Free Web NovelChapter 18: Chapter 18. Hello
The tension in the room eased by several degrees.
Seeing that kind of genuine enthusiasm from two professors who had spent the day in direct proximity to Necrotize, and come out the other side not shaken but *energized*, did something quietly reassuring to the rest of the faculty.
One of the senior professors turned to Jennifer with a mildly puzzled expression. freēwebnovel.com
"Ronald’s reaction makes a certain kind of sense given what happened. But you — why are you so pleased?"
Jennifer smiled, and it was the smile of someone who had been waiting for exactly this question.
"Most of you know that learning is something of an obsession for me. I’m at Magical Rank Six, which isn’t nothing, but what I’ve always cared about more than rank is knowledge. I’ve read nearly everything in our magical library. Every text, every record, every archived paper we have." She paused to let that land. "Which means I’ve been running out of new things to learn for quite some time now."
She leaned forward slightly, the smile sharpening into something closer to genuine excitement.
"But now Lord Necrotize is a student here. He overturned everything we thought we understood about Mana in the first twenty minutes of the first class. Ancient knowledge, firsthand accounts, frameworks that predate recorded history. I have no idea how much he carries, but today was apparently just the beginning." She shook her head slowly. "I can’t imagine what the rest of this year looks like. I genuinely cannot wait to find out."
Several heads around the table nodded. Among those who had walked into the meeting quietly dreading their turn in the classroom with Necrotize, something had shifted, a cautious, tentative excitement beginning to surface beneath the apprehension.
Perhaps, they were starting to think, their own classes would be worth anticipating after all.
One person said nothing throughout any of this.
Nicholas sat at his corner of the table and observed, the reactions, the shifting moods, the slow transformation of the room’s atmosphere from anxiety to something approaching anticipation. He offered no opinion. He asked no questions. He simply watched, with an expression that revealed nothing at all.
***
Lunch ended, and the afternoon classes began.
Necrotize returned to the Magic Department and stayed there for the remainder of the day. He had decided, at least for the near future, to focus his attendance here. Modern Magic Theory was the gap he most wanted to address, and addressing gaps required repetition and exposure. If a class didn’t seem relevant to that goal, his motivation to sit through it was limited.
He took his seat beside Lyra again.
She was noticeably calmer than she had been that morning. The God of Destruction settling into the chair next to her had not become exactly normal, she suspected that threshold was some distance away still, but it had become something she could manage without her hands going cold.
Progress, she supposed.
The afternoon sessions covered foundational magic, two classes, two different assistant professors, each working through the building blocks of Modern Magic practice. Necrotize gave both his complete attention.
Most of it went over his head anyway.
The gap between Modern Magic Theory and the ancient frameworks he actually understood was, he was discovering, considerably wider than he had initially estimated. The terminology was different, the underlying assumptions were different, the entire conceptual architecture had been built on foundations that didn’t quite match anything he had direct experience with. Following the logic required constant translation, and the translation kept breaking down.
He kept trying regardless.
The professors, watching him work through each concept with focused and patient effort, found themselves putting more into their lessons than they had planned, reaching for clearer explanations, better examples, anything that might bridge the gap for the student in the middle of the room who was listening harder than anyone else.
It was, all things considered, a strange kind of honour.
**"
And so Necrotize’s first day at the Academy came to its end.
Not with incident, not with catastrophe, not with any of the dozen outcomes the faculty had quietly been bracing for since his enrollment was announced.
Just classes. A sparring match. A plate of dessert. A conversation over lunch with a girl who was slowly, carefully, learning not to drop her fork every time he said hello.
He walked out of the Academy as the afternoon light went long and golden across the grounds, hands in his pockets.
Today had been really fun. After a very long time, his quiet existence had finally started to feel like something worth waking up for.
He found, to his mild surprise, that he was looking forward to tomorrow.
***
Necrotize made his way back to the dormitory at an unhurried pace, the day settling quietly around him.
A group of girls came down the path from the opposite direction. They saw him and the familiar response began to take shape, the slight stiffening, the instinct to look away, the low-grade nervousness that his presence seemed to produce in people as a matter of course.
Then he smiled at them. Nothing elaborate. Just a small, easy expression, the kind that cost nothing.
Something shifted.
The nervousness didn’t deepen into the usual panic. Instead it transformed into something else entirely, something that had no precedent in any of their previous encounters with beings of cosmic significance. Their hearts, more or less simultaneously, decided to beat considerably faster than the situation strictly required. Colour rose in their faces.
The thought that moved through each of them in near-perfect unison was not one any of them had been expecting.
He is so hot.
Necrotize caught it clearly. He considered it for approximately half a second, filed it away under the broad category of things mortals thought that he had no particular framework for, and continued walking.
The girls watched him go, standing in a loose cluster on the path, none of them quite ready to resume walking yet.
***
He reached the dormitory corridor and came to a stop outside room 306.
Before he touched the door, he noticed it, a presence on the other side. Faint but distinct, the particular quality of someone occupying a space and being aware, at some level, that they were waiting.
Interesting.
He opened the door and went in.
A boy was sitting on the bed across from his, his assigned roommate, perched at the edge of it, hands loosely folded, with the posture of someone who had been trying to decide for some time whether to stay or leave. Light brown hair, green eyes, and the kind of lean, slightly angular frame that suggested he’d spent more of his life moving than eating.
Necrotize recognised him immediately.
The boy from before. The one surrounded by bullies in the corridor, who had said nothing and shown nothing and simply looked at his tormentors with the flat, patient expression of someone who had learned that reactions were a resource worth conserving.
Necrotize looked at him across the room and offered the same thing he’d given the girls in the hallway, simple, uncomplicated, and entirely without weight.
"Hello."
