René was numb to pain. Too much had happened in his life – which some might dare to call short – for him to be affected by it any longer. Or at least show that he was affected by it. Yet as he saw that girl with the bright red mane and bicolored eyes shedding tears as she trembled in fear, he felt a kind of pain that he preferred not to think about. The worst pain of all was seeing pain inflicted on others, and unfortunately, it was a pain soldiers knew all too well.
Then the girl slapped him.
All things considered, it was a solid slap. If she had a bit more muscle, she might have even knocked me down. Women are ferocious, huh? The slap certainly burned, but that pain was easy to deal with. What hurt him more was that the girl who slapped him was the daughter of his savior.
“You know what? I kind of deserve that,” he sighed as he recognized his mistake.
“Of course you did!” The redhead roared between tears. A cub she might be, but a fine lioness she will grow into.
“Mortal terror towards heights notwithstanding, try summoning your agates now, I want to see something,” René commented nonchalantly.
“You should… No, now that I think about it, stay where you are,” Christina said with hostility.
The soldier chuckled and took a handful of steps backward, if just to amuse the girl. He had already seen what she was capable of at the demonstration she gave on the first day of the school year, and whilst it might have been problematic if she had joined the sparring alongside the rest of the class, she alone posed no threat to him.
The redhead took a deep breath as she clasped her hands together and clutched them against her chest. The next instant, the ground around her was covered in frozen waves of stone. Definitely a sea, he mused. It was a jarring sight. Even for the most experienced soldiers, the instantaneous summoning of agates in mass could be disconcerting, but that absurd amount was even unsettling when promptly materialized.
“Are those all of your agates?” Quite the amount, not that dissimilar from the Shining Knight, though.
“N-no,” she responded with a grimace and a pant of pain. “Unless I use the Range command, I cannot take out a significant amount.”
“Interesting,” René caressed his chin as he realized after the comment that the sea of stone was perfectly cut off at the limit of the girl’s recalling range. Around ten meters. Definitely the worst range I’ve ever seen in my life. He didn’t voice that aloud as Hasel’s daughter looked like the type of person who easily became depressed upon hearing cold facts. Still, that’s an interesting sight. Her agates form a perfect circumference around her. This is the best visual representation of the recalling range I’ve ever seen. The man frowned as he felt her inner teacher a bit too active. “Could you try using the Range command then?”
“You w-will need to get further out,” he was surprised by how pained the girl looked at the simple action of summoning her agates. An action that should be a reflex, not… whatever she was undergoing.
The black-uniformed soldier nodded and took to the skies at her suggestion. Nothing that an Amplify Float alongside touches of Control and Merge couldn’t handle.
“Whenever you please,” he said once he was airborne and a couple of dozen meters away in all axes.
The bicolored-eyed girl nodded and took an even deeper breath. René could feel the strength that Christina was mustering to keep her agates in control even at that distance.
A lake materialized.
Jarringly, silently, lethally, promptly. Many epithets were capable of classifying that infinitesimally small slice of time needed to materialize what seemed to be tons of stone into existence.
“Whoa…” He added softly, but in an intimidated manner.
That’s around a thirty-meter radius around her. The agates reach up to her hips, so around a meter in height. Pi times thirty squared times one – well, that one is useless – that is around three thousand cubic meters. The average density of agates of her quality – which should be a normal agate – is two-point-six grams per cubic centimeter, so almost three tons per metric meter. Multiply the two and we get… Fractures! Nine thousand tons!
“Have you finally been able to pour out all your agates?” René said out of courtesy.
“Ugh… not quite…” Christina responded with a nauseated expression.
“Excuse me?” He arched his brow. “Are you saying that these are not all your agates?”
“I have never been able to-ukh,” she covered her mouth and gagged before she regained her composure. “I have never been able to summon all of my agates. And if I tried… well…” The girl looked down at her legs, which were encased in a solid layer of agate. “I am scared what could happen if I tried to go all out.”
“Yes, I understand your preoccupation. This is much more serious than I thought…” The teacher put a hand before his mouth as he pondered deeply in thought. “I know this is hurting you, but could you try to go all out? I promise you that nothing will happen to you, and I will guarantee your safety.”
