The Archmage Coefficient (OP Archmage/ Mage Academy/ LITRPG/ Hidden Genius)

Arielle was not happy about the interruption, particularly because it came from the dean.

She hadn’t had time to perfect her expression-reading spell, and she wasn’t in the mood for games and deceit.

However, it wasn’t like she could refuse to see the dean either.

She sighed. She had wanted to find out more about Telip and whether or not his focus on portals was to find Plutarch, but it seemed the Dean had other plans.

“We’ll talk later,” Telip told her. “I need to go now and investigate my anchors and spell connections. I have to find out what happened to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

She watched him walk away and then went back to the dining hall to tell Lyra that she had been summoned by the dean.

“What for?” Lyra asked.

Arielle shrugged. "I'm not sure. I'm hoping it's not another test."

Lyra gave her a sympathetic look. "Well, what did you and Telip talk about?"

"He's going to be my mentor again."

"Really?" Lyra's smile turned into a full grin.

"Yes. I'll tell you more about it later."

"Okay. Let me know if you need anything." She waved, and Arielle waved back as she began toward the dean's office.

As usual, the office door swung open before she could knock on it. Dean Octavius was sitting behind his desk, with a pair of spectacles she had never seen, perusing a scroll in front of him.

He looked up when she walked in. “Arielle.”

“Dean Octavius,” she said.

"How are you feeling?"

"Okay." Was that a trick question? Did it have a hidden meaning?

He gestured to a hard-backed, upholstered chair. “Have a seat.”

She sat tentatively, and at the same time, she activated her expression-reading spell. It wasn’t perfect, but she needed all the help she could get to ferret out the dean’s true intentions.

Dean Octavius began by saying, “I’ve heard Elric is doing better.”

She nodded but then paused.

How did he know that? Did Elric tell him? Or Vittoria?

Or was he simply asking to get confirmation out of her? Darn it, had she already failed?

The dean kept going, his fingers tracing the page, his gaze focusing on a spot above her head.

“Your cousin has gotten himself into quite the mess. But he very impressively exposed a major conspiracy that ousted one of the more problematic archmages in the council, so I guess it’s for the better. He’s worried that there will be retaliation against him or anyone he cares about, particularly you.”

Arielle did not respond, still waiting for the dean to get to the point, and scared she might accidentally give too much away. In the ensuing silence, she chose to study his face instead. The relative darkness of the room–now that it was past sunset and only illuminated by candles– made that difficult, but what made it even more difficult was simply that she didn't trust anything she was observing.

If she assumed that everything she'd known about Dean Octavius was a lie from the beginning, then she didn't have a baseline to work off of.

“I just want to assure you that you will be completely safe here from the demons,” he told her. “The professors and I had a meeting about further defensive measures to detect and discharge demons from campus. We will also hold an assembly to ensure that every student is on alert.”

“Alright,” Arielle said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was a stretch of silence where his hands folded together, and his thumbs slid over each other. His forehead wrinkled ever so slightly, a deeper inhale flowing into his nostrils. Arielle’s spell fed her information regarding his discomfort and possible anxiety, but she didn't know what he had to be anxious about.

Then he finally sighed. “Arielle, I just want to apologize once more for what happened in the Helleron forest. I’ve been thinking about it more, and while my concerns might have been valid, I went about it in the entirely wrong way, triggered by my own biases." A small smile. "I pride myself on being a smart man, but even a smart man falls victim to his own prejudice.”

Arielle said nothing, continuing to stare at him.

"I’m not saying this so that you trust me again. In fact, I think it’s perfectly fine that you don’t trust me all the way. But I just wanted to reiterate how truly sorry I am that I made you feel lesser than.”

Arielle pressed her lips together, her hands gripping the sides of her seat. Heat crawled up her neck at the memory, a purely emotional recollection of shame and anger.

Was he even being honest now? Was this another trick he would use to humiliate her?

She didn’t know if she could trust his words, even without her anger. He looked truly apologetic, but she’d never have thought he would have done what he did either, and she recalled just how badly it hurt when he had lied to her.

She didn't want to be hurt like that again.

Then again… A voice of reason returned. You lied to Telip, too, and he forgave you.

She gritted her teeth. She didn’t want to hear it, but reason remained like a judgment on her.

As much as she tried to tell herself that the situations were different, there were similarities to what she had done to Telip and what the Dean had done to her. She had tricked Telip to help Lyra; the Dean said he had tricked her in order to help her, but he simply hadn’t understood her.

He wasn’t the only one.

Most people did not understand her, even her own family. They made the effort and tried to see things her way, but most of the time, she knew they only tolerated her idiosyncrasies because they loved her, not because they thought her feelings and behaviour were warranted.

