Agatha was nervous, to say the least. Whilst the letter containing the special summon to the academy told her that she had a guaranteed year at the academy, she was now to meet with the person who expedited that letter in the first place. Whatever she did in this meeting would affect her future, and that scared her. Sure, the option of maintaining herself on the Skyscraper Academy through scores alone existed, but it wasn’t much of a valid one. She had barely learned to read and write a handful of months ago; passing the tests of the most prestigious academy in the country wasn’t a possibility at the moment.

  Her only real way to maintain herself at the academy was to impress the person who summoned her so she could at least scrape another year out of the academy. Yes, another year is more than enough. This is the best academy in the kingdom; two years out of five is more than enough for me. She was satisfied with herself if that were to be the case. Some of the most dilapidated public schools only offered a year of schooling, so getting twice that – and top education at that – was more than enough for Agatha as she had come from nowhere.

  Regardless of the result, she wouldn’t give up on her wish. She would show the world the might of her single agate!

  And regardless of her bustling confidence in the inside, Agatha was trembling in the outside. She caressed and squeezed her little sapphire before she knocked on the door she had been addressed to on the third floor of the academy.

  “Who goes there?” A female voice screeched behind the door.

  Unconsciously, Agatha took a step backward before regaining her composure. “A-Agatha of Malachite. I have been told that you have summoned me.”

  “Right, right,” the woman behind the door grunted. “Let yourself in, it is not like the door is locked or anything.”

  Carefully and doubtfully, the seamstress-in-training extended her hand for the doorknob and opened the door. The first thing she was met by was the stench. A heavy and charged wave of dust assaulted her, jointed with the smell of dry paper. She nearly gagged. The second thing she was met by was the darkness. The room seemed to have many windows, but all the curtains had been closed shut, and only measly lines of light made it inside that were easily visible with all the airborne dust.

  “Careful with your step!” The woman shouted from the back of the room, though it wasn’t like Agatha could see her with all the darkness.

  For a moment, the girl thought of using the Light command to lighten up the room, but quickly decided against it. Not because she realized that the owner of the room must have chosen the darkness for a reason, but because if she were to activate that command, she would summon a second sun in this enclosed and dark room, potentially blinding them both.

  “It is… difficult to step around with this darkness,” Agatha responded.

  The problem wasn’t actually the darkness, but the ground before her was completely littered with paraphernalia. And that was the little she could see with the light that came from the door. Something told her that there was way more… everything around.

  “Ugh!” The woman grunted again. Then light was made. It was a single small agate that floated in the air. At least a Second Stratum one, Agatha realized. “Satisfied?” She added with hostility.

  “Thank you so much for the help,” the student replied politely and didn’t let herself be affected by the woman’s contempt. She was her lifeline, after all.

  As Agatha carefully treaded the ground littered with books, parchment, and… rocks, she realized the peculiar structure of the room. It was a massive one the size of her classroom – though without that comically high ceiling – and hosted many tables the size of the ones found at the mess hall. Except that these ones were higher and had many drawers to them, instead of being hollow. Atop the tables, there were also shelves that hung from the ceiling. Those were too littered with books. And rocks.

  But the most surprising sight wasn’t that of the room, but the owner. The agate softly illuminated its summoner, and it revealed a… striking picture. The woman sat hunchbacked on a stool as she seemed to be toying with rocks. She boasted a long black mane that was heavily unkept and with many unruly hairs. She wore a coat that Agatha supposed had once been white, but now was yellowy-grey. And her visage… it was honestly nightmarish. Her cheekbones contracted inside of her face, massive bags hung beneath her eyes, and her skin was so pale that it didn’t look like she had eaten or seen the sun in three days. If not more.

  Agatha had seen families starving at winter at Malachite, yet never before had she seen a person so emaciated before.

  “So,” the woman cracked her neck and turned around on her ass. “I heard you have an agate with superb quality. Gimme.” She made unsettling gestures with her bony fingers as they clutched ever-so-slightly closer to Agatha.

  “H-here.” With much repulsion, the dirty-blond girl took out the agate of her pendant with a pop and gave it to the emaciated woman.

  “Hmm. Hmm! Hmm~” The wailing soul of a woman hummed in the most off-putting and unsettling ways imaginable to mankind. Agatha couldn’t help but feel violated as she laid her long and bony finger on her little sapphire. “Yes, yes! That is indeed quite the superb quality. And it is only a First Stratum Agate! Superfluous! Oh, I am getting all tingly just thinking of how beautiful it will get once it grows up!”

  Agatha took a step backward. Violated definitely was the utmost correct epithet to describe her current state of mind.

