When Agatha came back to the room, she was serene and smiling. Christie didn’t ask anything about it, nor did Agatha mention anything about her previous outburst. Why? Simple, neither of the girls considered that they needed to. Christie had promised to give her time before she left, and the redhead was going to respect that.

  And even then, they had understood themselves at the end of the conversation. The beautiful thing about communication was that when there were assurances in place, any further attempt was made redundant. Christie would wait for Agatha to initiate.

  In simpler terms, they trusted each other.

  So they went to sleep in the same bed as always and woke up rested as always, then dressed up as always with Agatha behind the wooden curtain and went to have breakfast together at the mess hall as always.

  It was so mundane that Christie couldn’t help but feel ever-so-slightly irritated. She wanted some acknowledgement of the events of yesterday, even if they were under a bad light. For better or worse, it had been an advancement, so acting like it never happened… it left her with a sour taste in her mouth.

  However it may be, it was time for classes. Physics had gotten more complicated and they were introduced to new fields of mathematics, but it wasn’t anything Christie couldn’t deal with, even with a half-working mind. History had also stopped being history as they finally reached the modern day and it shifted more to politics and warfare. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the subject had now turned into a substitute for any of the students who hadn’t picked a military subject. After all, this was still a military academy – and mostly dedicated to commanders, at that – so it made sense they shoehorned that curriculum here and there.

  Christie didn’t have anything against Jacobello Castellar and Novela Ashcroft, but their classes were more boring by virtue of not being Agatecraft-adjacent.

  And the day came to an end. Some physical training at the morning with René Dago then two other classes. This pace had made her totally exhausted the first year, but now that her body was beyond the physical training and having never had any problem with academics, Christie found herself perfectly rested yet bored.

  She knew that there wouldn’t be an answer today, tomorrow, or the day after that, yet she still found herself waiting for her ladylove to address that sensitive subject.

  Knowing better than to waste her time, Christie trained lapiloquia and summoned her agates as long as she physically could to follow the materialization and mindfulness lesson she had been instructed two years ago now until the day run out and it was dinner time.

  She met with Agatha in the mess hall, they ate and went to their bedroom together, and finally slept.

  Nothing had happened. Not any kind of violence, word-hurling, or distress, but that made it worse. Mundanity was killing her. It was comforting yet torturous. It was awful having to wait for an answer. For confirmation.

  Is this what Agatha felt when she was loving me in the first year, yet she did not have the courage to say so? Christie found herself thinking on the bed, her eyes wide open even though it was well past midnight. I mean, she did not have to wait for the answer to her confession… but she waited a long time before she even gave it to me.

  To say the least, Christie was feeling the effects of hypocrisy.

  ***

  Christie felt awful about herself. That was the conclusion she reached after several days of thinking and waiting. She had been hasty, and even though she had apologized, the damage was already done. The worst was that this wasn’t the first time that it had happened.

  So she decided to act like normal.

  Mundanity was the punishment she deserved. It was her fault for trying to push forward with this much aggressiveness. So she wouldn’t initiate. She would wait for Agatha to be the one to start anything, and if she never did… well, it wouldn’t be a punishment if that weren’t the case.

  The redhead put aside the love of her life for the time being and focused on her studies.

  “These last weeks we have tried to get more and more information out of the ground,” Sandra lectured. “But now it will be the time we give that final leap to hear everything the soil has to offer us.”

  They were once again down on the ground instead of the flying island. It had been a while since that first lesson on firm ground, as the rest had either been on the training grounds or in the classroom as Sandra taught them how to make simple defensive structures – that wouldn’t do much against a lapiloquist but were still nice to have – and to differentiate types of stone. Some were better at tension, others at compression, some were easier to command, others were easier to shape.

  Things like that.

  Not that interesting, but mundanity was a given to Christie by now. At one point, she had only wanted mundanity and peace, yet now it felt oppressive. Perhaps because she hadn’t kissed Agatha for a while. Sure, they slept together, held hands, and gave each other pecks, but there weren’t any of those maddening and long kisses that she loved so much.

  That she lived for.

  Abstinence wasn’t the right word. She didn’t lack anything; she just wanted more. Christie wanted to show how incommensurably big her love was, as massive as her sea of stone, yet she couldn’t initiate. Not anymore. She had misplayed too many times. She couldn’t even care about being the perfect girlfriend now; if she misplayed one more time, she might not even be a girlfriend.

  “Now, I want you to perform the same routine as always.” When Sandra spoke again, Christie was reminded of the small fact that she was in class.

