“What do you mean ‘almost’ gave it your all?” Detia’s voice broke a bit, both in anger, surprise and just being too loud for her vocal cords to handle.

Gilliam’s vision was slowly getting better but he was far from seeing details yet.

“Well, you told me to use all my mana, it was my first fireball so I accidentally held back a lit-” His explanation was cut short as she broke in again.

“No, I mean, what was that massive thing? That wasn’t a fireball?!” Her loud voice and uncertainty aside, it sounded like she was more surprised that it was so far out of the expected that she couldn’t handle herself and turned angry.

Gilliam could not fault her for that, or, technically he could but he was too high on himself at the moment. In his mind this went perfectly, save the vision thing... but he got to try this out and it was amazing!

He was super glad that this was done in a fire-safe area but he learned a valuable lesson, especially if you consider the difference in energy-usage if he were to make a Structured spell with all of this in mind.. If Unstructured uses about ten times the energy... and a Magical circle can be the lens that focuses and strengthens your spell... Good gods, he could do so much damage... He would need a better place to test these things.

Detia had started going around in circles in a surprise fueled rage, she was not good at handling her emotions.

Gilliam felt a small hand on his shoulder as Aeris had come up to where he sat.

“Don’t worry, I think it was amazing.” her voice sounded honest and genuine.

“Thank you, so do I.” Gilliam added in a reply, it was honest from his side as well, and though he could not see properly in the center of his vision the surrounding area was fine enough that he could see an excited smile on the young girl.

Forcing himself to his feet, he sort of felt around, moved his body, shook his head. “Sooo... Is the no-mana headache thing happening delayed this time as well.. Or...?”

He was unsure, he did remember Angela stating that his Core had improved a few days ago, but he didn’t know exactly how that was going to handle any of this.

Detia broke in with a response which was more a statement to herself. “Oh, and he’s not even getting mana sick. Great!” It was so sarcastic that you could almost grab the sarcasm in the air and box it.

Gilliam took this as praise, this was great.

“Well, would it be poss-” Gilliam wanted to go back and take a look at the aftermath now that things were most likely settled. But his Boundary had other ideas.

It was the same thing as last time, his mind was about to break, his vision narrowed and he could now almost only see the bright spot. He had to widen his stance to not fall over but after a few seconds ended up sitting down again.

“Oh, it caught up to you.” Deta’s voice had an oddly happy tone to it. Gilliam felt too horrible to come with a retort or even try to look at her.

For now he just sat there, waiting for this to pass. Last time it took a short while so it should go away at the same time now, or something.

“Yeah... it really did... I hate how it’s delayed like that.” Gilliam complained as he had placed his face in his hands, blocking out as much light as possible, it helped a little bit.

“Well, good. Doing all of that without any drawba*, no wait. No.. What the fuck were you thinking?!” Detia’s sentence started out with her being happy that he at least had to pay the price for this, but she interrupted herself to change the subject back to her complaining.

Gilliam moaned in annoyance, he was absolutely not having a good time, but she kept badgering, she could wait a few minutes or something but no...

“What did you tell me to do? Didn’t you tell me to give it my all? Or to be specific, I believe your words were more ‘Biggest Fireball’ or something?”

His tone was annoying and had heavy pressure on the Biggest Fireball words. He understood she didn’t expect this much but that’s on her, not him. He’s fine with surprise and some weird annoyance not expecting this but she was being a bit much, especially considering that she clearly knew the zero mana pain thing.

She calmed down a little, but was still somewhat angry, at him, for some reason.

“Yes, I did, but I didn’t expect you to blow a deeper crater in the whole quarry!”

She raised her voice again in disbelief.

Gilliam realised just how little she was used to emotion and whatnot. Her lazy lifestyle probably had her being outside of social situations a lot.

“That is on you, not me. I’m sure Jial or Saleg told you a few things about me. I don’t know how much info there is about Heptagon mages but why are you yelling at me when you didn’t even somewhat try to find out how much mana I had before you told me to go ham?”

His voice was annoyed, he was getting angry at this. She was entitled to her surprise, that is fine. She could even throw him some shit for this, that is also fine. But now she’s blaming him for not doing her job, checking up on her student or even asking about the mana-pool size before telling them to go nuts.

“What about asking next time?” he looked at her clearly pissed at her. Though it’s not fun being blamed, when it’s your fault it at least makes sense. Being blamed for something that isn’t your fault triggered him a lot.

And yes, an argument could be that since he’s out of the norm he should have double checked, but he’s new to all of this.

This seemed to have the opposite effect than planned, she seemed to get angry, her whole face turned furious as she inhaled deeply.

Though, as Gilliam expected a high-volume lecture she actually calmed down, seems like she processed it during that buildup phase?

“That... yeah... that makes sense...”

