Agatha felt horrible. A knot had formed on her throat, and it kept tightening and tightening, only making her feel more and more nauseous. The rest of her classmates kept trying to get through the targets the teacher had summoned with lapiloquia, but she sat on the ground while embracing her legs, separated from the class.

  “Ugh…” She groaned both mentally and audibly.

  Her gaze went to that student she had almost killed. The worst part wasn’t her massive failure, but the fact that she still didn’t know his name, even though his likeness was now engraved in her mind so deeply that she didn’t think it would ever fade from her memory.

  “Are you okay?” A sweet Christie asked. Her roommate had been looking over the rest of the students, but she hadn’t tried making an attempt at the targets just yet.

  “No,” Agatha stated plainly.

  “Oh,” the redhead was taken aback. It would appear that she expected Agatha to just lie and say everything was fine. But that wasn’t her style. That wasn’t her.

  Yet right now, she didn’t know who ‘her’ was.

  “Nothing happened,” her roommate said softly.

  “But it could have.” And the potential outcome didn’t leave her mind. She imagined it with so much detail that the nausea just kept growing and growing. Biology wasn’t a subject that should be taught. The image of grey matter was haunting her. Gnawing on her.

  “But it did not,” Christie countered. “And even then, are we not supposed to be soldiers? Or at least be in the future? Is death not part of the profession?”

  The words were so hollow that not even the redhead believed them. Agatha could see the tremors in the bunny of a girl; she wasn’t ready for death any more than her.

  “Maybe…” Agatha responded, if just to ease the knot in her throat. “But even if I had to kill someone, it would be an enemy and not…” She sighed and gritted her teeth. “We do not kill our own!”

  She didn’t know what her ‘own’ was; she had not formed any sense of camaraderie with her classmates, but it felt appropriate to say. It was one thing to kill someone that had been labeled as an ‘enemy’, it was another to kill one that was labeled as an ‘ally’. Both were people, yet only one felt appropriate. Or at least she told herself that. Agatha couldn’t imagine herself killing anyone. Yes, she had beaten her bullies into a pulp when her rage got to a boiling point and her sight became both literally and figuratively covered in the blood of several sources, yet… That was different. Pain was one thing, death another.

  And she almost killed her classmate.

  Christie sat down next to her, yet she didn’t say anything. She just remained there in silence. For some reason, even though nothing had happened or was happening, Agatha felt the knot in her throat loosen up a bit. She could almost breathe normally now.

  Both girls remained sitting on the dirt of the training grounds as the rest of their classmates kept chugging their agates into the bedrock. Even her mean sapphire hadn’t been able to get through, so the rest had no chance. They were so pathetic. But if they were that pathetic, what did that make her?

  Oh, they tried everything against those targets. Combustion. Speed. Heat. Even some commands she didn’t recognize, but that were most likely in the textbook. Everything failed. Teacher Dago had just mentioned the important of the application of the commands, but this was a wall that could only get passed through – literally – with quality. Not even quantity seemed to do the job as some students threw a barrage of Speed agates.

  At least not instantly.

  Yes, those agates didn’t even get a finger in, but they were slowly chipping away at the targets like they had done many weeks ago during the first day of school against René Dago’s agates.

  That definitely wasn’t her style.

  That tactic had already failed, but she couldn’t even try it if she wanted. Which she didn’t. Quantity wasn’t in her dictionary, and quality was debatable. She was a burst, and an explosion; she was sudden and violent. Peltering the target until it crumbled wasn’t the way like those fools, no, she would instantly send it to the depths.

  Agatha found herself sighing. She caressed her little sapphire. It was jittering with excitement and energy. The dumb rock didn’t know of death or dread; it just wanted to shine brightly. And Agatha could get behind that.

  “Are you better now?” Christie asked, and the seamstress-in-training complied by looking at her, and she was met by her marvelous bicolored eyes, nothing short of two lustrous agates.

  “No,” Agatha responded plainly and slowly stood up. “But fractures, they are making me sick with those awful displays. Come on, let us show them,” she extended a hand to her roommate.

  “I doubt I will fare much better than they, Agatha,” the redhead said with a wry smile.

  “But you at least have to try once!” She beamed her a smile and snatched her hand before raising her from the ground with a single pull.

  Yes, that’s okay, the dirty-blond girl told herself. Ah, it’s so much easier to smile for others than for oneself. She wasn’t okay, but that didn’t matter. She just needed to fake it until she made it.

