Authors Note: I have a lot of big paragraphs here because that is just how I write, but the length is about RRL standard (more than 1500 words).

I want to do some larger releases for this section though, if I can, and longer chapters take me a lot more time to write. So I'm not going to update for a few days, but then will hopefully have some longer chapters (or multiple smaller ones) started. No specific time-frame though, as I have a lot of stuff going on right now in my personal life.

It turned out that our rooms were co-ed, which shocked me despite having spent the last five years in my new culture. I had spent far longer in a much more… conservative… society, I suppose, so having young men and women room together hadn’t even occurred to me. But then again, this society, as a whole, treated the divide between men and women vastly different than most cultures I could think of on Earth.

My theory was that it was to do with how everyone is born with such wildly varying traits, making the visible gap between men and women seem a lot smaller than it might otherwise be. My new female room-mates were great examples: Idonea and Mei, who were both tall and broad, with builds that looked as if they would one day rival any one of the powerfully built blacksmiths I had met at the Smithy. The men here could definitely still put on muscle easier than women, and were also generally taller, but all the truly large people in the village were always the result of one of our unexplained physical mutations.

I had asked mother why we all looked so different once, and she been amused by the question – to her it was only natural. There was still no pattern that I could see, and although siblings were somewhat rare (due to our low population growth rate) there hadn’t been any similarities between the few I had seen.

Idonea and Mei actually looked like siblings, even though Idonea had a large jaw and pointed teeth (like a mini-Jaws) and Mei had oddly large hands with retractable claws (but normal teeth). They were both roughly the same size, and although they were only about eleven years old I would guess them to be as strong as an average adult male. They both had long brown-blond hair (dirty blonde), with Idonea wearing hers straight down her back and Mei having hers in messy bun at the back of her head. I didn’t find either of them remotely attractive, but then again I was still somewhat programmed to like girls who looked human… or maybe like Tetra… my thoughts started to wander again…

“Heller? Hello!” said Mei. She rolled her eyes at me as Idonea suddenly clapped her hands right in front of my face. I didn’t think it was fair that I was stuck with two of the largest students in Academy, but apparently they were also the closest to my age… and room assignments were always decided by age. We weren’t exactly a ‘quad’, but we were expected to work together to some extent.

“Oh, sorry.” I said, my attention focusing back on the two humongous girls.

“Beasts take your sorry, weakling.” Snorted Idonea, “And because of that I’m adding another chore for you. You get to do our laundry as well.” She smirked at me, but her teeth were much smaller than my father’s so I wasn’t fazed. She had already informed me that because I was skipping ahead by five years I had to learn my place, which meant that I had to tidy the room and make all the beds every day.

I was obviously not pleased, but I didn’t want to start off my life at Academy as an even worse bully by abusing my powers (nobody else at Academy was a Cultivator, not even the teachers as far as I knew). Lord Runax had mentioned that using cultivation on normal people was generally frowned upon, though there wasn’t actually a law against it specifically… which made sense, since almost all nobles were Cultivators. They wouldn’t want to unduly restrict their own use of power.

Then there was the fact that House Flameward wanted to keep my cultivation quiet, I was informed, because it might cause jealousy, or even frighten people. That suited me just fine, as my original plan was to keep the whole thing secret until I was sure that I had enough power to ensure my family’s safety. After all, I knew that I was an alien to these lands, even if nobody else had realized it yet. None of the students here knew of my powers, and I was hoping to keep it that way if I could.

“Yes sir.” I said, replying in the manner that Idonea had told me to address her (our term of respect is a combined word that means both ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ at the same time without differentiating gender). Mei had slapped me when I had tried to refuse earlier, and although my scales were starting to slowly harden they were still quite soft and provided little protection – the slap had hurt quite a lot. Mei had actually looked a bit guilty, and I could tell she held back quite a lot (with her massive hands and claws she could have killed me with one swing if she tried), but that didn’t stop her from following Idonea’s orders.

I felt pretty good about the fact that, any time I wanted too, I could easily start zapping either of them into oblivion. It gave me a sense of confidence that, strangely enough, actually seemed to make taking their abuse slightly easier than it might have been. It hadn’t been easy to lower my Ion Shield in time for the slap to connect, but the fact that I had managed it made me feel a bit smug – my control over my powers was getting better all the time.

Idonea smiled a toothy smile and nodded. “Good, start with my bed then.” She said, before turning and leading Mei out of the room.

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There was no particular intake time for Academy, so new students would join every month or so with no particular pattern. The only rule was that every commoner child born in House Flameward’s territory would have to register in Academy before they were eleven years old, and would have to leave before they turned fifteen. But because the student population was so low, compared to the number of teachers, everyone’s was given individual attention with their progress tracked and monitored by the teaching staff.

“Front and center, recruits!” yelled Sylko, the beautiful Master of Fire.

We were already lined up in order of seniority, starting with the oldest warrior trainee; a boy named Kodan with lumpy orange scales that looked as hard as rock. From there we went down the line until we hit Mei, Idonea, and then me. There were eleven of us in total, split up into two groups of four (quads) and my group of three. The lineup might be humorous under different circumstances, with Kodan being the tallest, then decreasing heights along the line until it suddenly jumped up at Mei and fell sharply at me, the youngest by five years. But we were being rather abrasively yelled at by Sylko, whose angelic face was twisted into a snarl as she berated us.

“If one of you fail the exercise, everyone fails!” She continued. I groaned inwardly, once more feeling the urge to act like an immature child and blasting away with my powers. She was referring to the fact that I hadn’t been able to complete her obstacle course in the time she set, and it wasn’t even remotely fair that she was punishing everyone else for the fact that I hadn’t made it. Actually, nothing about this was fair.

“I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time!” I said. Nobody had really told me what to expect, and having to do an obstacle course set by a madwoman on my first day… well… it was just insane. Especially when my body was about half the size of the next smallest trainee, a twelve year old girl named Rizia.

Master Sylko froze, slowly turning to look at me… and I noticed that everyone else was now looking at me as well. Idonea looked furious, Kodan looked annoyed, and everyone else was somewhere in-between.

“Four laps around the grounds!” Screamed Sylko, “And if any of you speak out of turn again I’ll have the lot of you beaten!”

Bloody beast, nobody had told me we couldn’t speak! I wondered if Sylko would smell like roast pork, or more like bacon.

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I was absolutely exhausted by the time the morning lesson ended, and I certainly hadn’t made any friends – Master Sylko had made sure of that. We had a communal meal afterwards, but I felt so ill from pushing myself so hard that I could barely eat a bite. I sat with the group, refusing to resign myself to self-imposed exile: People can only succeed in making you a victim if you allow it to happen, so even though I was mostly ignored (except for having to clean up Idonea’s dishes) I still sat and tried to smile pleasantly as I nibbled at my food. I would let them get used to my presence for a few days, then start with small conversations, and then after a few weeks hopefully be able to make at least a few friends.

The next lesson was with the Master of Air, Haar, who had seemed to be pretty friendly when I had met him before. At least, it couldn’t be any worse than the last lesson…