Well...

It was the ringing, and the way little pieces of ceramic and tiling fell from the ceiling above John noticed first. He didn't feel the rubble falling, at least not at first. After the initial explosion, all John could feel was just an overall sense of numbness. A strange feeling that, as the seconds passed, began to tingle painfully throughout every bone in his body.

He watched, when the dust began to settle, as the lights in the bathroom flickered around him. The walls of each stall that had been nearby John had been knocked down and cracked and dented outwards, away from the original explosion.

Next to John, lying open on the ground and unscathed, sat the now dusty and open tome he had gotten from Cassandra. Above him, a single pop-up hovered in the air. A pop-up with golden letters written on it and a thick, well-defined boldness emphasizing each one.

Level Up!

The announcement was concurrent with a sudden change in his status screen and a flush of feeling as his health bar suddenly filled with ruby red color again. His lungs, flush with smoke and dust, burned as John's body physically reformed itself. The damage caused to him by the explosion, which had temporarily reduced John to a gory mess, reverted like somebody had hit a kind of magical rewind button. The only problem was... it only fixed the damage that had been done to him. The rest of the bathroom was still in shits-ville, and there was no way that John had the time to clean it up.

You have gained 5 additional stat points!

"Not now!" John growled as feeling returned to his legs, and slowly... the ringing in his ears changed. The sound didn't go away necessarily, it just... shifted its tune. After a couple seconds, John recognized the noise as the school's fire alarm from the drills that they held regularly. From the entrance to the bathroom, John could make out the color of flashing red lights and the sound of students shuffling to the emergency exits. A thin line of smoke trailed out from the bathroom doors into the rest of the school.

"Nobody rush, please! When you get outside, please, follow your teacher out to the...." one teacher called out as they went past the bathroom.

He was understandably hesitant to pick up the book after that. The way it reacted after just a little bit of mana proved the object to be trapped, and since he knew absolutely nothing about the trap, he didn't want to risk the possibility of triggering it again. Yet he was running out of time. He couldn't remain in the bathroom for long without drawing attention, and after the complete depletion of his hit points, he wasn't sure how long he had already been in the room. In the end, he chose not to pick it up with his hands. He couldn't risk leaving it either, so with a little bit of risk from using his powers, he just set the book into his inventory and left.

It wasn't hard for him to slip out into the hallway. He just had to stop by the cracked and ruined mirror on his way out of the bathroom to splash a bit of water on the portrait of grime that covered his face. Getting out of the school with the rest of his fellow students was near to child's play for John. A simple step out into the hallway, and he disappeared into the waves of ever moving faces.

Shortly after that, someone stepped into the bathroom he had just left...

He was surprised to see that school continued after that. From a distance, that he judged to be safe, John learned from watching a group of teachers that they decided, along with the fire department, that there was no risk of fire. Whatever problem had happened had been miraculously cut off at the source and it was completely fine to continue the day. Somehow, none of the teachers seemed to even bother trying to fight that.

It wasn't until Mrs. Wentworth cast a glare in his direction that he felt like he was starting to understand why the teachers were so amiable.

Lunch for John came and went, as well as his fifth hour class. Naturally, John used that time trying to work with the very book that had killed him. It killed him. That thought itself felt stuck in John's head for hours after the actual event. Even as he carefully laid the book out on his desk and went over it with Observe like it was a fine-tooth comb, John couldn't shake the thought. According to his hit points, he had quite literally died. His powers thankfully brought him back, but it was just...lucky, really. A happenstance that he managed to finish a quest at the same time as the moment when he died.

It wasn't until John got halfway through his fifth hour that he made any real progress with the book. The trick ended up lying with how simple it was. Each page, he found out, was trapped. Each trap took nothing more than hours to recharge and it was layered with magical rune after rune that were all triggered whenever somebody tried to 'incorrectly' access the real goods hidden inside. To correctly access the hidden stuff, one had to go page by page and find both the trigger for the page and a rune at the back of the book to turn on a sort of safety in the spells. When they were both flooded with mana, the traps were disarmed...

...at least up until the next time that the book's contents were locked back up.

As much as John would have liked it to have been, the 'Arcana Iglaciem' was not a skill book of any kind. It wasn't something that he could just hit a button and know. The tome itself was a manifesto of sorts for mages, and since John first started at the beginning, he found out that it wasn't just Cassandra who had owned this little booklet. He quickly found out that the journal disguise set up for the book was something made by the newest owner of the journal and that, despite it's illusion, the actual thing was much bigger.

When John initially began reading, he chose to list the works of each individual user inside as a chapter. Each chapter spanned the length of the user's life from the moment that they had obtained the book. While the journal itself may have only had a couple hundred pages, the tome had thousands. It was never obvious how much information the book contained because, after some time of flipping through it, John noticed that it was like each page could just be... pulled apart. It was like some of the pages got stuck together, and after a little bit of pulling, he managed to separate them... then he did it again and again... and again.

After a while, he decided to just skip to the parts with Cassandra. Most of it, mainly all the runes and specifics for spells, made no sense to him anyways.

For every part the journal had had for Cassandra originally, the tome held ten more. In ways when Cassandra spoke about understanding her mom and relating with her, the tome spoke about how she seemed to idolize her mother. He also decided it was the tome itself taking account of the situation. The way that the contents of the book were written, it was in an entirely different manner from the one he had already seen from Cassandra. It was like... the book had been linked to her and recorded everything she did.

It spoke of spells and memories. Everything from big, old stories that you would recount with old war buddies to little comments that people would say to her in passing. It spoke of a time before Ashcroft where Cassandra served in the military. Where she trained and learned how to fight before her mother arranged for her to return home, learn magic, and go through some kind of trial and a ritual. A ritual that eventually linked her to the book. It spoke of her pride upon winning her trial and the happiness she got when she pleased her mother.

It was... extremely personal.

John almost felt awkward reading it.

{We need to talk.} John's phone read after he felt it buzz silently in his pocket. It was Mary, and as sad as it was to see the images of her slowly scroll up into the history of his saved texts, he decided it was a good idea to reply to her.

{Oh?} There was nothing that said he had to be articulate about it, though.

{Skip next class. I have free period. Meet me outside,} she sent back. His phone vibrated softly in the palm of his hand as he read through it. Immediately, it didn't seem like a safe idea. There had been a time that Mary herself had been giving Vanessa a run for her money as the bitch queen, and after springing one trap, John wasn't ready to possibly spring another. She could have been setting him up for an ambush for all he knew.

{No,} he ended the message there for a moment. A couple replies came in with her expressing her annoyance or trying to plead with him, but he didn't answer her. He took his time, fine to let her stew in her own anxiety as he thought over his options. He wanted to talk to her; he was sure of that. He just didn't want to get beaten into a pulp while it was happening. {Use your next hour to help Miss Brooks. I'll see you there.}

At the very least, it was a public spot. It seemed unlikely for her to arrange an ambush in such a public place with so many witnesses. Of course, he didn't even bother replying to her when she spent the next twenty minutes trying to change his new plan.

He had some studying to do.