"So, you can see how the correct application of skills will have a synergistic effect on what you want to accomplish. If you can find the rare mage with both Will and Soul Magic, watch out. It's a combination that has ended dynasties. You should be very afraid of someone whose soul is visible to the naked eye." The instructor gave Ludere and Mila a glare.

  He had been debating on whether to trust Mila for a minute. So far, they had bonded over being lower-class and customer service jobs. Mila had worked at an inn her parents owned, just north of the city. That had given her ample time to learn letters and numbers.

  Mila was writing notes on her parchment. Ludere was on his third sheet of the day, but it had only been one hour. Whatever else was happening, the academy existed to prop up paper makers as an institution.

  "What is the market value of a Will Magic gem?" Grammarian Nix paused.

  Several hands shot up. The usual suspects, those jockeying for the top slots, would answer a few questions early on in the class, and thereafter let others fall on their faces. Ludere raised his hand.

  "Ah. Our new student. Pray tell us, Ludo, what would the skill gem fetch on the open market?"

  Ludere cleared his throat. "Roughly one hundred Dinarii."

  The grammarian stopped in front of the aged wooden table he shared with three others. "How much would a Soul Magic gem cost?"

  "Roughly the same, but slightly more, perhaps one hundred and five, if the tables are reliable."

  "And if we combine the two on an open market?"

  Ludere knew that this was a trick question. There are rules against this. He knew that. But that wasn't what the question was asking.

  "In a black market, it would be three hundred Dinarii. Three thousand if the seller could do this in advance, or reliably."

  There was gasp. Several heads turned his way.

  "That is… How did you come up with this figure?"

  "You have to take in the quantity of these things that are floating around, which is not many, and the scarcity, and then figure out how much somebody is willing to pay for it. A lot of these Prefereti have money to burn, so it's going to be one of them that they're going to pay a premium. And baked into it is the trust that you are actually buying what you are asking for, and that the person can be discreet about selling it."

  The Grammarian closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples.

  "I suppose you don't have a source for this?"

  "No one that I would allow within one hundred feet of my family, no."

  Several of his classmates chuckled.

  "Well, you all understand exactly how important these are. The government will pay fifty Dinarii each for either so the fact that the open market is so much more shows that there is a demand. So many things are possible with Willpower."

  The grammarian resumed his discussion on the potential of Will in combination with Soul. It was fascinating to Ludere how much scholarship went into figuring out how to work one of the branches of magic. They had almost forgotten it in the two hundred years since the last renascentia. He shuddered when they went over it. The fact that the empire had been able to build up so much in that time… Well, situations like this made him think that it was possible. Skills on their own were great, but people had to work together in order to get this done.

  The Empire wasn't built in a week. After all, it took careful, planning men like all the grammarians that taught their classes and legions upon legions of devoted followers. Each one willing to lay down their lives to expand the holdings of an Empire that was only functionally a little bit better than not.

  When the class ended he went with Mila to get lunch. He found that the punctuation of lunch time was a good way to keep time. She walked next to him as they crossed the grounds of the academy.

  "There's something you're not telling us."

  They weren't alone.

  Ludere quickly glanced around, taking in the mixture of Will power and Soul. Whoever was there either had some way to hide theirs, or didn't have anything worth mentioning. This was the case with about half of the students there. A lot of them were promised that they would be getting the skills by the end of their tutelage, but as he could already see, it was one of those things that you had to wait and see about.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  It didn't take him long to realize that he needed to take this advantage. "Three people?"

  "Ah. You want my permission to throw them? Throw away."

  "Yes, boss." Ludere reached out, finding three unwilling targets. Taking advantage of their relative strength, he decided that floating them into the air was a good use of his well of Willpower.

  As their feet gently left it off the ground, he took stock in the situation. The three humans all were wearing students' robes and all looked like they were about to get the jump on him. One of the humans immediately started sobbing.

  "I'm so sorry! They said that you were strong, but I didn't know, and…" He dropped into a crying mess.

  Everything was going according to his plan. Then suddenly these three fools had arrived. They'd even done him the disservice of turning their togas into cowls so he couldn't see their full faces.

  He wouldn't give up this feeling for all the Dinarii in the vaults the Empire so highly prized. He had them where he wanted them, and if their tiny souls were to be believed, each one of them was terrified beyond belief.

