"There exist four ways in which mana can manifest within a person's body."
The instructor's voice was measured, precise, the kind of voice that had spent decades lecturing students who were too afraid to ask questions.
She stood at the front of the private study, a silver-haired woman with spectacles perched on her nose and a posture that suggested she'd never slouched a day in her life.
"First, the crystallization of mana into tangible constructs, weapons, barriers, objects given form through will alone. Second, the manipulation of elements or specific chemical compounds. Third, mutations, abnormal biological changes that alter the witch's own flesh. And fourth, the projection of mana as intangible force, pressure waves, telekinetic fields, extensions of the self that cannot be held but can certainly be felt."
She paused, tapping her pointer against the holographic display. Diagrams of witches from centuries past flickered in the air.
"The Shaw family technique falls into the fourth category," she continued. "Sound manipulation. The ability to-"
"Why am I being forced to listen to material I learned when I was six?"
The instructor's pointer stopped mid-tap.
Neila Shaw sat at the polished mahogany desk, her chin propped on one hand, her blonde hair cascading down her back in waves that caught the morning light.
Her blue eyes were fixed on the instructor with an expression that hovered somewhere between boredom and contempt. She hadn't touched the notes spread before her. She hadn't opened a single textbook.
"I am aware of your proficiency, Miss Neila," the instructor said carefully. "However, the family has requested a comprehensive review before your entrance exam. A foundation must be-"
"A foundation I already goddamn know." Neila's voice was flat. "You've been here for three days. Three days of the same lecture. The same diagrams. The same examples. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I need to hear about the four manifestations of mana for the forty-seventh time?"
"That's not—"
"You're wasting my time." Neila stood. The chair scraped against the marble floor with a sound like tearing silk. "I hired you to teach me something I don't already know. Instead, you've been regurgitating the same basic principles that any half-trained novice witch could recite in their sleep."
The instructor's composure cracked, just slightly. "Miss Neila, I was engaged by your father to ensure-"
"Do you really think I care?" Neila's fingers curled around the edge of the desk. The wood creaked. "And I'm telling you that this is useless. Get out."
"I will not be dismissed by a—"
Neila snapped her fingers.
The sound that erupted from her hand wasn't a blast. It was a scalpel, a focused point of compressed air and mana that crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a heartbeat.
It struck the instructor in the chest, not hard enough to break bone, but hard enough to lift her off her feet and send her crashing into the wall of books behind her.
Leather-bound volumes rained down around her. The instructor slid to the floor, gasping, her spectacles askew, her carefully arranged silver hair now a wild tangle.
Neila was already walking toward the door.
A maid stood at the entrance, her uniform pristine, her face carefully blank.
The glass doors slid open at Neila's approach.
"The training grounds," she said. "And go fetch me a drink. Something cold."
"Yes, my lady."
Her heels clicked against the marble floors, the steady, measured rhythm of someone who had been walking these halls since she could walk at all. Servants pressed themselves against the walls as she passed, their eyes downcast, their movements still. They'd learned. They'd all learned.
{Neila Shaw}
The youngest daughter of the Shaw family, one of the four great families that have a massive influence over the academy, renowned for their family technique that has been passed down over generations to create intangible sound waves.
She strutted along the golden carpet, the hallways echoed from the sound of her heels.
"Go fetch me a drink or something".
She waved her hand for her servant like a dog, shooing her away.
"I'll be in the training grounds"
{Neila Shaw.}
The youngest legitimate daughter of the Shaw family. One of the four great families that held the Academy, and by extension, the entire witch population in their iron grip.
The Shaws were renowned for their sound manipulation technique, a bloodline ability passed down through generations, refined and perfected over centuries until it had become synonymous with their name.
Neila was the latest inheritor of that legacy.
She was also, according to her father's private physicians, a disappointment.
"I can't be a disappointment forever, can I?"
The hallway opened into the estate's private training hall, a vast, circular chamber with reinforced walls and a ceiling that arched forty feet overhead.
