Kevin Curry
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Chapter 4: The "joys" of teaching
🕑 Added 2022-02-14 14:13:13 +0000 UTCSome adventurers tended to mock Casimir when he insisted on referring to beneficial curse magic as such instead of saying less accurate but more informative things like blessings, wards, or buffs. One of the reasons he did so was to remind himself of the core legends of his discipline: curses didn’t just… go away when they were well made. They could be cast but lay dormant for years until the proper trigger was provided, from a set of words, being splashed with water, or even touching something owned by the caster. With a bit of mind mana incorporated into the curse, it could be anything the target could conceive of, with their realization of the trigger being what actually triggered it.
As such, he didn’t even need to do more than will it for the spells he had long ago stitched onto his soul to activate, allowing them to drink from the mana within his mana heart to invoke their effects. His body warmed as his blood flowed faster, his lungs took in more air, his movements sped up, the world around him slowed down, and his movements rippled with force. He wouldn’t call himself elite-ranked in physical combat alone, but he got by.
It was probably overkill… but they might have something up their sleeve. It’s safer for them for Casimir to not have to worry about his own safety in the battle.
Faron proved that he wasn’t entirely stupid by proving that he could cast the basics of his discipline, shaping a Force Blade and Barrier Shield before charging forward, using Fly to close the distance quickly with a shield bash.
Still, a fist empowered with a Wallop spell shattered the construct and allowed Casimir to grab the hand that still held the sword, gripping it to cause the wannabe knight to drop the blade. With contact severed combined with the two shocks to his concentration, the blade dissipated with a pop. “Your spellblade was still unstable.” Casimir criticized as he spun around and flung the boy towards his teammates. “It didn’t even hit the ground before it lost coherence.”
Casimir plucked from the air the training knives the other members of the team had used Move Object on, leaning out of the way of the one Hanna used Propel with as a finishing blow. “Going straight for the kill. Wise.” He commented, testing the edges of the blades to confirm their dullness. “Try again.” He got into a combat stance with the knives, twirling them around his fingers before settling just for fun.
Illivere brought out an iron-capped staff from her magical bag, it was definitely enchanted, but not by her, too professional. Peter had more knives, but instead of wielding it completely telekinetically, he instead synchronized it to his physical movements and had four of them surrounding each fist. Faron shaped a new force blade and took a more maneuverable stance before Hanna propelled a sling bullet, the signal for the rest of them to charge while Casimir moved his knives to block the projectile.
Four seconds of frantic action later, Casimir was balancing one of the knives on his finger while sitting on the groaning pile of his students. “In order: having a Wallop enchantment on the iron caps of your staff doesn’t do much if your enemy knows not to touch the metal part and is skilled enough to follow through with that knowledge, the knife-fist trick looks cool and helps you block and deal damage, but not hit your opponent, and Faron, you would have been more effective if you instead formed only your shield and worked to distract me so your allies could get hits in.” He let that sink in for a moment. “They still wouldn’t have scored a hit, mind you, but it would have been smarter.”
Hanna kneeled next to the pile and started focusing on mending the team’s wounds. “How was our performance, Mr. Toomes?” Illivere said, unbothered by her position at the bottom of the pile despite the wheezing tone her voice took on from it.
Casimir stood up, pulled Faron off the pile and let him drop back onto the ground. “Y’all planned for me to fight you.” He observed.
“We reasoned that it would be a likely method of testing us.” Illivere said demurely.
Hm. Yeah, it was pretty predictable, wasn’t it? “Well, you did okay.” He eventually said. “Not great, but it was good progress seeing as how half of you are still doing bookwork for your specialties.” Spellweaving and shaping studies went into practical application pretty much immediately, but enchanting and curse magic required targets, so a more thorough understanding was preferred before they got started on those.
“So do we get to hear your awesome title then?” Peter asked, hopefully.
“Hmmm… nah.” Casimir replied, which was met with groans from the group. “Once you guys can land a single hit or force me to use a proper spell, then I’ll tell you.” It’ll give them a clear goal to work on. Motivation is a precious resource when you’re still weak, after all. Wait… he used Wallop earlier. Eh, they probably didn’t notice. Besides, calling Wallop a proper spell was like calling walking a martial technique. Toddlers could pull it off if they were spirit-blooded.
“So, I have to help teach the class of sorcerers soon, so I’m going to get going. Just keep up the exercises and when you think you’ve gotten strong enough to impress me, we’ll do this again.” Kicking student asses, that is.
“We’ll beat you, Teach!” Peter said, still as determined as before his asskicking. “Just you wait!” Faron said something loudly in Elvish to agree with the sentiment. Illivere stood with them with a calculative expression, but her proximity was a statement of its own. Hanna was standing beside them instead of hiding behind Faron, so it looked like they were in agreement in this.
