To start with Sora started constructing stars outside of his Mana core and fusing them with both of his elemental cores. He could only form 1 every 2 days so he had to pick between equally splitting the 2 stars between both of his elements or fully focusing on his fire element which was his academy registered element anyway. The perks are that he keeps a balanced skillset if he splits it equally and knows his strength across all elements at the expense of his progress being slow and delaying his ability to sustain himself as a mage. On the other side of things having 4 in his fire element allows him to lay out the strength of each one, this however would come at the cost of balance.
Sora, however, neither cared about balance nor did he care about the academy, in line with that train of thought he went for option 3; he placed 4 stars into his lightning element, it wouldn't upgrade into a true basic elemental core (Lesser basic core to basic-basic core) just yet since he needs one more star for that, this worked out perfectly for him as he needed to work on the actual process of casting before stocking himself up with power After all it doesn't matter if you give a soldier then best weapon in his line without the proper training, it is a decorative ornament at best.
It was the last day before he resumed for the second part of the term and The main focus of today was to perfectly cast a lesser fireball and lesser spark without any of his special add-ons, If he mastered that quickly he would move on adding the Sun fire and dark purple lightning effects. At first, it was awkward to fill his elemental cores with mana because at the end of the day despite his large mana reserves even at this level he had roughly 30 spells in the tank at any given time. This means he had 15 attempts on each element.
For Fire, since it was significantly more complicated to cast it took him 8 attempts to fill up his elemental core in one go and even that took a whole 7 seconds, Lightning was much better as he had it figured out in 3 attempts and he could fill it up in 5 seconds flat, it might not seem like much on paper but imagine having to wait 2 seconds before having to dodge a punch that was thrown at you at point blank range, and the dodge didn't carry over to the next hit, each time it just took 2 seconds to dodge, that was essentially the difference between the casting the two spells.
By the time he used up 9 attempts each Sora was able to fill up his lesser basic lightning elemental core in a single second while he was still stuck on 3 seconds with his fire element, At the end of the day he dedicated all leftover attempts to fire and could now consistently fill up both elemental cores in 1 second. Sora then manually refilled his mana reserves by gathering mana as though he wanted to cultivate, All mages could do this but it usually took well over 10 times the mental energy and concentration to refill your mana reserves, and for someone like Sora who had ridiculous mana reserves the 10 minutes it took to refill his mana felt like weeks.
Sora wasn't particular about speed just yet but he would not relent on form and detail As such he decided to cast each spell fully once to get a proper feel for the process, For this, he started with a fireball, the significantly more complicated spell to cast manually. Sora filled his lesser basic fire elemental core in 1 second and awakened his (quite literally the mana equivalent of waking up) and could feel the dormant fire building up in his body, Sora manifested energy as actual fire and condensed it into the size of a tennis ball, he then poured the remnant energy in his body to intensify the spell as much as physically possible and held it in place, the whole process of forming the spell took roughly 5 seconds in total before shooting it out by flexing the hand he cast the spell through and the fireball shot forth like a bullet striking the centre of a large oak tree, the fireball pierced into the tree trunk before Sora let it explode destroying the tree from the inside. The raw force of the spell reduced the tree trunk to splinters while the top half of the tree fell into the intense burning embers burning up rather quickly. Unlike normal fire that spread wildly this fire would only burn where mana was present and since it was focused inside the tree, once the tree fully burned to ash 20 seconds later the fire died down immediately.
Sora then walked up to the other tree he had set up as a target and focused on lightning this time, he filled his lesser basic lightning elemental core with mana and awakened the mana once more, this time he could feel the electricity running through his body, desperately trying t burst out, first, he gathered all the electricity at the centre of his palm and intensified it before tensing his palm to fire the spell, Sora had genuinely underestimated the power of his casting method as a crisp clear crystal blue bolt of lightning shot forth from his palm and struck the tree splitting it clean down the middle, almost immediately after spark travelled across the tree through the moisture and burst it to splinters in seconds. Even in the burst pieces of the tree, Sora could see excess sparks of electricity travelling across the splinters in low-voltage sparks. Now though, Sora needed to test something else, While he could intensify the lightning freely on his palm Sora recognised that his fireball could get much smaller when condensing it on his palm, he needed a much smaller surface area to channel the mana through.
Sora then looked at the next tree he had lined with a pondering expression, he started channelling his lesser fireball spell and condensed it into a table tennis ball at the tip of his index finger and pointed at the tree, he had significantly more dormant fire energy left over and intensified it to the point even he, a fire mage, began to feel the heat. He shot the fireball out at twice the speed of his previous attempt, the spell had a spiral ember forming around it as it cut through the air and pierced the body of the tree, the spell shot straight through the tree burning the path it went through to ash immediately starting a fire from the point, the spell travelled through the tree and struck the boulder behind it cutting through that as well, only when the fireball got to the middle of the boulder did the spell explode and the pure force of the explosion not only disintegrated the boulder itself to meagre roadside pebbles but it creating a 3-foot deep crater in the ground. The hole in the ground was filled with a blaze so intense you couldn't see through it if you tried, It rose out of the crater to a size even greater than the boulder it destroyed, and this was supposed to be a lesser fireball. Sora was genuinely shocked by the results as he had to ground himself to the shockwaves of his fireball.
Sora wasn't stupid enough to try the same with lightning because if a little fire could do this what on earth would a precise and well-refined spark bolt do to his little practice ground? Sora figured he would need to test this out soon but honestly, the best he could hope for was that a miraculously done creature presented itself for him to kill which was very unlikely, On the other hand, that reminded him of an unspoken rule in today's society that just didn't exist before.
People had this belief that it required a squad of mages at a certain level led by a mage the level above to deal with a certain level of beast. For instance, The idea that a squad of basic mages led by an intermediate mage was required to defeat a single common class Creature, and while in the true modern era, in Sora's era depending on the element one awakened a single basic mage could kill even 10 common class creatures, highly unlikely, but far from impossible. With Sora's method, as long as one had a bright gold mana core they would be able to cast 10 spells on average, Sora just happened to be a special type of freak who knew what he was doing and could cast up to 30 basic spells before running out of mana. The point is though, Sora could certainly take down some of the weaker races of common class creatures as he was.