“Miss Malachite will be the leader of this team,” Agatha’s ears rang in a high pitch after René Dago said that. She was not used to a position of command, and she doubted she could do anything with that position. She always acted on instinct, seldomly in strategy. Even less acting as a team instead of an individual.

  She took a deep breath and tried to imitate Christie to her best capacity. “With all due diligence, I work better as a soldier or a scout than a general. Someone else should have that position.”

  “Sure,” he nonchalantly responded.

  “Just like that…?” The petite lithorist professed her bemusement.

  “Indeed,” the black-uniformed smiled at her.

  Motherfucker’s toying with me. This wasn’t a binding position in the slightest! The stupid bearded grin was making her blood boil.

  “Does anyone want to take the position of leader?” René Dago asked the class, and as always when a teacher asked a question to the classroom no matter the contents, every student hesitated.

  Well, everyone except one.

  Shayla unapologetically raised her hand. Everyone looked at her, but everyone else failed to raise their hands, so she just puffed her chest and proclaimed, “I now lead,” with the ostentatiousness of kings.

  Agatha couldn’t help but simply shrug at that. That was how Shayla was, and the only way to describe her was of being Shayla. For there was no better definition, nor it was needed. That was partially attractive in of itself.

  Now that the burden of leading and strategizing had been lifted from her shoulders, Agatha peered onto the horizon to try to see where the opposing team was. Judging how trees only surrounded them from the back, there was only one direction to look at, but she didn’t see anyone.

  Control Amplify Watch.

  She gave that series beyond the already existing Control Compact and popped out of the socket of her necklace. As always, it was a satisfying sound, but just like the high of the drugs she had never had, it wasn’t quite as good as that popping sound she had been able to hear underneath the academy, at its agatiferous basement. Alright, that was a good word, she patted herself on the back for using an obscure word on her own thoughts. Agatiferous, heh.

  The petite lithorist then removed the Control Compact series to reduce the load on her brain and flew her big sapphire high in the sky until she had a clear view of the opposite team, completely unbothered by the nuisance of air not being fully transparent due to the Amplify Watch synergy.

  “The enemy team is about two kilometers away!” She exclaimed and everyone turned to face her. “What? I already said I fare better at scouting than leading.”

  Some people shrugged, namely Shayla, and went back to their strategizing. If it weren’t for one person.

  “Is this allowed?” Mateo asked their teacher.

  “Miss Malachite is not interfering with the enemy team, is she now?” René Dago answered. “As long as you do not move from here and not mess around with the enemies, you are allowed to scout. That includes prospection for the lapiloquists, but I do not want to see anyone commanding any stones near the enemy team. After all, information gathering precedes all battles. At least the ones with non-moron commanders,” he added that last sentence under his breath, but he didn’t fool most.

  Mateo dutifully nodded at that information and went back to hold conversation with the group. Shayla did too participate in this conversation, taking a bit too much joy in her leadership position. Something told Agatha that the Intaksolfani would promptly grow bored out of it.

  For now, Agatha thought to herself how to annihilate the enemy team with the utmost brutal efficiency.

  So far all the fighting she had done had been in close quarters, which was actually to her detriment. Her recalling range was so megalithic, she had only once activated it, and that when she used her virtual four commands with Control Spin and Amplify Speed to get through that stone target, which made her – back then little – sapphire speed at several times the speed of sound and leave her area of effect in a matter of blinks.

  But that was when she was at the Second Stratum, and now she was at the ‘Fifth’, so her recalling range must be far more lengthy, if not by orders of magnitude. So she could save herself one command slot and snipe people from a save position and technically have a virtual Sixth Stratum, if not seven command slots as some people with far lesser recalling range – as it wasn’t wholly tied to quality – would even need an added Amplify.

  She was actively choosing to ignore the added bonus to the command range of the Amplify Range, however.

  Why does the concept of a virtual Seventh Stratum sound so alluring? Agatha knew the answer, for it was clear as day. And even then, she was lying to herself. The attraction to that megalithic increase of power could no longer be called alluring, but outright exciting. And yet, the concept of creating hindrances for herself was also quite energizing.

  The terrain started trembling around her and it only took her one look at the class to know it was the act of lapiloquists. Not because lapiloquia was visible or anything like how agates sprouted from Christie’s body, but because the students who had awakened that discipline were panting heavily.

  “Are you not panting a bit too much for just a couple of pebbles?” Agatha casually asked Shayla.

  “Fuck. You.” The merchant’s daughter asked with heavy and marked pauses as she took air in.

  “It is a bit hard to do,” the villager shrugged. “But what are you actually doing? Lapiloquia is not that exhausting, is it?”

  Shayla stopped for a breather and took her uniform coat off, haggardly throwing it on the rocky floor. “We are hardening the ground and making the whole base out of types of bedrock that are hard to manipulate so enemy lapiloquists will not be able to catch us by surprise.”

  Agatha frowned at that explanation. Something didn’t sit well with her. “Let me guess, the other team is doing the same thing.”