  “Make way!” Agatha shouted and made a handful of students that were standing before a target, but not using it as they were resting and coming up with ideas in a somewhat loud hubbub. The group protested a bit with incohesive grumbles, but they did make way, whether it was out of camaraderie or out of fear. “Also, I recommend moving a bit away.” They didn’t listen to her. “And covering your ears.”

  Instantly, they became paragons of understanding and obedience as they ran away with their hands violently pressed against their ears. Understandable, she mused inwardly. I think my ears are still ringing a bit.

  “That goes for you too, Christie,” Agatha said with a slight turn of her head.

  “I guessed as much,” the tall world lethargically nodded. “I would rather not bleed from my ears.”

  Depths! Hubbub and lethargically? I’m on a streak today! It seems that reading is actually making a dent on my skull, the petite girl puffed out her chest even though all the musings had taken place in her mind.

  Now that she was alone and had gathered some spectators, Agatha commenced planning. Not before giving a dirty look at René Dago, who was casually overseeing her from the other side of the field. She took that shallow nod as an invitation to try her luck against the target.

  While she had spent most of the class brooding, her mind wasn’t without ideas. It was hard to control one’s mind when it was excited; imagination was even harder to control than fear and anxiety. And even more excited than her mind was her agate.

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  Control Speed allowed me not only to easily modify the value of the speed before even shooting the agate, but also mid-flight. It also made it easier to remove the Speed command mid-flight, something that shouldn’t normally be possible. So…

  She didn’t intend to use the Control command with Speed, but a completely different one. Well, perhaps not completely. It also had to do with velocity, just a different one. Agatha took her little sapphire to the skies with the Control command and then applied Spin. René Dago had already shown that the Control Spin synergy worked like the Control Speed synergy, but she wanted to try if she could remove the command mid-flight. Well, I guess mid-spin would be more accurate.

  Once the agate was airborne and it had gained a lot of rotational speed, Agatha tried removing both commands. Tried being the keyword. It wasn’t impossible, mind you; she felt the tugging of her non-verbal command taking effect, but the Spin command didn’t budge. It’s as if I’m fighting the momentum of the spin… She wasn’t unaware to that feeling, as that also happened with Speed, but after seeing it replicated in another command, it basically confirmed the phenomenon.

  That didn’t mean she gave up, though.

  Yes, there was a lot of resistance, but Control was giving her a lot of leeway, and she felt it was possible to remove the Spin command mid-spin. So she pulled. And pulled. And pulled. She gritted her teeth, she stopped breathing, and her nausea became more acute. But she did it. Her little sapphire kept spinning through inertia alone, even though there wasn’t a Spin command sustaining it any longer.

  Can’t dally around, she regained her focus and executed the rest of the commands, the series programming, as René Dago had called it before her agate lost all its spin from the friction against the air.

  Agatha covered her ears and also removed Control to liberate space, and before her little sapphire could start to plummet down, she dotted her agate with two others.

  Amplify Speed, she commanded.

  And the air exploded.

  Even though she had covered her ears, she still felt her ears and brain rumble. Also, a lot of air had been displaced from the shot, so she became partially blinded for a few seconds as her eyes couldn’t stop blinking.

  Then she felt a tug in her being.

  Her agate had been recalled.

  Huh, Agatha groaned mentally. She then opened her eyes and looked at the perfectly circular hole that went from one end to the target to the other. “Huh,” Agatha groaned audibly.

  From what I’ve read, the speed of sound is something like three hundred meters per second, and the recalling range was already beyond the two-hundred meters mark before my agate got to the Second Stratum… So this means that even after getting through this much stone, it still conserved a significant fraction of the speed to make it outside of the recalling range to make it outside in a handful of seconds. Even the meaning of that got through her thick-headed skull.

  “Brilliant,” René Dago slowly clapped with a flair for dramatics, and Agatha turned to face him. That was when she saw the rest of the class looking at her. “You have come up by yourself with the strategy to remove a working command to get more virtual command slots out of your agate. I was going to teach it once more people got to the Second Stratum, but you have certainly beaten me to it.”

  She could see it in his eyes, what she just did wasn’t anything special. The soldier had probably seen it a million times, even done it himself. Yet Agatha couldn’t help but take pride in the fact that she had discovered it alone. For a moment, she had given four commands to her agate when it should have only been capable to hold two.

  “I understand now what you said about the intelligent application of commands,” Agatha curled her hand into a fist. Her little sapphire found itself inside, her Summon command having become third nature, as she liked to call it.

  It truly is incredible the work of excitement in the body. Agatha found herself trembling, but no longer out of fear. She hadn’t been able to look at her teacher only a few minutes before, yet now she couldn’t help but look to the future. To learn more about agates. Yes, she knew they were dangerous – she would never forget that lesson – but that didn’t stop her from pushing forward.

