"You're doing it wrong."
Arthur looked at her.
Then at his wet sleeve.
"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."
Alfia Everreth didn't move from the wall. Book still closed in her lap. One leg folded under her. She had the posture of someone who had claimed this spot long before he showed up and was not particularly happy about the interruption.
"This is usually empty," she said.
"I know."
She looked at him the way you look at something that has landed in your space uninvited and hasn't left yet.
"You're Lestilaut."
"Yeah."
"Then you already know I'm not going to help you."
Arthur opened his mouth.
'GOOD. Don't ask her for anything. Snobby wench. She thinks she's above everyone just because her output is slightly above average. Don't give her the satisfaction of—' Vexis hissed, hovering just over Arthur's left shoulder.
"Why not?" Arthur said.
Vexis made a sound like someone had stepped on him.
Alfia tilted her head slightly. Like she was deciding whether the question was worth answering.
"Because the last time someone from your circle spoke to me," she said, "it was to tell me my family name wasn't worth the ink it took to write it. I believe that was your exact phrasing."
Arthur had zero memory of that. Vexis's memories were inconsistent at best and apparently had zero interest in preserving the moments that made him look the worst.
He should apologize. That was the reasonable thing. Simple, clean, just say sorry and try to redirect.
"Your family name probably wasn't," his mouth said. "But your output clearly is. So teach me."
Alfia stared at him.
Arthur stared back and thought about screaming.
She looked away first. Back to the courtyard, to the single tree growing out of the cracked stone near the far wall. Her expression had shifted slightly. Not warmer. Just different.
"Your form is wrong," she said, like she hadn't decided to say it yet and it came out anyway. "You're forcing the flow instead of moving with it. The aetheric blood doesn't respond to pressure. It responds to rhythm."
She wasn't looking at him while she said it. Wasn't teaching. Just talking to the middle distance in a way that he could technically overhear if he chose to.
Arthur chose to.
He turned back to his hand and breathed in.
The Mageia Core worked like a heart. He knew that much. Which meant it responded the same way a heart did. Not to force. To pace. To rhythm.
He breathed out slow. Then in again, a little faster this time. Felt something shift behind his sternum. Not much. Just a degree of warmth that hadn't been there before, moving upward through his chest and into his shoulder.
He pushed it forward.
A water ball rose above his palm. Bigger than the marble from before. Still wobbly, still uneven, but it held for five full seconds before it came apart.
Okay. That was better.
He tried again. Same breath sequence. Faster in, slower out. The warmth moved through his chest into his shoulder, down his forearm, and hit his palm like something looking for a way out.
The ball formed. Golf ball sized. It spun in one direction and actually kept spinning.
Then it burst and soaked his hand again.
Arthur shook the water off his fingers.
'PATHETIC.' Vexis floated down beside him, arms crossed. 'You are using my body. My blood. My core. And this is what you produce. A damp hand. Congratulations.'
Your core is basically running on fumes so maybe sit this one out.
'It is NOT empty. It is simply undertrained because I never had reason to—'
You never tried. That's literally all that is.
Vexis went quiet.
Arthur breathed in again.
The thing was, even as small as the output was, it felt dense. The water that formed above his palm wasn't light. It had weight to it. A deep quality, the color of it sitting somewhere between blue and almost black, like water over something very deep.
It didn't feel like the clear wobbly sphere Alfia had probably produced at age twelve without thinking about it.
It felt like something compressed.
He pushed more breath into the sequence. Heart rate climbing. The warmth in his chest moved faster, hit his shoulder harder, ran down his arm like something that had been waiting a long time to actually move.
The ball that formed was coin-sized.
Arthur looked at it and felt genuinely embarrassed for it.
He shot it at the tree anyway.
It didn't burst on impact.
It went through.
A clean hole, perfectly round, punched straight through the trunk and out the other side. A shaft of light appeared through the gap. Bark on the far side scattered across the courtyard floor.
Arthur stood there with his arm still extended and stared at the hole in the tree.
