"Your pursuit is worthless, Miss Seliphaz."
The man sitting in the middle seat of a panel of judges coldly declared.
Seliphaz winced under his frosty gaze, shifting uncomfortably in her seat on the other side of the table.
She knew she should speak up.
She knew she ought to fight back.
She knew.
And yet—
"…I'm sorry."
Her voice was timid and small.
She just grew smaller and smaller in her seat as she lowered her head, her eyes tearing up involuntarily, threatening to fall on her round spectacles.
And yet, she couldn't help but feel profoundly frustrated.
At herself, more than anybody else.
She had spent a month preparing herself for the Extracurricular Sponsorship Program interview. The interview was meant to be the final stage of the application process, the passing of which would allow her to get the funding she needed for her own engineering ambitions.
She had formulated answers for every single question she could dream up of.
And yet, when she sat before the panel of stern-eyed interviewers who would have the final say on whether her application would be accepted or not, she found herself choking.
The unpleasant tingle of nervousness and panic that lingered around her heart.
It choked her.
It warped her view of not just the people she was facing but also the room she was in.
A plain, well-lit office with a classy modern decor had become a cold, dark interrogation room used for prisoners of war in her eyes.
The group of plain, normal interviewers who gave her an earnest chance at making her case became mean and cruel in her eyes.
Although the latter was not entirely an illusion.
"Mana-Independent engineering?" the lead interviewer scoffed with derision as he stroked his pepper-salt mustache. "You want to build things that are not connected to the magigrid? What manner of nonsense is this, might I ask?"
His tone was courteous enough not to warrant backlash, but it hurt her immensely nonetheless.
She was afraid.
Of people, in general.
She glanced at the lead interviewer, catching a glimpse of his contemptuous eyes.
Eyes that rejected everything she had worked for all her academic life.
"I-I b-believe that n-non magical engineering can help all of u-us save a lot of magical energy," she squeezed out, stammering her way through a weak rebuttal. "With t-this, we c-can lower our energy consumption and magical pollution a-as well."
Her breathing grew labored as she managed to squeeze out the rationale that had driven her to invest in up-skilling in this niche branch of engineering. It was easy enough to manufacture enchanted items that required a continuous supply of energy from either the magigrid or a frequent supply of mana stones.
Yet, that caused the consumption of energy to balloon exponentially as each sector of magitechnology operated with the presumption of a stable supply of magical energy. This was especially the case for construction where the final product would continuously consume energy almost at all moments in time.
She, on the other hand, sought to try and pursue a field of engineering that allowed her to create products that could function without necessarily consuming a large supply of energy.
That didn't mean that absolutely no magic was used when producing the product, just that after the product was complete, it could be used without any need for a stable supply of magic energy.
She firmly believed in the merits of her chosen field.
But unfortunately, not everybody appreciated her niche, albeit thoughtful choice.
"A little over a hundred years have passed since the magindustrial revolution began," the head interviewer snorted as he stroked his mustache. "The mass production of enchanted goods is the very foundation of modern civilization. What sense is there in defying the foundation of our world? It's a fool's venture if you ask me, this 'mana-independent engineering.' There is a reason that this is a niche, and it simply is not something that we see the merit in sponsoring."
THWACK
He slammed her application on the table, earning a flinch from her, as he directed a frosty gaze of disapproval at her.
"Rejected."
Her expression crumbled with disappointment.
She tried not to burst into tears in front of them, quietly collecting her materials as she left the room in a hurry after thanking them for their time and consideration, and bidding them goodbye.
She walked across the corridors of the senior wing of the Elendir Institute of Magic with a dejected demeanor and body language.
Her head lowered as a shadow covered her eyes.
"Miss Seliphaz?"
A male voice jolted her out of her reverie as she found herself standing in front of a man.
He towered over her at six feet as she found herself staring at his chest.
What she saw when she gazed up at his face shook her.
His face was scarred.
Scars that ran down his neck.
His pupils were dichromatic, his left eye was a darker shade of gray while his right eye was much lighter, so much so that the Iris seemed to partially blend in with the rest of his eye in a disturbing fashion.
His expression was stoic.
His eyes were impassive.
His body language was stoic.
Everything about him inspired fear in her.
