Chapter 28: Professor Ines And Comfortable Elements.
The hall for Practical Casting was a big, empty room entirely devoid of anything except the small podium that was placed in the direct center of the room.
The instructor arrived a whole ten minutes after the class was supposed to have started.He was a tall, rugged man with a confident smirk stretched on his face who introduced himself as;
"Ines, just Ines".
"Just Ines," he repeated, when nobody in the room responded fast enough for his liking, dropping his weight against the podium with the easy confidence of someone who’d never once doubted a room would eventually catch up to him.
"No titles. I’ve got them, technically, but I stopped using them the day I realized ’Magister’ just meant students spent more time bowing than casting, and I’d rather you cast."
He looked out over the room—considerably smaller than either of the two lecture halls, maybe thirty students scattered loosely in a circle across the bare stone floor—with the assessing look of a man deciding exactly how much chaos he was willing to permit before lunch wore off.
"Ten minutes late," he said, before anyone could bring it up.
"It was not an accident, I’m not busy enough for that to happen. I wanted to see who’d actually show up on time versus who’d wander in five minutes after thinking they’d beaten the deadline. Tells me things."
It was a lie, even Elian could tell that.
He didn’t elaborate on the things part, or whether the information had been useful at all. Which Elian guessed rightly, was a lie as well.
"Anyway. Practical Casting. You’ve all had theory this morning, presumably, so you know the difference between Command and Alignment now, or at least you’ve written it down somewhere you’ll forget to study."
A ripple of quiet laughter, more genuine than the polite kind Aldous’s dry jokes usually earned.
"Good. Forget it for the next hour."
Professor Ines pushed off the podium, pacing now, restless in a way that read as physical rather than nervous.
"Theory tells you what’s happening. It does not tell you what it feels like, and feeling is the only thing that actually matters once something’s coming at you and you don’t have time to recite a definition."
He stopped near the front row, looking the assembled first-years over with something that might have been amusement or might have been genuine assessment—Elian couldn’t quite tell which, and suspected that ambiguity was probably deliberate.
"Alright, rule one." He held up a single finger.
"You will get this wrong today. Repeatedly. Loudly, in some cases, if the scorch marks on this floor are any indication of past classes. I do not care. I would be more concerned if you got it right immediately, because that would mean you already knew how to do this, and if you already knew how to do this you wouldn’t be in a first-year practical class, you’d be out there embarrassing me on a battlefield somewhere."
"Rule two." A second finger.
"Nobody laughs at anybody else’s mistakes in this room. I don’t care how funny it is. I will personally demonstrate exactly how much worse my first attempts looked on you, and I promise you it will not make you feel better, it will just make you uncomfortable on my behalf."
He let that settle a moment, then clapped his hands together once, sharp, the sound cutting cleanly through the room’s remaining murmur.
"Alright. Everyone up. Spread out, give yourself room to be bad at this without setting your neighbor on fire."
He was already moving toward a rack along the far wall, pulling out a set of blunted training foci, and an opaque ball of marble.
"We’re starting simple, first we find your comfortable element. Then small elemental discharges, same basic form your tutors probably drilled into you before you got here. I’m not interested in your form today. I’m interested in what happens the first time it doesn’t work the way you expected, because that reaction—especially that specific, unguarded half-second—tells me more about how you actually cast than a month of theory ever could."
His eyes swept the room once more, and this time they landed, briefly, deliberately, on Elian.
"Some of you," he said, "are going to find that half-second more interesting than others."
He went to the student closest to him, holding out the marble to the nervous looking boy.
"The process is simple, just place your hand on the stone and push in a faint trace of mana, I will be able to tell the element that you’re the most comfortable with after that."
The boy placed his hands on the marble after a small moment of hesitation, and professor Ines encouraged him, telling him to relax and slowly push out his mana.
The stone glowed bright red.
"Fire, the most suitable element for you is fire. You’ll only exclusively do fire magic for today."
Then he moved to the next student without waiting for a reply.
It took a whole ten minutes for the teacher to finally reach Elian, in the meanwhile were various stuff had happened that had the class suffocate themselves trying not to laugh. The man was covered in char and various other things when he reached Elian, telling him to place his hands on the stone with an encouraging smile.