The dean had been a stranger to her up until a few months ago. He admittedly had misjudged her, and he was apparently trying to make up for that now.

But this could just be another manipulation tactic.

Understand what he wants.

That’s right. His manipulation had to have a motive behind it.

She knew the point of the exercise had not been for her to get hurt. She likely would not have gotten hurt if the Drift had not interfered. Though the dark cloud surrounding her had seemed threatening, it had only scared her. And when she ran to the ruins, the hybrid and Professor Graham had appeared at around the same time, looking for her.

They might have been called to protect her.

The dean likely didn't intend to humiliate her either. What would be the point of that, outside of his own amusement, and he didn’t seem very amused by it himself. He had seemed horrified.

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She bit her lip. She didn’t know what to say. Admittedly, the most painful part about the deceit hadn’t even been the trauma of being stuck in the abyss without knowing if she would ever make it out. It wasn’t even the humiliation of it all.

It was the wound to her pride.

She had never thought she was great at reading people, but to know that her judgment had failed her that badly hurt. To feel like she was being mocked by people she cared about hurt even more.

She was brought up to be honest, but the world didn’t work that way, which put her at a constant disadvantage. She wanted to be better at lying, like they were, but she didn't think she ever would be.

But perhaps she could learn how to trick people with the truth. Or at the very least, know what they wanted from her.

“You said before that you could teach me to read people better,” she said to the dean, who raised an eyebrow.

“You want me to?”

She hesitated. She hadn’t entirely forgiven him, but it would be hypocritical of her to hold his mistake against him forever, when Telip had forgiven her for hers so easily. Because she understood the concept of lying to someone for what you believed was the greater good. She had been tempted to do it to Inara even more recently.

Additionally, her expression-reading spell may not work if she didn’t learn to establish proper baselines. Dean Octavius could help her with that, and that would be in his own best interest, too.

After all, he wanted her to be his asset.

“Yes,” she said.

He watched her for some time and nodded. "Alright. I will help you. I will also help you to better that spell you're using on me."

A short gasp escaped her. “How did you know?" Had he spied on her again?

"I didn't spy on you," he said. "I can tell you're using a spell to read my facial expression simply because of how focused you are on it. And you're frowning, which means the translation isn't as clean and certain as you would like it to be. It's a good start, but there's far more to understanding people than their emotional affect. I'll teach you. But first, I need to understand you more and understand the way you think. Do you mind my asking you questions about your childhood?"

She hesitated, and the dean smiled.

“You don’t have to reveal any secrets to me,” he said. “Nor do you have to do anything but tell me more about yourself. For example, I know you had some kind of primary general education in Fenway, right?"

She nodded. "Yes. There was a schoolhouse for all those who wanted to attend. It cost one silver a year.”

“Interesting. Did all your siblings go through that?”

“Yes, even though my brother didn’t want to. He didn’t see the point of it, if he was going to be a warrior anyway. My mother insisted he go because no son of hers would grow up a dunce.”

The dean chuckled. "I see. So most of your friends were from Fenway as well?"

"I didn’t have any friends in Fenway.”

He raised an eyebrow. “At all?”

She shook her head. “There was Greta, but she wasn’t my friend. My sister paid her to pretend to be my friend.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay. They meant well. And I have friends now. Lyra and Maus and Riorke and Lacey." And Elric and Vittoria. "So Greta doesn’t have to pretend anymore.”

“Did you ever try to make friends with anyone when you were younger?”

She thought about it. “I tried. I wasn't successful."

The dean stroked his long beard at that, his gaze softening. “I understand. We’ll talk about this more later. More importantly, I hope you also take up extra fight training with Professor Graham. He intended to ask you after the trials were over, and after you were no longer furious at him.” The dean tapped his finger on the table. “You should know, he was not at all in agreement with what we did. I was the one who insisted.”

She didn’t know if that made it much better, but she nodded anyway. “It’s okay. I forgive him. And you.”

“That’s very magnanimous of you. So, I hope you’ll start training with him. As you know, some things and beings can block access to your magic and your cores. There might come a time when you have no choice but to fight with only your fists."

“My brother tried to teach me how to fist fight before my Moat Trials,” she said. “I still wasn’t very good at it.”

He grinned. “Don’t worry. Something tells me Graham’s methods will be more effective.”

She hoped so. And also she did want to learn how Graham had managed to effectively dodge nearly all her attacks. His primal instinct, if it were something she could copy, would be very useful to her.

“Alright,” she said, and she left the office feeling much lighter.

***

For the next few days, Arielle focused on the last of her trials, while spending her free time trying to solve her list of problems.

