I’m not alone. I’m not alone in this world, I’m not the only one who’s affected by this. This is the Academy’s fight. Everyone goes to war. Everyone fights, everyone puts their life on the line. They laugh, they cry, they live, and they die. I may be there, I may not be there, but they’re still fighting. They’re still people, and they’re my classmates. Shouldn’t they deserve to know, too? They’re just as important as me, they all serve just as important as a role here; without them, I have no class. I have no reason to be here.

  I’m not alone. This isn’t my own little world, it’s everyone’s. It’s the Earth Mother’s, a gift that was given to everyone. The world may be looping the same three years over and over again, and I may only just be a pawn in some grand design, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything. That doesn’t mean I have to do this all alone. Maybe the burden is on me, but who says that I must make the decision by myself? Theo was right, the world isn’t just me, this isn’t some sort of fairytale where I’m the heroine. It’s everyone’s. This life, everything here is everyone’s, so who am I to make it all about me?

  I’m not alone.

  She stopped in her tracks far away from one of the dorm practice yards, staring at the figures sitting outside the door. Three of her classmates were talking to each other, looking like they were enjoying themselves. One read from a book, the other two repeated after them.

  Without waiting any longer, she walked down the path toward them, feeling her heart lighten with every hurried step she took even though she was as confused as ever about everything, even though she had no answers to anything, even though little made sense.

  They made sense to her. Her classmates, her friends, they made sense to her.

  “Hey,” she called as she approached. “You’re all early.”

  Taking another bite of her pancake, Alex was the first to look up. Followed by Darius, and then Theo.

  “We’re just practicing some pronunciation,” called Alex, who chewed and swallowed her food in record speed, beckoning her over. “Come, join us.”

  Darius followed her lead and nodded, echoing her words perfectly, with no hesitation or break in speech. “Come, join us.”

  Alex cracked a wide smile, swiveling her head toward the Ancient. “Yeah! That was perfect!”

  Unable to help but smile as well, Ty tried to steady her thoughts. The scene of them chatting nonchalantly felt so normal that she wondered to herself why she had ever thought that no one would be there to listen to her, hear her doubts, and assuage her fears.

  “Hey,” she said again, softer this time. “Can I ask you three something?”

  “Sure,” beamed Alex, looking to Darius for his answer.

  “Yes,” nodded Darius solemnly.

  They both turned to Theo.

  She had been dreading it, but she finally did the same. “Were you working on Cyril’s paper the whole night?” she summed up the courage to ask him.

  “Yeah,” he responded, out of sorts. “We turned in his paper noon-ish.”

  “Did you not sleep?”

  “I’m fine,” he replied dismissively. “What is it?”

  Something didn’t quite add up, but Ty continued to press forward. “What would you do if…” she scanned her classmates’ faces, trying not to fidget, trying not to let Theo’s words bother her. “If you knew something was going to happen a year or two from now, something big, but you were told that you couldn’t do anything about it until it happens?”

  Alex was the first to speak. “Depends on what the something big is, I suppose,” she thought aloud. “I mean, if I really couldn’t do anything about it, then what would be the point of worrying? Like—”

  “Also depends who’s saying you can’t do anything,” interjected Theo with narrowed eyes. “What if they only say that because you can do something about it, and then when you wait for it to come, it’s too late?”

  “Ah.” Poking her cheek with her index finger, Alex thought about what he said. “I suppose the assumption is that we trust that they’re telling the truth? Hypothetical and all?”

  “You trust them?” Theo asked critically, turning to the tactician.

  Instead of responding, Ty turned to Darius, knowing that he, too, had a part his own part to play in the charade of shadows that surrounded her, that he must have known the secret she had been handed. “Would you trust them?” she asked him.

  Darius, who hadn’t yet given his input, who no longer had a straightforward, simple smile on his face, adopted an expression as severe as Nate’s when he had told her the truth. He took a long moment to read her expression, absorb her words.

  Then, with perfect command of the language as if he had had many more years to study it than he let on, Darius nodded. “I trust him.” And, digesting Alex’s na?ve expression and Theo’s suspicious one, he finally turned to her. “Not that you cannot do anything, but these formative months are more imperative than you may believe.”

  “So that’s it, I do nothing?” Ty frowned, her eyes trained on the Ancient.

  “Your class is not nothing,” Darius tried to reply kindly, though his expression was anything but.

  Finally registering the challenging look on Darius’s face, she articulated slowly and carefully, bursting at the seams, “So it’s true. The war.”

  The Ancient did not waver, even when Alex gasped. “Yes. It is a burden we all share. Together.”