Huh.
'WHAT.' Vexis snapped from above him.
The coin held for a second then dissipated. Arthur lowered his arm.
That came from a coin-sized ball. That went through a tree.
'I HEARD YOU THE FIRST—'
Vexis. Your body is absolutely stacked with aetheric blood. Like an insane amount. How did you not know this.
'…I am aware of my own bloodline.' His voice had gone strange. Slower. Less certain.
You knew it was there. You just never actually used it.
Silence.
Arthur looked up at him. Vexis was staring at the hole in the tree with the expression of someone who had just found a door in their house they had walked past every single day and never once tried to open.
He didn't say anything.
Arthur looked back at the tree.
Dude. You were sitting on all of this the whole time and just never bothered.
He hadn't meant it to land hard. But he felt Vexis go somewhere quieter anyway, and Arthur left him there.
He turned around.
Alfia was still on the wall.
She wasn't looking at the tree. She was looking at him. Her expression was screaming intrigued.
She looked away the second their eyes met.
Then she stood up, tucked the book under her arm, and reached into her pocket for the relic stone.
"Hey," Arthur said. "You're leaving?"
She didn't answer. She raised one arm out to the side with her palm open and the air in the courtyard shifted. Water gathered from nothing, pulling itself together above her palm in a slow orbit. It kept growing. Basketball-sized. Then bigger. The color of it was clear and light, nothing like his, and it moved like something alive.
She looked at the tree once.
Then she shot it.
The impact left a crater in the bark the size of a dinner plate. Splinters scattered across the whole courtyard. Water ran down the trunk in rivers.
She looked at Arthur with an expression that was not quite a challenge and not quite a demonstration.
"Your density is unusual," she said. "Your control is nonexistent. Those are different problems."
Then she pressed the relic stone and vanished with a hiss.
Arthur stood in the empty courtyard with splinters in his hair and water on his shoes.
He pointed at the empty space where she'd been standing.
That. Right there. That is textbook tsundere behavior. I grew up on the internet. I know exactly what that was.
'…What is a tsundere.' Vexis said flatly from somewhere behind him.
Don't worry about it.
Arthur lowered his hand and looked back at the two holes in the tree. Hers wide and blown out. His small and clean.
Volume versus density.
She had more flow. More output. Probably spent years developing the control to move it smoothly.
He had a body that had spent eighteen years sitting on a reservoir it never knew was there and had never once opened the tap.
He raised his hand again. Breathed in. Felt the warmth build in his chest and shoulder and arm. Pushed it out slow.
Coin-sized ball. Dark blue. Dense.
He held it for a moment.
Then a square of red light appeared in front of him, hovering at eye level, and he almost lost the ball entirely.
[Massive Relevance Recorded]
[You made an impression on a Heroine]
[+20 RP]
[Current Balance: 23 RP]
Arthur looked at the number.
Twenty points from one conversation with a girl who didn't even want to look at him.
Three points from standing up in front of a whole class and reciting a textbook answer.
He stared at the gap between those two numbers.
Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and rested his chin on both hands.
Okay. Twenty points. From her.
He knew exactly why.
Alfia Everreth wasn't just a plain heroine. Heck, she was barely in the first act at all, which was probably why he hadn't clocked her properly. But in the second act she was everywhere.
The girl who looked like a side character in the early chapters turned out to be the false antagonist of the entire second arc. Pulling strings. Dismantling things quietly from the inside.
The kind of villain that worked because nobody saw her coming, including Xavier.
Arthur had actually liked that arc. One of the few things he hadn't complained about in the comments.
And she was sitting in an empty courtyard watching him fail at basic magic.
He had no idea what that meant for the story. Whether running into her here changed something or whether this was always going to happen. But the system was telling him loud and clear that she mattered right now, in this act, not just the next one.
He needed to not mess that up.
The red light faded.
Arthur looked at the coin of dark water still spinning above his palm.
He shot it at the same spot on the tree and punched the hole a little wider.
Then he sat back down and got to work.