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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 99
🕑 Added 2024-05-25 13:27:38 +0000 UTCA couple of days later, it was finally the weekend. That means no classes, day or night.
After greeting the lunch ladies on weekend duty and getting some breakfast, I made my way to the part of the academy where the reinforced enchanting classrooms were, but instead of entering one of the classrooms, I took the stairs down to a basement, below the reinforced classrooms, and I got to say, it is quite a walk down, I can safely say I walked three stories down, which means if nothing is occupying those two stories above me, I can safely assume it is two stories of solid rock between me and whatever accidental explosions happen above.
At the bottom of the stairs is an academy staff doing some paperwork, and nearby is the academy’s dragon in disguise, Professor Sageira Drackot.
Over the past few months since finding out she was a dragon, we have been exchanging information on our usage of Instinctive magic. To do that safely and privately, we used a facility provided by the school for testing volatile spells or potions.
This facility is arguably the most fortified place in the kingdom, the only difference is that instead of being fortified against anything getting in, it is heavily fortified and warded against anything getting out, be it mundane or magical explosion, liquids, gasses, mana, and most other kinds of energy.
This facility is officially known as the Testing Chambers, but everyone calls it The Cells due to each Testing Chamber looking like an upsized prison cell, and for all intents and purposes, it was just that, a prison. It is even sometimes used to keep Magic Beasts and monsters for study.
After meeting and greeting Professor Sageira, we booked a testing chamber with the academy staff and went to our assigned chamber.
Once we were behind closed doors, Professor Sageira turned to me, “Good to see you again, Luke, I hear you had quite an eventful few days in the Arena. You seem to be quite the subject among the faculty.”
I turned to Professor Sageira from closing and sealing the door, “Why do you make it sound like we have not seen each other for a long time, I was in your class two nights ago.”
“Ahh, but that is in a professional setting where we could not discuss more personal matters. Behind closed doors, we are free to be ourselves. I am free to be a dragon and you are free to be a grown man in a child’s body.”
I groaned at the last part of her sentence. I may be in a child’s body, but due to a period of my life where I experienced accelerated growth, I recently started showing signs of puberty. It started with unexplained boners, and not long after, I had my first wet dream. I was not proud of it because it was of my wetnurse Anna. The morning after, I had to use some magic to get rid of the mess I had made before sending that pair of pants for laundry.
“Please don’t remind me, I am starting to hit puberty and it is not a phase of life that I like to go through again, next thing I know, my voice is going to break and my face is going to break out in acne.”
Professor Sageira chuffed in amusement, “Ah yes, puberty there were points in my life when I adopted human children, you humans are so cute until you get to that stage, then they get all angsty and rebellious, I wonder if you will be the same even with the mind of an adult. Besides I do not think you will need to worry about acne, all the children I raised had their pimples clear shortly after they learned and practiced Aura, the constant flow of stamina energy seems to clear things up. As for you who already uses Aura, your skin may never be blighted with pimples ever again.”
“That… is somewhat of a relief… and did you say you raised human children?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, “Why would you do that?”
Professor Sageira had a faraway look when I asked her, “It was a period in my life after I learned to polymorph, after trying out different animals, I eventually decided to try living as one of the enlightened races, and seeing as you humans are so prolific, I decided to go with one of you.
I adopted my first child a few decades after integrating into human society. This was far away in a long-dead kingdom, and said kingdom had just finished fighting a war with its neighbor, naturally as all things that come during and after a war, were bandits. And I found my first human baby son crying in the arms of his mother who was recently killed.
It was such a small defenseless creature, and I took pity on it. But instead of dropping it off at some orphanage, I had the, at the time, interesting idea of raising it myself, by then I was already an adult dragon who had raised a few clutches of wyrmlings, so I thought to myself, ‘How hard could one human be?’, turns out that human babies need a lot more attention to not accidentally kill themselves.
Eventually, my son grew up to be a court mage of the kingdom I found him in, and had a bunch of children and grandchildren. And unlike my dragon offspring, my human son’s family was a lot more sociable, which I enjoyed. But all good things must come to an end, after my son and his children passed, subsequent generations became more distant, that was when I decided it was time to move on with my life.”
“I am sorry for your loss.” I said solemnly, but she gently waved it off, “but why did subsequent generations become more distant? I thought it would be kind of cool to have a powerful dragon as a great-grandmother… Unless they did not know you were a dragon?”
She shook her head, “Only my son knew I was a dragon, but by that time, I was wise enough to know ‘He who guards his mouth preserves his life.’ I ingrained that into my son so only he knew. It would not do for some would-be dragon slayer to use my son as a hostage to draw me out. But enough of that, you said you had some questions about the hobgoblin shaman you faced?”
“Yeah, it was when I touched it to get a better look at its mana-” I then told her what I observed and what the hobgoblin shaman was capable of during my fight.
Once I was done, I waited to hear her input on the subject, but all I got was a “Huh, that's interesting, I did not know hobgoblins could do that.”
