Out in the plains Arabelle was having fun playing with and training Piti, far away from other people that went to the zone either for a picnic or to gather some herbs for personal or commercial use. Gabriel went closer to the entrance for the forest, with the excuse of other plants being there which was true, but that wasn’t the reason he was there.

In fact, even though his now not-so-recent experience had turned out to be more formative than expected. When he was trapped inside the mansion and deep in the catacombs, he realized that those beasts had been “tamed” not in the usual sense of the word and had used every moment he wasn’t escaping to analyze the mana forms inside their brains.

He didn’t manage to fully understand how the spell was made but while he was willingly stuck in a room with his sister, he managed to find some rats and experimented on their small brains to little success. But he still managed to somewhat control their minds and if he managed to control beasts and animals alike maybe he would be able to create a beast army to follow him and protect himself, his family and the people he cared about.

But, as you probably know, hordes of animals and beasts never fought for me in the many battles I fought. Yes, sometimes great amounts of manually tamed animals fought by my side, but never through magic.

It is better explained with what I experienced that day and the following weeks, and it will probably also inform you why no country is actually perusing such magic… at least that’s how the present situation is.

Gabriel didn’t enter the forest but prepared a smelly bait for deer and moose alike, it was a mix of plants that were attractive for males and as it was spring many of these animals would reproduce. After a few good minutes a deer approached the smell Gabriel activated his trap and caught the animal.

He then put his hand on the deer’s head and attempted to replicate the spell he had made on the rats inside Poco’s restaurant, but to no avail. The deer resisted even the most basic tasks like “open and close your mouth” or “look here”. But why did this happen? Why did the spell not work on deer but did on rats?

Maybe he had made a mistake while imprinting the spell on the deer’s head, so he would now return to his home and not only check if he had used the right spell, but also retry it on rats and slightly larger animals as maybe it was due to the size of the brain that it didn’t work.

- Arabelle, we are coming back now! – Gabriel cried out for his sister, and she replied “got it” while she used these last few seconds to go over what she had taught her pet… although it wasn’t much. She only managed to make it sit by force so when she called “sit!” the dog didn’t do anything.

- It seems you need to teach it better… Piti does not follow your instructions and barely manages to differentiate her name from other words. Or maybe someone more experienced should train it instead.

- No, no, I know I can do it! Just give me more time Gabriel! My beautiful, genius, excellent brother! I promise that in the next year… no, season it will be trained enough for your tastes! Please trust me on this one!

Gabriel wasn’t really sure whether she could accomplish such feat, even less when she didn’t know his standards, but with his mind more focused on the mind-controlling spell he simply mumbled some sort of confirmation and continued walking towards Destin without paying attention if his sister was following, too caught up in his own world of spells, mana, magic and wizardry to pay attention to his surroundings.

This time nothing out of the ordinary happened on their way home and so, while Arabelle worked on trying to get Piti to sit by command, Gabriel started searching for small holes around the house that would prove the existence of rats and help him find them to experiment on their minds.

After he found three of them, he put the same spell on one rat at first and see if it acted the same way as the original one did. And in confirmation, this rat started dancing on command, although it wasn’t very good at it. It was like a drunk dancing a new dance for the first time, maybe funny at first, but not beautiful in the least.

Seeing that his spell, in fact, worked, he got lightly confused but decided to put the other two rats he had captured to good use and tried controlling their minds as well. On one of them the spell worked in a similar fashion, but the third rat didn’t bat an eye when he was given orders and kept doing whatever it was doing before.

Gabriel was lost now. What was happening? He checked if the spell he had used was the same on all three rats and it was. Did the third rat have some sort of evolution making it more resistant against mana? But there was no clear difference in the shape of its brain compared to the other two…

He needed a pause, Gabriel knew that banging his head on this problem over and over wouldn’t really help as he had no idea where to even start, so how could he ever get to the solution? Maybe if he contacted other people with similar interests, he could find more information out.

Yes, he was once again going to study, either in the magician’s manor or in the wizard’s academy, whichever let him in with his oldish student documents. After shortly checking his sister’s progress with Piti and her training he made his way out of the house and towards the magician’s manor.

On the way there his body and face went through multiple transformations, as Gabriel changed the hue of his skin to fit better in the crowd and changed his face in case someone from the mansion was searching for him. Luckily the student card didn’t have any recreation of his face, so he also managed to easily pass through

As half the semester had already passed and he hadn’t attended any classes he wouldn’t be able to gain the approval of teachers the common way, by passing their class. So, Gabriel decided to go into an unconventional way and decided to challenge teachers in the arena, where the only conditions were not to kill the opponent, because basically all wounds could be healed.

But he wouldn’t rush things, either. So, he spent all day searching for information about the different teachers, their specialties and their records in the arena. Most teachers had been defeated less than ten times due to three main reasons.

First of all, you couldn’t challenge a teacher if you had already gained their approval, secondly you could only challenge them once, so if you had been defeated by them but managed to find a way to defeat them you couldn’t try it.

Finally, everything about the battle couldn’t be informed to anyone else, so preparing for the battle was tough. But Gabriel still managed to get useful information, such as the skills of the people that had defeated certain teachers, when they had been defeated, their behaviors during classes and outside of them and other details that could potentially give him the win.

Gabriel continued collecting this information during the next week but also managed to sneak in some time to search for new mind-controlling books in the library. He managed to find two new books he had access to but none of them helped him with his current rodent situation.

After a week of searching for information about every teacher he thought he had a chance against he managed to reduce the possible teachers to eight and he only needed to beat five to get access to the third floor of the library, the one he wanted access to.

Gabriel believed that he would be able to fight one teacher per day readily prepared to beat them, but he would end up quite tired from the battle and as such he may be attacked on his way home. Or worse yet, his home could be attacked, and his sister kidnapped once again… He would have to plan things through to make everything work.