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Laurence Academy of the Gifted was an extremely prestigious school taking care of students all the way from Grade 1 to Grade 12. The excessively large campus was split into two sections, one for the elementary students, and the other as a combined junior-senior section.
The reason the school was so highly regarded was mainly due to them being the only school in the entire state that not only taught magic as a part of their curriculum, but even offered more advanced elective courses in the subject.
As a result, the tuition fees for the school were astronomical and only the extremely wealthy could afford it. The rest of the curriculum was of an equally high standard, so the wealthy sent their children en mass to attend the yearly entrance examination.
Only those who were able to pass the examination that merely required them to have a modicum of talent for magic would be admitted, whilst the rest were turned away.
The government constantly wanted to strengthen their presence in the magic world, so they also poured a lot of resources into these schools teaching magic and even offered full scholarships to children from lower income households with talent in magic.
While paving the path for more people to be able to learn magic in school, this also resulted in a division between the wealthy and scholarship students.
This rift only widened due to the wealthy having more access to resources that could accelerate their absorption of mana and mana mediums. This meant that even the wealthy with less talent, they would be able to grow as mages much faster, but their spells would also be stronger by comparison.
Elitism was inevitable.
Jack Riddle was one of the scholarship students at Laurence Academy of the Gifted.
He was 16 years old at the time, with messy brown hair and dull green eyes. Whilst he was approximately 6 foot tall, he instinctively hunched which made him appear shorter.
His family was a prime example of mediocrity. His father worked six days a week at a packaging facility that was too poor to use robotics for mundane labor, let alone pay their employees decent wages. His mother was in phone sales and had to deal with people cursing at her all day on top of barely making a living off the commission.
Now in Grade 7, the tuition fees his sister, who was three years younger than himself, had only increased once again.
He had been born with a decent talent in magic, but a constant lack of resources and being overshadowed by others with more money made him feeling like he was wasting his time. His motivation left him and his began to bludge through his studies.
While wallowing in his weakness, a group of wealthy heirs begun to bully him. At first, it was just mocking and jeering at his failure. But this only escalated over the next several months into more violent actions, such as using him to test their spells.
“Hey, failure, we need you to come help us test our new wands,” Alan West, the leader of the group bullying him, suddenly caught up to him after school just as the he was leaving to go home.
The rest of the group was with them, four boys and one girl in total. The boys looked quite eager whilst the girl, Erin West, was fiddling with her phone completely disinterested in what was happening.
Jack tried to come up with an excuse, but ended up subserviently nodding his head before following them to a dilapidated underpass which had signs of homeless habitation.
Erin West was a senior just like them, but in the grade above. She wasn’t a part of the group the bullied him, but was dragged into this event due to going home with her brother, Alan.
Her blonde hair was curled and tinted with streaks of red. Her earrings glowed yellow like fireflies and she had a small beauty spot on her left jaw. At six feet tall, she was just as tall as the boys, but had long legs that she enjoyed showing off.
Despite being quite beautiful, she was much more talented than her brother and widely respected for her strength in the school.
Erin shut off the holographic display of her phone momentarily before glancing at her younger brother, Alan, and asking in annoyance, “Would you hurry up, already? If I don’t have time to have my hair and nails fixed before my boyfriend comes over tonight, I will tie you up and hang you from this bridge.”
“Don’t worry, sis, we just want to test out our new wands, it won’t take long.”
“Whatever.”
“You heard what she said, failure, there’s no time to waste.”
Jack glanced left and right whilst looking for a way to escape, but Alan and the other boys had covered every escape and were looking at him with smirks.
“That… what do you want me to do?… How should I help?”
Despite asking, he felt like he already knew the answer.
The grin on Alan’s face only grew wider as he took out his wand, a foot long silverish platinum stick with a gold tip and extremely intricate runes engraved on it.
“That’s simple, you just need to be a moving target~ It wouldn’t be a good practice otherwise.”
The other all begun laughing as they took out their wands too. Except for one of the boys who took out a large staff.
“Harold! Your parents really splurged to get you a Portin’s staff! How much did that cost? At least several hundred thousand creds for sure,” One of the boys rose his brows and praised his friend.
Harold just laughed and stated, “1.2, it’s from the latest product range, and boasts a mana enhancement of 3.4 times. It can be a bit tiring to push magic through it, but it’s worth it!”
Jack shook in fear whilst the others were whistling in praise. He desperately looked for an escape, eventually trying to run past Erin who seemed wholly disinterested in the events.
“Thrym!”
A sharp bolt of lightning shot from the gold tip of Alan’s wand and struck him in the back, stunning him and causing him to trip over his feet.
“Hey, don’t be in such a hurry to leave, we still have to test our spells with our new wands… and staff! Hahaha!”
Jack pleaded and broke down into tears, but they were relentless. They kept pelting him with stunning spells and flinging stones at him. He curled up on the ground to try and cover his head and face, but they only laughed.
His body was bruised and kept twitching as the constant stun shots left his entire nervous system burning like it was on fire. They would also spray him with water bursts, but these only made the following stun shots more painful.
The cars buzzing over the overpass completely drowned out the sounds of spells being cast below. There had been a homeless man who returned to what was his home, but upon seeing the students and their uniforms, not to mention that they could use magic, he abruptly hid behind one of the giant concrete pillars in case he was targeted too.
Just as the group of boys seemed to be getting bored of their game, Harold raised his staff and stated.
“Hey, let’s see how much this staff can output.”
Staffs were much slower at casting spells compared to their smaller wand counterparts, but they were undeniably stronger when it came to single hits. This was even more so when the wielder took the time to fully guide the spell through the mana conduit of the staff.
The group were interested and even Erin stopped fixing her hair in her phone camera to watch.
Harold scrunched his brow and channeled mana into the staff before calling out, “Thrym!”
A bolt of lightning half the thickness of a hand shot out and struck the curled up boy on the ground with a resounding crack while the caster huffed deep breaths in exhaustion.
The stun shot was powerful enough that it tore through Jacks clothes and burned a large black scorch mark on his back. Even worse, his entire body spasmed as it tore through and destroyed his nervous system.
“Holy shit!” Alan’s amazed voice sounded incredibly distant to the now motionless Jack. “Did you see that! Now that is power, I’m telling dad I want a staff too. Hey, this failure isn’t moving, do you think he-”
At that moment, Alan’s voice only grew more and more distant as Jack’s consciousness faded into darkness.
Jack was not sure which hospital he was in, but he couldn’t open his eyes. He was also incredibly tired and weak, fading in and out of consciousness.
After an unknown amount of time and a long period of pain brought by constriction, he opened his eyes once more.
Rather than seeing the ceiling of the hospital room, he saw the faces of several giants who poked and prodded him before placing him into the arms of an equally giant woman whose face was covered in beads of sweat.
Even despite her apparent fatigue, her golden irises seemed to radiate an indisputable might.
He didn’t realize it at the time, but Jack had died and been reborn in the world of Aster, where magic was discovered before science and became the focus of technological advancement. It was a system of magic entirely different from the one of his previous life.
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