Antikythera sat down and waited for Ninya to come. He could feel the presence of all the dormant automatons around him, waiting to be called into action. Antikythera had no need for them right now, so they remained dormant until he had something in mind. The presence of the humans, while faint compared to his workforce, was also there. Lingering. It disgusted him somewhat, knowing what some of the organics did, be it waste disposal or copution.

  Ninya's presence was much stronger, noticeably so. Antikythera could feel the girl inside her home, talking to her sister and grabbing books of different types from the shelf they had somehow managed to purchase. In his mind’s eye, Ninya waved goodbye to Tsuare, closed the door, and ran in the direction of the field where Antikythera would teach her.

  In her lonesome, Tsuare locked the doors and started pying with herself. Antikythera closed his mind’s eye right then and there and put his focus on his mechanical senses. His audio receiver picked up the rustling of leaves from a great distance, the song of birds, and the squeaking of rodents, while his digital cameras saw the world in every spectrum of light.

  "Antikythera sir!" Ninya was upon him soon enough. Antikythera rotated the position of his head and saw the aspiring mage trying to control her breathing.

  Antikythera left his seated position and rotated his body to face Ninya as he made his way over to her. "You will not compin about anything I teach you, no matter how slow our progress may get."

  "Yeah, yeah! You said that to me already! I get it!" An impatient Ninya gred at him. She opened her book—one which she had written her personal magical observations into—and showed it to the Automaton. "What do you think?!"

  Lackluster. Antikythera thought. It failed several magical theories, but it was also a good baseline for his expectations. Ninya was uneducated, simply put, and that was why her magical observations had so many gaps within them. What she didn't understand, she filled with random mumbles which, Antikythera suspected, even she could not read once the feeling that came from her Talent subsided and stopped guiding her thought process and conclusions.

  "It is solid, fundamentally speaking. I can see points where you are cking, but I assume it is because you do not know how to interpret the ‘feeling’ you get from your talent?" Antikythera reached out his palm in a silent request to hold the book. "May I see?"

  "Here," Ninya was scared to give him a book with such ckluster knowledge, but he supposed if her assumption was that this book was the accumution of all her work thus far, then it was only expected for her to be protective of it.

  "Thank you. I will not burn this thing." Antikythera bluntly reassured the girl’s fears. It caused her to smile, which was a small victory that would stretch far as their lessons went on. Antikythera closed the book violently. "You will try to guess the function of my spell without writing it down or the convenience of your book."

  "What?! Why?!" Ninya ran to try and reach for her spell tome, but Antikythera didn't even have to move to ensure she didn’t get it. He was simply far too tall.

  "You will intuit a spell's inner workings without the guidance of writing down your thoughts." Antikythera coldly expined. He wanted to know the limits of Ninya's ability, and this girl was proving it difficult for him to do so. "I am able to know the inner workings of my own spell. You cannot have a better teacher than me. Wasting your opportunity like this is inefficient. Follow what I want."

  "Okay, fine!" Ninya gave up and sat across from him. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Name the processes of this spell." Electricity began to crackle at the tips of Antikythera's bde-like fingers. "What am I doing?"

  "You're... turning mana into some kind of lightning?" Ninya touched her head, wincing.

  That was the first limitation to her intuition. Why? Antikythera considered the answers. It could be because her body cked mana and thus was unable to understand it. Mages already had an innate understanding of their own magic; this one seemed to be able to understand the workings of others.

  The second possibility was that Ninya did not know how to weave mana—another type of knowledge that could be considered in the category of “innate.” Most mages instinctively moved mana, and someone who did not know how to do it yet but experienced it might give themselves migraines.

  "Good." Antikythera stopped his spell from continuing and gave Ninya some space to rest. In the meantime, he would confirm his theories. "Do you know how to weave mana?"

  "No," Ninya shook her head. "I wish I did, though."

  "That is why I am here." Antikythera lied. "Close your eyes." Ninya followed. "Feel the air. Is there something strange within it?"

  "No?" Ninya's eyes were cmped so tight that her brows had furrowed. This, as Antikythera had learned, was wrong for an organic creature to do when sensing mana.

  "Rex," Antikythera said, pcing a hand on the girl's shoulder and causing her to flinch. The sudden surge of emotions reset her stressed mind and let it follow his command. Antikythera pulled his arm back. "Just calm down. Magic is not something you can brute force."

  It was possible, but Ninya was nowhere near powerful enough to be able to do it. Antikythera didn’t let her know of this.

  "Feel the mana in the surroundings. It is in the air. No matter how minuscule it may be, know that there is dormant energy ever present across this world." Antikythera watched the girl's internal heat and listened to the beating of her heart, trying to gauge if her talent had any physical tells.

  "It's all around us," Ninya repeated.

  "Yes," Antikythera confirmed, still focused on the girl's biological processes.

  Ninya breathed, and she flinched. Antikythera increased his mind's processing power to figure out what had just happened. His perception slowed down, and with it, he reviewed everything Ninya's body had done in the past hour.

  First, he noticed that the spark of activity within her brain when she was intuiting [Electro Burst] from his fingers earlier was simir to the brain activity she experienced when breathing just now. Everything else had been the same from Ninya's daily biological status.

  Only her brain activity had changed, which meant one simple thing: Ninya's talent somehow managed to activate the mana she was breathing and give it the same properties as that of [Electro Burst].

  "You did good." Antikythera stopped hastening his perception of time and complimented Ninya on her first-ever successful breathing exercise. "You managed to turn the very first dregs of mana you inhaled into a spell—one simir to the one I showed you, in fact."

  "Und thwah's Gwud?" Ninya rubbed her bleeding nose.

  "More than good," Antikythera confirmed. "It means that you also have some type of copying ability."

  "Huwayyyyyyy," Ninya cheered.

  "Here." Antikythera offered her a potion. She could not give up on him physically now. Time was of the essence, and there were more tests to conduct!