The lights adjusted automatically to her presence, dimming from their standby configuration to full illumination. Training dummies stood at attention along the far wall, each one a perfect anatomical replica of the human body, their surfaces gleaming with the faint shimmer of embedded mana sensors
She made her way into the estate's private training halls. The lights adjusted automatically to her presence.
The dummies lit up in sequence, crimson auras flickering to life around their torsos, their limbs, their heads. Dozens of them.
"Activate simulation, put a layer of mana around them".
She snapped her fingers
A shockwave bursted forth.
When the dust settled, the dummies were gone, reduced to smoking skeletons of twisted steel and melted sensor arrays. The concrete floor beneath them was cratered. The walls had sprouted new cracks.
Her hair, caught in the backblast, settled slowly around her shoulders.
"Again."
Her hair blew in the wind.
"Again".
The holographic projectors hummed. New dummies flickered into existence, their crimson auras blazing brighter than before.
"It's taking too much mana." Neila flexed her fingers, watching the faint tremor that ran through them. "Every time I push past the threshold, the efficiency drops. The compression is unstable."
She snapped her fingers once more.
She raised her hand. Mana gathered at her fingertips, not the unfocused burst she'd used before, but something tighter.
Something more controlled. A symphony of sound began to spiral around her index finger, invisible waves layering upon each other, building resonance, building pressure.
Then she released it.
The wave expanded exponentially.
The floor shook. The dummies rattled in their moorings, their crimson auras flickering wildly as the sonic assault tore through them.
By the time the echo faded, the training hall looked like a bomb had gone off inside it.
Neila lowered her hand. Her breathing was steady.
The door creaked behind her, as a servant came into the room.
A servant entered, a young man in the Shaw family's livery, carrying a silver tray with a single glass.
The liquid inside was yellow, thick, the kind of nutrient-rich concoction that was supposed to help replenish mana reserves.
"I have your drink, my lady."
Neila took the glass. Raised it to her lips. Took a single sip.
The taste hit her tongue like curdled milk and industrial solvent.
"This is undrinkable."
The servant's face went pale. "My lady, the kitchen prepared it according to—"
"Bend down."
"Yes m'am".
He dropped to his hands and knees on the marble floor, his head bowed, his back curved in perfect submission. Neila stepped closer, the glass still in her hand. She tilted it.
The yellow fluid cascaded over the back of his head, soaking into his hair, running down his neck, pooling on the floor beneath him.
"Does this taste edible to you? This is borderline dog food".
She bent over as she poured the rest of the cold drink over his head.
"You're trying to poison me aren't you"?
She smashed the glass against the side of his head.
Blood welled up instantly, a bright crimson line that traced a path through the yellow fluid and dripped onto the white marble.
The servant didn't scream. He bit his lip. He just stayed there, trembling, his fingers pressed against the wound.
"Remake this," Neila said. "And tell the kitchen that if the next batch tastes anything like this one, I'm banging his head on the table, understand?"
"Yes, my lady."
"And call the driver. I'm leaving for the Academy in ten minutes."
She turned away before he could respond. The training hall's lights dimmed automatically as she walked toward the exit, her mana signature fading from its active state to something more quiescent.
The elevator doors opened without being touched.
She stepped inside, and her reflection surrounded her, dozens of identical staring back from the polished steel walls. Small. Blonde. Blue-eyed.Neilas
A doll's face on a child's body.
She clutched her arms. Pressed her fingers into the fabric of her training clothes until the knuckles went white.
After a while, the doors slid open as a large wind blew in her face.
Neila hopped in the helicopter, the driver bowed his head.
Neila climbed in without a word. Crossed her legs. Folded her arms. Stared straight ahead.
"Drive quickly," she said.
"Yes, my lady."
30 minutes before the entrance exam.
