Of Witches and Walls

John's walk to the history room had been long and somber. He wrestled with Ela's warning in his head over and over.

Mrs. Wentworth had always been a terrifyingly strict teacher, quick to deal out punishment and never offering praise, yet, even with all that and the truly exaggerated student rumors about her, John hadn't thought of her as seriously being harmful to him in any way.

To hear that Victoria Wentworth was a cruel witch of unfathomable power? John wouldn't have believed it at all if he hadn't seen the abject horror in Ela's eyes as she spoke about her.

He supposed that he’d learned stranger things in the last forty-eight hours.

John’s hand trembled as he touched the handle of the door to the history classroom. Ice shot through his veins. He swallowed and opened it, a rush of cold air meeting him.

’Has her room always been this chilly?'

As he prepared to enter, John wasn’t worried at all about the results of the last test. Ela’s final words rang in his ears once more.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“It was a miracle that your powers turned off in her room yesterday,” the buxom blonde had said, voice trembling. "The Witch is not to be taken lightly. She is to be avoided at all costs.”

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John walked in, carefully, measuring each step to his desk and shrinking down as small as he could make himself. He jumped at the sound of chalk on the board, as the source of his terror began laying out the day’s lesson plan.

He made it to his chair and sat down, hoping that he could simply hide away and let the class pass him by.

Mrs. Wentworth stood at the front of the class, quickly scratching instructions and homework onto the board. Her lightly silver-tinged hair was tied into a bun, a simple and spartan choice, which matched her clothing.

She turned to the room, her cold eyes framed in square-rimmed glasses as she prepared to address the class.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You’re serious?” John had wondered. “Mrs. Wentworth?”

Ela had grabbed him by the shoulders. “I am deadly serious.”

John had locked eyes with the fear-struck woman and saw only terror in her beautiful blue orbs. He knew, as he looked into them, how real this was.

“She might have killed you merely for the insult of using your magic on her.”

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“John Newman.”

The Gamer shook himself from the memory as he was called. His toes curled and he shrunk backwards. It felt like the room was closing in on him.

“Begin reading section two from page eighty-three,” Victoria Wentworth commanded.

John’s voice cracked as he started, eliciting soft laughter from a group of girls in the front - they were quickly silenced by a look from their teacher. John imagined laser eyes shooting from his teacher to vaporize them.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Wh-why?” John had muttered, the terror in Ela’s eyes seeping into his own.

“Leave her alone, and she will leave you alone, but do not test those boundaries. She is swift to remove anything which she feels impedes her.”

“B-but I’m not trying to-”

She cut him off, “A leaf is not the enemy of a storm.”

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John’s turn reading had taken approximately one and a half eternities in his mind, though his assigned segment was, in reality, mercifully short, and he finished without incident. He was thankful that the hecklers in the front seemed to have taken Mrs. Wentworth’s ire away from him, for the time being.

The Gamer shook slightly as he recalled the genuine, primal fear in Ela’s voice. Who was Mrs. Wentworth? And what had she done to scare her so badly?

’Curiosity killed the cat, John,’ he chided himself. ’Eyes on the work, think about the rest later.’

Every tick on the clock reverberated in John’s head, and he began to sweat, goosebumps on his skin. The nervous nerd fought not to jump at every little noise and snappy action in the room, praying that class would end.

Mercifully, history class eventually did end.

“Mr. Newman,” a scathing voice cut through the sound of the bell, “stay behind.”

John thought himself on the verge of tears. Class ended, but the ordeal did not.

As the rest of the students fled the room with haste, The Gamer approached Mrs. Wentworth at her desk. It was as desolate and pristine as her own appearance. Nothing was present which was not essential. John swallowed. He hoped he hadn’t somehow made himself something to be removed.

Agonizing seconds passed by as the classroom emptied. Mrs. Wentworth paid no mind to John, writing something into her lesson binder and leaving him to stew in his thoughts. Pressure began to build around him. He felt light-headed.

He recalled with unfortunate clarity the exact despair he’d felt in the shipwreck the previous day - the fear of oncoming ****.

Wryly, The Gamer remembered that his party with Ela was still active; he'd been so concerned with removing anything magical he might have had equipped that he’d forgotten something so obvious. He was probably lit up like a christmas tree.

John winced as the door to the room clicked shut. It locked itself.

Wentworth set her pencil down.

She looked at him, her eyes seeming to evaluate everything about him, scanning for every detail before she broke the silence.

