By the time Mordredt wrapped up the session, he had walked me through several gravity spells and assigned me to work through a handful of second circle ones on my own before our next meeting. I was to show him results tomorrow.
Honestly, once I got past the whole getting flattened into the floor experience, Mordredt was not that bad. He had a permanently serious face and carried an unfriendly aura around him like a coat he had been wearing for decades and forgotten to take off, but underneath all of that he was actually fairly straightforward to deal with. He explained things clearly, he did not waste words, and he did not seem interested in making things harder than they needed to be.
As long as you did not call him a kid. That part I was keeping firmly in mind going forward.
After the doors closed behind him I spent the remaining time before the next session running through the spells he had shown me, casting each one a few times until the formation felt clean and the timing was where I wanted it. The gravity circles were simpler than what Virgil had put me through and my hands were already finding the shapes easily.
The minutes passed and then the doors opened.
A figure stepped through and walked toward me at an unhurried pace.
She was tall. Very tall. Taller than Alexandra, which I had not expected, probably pushing two meters. Her purple hair was pulled back and tied up in a neat bun with two long bangs falling forward over her forehead on either side of her face. Her skin was a deep tan, the kind that only comes from a long and genuine relationship with sunlight. She wore a black crop top that left her midsection visible and showed off a set of well defined abs, with a long sleeve black jacket over it left open, and a pair of baggy black pants that fell almost to the soles of her heels.
Her eyes were a sharp blue, the kind that catches light like the surface of deep water and holds it, and her lips had a clean coat of red.
Why is every woman in this world this attractive? I had genuinely never seen an unattractive woman since arriving here. Not one. If I had not spent this long surrounded by Alexandra, Sephira, Londres and even that insufferable Andromeda on a daily basis, someone like this walking toward me would have had my full attention in a way I would not have been proud of.
As she got closer I caught something I had not noticed right away.
Her ears.
Long. Pointed. Sharp at the tip.
A dark elf. I thought, recognizing it immediately. And this was my first time actually meeting one in person.
There were three types of elves in this world. White Eyed Elves, Dark Elves and Moon Elves. All three fell under the Empire of Luntia, which shared a border with the Sun Empire. Unlike most empires which operated under a single ruler, Luntia was governed by three factions, one for each type of elf. The belief there was that no single ruler could adequately represent the whole, so the three factions shared the governance between them. It was an interesting system and from what I had read it actually worked reasonably well for them.
The elf stopped in front of me. I had to tilt my head back to look at her face properly, which was not a feeling I experienced often. The aura she was putting out was strong. Not Arthur strong, but in the range of sixth or seventh circle if I had to estimate. She was no one to be careless around.
As I was taking stock of all of this my gaze drifted slightly and I caught myself briefly noting certain other details about her before I caught it and redirected my attention upward.
"You like what you see, my prince?" She said, her tone light and teasing.
I coughed a couple of times and met her eyes. She had a cheeky smile sitting comfortably on her face like she wore it often.
"Good afternoon. I believe you have been assigned as my instructor."
She seemed mildly amused that I had not taken the bait. The smile widened slightly. "Yes. I will be teaching you the space element."
That was a slight surprise. Dark elves were primarily associated with the darkness element. Space was not unheard of for them but it was far from the norm. She was clearly one of the exceptions.
She rested one hand on her hip. "I will make sure our lessons are very, very pleasant, my prince." She winked.
I am fifteen ma'am. You are almost certainly centuries old. I thought. I kept that thought where it was.
"I forgot to introduce myself. I am Viserys."
"Nice to meet you, Instructor Viserys. I am Lucas."
She waved a hand. "You can drop the formality if you like. Instructor Viserys is fine, or just Viserys. Whichever you prefer."
"Instructor Viserys is fine." I said, without missing a beat.
The other option was not one I was willing to explore. If Alexandra heard that I was on a first name basis with a woman who looked like this, the conversation that followed would not be enjoyable for anyone involved. Least of all me.
"You are no fun." Viserys sighed with an ease that suggested she had said that to many students before. "Anyway. What would you like to learn about space magic?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Are you not the one deciding that?"
"I like to hear from my students first. What they want, what they are curious about. Especially when the student is as particular as you are." The way she put emphasis on that last part was slightly odd. I noted it but let it go.
"Then I would like to start with first circle space spells, beginning with teleportation."
"Good. Direct. I appreciate that." She tilted her head. "Why teleportation first?"
"Because it is the most useful thing the space element offers in a real situation. And because I already know how to do it through the martial arts path, which should make picking up the spell version faster."
Viserys opened her mouth to respond and then paused.
"Wait. You already know how to teleport?"
"Yes. I worked it out on my own."
A small lie, but a necessary one. The real answer was that a god had thrown me into open space and refused to collect me until I figured it out myself, and somehow I did not think that explanation would land the way I needed it to.
"Can I see?" She asked, softer now, genuinely curious.
I nodded, activated the space element and picked my destination, a spot just behind her. I blinked out and reappeared exactly where I had aimed.
When I looked up she was already facing me.
She had turned before I had finished arriving.
"How did you know where I was going to appear?" I asked.
"Two reasons." She crossed her arms and the smile on her face took on a different quality, less teasing and more engaged. "The first is that I am a space mage. When another person triggers a teleportation nearby I can feel the disturbance in the fabric of space itself. It is like watching a ripple form in still water before the stone has even landed. The second reason is that I could feel the destination point forming behind me before you moved. That is actually how non space mages with refined enough senses can track a teleporting opponent. The arrival point registers as a kind of pressure or pull in the area just before the teleporter appears. If your senses are trained well enough and you are sensitive enough to mana manipulation, you can read it."
That answered something that had been sitting in the back of my mind since the fight with Arthur in my room. He had been standing on the table, sword already thrusting, before I had even fully arrived. I had assumed at the time that it was pure experience and pattern reading but it was more than that. He had felt the destination forming and positioned himself there in advance.
To teleport you effectively needed to create two points at once. The origin where you were leaving from, and the destination where you were arriving. Both of those points existed for a brief moment before the movement happened. Anyone sensitive enough could read the second one.
"So teleportation is not actually that difficult to counter?" I asked.
"Yes and no." Viserys shook her head slowly. "It depends entirely on the gap in skill between the space mage and whoever they are up against. A space mage with high level control can shorten the window between establishing the destination and completing the move to the point where it becomes nearly impossible to react to in time. The destination still forms, but for only a fraction of a second. Not long enough for most people to process what they felt, let alone do anything about it."
She took a slow step forward. "On the other hand, a space mage who is still learning, someone whose movements are slow or predictable, can absolutely be read and countered by someone with the right training. You telegraph more when your control is rough. The window stays open longer."
She was looking at me with the same steady attention she had worn since I first teleported behind her.
"The goal is to close that window as much as possible. And that is exactly what we are going to work on."
I nodded slowly, turning it all over. The mechanics of it made sense when laid out like that. Every element of the space affinity seemed to come back to the same thing in the end: control. How precisely you could do what you were doing, how little excess you left behind, how small a trace you put into the air around you when you moved.
"Then that is what I want to learn." I said.
Viserys smiled, and this time it was a different kind of smile than the ones she had been wearing since she walked in. Less performance, more genuine.
"Good. Then let us begin."