Chapter 11 — Born Again, Same Glasses
He landed in a bush.
Not beside a bush. Not near a bush. Directly, completely, and with impressive thoroughness — in a bush. The kind of bush that had opinions about uninvited guests and expressed those opinions through the medium of small sharp branches arranged at every possible angle.
Raj lay in it for a moment staring up at a sky that was very blue and very normal looking and breathing carefully while the bush finished making its point.
Then he sat up, pulled a branch out of his hair, and took stock.
Body — present, functional, approximately the same age he had been when he died which he estimated at seventeen, maybe eighteen. Same lean build. Same hands. He touched his face. Same glasses, which raised immediate metaphysical questions he decided to table for later. Clothing — his scout gear was gone, replaced by something simple, dark trousers and a plain shirt, the kind of neutral unremarkable outfit that a goddess with good instincts might choose for someone who needed to arrive without context.
He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked around.
He was in a park. A large, well maintained park with stone paths and old trees and the particular manicured quality of a space that belonged to something institutional and important nearby. Beyond the tree line he could see a building — large, gothic, familiar in the very specific way of something he had only ever seen in a description.
Magic academy.
The goddess had good aim. He would give her that.
He stood up, extracted himself from the bush with the remaining dignity available to him, and brushed leaves off his shirt. A bird on a nearby branch watched this process with what felt like judgment.
"Not a word," Raj told it.
The bird flew away.
The academy gates were a ten minute walk from the bush and Raj used the time to observe.
The city around the academy was mid-sized, clean, clearly built around the institution rather than the other way around — the roads all angled toward the gate, the shops along the main street catered to students, the whole place had the energy of somewhere that took education seriously and wanted you to know it. People moved with purpose. A few of them had mana visible — faint attribute glows around their hands or shoulders, the passive leak of people who weren't bothering to suppress.
Fire. Water. Wind. Earth. Lightning. He catalogued them automatically, old habit, and noted the distribution. Mostly single attributes. One person near a bakery had what looked like a dual fire-wind affinity and was apparently unaware of how unusual that was based on the complete absence of anything remarkable about their morning.
Raj kept his own mana completely suppressed. Also old habit.
The academy gate was large and iron and flanked by two stone pillars with enchantments baked into them — detection wards, passive, scanning for hostile mana configurations in anyone who passed through. Standard security. He walked through them and felt the scan run over him and return nothing because he was putting out approximately the mana signature of a mildly damp rock.
Inside was a courtyard. In the courtyard was a table. At the table sat a harassed looking young man in academy robes surrounded by stacks of paper and the energy of someone who had been processing new student registrations since before dawn and had achieved a state beyond tiredness into something philosophical.
Behind the table was a queue of approximately thirty students.
Raj joined the back of it.
The queue moved slowly.
Raj spent the time observing his future classmates with the attention of someone who had spent a year reading combat situations and could not turn it off. The student in front of him was tall, broad, with the passive red glow of a fire attribute that he was absolutely not suppressing — it flickered off him in small waves every time he shifted his weight, which was every thirty seconds, because he was the kind of person who could not stand still. He had the build of someone who had been training since he could walk and the expression of someone who found queues personally offensive.
Two people ahead of him was a girl with her nose in a book, silver-blonde hair, wind attribute glowing faint blue at her fingertips as she turned pages without using her hands. Behind Raj someone kept accidentally sending small lightning sparks into the ground and apologizing to the ground each time.
Normal people, Raj thought. Genuinely, straightforwardly normal people doing normal things.
He felt something warm settle in his chest.
This, he thought, is what I asked for.
"Next."
He stepped up to the table. The harassed young man looked at him with the eyes of someone for whom all new students had blurred into a single continuous new student some hours ago.
"Name."
"Raj."
The man waited. "Family name?"
Raj opened his mouth. Closed it. His actual family name was from a world that did not exist here and would mean nothing to anyone and would raise questions he did not have answers for that would not cause suspicion at all.
"Just Raj," he said.