Her Creatures and Clans presentation got postponed because Riorke had to go home briefly for an emergency, but the exams for Politics and Leyline studies went relatively well, with Arielle earning perfect points on each.

Well, near-perfect points.

Flintwick docked a mark for her rounding up a decimal point for the calculation of the general lattice flux of the area. However, she had represented it with exactly the number of decimal points there had been in the textbook, which was one less than what he had taught in class. Ari spent a long time arguing about it with him, until Lyra dragged her away and told her that she had still done better than most other people in class and it was making them upset to see her fighting over that last half a point.

Arielle very reluctantly let it go although it still bothered her for the rest of the day, and she talked about it to anyone–mostly Maus and Lyra–who would listen.

She managed to collect a few drops of Lyra’s blood, but even while analyzing it with her aura sight, there was nothing in particular about it that would suggest a blood covenant. She wanted to ask for Inara’s blood to compare, but she didn’t want to do that over the messaging scroll, so she simply told Elric that she had to meet him soon.

He told her he would be visiting a few days after her trial, so she had to wait until then.

In the meantime, she worked with Valeria on the lost abyssal spells. Arielle told Valeria about her theory concerning the different representations of the abyss.

“You’re not the only one who came up with something like that,” Valeria responded. "A researcher called Hans Grumer gave us the dark relativity model, which essentially says what you're saying as well. The problem with that is that when they tried to put it into practice, it did not yield the results they wanted. For example, when investigating the abyssal spells, they eventually got to the point of creating a mini portal and a lesser curse. Both a portal and a curse utilize Vacu 𝝙–as we suspect most abyssal spells use–which should not be the case, as one is additive and the other entropic. From what we understand, Vacu 𝞪 gives void and erasure; however, it's the dominant element in [Listless], which is a spell that imbues entropy, and it’s prominent in some rifts as well. This is a paradox of Vacu, which is further explored in the Bernadette Files, which discuss how Vacu isotopes behave differently from the other essences. Unlike other essences, where there is only one interpretation of an isotope, a single Vacu isotope can give you different interpretations. The textbooks note down the most common ones, ignoring the outliers, but you typically learn about it in your third year.” She adjusted her glasses. “Speaking of rifts, did you know they supposedly bear little structural similarity to each other? We thought perhaps they were classified due to the nature of the bonds, or the shape formed by bonding. But no. All those things did not seem to matter."

"What shapes did they form?" Arielle asked, and Valeria retrieved a notebook and a quill, drawing on the page

“These are the scripts I remember from the rifts, and the proposed abyssal spell names underneath them," she said. "All the colored squares represent Vacu orbs, and the crosses are Calor, and the straight lines are Massa."

Arielle watched her draw the different Vacu-dominant spells, most of which she did not recognize. “These are Master tier spells, right?"

"Yes. But this one is an upper adept."

"What if we operated under the assumption that there are micro isotopes," she said. "Or more intraisotopical differences than we initially imagined."

"That would be interesting to theorize, but difficult to prove," she said. "There is research still ongoing about what gives isotopes their true nature, and as you know, the wand has inbuilt features to attract a given isotope for a given spell. Those who discovered the isotopes said that they did so by extended meditation, in core balancing chambers, which enabled them to get a feel for the different isotopes. Over the years, they’ve attempted to use things like speed and other properties to differentiate them, but most people can only do so by sheer luck and practice. You eventually get a feel for the spell, and we find that if you cast a spell enough times, the isotope eventually learns to choose its spell, rather than us choosing the isotope.”

“Oh,” Arielle said.

“Yes. It also took a lot of years and experimentation to give us the isotopes we have now. If there were more isotopes, I'm fairly certain we could have discovered it.”

Hmm. It had only taken them that amount of time because they couldn’t see the orbs.

But Arielle could observe it. She could meditate on it.

Though isotopes did not look visually different, there had to be something that differentiated them.

Perhaps, their mini-orbs.

After their meeting, which was spent brainstorming all the possible reasons for this variance–Valeria had a theory that it was due to some microconvergences in Vacu–Arielle began to also practice with the list of spells Valeria had given her.

She didn’t let the spells go to completion, but she studied the actions of each mini-orb as she put it together, trying to investigate if the inner orbs perhaps caused the differentiation.

But there was no consensus on the number of inner orbs with each spell, though it was difficult to tell without letting the spell run its course.

Maybe it had to do with the core.

But she didn’t know what the cores contained. They were just blobs of energy roughly about the same size, shape, and color.

So what gave the isotopes the differences, and why were rifts structured differently? There had to be a reason.

She pondered on it while doing her centering exercises and her blue orb exercises. She continued to arrange the spells in different forms to try to find the pattern between them.

She didn’t figure it out until her core stabilization test at the end of the week.

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