  “Most likely, yes,” the dark-skinned girl nodded and unbuttoned the first button of her blouse. The dirty-blond girl did her best to not stare at the sweaty cleavage of the color of chocolate. Closer to coffee with lots of milk, really. That thought alone spoke a thousand words about her success.

  “Then,” she coughed and separated flung her eyes away as if commanded by Speed, “are you not all wasting your energies doing so?”

  “I will not deny it, but that is the thing about preparation. You can be overprepared, but better that than not be at all.”

  “I guess,” Agatha shrugged. “So is there any strategy beyond this?”

  “Yes, there is. But I have explicitly kept you out of it.” The statement confused the life out of Agatha because it wasn’t spoken by Shayla’s characteristic smugness, but a more analytical tone expected out of Mateo or Christie.

  “How come?” The petite lithorist asked in veritable bewilderment and no ill intention at all.

  “I know how you operate; plans do not work with y...” Shayla fell silent for a moment. “Actually, I do not know if plans work with you at all because I have not seen you plan ever, but if you perform this great without them, I have no reason to believe that they will do you any good.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Thank you?”

  “It was an insult,” she said with a warm yet megalithic shit-eating grin. Agatha couldn’t help but find it endearing. “But yes, the team has a strategy, but I decided that more than a pawn, you should be the Shining Knight of the tabletop.”

  “I… cannot deny that it has a marvelous ring to it,” the villager smiled goofily, the praise working wonders.

  “So there is that,” the dark-skinned girl cracked her neck. It was wider than most of the male students. “You are on your own, but I guess I do not have to tell you that you should not interfere with our team.”

  “No, sir!”

  “Should it no be ‘ma’am’?” Shayla squinted at her.

  “Force of habit,” Agatha snickered.

  The Intaksolfani rolled her eyes and walked away because there was no habit whatsoever as they hadn’t made any military salutes in the academy. Perhaps they should, but René Dago hadn’t bothered to teach them any that wasn’t multifaceted discipline, not strictly limited to the military aspect.

  So Agatha waited on the sidelines until a thought came to her while she continued to observe the enemy team with her Control Amplify Watch series.

  “I can snipe people. But agates can be seen. Especially if they are far away. They need to travel a lot then. Too much time to react.” Her thoughts were short and self-contained, yet constant-flowing. “But…” A thought she had a long while ago resurfaced after it had been buried under many strata. “What if they weren’t visible?”

  The concept of an invisible agate was nothing new for her, but the first time she had thought of it she didn’t even half the understanding of lithorica as she did now.

  “Oh, my brain is braining!” The dirty-blond girl grabbed her head and summoned her agate back to her as she felt idea overflowing her. “First, Light.” She blinded herself. “First, Control. Then Light. Ugh…”

  Agatha groaned while she rubbed her eyes. And the rest of her teammates wouldn’t have appreciated it either. Perhaps three whole years of elite instruction had gone by, but she still was nowhere close to manipulating the magnitude of her commands, a skill that came instinctively to most people. In that sense, she and Christie were awfully similar. One was unable to control commands, and the other couldn’t give more than one at a time. I’d prefer if we weren’t so similar in that sense, though. We would both appreciate using lithorica to its full extent.

  But she was rambling. Getting flashed tended to have that effect on people.

  The petite lithorist floated her big sapphire in front of her after having given its light a very low luminosity.

  “Invert’s the way,” she whispered to herself without a doubt in the world.

  Not wanting to blind any other people as Invert Light only inverted nearby light and the rest of people outside the range would see the agate at its full luminosity, she carefully applied the commands.

  Control Invert Light.

  Simple so far. The problem was that it also affected the magnitude of the inversion whenever she tried to dim the light. But it didn’t matter yet as that wasn’t the full series.

  Control Invert Light Range.

  Now a lot of people looked at her as everything in a non-negligible radius dimmed ever-so-slightly. The problem with Invert Light was that the area of effect wasn’t visible, there wasn’t a dome of inverted light in a region of space, but rather only people within that region of space experienced inverted light. So Agatha had no way of knowing how much range the command actually had.

  But she guessed a fuck ton.

  What she did know, however, was how a hand landed on her shoulder.

  “Can we talk?” René Dago asked with the opposite of a smile.

  “Uhm… sure?” She said wryly and stood up as the teacher led her away from the group.

  “Can you explain to me what you are even trying to achieve with this light spectacle instead of reading for the exam that is going to start in three quarters of an hour?” His voice was stern; more soldier than teacher.

  “Invisible agates?” Agatha responded with a hint of doubt.

  René Dago opened his mouth yet closed it before a word left it. Then he scratched his short-bearded chin for a solid moment before speaking. “Keep at it.”

  “Does that mean that it exists?” She exclaimed radiantly, practically jumping on the spot. All that gloom completely and utterly forgotten.

  “I will not deny or confirm anything. You will understand after the end of the fourth year, but as a soldier you are forbidden from speaking about lots of things. The higher ranked you are, the less freedom of speech you have. So just keep at it.” He started walking away but stopped for a second. “Oh, and before I forget, stay here or go a bit further away. I do not want to get myself blinded away.”

