Chapter 31: The Ruin Under the Academy

So, apparently, there was a ruin under the academy.

We went down at night, since what we were doing broke about six different school rules.

She took me through the faculty wing and then down two flights, past the practice halls and the archive. After that came a corridor I’d never seen before, and by the end of it the air was cold enough that I could see my breath. Sabine stopped at a stretch of wall, ran her fingers along the mortar until she found a brick set lower than the others, and pressed it.

A section of the wall ground backward and slid aside.

[Oh, hang on. I wrote this.]

I did. It came back to me the second the stone moved. There was a ruin under Stellaris Royal Academy and the school was built directly on top of it. In volume three, Lily and the gang find their way down here and the whole second half of the book happens underground. I’d needed the academy built on a ruin because I’d needed somewhere for the plot to go once I ran out of school festivals.

Cold air came up out of the dark on the other side. Below the opening there was a staircase cut from black stone.

"After you, Miss Sakana."

"You first, actually. You’re the one who knows where the lights are."

She went first.

The stairs took a long time. When they ended we were standing in a chamber I couldn’t see, but our footsteps kept coming back to us a second late, so I knew it was big.

Sabine snapped her fingers and light came off her palm. There were columns, and carvings on the columns that I couldn’t read.

"Right. Here’s the thing nobody teaches first-years," Sabine said. "They don’t teach it because first-years who try it tend to die, and dead students are terrible for enrollment."

"Makes sense."

"Anyway, your core isn’t a fixed size. Everyone talks about it like it is. It can be made bigger."

"Bigger how?"

"Crystals. In old places like this, where the mana has been sitting undisturbed for a thousand years, it settles and hardens. Core seeds. You absorb one, it merges with your core, and it forces the whole thing wider than it would ever have grown on its own." She kept walking, and the light went with her. "That’s the head start. Every prodigy you’ve ever heard of, every twelve-year-old genius the papers make a fuss over, somebody in their family knew where a site like this was and got them to it early. Nobody says so out loud. Saying so out loud is how sites get emptied."

"How much bigger are we talking?"

"That depends on the seed, and I can’t tell you what’s down there, so I won’t guess. More than you’d get in three weeks of training. Considerably more."

"Does it hurt?"

"Enormously."

[As expected.]

"Great," I said. "So where’s mine?"

"That’s the part you aren’t going to enjoy." She swung the light toward an archway ahead of us and the dark going down past it. "Seeds form where the mana is thickest. The thickest mana is at the bottom of the site. So are the things that like living in thick mana."

"Ah."

"Everything near the surface was stripped out of here centuries ago by people far better funded than you. Anything left is deep, and it’ll have a guard on it."

"What kind of guard?"

"I don’t know. Nobody has been down there in a very long time, which is rather the point of the exercise."

"So you brought me to a dungeon with a prize at the bottom and a monster parked on the prize?"

"In a way. I’d like to think I brought you to a door and I told you the rules."

"Right, but you could-"

"Nope."

"Y-You didn’t even hear me out!"

"Don’t need to." She stopped and let the light settle between us. "Two reasons. The first is that a professor hauling monster corpses out of a sealed ruin underneath the school is a conversation I’d rather not have with anyone, ever. The second one matters more. If I kill it, nothing about you changes. The seed has to go into your core, and the only way to the seed is through whatever’s guarding it. That’s the arrangement I’m offering. I’m aware it’s a bad one, and I don’t have another."

[Naturally. The one useful thing this world has coughed up for me is at the bottom of a hole with a landlord sitting on top of it.]

Fifteen years ago I sat at a desk and decided this was a good idea.

[Past me, I swear to God.]

"And I’ve got three weeks," I said.

"Less than that now." Sabine closed her hand and the mage-light went out, which left me with the little blue glow off the weasel and a hallway I couldn’t see the end of. "The door stays unlocked. Come down when you’re ready to be stupid about it, and try to be stupid about it soon."

Then she went back up the stairs and left me there.

[No shortcut, then. No kindly old master or training montage, just a monster and three weeks. Fine. Let’s go be stupid about it.]

---

{Serena}

I hadn’t intended to go anywhere near the faculty wing.

I’d gone out walking, which is what I did when a day annoyed me and refused to stop. The mutt won her first match. I watched the whole thing from the competitors’ gallery. She struck a pose in the middle of the duel like an idiot, then won anyway.

My walk took me to the lower faculty corridors.

Suddenly, I spotted Professor Corvaine and the mutt at the end of it. Professor Corvaine had her hair down and was out of uniform. The fox was all giddy. The two of them were walking very quietly toward a part of the building I knew to be a dead-end.

I stepped back into a doorway before either of them turned around.

[... Curious.]

Corvaine ran her hand along the wall and the stone moved. The two of them went down into a stairwell I hadn’t known existed. Then the stone slid shut behind them.

I stayed in the doorway for a while after they’d gone, arms crossed.

[Hm. What does she want in there with Kohaku?]

I turned and went back the way I’d come.