An hour later, I had gotten a plate from the cafeteria and was sitting at my desk, silently watching the sleeping form of Mistletoe. My food lay untouched where I’d set it down a few minutes earlier, the papers I’d been given still neatly stacked in front of me.

Seeing Professor Igor’s… farm had been quite a shock and I wasn’t sure how to feel. I didn’t think I was an especially bad person per se. I certainly wasn’t a good person, good people did not last long at Avalon, but I tried to hold myself to a moral code. I’d known intellectually that many of my professors and classmates were monsters, but seeing it so blatantly was still disturbing.

Did I regret capturing my Mistletoe? I took a moment to consider it, weighing the question in my head as I absently twirled a fork between my fingers.

No, I finally decided. I didn’t regret it, not one bit. Our conflict was inevitable and I had simply taken steps to preemptively defend myself. I refused to be a statistic, one of the thousands who joined the academy and never emerged. I could have simply killed her, but that would have felt… wasteful. This was a much better outcome.

Did I ever think I would go as far as Professor Igor? Taking someone else’s prisoners of war and turning them into those things hanging in his office? No, I didn’t think I would be comfortable with that. Maybe if they had fought against me, that would be different. It was basically self defense then, right? But I wouldn’t go that far for someone that hadn’t wronged me directly.

Finally satisfied, I turned back to my meal and dug in, barely tasting my food as my thoughts continued to race. Seeing her like this was still so very strange, though I thought I could get used to it with time.

I still remembered the arrogant, leather-clad elf that I had met on my very first day here. Back then I had been a very different person, more open and friendly than I was now. I’d tried to befriend the girl, offering to lend her a pen when I noticed her sitting with a blank notebook, thinking she must have left her supplies in her room.

Her haughty reply, that a higher being like herself didn’t need to do something as pedestrian as take notes, had just been the start of our bad blood. When Aaron, another of our classmates with whom she’d had a rather rocky relationship, was found shot full of arrows in one of the herb fields, her smirk had been the final nail in her coffin. She’d as good as told me that I was next, and I was not willing to just wait and die.

My attack had been meticulously planned and executed, every path considered and a dozen contingencies ready to go. I’d been perfectly willing to kill her if my first plan didn’t work out, a full vial of elfbane poison at the ready if things went south. Elves were hard to put down, but she was still young, not yet fully matured and resistant to many of the attacks older elves could simply shrug off.

In the end, none of that had been necessary. She’d been so confident in her superior senses and natural abilities that my ambush had never been detected. Before my meeting with Igor, I had really thought no one had been the wiser till she didn’t show up to classes the next week.

I stood up abruptly and crossed the few feet separating my desk from her prison, taking a seat on the stool I’d left beside her. At some point during her struggles, her hair had finally escaped the loose bun I’d tied it back in, now hanging in a curtain that half covered her face. I brushed it back gently, enjoying the silky smooth feeling of her bright red locks on my fingers.

Elves were generally hairless below the neck, which was once again quite convenient for maintenance purposes. Professor Igor had gone a step further in his own setup, shaving them all over and likely using a potion, or knowing him, some sort of horrible procedure to prevent it from growing back.

It was probably quite convenient, I had no idea how to cut a woman’s hair properly, but I would cross that bridge when I got to it. For now, I didn’t think I could bring myself to ruin this gorgeous mane.

She looked kinda cute like this, I decided. She’d always been beautiful of course, all elves were. It was just another of the unfair natural gifts they were blessed with. Usually however, her haughty expression and bad attitude really took away from that. Like this, mouth stretched into a wide o-shape by the gag in her mouth, blindfolded, helpless… the look really suited her.

Without really thinking about it, I reached down and gave one of her breasts a grope, the warm flesh deforming easily under my questing fingers. They were softer than I’d expected, I’d thought that with the way they had always stayed so perfectly shaped and perky they would be much firmer, but instead they were pillow soft.

With a start, I realized that I’d had her at my mercy for an entire week and had never bothered indulging in any way. Sure it had been inconvenient at first, what with the tiny cage and all, but not even a grope? The me of three years ago would have been shocked.

After a moment of intersection, fingers still digging into the wonderfully pliable flesh, I realized it wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to, but rather that I hadn’t felt safe doing so. I’d had to be on alert at all times around her, watchful for any attempt to escape her bonds. Now? I was confident she wasn’t going anywhere, not for at least a few more weeks. I certainly had time.

I felt her shudder slightly as my hands trailed along her body, tracing the edges of her ribs and the contours of her sides. I stood up when I could reach no further, stepping around to stand between her legs.

The way I’d bound her feet ensured her legs were forced wide apart, leaving her pussy and ass readily exposed. A single finger trailed down her spine and I felt her muscles tense as it continued further downward. It stopped for a moment to circle around her tensed anus, then moved on.

I smiled slightly as my finger slid smoothly between the lips of her cunt. She was soaking wet, enough that I was half surprised she wasn’t dripping all over my floor. I didn’t really care if she was enjoying this, but something about seeing her tied up and all but leaking juices had turned my uncomfortably tight pants into a tent.

Unfortunately, now was not yet the time to get distracted. In a couple days, once I was certain her bonds would hold and I’d had a chance to catch up on my assignments and practice, then I could have my fun. Until then, getting distracted was a liability.

