Enigma of Sin

Kinzie woke up feeling refreshed after a good night's sleep. She was a Prime student in her second year now and today just like normal, she woke up early so that she could go to the training hall, eat, and clean up before here classes began.

After her morning training regimen was complete, she cleaned up and went to the cafeteria to eat some breakfast. However, surprisingly, while getting her food and while just sitting and eating, every conversation was about the same thing.

Apparently last night, unbeknownst to her, a professor had blasted half of the roof off of their own home to attack an intruder. The professor was rumored to be a new healing department expert that appeared quite young and handsome. Though he was said to go around with a small girl that looked just like him aside from eye color most days.

Kinzie couldn't help but think that the rumor was over exaggerated as she lived somewhat nearby and figured that she would have woken up to such a commotion. But upon giving it some further thought, she realized that she was quite exhausted after her first day of class and could have easily slept through it.

Wanting to see the scene for herself, just like many other students, she made her way to the residential area and was able to see that the rumors weren't really rumors at all. The building in her sight was a smaller two-story building, but there was a perfect circular hole about as large as a person was tall that tore through one half of the building.

The area around the home was currently cordoned off and she could see people from the security department moving to and fro, investigating the situation. Inwardly, she was astonished a 4th stage healer could do such a thing, but a 4th stage was a 4th stage after all.

It had been a while since she thought of him, but the situation did remind her of a certain someone who was ridiculously talented at healing while also being an excellent fighter. She couldn't help but pull out a dull crystal from her bag and stare at it with sadness before placing it back and heading off to her first class of the day.

…

Kayn wasn't required to be anywhere for today as his office hours would officially start during the lunch hour tomorrow and every other day following his lecture schedule. Thus, he brought the Wanderer's Villa out inside of his new home and went inside to spend his time in the library learning all about arrays and formations.

Arrays in general were a bunch of symbols all stacked upon each other and intricately connected before being placed onto an item or area. Formations on the other hand were the same, but were made up of multiple arrays all forming one giant symbol after being connected together. Further runes could also be engraved into both which would strengthen their power or give them a certain effect.

Kayn was inwardly amazed by the amount of time array and formation masters would have to put into it just to make one formation. Even some of the more complicated arrays could take weeks upon weeks to complete.

Kayn's focus for now was to memorize all of the symbols he had access to and practicing the basic arrays before moving on to the more complicated ones.

He was also partly excited to just play around with mixing and matching symbols to see if he could come up with new arrays that weren't in the books he had. However, he also doubted he would be able to any time soon as there were hundreds of books about arrays and formations in this library.

Each symbol represented something and combining two could result in a meaning that wasn't even related to the original meanings. It honestly made his head spin, but just knowing the array symbols and being able to deconstruct an array by looking at it would be useful in itself.

Kayn had to answer a few calls on his communication necklace throughout the day, and since the Villa was inside the academy, it functioned just as it normally would. Kayn even received a visitor to his residence to which he was alerted of the knocking on the door via the Villa's detection formations.

The headmaster had shown up to update Kayn on the situation, ensuring Kayn that he was doing everything in his power to bring the one who initiated the contract to justice. Not to mention that when they were found, they also planned to make them cancel the assassination contract, forcefully if necessary.

…

Thus, the days passed with not much change to Kayn's schedule. Within the first week, all of the students had learned the tier 0 spell he instructed them to learn. Honestly, this wasn't all that surprising to Kayn as they all had a core and were supposed to be talented with their mana.

At that point, along with a review worksheet on the lectures he gave, he also provided a tier 1 spell for each element. The spells were designed to be used in a situation requiring healing of a certain kind.

Since each element was different, their uses varied. For those who had multiple elements, they were allowed to take both their main and secondary element's spells if they wanted to try learning both.

Annabelle Mirth turned out to be a light elemental mage with an earth secondary, which Kayn told her would be very useful in the future. He had pioneered a lot of different uses with the earth element himself, so he would directly pass down some of the simpler knowledge he had.

Luvio Malesque to no one's surprise was dark element attuned with no secondary. Most of what Kayn provided for the dark elemental students were spells and instructions on how to get rid of dead spots in flesh or corroding out impurities.

Luckily for them, since Kayn was directly passing down the spells, all they had to do was learn the mana flow and have a basic understanding of the underlying works for the spell to activate.

What did surprise Kayn was that he actually had five applicants to be his assistant. There were three from his own class while one was a second year, and the last applicant was a fourth-year Prime student.

Annabelle was included in his applicants, and if he was honest, she would be an excellent assistant, but he was looking for someone outside of his class.

He decided to offer Annabelle and the two others a private lesson if they wanted one once per week. All three readily agreed as being taught directly was really the only reason they had applied anyway and all three had shown promise in Kayn's class already.

Looking through the other two applications, one seemed to be a middle of the pack second year who focused on their combat classes more than healing. To Kayn, this applicant wanted the position merely for the easy contribution points, not to learn anything from him.

The last applicant was a fourth-year Prime student who only focused on the specialization of healing. Surprisingly, this student was already at the 2nd stage and was able to perform most tier 3 spells and even some tier 4. They had achieved all of this at the age of 18, meaning they entered the academy at 14.

Reading over the achievements listed for this student, Kayn couldn't help but be impressed. They had not only learned most of the tier 3 spells available at the academy, but also had come up with a couple of their own. Although the spells were just alterations of already existing ones to better match their style, it was impressive nonetheless. 

Included with this application was a recommendation letter personally signed by Director Vix. She emphasized all of the student's accomplishments as well as noted down her own interactions with this student. However, as if on purpose, she didn't mention the students name a single time.

The student was said to have a very high affinity towards the light element with almost just as high of an affinity for water. Even Kayn was impressed since most people only had a high affinity for one element while the secondary element was usually just usable, if Kayn excluded himself of course.

Kayn's curiosity finally got the best of him, so he skipped to the last page where the applicant's name was finally listed. Kayn couldn't help but put on an amused smile, listed was a name he didn't expect to see applying for his assistant position.

The name? Marianne Whiteclaw.