‘Four.’
‘Four?’
‘You’re forgetting your parents.’
‘I’m not. I’m purposefully declining to consider them as that sort of couple. My mother is a nun.’
‘I don’t believe that to be true. Your mother is a beautiful woman and your father would be an idiot if he wasn’t–’
‘She’s a nun and that’s all there is to say about it.’
‘They have four children.’
‘We were manufactured in cloning tanks.’
There was enough silence for Mitsuko to start wondering whether she had said something wrong. ‘That’s actually not funny,’ Nava said.
‘I– I’m sorry.’ Mitsuko was unsure why it was not a good joke, but it did sound like Nava was upset by it. You could tell nothing from her face, of course, but she would not have said anything if it was all okay. Perhaps she would have said nothing at all if someone else had said it. Nava was a mystery, but she was opening up, just a little, when she was alone with Mitsuko.
‘It’s nothing important. I’m sure you can think of a way to make it up to me.’
Rest time was over. ‘I’m sure I can.’
Shinden Alliance School of Sorcery.
‘Do you think we should have invited them over to use the spare room?’ Mitsuko asked. She was putting clothes away in the wardrobe in her apartment’s bedroom. Nava was languishing on the bed. They were all back at school having left the mansion after lunch. The ‘them’ in question was Melissa and Rochester, who had headed off to their own apartments with a look about them which suggested they would get no further than Melissa’s bed. ‘From personal experience, we both know that there can be insufficient clearance in those bunks.’
‘That’s mostly your problem for being so tall,’ Nava replied.
‘Chess isn’t that much shorter than me!’
‘Five or six centimetres. I suppose Mel will have some difficulty if she wants to be on top. However, I think they’d be far too embarrassed to take you up on the offer.’
‘Perhaps. Maybe we could invite them over here every so often and then just… suggest they stay because it’s late.’
‘Flimsy, but it might work.’
‘I’m glad they finally got their act together.’
‘Yes,’ Nava agreed. ‘And we have every hope they’ll pass through the novelty phase quickly enough to not be irritating.’
Mitsuko giggled. ‘I haven’t got over it yet.’
‘Then why aren’t you over here, ravishing me?’
With a slightly exaggerated motion, Mitsuko tossed aside the dress she had just put on a hanger and turned toward the bed. ‘That’s a very good question…’
235/5/13.
Nava stood in combat simulation room three, dressed in her school combat suit, with the rest of class 12C. There was a MagiTag pistol in her right hand which she was largely ignoring while her classmates examined theirs with interest or outright glee.
The room was basically a gymnasium with a bunch of embedded magical devices allowing the instructor to create illusory obstacles and obstructing force walls wherever they wished. It was employed for combat practice. Today would be the first that the class was to receive actual instruction in the practical use of magic and the tactics it demanded. Truthfully, Nava considered it pointless: she was about to spend an afternoon having fun rather than learning anything.
‘All right, listen up.’ The instructor was a big man, muscular and powerful with the general air of a drill instructor about him. His hair was probably dark, but the precise colour was hard to tell since he kept it shaved to near baldness. His eyes were blue, and he came with a solid jawline and aquiline nose which likely marked him as coming from European stock, but his skin was a darker shade of brown. His name was Mathias Statham Mendel, which made him a clansman of their theory teacher, but the two men were entirely different, it seemed.
The class grew quiet and Mathias continued. ‘In these lessons, you’re all going to learn what it is to actually fight, using sorcery to gain advantage over your opponents and defeat them. You’re all on the support stream, but that doesn’t mean you can assume that you’ll never have to fight.’
So, even some members of the faculty were under the impression that people selected the support stream to avoid combat. Of course, that was not entirely untrue. Both Melissa and Rochester, and likely others in the class, had no plans to end up on a battlefield. They might end up in the ASF’s naval forces where magical technicians were an integral part of any warship’s functions, but close combat was something they were unlikely to see. Still, Nava had to agree that some combat experience was useful, it was just that, by the time her classmates came to really use what they were learning, it was fairly likely that they would have forgotten their lessons.
‘We’re going to start with something you’ll probably find fun, but I’ll be assessing your abilities while you’re enjoying yourselves. I want everyone in teams of three. Then we’ll get started.’
Nava did not even bother turning around. She knew that Melissa and Rochester were flanking her. She had a three-person fireteam practically built in and none of the others were going to try to break them up.
~~~
Nava watched the goings-on below from the training room’s observation area, considering her strategy. The tactics were not an issue, but the strategy was another matter.
She had spent the first couple of matches watching the instructor. Her assessment was that he was an arrogant man who did not want to be bothered with teaching students who did not want to learn how to fight. He was not ex-military. The military would have knocked some of the edges off the man. Besides, he was too young to have had a military career and then gone into teaching. Practically, people did not tend to retire from the ASF until they had to. Mitsuko’s father was something of an exception since family duties had compelled him to leave the service. The same was true of the services the clans