  Together. Hearing the word slightly cleared the dark fog hanging over her, but now she could hear another voice at her core:

  This is why you don’t leave.

  Though she could swear she did not say the words out loud, Darius’s expression looked regretful. “You know. It has been tried, many times.”

  Ty turned to Theo, whose eyes were focused on something far away. He had his head propped up with an arm, his palm over his mouth.

  We’ve been here before, many times before, she wanted to say. That’s why, she wanted to say, that’s why you—

  “Theo,” she said aloud. “Theo, you were right.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  He looked up at her dazedly.

  “You said something in the courtyard, after your test, after I healed you. When I asked you how you felt. You were right,” she prattled on stupidly.

  “Yeah,” he answered simply, with barely a pause before he looked away again.

  Reading the tense atmosphere, Alex interjected, “W-well I guess we all signed up knowing that war was an eventuality…so maybe we shouldn’t dwell on it. Think about the happy things—like what we’d like to do before then, hmm?”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that there were things she wanted to do. All she had planned on was being with her classmates, at school, fulfilling whatever purpose she would be given. “I…” she started, unable to stop herself, “I’d like to have supper with everyone.”

  She must have said something funny, because Alex laughed out loud, and even Darius started smiling again. “Aw, that’s an easy one. We can have many, many suppers. What about you, Darius?”

  The Ancient did not have to think twice. “Help friends.”

  Surprisingly, that answer solicited a grumpy reply. “Blah, is that why you’re usually in your workshop? You and Ty are always working, working, working. Should enjoy yourselves a bit more.” She craned her neck to look back at Theo. “You too, Theo. You’re better than these two twits, but you’re borderline, just like Kor.”

  “Ah, yes, yes,” sighed Theo quietly, letting hand drop from his frowning face as he turned back to the book on his lap. “Alex-mandated class time. The next sentence is…”

  Ty watched them, happily standing with her hands clasped in front of her, a simple smile on her face as she listened to them, thinking that perhaps this was enough. She’d have supper, she’d work on her class. The small things. The world didn’t need to have to arrive at their doorstep all at once, some things took time.

  Time. I have time.

  * * *

  “Get up.”

  Faris kicked Cyril.

  “Y’know that actually—”

  “Stop being disgusting and get up.”

  “Faris, please don’t kick your healer,” said a clear, pronounced voice that seemed to float over the two.

  Against his better judgment, the caster went back to his spot a few steps away while pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration.

  “Wow, that’s hard to get used to,” remarked Cyril, quickly patching up his ankles before slowly getting up to give a thumbs-up to his tactician, who stood at a podium far behind them, the clarity of her voice deceiving her proximity to them.

  “Keep it up, you’ll get used to it far more,” admonished Faris sourly.

  Cyril opened his tome up again and focused his eyes on a floating target several yards in front of him, muttering, “Yeah, I’m out of it, man. Sorry.”

  Class practice had started around half an hour ago, most of the time having been spent preparing for the first of ten exercises located in the back of Ty’s Tactician’s tome. This first one was relatively straightforward: she’d imbue four targets with custom spells, then get her students to fell three of the targets before the last one—Cyril’s, at the moment—sustained any damage. If that last condition was violated, the target would enter an enraged state, which was likely something bad.

  Ty looked down at her page, calmly ordering, “Cyril, it’s preparing a Petrify, so please annul it properly this time. A Dispel Veil within three seconds of the cast should do the trick.”

  “It means it’s preparing when it starts glowing,” chided Faris patronizingly.

  “Okay, Faris, your target just recovered, so you know what to do,” Ty ordered next, lowering herself from the tips of her toes as she noticed that Elias and Alex’s targets—which were equipped with weapons—were now turning red. “Um, red…red…”

  Flipping to where she had marked down the retreating commands, Ty first gave a warning to her students. “Elias and Alex, I’m moving both of you back; Callie, do a small shield across the front line. It shouldn’t hurt too bad.”

  With little say, both students moved back, stepping further away from the targets and closer to their spell-casting counterparts. Meanwhile, Callie granted a low-grade shield to the two in the front.

  Then, before the glowing red targets finished preparing their spell, the one that had had its Petrify spell canceled by Cyril burst into flames, accidentally caught in Faris’s rotation.

  Faris broke his concentration and spoke a small, clean “Oops” before the target meant for Cyril started to grow in size and the two red targets advanced onto the shielded students in a blink, unleashing a flurry of hits which were thankfully absorbed by Callie’s shield.

