of it.

The same result. I sighed. Doing this incremental power increase would eventually get me to my goal, but I didn’t want to bother.

The student to the left of me started casting, their off-white missiles making not much more impact than the dud I’d fired. They fired spell after spell, no care paid at all to their oath reserves, which had to be draining rapidly.

Their dummy slowly fell apart under the bombardment of magic, each individual spell no more powerful than a hard punch but the combined power of ten or fifteen of them in a row overwhelming the reinforced earth.

“That,” the student— a girl, by the sounds of it— gasped, panting with effort. “Took a lot more than it should have.”

I had to be at least a little impressed with the stamina she had to fire so many spells off in such quick succession without passing out.

“You got it in the end,” I told her. “That’s what matters, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, and she took a moment to catch her breath before speaking again. “Looks like— looks like your spells aren’t hitting super hard either. Maybe you can try this approach too?”

“I’ll consider it,” I lied. “Good luck with the next part.”

“Thank you,” she said, recollecting herself as she walked off.

Those five to ten people by Professor Lasi were fifteen now, and the number of people joining was slowly increasing. The first of them had already begun casting the next spell, a translucent circle of force flickering into existence in front of one student. The Ceretian shield spell.

Alright. In the grand scheme of things, this didn’t matter, but I still did have some semblance of self-esteem to uphold.

One more time. The same process, no less awkward than it was before but this time I did not hold back anything on the magic power I poured into the spell, dumping in about the same amount I would use for an unstructured pseudo-spell of this size. Unfortunately, I had to admit, the magic did flow faster when it was filling a defined mold like this. It came surprisingly easily, and I accidentally poured more magic in than I’d intended to, the threads of magic running through our world bending to my will quicker than I was used to.

The magic missile blazed with darkness, this time, the area around it discoloring temporarily as the spell stole the light itself from the air.

The spell slammed into the target, and I could tell immediately that I had put in too much magic for something this small.

With its collision, the target simply fell apart, the magic holding it together failing. The chunk of earth, no longer supported by the spell, dissolved into the void effect emanating from the missile.

When the magic fizzled out and dissipated, the ground around what had formerly been the construct was smooth and dead, grass gray and lifeless and healthy dirt desiccating into dust.

I could feel the energy that that spell had taken out of me, noticeably better than when I used unstructured magic but still not insignificant.

Around me, a couple of people were chattering about the effects of the spells, but mine seemed to garner no special notice when other oathholders had set the areas around their spells on fire, froze them, or in one particularly interesting case broken gravity, dirt floating in the air where the force of the missile had sent it flying.

Whatever. I was done with this, and I could go off to the next lesson.

With any luck, this one would be much less of a problem.