Turning around she made some distance between them. Gilliam decided to not demand an apology or anything, at the moment he just wanted this bloody headache to take all its shit and leave.

Aeris just stood on the side, she was not part of this and seems to have decided to not get involved, probably a smart move.

Once this talk died down a bit Gilliam was given downtime to rest and leave the worst of the zero-mana problem behind. He was still sluggish and would absolutely not be able to cast a similar spell anytime soon, but he was good enough to move around and perhaps cast simple things.

Getting to his feet he had to smile a bit now that he could move again without hating himself, but at the same time this was a very interesting condition. Only a week or so ago magic was only a fairy tail, but now he could do wondrous things. This pain was totally worth it.

“Oh, you’re doing better?” Aeris asked curiously with a smile.

“Yeah, a little, still a bit wonky but I’m fine.” he smiled in return. Aeris seemed like a nice girl, calm and polite, not like certain socially awkward teachers around here, he thought to himself as he held back to eye Detia with slight annoyance.

Turning towards Aeris properly, Gilliam squatted down to get to her level.

“How many times can you teleport us around? I assume we’ll be going back soon but would it be possible to go back to the quarry?”

He had no idea how teleportations work, he was still sort of used to this being an expensive and high level spell, from popular media it was often that certain mages could only cast a few of them a day. Detia did introduce Aeris as one of the better teleporters but none of that meant anything to Gilliam without any reference.

“Hmm...” Aeris put a finger to her chin and looked into the sky, pondering her answer. “To and from the academy-” she started counting on her fingers as she seemed to mentally feel for the answer. “Six!” she held up three fingers on both her hands towards Gilliam.

“That’s great!” he responded, he still had no idea if that was a lot or not, but it was plenty to take them to the quarry before back to the academy.

Turning towards his rambling teacher he had to raise his voice so she could hear him. “Hey, Detia. We’re going into the quarry, you want to come along?”

Detia turned around with a strange face, it was a mix of annoyance, interest and... Something else, couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“Damn right I’m coming along.” she didn’t sound happy about it but she did seem adamant about being part of it.

Aeris held her hands out like before, Gilliam took one and after walking over so did Detia.

Trying to avoid the blinding light Gilliam closed his eyes this time, it was only after the weird teleportation feeling subsided that he realised the bright light was still there, So it was not light per se but rather some part of the spell. It was probably part of the disintegration and reintegration process? Magic was weird at times.

Now finding themselves roughly where GIlliam stood when he channelled that firespell he took a look around. The place was absolutely covered in debris, everything was wet, rocks and boulders around, it looked like the aftermath of a war.

Walking to the edge to look into where the lake was he found out that there was no lake. It was slowly refilling from water running back to the lowest point but the whole lake was spread across the mountainsides. There was a substantial crater as well, looking at it from this range it looked like it was 4-5m deep (13-16ft), and about double that wide.

That was in solid mountain rock, underwater in a small lake.

Gilliam was beginning to understand Detia’s reaction a little bit, she probably expected some beginner student with a small boost in abilities, not some missile blowing up in there. The more he thought about both how awesome and how dangerous this was, his mind started wondering about the results if this was cast with a simple amplification magic circle... The results would be horrifying, or amazing, depending on how you looked at it.

Also considering just how much mana this took compared to the streamlined structured spells, he apparently had quite the mana pool, or quite the Boundary to use local terms.

“Soo.... I made the lake deeper...” he sort of commented to the others, not really knowing what to say about the situation, this comment sort of forced itself out to break the silence.

The others came over to the edge as well, Detia sighing in some weird response but Aeris looked like she was beaming with interest and excitement.

Gilliam thought to himself how the two reactions were quite the opposite of eachother.

“Aeris, please take us back, I need to talk to the headmaster a bit.”

Aeris just smiled, which seems to be her default expression, as she held out her hands like before.

Gilliam took one last look at the aftermath of his fireball, his mini-sun, before he took Aeris’ hand. And like before there was a flash of bright light before they were again at the academy grounds.

When they landed pretty much where they left from, Gilliam noticed a few things. First Bob was just chilling in the sun, a lazy lizard much like his master. But there was also some weird commotion, many of the adults were scampering about and looked somewhat distressed.

Detia facepalmed for a second as she pointed on the ground, facing Gilliam.

“Wait here. I need to inform them that the massive explosion was not something to be worried about.”

Before Gilliam could respond she had already ran off, though he wanted to make a point about Ms. Lazy actually running, he held back as this was pseudo his fault. On top of this she actually had a good point, the explosion was substantial and the quarry was in the mountains a distance away from the academy grounds, if the explosion could be heard this far away it was natural that they would react like this.

“I’ll be going, then.” Aeris smiled at Gilliam.

“But she said for us to wait here?” he asked, the facial expression from Detia did hint that this was mainly for Gilliam but he wasn't really sure if this meant Aeris as well.