  "All right, you've got my attention. Why did you choose to follow us out here? This is very unusual."

  "Let them down." Mila motioned to the three conspirators.

  "Oh, very well."

  It took a supreme effort of restraint for him to untangle himself from them, allowing them to fall down ever-so-gracefully the two feet that he'd raised them up. The one that had begun crying immediately upon being lifted in the air looked stricken.

  "Please explain why you're interrupting my lunch. I am a very hungry man, and I would like to feed my very hungry classmate as well."

  "Ludo… You… I challenge you…" The voice wavered.

  "I'm going to stop you right there. I've read the entire rulebook here, and I understand that you think that you have something over me, but you do not have anything over me. I don't have to accede to any of your demands, and I don't think that I'm going to be answering or fighting any of you. The fact that you couldn't even sneak up on me when you were trying, and did it badly, means that you're just going to embarrass yourself even more. I would love it if you didn't embarrass yourself anymore than you already are."

  Mila crossed her arms. "And if this is some sort of secret society initiation, I promise you that whatever way you thought this was going to go, it is not going to go that way."

  He held up a palm to them, a gesture of peace. "They weren't getting by your strength, were they? I thought that this was some sort of joke."

  He hadn't choked them out, per se, but he had made their breathing a little bit more difficult. In order to pick somebody up, it was easiest to just pick up the whole body. This, of course, had the unwanted effect of him having to spend all the energy to encase the person like a sausage. That encasement meant that they were restricted. If they had been breathing in? That meant that they could not expand their lungs. This was bad news for anybody that wanted to be able to breathe out.

  This specific exercise of Will usage was not air-tight so he couldn't cut them off from actually breathing, but it was difficult for them to move their lungs.

  They just sat there panting for a little bit. Ludere wondered if he should take them to lunch and offer them some sort of consolation. After all, they'd interrupted his lunch, and he didn't want to miss it. But then also, if these were students, they were probably in his class, and they probably needed to get lunch themselves. Would it be kinder for him to offer them to go with them or not? He wasn't entirely sure.

  "This is not an invitation. We just wanted to ask some questions…"

  Ludere shot him a glare that would have given a mother in law second thoughts.

  "See if I was thinking of doing the thing? Do you know how many demons I've killed? Do you have any idea how hard it is to kill a succubus? No, you don't. Because we don't talk about those kinds of things. I've killed dozens of succubi, if not hundreds. I have killed almost a dozen elite demons. The three of you? You're nothing to me."

  He walked to the man in the lead. Hopefully that one was the one that was in charge.

  "Let me give you the understanding that I gave the demons. I'm in charge. I don't need this academy. I'm here to learn. So whatever you're about to say? I will remind you that I'm a Regnicus for a reason. I have no problem going back to fight more demons. Can you say the same?"

  He held the tunic of his collar, pulling it down like it was choking him. "Demons? Holy Fiddler. How… What?"

  Ludere gave him a small amount of grace. More than the entirety of the demons' invasion force fighting him down. The one thing he didn't want to have to deal with was being bitched at because he destroyed a student. He did not want to have to deal with the bane of man's existence.

  He would do terrible things to avoid paperwork. If he could reset time to the beginning of the loop? He might just do that to avoid it as well.

  "We wanted to form an alliance. We heard that you had a particular set of skills. It would be a shame if…"

  Ludere held up a hand. " If that sentence doesn't end with… 'it would be a shame if you didn't like money' then we're going to have a real problem. You are not in a space to threaten me or mine."

  The man was finally standing up. A simple scar ran along his cheek. His brown eyes under darker brown hair didn't stand out at all. Ludere would not have been able to pick the man out from a crowd. In fact, his toga showed that he was unaffiliated. He'd never seen someone who could serve so well as a perfect spy in his life. It was like as soon as he looked away from the man, he forgot how he looked.

  "Apologies. There is money on the table. After hearing what you said during class today, you got me thinking that perhaps you had a connection."

  "That's an interesting way to say that you like the idea of paying to get skills that you couldn't otherwise get.

  "So is it true that you can do this, that you know somebody… Do you know somebody that can do this? Because you might not understand how bad it is for us to be the academy and not have Will Magic. So much of what we could learn here is wasted, and it's shameful, honestly."

  "I think that we can work something out. How do you feel about paying through the nose for something and signing a Writ of Silence?"

  The man smiled. Finally they were getting somewhere.