The duel had technically begun several minutes ago, yet the arena floor remained untouched by either spellfire or steel.
Two students stood facing one another in the centre ring, one with a handaxe already drawn and light shining slightly in his palm, the other standing with empty hands and the loose posture of someone who had not felt threatened for even a second since stepping into the arena.
From the stands, the first-years shifted restlessly as early excitement curdled into bafflement.
They had come for spectacle, for the sort of match people talked about afterwards in loud voices over lunch, not this long, taut stillness that made the whole arena feel like it was holding a breath no one knew when to release.
The murmurs had started soft, then spread.
— What are they doing?
— Is this some kind of mind game?
— Carlen wouldn't need one.
— Did Soren Arden lose his nerve?
The words were not hard to hear.
There were too many of them, too many voices layered over one another, but that hardly mattered when the entire meaning pressed in from every side anyway.
Soren felt every stare like a weight across his shoulders and the back of his neck.
It made his skin feel too tight.
It made the hand around his axe-handle want to adjust, to fidget, to give away nerves he had no intention of showing.
But he did none of that.
His fingers remained where they were, his stance remained planted, and he kept his breathing even by sheer force.
He was anxious, painfully so.
But that did not mean he was going to move.
Across from him, Carlen Frenun studied him with a calm that bordered on detached curiosity.
There was no strain in the student's posture, no impatience, no trace of aggression waiting to spring.
If anything, he looked as though the noise of the stands had ceased to concern him almost as soon as it began.
Then, at last, Carlen gave a small nod, as if settling something privately.
"You were honest," he said.
Soren blinked once.
"What?"
"When I asked why you challenged upward when you clearly knew you couldn't beat me, you didn't posture, and you didn't try to make yourself sound brave." Carlen's tone was level, conversational, despite the arena around them. "You admitted you were weak. Most people hate doing that in private. You did it in front of this many eyes."
The murmurs in the stands did not stop, but Soren barely heard them for a moment.
Carlen's gaze sharpened very slightly, not hostile, just more intent.
"You look at yourself like you don't think much of what you see," he continued, "but underneath that, there's still something useful there. You still want to get stronger."
Soren said nothing.
Because that was the problem, wasn't it?
The self-loathing, the anxiety, the constant sick sense that he was one wrong step away from making everything worse, all of it was there, heavy and familiar, but none of it had killed that hunger.
It had not killed the part of him that loved magic, that wanted more strength to survive, that wanted to understand, to reach, to claw his way forward no matter how absurd or ugly the effort looked from the outside.
Carlen glanced once at the handaxe in Soren's grip, then back at his face.
"If I cast a real spell at you, you'll lose immediately," he said, without cruelty and without softening it. "There would be no point in pretending otherwise. I'd learn nothing, you'd learn nothing, and this would be over in a few seconds."
Soren's grip tightened once, not in anger, just acknowledgement.
It was true.
He knew it was true.
Hearing it said aloud still landed hard, but not because it offended him.
It landed hard because there was nothing to argue with.
Carlen lifted one hand slightly.
"So instead, I'll help you once. Whether you make anything of that is your problem. I won't repeat myself."
Surprise hit Soren first, clean and abrupt.
'Help? Here? In the middle of this?'
The thought barely had time to settle before Carlen began moving mana, and the surprise vanished beneath a much sharper instinct.
Pay attention.
Soren's focus snapped into place so quickly it almost hurt.
Mana gathered above Carlen's palm in a pale distortion, the air itself seeming to tighten around the forming shape.
It began as a faint pattern, then sharpened into a proper circle, clean lines knitting together with effortless precision.
Carlen kept his hand angled so Soren could see clearly, which confirmed it, this was not some joke or taunt, he was genuinely showing him.
"How long have you been learning magic?" Carlen asked.
"About three months."
The answer came out before Soren could second-guess it.
It was the truth, near enough.
Whatever scraps of training the original Soren had possessed, they had been nowhere near enough to make a difference.
The status window right after transmigration had made that painfully obvious.
Skill levels that looked so miserable that it showed the previous owner of this body had never gotten very far at all.
Carlen gave a faint hum.
"So, since entering the academy. That makes certain things simpler."
The magic circle stabilised in his palm, bright and precise.
"This is the form Stellaris teaches first. Basic circles in the palm. You know that much."
"Yes."
"Good. Then answer properly. Can magic circles only be formed in the palm?"
"No."
He did not need to hesitate over that.
Even in the original game, even through the shallow lens of systemised visuals and half-explained combat, it had been obvious that truly skilled magicians stopped relying on palm circles early.
They spread circles above the ground, around their bodies, beneath targets, across the air.
The hand was just the beginner's anchor.
Carlen inclined his head once.
"Then how do you form one somewhere else?"
Soren opened his mouth to speak, but nothing useful came out.
Because knowing that something existed and understanding how it was done were nowhere near the same thing.
He had seen enough of this world to know the difference intimately by now.
He knew intermediate magic existed.
He knew higher-level magicians cast in ways he could not imitate.
He knew, abstractly, that the hand was only a starting point.
But he did not know the method.
"I don't know," he admitted.
Carlen's expression did not change.
"Of course you don't. If you did, you wouldn't still be where you are. So watch."
