Chapter 35: Another Training Montage

My first day of training wasn’t nearly as productive as I had hoped, since Aster had way too many questions about what I was planning and my overall sanity. However, things really sped up on day two. I didn’t tell him nearly as much and just used the queen’s threat to incentivize him into helping me train with void magic. For the next stage of my plan to work, I needed to reach advanced class for void, temporal, and spatial magic, and doing that without a proper teacher would be nearly impossible, since these were considered the three hardest elements to learn.

Even at the academy, Aster was the only person, including teachers, to have reached advanced-class in all three. In contrast, only a handful of teachers had managed to reach that level with a single one of those elements. They were strange and abstract spells that required you to understand the world on a far deeper level than the other elements. Even with Aster’s aid, I expected this process to take decades. However, things moved far more quickly than I expected, partly due to Aster being an excellent teacher and partly due to my own experience with the elements.

Void was the element of nothingness, and learning its spells required you to fundamentally understand what it meant to have your existence erased from reality. This was considered essentially impossible without consecutive days or weeks spent in complete darkness and isolation. However, this also had a habit of driving the mage insane, so few mages attempted it. Thankfully, I had died hundreds of times by that point. I understand what it meant to die better than anyone else in the world, and as a result, I reached advanced-class void with almost no issue. Aster was certainly confused and a bit annoyed, since reaching the same level had required him to spend a whole month in a pitch black room, but he didn’t pry.

Spatial magic, meanwhile, was exactly what you’re probably expecting. It covered things like teleporting, scanning the space around you for people or objects, and even creating pocket dimensions that can store various objects. That last one is considered intermediate-class magic by the way, and yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how Sally was able to keep so many weapons and poisons in her dress, though I didn’t ask. I preferred the mystery when it came to her skills. That being said, while Pocket was a fun skill to play around with and had its own use in my bigger plan, my real goal was learning the advanced-class spell, Leap. This spell allowed one to move in a straight line to any point they could see.

Aster’s explanation about this spell was difficult to understand at first, but I quickly realized that he was just describing a Cartesian coordinate system. All Leap did was calculate the distance between two points and move the person by that amount. Of course, it was a bit more complicated than that. The spell also required a check to ensure that there was nothing in the location where the person was teleporting and to calculate the angle the person would be at after teleporting. However, the former was handled with simple collision detection, and the latter with quaternions. Okay, so quaternions are in no way simple, but I had worked with them enough when learning 3d modeling that I could at least figure it out here in a relatively short amount of time.

Finally, there was temporal magic, which I probably had the most experience with out of any element, since I was stuck in a time loop, though that didn’t really help me all that much. Instead, I once again used memories from my past life to help me better visualize this element. It may sound silly, but my experience with a TV remote was actually helpful here as it allowed me to create a very clear image of what it’s like to rewind, fast-forward, slow down, speed up, and pause something. Of course, this mental image alone wasn’t nearly enough to learn temporal magic, and this element ended up taking more time than spatial and void magic combined. It took so long that I briefly considered stopping at intermediate-class temporal magic, as the overall difference between the two would be pretty mild considering what I had planned, but, ever the perfectionist, I persisted.

Still, all told, reaching advanced class with the three elements had only taken me three years. That was remarkably fast, and thanks to Aster’s company and the variety of elements, it had not felt nearly as slow or repetitive as mastering healing magic. Even though Aster reset each day, like everyone else, and we ended up having the same conversation many times over, I was still continually surprised by some new line of dialogue he dropped. It also helped that every meeting with him began with him being shocked about how far I’d come in magic without him realizing. Of course, this was due to the years I’d spent repeating the same day, but as far as he knew, I had just spent the last school year diligently studying in my room without telling anyone for some reason.

Oh, and I noticed something else during this time as well. While I was going back and forth from Aster’s room, I started to overhear repeated conversations, as every hallway was filled with students complaining about one problem or another. I hadn’t noticed this during the five years I’d spent studying healing magic, as the infirmary was quite close to my room, while Aster lived on the other side of campus with the other boys. Though I ignored these at first, I gradually began to realize their true purpose, and couldn’t help but kick myself for not noticing them sooner. With this, I now had everything I needed to get my game’s best ending, and there was nothing that Eros or her pawns could do to stop me. This time, victory would be mine.