There were three needles stabbed into my desk. I had turned them all into arcane tools. I also had more than ten broken needles, all failures. That gave me a success rate of about 10 or 20 percent. My focus was starting to fray, and I was running out of essence. Although one needle didn’t require much to transform, I’d used plenty on the failed attempts, so it was no wonder I was tired.
I looked around me. Surprisingly, there weren’t that many children who had found success. The sticking point for them at this age was probably their inability to focus.
There were some with outstanding results, the elf boy in particular. He was a top student when it came to essence training too, scoring excellent results again and again. More than ten needles were sticking up vertically on the desk in front of him. He had broken just one. His first failure had been his last, and he went on to create perfect arcane tools one after another. Truly, manipulating essence was his forte.
As for the dragon girl, her desk was covered in countless vertical needles and many more broken ones. She was determined to dissuade anyone from believing that other children might have more essence than herself. While she might not have had as much control over it as the elf boy, she was still far ahead of everyone else. An accurate ranking was hard to envision, since making arcane tools required focus as well as essence, but it was probably safe to say that these two were leagues beyond the rest of the cohort.
Though I originally thought that three successful needles were a measly result, it actually put me near the top of the class.
Sister stopped beside a beastborn boy who resembled a monkey. “You don’t understand what ‘penetrate’ means, do you?”
His desk was littered with splintered needles, and he had yet to make a single one stand upright. Sister snatched his hand and pushed the point of a needle through the flesh between his index and middle fingers until it emerged on the other side.
“Ow! St-stop!” he howled.
She held him down so that he couldn’t flail too much before grabbing his cheek. Her disgust was evident from her gaze. “That is what ‘to penetrate’ means! Look at it!”
The boy could only whimper. Sister pushed his hand into his face. He was forced to continue the lesson with the needle in his flesh, not allowed to so much as writhe. Ten other children who had failed to produce an arcane tool were subject to the same fate. However, strangely enough, she seemed to overlook the manborn children in the room. I gleaned that she despised all other races but them. It was fortunate that I succeeded and escaped punishment. While others were suppressing their screams around me, I devoted the rest of the time to learning what I could about arcane tools and their nature.
✦ ✦ ✦
We started learning two new skills as part of our long-distance training: trapping and perceiving.
“No, it’s best to tie your rope like this,” the gnome grumbled, adjusting what we’d just set up.
Trapping was, as the name implied, about setting traps. Perceiving was being able to spot traps. The skills came as a pair. The more you knew about setting traps, the better you were at detecting them. The opposite was true too. The snakeborn instructor decided it would be effective to turn our training into a competition: Half of us set traps for the other half to perceive. Our group was practicing the former skill, following the teacher’s instructions as we assembled our snare in the designated area. Naturally, we adapted our traps so that they weren’t lethal. They could harm, but they wouldn’t kill. There were types of traps that could cause some real damage, and I foresaw this training gradually becoming tougher.
Pipsqueak, Tiger’s hanger-on, had displayed a surprisingly high level of skill. It was probably thanks to his race. The gnomes and dwarves were proving themselves excellent and adept. Tiger was in a different group, and I was slightly taken aback by how assertive Pipsqueak was being without him.
While both gnomes and dwarves were small, the latter were broader-framed and physically stronger. The differences might become more obvious as we grew older, but currently both races seemed to be equal when it came to perceiving traps.
Unfortunately, there was no way of detecting oddities in temperature from something that wasn’t alive, so I only had my regular senses and knowledge to rely on, unlike some others. A batborn might be able to discern what was on the other side of a door without even touching it and perceive any traps beyond, for example. However, we didn’t have anyone like that where we were. I doubted it was because they didn’t exist in this world. Rather, it was probably because winged races would have an easier time escaping this place.
I observed that, throughout all the training we did, most races seemed to excel at one skill in particular. The exception were the manborns due to their averageness. A higher degree of specialism meant that there was a more glaring weakness. In the case of gnomes and dwarves, their small fingers allowed for excellent dexterity, but they also had smaller frames. As for me, I may have had a tail and the ability to sense heat, but... Well, from what I knew about reptiles, I was probably vulnerable to the cold. I decided it would be wise to learn more about snakeborn characteristics.