Chapter 42: Welcome to Pathfinder Academy
The silence held for another three seconds.
Then the ground began to glow.
It started beneath Arthur’s feet, a faint gold that spread outward from the point where he was standing with the patient certainty of something that had been waiting for the right moment. Students looked down. Some stepped back instinctively, which was the reasonable response to the ground developing a new property, and others simply froze and watched it spread.
It covered the training fields first, moving through the Academy grounds in a continuous wave, touching the cracked pathways and the displaced earth and the sections of stone that had landed where they had not intended to land. Then it reached the buildings. Then the walls.
Then the dome appeared.
Not with a sound or a flash.
It became visible the way things became visible when a light moved behind them. It arched over the entire Academy, enormous, covered in runes and symbols that moved slowly along its surface like water moving under ice.
A first-year near Arthur reached one hand toward it and stopped just short of touching.
Arthur stared upward with his head tilted back. "It was here the whole time," he said.
"Always," Mithra said, and her voice had lost the dry quality it usually carried. She was looking at the dome with the expression of someone seeing something they had studied in texts and finding the text inadequate.
The golden light intensified.
Without warning...
Arthur’s feet left the ground. "...Huh?"
Gasps erupted across the Academy.
Students floated several feet into the air.
Professors.
Beasts.
Broken stone.
Even loose leaves drifted upward.
It lasted only a few seconds but it was long enough to make Arthur eyes shine. And then he instinctively looked around.
From above...
Pathfinder Academy unfolded beneath him. His eyes widened at the sight of Crystal Wolves racing across distant rooftops.
A fourth-year traded punches with a towering Magma Ape that laughed with every impact.
A massive circular arena stretched across the western district that was bigger than Greenleaf town.
Hundreds of wyverns descended toward an enormous hall covered in expedition banners. A floating bridge connected two ancient towers. One of them looked less like a library...
...and more like a mountain made of books and glowing crystals.
Arthur forgot to breathe and he quickly looked away, as if he kept staring. He was fairly certain he would start running toward it. But then he froze as his eyes widened in disbelief.
Above the academy was an island that was somehow floating. He saw chains made out of crystals connecting them.
"What the..." Arthur muttered in shock.
Mithra notices him staring. "...You’ll see that later."
"I need it now Mithra, not-"
"Nope, later~"
"..."
Then gravity returned.
Everyone landed back on the ground.
Arthur stared around for several seconds before quietly saying, "...I think I’m going to like it here."
"I knew you would say that. Did the academy meet your expectations?"
"All I see is potential, Mithra... So much potential!"
Then the stone of the broken tower began to move.
Not falling but rising.
The pieces that had scattered across the courtyard during the crash reversed their trajectories, lifting from the ground and moving upward and inward, and as they moved they caught the golden light and seemed to know where they were going.
Not assembling themselves in a new configuration but returning to the previous one, every piece finding its exact place in the exact order it had come from.
Dust that had been settling collected itself back into the surfaces it had left. A section of window that had broken into four pieces joined itself along the fracture lines and rose back into its frame.
The crater beneath Arthur’s feet began closing.
He looked down and took one step backward, and then another, as the earth rose to meet itself with the unhurried certainty of something that had been interrupted and was simply resuming.
The training field restored itself across the area where the carriages had impacted, the compressed and displaced soil returning to what it had been with no visible effort.
The administrative building’s roof grew back from the edges inward. A support beam that had come through a wall reversed its trajectory.
Within two minutes, the Academy looked the way it had looked that morning.
The silence continued a moment longer. Then a first-year said, very quietly: "Is that time magic?"
An older student beside him shook his head. "Not time. A barrier." He looked at the dome above, still faintly visible now that it had made itself known. "The Academy remembers what it’s supposed to be."
A professor nearby had stopped moving and was watching the completion of the restoration with an expression that was not quite professional. "The barrier was placed when the Academy was founded," she said, to no one specifically. "It maintains the original form. We’ve known it was there. Nobody has ever seen it activate."
Arthur processed this information. "Academies can do that?"
"Apparently this one can," Mithra said.
Arthur looked at the tower for another moment. Then he looked at the training field. Then at the administrative building.
"Huh," he said, which was the complete extent of what he had available.