Casimir gave them his most sadistic grin. “We’ll see.”
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It was the start of the third week of classes, and Casimir gets to talk about one of the most exciting parts of being with other wizards: debating spell choices. “Today, class, we will be learning about one of the fundamental limits on curse magic: Inherent Magical Resistance.” Casimir said, revealing his pre-prepared soul diagram. “Who can tell me what that is?”
As usual, three people raised their hands: Illivere, Ruzum, and the dwarf in the back that carries twice as many books around as everyone else does. “Horace.” Casimir said to call on him.
The dwarf stood up, stroking his coal-black beard. “It’s a soul’s resistance to binding curses and certain other kinds of magic into it. Resistance varies based on how dangerous a curse is, which is why directly lethal curses aren’t particularly useful.”
“Correct.” Casimir said. “To be more specific, let’s use an example of a life curse that stops someone’s heart.” He sketched out the spell matrix to the side of the soul diagram. “If you actually used it, it would be fought with everything the soul had, which would have one of two results: Either they fail and collapse, dying swiftly from the stopped heart, or, more commonly, they break the spell, stumbling a bit from the interruption of their heart’s normal pace, and with some chest pain, but in the end that’s all you’ve accomplished.” Noticing someone with a question, he pointed to the student. Hey, he never asked one before, neat. “Name?”
The boy hesitated. “Ah, I’m Steven Cooper, Professor. It seems to me that interrupting someone’s heart would be pretty useful even if it doesn’t stop it.”
“Correct.” Casimir said. “However, using lethal curses that the target takes damage to shake off is generally a pretty mana intensive way of fighting and there are much easier methods. Now, there are advantages; if you wanted to, for example, harvest a particular body part of a monster you overpower significantly, you could just keep casting lethal curses that target a completely different but essential part of the body, until they keel over, giving you a low-risk way of ensuring that it’s in the best possible condition.” By now, the class had learned that Casimir usually used monster hunting as his go-to when giving examples. “Incidentally, the name of this curse-” Casimir taps the spell matrix he sketched on the board. “-is actually Heart Tremor, to reflect the fact that it almost never kills the target, which is what it’s theoretically designed to do.” He erased the diagram.
“The usual method of managing this, with debilitating curses, is to deliberately constrain the curse into being something that impedes the target but without being directly lethal.” He drew a similar but different spell matrix. “This variant of Heart Tremor instead restrains a heart, ensuring that it remains at a steady, even pulse. When the target is just sitting there, this does nothing at all, and is actually a bit relaxing.” Which made it fantastic as an aid to an ambush, as it could be cast on mana-blind beings without them noticing anything amiss. There weren’t a whole lot of those among monsters you usually send elite-ranked adventurers at, though, so he’s had to pivot to more overt curses since his last promotion. “But when they start getting excited, scared, start fighting? They’ll find themselves light-headed, their muscles will tire at a greater rate, and eventually the curse becomes dangerous enough for their soul to fight it off, causing the Heart Tremor effect.” He erased the curse again.
“These two curses use approximately the same amount of base mana, but while the first tremor is more potent than the second, the difference isn’t that big.” He wrote some mana equations on the board, the ones from the textbook about how to calculate the strength of a resistance reaction, before circling the part related to the mana drain of the curse’s normal effect. “While the damage from a resistance reaction is nice, your curses will always be more effective if they work as designed instead of relying on the damage from the reactions.” Well, assuming you had a good selection of combat curses and used appropriate ones, but this was a class for wizards; that was a given.
“One of the more fascinating parts about inherent resistance reactions, in my opinion;” Casimir continued, “-is that the soul’s ability to detect the lethality of a curse declines if you use more roundabout methods. Roughly, the more complex the curse is, the further it can go before the reaction occurs. For example, let’s go back to the heart-stopping curse.” He sketched out a larger and more complicated spell matrix. “Can anyone here identify the type of mana I’m using here?” Their ability to read curse diagrams was still pretty limited, but they’ve been working on it for two weeks, so they should be able to tell this much. He used Magnify to increase the apparent size of the chalk sketch, the active light spell being quite useful in scouting.
A few hands up, good. “Illivere.” Casimir said, pointing at the white-haired girl.
Illivere’s reply was emotionless and without inflection. “Water, Mr. Toomes.”
“Correct.” Casimir said. “This is called the Blood Thickening curse. It also increases stress on the heart, and produces the same rough effects as the Steady Heart curse in similar circumstances. But it’s less subtle, as even when calm a vigilant target can notice something amiss. This means it’s easier to detect and break with active curse resistance techniques, which are usually just willing an inherent resistance reaction to happen and focusing their own mana to reinforce whatever area the reaction would damage.” Really, the spell had many downsides, which was why Casimir usually didn’t cast it. “However, a proper inherent resistance reaction occurs after a greater degree of impediment, and the reaction’s damage will usually create a larger health problem than skipping a beat or two of the heart.”