  “Yes, asking for that favor was definitely worth it,” the woman mumbled to herself. “I wonder what happens if you use this as a core? Oh, Autonomy would definitely go crazy. My mind sizzles with possibilities!” She grabbed her head and pulled her hair backwards.

  Of course, this action required both of her hands, so she dropped Agatha’s agate and let it fall. Before it could impact against the ground, the girl recalled her little sapphire and summoned it back on her hand. She scowled at the mumbling woman, her bowling incoherent by now.

  “Oh, right, the agate,” she realized and looked at Agatha. Her dark eyes looked from the corners of her eyeholes, a bit too pressed to the side for the girl’s comfort. “Girl, I think we are going to have a good time.” She muttered with her hands still pulling back on her hair.

  “I have a name,” Agatha responded taciturnly.

  “So do I,” the woman regained her composure and then blinked twice in confusion. “I forgot to present myself, have I not?”

  “Yes…?”

  “The name is Terráquea, no need for surnames, I cannot be bothered to learn them,” she said with the neglect of a deadbeat father.

  “Uhm… Agatha?” The villager found herself unable to react to the woman’s mannerisms.

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  “Girl, are you not a bit young to be forgetting your name already?” Agatha frowned at Terráquea. “You should more on it, the brain is yet another muscle. Is that not what soldiers do? Train muscles?”

  “So,” the girl did her best to contain a sigh, “what do you want of me, Missus Terráquea?”

  The woman jerked around, and she abandoned her hunchbacked position, only to reveal her real height. “Bold of you to assume I am married,” Terráquea said, towering over Agatha.

  Depths! She almost swore aloud. That’s… tall… she was forced to look up as the woman was probably past the two-meter mark. But yeah, no one’s gonna want to marry you. Besides the many problems men had with their fragile egos and being unable to appreciate women of towering heights, the woman before her was more unkempt than the vagabonds she had seen around.

  “I… uhm… I thought it was the term to refer to older women.” Which wasn’t a lie. To be fair, all the older women Agatha had ever met were married or were widows.

  “Such a life you have lived,” the lithe and overall skeletal woman scoffed. “Yeah, but we do not use honorifics here. Too much waste of time they are, yes. You start with a Miss and end up with Countess of the Shitstain, Duchess of the Seven Dumps, and Heiress of the Fuckall Throne.”

  “Right…” Agatha giggled nervously. “You are not a woman of… quaint vocabulary?” More than a question, it was a doubt on her own use of words as she was winging them to sound well-spoken.

  “I have lost my touch with words as people do not stop spewing shit.”

  “Yet you use a formal dialect?”

  “Some things you never lose,” Terráquea scratched the back of her head and groaned. “Anyhow, Agatha was it?”

  “Yes,” she nodded with regained composure. “Could I ask you a question of my own?”

  “Sure, go for the throat,” Terráquea shrugged.

  “Are you, by any chance, a military engineer?”

  “Curious question indeed. As for the answer, I am not sure hpw to respond. My position here in the academy is a curious one, but if I had to say something, then yes, once upon a time I was one.”

  Crown in the heavens! Mister Krugger was right! Military engineers are crazy, the girl thought to herself.

  “But enough about myself, let us talk about you. I do have high hopes for this agate of yours, and from what I have heard, it is the only one you have. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Terráquea,” Agatha nodded solemnly without letting her thoughts shine through.

  “Interesting…” The emaciated woman put her index finger on her lips. “Whilst there are no rules to the awakening of agates, there is certainly a median. Well, also a mean and a mode, but I always confuse them, and there are too extreme of outliers to make the mean trustworthy. But what I mean to say, it is not common for such events to happen. My theory is that your body prioritized quality over quantity, as the agate that you consumed was so pathetic that it could not even muster enough power to create five stones, which tends to be the magic number of the lower limit. Could you confirm that?”

  “I… yes, the agate I had was of poor quality,” Agatha pressed harshly on the agate on her hand, as it was a sensible subject to her. She might be proud of her little sapphire, but not of the stone that created it. “Not even that, it was only a chip of an agate.”

  “A chip of an agate?” Terráquea laughed like those seagulls that sometimes would make their way inland. That was to say, disgustingly. “You certainly lucked out then, girl. A chip of an agate of poor quality, and from the way you are explaining it, you were old when you consumed it, were you not?”

  “Yes,” Agatha not only clenched her fist now, but also gritted her teeth. “I have consumed it only a handful of years ago.”

  “You definitely lucked out,” the woman was losing it as she howled. “A poor-quality chip whilst you are conscious and have memories of it? I think you are the first person I have met who remembers having eaten their agate, let alone being sapient at the time of doing so. Oh, your luck knows no bounds, girl!”

  “Agatha,” she corrected sternly.

