“Finished up on your work?” Mr. Tona asked Sage Yeltz, earning him an irritated glare.

  Aurelius sat on his couch awkwardly, staring innocently at the coffee table with his hands clasped neatly on his thighs.

  After the discovery of Dr. Varian on Campus grounds, the Academy had granted Sage Yeltz and Mr. Tona a temporary office in the faculty towers.

  This was an attempt to accommodate their investigations into the Fae and ensure a comfortable time at the Academy over their 2 months worth of duty at the school.

  The office was simply furnished with a single bookshelf, a plain wooden desk, 2 couches and a coffee table. There were 3 crates of books on the ground, with Sage Yeltz apparently having brought them in to line the empty bookshelves.

  The Sage seemed rather comfortable on her cushioned chair at her desk, sipping her coffee. However, her perpetually foul mood seemed to paint her in a rather menacing manner befitting that of a glum dragon resting in its nest.

  With an impatient swipe of her hands, she politely gestured to her old mentor to kindly ‘screw off’.

  “Go back to the office, old man. We’re not paying you to stand around like a lost little lamb.” She growled, taking another sip of her coffee, scowling very intently at the old man.

  “Well, would my apprentice kindly send me off to the Tower? You wouldn’t want a senior like me walking such a distance out of the barrier’s boundaries!” He replied cheerfully, completely ignoring the venom dripping from her stare.

  With a disgruntled nod, Sage Yeltz snapped her fingers, creating a line of geometric shapes to materialise in thin air.

  Mr. Tona smiled, and waved goodbye to Sage Yeltz, tipping an invisible hat to her in politeness inadvisably to her rather murderous face. Then, with a wink at Aurelius, he stepped into the line, fading from existence.

  Aurelius personally wasn’t sure what to make of that last wink that the eccentric man had given him.

  Some could say that he was actually quite bewildered by the gesture, given that the man had been interrogating him in a cell just the night before. What kind of mood swing was that?

  Additionally, that wink seemed awfully like a “good luck” and “get ready” rather than anything else more… positive.

  For an already nervous Aurelius, that wink did very little to calm his nerves for his first one-on-one session with the grouchy sage in front of him. In fact, it stoked them into a raging bonfire in his heart.

  “You, get your stupid ass off that couch and bring that chair over here.” She grumbled, taking another sip of her coffee.

  Aurelius’s bewildered expression snapped into terror as the Sage addressed him for the first time that day. He promptly complied, jumping up to his feet hurriedly as he pulled up a chair towards Ms. Yeltz.

  He could observe the steam emanating from her coffee, as well as the pleasantly bitter aroma as he started to sit down on the wooden chair in front of her desk.

  “Who the hell told you that you could sit down?” She barked in annoyance, gesturing at him to stand back up.

  Aurelius, with a gulp, shot back on his feet, frightened out of his mind.

  And… He immediately was struck by a question of what exactly he should do with his hands…

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  “Do you know what our time together would entail?” Ms. Yeltz asked, putting her feet up onto the table.

  Aurelius opted to just put his hands awkwardly in front of his crotch in a show of submission and modesty, looking past the sage’s face into the window with a petrified expression.

  The sage was dressed rather casually today, with a simple black shirt and black pants that both fit tightly around her muscular frame.

  “Err, no ma’am.” Aurelius replied, resisting the urge to wipe the sweat threatening to drip off of his face.

  Aurelius had no wish to offend this woman, especially not in an enclosed space such as this! After all, there were no witnesses to his… potential murder! Or something grim along these lines.

  He had no doubt that such a foul tempered woman had qualms about teaching him a… painful lesson…

  “Don’t take me for some violent sadist Mr. Vennor.” She commented, her face scrunching up in an angry frown.

  He had forgotten that the sage could read some of his thoughts… Aurelius froze, trying hard to empty his mind… again.

  “Sigh, we’ll need to teach you how to control your bloody thoughts another day.” The sage grumbled, rubbing her forehead with her fingers, looking almost regretful that she had taken him as an apprentice.

  With a wave of her hands, she started to give Aurelius her instructions.

  “Today, I want to observe your current level of magical competency. So I’ll be having you organise these books on the bookshelf.” She commented casually, waving her hands vaguely at the crates of books on the floor.

  “Do not drop a single book, and do not disturb me while I do my work.” She warned with a glare.

  With a gulp, Aurelius nodded, pushing down any rude thoughts that threatened to pop up into his head back into the depths of his mind.

  Aurelius closed his eyes, envisioning his soul reaching out to the mana in the room.

  He focused the currents of mana into a larger and larger mass, treating it as an extension of his own body. As the blob of invisible mana grew larger, Aurelius started to subtly shift his soul into his desired shape.

  “Manus Moveo” He muttered, using each syllable to reinforce his memory of the magic.

  The books started to lift themselves out of the crate under his command, floating unsteadily towards the shelf… He would start with maybe… three of them…

  Then, a bark from the sage caused Aurelius to lose all of his concentration.

  “HEY, no. I want you to do it one by one!” She yelled, causing the books to fall from the air onto the ground unceremoniously.

  Aurelius whipped his stunned face to face the sage.

  Individually? That’s ridicu- Aurelius’s thoughts were stopped dead in their tracks when he saw the sage and her narrowed eyes.

  Coughing lightly, Aurelius started to levitate the books one by one, pouring his concentration into them individually as he laid them carefully into the empty shelves…

  ???

  Horrible. Aurelius thought to himself.

  It took an hour to stock the books into the shelves, leaving Aurelius incredibly sweaty by the end. The prolonged use of such precise magic had strained his body and mind, putting him near the verge of fainting.

  However, the Sage looked completely unimpressed, as she let out a disgruntled sigh and gave Aurelius instructions for his training sessions.

  “Hmm, you will be reporting to me after school every weekday at 5pm. I recommend that you finish your dinner before then.” She instructed, taking a note in her notepad.

  …Have dinner before 5pm? So… like double lunch?

  “You have been given a fantastical and dragonshit role of Academy Student Ambassador by the school. So do inform everyone that tending to the visitors from the Commission is the reason why you frequent my office.”

  “Additionally, weekends will be reserved for some more in depth practice. I have been given permission to use one of the school gyms in the morning from 6 to 10 o’clock.”

  “I expect you to report on time or there will be extra physical training.” She finished, dismissing Aurelius with a wave of her hands.

  Using magic, she pushed Aurelius stumbling backwards out of the room, as he struggled to keep his shaky feet on the ground.

  Then, with a soft bang, the door immediately shut in his back, closing the doorway into what would now be associated with Aurelius as… hell.

  The bang of the door echoing through the hallways left Aurelius blinking in bewilderment. He was very much exhausted after that… practice? Chore?

  But there was a single, horrible question that had started to eat him up from the inside like a worm carving its way out of his body.

  Did she say to report at 6 AM on… Weekends?