"No, not at all" Alice quickly sat down.
"Lets get to the topic at hand then" He giggled. Unable to keep his cool because of this situation. "My name is Charles Redacre and I'm the head of student council and your upperclassman. The goal of student council is to keep the rules inside our academy intact" He took off the robe he had been wearing revealing his uniform. It was a jet black suit with red epaulettes which had a golden emblem of the academy on them with small crowns above. There was a row of red buttons going down the suit. Each one carefuly engraved with names of his predecessors in this role. The rest of his clothes were as detailed as his suit jacket. But he didn't have anything on his hands.
"Its probably to not restrict the mana he would input into his staff" Alice thought to herself.
"This week we will hold a tournament to find new members from your semester." He announced.
"Why would we take part in this ?"
"What's there to get from that ?"
"He thinks I will really do that just to join the student council ?"
Laughter, mocking and disinterest could be heard from all around the classroom.
"It will be a dungeon raid. Where you will be free to keep any valuables you want" He continued with his announcment. Not caring about the comments. "And based on our evaluation we will decide if any of you are good enough to join the council. Don't forget that there are many positives to being part of the council. We get acces to top notch training facilities" He tried persuading the class to be a little more interested.
Sadly the only thing that could be heard in the room besides him were chirps of crickets .
He sighed in defeat "We also get a total of 60 hours of excused absence throughout the year" He scratched his head while saying that.
The entire class suddenly changed their demeanor and yelled excited.
"IM INTERESTED!"
"NO I AM"
"BOTH OF YOU ARENT AS GOOD AS ME!"
They were basicaly like wild animals. The thought of being allowed to skip classes was priceless for some of them.
"Every single time" Disapointed Charles forecasted. He knew it would come down to this but still had his hopes up.
Tania and Alice weren't too interested though as Alice didn't want to skip classes and Tania didn't want to miss out on time with Alice.
"They will let us keep the treasure we find Tania ! We need to do our best. But not good enough to get accepted into the council" Treasure hungry Alice pumped her fist in the air in excitment.
"Ofcourse !" Tania followed. Mimicking her strange behaviour.
"Now we will go back to the lesson." The prince calmed down the class. "I will teach you magic circles right now, and after that we will practice them during your practice lesson"
Charles put his staff away and conjured a ball of water with his hand "As you can see this is the most basic spell one could make right ? It took an instant to cast and now its here" He shot the spell outside through a window. "And now look what a magic circle can do"
A flashing light appeared on top of him. It was a spinning circular shape with runic signs and engravings. It cracked and broke into milion pieces as a high level spell got instantly casted in his palm. The class watched with their mouth open.
"With a magic circle, you are able to store powerful spells and then cast them in an instant. There are two drawbacks to that. It requires double the amount of mana, one to draw the circle and the other to cast it. The other drawback to this method is very severe though" His expression switched to a very serious one.
"Uhm what is it ?" One of the students asked.
"The learning process is very boring" He started laughing until his cheeks hurt. "It took me around a year of trying to figure out a magic circle for a singular high level spell like this one" He demonstrated the level of the spell by throwing it in the same direction the previous one flew. The tree that was standing in the way got cut in half vertically, falling over in both directions. "But luckily after that it was a bit faster with each next one. But if your engravings and visualization aren't spot on you risk wasting the engraving and the mana this part of the spell requires. Anyone wants to try ?" He examined if there were any hands in the air. "The girl who stood up earlier. Come here"
Alice was the first one to put her hand up. She wanted to try how convinient such a technique could be. "Can I choose a spell I want to create a circle for ?" She questioned the prince.
"Yes. Any spell at all is fine. But I reccomend starting with an easy one" He was scared that Alice will attempt some all powerful explosion spell and fail turning the entire classroom into charcoal.
"Would it be possible to store mana itself in one ?" She inquired. An idea forming in her head.
"No its not possible. There are no engravings or runes for mana itself. Only one of the four elements" He swiftly destroyed her hopes.
"Oh..." She was bummed. Her idea about chaining mana blasts fell short almost instantly. "Can you tell me the basics so I can try to make a circle ?" She decided to settle for the second best option which was storing air magic.
"Each element has a different engraving" Charles wrote down all four of them on the chalkboard. "And then you have thousnds of different runes that can go together with it. Some are used to store more power into the spell, others to increase the size of it. Possibilities are almost endless but you need to know what the spell is intended to do for the circle to work. If I drew a random one and tried to cast it there is no way it would work because I have no idea what kind of spell it is." He explained it more thoroughly.
Alice took a piece of chalk and began scribing on the chalkboard. While Charles drew one engraving for the high level spell with over a hundred runes, Alice drew almost twenty engravings each with only two runes per one.
"I think you didn't fully understand what i just said" Charles tried to interupt her theorycrafting.
"No I fully understand your explanation, but even if I fail part of the visualization the spell will still go through if I add fail-safes " Alice was too focused to stop now. The whole class watched as she optimized the magic circle more and more until she finished with only ten engravings and one rune on each one.
"Now lets just hope it will work. I for one hope it does" The prince cheered on Alice. The entire room was silent. Waiting to see if she will succed.
She created the circle. "Excuse me" She jumped outside to test it instantly, when she was activating it she added two extra support cores to speed up the casting to less than a second in total, and after that she suddenly disapeard. Appearing almost twenty meters farther but face first on the ground "This is way harder than I expected"
Charles clapped "That was fantastic for a first time. I have never thought of such a forceful method. Because of the smaller size of the engravings the mana consumption isn't any different from one big engraving" He gazed at the prodigy in front of him. "This years dungeon raid will be interesting" He exclaimed.