His student looked at him with doubt, but she nodded weakly. There was a glint in her green and red eyes that suggested she also wanted to explore the depths of her sea of stone. Christina Valasela took a deep breath and went all out.
For the briefest of instants, René became blinded. Not by light, but by air as a monolithic amount of agate materialized into existence, so much so and so fast that the air displaced to make place for her agates literally exploded. By the time he regained his composure, a hemisphere of thirty meters in radius rested in the training grounds.
A solid, round, red and green agate.
Hemisphere, half of a sphere, so two-thirds times pi times thirty cubed… that comes out to around sixty thousand cubic meters. Multiply that per the density of agate and it’s… Fuck me. One hundred and fifty thousand tons. How can a single child wield that many agates? How can they fit inside her? Then a grim realization hit him. It’s a perfect hemisphere. IT’S A FRACTURED PERFECT HEMISPHERE. His breath became ragged as he realized that wasn’t the full extent of Christina’s agates.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
If the perfectly smooth surface of the hemisphere wasn’t proof enough, the flowing texture of the solid agate confirmed any suspicion. Crown in the heavens… more agates are flowing out of her, but because they reach the limit of her recalling range, the oldest agates blink out of existence… Hasel, what have you done?
The analogy of the sea of stone became more and more veritable with its flowing texture as it resembled water and sea foam. Agates already had a foamy texture with the layers of quartz that they hosted most of the time, but Christina’s… she was the pure example of that.
Christina! He had become so focused on the monstrous agate that she had forgotten about the lithorist that had summoned them. Or it, as the sea of stones now seemed like a single, perfectly continuous agate.
The girl lay in the epicenter of the sea of stones, and much to the teacher’s dismay, she remained petrified and reactionless inside.
“Christina!” René shouted and banged on the stony surface after landing on the ground. “Recall the agates now!”
She failed to respond.
The teacher clicked his tongue. “I am going to break through! Sorry, but this will hurt!”
René summoned all his agates and made an amalgamation of his own. But even then, with all his agates – which were way more than the median – he only managed to make a creation the size of a jousting spear. Pathetic compared to the monolithic agate, but also way more than enough.
Merge. Shape. Amplify Drill. Spin. Control.
It was a complex series program that he executed, but he had done way worse. The Control command was also unnecessary, but as he was trying to save someone this time instead of killing them, so he erred on the side of caution. He then added one final command.
Speed.
His jousting lance shot at a speed high enough to break the sound barrier, but what he wanted to break wasn’t air, but agates. The moment of truth arrived, and he breathed in peace upon seeing that his agates broke through the lithic sea with the same ease as the air. Her quantity is certainly out of this world, but it seems her quality also lacks because of it.
With great mental dexterity, the soldier controlled his agate and stopped it short of the girl’s head. By then the pathway it had carved had already closed as newer agates pushed against older ones to fill out all the recalling range – or rather, recalling volume – of the student. Carefully, René drilled next to Christina’s ear and deactivated some commands to give place to the Sound one.
“Christina, recall your agates,” he said it softly as to not alert the girl, but began panicking as the sea of stones continued flowing. As he was about to send another sound, thankfully, the monolithic agate vanished. It only took a blink. And that made it all-the-more horrifying.
René rushed to assist his friend’s daughter who had collapsed on the ground. First thing he did was to check for her pulse and breath, and she thankfully had both, even if her skin was deathly pale. His fears proved unwarranted as the girl coughed a moment later.
“Ugh…” She groaned and squirmed on his arms. “I did not manage to summon all of them…” Christina added weakly.
“Yeah… I noticed.” As grim as the situation was, René couldn’t help but chuckle. “You were right, Christina. You certainly have the largest quantity of agates in the world. Likely in all of history, present, past, and future.”
“Yeah…” His student chuckled too, though her laughter was littered with coughs. “I could not breathe in there.”
“I noticed…” His smile vanished as he replied. “I do not know how we will do it, but we need you to get to Second Stratum, Christina. Maybe the way to solve your affliction is to manage to summon all your agates.” However much they might be, he left that part unspoken.
“But… I cannot summon a single agate in a vacuum. How am I supposed to take one to the Second Stratum, let alone all of them?” She said with watery eyes.
“What I told you yesterday in class was not the only way to increase one’s Stratum, only the fastest. And either way, I believe here the part of mindfulness I spoke about will come in handy here.”
