Christie didn’t like to be toyed with. The only person exempt from that was her ladylove, someone who wasn’t the black-uniformed soldier in front of her.

  “For this first class, I decided on a more entertaining lesson,” Sandra started. “We will get down to logistics and whatnot later, but for now, let us work on the ground. Some of you have correctly pointed out that an unstable ground is not a good environment to work with as a lapiloquist. But there are some caveats on the environment.”

  The brunette teacher tapped the ground and summoned a pillar of stone, which she used as a seat. Christie didn’t know why her eyes had locked onto her, but she had to say that seeing her sit down made Sandra’s big-looking thighs even more plump.

  “Some of you might have guessed – or even experienced this yourselves – that there is a difference in the way one must command the different types of soil. Does anyone want to share their experiences?”

  “Dirt is easier to command,” Carlos Trastar said.

  “Good observation,” Sandra nodded. “Come on, students! Do not be shy!”

  “Stone is less responsive than dirt,” spoke Shayla.

  “Interesting distinction,” their teacher nodded. “Not harder to command. Just less responsive. I like it. Keep them coming!”

  “Bedrock is more accurate,” Mateo added.

  “Hmm, I think I understand where you are coming from, Master Librar, but you could word it a bit differently? You can use longer sentences; I am not limiting anyone’s word count here.”

  “Bedrock…” The scholarite stopped to think about his words. “…conveys the commands into reality better. It accepts far more complex information than dirt would.”

  “Yes!” Sandra snapped her fingers. “That was what I was looking for!”

  She jumped out of her column and stepped toward the class, the stone formation casually receding into the soil. The teacher sort of reminded Christie of her dearest father. He could perform massive displays of Agatecraft – whether it was lithorica and lapiloquia – with the flair of mundanity. The same flair was here. Mundanity was a luxury when performing Agatecraft; both disciplines were extremely intensive in their respective fields, so one couldn’t afford to be casual.

  Well, they normally couldn’t afford to.

  “I know you do not have your writing material here,” the black-uniformed soldier pranced around whilst she spoke, “but there is no need to. You either engrave my following words into your very soul or you should forget passing this class.” A couple of students gasped in cold sweat and panic. “When performing lapiloquia, the type of soil you manipulate is important. Dirt is easy to manipulate, but it is not strong in the slightest. If you make a tower out of dirt, it will collapse.”

  As she walked around, dirt started gathering on a pile. Drawn from all the surroundings just to be accumulated in a single point.

  “Just like how we call anything used in lithorica agates, we call everything in lapiloquia stone. Dirt, rock, bedrock, gravel, even sand.” Sandra stopped in her tracks and harshly eyed the students. “If I find any of you building with sand, I am not just going to fail you, I am going to hunt you down.”

  The students with cold sweat on them could no longer claim it was cold after that glare.

  “There are some limits to lapiloquia, and most of them are with the responsiveness of the material. Maybe some of you have tried to command agates with lapiloquia,” Technically, I did, Christie thought, “and have found that it is almost like speaking to a wall. Agates are the hardest ‘soil’ to command. Other notable mentions of things you might not commonly consider soil but can be affected by lapiloquia are clay, obsidian, some kinds of monsters, and lava.”

  Christie’s eyes shot wide open at the latter two items. Those certainly are different… Her mind was already coming up with some thoughts.

  “Good luck getting close to those monsters and lava without getting killed.”

  Fractures, it is true… Her fantasies were shattered the moment she was forcefully reminded of how lapiloquia worked. She didn’t want to be anywhere near a behemoth unless there was thirty meters of solid agate separating them. But wait… Christie realized something.

  “Can we simply not use Amplify Range to command those from a distance?” She suggested.

  “Good observation, Miss Valasela,” Sandra nodded. “Unfortunately, you are not the first one to think of that. Amplify Range has a massive loss in efficiency that scales exponentially with the distance. A couple of meters? Sure, not much of a difference. But tens of them? Hundreds even? You would not even be able to command a grain of sand. Oh! Talking about grains. Salt is also controllable. Make of that what you will.”

  Can you control seawater? Christie frowned and looked at her teacher. No, she is messing with us. Seawater does not have enough salt per liter to be significant. And I would have heard of anything remotely close if it were possible… Are the other significant sources of salt that I am not aware of? She cannot just be talking about salt quarries, is she? The redhead didn’t even bother to ask, as that vulpine grin in front of her told her that she wouldn’t be getting answers.

