Just... What ?

The facts were there : the illusion was completely encased in ice, and it originated from your hands. You didn't really understand how that happened, but the facts were there, so you broke the link between you and the ice, and started inspecting it closely.

When you inspected it, you could clearly see the moment where your focus stopped being on the ice, as it suddenly started to have a far rougher shape than when you actually focused on it, closer to the shape of Permafrost's ice actually, and it looked like it expanded in the direction of the illusion directly instead of expanding a bit everywhere.

Something that was strange too, was that when you turned around, you saw a faint smile on her face as she looked at you for a brief moment, before resuming her teaching for Rei and Douma. It looked like she expected something more from you... Maybe she expected you to understand something about this, and this thought made you think hard, as the ice slowly melted in front of you, leaving nothing behind, not even water.

Your idea about this was that the key for the primal ice was focus, and so you started trying multiple times to reach the illusions, sometimes focusing on giving a shape to the ice, while other times you just focused on your goal. And this quickly showed results : it was far longer to even reach the illusion while focusing on giving a shape to the ice.

So after a long while of doing this, you were fully aware of the fact that you just needed to focus on a given objective to make your ice be the most efficient, and so you created a little block of ice, small enough to fit in your closed fist, before infusing some more magic in it, and launching it to the feet of the illusion, your whole focus simply on freezing it whole. And it had the effect you were waiting for.

Ice suddenly spread out of the cube, encasing the illusion in it completely in mere seconds. The sound of ice cracking was a bit loud, but it quickly became far quieter. You stood there, in silence, watching the frozen illusion, contemplating the results of your understanding.

Suddenly, you heard applause in your back, that tore through the silence around you, and turned around to see that it was Shirayuki applauding, before she said.

"Great job, Adam. You managed to freeze my illusion with quite a bit of ease, I guess your understanding of how ice worked helped you out a lot more than I would have expected."

"Guess so too." You replied with a casual shrug. "Was just a coincidence in the end. If I didn't make the mistake of losing focus in a training that wouldn't have happened."

Your answer made Shirayuki chuckle, before she snapped her fingers, making the ice crack behind you, and the illusion disappear in front of your eyes after you turned around to see it.

"I wasn't expecting Primal Ice to work in such a way." You eventually said, turning around once more to face Shirayuki again. "I expected it to simply target your foe as you willed, or to spread with no thinking needed whatsoever."

"It is, indeed, quite strange, at first glance." Shirayuki answered. "But that is how some kinds of magic works in this world. Magic is most often working in ways that is far from our understanding, and that is why magic varies so much in nature. To give you an example, while Primal Ice will be created according to your focus on a given need, Healing Magic will work according to one's desire to heal, changing itself to meet the caster's need, and in maybe a day, maybe ten years, maybe in another age, we will discover a new kind of magic relying on something completely unseen before."

Shirayuki then used her Master Illusion to create another illusion, before saying.

"Now, I want you to freeze this illusion through the use of your weapons. Do not mind it if it cries out in agony or something like this, illusions of mine usually cannot feel anything."

"That's... Completely messed up." You reply.