“You are a curiosity. Late Bloomers grow more and more rare these days,” she cooly intoned. "Unusual that I could not sense you immediately. I take it from your childish reactions in today’s lesson that someone has already informed you of the Abyss?”

“Y-Yes, ma’am,” John replied, stomach churning.

“What did they tell you about me?”

“That you were dangerous, and that I should avoid getting in your way at all,” John trailed off, “for my own safety.”

Mrs. Wentworth smiled at that, coldly. “Excellent advice. You were one of those using scrying spells around the school yesterday, yes?”

John felt her words crawling over his skin, like spiders of ice. He inhaled deeply and clenched his eyes shut, nodding, struggling to speak.

“And you did not attempt to use such a spell on me, correct?”

“N-n-” John shook his head. “I- co-couldn’t…”

“You will attempt to do so now.”

John’s eyes shot open, confused. He looked at her in disbelief.

She narrowed her eyes. “I will not repeat myself.”

That sent a shot of adrenaline through John, and the hair on his arms stood on end. Reluctantly, he channeled his magic as he had all through the previous day, willing his [Observe] into action. The familiar feeling of his mana moving through his body restored some of John’s warmth. He looked at Victoria Wentworth as he invoked his first ability.

Pain.

John’s head snapped backwards, ears ringing. His mana bar flashed and emptied itself. The Gamer steadied himself on a desk behind him, noting that he’d lost a small chunk of HP.

Observe Failed: Target Level Too High.
Ability locked due to Magic Rebound.

He lowered his eyes down to where his teacher sat, and he thought he almost sensed a faint smile. ’Rebound? What?’

“I-it failed,” John said, the shock clearing some of his fear. ’How many levels? A hundred? A thousand?’

“Very good,” she responded tersely, “though needlessly dramatic. As long as you do nothing to impede me, we have nothing further to discuss.

“If you choose to ignore the wise advice you have been given, then you will wish that **** was the extent of my retribution," the witch stated, matter-of-factly. "You may leave.”

John knew that was no bluff. He could feel it in his bones.

As she gestured towards the door, the pressure and the cold seemed to lighten, and a small click indicated that the lock had undone itself. Nervously, John turned and walked out, all but sprinting away as soon as the door closed behind him.

’An ant has no quarrel with a boot…’

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John paused to catch his breath once he was nearly halfway across campus. It felt as though he’d been crushed, and his lungs and ribs were sore, as if a weight had been on his chest the entire time.

A part of him had wondered if Ela's words had been hyperbole, though not anymore. Every moment in Wentworth's room had been nauseating.

The Gamer took a detour into a restroom to run some water over his face.

’What the hell...’

It took a few minutes for the anxious teen to stop trembling. His stomach never settled, but he conceded that he was already late for class, and tried to move on with his day.

As John started on his way to art, he noticed that he'd received some notifications.

’More than… a hundred times?’ he thought, in complete shock.

Don't feel too bad; she kinda scares me, too.

'Thanks,' John mentally replied, checking where his stats had landed post changes. 'Glad I'm not alone in that.'

The Gamer noted that his mana had already begun to refill, and that [Observe] seemed to be functioning again. Whatever lockout had been applied to his powers, it had either passed or been removed, and he had no idea which it was.

He was frustrated with himself that he'd missed the information, but he was too glad to have lived to worry about it.

Fortunately for John's sanity, his next teacher, June Summers, was blessed with empathy enough to match her bosom, and she could tell something had shaken him. Giving a weak excuse that he didn’t want to talk about it, The Gamer was able to try and fade into the background of life again for a bit.

He spent the rest of the morning working on his alchemy, paying off in his sculpting, and the statue of June began to take excellent shape. The elements within the clay were an odd mixture of the feelings of water and earth. They seemed to prefer structure, like earth, but weren't rooted to where they were. The Gamer was able to coax them into flowing places he needed as long as the substance remained unbroken.

When lunch had come, John had first tried to go to the library for lunch, only to find no one there. Unable to find Ela and unwilling to go to the cafeteria, John had holed himself outside, hoping that no roaming jocks would find their way to him.

There were some nice benches setup in a small courtyard out of the side door of the library, and John had found a nice place to eat alone there. A single tree hung over the group of tables, providing comforting shade.

'I've managed to avoid Frank for a whole day basically, since the bus yesterday,' John mused. 'I'll bet he's upset about that. I'd really rather not have to deal with him until I get my stats up.'

