Jaux Ballad has always wanted to enter the realm of magic, but could not do so by regular means. In his desperation to become a magician he finds himself with more power, and more trouble, than he could ever have imagined.

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Frey was waiting down in the training room with a metal training puppet that she borrowed from the Lyceum. The dolls were reserved exclusively for use by master and ace class students, since they usually practiced with the most dangerous spells. The featureless metal doll was also one of the only ways that curse magic could be practiced without hunting down a masochist. The sheer amount of inconvenience that came with trying to practice curse magic was one of the big reasons people didn't learn many curses in the Lyceum.

The Lyceum training puppets were specially designed with master level magic from the mind, motion, and concentration genres. As soon as a student powers up the training doll with some magic, it will start behaving like a person with fear and self-preserving tendencies. The dolls are incapable of feeling anything, but they can still imitate the reaction of feeling pain. Their durability also meant that students didn't have to hold back while using high caliber magic attacks.

The doll was an extraordinarily useful device, but also extremely difficult to make. It takes a lot of precision item crafting to blend so many master level spell traits together. There were only fourteen functional puppets in the entire school, and it was first come first serve. For the sake of Jaux's practice session, Frey had made sure to get up early in order to borrow it.

"Thank you so much for going through all this trouble, Frey." Jaux said in gratitude when she arrived in the practice room with Tricks.

"No problem, anything for my novi." Frey cheerfully replied, before pointing over to one of the tables in the corner. "I also put your staff right by your textbook. It's over on that desk."

"Oh, awesome!" Said Jaux, before she made her way over to her supplies.

"So, how was the duel?" Frey asked Tricks.

"Easy win," answered Tricks, "pretty much just sat in an air chair during the whole thing."

"Okay, I'm ready!" announced Jaux as she returned with the staff and book in hand.

"I'll be going then," Tricks said, "I'm kinda hungry from the fight. I'll be down near the kitchens if you need me!"

"Alright, see ya shorty!" Frey jeered as Tricks ran out the door.

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More advanced curse spells are often nicknamed parasite magics. Curses will usually harm the target by draining their power and then turning that power against them. The effect is always noted to be similar to parasitic creatures such as mosquitos or leeches, which drain blood from their victims and usually cause those victims to get sick. The comparison has sometimes led to curse magics being nicknamed vampire magics, but that particular term fell out of use. Real vampires actually did have a few types of specialized magics.

Jaux was currently flipping through her textbook, trying to weed out all the curses that caught her attention. She specifically looked for some high powered combat magics, since she was still excited about Tricks' duel. The first spell that she decided to try out was a motion based cursed that stole a target's speed and then hurt the target based on how fast they were going. It was a good spell to have against melee opponents, but generally useless against most mages.

The doll couldn't be told to do anything, but it could be made to react in a person's favor. Frey set off a small explosive fireball close to the metal puppet whenever they needed it to move, which caused the doll to jump up in surprise and then start running away from the source of fire. After that all Jaux had to do was point and shoot.

The first couple tries were a pleasant success, where Jaux stood right in front of the running puppet and just fired the spell forward. A sphere of navy blue mist would shoot out from the tip Jaux's staff, hitting the puppet in the chest and causing it to freeze in place. Then the puppet would curl up in what appeared to be silent agony and hit the ground.

Unfortunately, Jaux didn't do so well when Frey had her trying to hit the puppet from different angles. Sevla was an incredibly awkward staff to aim with, and the spell would end up missing almost every time. After about two dozen failures, Jaux decided to just switch back to using the demon root, which allowed her to aim with more flexibility.

Staffs were usually more powerful than wands, but Jaux found that the curse spells fired from the demon root could be bigger and faster than when fired from Sevla.

It took a bit of time for Jaux to get used to adjusting the speed, curvature, and timing of her spell, but by the time she moved on to the next curse she was hitting the puppet about once every three shots.

The second spell was temperature based, a heat sucking spell that caused an explosion. Frey needed to set some fires around the doll for it to work, since it didn't suck up any heat when the temperature was below a certain point. The heat explosion curse was actually an advanced level curse that had a few complicated stages. First it would fire off as a transparent magenta sphere, which would burst as soon as it touched something that wasn't air. The spell could also be set to manually discharge at a specific point, but it was already complicated enough as it was.

An implosion would occur at the point of detonation, which would instantly suck up a large amount of heat within roughly a meter and a half of the spell. After the implosion, the magenta orb would do nothing for the next second, before suddenly blowing up in a wave of compressed heat energy.

The spell had been powerful enough to extinguish all the flames that Frey set up, and the resulting explosion would throw the metal doll back half a meter. Since the puppet was pretty heavy, this was a very effective result.

Frey liked the idea of the spell, and advised Jaux on how it could be used defensively. Jaux didn't have the reflexes to pull off legitimate spell interceptions yet, but Frey introduced the concept by firing some extremely slow balls of fire at Jaux. The fireballs traveled at walking pace, which gave Jaux more than enough time to hit them with the heat explosion curse.