  Agatha blushed at that comment, but she didn’t reply in any way and just focused on her task. She sat down on the sparse forest her teacher had led her into, leaves and grass rustled underneath her.

  “Keep at it,” she murmured while rubbing her agate. “That means I am on the right track. Control, Invert, Light, and Range are definitely the commands, but I don’t think I got the order quite right. This isn’t addition or multiplication, the order of the factors does alter the product. But what is the order?”

  There weren’t many possibilities, she was aware of that. Mostly because most would be non-sensical, but she didn’t bother to calculate the number. If she were Christie, the nouveau riche would’ve said that the numbers of possibilities were four factorial or, in layman terms, twenty-four.

  Agatha tried Invert Control for the fun of it as it was clearly not the answer, and she found herself with an agate that had literal inverted controls. Useless in every possible scenario. Unfortunate, for she had great expectations for it. She clearly hadn’t added up two and two together as her mind was currently hyperfixated in something else.

  “Control. Invert. Light. Range,” she kept telling herself in a mantra. “Invert Light go together. Well… they should, right? At least if invisibility works like I’m thinking it does.”

  Teacher Castellar did give them a handful of lessons on optics, and while that didn’t make her an expert in the slightest, it still gave her some idea how visibility as a concept worked. And therefore, invisibility.

  Now that she was at it, she also tried Invert Range, but unlike Invert Control, the commands didn’t link up together.

  “Huh, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an invalid combination.” That did help in finding her answer. “I don’t want to do this because I’m going to get blinded if I apply this incorrectly, but this looks like the only possible combination…”

  The petite lithorist sighed and gave the command.

  Invert Light Control Range.

  Putting commands before Control made it so that the Control command itself gained those properties, and while some commands were incompatible with that, Light had never been. So, technically speaking, what she had here were two virtual series taking up five virtual command slots in the shape of Invert Light Control and Control Range.

  First, nothing beyond the obvious happened. She was in the area of effect of Invert Light, so light was dimmed and harmless to her eyes.

  “Now it’s time to try if this works…” Agatha held her heart in a fist as she started manipulating the Range command with Control.

  Control Range couldn’t augment the magnitude of Range, but it could decrease it. And even if she could affect the Invert Light Control Range series as two separated ones, it was still a single, whole one. So reducing the Range was reducing the effective area of effect of Invert Light.

  With a lot of hesitation, Agatha started reducing the effects of Range with a hand before her eyes as reducing Invert Light meant exposing her to Light.

  For a moment she was blinded, but once she had reduced the Range command to the surface of her perfectly spherical agate, everything stopped.

  No Light. No Invert Light. Just a normal floating agate the size of a head.

  “Huh,” she mouthed after she had apparently wasted four command slots for nothing. “I still can reduce the range of the series even more, though.”

  The feedback from her big sapphire – an innate and completely instinctive thing – told her that the Range command hadn’t reached its limits yet.

  So she kept reducing.

  Nothing happened.

  She reduced some more.

  Nothing either.

  Having grown tired of small, infinitesimal steps, Agatha went full throttle and reduced the magnitude of the command as she was physically capable of.

  Apparently, the answer to that question was zero.

  Having multiplied the Inverse Light that was bound to her agate by zero produced an interesting result.

  “Crown in the heavens!” Agatha exclaimed as the agate disappeared before her eyes. Then she revalued the importance of her discovery. “Oh yeah, this is useless. Four commands to make an agate invisible. And if René wasn’t worried about me making agates invisible, it must be because there’s a way to detect invisible agates.”

  She then mentally flew her agate toward her hand, a gesture that was only possible because of the inseparable bridge between agate and lithorist. And even then, it took her a handful of tries to get the ball in her hand. It was impossible to put eye-hand coordination into work when there was no eye.

  “Depths, this is so odd…” She said in a mixture of fascination and annoyance. “It’s completely invisible. Like… I’m touching something that doesn’t exist.”

  Agatha flicked a finger with her other hand on the surface of her invisible agate, only to get a soft pang of pain and muted sound from the collision.

  “I mean… I guess it’s somewhat useful? Maybe the teachers can sense it, but the rest won’t be able to. And they will only be sensing it because it must be some command. People can’t sense any agates around the by default.” She fell silent and frowned. “They can’t, right?”

  Her thoughts were cut as she heard faraway shouting, which sounded like they were summoning back to the group.

  “Yeah, I think it’s time for the exam to start,” the petite lithorist stood up with a groan, still heaving up the invisible gemstone on her hand. “But it has Control as part of the series, and the Range command at zero doesn’t affect the recalling range so…”

  She could send invisible agates at people with her already existing massive range and give them nearly no reaction time whatsoever as she changed commands once the agates already were in range. Unfortunately, Speed wouldn’t be part of the base series if she really wanted to snipe people for really, really far away. That privilege had to go to the Watch command.

  But something told her that wouldn’t matter in the slightest. But, if anything, that made her invisible, remote, flying, and kilometric agate even more scary.

  “Oh yes, brutal efficiency is the name of the game,” Agatha grinned sadistically.

  They would only see the agates for a fraction of a second. And it would be too late by then.

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