The circle in Carlen's palm broke apart.
Not with an ugly crack of sound, not with anything dramatic, just with the quiet collapse of a spell deliberately dismissed.
The ordered light thinned, fractured, and dispersed into the air like glowing dust caught in a breeze, and before the last traces had faded, Carlen was already gathering mana again.
This time the spell did not form in his hand.
The mana rose above it.
Soren's gaze sharpened.
At first it looked like nothing more than a concentration of pale blue light, but then he began to catch the structure hidden inside it.
The air around Carlen's raised hand was not empty.
Threads of ambient mana were being drawn inward, so fine and faint that Soren would have missed them entirely if he had not been staring as hard as he was.
They curved towards a fixed point above Carlen's palm, feeding into it, layering around one another, and as they gathered, the circle began to take shape in open air.
A ring.
Then a second line inside it.
Then smaller internal geometry, turning slowly as the spell stabilised.
Soren watched without blinking.
This was what Lilliana had meant.
Fight someone stronger, stand in front of a level you cannot yet touch, and even if all you can do is lose, the gap itself can still teach you something.
He understood it now in a way he had not before.
What Carlen was building was not just a stronger spell.
It was a different relationship with magic altogether.
He was not leaning on the familiar support of palm and skin.
He was anchoring the structure elsewhere and using the mana already present in the air to hold it steady long enough to complete it.
Soren tracked everything he could.
The direction of the ambient mana.
The rhythm of Carlen's breathing.
The way his focus did not harden so much as narrow.
The order in which the lines appeared.
The slight change in tension around the circle once his own mana entered the structure more fully.
He knew very well that seeing was not the same as mastering, that memory alone had limits.
Still, the opportunity in front of him was far too valuable to waste on defeatist thoughts.
If Carlen refused to repeat anything, then Soren would not miss a moment.
By the time the circle had fully stabilised, a fine sheen of sweat had appeared across Carlen's brow.
He opened his eyes.
"How did I do it?" he asked at last.
Soren frowned, replaying the sequence as quickly as he could.
Pieces were there.
He could feel them sliding against one another, not fully fitting yet.
The ambient mana had mattered, yet so had Carlen's own.
The air-borne structure had not simply existed on its own, it had been held together first, then completed.
"You used the surrounding mana to form the circle," Soren said slowly, "then added your own mana to finish it?"
Carlen's mouth lifted slightly.
"Close enough, but not quite. The surrounding mana did not form it, it only held the structure steady. The spell itself was still built with my mana."
He looked at Soren with a faint, measuring approval.
The circle dispersed with another controlled dismissal.
"What I just did is beyond you," Carlen said. "So I'll lower the level once. Keep up."
He closed his eyes again.
Around them, the arena had gone strangely subdued.
The whispers were still there, but thinner now, uncertain, as if no one quite knew whether they were still watching a duel or something else entirely.
The teaching assistants at the edge of the platform looked no better.
Yet none of them intervened.
Technically, the match was still active.
Neither combatant had stepped out of bounds, surrendered, or been incapacitated. Whatever this was, it still counted.
This time, the gathering mana moved differently.
Instead of lifting into the air above Carlen's hand, it sank.
Soren followed it down almost instinctively.
A faint pattern appeared at the sole of Carlen's foot, not in his palm, not floating above him, but fixed low, almost flush with the ground, a magic circle seated beneath his left foot like a luminous seal pressed against stone.
And then the world changed.
.
[Unique Skill [???] is showing signs of awakening.]
.
The notice flashed across Soren's vision, and in the same instant something cold passed through his left eye.
His pupil turned translucent.
The arena did not disappear, but it stopped looking like the arena.
The air was no longer empty space.
It was full.
Full of drifting particles, silver-blue dust suspended everywhere, of thin currents sliding past one another in layered streams, of faint eddies curling where bodies disrupted the flow.
Mana was everywhere.
It moved through the world in restless, beautiful patterns, some so delicate they resembled breath against glass, others denser, braided together like translucent cords.
Then his sight narrowed on Carlen.
He saw the mana inside him.
Not metaphorically, not as a vague feeling or a guessed-at impression, but directly, horrifyingly clearly.
A bright reservoir pulsed near the centre of Carlen's chest, and from it spread the activated lines of his magic circuits, branching through his body like a living network of luminous veins.
Mana surged through them in ordered motion, not chaotically, not as a flood, but as something directed with perfect control.
He saw it move down through Carlen's torso, into his leg, through narrowing pathways, compressing and refining as it travelled, until it reached his foot and bloomed outward into the forming circle below.
He saw, too, how the surrounding mana reacted.
The ambient particles nearest the spell bent towards it, not obeying Carlen in the same way his own mana did, but answering the shape being imposed, drawn into alignment, pressed into temporary structure.
For one suspended, impossible moment, Soren understood.
He understood what a magic circle really was.
Not just a symbol.
Not just a memorised pattern.
It was an instruction.
A structured array of commands imposed onto mana, telling it where to move, how to flow, what shape to take, and what function to perform.
The lines of a circle were not decoration; each line held meaning.
It was only then that Soren finally came to realise the truth behind magic circles.
————「❤︎」————