Months passed without any significant changes.

The new year had just passed with him at home with his family celebrating another year of being together, they even invited over the families of the farmhands and guards.

Nobody had really tried to attack them since the war ended except overzealous lone thieves, whatever guilds controlled them had long realized there was nothing they could really use, even if they did take a golem it was still going to try to kill them and then if it couldn’t it would just turn itself into a fireball.

Harlan had been working on alchemy and Sepul found that he was passable so long as he worked alongside Lugh, together they made at least a beginner alchemy.

The sleepless nights he had been using to work on the communicators had instead been spent with his new subject and he didn’t mind it at all, it was like cooking, which he wasn’t very good at, but he could follow a recipe to a T and imbuing magic into a a mixture wasn’t actually as difficult as he thought it might be.

He had already heard about how void could, in its liquid or solid state, poison the land and stick around, so the idea was at least in the back of his head as something possible, the process was also not unlike binding a ward into an object.

Harlan wondered how thin the lines between schools of magic really were.

He hadn’t tried to learn imbibing or transformation more, he knew Balor was hard at work with the latter and he just didn’t feel like he had the time to do the former.

He had loosened himself quite a bit, he spent a lot more time with Yara who seemed to just enjoy his company and they gave books back and forth to discuss.

He never thought that he would spend so much time reading and enjoying it, they read every subject from history to romance, she had actually been sending a lot of romance novels to him lately.

He ignored the hint, outside of Amber nobody knew his reasons, but he couldn’t bring himself to be like that with somebody; he liked his friends, he didn’t like the idea of trying to be anything more, they were all children still anyway which made him feel even more awkward over the whole thing.

He was currently in his healing class, they had been figuring out how to reattach pieces of flesh that were unharmed, next month would be continuing to do this but with flesh that was damaged.

He wondered when the complex things would start, other than broken bones almost everything they were learning about was surface layer, they barely worked with muscle even.

They would all end up as masters of first aid and non fatal wounds before their school year was done, then they would start as beginners of the advanced parts of the body and master them before their third year.

Harlan yawned as he left the class, it had been 18 days since he last slept, this was both a long time and a short time.

Without the academy’s mana density he would be wiped out after every few days of overnight magical work, yet if he didn’t do those things he could’ve been up for months on end without much issue, each time he pushed himself too hard it cut his stamina severely.

He thought back to when he first came here and ended up sleeping through merchantry because he went far over his limits.

Adina poked his ribs, she was still wearing the glasses, every time he saw them it still made him upset.

She moved around him with her hands behind her back and bent over.

It hadn’t dampened her spirits that she had to wear them again because she knew that it kept Harlan from doing something stupid.

“So, you’ve been getting close to Yara, are you planning anything with her?”

He froze at the question, he hadn’t been, but he expected that she would be upset at the idea that he was.

“No, we are just good friends, like you and me.”

Without breaking the interlocking of her fingers she moved her hands over her head and to her front.

“Now I know what we look like to other people. I don’t know why you don’t want to move forward, but if you keep things civil it won’t mess with your friendship even after it is over.”

“Oh? So you think that it would end? Maybe I should just prove you wrong.”

“Yara will go back to the Golden when she is done at the academy. I am sure she just wants some experience before she has to live the rest of her life in a desert.”

It was something that everyone independently decided was best left unsaid, it was a dampener on their time together to know that there was a time limit before they could never see each other again.

“You seem to be pushing us together, I expected you to be upset.”

“You keep dodging my requests to explain why you won’t enter a relationship with me, because I know you want to and I want to, so I figured I should see if you were just blanket banning the idea.”

Ximena walked next to Harlan and felt her cheeks redden as they spoke, she would be happy for both of them if they would just finally do it since they wanted to.

But having to hear about it all put her in an awkward position and most of the other students moving down the hallway felt the same way, or they felt burning anger at Harlan.

The students from Reino considered her a freak openly in love with somebody they didn’t consider a real person, while the students of Ragne noticed that she was actually cute, the same could be said about Yara.

His fights with Liat had only gotten faster and his body was growing to the point that it was a fair fight if she didn’t use magic

Both sides had no desire to deal with the boy who didn’t flinch at a broken jaw and shattered stone with his punches should they wrong one of them.

“Just drop the subject. Anyway, here we split up. See you two later.”

The warmagic classes began to focus on counter warspells.

If nobody blocked them then every battle would end after the first volley killed everyone, so the job of a warmage was more often to focus on making sure nothing hit their side while trying to slip something through to the other side.

Sepul once said that 80% of all energy that a warmagic uses goes into defense, while the last 20% could still turn the tides.

Harlan was once again banned from using void, it didn’t make a good class if he shut down the enemy spells and then nobody could cast anything for 10 minutes.

Both sides sat in a trench 600 feet from the other while in the middle a set of pillars represented their troops.

The goal was to have more pillars left standing than the other side after a period of 5 minutes.

Sepul enjoyed this game when he invented it 160 years ago, yet it never caught on like he wanted to since a stray warspell would kill anybody that it hit.

To make the headmaster agree to let him use it for training he had to watch everyone very carefully.

The normal method would be two mages standing at an angle to one another and launching their spells with them clashing in the center.

Harlan went with the strategy of slow and steady, he never struck first.

He prepared as big of a spell as he could while still letting it be something that he could send off as soon as his opponent sent out their spell.

The downside was that if his opponent happened to send something that had a direct elemental advantage then his longer casted spells would lose a lot of their use.

