Training people to sense the universe was surprisingly not as straightforward as Florian had thought. Scratching his head in absent-minded frustration, Florian looked on as Hornbeck tried – and failed – to meditate with mana. The commander certainly thought he was doing something, but what that something was remained to be seen. Anna had barely more luck, previously exclaiming that she had seen something before realizing that she had forgotten to breathe and was seeing stars. Florian sighed. He wondered why he had thought teaching people magic would be anything but next to impossible.

Begrudgingly, he had come to respect Theo’s command over magic. He had always known that the wizard was experienced, but up until then, he had only seen the difference in their ability reflected in their capacity to perform magic for extended periods of time. Whatever Theo could do for an entire night, Florian could have done for an hour.

“Well, this isn’t doing shit,” Anna declared, leaning back and collapsing on the ground in a small tent the trio had commandeered for the price of just a little bit of Anna’s quite exhaustive meat reserve. “Are you sure that you’re doing this right?”

Hornbeck opened his eyes and glared at his subordinate before Florian could say a word, but the look the commander gave him afterwards reflected doubt. Clearly, this was going nowhere.

“When I first felt the universe around me, it wasn’t what I saw that changed. I felt energized, as if there was a whole part of the world I had been ignoring my entire life. It was this energized air that I drew into myself and meditated with,” he gave his sage wisdom, hoping to enlighten his poor students.

“You’ve said that to us at least five times over the past three days, Florian. I get it, but that doesn’t help when I can’t feel anything new to begin with,” Anna said, exasperated.

He opened his mouth to claim that he had done no such thing, but looking back at it, she was right.

Anna continued, sitting up with a shit-eating grin from ear to ear. “That’s enough for today. Let’s go to the field.” And then Anna was suddenly out of the tent, moving about as fast as he had seen anyone move. Hornbeck, for all that he tried to remain impartial, followed her immediately. It was almost as if he had been thinking the same exact thing.

Florian, for his part, was less than excited. His spear skills had drastically improved in the previous three days, and he was finally not losing to Anna in the span of thirty seconds. It was more like 45, these days. He had yet to score a single legitimate hit on her, the usage of his magic during the sparring matches barred.

After being beaten up so thoroughly he hurt in places he didn’t know could hurt, Florian slipped on his robes, shoving his borrowed Warriors’ clothes in an empty locker the commander let him borrow. As he was changing, Florian overheard a few Warriors speaking in the shadowy interior of the barracks.

“Come on, James. We both know that you’ve been dying for a beer,” a gruff voice said mischievously.

“I’m not about that life, mate,” another responded, this one much shriller than the other.

“But it’s been a year since the last time someone found a couple bottles! We’ve got enough meat to trade for one of them if we pool it together!” a third pleaded, her voice a trained marketer’s. “Who knows when we’ll get the chance to have another?”

“And risk Lord Jones getting pissed? No, thank you,” the shrill one, James, said.

“Coward,” the gruff one.

“But think about the opportunity, James!” pitched the marketer.

“No, final answer,” James grumbled, pushing past Florian as he passed in a huff. The other two shadowy figures turned to look in his direction, sharing a glance before making their way towards him. Florian knew that this meant trouble. He wanted no part of what he assumed to be illegal alcohol purchase and consumption. His attitude already put him in Jones’ shit list, but this would cement his place there.

Florian scrambled, leaving for the class he was scheduled to teach in just a handful of minutes. The Warriors stopped at the threshold to the barracks, nearly pursuing Florian before the pair locked onto another target closer to them. Breathing a sigh of relief, Florian went about his day as usual, overseeing a class that barely had any need for him anymore and meditating with Wesley and Joe in the evening.

When the next morning came, it was possibly the last thing he expected. Walking into the small, blue-striped tent, Florian came face-to-face with an Anna who was chugging two glasses of beer at once, Hornbeck doing his best to ignore the whirlwind of chaos beside him as he greeted Florian.

Shaking his head, Florian prepared to do what he had done for the past three days. But as he prepared to attempt to cast a spell intending to simply make the target feel the universe about them, Florian figured he’d try a different approach. He’d cast a spell with the intention of transmitting a specific feeling to the target. In this case, he wanted the target to feel the electricity in the air, the energy coursing through the veins as it came from deep breaths, and the rainy taste of the air.

He started with Hornbeck, the man already patiently waiting for him even while Anna was busy doing her level best to feel the effects of the beer, but even as he felt his focus begin to waver – this kind of magic required keeping a slew of things in his mind – Hornbeck had yet to react. Lasting only fifteen minutes, the spell failed.

Fortunately, this kind of spell failure was not the magical kind. Florian hadn’t run out of whatever force allowed him to manipulate mana; this kind of exhaustion was purely the standard mental kind. Closing his eyes and resting for twenty minutes despite Anna’s frequent attempts to get him to stop, Florian was ready to try again.

Anna was a bit unsteady, her smile a permanent fixture on her face. For all that Anna was an incredible warrior, she was a lightweight. Smiling at the thought, Florian cast the spell with Anna as its target.

In no time at all, Anna yelled. “I feel it! I taste it! Ewwwww.”

The spell broke immediately, Florian looking at her with wide eyes. “Can you still feel it?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed, her look one of wonder. “Woah, I feel like a whole new person.”

Hornbeck looked on, a smile overturning the frown that had been resting on the man’s face up until that moment. “Congratulations, Anna,” he said. Then he nodded at Florian. “I suppose that either I’m just destined to be bad at this, or you’re lucky that Anna managed to get her hands on a couple of those,” he indicated at the discarded bottles.

Florian shrugged, gleaming with positivity. This was like a personal cloud nine, learning how to do something that had felt so crazy to him just a day before. He had, from scratch, taught another person to see the world in an entirely new way.

He just wished that he could get the commander a couple bottles of that stuff, just in case.