“How come?”
“You told me how when you give a single command, it propagates through all your agates,” Christina nodded at his words. “And from the outside, your agates did not look like a sea of stone, but more like a single, cohesive agate. So how about if you think about your agate amalgam like one lone agate?”
“But… it is not,” she explained taciturnly.
“I have noticed,” he smiled at her. “But it is mindfulness what matters here – your state of mind – and not reality. Like when mathematicians, astrologers, and physicists will sometimes make abstractions and theoretic fields of reference, you need not think of your agates as a collective, but an individual. For in practice, there is not much difference between your sea of agates and your roommate’s lone agate.”
“I think… I think I understand.”
“Good,” the soldier nodded. “Now let me get you up.”
René grabbed Christie’s hand and pulled it as he also pushed on her back with the hand that had been holding her all this time. She struggled to get up at first, but once she regained her footing and took a deep breath, she looked far better as her skin regained its coloration.
“It would be better if you rested for today, Christina. Do you need help getting to the dormitories?”
“No, I… I will be fine, thank you, Teacher Dago,” his student responded absentmindedly.
As she turned away, René called her out. “Christina! Today might have been a mess, but be sure we will resolve your affliction!”
“I would not have it other way,” she smiled softly before disappearing inside the academy.
René sighed. “You can come out, I know you are here spying.”
“I would not call it spying, per se,” a melodious female voice beckoned as she made her appearance from his blind spot. “I mean, that was the biggest agate I have seen, not even the headmaster has that many agates, and mind you, his quantity has made him a living legend.”
“I am not in the mood for your games today, Sara.”
The female black-uniformed soldier snorted derisively. “It is Sandra here, Reaper.”
“Lovely as always, eh?” The man chuckled.
“What can I say? I am the most gorgeous woman your pathetic eyes have ever seen,” Sara – or rather, Sandra – circled around him.
An unremarkable woman she was, the thing that most highlighted her was the black soldier uniform; otherwise, she might get confused for a maid. No one would suspect her secret. But for René, other traits were far more highlightable. Her familiar vulpine expression was one of them. The other was those black leather pants. Impossibly tight they were with those thick thighs and calves of hers. Oh, how hard they were to remove. More than once, he had been obliged to do so.
“But enough jesting,” she stopped in front of him and looked him dead in the eyes with her brownish-red agate-like ones. “What I have seen here is not just only impossible, but a crime. Ask me this simple question as if I were one of your students. How does a person get their agates?”
The male soldier sighed, for he knew where she was going with this. Nonetheless, he complied. “By consuming an awakened agate.”
“Yes,” she nodded. “The higher the quality of the consumed agate is, the better the results it will be. The stronger the awakening, so to speak. Then tell me, how high must have been the quality of the agate to produce such results?”
“Stop beating around the bush, Sara.”
“Sandra,” the brunette hissed. “But sure, I will be short, plain, and simple, for your stone-smooth brain does not seem able to hold much more information, and your person does not deserve any more than that. Why has that agate not landed on noble blood?”
“That is a question I cannot answer,” he replied stoically.
“Cannot or will not?” Sandra recriminated him.
“Cannot,” René sighed. “Sandra, I have become aware of Miss Valasela’s might at the same time as you.”
“Valasela? Oh…” Her stern expression broke in surprise. “That is… problematic. What should we do, René?”
René almost burst laughing upon hearing her change of tone. She went from a drill sergeant to a lovesick girl who got caught by her parents in a single sentence.
“It depends on you, truth be told,” he shrugged. “If you say nothing, nothing will happen. I will talk about it with the headmaster, but beware, I will always take Hasel’s side.”
“Yeah… I am aware,” Sandra responded with a sour grimace. “I will keep my mouth shut for now out of respect, but you better turn her into a soldier, or they will come for her.”
“I am aware,” the male soldier answered tiredly. Knowingly.
“Awareness is a thing you lack, you witless cur.” The female soldier stomped off the ground with enough force to make a dust cloud before she flew away.
René remained alone in the training grounds, and he closed his eyes as he turned his face upward to face the ring in the sky, dark as the depths yet bright enough to heat a whole world. “Women are ferocious, huh?”
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