His enemy went with meteor, it had a very long cast time due to them being on a flat area and the stone needed to be lifted high up, it was more often cast using the tops of mountains.

Its physical nature made it hard to block from a distance, even if he used a big bolt of lightning to shatter it the stone would splinter off into a rain of deadly shrapnel that might do more damage than not destroying it in the first place.

Harlan had time, both of them intended to end this with one move.

It wasn’t explicitly stated that they had to actually use only warmagic spells.

Harlan, unlike most of the rest of the class, had actually studied many more situational spells, and while everyone had a slightly different way of casting them, he doubted anyone here would add anything that would stop his plan.

As the meteor got closer Harlan launched a fast spear of stone roughly 15 feet long and 9 inches around with a large ball on the end at the mass of rock.

As they connected the spear struck inside and the center of gravity shifted due to the runes of a gravity spell on the ball.

The meteor that should’ve landed in the middle of Harlan’s forces instead hit behind his enemy units and the resulting shrapnel storm wiped out 60% of them along with 10% of Harlan’s forces that were closer to the front.

Harlan spoke with his opponent afterwards and explained how he could’ve countered the spear by shaping the stone to angle blows like that away from it.

Most people used their spells as taught and barely changed them, a big rock is good, a big rock with a little bit of shaping was much better, and yet most people also had a hard time understanding these things until they saw them in action.

He wouldn’t even understand it as much as he did if he didn’t look at Dearil’s notes on deflection angles for golems.

More than that nobody taught anyone how to carve runes due to the inherently dangerous nature of it, had Harlan’s spell activated sooner or later his attack using his enemies spell would’ve failed.

Harlan would be going back home for just the day tomorrow, none of Amber’s group would be there this time, they had each been there at least once and mostly they just wanted to introduce themselves.

Today however, he would be meeting with Adina in his room, privately.

As soon as she stepped inside she threw her glasses against the wall, she would fix them when she went to leave, but for now that helped her vent about wearing them again.

She sat on a couch with her hands behind her head and her ankles crossed.

“Harlan. Do you think I should really leave Reino?”

“Again? I’ll repeat it as many times as you want to hear it. I will always be there for you when you leave, since I know you won’t be able to stay there too long now that you have an idea of what people who aren’t pieces of shit are like. You always have a place in my home as a dear friend.”

She stretched and her muscles loosened.

“Thanks. I needed that.”

Yet there was something else she wanted to ask.

“Harlan, I think we finally need that talk.”

“Which one? I can think of a handful of ‘that talks’ that we could have.”

“Religion. You say your gods are real, my people say they are evil things pretending to be gods to lead the world astray.”

“Alright, do you want me to explain everything? Or do you want me to be kind?”

She pursed her lips, unsure how the first option would go, she hoped that she wouldn’t believe everything Harlan said, but she also knew he was potentially the one person who would never lie when giving a direct answer to her.

“Which one do you think I should pick?”

“I am not picking for you, this is something you can either hear or not, but I can’t put it back in its box once you hear it. Do you feel like you want to take that step into the unknown? Is it worth the risk to you?”

“Don’t do that. I just… Tell me the truth, do it.”

The pit in her stomach only worsened as he started to talk, she had always had faith if nothing else, one of the things that stopped her from just giving up and ending it earlier in her life was her fears that she would damn her soul if she took her own life.

Then he finally said the words that she knew he was going to say, the thing that got people branded as heretics and led inquisitors to take them away in the night to a bigger town for public execution.

Fae.

The most cursed creatures on Aarde, mischievous, sometimes helpful, but always a danger, bound by rules very few understood and fewer felt safe actually putting into practice because they could trip up on some other rule they didn’t know about.

“Stop, stop, just…”

She sat up, her skin felt cold under her robes.

She first quivered and denied it to herself, then to Harlan.

A crisis of faith was never easy, it had been a pillar to her that she could lean on when she had nobody else to talk to, to hear from the only person she felt was another pillar to her words that were supposed to make her hate him shook her.

Then the stress got to be too much and she threw up, Harlan got some towels to clean things and she was gibbering how she was sorry among other things he didn’t understand.

He sat across from her and handed her a cup of tea to wash the taste out of her mouth but she could barely drink it between her sobbing and her shaking hands, so he sat next to her and helped.

She was torn between pushing him away and grabbing hold and just crying into his chest.

Finally she had calmed down.

“I am going to go to sleep.”

It was barely past 7.

“Do you want me to walk you to your room?”

“No. I am fine.”

She got up and walked to her room without another word.

He could feel her mind from well over 100 feet away at this point, they had a strong connection to one another.

He stepped out of his room and followed behind her outside the range of her senses to make sure she was alright, then he stepped back once she entered her room.

Even with the golems patrolling he didn’t feel safe leaving it to them, they were honestly disappointing to Harlan.

His only explanation was that they were worried about somebody making a spell that somehow controlled them and would use them against the students.

It wasn’t an unfounded worry either, the headmaster needed to personally upgrade each of them since his connection to the web of minds was actually a backdoor into them.

Golems had no true minds, meaning the commands went directly to their souls without a filter if somebody gained access to their gem that held the soul.

The kingdom already knew this, most creations lacked this safeguard since the only real option was to either let a man who had no affiliation to them put his hands on every one of their most expensive and secret pieces of work, or having Harlan do it now that he gained the connection.

The king was unsure which one was more terrifying.