Cracking open the bag of pizza he’d stashed in his inventory that morning, he pondered the rest of his afternoon.

'Mission accomplished, I guess, at least in terms of potentially getting a party member for another dungeon run,’ John thought, cracking open a gatorade from his inventory. 'She seems less concerned about the difficulty, which is either a good thing or a really bad thing, and I won't know until we've started.

'At least I think I know I have a spell that gets me out this time…’

He stretched his neck back and cracked it, flexing a bit to relieve some tension.

’While I’m free, I ought to try and make a review of things, see if I can try and cook anything else up to help out.'

The Gamer ran through his performance in the previous dungeon in his head again, reaching the conclusion that he had inadvertently become a glass cannon - mostly due to how his stats had started out. He felt pretty good about his offensive capabilities, at least in the context he was aware of, but was strongly dissatisfied with the state of his defense and utility. He'd been overwhelmed and injured in every encounter in which he hadn't gotten a definitive edge from a surprise attack.

John also cringed a little bit at his impulsive decision to hard dump into Charisma the previous evening. While he guessed it had been helpful with his attempt to get assistance in the morning, it also meant that he hadn’t gotten any stronger on a personal level in combat. He was going to be dependent on the assistance of Ela for the time being to make up a lot of that difference.

The equipment he’d gained since yesterday was nice, but inconsistent in quality. The largest boon was the staff, which was a purely offensive offering as far as John could tell - for as long as his only spells were offensive, at least. The chest armor was still difficult for him to move in, enough that he was beginning to question if it had even been a good drop at all.

’Would be a real shame to have to ignore such a nice item though,’ John lamented, juggling items in his inventory slots and opening his skills menu. ’Maybe I can supplement things for now with something else. I have an extra talent point, and likely two slots I can flex. Maybe I can basically turn the staff into a defensive item if I can unlock the right skill for it.’

The Gamer sat, pondering that thought, for a moment. His mind raced through every skill he’d ever used in all the games he’d played and all the anime he’d watched. He absentmindedly swapped some of his gems around in his inventory, grouping them by color and ordering by size.

’If I can’t tank a hit, I need to not get hit. Duh,’ John decided, absentmindedly reorganizing his inventory. ’So, blocking or dodging. I could maybe use wind to push myself around or something, but that seems like it has a lot of ways to go wrong if I’m not careful and prepared. Blocking is probably a more reasonable starting point. A frost barrier or earth wall or something. Assuming I can get it to cast fast enough to actually help.’

With a goal in mind, John moved to a more secluded corner of the outside area, where he felt like he could practice channeling his magic out of view from the library windows.

’I really ought to figure out how to open one of those barriers that isn’t a dungeon. That would be really convenient right about now.’

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John spent the rest of lunch formulating the base steps of his wall skill. At first, he’d targeted earth as the element, since he assumed it would be more naturally suited to the task at hand; however, he found it prohibitively difficult to try and draw on enough clay or metal to try and form anything substantial. Earth’s tendency towards structure and rigidity worked against him for the same reasons he’d thought it would be the superior option - it was immensely straining and mana intensive to try and move such a mass with his [Reshape Matter].

And so The Gamer had moved on to testing with water and ice. It was far easier to draw together, but the mana cost was only barely alleviated, since he had to double the active cost to actually freeze the substance. Mana wasn’t the only issue he’d encountered either.

Doing some quick napkin math, John had realized that even at maximum capacity, he was going to struggle with the dimensions of his wall. The limitation of a single cubic foot of a substance meant that he’d need to make the wall relatively thin if he wanted it to be large enough to justify using.

’Then again, I don’t actually know that material strength matters, since I’m thinking about a magic ice wall… Is material strength even the right term at that point?’ John pondered, taking another bite of his pizza. ’Judging by how the rest of them work, it’ll probably scale with one of my stats, though maybe the multiplier will be bad.’

The Gamer sighed. Theorycrafting was very difficult for him without enough data for a spreadsheet or anyone else to bounce things off. He'd love to enter a training room or firing range where he could mess around with styles and settings freely.

’I could maybe bypass the issue entirely if I could just put it in the air, like a floating shield or something. Would probably be quicker to cast, at least,’ John thought, making a note on his phone to research lift physics that evening. ’That sounds really difficult to execute.’

And so The Gamer found himself finishing his lunch alone, idly freezing large patches of the library's brick wall, hoping to unlock a skill of defensive value before his afternoon plans.