Ch 8 Escape

“M-me?”

Lenia’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. She pointed a trembling finger at her own chest, looking at Asterion.

It was obvious she didn’t believe for a single second she could actually pull this off.

She was an open book.

Asterion could easily guess what she was thinking.

Her previous attempt was so unstable that she had risked blowing her own fingers off, and now this truant was volunteering her to succeed the same technique in front of the strictest professor at Aeterna Academy?

However, he just looked at her calmly.

“If she does it this time, is the expulsion off the table, professor?” Asterion asked.

Professor Sylvaine von Eckert raised a single, skeptical eyebrow.

“…Are you claiming that Lenia can suddenly perform chantless casting now?”

“Wha-what are you talking about, Ivan?” Lenia hissed under her breath. “You saw it! I can’t do it!”

She acted as if Asterion had just shoved her off a cliff into a pit of hungry wyverns.

“She can do it. She just slipped a little earlier,” Asterion said simply, ignoring her panicked tugging.

At Asterion’s assertion, Professor Eckert’s mouth opened and closed silently like a beached fish. Normally, these were terms he would absolutely never accept. Words like “do-over” were the absolute bane of Eckert’s rigid existence.

Magic was a science of precision; it did not offer second chances on the battlefield, and therefore, Eckert did not offer them in his classroom.

However, right now, he found himself surprisingly persuaded by the boy’s bizarre confidence.

Why? Even Professor Eckert didn’t understand himself.

Was it because he had just witnessed a level of magic that defied the known laws of reality?

Or was it because his entire, rigid worldview regarding arcanology had just been shattered once?

“…Very well. Lenia, try it,” Eckert’s permission fell slowly from his lips. His mouth was actually trembling.

“M-me?” Lenia squeaked, practically jumping out of her skin. The twenty pairs of eyes swiveled to look at her, making her want to sink into the floorboards.

But the reality of the stakes crashed over her. Humiliating herself once more was nothing compared to just accepting the expulsion without trying.

She swallowed hard and nodded.

“I-I’ll try! Thank you for the opportunity, professor!”

As expected, thought Asterion.

Right now, there couldn’t be anything more urgent in her life than avoiding expulsion.

Fear was an excellent motivator, but desperation?

Desperatoin was the ultimate catalyst for breaking through a magical plateau.

Taking a deep, shaky breath, Lenia slowly stepped back up onto the elevated dais. She was a lone leaf trapped in a hurricane.

Her knees were knocking together, and the hem of her blue robes fluttered with the tremor wracking her frame.

It was obvious she was still paralyzed by nerves.

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And the suffocating silence of the classroom wasn’t helping.

However, Lenia gritted her teeth and slowly extended her hands toward the ruined, still-steaming target dummy at the front of the room.

Right at that moment, Asterion’s sharp gaze caught sight of her hands.

He noticed the thick calluses on her middle finger from gripping a pen for hours on end; the worn-down, smooth fingerprints from desperately flipping through rough parchment pages; and finally, the faint, burn scars dotting her knuckles—the undeniable hallmark of someone who practiced [Fireball] often.

It was likely the result of her stubbornly attempting the chantless casting method over and over again.

She had zero natural talent, but she was trying to bridge the gap with sheer perseverance.

And that reminded Asterion of a certain magic nerd.

Feeling a sudden, unexpected pang of nostalgia, Asterion leaned in slightly and whispered under his breath, pitching his voice low so only she could hear it.

“This time, when you ignite the mana, pull one of your hands away faster.”

Lenia flinched slightly, but didn’t turn around.

From Asterion’s observation, it seemed she instinctively brought both her hands close together to physically lock in the directional coordinates of her mana cube. Asterion, of course, didn’t need any physical gestures whatsoever, but for an amateur like Lenia, that physical anchoring was probably crucial to her visualization process.

Her problem earlier was that because she had removed the vocal chant, she had unconsciously overcompensated by physically holding the “Condensing” phase for too long.

If she could just let that bottleneck flow smoothly and trigger the ignition phase faster, the [Fireball] would effortlessly project forward.