Chapter 30: Mana Core

{Lily}

Kohaku wasn’t in the room when I got back.

She’d left a note on my pillow in her... unique handwriting that said had to go do a thing, eat something, you did great today, which was a lie, because I did not do great. I lost in ninety seconds because I turned my head at the worst possible moment in my entire life.

I sat down on my bed with my knees up and the word came back.

Lover.

I didn’t even know women could be that, with each other. I mean, I knew, sort of, in the way you know things exist without ever having a reason to think about them. Nobody had sat me down and explained it. It simply wasn’t a thing that happened in the villages, or if it was, nobody said so.

Although...

There was the thing with Serena, before all this. Before the academy, back when our families’ carriages had shared the road to the entrance exams and we’d been stuck at the same waystation overnight. There’d been a bottle of something her attendant hadn’t watered down enough, and we’d. Well.

We’d kissed.

More than once. And she’d never spoken of it again, and I’d decided it was a phase. Experimentation. The sort of thing girls did once and grew out of.

[That was different. That didn’t mean anything. This is Kohaku, and Kohaku is my new best friend!]

I put my face in my knees.

And then, my traitorous imagination built me a picture, fully furnished, in about two seconds.

A balcony. Roses, for some reason, a whole trellis of them, in the evening, with the good kind of light. Kohaku leaning on the railing looking effortlessly cool the way she always does, and Lady Vantecca beside her with a glass of wine, and the two of them saying the kind of things I’ve only ever read in the romances I hide under my mattress.

"To think we’ve kept it secret this long, my dear."

"Mm. It helps that my roommate is such a fool. She hasn’t the faintest idea."

"The little scholarship girl? Oh, she’s hopeless. It’s a mercy she’s out of the tournament. Now we needn’t work around her at all."

"Haha, right. Did I mention she’s lame? She’s lame."

And then they’d laugh and make out.

"NO," I said out loud, to the empty room, and grabbed my pillow and put it over my face. "NO. Stop it. That’s not, I’m making it up, I don’t even know what a Vantecca balcony looks like, I invented the roses. I’m misunderstanding! That’s all this is! A misunderstanding! People kiss for lots of reasons! It’s, it’s probably a noble custom! Sealing things! People seal things with kisses, that’s a whole, that’s completely normal, and I’m being ridiculous, and I’m going to go to sleep, and when Kohaku gets back I’m going to ask her, calmly, like an adult."

I lay there under the pillow.

[...I’m never going to ask her. I’m going to lie here and think about the roses until I die.]

---

{Kohaku}

I was on my knees.

Not for a fun reason. Well, I was in Sabine’s office, and I was on the floor, but I had my forehead nearly on the rug and my hands flat in front of me and I was doing the full dogeza.

"Professor. I am begging you. I need to be stronger and I need it in three weeks!"

Sabine was in her chair with her boots up on the desk, looking down at me over a cup of tea.

"Stand up, Miss Sakana, you look like a rug merchant."

"Not until you say you’ll help!!!"

"You’ve made a spectacle of my floor before, this isn’t new to me." She sipped her tea. "Explain the emergency. And I’d like the real one, not the version where you’re an ordinary student with ordinary reasons, because we’ve established you’re neither and it’s tiresome to pretend."

I kept my head down and gave her the sliver I could afford. Not the novel, not the Calamity Queen, not four years from now or anything like that. Just the general idea.

"Lily’s out of the tournament. She lost her first match. And I need to win the whole thing, the entire bracket, the Benediction, all of it, and I can’t do that as an E-rank who wins by remembering which way to step. I need to actually be stronger, and I know that’s insane, and I know three weeks is nothing, and I’m asking anyway. Please."

Sabine was quiet for a bit.

"You understand what’s in the bottom half of that bracket," she said. "You watched her at the exam."

"I understand exactly what’s in the bottom half of that bracket."

"And you believe you stand a chance?"

[No.]

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind her face that wasn’t the usual amused thing, and then she took her boots off the desk and sat forward and set the cup down.

"Fine," she said. "Get up off my floor. If you genuinely intend to walk into a ring with people who can hurt you, then we start where everyone starts and nobody bothers to tell first-years, because it’s slow and unpleasant." She laced her fingers together. "Before anything else, before a single new Form, you’re going to expand your mana core."

[Um... What?]

I sat up.

"... That’s a thing?"

Sabine paused.

"...What do you mean, is that a thing?" She squinted at me. "It’s the most fundamental thing there is. Every mage in the kingdom does it. How did you contract a spirit without knowing your core can be enlarged?"

[Because I never wrote it down! I invented forty kinds of magic and I gave everyone Mana as a stat and I never once, in six volumes, explained where the mana came from or how you got more of it, because I was a teen and I thought a number going up was self-explanatory!]

"I’ve, um. I’ve had gaps in my education," I said.

"Clearly. Lock the door. I’m going to explain some very basic things to you and I don’t think you’d appreciate people hearing me explain how the world works."

[MANA. There’s a whole mechanic. There’s a whole mechanic under my most important stat and I’ve had it for five weeks and never touched it. Okay. Okay! New rule of this world, fresh off the press, and it’s the one I need. I can get stronger. I can actually get stronger.]

I got up and locked the door.

[Let’s expand my core! Whatever that means.]