Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (73/?) WiP 1 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here is the Work in Progress for Chapter 73 I hope you guys enjoy! :D

“In the beginning, there was nothing.” The fox began with a certainty and absoluteness of unassailable academic authority. “And I don’t mean this in a metaphysical manner, nor in a literal sense, but from a historian’s earnest and pragmatic perspective. For in the beginning, as any good historian can tell you, there was nothing - by virtue of there being nothing present from the time to infer from, nor anyone present at the time whose records we could likewise draw conclusions from. So I am afraid I will be unable to touch upon the matters of what some may strictly consider as: the beginning. I will, however, be able to tell you what sources tell us of said beginning. Of the tales and stories passed on by those closest to that time, by those who might have heard whispers and echoes of a time before time.”

The end of that monologue had me yawning hard.

And it wasn’t even five minutes past o-ninehundred yet.

I was quickly starting to dread what the rest of the class was shaping up to be. Because if this first impression was anything to go by, then there was little hope for much in the way of engagement in this class.

“We begin our story-” Articord continued, her voice deepening, as its formerly grouchy undercurrents gave way to an epic score of narration. “-with creation.” Several mana radiation pings suddenly hit me at once, the first marking the amplification of the fox’s voice, the second coinciding with the sudden manifestation of an emerald-encrusted staff, and the third… plunging the entire room into complete and utter darkness.

Gasps and startled breaths quickly followed, echoing in the emptiness that was the vast and all too familiar darkness. "They say that the time before beginnings wasn’t so much time at all, as it was a formless and vague state of nonexistence." True to the professor’s words, there was indeed, nothing around us; save for her and the rest of the student body hanging listlessly in the void. “This nonexistence manifested itself as a state of unbearable heat-” The professor’s staff shifted from its natural shade of green to a brilliant and vibrant shade of ruby-red. “-of chaotic and violent manastreams-” The ruby-red gem started glowing abruptly, eliciting both sharp breaths of shock and wide-eyed looks of confusion, as the heads of a hundred different students cocked every which way in as many axes as they could turn. Their eyes focused on something in that dark, jumping and darting from invisible object to invisible object, seeing something that my human eyes and human-built sensors just couldn’t see - manastreams. “-set within a space so small you could rest it comfortably upon the tip of a pencil.” Sure enough, the diffused glow of Articord’s staff shrunk whilst its intensity only grew. It shrunk to the point where the light was the size of a dot, yet it continued to glow so bright that it forced those among the crowd without auto-tinting lenses to shield their eyes with a mix of magic and a good old-fashioned squint.

“They say that in this smallest of smallest spaces, came the birth of a powerful force that no apocalyptic cataclysm on record could ever, or will ever contend to.” She raised her staff once more, the pin-prick dot of intense light continuing to grow brighter and brighter until finally…

It could glow no more.

ALERT: LOCALIZED SURGE OF MANA-RADIATION DETECTED, 300% ABOVE BACKGROUND RADIATION LEVELS

And an explosion rocked the once void-filled space.

This very-real force knocked many students from their invisible seats, buffeting them back with wave after wave of successive shocks, eventually forcing the smaller and () amongst the crowd to be flung back to the back of the lecture hall itself; eliciting screams and wails that were mostly drowned out by the heart-stopping thumps of this visceral explosion.

My gut twisted more than it should’ve during the whole episode.

My whole body felt… nauseous, sick, and for the briefest of moments I felt weirdly disconnected from everything that was happening, as if I was looking at everything from the outside in.

That alien sensation lasted for… an amount of time. Ending just as abruptly as it’d started, leaving me dazed, confused, but otherwise unharmed.

Articord, all the while, maintained this genuinely merry smile. “Such a force would have been the final moments heralding the end of time and yet… it instead marked the end of that nothingness that came before. For following this point, came the ceaseless expansion of reality as we know it. A reality consisting of the realm of the gods, and the realm of mortality, with the latter coalescing into what we recognize today as the Nexus.”

Upon de-tinting my lenses, I was met not with the featureless void like before, but instead a large expanse of green beneath our feet, and an equally expansive bright blue sky above our heads.

It was as if the whole class was now floating above one of those pre-alpha test-maps for some immersive VR-sim, but one that was quickly being populated by all sorts of things, with life below us growing, changing, shifting, with trees and forests rising and falling by the second.

It was around the same time that a hand was finally raised.

Auris’ hand.

“Yes, Lord Ping?”

“Professor, what you are saying is sacrilege.”

Here we go again. I thought to myself with an internalized sigh, the bull’s predictable stubbornness being the thing that finally grounded me after that whole experience.

“How so, Lord Ping?” The Professor urged, crossing her arms.

“You mention nothing of the gods. You mention the myth of creation without any utterances of the Gods which played a role in its formation.” He continued, prompting the Professor to respond in a way I wasn’t expecting.

A small, yet sly, smile.

There was something she found amusing in Ping’s comment.

“Indeed. And I do in fact applaud you for taking proactive note, Lord Ping. However, I would request that you reserve your judgment for the very end of the story; at least with your grievances as it pertains to the Gods.”

This sentiment was more or less confirmed by her response, as it was clear there was something she wasn’t addressing just yet. Something that made it so that she didn’t have to dock points from Ping, which meant that there was something else there to her story that hadn’t come up yet.

“I will obey, Professor.” The bull dipped his head low in acknowledgement, before sitting back down.

With that out of the way, Articord continued, bringing back the blackboard behind her as several floating pieces of chalk were now busy not just writing down her talking points, but illustrating it; or at least illustrating something.

That something eventually started resembling a timeline of sorts, a fact that was confirmed by the label at the bottom denoting it as the: “Timeline of the Beginning.”