Well, time to move on from this tangent. “Now, this is not a combat curse class, so clearly these examples may not be suitable for all of your future careers. But inherent curse resistance also applies to more beneficial curses, in particular ones that are meant to cause a permanent change. Regeneration, for example.” The simplest method of healing exceptionally grievous wounds was using curse magic to slowly correct the damage over weeks or months. There were some ritual spellweaves that could do it over seconds, but those required… a lot of mana. Also, there were… ways to prevent both of those spells from working properly.
Will Hana reply to the letter, or feed it to a shark? Wait, what was happening? Oh, Hanna has a question. “Yes, Hanna?” Casimir asked.
“Um… the textbook said something about spirit-blooded people being un-unusual with inherent resistance?” Hanna said, softly and unsure.
“Ah, right. Knew I was forgetting something.” Casimir said, pretending his distraction didn’t happen. “Because spirits, and by extension spirit-blooded, have aspected mana composing their souls, although spirit-blooded have only a portion of their souls like this by default, they have a unique relationship with hostile mana effects.” Should he draw the chart? …nah. “The specifics of mana interactions is beyond the scope of this course, so we’ll leave it at ‘spirits are harder to curse’ for now.” If you knew what you were doing, you could do some interesting things to a spirit, but as they lacked things like normal organs and muscles, you needed to use specific kinds of curses to affect them, and depending on what you wanted to do, you had to change what mana type you were using to either oppose or complement the spirit’s own nature. “Fortunately, one of the primary differences between monsters and spirits is that monsters have proper physical bodies that can be disrupted like an animal or person’s system. Just don’t try and curse spirits until you know what you’re doing.”
Peter raised his hand. What now? Casimir pointed to him. “Teach, what was the nastiest spirit you’ve cursed?”
He should really stop humoring these off-topic questions. But then again… “Definitely the rockslide spirit. Dual-aspect spirits can be harder or easier to curse than single-aspect types, depending on how synergistic they are. Force and Stone mana are not terribly synergistic, as it turns out. A bone-weakening curse twisted to use stone mana combined with an inverted strength-increasing force curse caused him to break apart every single stone he was controlling into dust. We dealt with him before he was able to shake off the curses.” Normally that combination wasn’t quite so dramatic, as it was hard as hell to get the bone-weakening curse to properly settle in, and both get shaken off at the first broken bone… “That’s an example of using curses effectively to get around inherent magic resistance, by the way. The magic that spirits, and true sorcerers, use can be treated as an extension of themselves, in some ways. Curses can affect their spells in ways that just don’t work with other kinds of mages, due to the separation of soul and the mana heart.” He clapped his hands. “And once again, the complexities of curse magic and spirits is beyond the scope of this class.”
Where was he? Explanation, example, why studying it is important… Oh right. “Now, all curses have the potential of being fought off by an inherent resistance reaction, if you cast them poorly. If the spell is beneficial, this means you not only waste mana, but also hurt your ally.” As it turns out, shoving mana into people’s souls is dangerous! Who knew? Not as dangerous as proper offensive magic, mind you, but dangerous nonetheless.“So we’re going to spend the rest of class going over how to calculate how dangerous a resistance reaction would be, going over each of the curses you’re going to be learning with those equations, and discussing why the answers differ for each one.”
Most wizards could talk about their discipline for hours. Teaching was really just putting that boast to the test, and Casimir was happy to say that he had passed it with flying colors.
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Most of the time, teaching was ‘okay’ to ‘kind of nice’. But at others…
“I cannot read this bastard’s handwriting.” Casimir groaned, slumping over the pile of papers. “His beautiful, absolutely incomprehensible handwriting.” Fucking Horace…
Master lifted up his head and snapped up the paper. “Hm… yeah, dwarves can get pretty elaborate with their calligraphy.” She agreed. “He’s using dwarven symbology in his equations, though, so that’s probably most of the problem. I’ll grade this one, and you can read one of my books on the subject for later.” She took a moment to scan her shelves. “Did I put that under art or language…” Eventually, she gestured and a thick, intricately decorated tome flew out of a shelf and into her hand. “It was in the language section.” She said, nodding to herself.
It would be pretty easy to spot a book written by dwarves, wouldn’t it? “I’ll make a note for him to use the symbols taught in class, and to tone down the flourishes. Magnus got offended, but he always listened when I argued that he was compromising function.” Just because dwarves preferred to blend form and function in their crafts… doesn’t mean they always struck the correct balance.
…Casimir grabbed his Upsi tea and drank it.