“Nah, she said that to you. Besides, who’s going to stop me from leaving?”

As soon as her sentence was completed she was gone, literally in the blink of an eye she had popped away somewhere and was out of sight.

Gulliam chuckled as he sat down next to Bob.

“Seems like you have the right idea here, Bob.” The lizard didn’t react more than moved his tail a little, at least hinting to it still being alive where it was ragdoll-splayed out in the sun.

As he was waiting Gilliam decided to play a bit more with unstructured magic. It was costly but good exercise. To get a feel for the difference he tried replicating his 1m (~3ft) laser from yesterday. The first five attempts failed to even manifest it, it flickered, flashed, failed to light up and just didn’t behave properly. Making sure to aim upwards just in case he used more than the 5 failures to get it to remain stable. He had to give it more and more energy, focus on keeping the containment in a beam or it would just glow out everywhere. It seems that the magic circle with the beam rune took care of that by itself. The addition of the power and energy runes also helped a lot with the mana cost, as keeping the beam sustained Unstructured was possible, but demanded quite the focus. Though he was not in perfect shape after the Sun-ball he cast before it felt like it should still be enough to get things working properly. As a test he double checked his notes and cast the Structured variant of the laser right after, this went off right away and worked just as intended. He could feel the mana being drained slowly but it was more like a gentle controlled stream where the Unstructured variant was the faucet on full.

Dismissing the spell he was starting to get some ideas of how things worked and tied together. Unstructured magic really fit Detia’s lazy personality. No remembering or testing of spells and spell circles needed, just think of what you want and do it. With that in mind she had probably built herself up a substantial Boundary to keep doing it that way. Given how she reacted to Gilliam’s fireball it also hinted that her Boundary was smaller than Gilliam’s, as she’s an expert on Unstructured magic this gave Gilliam some context of just how large his Boundary was. In game terms her Max available mana was much lower than his.

Looking around again it seems that the chaos had subsided a bit, almost like everyone got a text explaining that everything was good. Perhaps some telepathy? Jial used something like that to speak to his aide before, since they were ready for something then this might have been a mental broadcast or something?

Well, in any case they were calming down, which was a good thing. Now the only thing that remained was to wait for Detia, something he hoped would not take as long as their first meeting.

To pass the time he kept testing out Unstructured magic, lifting a stick, pulling some grass, trying to feel things from afar with a variant of telekinesis and some sensory link. It quickly became apparent that you could do almost whatever you wanted with Unstructured magic, the main problem was just that it was unrefined and stupidly mana expensive. Most of the effects were ‘good enough’, but like with the laser test; a few more attempts to refine the concept would most likely have it working better but it was still suboptimal as a spell. Sure, if he wanted to alter things, have it bend or whatever, that was easier to do as an Unstructured spell but a Structured spell was more practical if you knew what you were after and had the time to alter the Magic Circle.

Gilliam had taken some notes, concepts and started some ideas and new spell circles in his notebook when Detia came walking back.

“I think we can end today’s lesson here. You seem to have the basics of things and based on what I have seen so far-” she had a weird pressure on that last part. “-I think you’ll figure out the rest on your own.”

She seemed almost a bit annoyed at things, which is understandable to some degree. Gilliam mused that some of it might be because he learns fast, has a lot of mana and needs only a tiny bit of effort to get major results. Someone with Detia’s lifestyle would most likely envy that a bit.

“Keep the book.” Was the last thing she said as she turned around, starting to leave.

Bob seemed to wake his lazy self and started walking after her.

“Any good last hints before you leave?” Gilliam asked her before she was out of conversation distance, hoping she might have a neat hint or something that could put him on a good path.

“Get a familiar, they are absolutely worth the effort.” There was a tone to that sentence. Bob turned around, looked at Gilliam and then followed Detia again.

The tone hinted that she might actually enjoy Bob. Her whole existence sounded lazy and she wanted to skip anything that took any sense of effort, but this was ‘absolutely worth the effort’ coming from her.

Perhaps he should reconsider it and at least read up on things a bit more.

Though there was still a little left from the school day, it was nearing its end. A lot of things had happened and all around, it really had been an interesting and educational day.

Gilliam didn’t know what was planned for tomorrow in Angela’s schedule but he supposed it was something interesting.

Since he was sitting outside, the weather was nice and he didn’t have anything specific planned, he decided that this was as good a place as any to read up on familiars a bit. He had the introduction book in his bag so there was no need to go anywhere.

Finding a better sitting position he ended up with his back against one of the walls, he had taken out the book and flicked to the Familiar section.

Most of this was a repeat of what he found in the note before, how they need to be cared for, school will aid as long as you’re a student, the soul bond, boons and cons for everything.

But the book elaborated a bit on the wonders, and problems, of having a familiar.