The man looked at him over his papers. "Just Raj."
"Yes."
"Like — one name. Singular."
"Is that a problem?"
The man looked at his papers. Looked at Raj. Made the face of someone deciding that this was not a battle worth fighting at this stage of the morning. "Fine. Attribute?"
This was the question Raj had been thinking about since the park. The goddess had confirmed his all-type affinity carried over. In this world all-type was apparently the stuff of myth — meaning the moment he demonstrated it he would become the most interesting person in every room he entered indefinitely.
He had done interesting. He was tired of interesting.
"Fire," he said.
The man wrote it down without looking up. "Previous training?"
"Some self-study."
"Placement test is this afternoon. Main hall, second floor. Don't be late." He stamped a form and handed it across. "Welcome to Aldenmoor Academy. Next."
Raj took his form and stepped aside.
He stood in the courtyard for a moment, form in hand, looking at the academy building properly for the first time. It was large and old and slightly intimidating in the way that places built to contain a lot of knowledge tended to be. Students moved through it in streams, talking, arguing, demonstrating small attribute tricks to each other with the casual showing-off energy of people who had just arrived somewhere new and were establishing themselves.
Normal, Raj thought again. Wonderfully, completely normal.
Then someone ran directly into him from the left at considerable speed.
The impact was — significant. Raj had excellent reflexes from a year of scout training and still barely managed to not go completely down, catching himself on one foot with the instinctive balance adjustment of someone who had been hit by considerably worse and learned to compensate. The person who had run into him was less fortunate — they bounced off him, which given that Raj was not physically large said something about their momentum, and went down in a tangle of academy robes and long dark hair and what appeared to be approximately forty loose pages of notes that launched into the air and began a leisurely descent across the entire courtyard.
"Oh no," said the person on the ground, looking at the pages. "Oh no no no—"
She scrambled up immediately — dark hair, bright brown eyes currently wide with horror, fire attribute blazing completely uncontrolled in her panic, which was setting the corners of the descending pages gently on fire one by one.
"The notes," she said, reaching for them. "My notes, they're—"
"On fire," Raj said.
"They're on FIRE—"
He moved before thinking about it. Wind magic, tight and precise, gathering the pages from the air in a controlled spiral before they could drift further. Earth magic, grounding the fire attribute sparks before they caught anything else. The pages collected themselves into a neat stack and settled gently in front of her like they had simply decided to return on their own.
He cancelled the magic in the same motion, smooth and practiced, total output time approximately two seconds.
The girl stared at the neat stack of unburned notes.
Then she stared at Raj.
"You just used two attributes simultaneously," she said.
"Wind and earth, yes," Raj said, and then immediately wished he could put that sentence back in his mouth because that was exactly the kind of thing a person who had told the registrar their attribute was fire would not say.
Her eyes narrowed. Not hostile. Interested. The specific sharpened interest of someone whose brain had just received a piece of information that didn't fit and wanted to understand why.
"You registered as fire," she said. Not a question. She had been in the queue. Of course she had been in the queue.
"I have a broad application," Raj said carefully.
"That's not what broad application means," she said. "Broad application means you can use adjacent elements to your primary. Wind and earth are not adjacent to fire." She tilted her head. "What are you actually?"
Raj picked up the last stray page from the ground and handed it to her.
"Just Raj," he said.
She took the page. Looked at him for a moment longer with those sharp interested eyes. Then she collected her notes, tucked them under her arm, and extended her other hand with the directness of someone who had decided to table the mystery for now but absolutely had not forgotten it.
"Sana," she said. "And thank you for saving my notes. My professor would have failed me for losing them two hours before placement."
"Don't mention it," Raj said, and shook her hand.
She walked off toward the main building. After three steps she turned back. "You should probably work on your cover story before the placement test," she said helpfully. "The instructor tests every attribute individually."
Then she was gone through the main doors.
Raj stood in the courtyard holding his registration form.
Two hours in, he thought.
He pushed his glasses up his nose and followed her inside.
End of Chapter 11