  “So, soils,” Sandra clapped – though normally, not empowered by lithorica – to get everyone’s attention. “Dirt is manipulable on a massive scale, trivially at that, but it offers no real properties in defense or offense. Unless you gather enough to create a landslide, but if you had enough time to do so – or got caught by someone doing so to you – that is the least of your problems and you deserve all of it.”

  Christie would’ve said that dirt had a real usage in making the ground stable and halting the march of soldiers, then she remembered that most soldiers could just easily hover over the ground, unlike her.

  As the brunette teacher finished speaking, she placed a foot on the heap of dirt she had passively gathered during the lesson. She started walking on it, and it shifted upon contact with her, forming a floating bridge. The dirt seemed to hold for a moment, but the moment she placed a single foot in the hanging section of the bridge, it instantly collapsed. Sandra then calmly descended the pile from where she had ascended as the dirt started to go back where it came from.

  “Now, stone is the middle ground of everything. It is decently responsive, decently durable, and relatively easy to manipulate on a large scale. Decent at everything, but not highlightable in anything. Now, I am not saying that stone is bad – not in the slightest – but try not to use it too much. There is a reason why we make a distinction between rock and bedrock. You want more solid stuff that is not as brittle or easily commandable. Question: Where would you place a military base? A: atop dirt. B: atop stone. Or c: atop bedrock. Justify your answer.”

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  “Upon bedrock,” Mateo started, “because that way the defenses will be stronger against attackers, but they will also not be able to manipulate and break said defenses in the heat of battle with their own lapiloquist.”

  “Depths,” Sandra cursed. “I had hoped someone would give me a wrong answer first so I could beat them. Alas, you are one hundred percent correct, Master Librar.”

  Demented harlot, Christie spat mentally upon hearing her teacher’s caravan of thought. Mateo seemed to think the same, for he at least visibly sighed.

  “Yes, the problem of everyone being able to manipulate the ground you tread, live, work, and battle on is that you are always subject to lapiloquia attacks. Therefore, the harder it is to manipulate the ground, the better, as that way you have time to react.”

  Christie could easily think about how that affected battles. She also knew that most armies didn’t have that many lapiloquists, as it was even harder to train expert lapiloquists than lithorists. And they especially didn’t use them for attack when that elite was a sitting duck because manipulating the ground left them totally spent.

  “So only one type of substrate remains: bedrock,” Sandra continued. “I am not saying that bedrock is outright the best solution. The others also have their uses, but bedrock is not monolithic either. You should look for the right type of stone. Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks all work and react differently. Some are more average than others, whilst others are more manipulable or stronger. It is not the same commanding pumice as gneiss. Personally, my favorite is limestone.”

  The ground started to tremble as soon as their teacher said that. Whether it was due to Sandra’s previous antics or the fact that the very earth was trembling, the students took to the skies. The rest of the students could use Speed Control Anchor or other series to become airborne, but Christie had to use different tactics. Her Control command was awfully slow, not like her ladylove’s which was way faster than a running person, so she first summoned a pillar of agate underneath her feet to gain ten meters of height, then created a sizeable platform of agate like the glorified bathtub she had made before, only that now it had a bit more glory and flair to its design.

  Thank the earth I can do this for more than a minute now, Christie sighed. Even then, her platform moved at a snail’s pace. Let us hope this is enough for whatever the demented harlot is trying to do. A part of her brain now outright refused to give any respect to her teacher.

  And the ground opened.

  It was a terrifying sight that nearly froze her blood. A massive ravine that went deep into the bowels of the earth was revealed that casually. And even more casually was how Sandra just stood there. Nonchalantly.

  The brunette teacher smiled and chuckled audibly. Then she stomped the ground. The earth closed. The whole imagery was surreal. Christie didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Fun fact!” Sandra shouted from the ground. “I had nothing to do with it! It was just a naturally occurring earthquake.”

  And finally, Christie’s blood froze.

  The sheer idea of someone being capable of stopping an earthquake with their will alone and not even breaking a sweat just… left her petrified. That was the rage of the very earth that they were talking about. And that woman shorter than her told the very ground to shut up.

  And it did.

  Christie was aware that lapiloquia worked on a massive scale, but everything she had seen until then could be considered small. Even the crown of earthen spikes she had created when she unlocked the discipline was minuscule compared to this. Only a dozen meters in radius. But this? She hadn’t been able to see the bottom of that ravine. Who knew how many cubic meters, if not kilometers, of stone the soldier in front of her had displaced.

  Hesitatingly, the students started descending and finally landed back on the ground.

