By the time class let out, a red-haired boy named Darvit had already sauntered over with the swagger of someone who had spent the entire lesson looking for an excuse to challenge somebody. "I, Darvit, challenge Corren to a duel," he announced grandly. "And if I win, Wrenna becomes my bride."
The laughter that followed was loud and immediate. Kaldric's expression, by contrast, went flat with disapproval. "You cannot set someone else's fate as your stakes without their consent," he said sharply. "Watch your words more carefully next time."
Corren declined the challenge outright, unbothered by the laughter still rippling through the retreating crowd. "It's our first lesson," he said. "We have too much still to learn before either of us should be dueling anyone."
Darvit muttered something under his breath and stalked off, humiliation trailing him more visibly than he'd probably intended.
Corren found Baris waiting outside the infirmary afterward, fully recovered and entirely unrepentant. "Why on earth did you cut yourself on purpose?" Corren asked.
"I was curious how it felt," Baris said, shrugging as though this explained everything satisfactorily. "Now I know. I won't do it again."
Corren doubted that very much, but let it go.
Spellcraft classes filled the late morning, and Corren found Wrenna already seated among the desks when he arrived, looking small and a little lost among rows of unfamiliar faces until she spotted him and her whole posture eased at once.
"Hey, Wrenna," he said, sliding into the seat beside her.
Her smile at seeing him carried real relief in it, more than the moment strictly warranted, and she leaned in close before he'd even fully settled, her voice dropping to an urgent whisper. "I have to tell you something. There's a boy who's been following me. He's told me he loves me three separate times today. I've turned him down every single time and he won't take the hint."
Corren didn't have to think hard about who that might be. "Red hair? A bit too confident for someone who lost a duel challenge before lunch?"
Wrenna's eyes went wide. "How did you already know that?"
"Don't worry about him," Corren said, a smirk tugging at his mouth. "I'll deal with it."
Their instructor arrived a moment later, a woman with a commanding presence and a voice pitched to carry across every desk in the room without effort. She introduced the five schools of magic in turn, destruction, illusion, conjuration, healing, and alteration, walking through examples of each with the crisp efficiency of someone who had given this exact lecture more times than she could count.
"To pass this class and earn the rank of mage," she said, "you need either a C-rank spell in each of the five schools, or a single S-rank spell in one school alone." She dismissed them to self-study shortly after, and the room emptied into the corridors buzzing with quiet ambition.
The alchemy classroom, by contrast, came alive only after dark, lit by the sickly, flickering glow of bubbling flasks and oddly colored liquids that made the whole room smell faintly of vinegar and something harder to name. Most students avoided it entirely in favor of swordsmanship or spellcraft, leaving alchemy to a handful with genuine ambition or genuine strangeness, and Renwick arrived precisely on time, not a second early or late, radiating a quiet authority that quieted the small room instantly.
"My methods are not orthodox," he warned them without preamble. "I will not lecture. I will not hand you lessons wrapped in bows. Most of you are only here because a Knight of the Realm requires all three disciplines, and I will not waste my breath convincing you to care about mine beyond what that requires." He explained their assignment in the same clipped tone: a C-rank health potion, a C-rank mana potion, a C-rank stamina potion, enough to pass, though he made it clear those three brews were the beginning of the craft, not the whole of it, if any of them cared to go further.
Corren went straight for the library the moment class let out, drawn by the familiar smell of dust and neglected paper that hit something deep and nostalgic in whatever part of him remained Kael Richards. He found the shelves criminally under-visited, ancient texts gathering cobwebs that no one in this world seemed to consider a tragedy the way he did, and spent hours combing through them for the ingredients behind every S-rank potion the academy's library still had record of.
He found what he needed eventually: a health potion requiring aloewater, golden lily, and phoenix feather; a mana potion requiring moonwater, lunar moss, and dragon scale; a stamina potion requiring honeywater, ginseng root, and griffin claw. He wrote it all down with the careful precision of a man cataloguing evidence, and carried the notes to a merchant in town the following day, hoping against hope the prices might be reasonable.
They were not. The merchant's eyes bulged at the list before he named a figure well past a hundred million gold ducats, and Corren walked away from the stall with his notes still clutched to his chest and no clearer idea of how he'd ever afford to become the alchemist he wanted to be. It was, he reflected on the walk back to the dormitory, the first genuinely unsolvable problem he'd run into since arriving in this world, and something about that novelty was almost refreshing, in the same way a difficult manuscript used to be refreshing, right up until the frustration of it caught up with the novelty and left only the frustration behind.
Night training became a habit before the first week was even out. Once Baris's snoring filled their room and the rest of the dormitory had gone quiet, Corren slipped out through the window, dropping soundlessly into the courtyard and crossing to the teachers' quarters under cover of dark, heart hammering the whole way with a nervous energy that had nothing to do with any physical exertion.