  Seeing this, the tactician immediately commanded, “Alex and Elias, work on your targets; Callie, both have a Haste buff you’ve got to dispel. Cyril, make sure they’re topped off and prepare a conditional Revitalize at 80% for Faris.”

  That left Faris alone with his own target and Cyril’s, ignoring the increasingly dangerous-looking one to its side.

  “It’s…it’s preparing something, but I don’t know what,” Ty muttered to herself, trying to wrack her brain for ideas. “Faris, advance and switch over to your large-area affliction rotation.”

  “Yup,” confirmed the caster as he jogged closer to Elias and Alex by the front.

  When he started reciting again, Ty glanced at her students on standby. “Kor, get beside Callie so you two can do an Object Cancel.”

  Eyes wide, half-standing up, Korinna looked beyond bewildered as she sputtered, “I…I don’t have a tome with Object Cancel on me.”

  “Wh—do you at least know the words?” Ty asked incredulously.

  “Well, yeah!”

  “Kor,” Darius called, tossing her a thin tome that she caught effortlessly when she swiveled her head toward him. “Go.”

  The chemist obeyed, sprinting toward the other students without taking her eyes off the ever-growing target. “Graces, you think we could even make a big enough Object Cancel?” she breathed.

  Ignoring her comment, Ty turned now to her secondary healer. “Selene, can you do a Renewal field from here?”

  Nodding, she hopped off her seat and stood by the sidelines, starting to recite from memory.

  Ty observed the field. Elias and Alex were doing well with the targets, which she could see now were about a third damaged. Its movements were now going at a much more human speed, stripped of its buff by Callie.

  Faris continued with his rotation and assault on the two backline targets, which did barely any damage, but it did succeed in hampering their movements. In fact, Cyril’s target stopped growing and was now eerily emitting a yellow glow.

  Oh, no.

  A sure-fire option would be to have the target enter a weakened state by bringing it to half of its health, which would prevent it from casting whatever it was preparing—but it came with a slight caveat.

  “Theo,” she asked quietly, going to another page she had flagged earlier. “How safely can I temporarily cut everyone’s health?”

  “35 sounds fine, I don’t recommend 50,” he responded tepidly, his black offensive tome on his lap, “Cyril is running a bit below 80, I’d say. He’d go critical if you cut 50.”

  Tch. She needed the target at 50, and it had been barely touched by Faris.

  “How long until you can deploy that field?” she called to Selene, wincing when the botanist scarily yelled back that she literally just started on it.

  Ty turned to Callie and Korinna instead, seeing the two read from their books with joined hands. A grey haze was slowly starting to build at the large target, not nearly big enough to surround it. Near it was Faris—who was closer to the front than she liked—with Cyril’s conditional Revitalize. “Hey, put that Object Cancel on Cyril instead.”

  All three of the mentioned students lifted their heads up from their books at once in surprise, but the building Object Cancel, commanded by Kor, immediately landed onto the healer due to its already larger-than-human size.

  “Done,” shouted the chemist.

  Ty took in a big breath. “Anyone who’s not doing anything, shield yourself. Cyril, get anyone who’s low. Selene, whenever you’re ready.”

  If the tiny botanist retorted, Ty couldn’t hear it over the blood pounding in her ears as she readied her tactician’s spell, tracing her hands over the neat script as she spoke every word clearly and concisely, finally looking up when she heard a loud, chime-like noise.

  “There!” exclaimed Selene as Ty clutched the podium, her knuckles white as she spoke the last words on the page.

  A deafening thud could be heard throughout the courtyard as the air grew heavy and most of the students absorbed the health-halving blow: Cyril was unaffected, Elias and Alex had been given shields by the supports and therefore were doing fine, and Faris staggered briefly before he hit the threshold for the conditional Revitalize and got back up. Ty herself felt a bit sick, and could hear a loud ringing in her ears, but felt far better than she thought she was going to feel as she analyzed the targets.

  The two that Elias and Alex had been working on were nearly defeated, Faris’s target completely fallen. Cyril’s target was now about half the size as it had been at its peak, deflated and much less threatening.

  Recovering from her stupor, and with a small sense of pride she didn’t know she had, the tactician watched her students take care of the targets one by one, leaving the serene sound of Selene’s chimes floating over the entire courtyard.

  “Well, then. Challenge one is complete,” she declared, walking away from the podium and hugging her book before bowing deeply to everyone watching her on the field and saying the final relinquishing phrase:

  “The contract hereby ended, relieving all from duty.”

  When she straightened up from her bow, in a voice far too quiet for most to hear, she nervously spoke, “Thank you, um, let’s begin the analysis.”