Even the flowers that had been crushed beneath the falling carriage stood upright again.
Around them, the students who had gathered began to find their voices again.
...
The rumors that resumed were not the same rumors that had been circulating on the convoy.
"I heard he fought whatever was in the clouds."
"Someone said the Goblin Commander controlled all the wyverns."
"My friend talked to a handler who said Arthur organized the whole rescue."
"The professors couldn’t even get there in time."
"He saved everyone."
The conversations multiplied and branched and none of them arrived at the same conclusion, but all of them arrived at the same name. Arthur, still standing near the now-repaired tower and looking at it the way someone looked at something they were still processing, heard none of it.
He was calculating whether anything about the restoration would translate to residential properties.
...
Athena had watched the crash from the main gathering area where her carriage had deposited her an hour earlier, which was to say she had watched it from the correct designated arrival point rather than through a hole in a training field, which put her among a distinct minority of the Greenleaf convoy’s passengers.
Athy was still on her shoulder. The owl’s feathers had not fully settled since the lightning, and one wing kept making small adjustive movements that were less about grooming and more about something unresolved.
"Still scared," Athena said.
Athy nodded without fully looking at her.
Athena put one hand up and ran her fingers gently along the owl’s side, feeling the fine tremor that was still there. She had read about this response in Theory of Interspecies Communication — the lingering physiological effect of encountering something above a certain threshold of perceived threat. The manual had described it in clinical terms. The manual had not prepared her for watching it happen to Athy.
She looked up at the sky. Clear now. Empty. As if the lightning had been an weather event and not something that had moved with intention through a convoy of students.
Why had it stopped? That was the first question. The shockwave had ended it, but what had produced the shockwave? Something withdrawing. Something choosing to stop. That implied will, which implied a creature of significant intelligence.
Why only the one convoy? The Academy was directly below and remained untouched. The lightning had avoided the center of the convoy specifically, which implied awareness of what was in the center, which implied perception at a range and resolution that was not typical of anything she could currently name.
Why had the lightning avoided where the students were? Arthur had seen this and acted on it. Which meant the pattern was legible to a person who was paying attention.
Why had Arthur been the person paying attention?
Athena looked at the group near the repaired tower where Arthur was apparently studying the restoration process.
"Why," she said, to no one, "are you always in the middle of impossible things?"
She opened her notebook.
"I suppose I’ll need to start a new section," she said, and began writing.
Athy watched this happen and settled her feathers by one more degree, which was the owl’s way of acknowledging that familiar situations, even alarming ones, were at least categorizable.
...
Leon was on one of the upper balconies when he heard the students below talking.
Mephistopheles was beside him, large enough now that the balcony accommodated the dragon rather than containing it, both of them looking at the sky where the lightning had been.
The clouds were moving normally. Nothing remained of what had been there except the slightly charged quality of the air, which might have been imagination.
A student passed at speed along the path below, calling to someone ahead: "They’re saying Arthur Cornwall organized the whole convoy rescue! The Goblin Commander controlled the wyverns!"
Another followed: "I heard Arthur gave orders from the carriage roof. The professors didn’t even know it was happening until after."
Leon looked at the space where the convoy had come down, now indistinguishable from the rest of the Academy grounds.
A small smile appeared on his face. It was the smile he had been accumulating slowly since the examination, the one that came with the discovery of something that did not disappoint.
"As expected," he said.
Mephistopheles made a sound that was not quite a snort. Low and quiet, the sound of something that had its own thoughts about Arthur Cornwall and had been developing them.
"You’ve gotten stronger too," Leon said, to the dragon.
The dragon looked at the sky and said nothing, which was confirmation enough.
Neither of them had anything that resembled resentment. They had something more interesting: a clear picture of a distance and the intention to close it.
...
Roland had found himself standing near a cluster of Silver-rank faculty at the edge of the now-repaired training field.
One of them, the older woman who ran the second-year Theory seminar, was watching Arthur through narrowed eyes. "He stayed calm when everyone else didn’t," she said. "That’s the thing I can’t account for."
"He didn’t stay calm," said the professor beside her. "The handlers said he was moving before he had a plan. He gave orders while figuring out the orders."
"He organized a rescue operation in freefall," the third added.