  “Truth be told,” their teacher started, “it is partially my fault. The soil is already depleted, and I just pushed it even harder, so earthquakes – or at least minimal seismic activity – are to be expected.”

  Christie was the last one to land as her agates were that slow. Not only did she have poor-quality agates, but they were also all in the First Stratum, so any commands she was to use wouldn’t scale much. But as she recalled her sea of stone, she saw her teacher. Sandra was talking casually, but Christie could see the heaving chest, dilated pupils, and the drenched, pulsating neck.

  She is just acting strong. Even that was too much for her, the student lapiloquist realized.

  “I did not want to give this lesson today, but it is not a bad one either to know from the start,” Sandra said. “When you make the ground tremble, be ready for it to tremble back at you.”

  The words would have had much more gravitas if the black-uniformed soldier hadn’t looked one step away from a heart attack. Reading minds wasn’t the same as reading bodies, but the rest of the students didn’t seem to catch their teacher’s overexertion. At least not to Christie’s degree. That, or they were raptured by the powerful words she had spoken.

  “So quality of the ground is not only important, but also how much it has been worked?” Mateo asked for a change.

  “Indeed,” Sandra nodded ever-so-sluggishly. Perhaps I am just reading too much into it, Christie guessed as she was the only one to react. “But that does not mean you do not get to perform lapiloquia, only that you should be aware of the exhaustion of the earth. If you ever find depleted soil, then you should fix it.”

  “And how do we do that?” Christina – once more, the noble one with the brunette-blond hair – asked.

  “Perfect that you ask that. It ties with the actual lesson of today: feeling the ground.” Their teacher created a new pillar to sit on and let out a sigh of relief as she did so. “By the way, you can all sit too; no one is forcing you to stand up.”

  Most students did so, Christie included. They created simple lapiloquia columns with their typical hexagonal formation to use as seats. Barring Shayla. The Intaksolfani instead opted to create a floating chair of agates to sit on, something between an armchair and a throne. That earned a snide gaze from the teacher, but the woman didn’t comment on it and continued with her class.

  “Right now, you can feel the ground, that much is true, but a ‘feeling’ is a limited and vague thing. Expert lapiloquists can get information out of the ground. Not much, mind you, but something. And as you might know, in warfare, there are few things as important as information. Even simple things like the composition of earth you stand on are key. Especially if the integrity of the soil is also part of that information. Before we get into anything complex, try to extend your senses to the ground. You can use Embed if you need.”

  Those last sentences she spoke while looking at Shayla, which the dark-skinned student smugly responded by lowering her floating throne, tapping the ground with her tiptoes, and summoning twin pillars to use as armrests and feel the earth.

  Christie ignored her friend’s antics and focused on the task. Feeling the ground was something trivial now, even if it had taken her almost a whole year to unlock through tedious and hard work. There was something about Agatecraft that was so instinctive that once you made something, it remained part of your being. Her ladylove also said that; she described increases in Strata as retroactive upgrades, and the redhead couldn’t deny that lapiloquia also felt like that.

  It was as if she had always had this sixth sense to feel the stones. It was so… intuitive that Christie was almost tempted to say that was the case, if the whole year of grueling training wasn’t still fresh in her memory.

  But even that instinctual sense was severely limited. Christie could only tell that the ground was there. A rather redundant fact, as at least two of her five senses already told her that, but if she were stripped of them, she knew for a fact that she would still know the ground was there. There wasn’t any additional information beyond presence. No composition, no integrity, no nothing. Just presence.

  If anything, what she could tell is that her range didn’t extend far away from her. But that distance was vague. She couldn’t tell if it was a hundred meters or a handful of them. Sandra seemed to have a range of a handful of hundreds of meters when she made the ground tremble, Christie pondered, no longer calling her teacher names as the irritation vanished after five minutes of introspection.

  “By now, you must all have had a grasp of your limitations,” their teacher spoke softly. “Unfortunately for us all, this is as far as we will get this lesson. Like when you awakened lapiloquia, it is a long process. And do not mistake my words, I am surprised that you all can even perform lapiloquia at your age, quite the generation you are.”

  The ‘all’ she was talking about were just seven people.

  Disappointing, but not surprising. Christie had already expected that lapiloquia wasn’t going to be filled with action, considering how sluggish the process was to even acquire it. And, as a matter of fact, she liked that. Slow progression and small steps were more than alright for her.

  “So, while we work on extending how much information you can get from the ground, let us work on the theory for the coming lessons. Remember, this is not Advanced Lapiloquia; you will not learn combat tactics here. This is Military Engineering, you will learn warfare tactics.”

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