  With a soft groan, Christie raised a pillar of bedrock and pressed her hands against it. She even summoned gauntlets of agate that she commanded with Embed as her control over her inner sea had increased enough for her to have a quarter of an hour. If she extrapolated her current growth, she would have a nonillion minutes at her disposal the next decade.

  She doubted that would be the case.

  Christie felt the call of the earth. Slowly but surely, in these supervised lessons, she had been able to get more information out of the substrate. But not that much more. At the start, she could only acknowledge the existence of the ground, just like a person might acknowledge the existence of colors because they could see them.

  Now she was recieving a bit more information like the shape of the ground. It wasn’t a complete mapping of the underground, but she had vague ideas where there might be crevasses and pockets of air and gas. But it required far too much concentration to be useful in a frantic setting like a battle. Not that she was currently worried about it, Sandra had repeated ad nauseam that this was Military Engineering and not a battle-related subject. It was more about the whole battlefield or even the war in its entirety.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Yet no matter how much the brunette teacher said that, Christie found her comprehension of Agatecraft – lapiloquia in specific – growing far faster with her classes than those of Advanced Lapiloquia with René Dago. Perhaps it was because knowledge-based instruction resonated with her more than martial-esque training. She would never tell that to her face, however. For some reason, Sandra got too much of a kick whenever she felt she had done something better than the black-haired teacher.

  “You are all doing a great job,” Sandra spoke softly after five minutes of deep concentration. “I can sense your intents and you are all progressing perfectly, so let us kick it up a notch.”

  You can sense us? That was the only thing that interested Christie out of that sentence. Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t allowed another thought as her mind was distracted by a change in the underground. Inside one of those pockets of gas she had found, some stone was now being shaped. The redhead couldn’t say why, but it felt like the stone was looking at her back. Is this what she meant?

  Stones had no eyes, and their sense of lapiloquia was not something guided out by sight, so the whole exchange was complicated to put into words. It felt more like an exchange of minds, something closer to a non-verbal conversation than a meeting of gazes.

  It now occurred to Christie that both disciplines of Agatecraft – or even the three of them if Agatha’s new teacher was to be trusted – were more tightly knit than she had originally thought. Because if lapiloquia was all about using the body, why then was she using her mind so much to sense the stones? That was clearly the domain of lithorica.

  “Without opening your eyes or moving, everyone who has detected the changes raises a column next to you,” their teacher said. “And do not lie, you have nothing to gain from it.”

  Christie raised a column of bedrock of her own with trivial ease, but her time was quickly running out with her agates. Bad with my own stones, good with foreign ones, she mentally sighed before recalling her gauntlets of agate and pressing her actual hands and skin against the stone.

  She felt a lot of pillars being raised by her classmates, and from what she could feel at the back of her head, the whole class had succeeded in detecting the underground formation. Though now that she wasn’t wielding Embed, the resolution of her sense of lapiloquia took a hit. Everything became way muddier.

  “Good job, good job,” Sandra praised them, which scratched another part of Christie’s head. “I believe you are all ready for the final step in the lessons of prospecting.”

  Prospecting, huh, the word caught Christie’s attention. Yes, this is what it is like, prospecting the ground. Maybe not for valuables, but intelligence. I wonder why she has not used the term until now, perfectly adequate.

  “As a word of notice, this might be a bit painful, so get mentally ready before you follow my instructions.” The fact that the teacher spoke softly only begot anxiety inside the redhead. “Summon your agates those who have not done so and give them Embed.”

  Christie was going to audibly groan as she had just recalled them, but Sandra’s next words chilled her blood.

  “Now put the Listen command before Embed.”

  It was such a simple order that the rest of the students followed easily without a care in the world. Yet that couldn’t be said for Christie. The redhead felt sick. A potent nausea assaulted her as all the progress she had achieved with lapiloquia was suddenly gone, and she was reminded of her deficiencies. Of how worthless she was.

  There wasn’t a second command for her.

  And a non-negligible part of her believed that it would never be. Several students now had several Third Stratum agates, her ladylove had the Fifth Stratum too, and yet her… she was still stuck in the First Stratum. No quantity of agates could comfort her, because if anything, her colossal sea of stones was more of a curse than anything else. There was nothing of use when the only thing it could cause was pain. Pain solely directed toward herself.

  A soft caress.

  Christie had been so distracted in her misery that she hadn’t noticed Sandra walking up to her and placing a hand on her shoulder.