First, the negatives. You are bonded on a soul level so if your familiar dies you will take a horrible hit. Many mages even lose their ability to cast magic for a short while as their soul heals. Due to this many mages decide against getting one, since you don’t know what you might get you might end up just getting a target with you.

There is also the personality thing, if the familiar feels strongly about something, let’s say the familiar has a fear of water, you will be influenced and start to at least dislike the water. Likewise if you dislike something or someone your familiar will adopt this as well. The connection is stronger from Mage to Familiar than it is from Familiar to Mage, but it does go both ways.

But, the list of wonderful things were much more written out and interesting. Not only do you get a companion for life, but you get an aide in anything you do, due to the link they will enjoy what you enjoy. You get a partner in studies, in life, in friendship. You basically get a best friend that has all the same interests and dislikes as you do. Many mages also use the familiars to do non-important tasks when the mage is busy.

Reading this last part Gilliam was reminded of Detia and Bob... The letter and getting Aeris, but it made sense. Their interest about the topic would align so the familiar should not feel abused about it either. The book even confirmed this.

Sure, there were some downsides, especially if the creature has some weirdly exotic and expensive food, this would become the mages problem after graduation. But the more he read the more persuaded he became.

He was also super biassed from familiars in media back home but he kind of wanted this now. And the ritual normally costs extra, both to cover the ritual itself but also as a kind of scare-tactic, if you can’t afford the ritual you can’t afford to care for the familiar, kind of thing. But in Gilliam’s case the school already decided to cover everything, that should cover the familiar ritual as well, right?

The book was written by and for the school, so it had some localised info, one bit was that this ritual was almost always done on Fridays, the reason is that there are no classes in the weekends, letting the student and Familiar get to know each other before the next week starts.

Luck would have it that it’s Thursday now, so if he wanted this to happen he could have it happen already tomorrow. Closing his book and packing his stuff he got up and left for the reception. He decided that he wanted this, so might as well get that started!

He was already rather close to the door leading into the main hall of the school. A door later and he found himself inside, the reception being off to the side he walked over, finding a middle-aged man with greying hair sitting behind a desk.

“Good afternoon, how may I h- Er.. How may I help you?”

He stuttered as he took a look at the badge around Gilliam’s neck. Odds were high that he reacted to all the triangles being filled.

“Hello. I would like to sign up for the Familiar ritual tomorrow.” Gilliam smiled.

“The name is Gilliam Gibson.” he assumed this needed to be properly registered and though he would probably get more known later, simply due to being a Heptagon mage, he named himself for simplicity’s sake.

The man nodded and smiled before he started checking a book. “Ah yes, there is a slot open tomorrow morning, right after the Fifth bell.”

As the man checked the list he looked at it a bit weird before facing Gilliam again.

“Mr. Gibson, there seems to be a mistake, you’re already on the list for tomorrow.”

He looked a bit confused, something Gilliam mirrored.

“Excuse me? I just decided only a few minutes ago...”

This was.. Well.. good, but didn’t make sense, are people here psychic as well?

The man checked some papers and flipped some pages to what looked like notes.

“Ah, it seems someone else signed you up, an.. Angela Sizoc? It’s signed off by the headmaster?”

His tone was questioning, seeming to double check with Gilliam if he knew this name. “According to the notes here a letter should be given to you before the end of the day explaining this.”

He didn’t sound as questioning anymore, it seems this last part removed the responsibility from him and gave it to someone else, so he sounded more at ease.

“Ah, that works out fine, thank you for the help.” Gilliam nodded at the man and headed back towards his room. He might as well get some more research and ideas done today, he has more things he wanted to test and some ideas he wanted to write down before he turned in.

From what it sounded he would get the needed details later, so he didn’t have to bother the receptionist for now.

Getting some food on the way, he was close enough to dinner time that he was fine just picking up a plate of something. Ending up with a decent bowl of stew, some bread and a bit of fruit on the side he headed for his room.

It was a bit finicky to unlock the door and hold the plate of his food, but he managed in the end. Only as the door opened did he consider that he could use telekinesis for something of this... It’s probably a good idea to not rely on it too much for the simplest of things but in this case it could have been practical.

Entering, closing the door with his foot he placed the plate of food on the round table, and as expected there was a letter addressed to him.

Opening it, the contents seems to be an official document and information, stating that he had been signed up for the Familiar ritual tomorrow at 08:15 at the Fourth bell.

Some extra information such as where he should go, what he should do to prepare and all that kind of things were in the letter.

The only thing was really that he needed to have some time off, preferably the whole day, to get used to the familiar. Now, since this was set up as part of Angela’s schedule this meant that nothing else should be planned that day. She really did well with this, he had to make a note to properly thank her later.

For now, it was a mixture of food and personal studies.

Tomorrow was going to be another exciting day!