Kyle was admiring the portraits of past academy students along the corridor to the dean's office. Each portrait had a name imprinted onto a gold plaque stating their choice of magic studies.
"Saint Nicole... strategic ranked Shinobi..."
"Josephat Josh... kingdom ranked pyromancer..."
The names of all these students seemed to invoke grand pressure as Kyle read them. These were clearly people who were regarded as grand and powerful. And Kyle planned to surpass them all.
He came upto the grand mahogany doors that seemed to be polished and engraved with bronze sculpting. The light from the ceiling torches reflected off the bronze in beautiful patterns on the soft black carpet under Kyle's feet. Kyle conjured up all of his confidence and knocked twice on the door.
"You may come in."
Kyle pushed the doors and they opened without a single sound as Kyle admired the beauty of the office. Two giant cats were resting on a raised platform near the centre of an artificial pond that took up majority of the office. An assortment of different daggers and shortswords were hanging on the walls together with portraits, shields and even the head of a giant minotaur. The carpet spread out into different paths like the branches of a tree and sitting on a desk placed in the center of the glowing blue pond was none other than the dean.
He held document papers while constantly fidgeting around with the positioning of his spectacles. He didn't look up once and acted as if Kyle wasn't there.
"The king wants...no can't supply that much... should have burnt her alive..."
The dean spoke at random not clarifying what was on his mind. He finally seemed to find the perfect position for his spectacles and met Kyle's gaze with tired eyes.
"Welcome... I assume that you must be Kyle?"
"Yes Dean..."
"Good, there's a matter that I would like to discuss with you... it's regarding your magic..."
"hmm? I thought that I was being suspended..."
"Really? must be that dwarf up to his tricks... you don't need to worry the professor who told you that was just messing with you. Please come take a seat."
The dean stretched his hand over the surface of the pond and immediately a path of steaming stones formed from the edge towards the center of the pond.
The steam blinded Kyle for a bit before the water settled and he now stood before the dean's desk.
"There's no chair..."
"Make one yourself."
"what?"
"Haven't you been practicing Frostborne arts? should be able to at least make an ice stand or something..."
"I only started learning it today..."
"Oh... well sucks to be you I guess. Anyways I had called you here to ask about your magic and to also ask you if you would like to join our academy's shinobi squad..."
"What?"
"Well you seem to have a talent in magic manipulation and according to your entrance exam paper you even seem familiar with the basic shinobi arts principles. Then there's also the fact you were learning Frostborne arts from my niece Nannette."
"That sounds really nice sir but what exactly does this squad do?"
The dean had a sly grin spread across his face as if he had been waiting for this question. A flash of purple lightning appeared in the short strands of his aged hair.
"I'm so glad you asked... come, let me show you."
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"So...did you get suspended?"
"No..."
The angels were sitting at the table back in the sleeping quarters. Alicia wasn't paying attention to the conversation between Kyle and Hannah. She was reading a book that had been recommended to her by one of their classmates.
[contemporary archery magic guide]
Kyle was intrigued by Alicia's choice of literature but decided to ask questions later. Right now he had something to discuss with his friend.
"This world isn't as far back in technology as we thought..."
"I can agree with you on that..."
Hannah was still wearing her uniform but had taken off her jacket and had untucked her shirt. She looked quite tired and had even taken off her skirt so her shirt was hanging all the way down to her thighs and was concealing her underwear.
But Kyle had no interest in things like that so he continued as if nothing was wrong.
"They've got pretty advanced magic research... a pretty balanced society and a lot more things similar to the average world. Almost seems a bit odd that they haven't gone past the iron age."
"Well let's think of it like this..."
Hannah picked up a notebook that she had used earlier in geography. As she turned the pages Kyle could see neat notes on the topic of climates and he frowned.
{They've even found a way to research climates... they would need pretty advanced knowledge to understand the value of predicting climates of a region. But wouldn't that mean they also know how to gather data on weather...}
To several this sort of information would sound useless but to a military force of a supposed primitive world...
It could prove fatal.
Think of it like a caveman fighting a dinosaur and he knows how to trap the dinosaur in quick sand without trapping himself. It's a display of intelligence but if you were to ask him what he did he wouldn't know how to explain and would continue using this method to benefit himself.
Still don't get it? well that's fine you can just ignore it for now.
Hannah finally found a blank page and picked up a quill she had hid in the centre of the book. She scribbled a few words and after confirming that it still had sufficient ink she began writing.
She started By drawing a large letter Y and wrote two different words on the fingers of the letter.
[magic] - [science]
"Ok so as far as we have seen these guys have a pretty solid political foundation which is great and so that's one point for [science]..."
She went ahead and wrote the digit 1 next to the science branch and then moved her quill towards the magic branch.
"They have discovered rare forms of magic and even seem to have created artificial magic alternatives..."
"What makes you say that?"
"There's the fact that they know how to do Shinobi arts and even some crazy jutsu such as [Frostborne arts]..."
"[Frostborne arts] aren't crazy... and how do you even know about it?"
"I read the textbook but that doesn't matter. [Magic] gets a point and so let's continue..."
And so when they were done they stared down at their tree and frowned. They usually did this back at heaven as a sort of activity to cure boredom. They would compare stats of worlds they read about in books and rank them in their imaginary ranking series.
So this world was quite hard to place in rankings because they soon realized something.
"There are way too many gaps...'
"They didn't discover magic on their own... they received help from someone or something else. There's also science where they have too many holes in it's advancement."
"So what do you think? where would you rank it?"
"Twenty...right next to Earth..."
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