The wind stirred the trees and rustled the grass below. Neila looked down from her helicopter at the crowd of witches gathering before the Academy gates—hundreds of them, their mana signatures blending together into a nauseating soup of anxiety and ambition. They'd come from every corner of the country, every minor family and upstart bloodline, all of them desperate to prove they were worthy of being turned into weapons.
"Pathetic," she murmured.
Her eyes caught on a figure near the front of the crowd.
Tall. Dark blue hair. Crimson eyes that seemed to burn even from this distance.
Lucy Walker.
A scowl twisted Neila's features. "If it isn't the Walker bitch."
The helicopter touched down, and Neila stepped out before the rotors had fully stopped.
She strode across the grass toward Lucy, her heels leaving small divots in the manicured lawn, her presence causing the lesser witches to part before her like water before a stone.
"Lucy Walker," she said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
"The freak among freaks. Your parents gave you away at birth, didn't they? Discarded you like garbage the moment they realized what you were." She stopped a few feet away, her arms crossed, her chin raised. "Don't even think of trying to be normal. You're a hideous freak wearing human skin, and everyone here knows it."
Lucy's smile didn't waver. If anything, it grew wider, a slow, deliberate curve of her lips that made her crimson eyes gleam like fresh blood. She chuckled, a soft sound that somehow carried across the silent crowd.
"Don't you have a mana deficiency?" she asked. Her voice was pleasant, almost conversational. "For a witch of your family status, that's just pitiful. The great Neila Shaw, a defective heir who can barely cast a couple of spells without running dry."
The crowd held its breath.
Neila smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who had been waiting for an excuse.
She snapped her fingers.
The sonic burst that erupted from her hand wasn't the focused scalpel she'd used on the instructor. It was a hammer, a wall of compressed air that struck Lucy square in the chest and launched her backward through the air like a rag doll. She crashed through the concrete wall of a nearby outbuilding, and the sound of the impact echoed across the courtyard like thunder.
Smoke rose. Rubble shifted.
Lucy crawled out of the hole.
Her arm was bent at an impossible angle, the elbow twisted backward, the bone visible through torn flesh. Blood dripped from her lips. But she was smiling. Still smiling.
And then her arm began to heal.
It wasn't slow. It wasn't gradual. The bones realigned themselves with a series of wet clicks, the torn muscles knitted back together, the skin sealed over the wound as if it had never existed.
Within seconds, Lucy was standing, whole, unmarked, her crimson eyes fixed on Neila with an expression that was almost amused.
The crowd erupted into whispers.
"Why aren't they doing anything?"
"The instructors—they're just watching."
"It's like they don't care."
"Mongrels!" Neila's voice cut through the murmuring, capturing every student's attention. "This isn't an academy. It's a puppet show, and you're all the puppets. You're beneath me. You'll be used, broken, and discarded, because you're all weak!"
She swept her gaze across the crowd, her blue eyes blazing with contempt. "You're going to die here. Most of you. And the ones who survive will wish they hadn't. Follow me, under my leadership! I promise that at the very least you'll all survive!"
Lucy responded with a scream of fury, launching a dozen razor-sharp tendrils of crystallized blood straight at Neila. The crimson streamers were fast enough to pierce steel.
And then the air stopped.
Neila didn't flinch. The tendrils were frozen in mid-air, trembling as if held by an invisible hand. A lean man with short blue hair and the Walker family's crimson eyes stepped between them, a gentle smile on his face. He'd caught the constructs with his bare hands.
"Now, now," Dominic said, his voice calm, almost cheerful. "Why don't you two calm down a little?"
"Elder brother, what are you doing"?
Lucy glared at him from the corner of her eye.
He clapped his hands together, the spell dissolving. "Let's not fight here," he said, his grin widening. He looked utterly at ease, a man whose very presence defused violence. But the students knew the truth.
Dominic Walker, the pride of the Walker family. His raw mana output was so immense that he could even rival the potential of even the student council president. Despite his sloppy technique, his power was undeniable. He was the undisputed second strongest.