  “This is only the start, Miss Malachite. The more slots you have, the more intricate and intelligent those applications are. You surprised me once with the Anchor command, and you did yet again with your double series programming,” he turned to face the rest of the classroom. “You could learn something from her!” And turned back to her. “Let me restore this target; it is on the verge of collapse.”

  Even though he had been using his foot all this time to perform lapiloquia, this time René Dago pressed his palm against the rectangular target, and the hole she had made rapidly vanished before her eyes as if it were a mineshaft that had collapsed.

  As the teacher walked back to his previous spot to supervise the rest of the class, Agatha turned to face her roommate. “So, are you going to give it a try or not?”

  The redhead sighed. “I will, but do not expect it to be a good one.”

  Compared to the first day of class, Christie stood more upright as she wore her military uniform. Agatha couldn’t say the attire matched well with her, but it was a different story with Christie. She was just so tall and had her curves in the right places that it created a sight just short of breathtaking. And now that even though the girl wasn’t falling short of breath herself, that sight was far, far better. It was weird seeing Christie in uniform without panting, but that only made the sight more attractive.

  As Agatha was trapped in her thoughts, her roommate shot a pillar of agates forward, just like the one she had used on the statal examination. While the seamstress-in-training personally knew how much it weighed, she also knew it carried no force at all.

  Christie sighed again, but before anyone could say anything, she followed with a “Wait,” as she put a hand on her mouth and remained pensive. Has she also come up with a strategy? Agatha lingered in that doll-like visage. It was weird to see her roommate not wear a cutesy expression, so that serious gaze alongside the military uniform created a side of Christie she had never seen. And she didn’t dislike it at all.

  With a sway of a hand, the redhead recalled her agates and extended her palm forward. Apparently, a pillar hadn’t been enough for her.

  A sea of stone flooded the field at the next moment.

  Agatha took a step backward in surprise, seeing that her roommate’s agates always provoked a visceral reaction. There was just something deeply unnatural about that quantity that made anyone backpedal. The reaction from her classmates was even more pronounced as they hadn’t seen Christie reveal that many agates to them just yet, but the redhead didn’t seem to care as her whole focus was on the target.

  Her roommate’s gaze was completely focused on the agate-covered target as beads of sweat trickled down her face. Agatha didn’t know the whole extent of her exhaustion, but Christie had told her that liberating more than a pillar threatened for the whole amount of her agates to pour out like a broken dam. And even with all that concentration, the amount of agate increased the next moment, practically doubling. There were so many now that all the ground around the target was substituted by agates, even reaching other targets.

  Then a sickly, crunching sound was heard.

  It wasn’t an instantaneous endeavor, it was a long and excruciating process where the sound got louder and louder until the was a final shatter. Then, the sea of agates reduced significantly in volume.

  “Oh,” Agatha mused in realization. That’s the Compact command. She had mentioned it to her roommate when she came back from visiting Terráquea, as the rice-grain-sized blue agate surprised her, truly living up to the name of little sapphire. This must be the first time she’s using it, though. And why?

  She instantly got the answer to that question as Christie recalled her agates with a soaked mane and a heaving chest. The villager didn’t linger on her roommate’s looks as her gaze was diverted to the target. Or rather, the lack of one.

  “What?” The dirty-blond girl said as she looked at the pulverized stone. It wasn’t truly pulverized as it wasn’t even gravel, but outright pebbles, yet it was incredibly significant nonetheless. “How?”

  The redhead chuckled as she panted with her hands on her knees. “I knew that I could not get through the target, but I could definitely bring it down,” she was smiling even though her face showed a pained expression. “The weight of agates was key here, or rather, the quantity. Both really,” her eyes were a bit blurry. “The Compact command pushes inward to make an agate small, and my sea behaves like a single one so… well, it pressed inward to the target. I doubt a small amount would have done anything against the natural toughness of stone, but if you use several dozen times their weight against it… Well, that is the result.” She chuckled again.

  “That is a very… you result. I doubt anyone else could have done it this way,” Agatha looked at Christie with a mixture of awe and dread.

  Awe, for she was amazed at her roommate’s unique solution, one that literally only she could have performed. Yet dread, for she was aware of how much the danger of her little sapphire paled in comparison to that sea of agates. As she saw that soaked red mane heaving up and down in exhaustion and by the noon breeze, Agatha could only think about how she hadn’t even seen the shore of Christie’s agates, let alone the depths.

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