  “Right, right,” Terráquea swayed her hand unconcernedly. “This makes me even more interested in your agate, Agatha…” The woman squinted. “Wait…?”

  “Are we going to devolve into children’s word play?”

  “Blame your parents for that, but no,” she shrugged. “I was just mildly amused by that. What really happened is that I realized that your agate is even of greater quality than I originally thought. Sometimes, there are lucky sprouts where the agate consumed by a person produces different results than expected. We do not know the reason for such phenomena, but we theorize that it is due to the person’s body. If your body is compatible with the agate, then it will produce better results than expected; if not, worse. I believe you might be the former kind.”

  “If I were so compatible, then why do I not have two agates?”

  “Greedy bunch, are you not?” Terráquea scoffed. “I already told you were lucky, Agatha. If someone consumed an agate of such poor quality at your age, normally the result is that they would have not awakened any agates in the first place, and they just would have had the worst toilet experience in their life.”

  “Not awakening… is a possibility?” Suddenly, Agatha felt her feet and hands very cold. She had to look at her hands just to check that she hadn’t commanded her little sapphire with Chill. That was the magnitude of her distraught.

  “Quite,” the woman calmly strutted toward a window, her feet expertly dodging the mountains of mess. “And once you have had your attempt with an agate, there is not another one. So yes, Agatha, you have been lucky.”

  “I see…” She wanted to puke. She wanted to puke so badly. It didn’t help at all that she was still bleeding. Her stomach protested. Her throat weighed her down like stone. Her feet were colder than ice. Agatha brought a hand to her mouth as she gagged, but thankfully, only a bit of bile came out, which she promptly swallowed.

  “Having said so,” Terráquea pushed open the curtains, “I do want to run a few tests with your agate. For now, I have seen that it has a nice, powerful color – at least on the core, but that is more than enough for a First Stratum – and perfect shape. The size leaves a bit to desire, but nothing increasing the Stratum will not solve. So let us do some practical testing. Do you know the command range of your agate?”

  “Uh, around thirty meters,” Agatha responded lethargically.

  “How about the recalling range?”

  “Uhhh…” The villager blinked a handful of times as her brain started braining again. “Is there a difference? I thought it was the same.”

  “If your agate is of piss poor quality, then maybe yes, but the better the quality of the agate, the more disparity between the command range and the recalling one there will be. Come here and chuck it outside, if there is not enough distance, aim for the edge of the island.”

  “Sure…” Weakly, Agatha made her way to the window and chucked her little sapphire with her hands before applying the Speed command.

  The air exploded. Windows rumbled. The agate was sent flying.

  “Crown in the heavens! My ears!” Terráquea swore as she pressed her palms against her ears. “Fucking supersonics shots at First Stratum? That is a monstrous agate indeed, fractures!” The woman looked forward, and they saw Agatha’s agate make her way well out of the academy’s perimeter and soon it started falling outside of their sight.

  “It is going further than-“

  “Shh!” The malnourished woman interrupted her. “One, two, three,” and she began counting for some reason. “Four, five, six,” she frowned, “seven, eight, nine,” her frown intensified, “ten, eleven, twelve… Okay, Agatha, when did the agate recall?”

  “What do you mean?” The girl tilted her head in confusion.

  “In which of the seconds did your agate recall?”

  “In none?” She frowned herself. “It is still summoned.”

  “There is no way that your agate is still summoned, Agatha.”

  “I still feel the pull of the Recall command, though. I can unsummon it.”

  Terráquea frowned. “The Skyscraper Academy is at two hundred meters from the ground level. You launched your agate high up, so it already reached terminal velocity when we lost it from sight, and I am pretty sure of my calculations as the weight and perfect shape make for simple ones. Even accounting for air resistance, there is no way that it could have taken more than six seconds for it to reach the ground, and I have continued to count until double that. And you are telling that somehow your agate has gone well past that time, practically confirming that it made it to the ground?”

  “Yeeeees?”

  “Right,” she clicked her tongue. “Alright, this definitely confirms my theory that quality affects the command range linearly, whilst it affects the recalling range exponentially. Fuck,” the woman stated plainly. “Well, I had high hopes for your agate, but I did not expect to make history the first day. Consider myself hooked.”

  “Right,” Agatha replicated. “Can I recall my agate then?”

  “Ha!” Terráquea laughed at her and slapped the girl’s shoulder. “How are you going to do that when it is outside of your command range?”

  The girl’s eyes shot wide open to reveal twin sapphires. “What…?”

  “Yeah, I would have expected the agate to have been recalled naturally by now. This is certainly a first. I have definitely never seen no one needing to retrieve an agate like an archer of yore with their arrows.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Terráquea chuckled softly, albeit with far too much joy. “Girl, I mean that you need to get off the island and search for your agate.”

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