  “I am aware of your limitations,” the military engineer whispered softly in her ear. “You can use only the Listen command, but you will need to use lots of agates and have them underground. And if it does work… it might hurt even more than the rest of the students. Embed acts both as an amplifier and a dampener here, heightening the lows and lowering the highs. But it should work.” Christie wasn’t sure whether to trust her, especially after she showed such a lack of confidence. And yet… “You can do it.”

  What simple and unnecessary words. There was no need to add them; this was a military academy, not the private tutoring of a noble, and there was no need for handholding or empathy. And yet Sandra did. Precisely because they were unnecessary, those words became ever-so-warmer and allowed Christie to keep pushing forward.

  Pushing her will into the ground, the redhead opened several holes which she promptly filled with trunks of agate that flowed out of her body. Not even olive trees had trunks as thick as Christie’s pillars. Perhaps she still had her eyes closed, but never before had she felt her physicalized sea so intimately.

  Christie let out a sigh of exhaustion from her acts of Agatecraft, but she wasn’t quite done yet. She extended the holes even deeper until they reached the end of her recalling range and filled them with agates as if they were liquid instead of solid stone. Once filled, the lapiloquist tightened the ground around her so it hugged her constructs of agate, even going as far as making protrusions of stone above ground that grasped even more tightly her agate in place, almost like a faux Embed command.

  Finally, she gave her sea of stones the Listen command.

  It took only a breath for Christie to begin feeling weird. Not only was this the first time using the Listen command, but also using a command that wasn’t Control on this scale. She hadn’t even used Shape in such amounts, considering she had her Grow ‘command’, though now she knew she was some skewed act of lapiloquia.

  The Listen command was like an ear that wasn’t limited by the body, so she felt sounds coming into her brain directly. Now, now; the brain was a very intelligent organ. Discarding duplicated information was one of the best tasks it handled, but even if there wasn’t a traditional physical medium, they were still dealing with sound here.

  So everything went wrong when Sandra began her lesson.

  Christie went from hearing the breathing of her classmates to hearing nothing at all. Similar to how too much light might blind someone, Christie had been deafened. Her ears were working perfectly, and they weren’t afflicted by a high-pitched ringing like a normal defeating might provoke, but that didn’t matter because the sound was being transmitted directly into her mind.

  It felt heavy.

  Very heavy.

  She felt nauseous.

  Going against her teacher’s lesson, Christie lethargically opened her eyes. She heavily moved her head around, but her classmates didn’t seem to suffer from the same complications as her.

  What is happening? As heavy as she felt, the redhead kept her composure. For better or worse, she had a strong head and could handle everything she was thrown. She ignored her sense of hearing as it was useless and focused on her lapiloquia one.

  Closing her eyes back for more resolution, Christie could feel how the ground was trembling underneath her. It was a light yet fast tremble that her body couldn’t notice, but her Listen agates were painfully aware of. Tremors transformed into sounds, which then transformed into a deafening cacophony.

  I… I think I should stop, she sluggishly thought as she grabbed her head. Whatever Sandra tried to show us with this exercise is not working with me. All because I am not…

  Sound.

  Christie gasped and blinked several times. Her sense of hearing was definitely not working as it was overloaded from those soft tremors, and yet… she could swear she could hear something in the back of her head.

  A sound so insidious yet familiar – primeval even – that it was like the clamoring and whispers of the classroom that she would just tune out of her mind. A sound that had always been present yet forever forgotten. Yet now she had lost the ability of tuning out of this sound.

  Or perhaps, she had gained the ability to do so.

  It was a megalithic sound in the slow sense of the word. Very, very slow. It was like the growth of a tree made into a sound. Too slow to get the meaning or make sense out of it. But exactly like a tree, the sound didn’t stop growing. The back of her head started to hurt more and more, but Christie couldn’t stop. She felt the imperious need to hear the sound, to process it, even if it was all inside her mind.

  She felt the underground tremble.

  She felt her summoned agates tremble.

  She felt her inner sea tremble.

  She felt her mind and body tremble.

  And, finally, there it was.

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

  Ah, Christie gasped as her body forgot to breathe. It was a primitive sound. Primitive being the utmost correct epithet to describe it. A megalithic sound in the powerful sense of the word. A sound that resonated with her very existence, even if she couldn’t decipher the slightest thing out of it. I get it… the redhead clutched her head as her vision turned blurry and grey. This was the intention of the lesson… To hear the cacophony of the world.

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

  The world howled at her as if to validate her words.

  Then darkness.

  Patreon to support me and read 20 chapters ahead of time!