Chapter 17: Chapter 17. The Facility Meeting
Every professor, senior faculty member, and department head had gathered in the conference room during the break hours.
Eric sat at the head of the table. The atmosphere was attentive in the particular way that faculty meetings rarely were — no one was reviewing notes from another class, no one’s attention was drifting toward the window. Every person in the room was focused on the same two people. Jennifer and Ronald.
The unspoken question that had drawn them all here wasn’t about curriculum coverage or pedagogical approach. No one was especially interested in what had been taught today.
They wanted to know about Necrotize.
How he had conducted himself. How he had engaged with the material, with the other students, with the professors themselves. Whether there had been incidents. Whether the Academy’s first day with a god in attendance had produced anything that needed to be managed.
Eric turned to Jennifer first and asked her to walk them through her experience.
What followed was not what anyone in the room had been bracing for.
Jennifer spoke carefully and completely, laying out everything — the interruption, the correction, the quiet and unhurried dismantling of the foundational framework that the entire Magic Department had been built upon. She explained what Necrotize had said about the Ancient Origins. About the eight essences. About the true source of all Mana across every world in the known universe, and the role the Ancient Origins played in maintaining the balance that kept existence functional.
By the time she finished, the room was very still.
Faces that had entered the meeting wearing expressions of cautious professional curiosity were now wearing expressions of something considerably more destabilized. Decades of academic certainty — frameworks built from Magic Tower records and historical documentation and generations of accumulated scholarship — had just been described as incomplete at best and flatly incorrect at worst.
By a first-year student. Who was older than time.
Eric let the silence run for a moment. Then he exhaled — long, slow, the breath of a man recalibrating something fundamental.
"We’ll need to inform the Magic Tower." He looked at the table rather than at anyone in particular, his thoughts visibly still assembling themselves. "They need to know what we’ve learned." A pause. "Though I suppose none of us could have anticipated this. Who could have known that the origin of Mana itself traced back to them."
Eric’s gaze drifted across the table and landed on Ronald.
Something about his expression was different. Not the tension that had settled over Jennifer’s face while she recounted her experience, and not the residual unease that had since spread through most of the room. Ronald carried none of that. He sat with the particular stillness of a man who had come to terms with something and found, on the other side of it, a feeling he hadn’t expected. Pride.
Quiet, uncomplicated, and entirely genuine.
Eric studied that expression for a moment before speaking.
"Ronald. How did your class go today?"
Most of the room turned toward him. The general assumption, unspoken but clearly shared, was that Ronald’s account would follow a similar shape to Jennifer’s — another domain upended, another framework quietly dismantled, another professor left reassembling their professional foundations on the walk back from class.
What Ronald actually said stopped the room completely.
"I..." He paused, not from uncertainty but apparently from wanting to find the right words for something he was still quietly savoring. "I beat Lord Necrotize in a sparring match today."
The silence lasted approximately one second.
"What."
It came from several directions at once — the same word, the same register of disbelief, the same involuntary widening of eyes around the table. Eric, who had thought nothing in this particular meeting could surprise him more than Jennifer’s account of the Mana revelation, discovered he had been wrong.
"Ronald." One of the senior professors leaned forward. "This isn’t a matter for jokes. You cannot simply invent something like that and present it as a report."
"I’m not joking." Ronald’s voice was even. "I beat Lord Necrotize in a sparring session on the training grounds today. In front of the entire class."
The staring continued. Ronald looked back at the assembled faculty with the composure of a man who had expected exactly this reaction and had prepared himself accordingly.
"I’ll explain the full context," he said, and began.
"Yes — I won the match. But Lord Necrotize used none of his power. No aura, no enhancement, no abilities of any kind. His swordsmanship technique was similarly basic — nothing formal or advanced, just straightforward strikes. The only thing I actually managed to do was break his sword." He let that sit for a moment. "Given all of that, I want to be precise about what I’m claiming. I didn’t defeat the God of Destruction. I won a deliberately constrained sparring exercise against a being who was operating at perhaps the lowest fraction of what he’s actually capable of."
A beat of silence.
"And it was," he added, in a tone that made several of his colleagues look at him strangely, "the most genuinely thrilling fight I have had in years."
The room stayed quiet.
They had all followed Ronald’s explanation closely enough to understand the full picture — the constraints, the context, the careful distinctions he had drawn between what had technically happened and what it actually meant. The rational part of each of them had processed it.
The rest of them was still struggling.
Knowing that Necrotize had been holding back — knowing that the entire exchange had been conducted under conditions that bore almost no resemblance to what the God of Destruction was genuinely capable of — didn’t fully resolve the feeling. Because somewhere underneath the logic of it was a simple, stubborn fact: a mortal had stood across from an Ancient Origin with a sword in his hand, and the Ancient Origin had been the one to walk away with a broken weapon.
That wasn’t something a person just absorbed and moved on from.
Eric pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment.
He had been running this Academy for a long time. He had, over the course of that tenure, believed himself to be largely past the age of genuine surprise. He had seen exceptional students and exceptional crises and exceptional circumstances, and he had developed, through long exposure, a kind of durable steadiness in the face of the unexpected.
Today was testing that steadiness in ways he hadn’t anticipated.
He lowered his hand and looked at the two of them — Jennifer, still carrying the particular expression of someone whose professional foundations had been quietly renovated without their consent, and Ronald, still wearing that expression of uncomplicated pride.
"All right," Eric said. "Setting everything else aside for a moment." He looked between them. "What was your personal experience of him like? As a student. In the room."
It was, he realized, the question that had been underneath everything else from the beginning. The Mana revelation mattered. The sparring match mattered. But what he actually wanted to know — what he suspected most of the faculty in this room wanted to know — was something simpler and harder to quantify.
What is he like?
Jennifer and Ronald glanced at each other briefly.
Then they answered simultaneously, with a harmony that clearly surprised both of them.
"Extraordinary."
The word landed in the room and stayed there.
Eric looked at them for a long moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and let out a breath that seemed to carry the weight of the entire day with it.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I had a feeling it might be something like that."