With a bit of effort, I positioned my stool so I could sit with my back resting against her delectable rear, far more comfortable than even my enchanted desk chair. My mind drifted to wondering if she would make a good pillow someday, but I stopped before I could get distracted again. This was already as much allowance I would make to my pleasure for now.

I was ahead on the practical side of many of my classes, the excellent mana shaping skills that I’d been honing since before I’d ever learned what a spell matrix was had served me very well on that front. Still, with some types of magic, the only way to improve was through constant practice.

I levitated the remaining wax I’d created earlier in the day with pure mana manipulation, then carefully shaped it into a rough sphere the same way. This was one of the first exercises that I’d ever practiced, though I’d initially used tiny bits of mud and small rocks instead of a sizable chunk of wax like this.

Fundamentally, there were two ways of using mana, spell matrices and pure manipulation. Spell matrices were the most common types of casting, by channeling the mana into very particular patterns and channels, you could achieve much more than was possible by applying the mana directly.

However, pure manipulation was still a crucial skill, since without it it was impossible to shape the mana into the needed matrices for powerful spells. Pure manipulation also had some other advantages.

For one, it was much faster to use, not requiring the charging time that almost all structured spells required. Secondly, if you didn’t know the correct spell matrix, it was impossible to cast a spell, while pure manipulation allowed you to manifest a huge number of different effects without having to develop or find the appropriate technique.

Since I didn’t come from a mage family, or even a particularly wealthy family, I hadn’t had access to any books of spells or the complex instructions required to develop a spell matrix. Thus, I’d been left with only pure manipulation to practice, and had gotten quite good at it in my humble opinion. It was undoubtedly that talent that had gotten me into the Academy after all, I doubted the single spell matrix I’d demonstrated would have gotten me the spot on its own.

Regardless, I wasn’t planning on practicing my manipulation right now. There was plenty of time to do that later since I could do it just about anywhere with no materials or preparation. That was exactly what I did actually, I typically spent every free moment going through one of the thousands of pure mana exercises I’d found since arriving here. This was simply to make my actual exercise more convenient.

I closed my eyes and focused on the alchemical symbols I’d spent hours memorizing. With agonizing precision, I wove tiny strands of mana into the structure, forming a series of sigils a few centimeters above my palm.

Opening my eyes, I examined the result carefully, checking the faintly shimmering mana constructs with a critical eye. Only once I was satisfied that everything was perfect did I channel more mana into the sigils to finalize the spell.

With a slight gust of displaced air and a dim flash of light, the wax above my hand expanded dramatically as the relatively dense material was suddenly replaced by a heap of loose carbon dust. I struggled for a moment with the new substance, my mana struggling to control the suddenly wildly different objects I was trying to levitate, but I managed it without getting the fine powder everywhere.

I smiled at my success, pleased by both the alchemical transformation and the mana control. Carbon dust was a valuable reagent in some forms of brewing, but it could be a pain to get the really pure stuff. That wouldn’t be a problem in the future.

After a moment spent admiring my creation, I got back to work. I modified one of the symbols and cast again. This time the powder collapsed in on itself, becoming one solid chunk of tightly packed carbon.

I continued in that vein for another half hour, first creating a loose powdered form of a common element, then a solid structure of the same material. Twice I lost control of my levitation, thankfully both times with the solid forms and not the powders. That had happened once before and it had been an absolute pain to clean up.

It was actually somewhat funny, controlling a loose dust was typically considered much more difficult than a single object of the same weight. For me it was quite the opposite however, likely because of how much more practice I’d had with levitating sand and other silt.

When I’d been on the road, I had been forced to hide my status as a mage. It was much easier to practice manipulating some dust on an already windy and poorly maintained road than it was to justify why there were pebbles floating around my arms and legs.

Eventually however, my practice had to come to an end. I groaned at the blare of my alarm spell, letting the ball of tungsten fall heavily into my palm. It looked like my fun practice time was over. I stood up with a groan and made my way back to my desk.

Though I much preferred practical lessons to theoretical work, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have mountains of the stuff to do. It had taken the entire weekend and all of my free time the week before to prepare my elf’s new restraints, and I’d left a big heap of assignments for this evening.

I only had one class on Mondays, right in the morning which sucked, but it should have left me with plenty of time to get everything done. Instead, I’d taken a long nap and spent even more of my precious time playing with my new toy like a child. I was looking forward to properly getting to know my captive, but that could come later.

I was better than this, I had to be better than this if I wanted to survive here. Letting a perky pair of tits and a nice ass distract me would get me killed sooner or later. Hell, it almost had twice already. Once with Miranda and a second time that same year with an upperclassman looking to harvest my soul for her experiments.

Setting the papers I’d gotten from Igor aside, I grabbed the half inch thick folder that had built up while I’d been busy. Recent behavior aside, I tried to stay on top of both my work and my personal studies, so it wasn’t as bad as it could be. Still, I had a long night and probably a long week ahead of me.

Giving the pert backside just a few feet away from me one final longing look, I grabbed the first handout. It was from my evocation class, one of the core parts of the curriculum that every student was forced to take for at least four years.

I was in my third year of the class, and it was rapidly becoming a brutally difficult slog. This homework had to do with spell matrix modification, and not the fun kind either. It was the nitty gritty stuff that regulated the tiny details of elemental spells.

With a soft sight, I grabbed the relevant reference book from its shelf and got comfortable. Flipping to page 934, I took in the tiny text and the densely drawn diagrams. Gods above, this was going to take a while.