"Students his age don’t do that," the woman said. "Not even talented ones. Not even with years of training."
Roland looked at the group near the tower.
Arthur was talking to Mithra. From here Roland could not hear the words, but the expression on Arthur’s face was not the expression of someone reviewing a crisis or processing a close call. It was the expression of someone looking at an interesting thing and wondering about the next one.
"He didn’t organize a rescue operation," Roland said.
The others turned toward him.
"He moved. That was all." Roland watched Arthur scratch the side of his cheek at something Mithra said. "Everyone around him was frozen because everyone was waiting for someone else to go first. He went first. And because he went first, everyone else had somewhere to put their attention that wasn’t the sky."
A pause.
"He gave frightened people something to follow," the older woman said.
"Yes."
Another pause.
"That’s not something most Beast Tamers learn to do at eighteen," she said.
"No," Roland agreed. "It isn’t."
He looked at Arthur for a moment longer.
"It isn’t something most Beast Tamers learn to do at all," he said.
Silence settled over the group.
One professor with brown hair finally spoke. "He’ll probably be placed in Class C."
Another immediately with black hair shook his head. "Not after today."
Another sighed and said. "The Head of First Years will want to see this report."
The black hair professor "...He’ll probably rewrite the placements."
The brown hair professor frowned. "What do you mean?"
"The Academy evaluates more than Talent."
He looked toward Arthur.
"A student who can keep his head under that kind of pressure..."
"...isn’t someone you hide."
Roland said nothing.
But he didn’t disagree.
...
Arthur was still looking at the restored tower when the thought arrived.
"Can I get one of those for home?"
Mithra turned toward him. "What?"
He gestured at the barrier dome, faintly visible above the Academy grounds now that it had made itself known. "The restoration thing. My mother’s roof still leaks."
Mithra looked at the dome. Then at Arthur. Then back at the dome. "I don’t think they sell them."
Arthur sighed. "That’s unfortunate...Mom would never have to fix the roof again."
"I do agree. Maybe we can find a way to replicate it." Mithra suggested.
His eyes lit up and said. "Then I can’t wait. We just need to find out more information on the barrier."
"Well first you need to know. The Academy’s barrier is one of three in the world," Mithra said with a chuckle. "It took the founding Principal thirty years to establish."
Arthur considered this. "So probably not something you could mail."
"Almost certainly not."
A throat cleared politely beside them.
A woman in an Academy uniform with a crest pin at her collar stood nearby, holding herself with the posture of someone who had learned to approach unusual situations without indicating that they were unusual.
She bowed her head. "Arthur Cornwall."
Arthur turns. "Yes?"
"He specifically requested you before the convoy arrived."
Arthur blinks. "...He did? Why"
"It’s because..." The woman paused before looking around. Her eyes widened when she saw all the students, beasts, and even professors were staring at Arthur.
"The principal will tell you the reason." She gulped before politely saying. "Would you come with me?"
"Well hopeful it’s for a reward."
Mithra smiles. "You crashed a carriage through his buildings."
"Correction! That thing in the sky did. I will not accept such slander!"
"But you which you could do it again, don’t you?"
Arthur scratches his cheek. "...Fair."
Mithra laughed while he started following the woman.
Behind him...
Students continue whispering.
A first-year quietly says. "...That’s the person with the Goblin Commander."
Another answer. "...I thought he’d be taller."
"I thought he would be scary."
"How is he not... He literally laughed while we were crashing."
Exactly, he is a madman."
For the first time since arriving... Arthur realizes something.
The entire Academy knows his name.
"What is this about me being a madman? I am very sane!"
Then...
Silence.
Arthur blinks.
A familiar screen appears.
[New Title Acquired]
Godly Entrance
Awarded to the individual responsible for the most unforgettable arrival in Pathfinder Academy history. Effect: Mental attacks and fear effects are ignored for the first 3 seconds after combat begins.
Arthur scratches his cheek. "Huh... That’s a weird title."
Mithra blinks. "What title?"
"For my entrance."
"Whoever gave you that is insane."
Arthur paused and said. "...You didn’t get a title?"
"...No one gave me one."
Arthur nods seriously. "...That’s tragic."
Then he simply keeps walking.
Mithra is left staring.
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