The curse could suck away all the flames from most of the fireballs, but a few of the brighter ones didn't completely vanish after being in the implosion. The explosion afterward did blow away a couple of the remaining flame spheres, but one in particular had to be erased by Frey.

"That's good," Frey commented after she got rid of the final fireball, "you can defend yourself from a lot of fire spells below advanced level."

The third curse that Jaux tried was a standard enchantment type. The curse cloaked her magical tool with an effect to absorb some magic out of whatever she hit. This spell was virtually useless with the demon root, but it was perfect for a staff like Sevla.

Thanks to how lightweight Sevla was for Jaux, she could hold the staff down at the bottom end. From a distance it looked a lot like she was using a thin black club as a combat weapon. The enchantment spell surrounded the staff with a light coating of white glow. The curse could be mistaken as a blessing due to the color of the glimmer, but the effect was due to how the magic absorbed by the enchantment would be released in a flash effect.

Jaux wasn't sure about how durable Sevla was, so she didn't test the staff out on the puppet. Instead, Frey formed a gel-like barrier for her to bash in. The barrier, which Frey said couldn't be cut with a standard sword, was torn apart after Jaux hit it for the fourth time. The staff flashed with white light after every hit, but it wasn't bright enough to affect anyone's vision.

After all the spellcasting lately, Jaux was actually having fun just bashing things with a stick. She adapted to the strange combat style really swiftly. Sevla would be wielded like a club in Jaux's right hand, while she used her left to cast with the demon root. She decided to use her dominant right hand for the staff, since melee weapons needed more skill and maneuverability than aiming a wand.

It took a little time for Jaux to get used to casting spells with her left hand, so she studied a straightforward spell for her fourth curse. The next curse was a motion-to-concentration effect, which absorbed one type of energy and used it to power another magic. The new curse was called a motion missile curse, which absorbed motion out of the air to speed up and harden a projectile of magic. The further the spell traveled, the harder and faster it became.

Up close, the spell did the equivalent of a puff of air. The puppet wasn't even scared when the fist-sized ball of sky blue mist hit him, it just continued to stand in place. Jaux had to move back about five meters before the projectile was strong enough to knock the doll down. The further Jaux stepped back, the faster and more opaque the projectile became when it hit the puppet. At around ten meters away, when Jaux could actually manage to hit accurately, the impact was strong enough to push the practice puppet back by almost two meters.

All the spell practice with standard and advanced magic took up almost all of Jaux's time. These standard textbook spells took a lot longer to learn than the spells from her smaller curse book. Since the spells included genre magics outside of the power genre, Jaux had to take a lot of time just to figure out the spell patterns before she tried anything with her wand and staff. It was also the first time ever that Jaux felt magic fatigue, since a lot of the spells required significant portions of magic.

Magic fatigue was a lot like being physically tired, but there was no sweat or muscle aches. Jaux simply felt worn out to the very core of her being, like she had spent the last two or three nights without any sleep and it just caught up to her. It became a lot harder to move around, and she just wanted to go to sleep right away.

Frey was amused by her novi's first case of magic fatigue, which had result in a lot of moaning while rolling on the floor. She had a blessing to restore magic, but it was supposed to be used at the first sign of magic fatigue, and not when a magician's magic was nearly empty. Having more of someone else's magic flowing in your body instead of your own was dangerous. Instead, Frey just resorted to casting a bit of mind magic so Jaux would sleep.

After returning the metal practice puppet and gathering up Jaux's supplies, Frey took her sleeping novi back to the dorm for some rest.

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Jaux swam blissfully in her soft blankets. Being extremely tired out had a positive side effect of making a bed being the most wonderful feeling in the world. She was still comfortably asleep when Tricks arrived back into the dorm. Frey's sleep spell had long since worn off, but Jaux was still stuck in her dreams.

"Aw, she tired herself out?" Tricks asked when she saw Jaux resting.

"Yeah, complete magic fatigue." Frey replied.

Frey had been leaning against the headboard of her bed, lazily skimming an old time magic textbook. Frey had long since finished compiling all her common use spells, so she had nothing left to do in the Lyceum besides waiting on Sellwall's spells and teaching Jaux.

Tricks made her way to her own bed, a small bag with new outdoor clothing held in hand. She threw the bag into her wardrobe, before slamming the cabinet doors shut and falling into her sheets.

"Hey, is Desyi in the bathroom?" Tricks abruptly questioned. "Curfew was a few minutes ago and she's never late."

"No, I haven't seen her, actually." Frey noted as she closed her book. "That is a bit strange..."

There are occasions where trips outside may get delays, and mages get home a few hours late.

However, by the time the middle of the night rolled by, Desyi still had not returned.