The crystalline lens blinked red.
Inside a steel-framed lecture hall buried deep beneath Nondicci's residential sector, Liam Passart stood at the front of a blackboard streaked with diagrams, sigils, and furious shorthand. The air buzzed with arc-light from overhead fixtures, and the faint whir of the wall-embedded recording lens was the only sound besides his tapping chalk.
"Right," he muttered, turning toward the board. "Lesson three. Introduction to Electron Flow in Ley-Infused Copper."
He cast a glance toward the control array. "AISAR, are we live?"
"Yes, Sir. Transmission is active. Recording is stable."
Liam nodded curtly. "Good."
He faced the camera with the weariness of a man who'd long given up on flair, but not on precision.
"Forget everything your local hedge-witch told you. This isn't about tossing herbs into a cauldron and praying to gods with too many syllables. This is real alchemy—applied, repeatable, scalable."
With sharp underlines, he wrote on the board: Electromagnetism.
"I know. It doesn't sound magical. That's because I stole the name, rewrote the laws, and made it work with leyline geometry and polarity salts. Welcome to my class."
It had been five months since the cataclysm swallowed the sky. The world above was caked in ash. Daylight was a rumor. But beneath the crust of a dying world, Nondicci's heart had begun to beat again—steel-framed, rune-lit, and stubbornly alive.
With that survival came noise.
Children. Slumborn, orphaned, aimless. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. They clogged the corridors. They pried open mana ducts with spoons. They declared light bulbs were "sun spirits" and formed barter cults trading dried mushrooms to malfunctioning drones.
Liam endured it for exactly three days.
Then he declared war.
Not with violence. With education. Ruthless, inescapable education.
"If I had to suffer through ten years of soul-killing coursework," he'd muttered while bolting a sign to the wall of Sector D-3, "so will they." The sign read:MANDATORY EDUCATION ZONE. NO EXCEPTIONS. LEARNING IS PAIN.
Ysolde laughed. Layla called him vindictive. Lorien Quavek rolled his eyes and accused him of "institutionalizing idiocy."
Liam didn't care.
He had access to every corridor, every relay, every lens. If necessary, he'd broadcast lessons into the latrines. And so began the curriculum.
He started in person. The first was Material Science, where he explained the lattice behaviors of thaumic alloys. Then Electromagnetism, demonstrated by frying copper wires into life. Then Computech, where he introduced rune-based logic gates and assigned ten-year-olds to reprogram automatic doors to yell profanities at passersby.
Later, he began recording. Dozens of hours—some polished, most not. All infused with sarcasm, brilliance, and that same dry conviction that turned gears in the mind.
And yes—there were exams.
AISAR proctored them with cold impartiality. "Incorrect, Miss Renna. You failed to ground the ley-voltage. Please reattempt before electrocuting yourself or others."
The noble elite hated it.
The capital's old academy had been exclusive—reserved for bloodlines, prodigies, those already blessed by tradition. Lorien had begun his own academy for mages: polished halls, cloaked students, and lectures dripping with pedigree.
Liam made no move to stop him. But he didn't back down either.
"Let Lorien take the golden children," he said. "I'll take the misfits. The ones who ask 'why' too often. The ones who break things just to see what happens. That's where innovation lives."
By month two, the school had grown into three departments, fifteen rotating student groups, a testing system, and even a disciplinary council—composed entirely of former pickpockets now enforcing hall passes with religious fervor.
It worked.
The kids stopped tampering with reactors. They started inventing.
Basic gadgets. Clunky bots. Even a leyline-powered rail cart that ran for thirty seconds before exploding gloriously into a wall. No one died, so Liam called it a success.
Now, once again, he stood before the board, chalk in hand, eyes tired but focused.
"Education," he said aloud, half to himself, "is just weaponized curiosity. And I plan to arm every one of them."
AISAR's voice chimed softly through the speaker grid.
"Sir, attendance in today's classes has increased by fourteen percent. However, several students have complained that your lesson on magnetic inversion caused minor nosebleeds."
Liam grinned. "Perfect. That means they were paying attention."
4o