"Miss Selipha—"
"T-Thug! There's a thug in the magicademy!"
"…Eh?"
Cæ froze as she accused him of being a thug.
Her yelps for help drew the attention of other students who immediately gathered around him with a highly suspicious gaze.
The worst part was that all of them were senior students who in a different wing of the magicademy. It meant that none of them had even seen him before during freshman transfers or during his honors student addressal.
In their eyes, all they saw was a man who looked like he came straight from the mafia to infiltrate the magicademy.
"What did you do to her?!"
"Who the hell are you?"
"What business do you have here?"
"Are you really a student of the magicademy?"
They surrounded him, bombarding him with questions as they sized him up.
"You're wearing an apprentice uniform but you don't like a sixteen year old to me!" one student growled at him. "An apprentice student has no reason to even be here in the first place!"
"If you're going to infiltrate the magicademy, do it better!"
Cæ groaned inwardly as many people, including professors and even staff employees, began growing suspicious of this strange mafia man who had entered the senior wing to harass a female student.
"That's enough."
A powerful female voice cleaved through the growing wave of heated chatter in the crowd.
The people in the crowd froze at her command as they slowly turned to behold the President of the Student Council, shifting aside a tuft of her green hair with a displeasure. "Step aside from him at this very moment."
Her tone was unyielding.
Her golden gaze bore heavy on these around him as they cowered, quietly adhering to her words.
She walked over to Cæ, gesturing to him with a hand as she directed a sweeping gaze across the other students.
"This is the newest member of the Student Council, Cæ."
Their complexions visibly darkened as they realized that they had essentially been harassing the student council.
"A-A-Ah…" Seliphaz short-circuited as her eyes grew hazy and her knees gave out.
She collapsed unconscious. Falling straight into Cæ before her, who gently caught her dainty body with troubled eyes.
"Oh dear…" President Mileila heaved a troubled sigh. "Could you please carry her to the medical ward on this floor, Cæ? I'm sorry to ask this of you after you got into such a mess because of her."
"That's no problem at all," Cæ gently lifted her in his arms, before turning towards the President with a nod.
"Thank you, Mileila."
He stiffened immediately after he uttered her first name.
That, too, in front of so many people.
They froze at his informal and intimate manner of addressing her.
And she simply smiled genuinely at hearing her name being uttered by another person. "Not at all, Cæ. This is the bare minimum I can do to help one of my own."
She nodded at him before walking away from the place with a pleased body language.
Everybody else turned back to him with a peering gaze.
Cæ simply heaved an exasperated sigh before departing from the place with unconscious Seliphaz in his arms. His eyebrow twitched as he watched the young woman drool on his custom tailor-made institute uniform.
"You better be worth this, miss."
Shortly after his training with Vice-President Kiln, he had gained access to the mainframe system, immediately logging into the student body database, containing the academic profiles of each and every single student enrolled in the entire magicademy.
From then on, it was just a matter of searching for the profile that he was looking for based on the conditions he had for the product development of his micro-housing unit.
It had just been an attempt at checking out the possibility of in-house development of the product. If he didn't find even the slightest lead or possibility, then he would most likely default back to the same but costlier option of outsourcing product development to the professionals.
But he did.
He glanced at the girl in his arms.
Seliphaz Nermandel
She was a commoner who had just barely gotten accepted into the Colohen Branch of the Elendir Institute of Magic and had immediately chosen the sub-field of non-magical engineering. Engineering that sought to produce outcomes that didn't require a continuous supply of mana.
This could be done with a combination of fields of magic and outside it, including but not limited to alchemy, the field of change in matter through magic, as well as several other fields such as mana-material science, which studied the properties of substances that innately bestowed with mana.
Cæ realized that she had the skill-set needed to help him develop micro-housing units that were mana-independent and didn't require an influx of magical energy. On top of that, she had expressed an inclination towards commercial endeavors.
She had applied to the Extra-curricular Sponsorship program that would give her the necessary venture magicapita to start her own business venture with trying to engineer products that would be of help to people without draining magical energy incessantly.
If she had been a research-oriented type who simply chased after grants and funds, he would not have even considered her.
But from everything he saw in her profile, she ticked all the checkboxes that he had in mind, at least on paper.
But he needed to have a firm talk with her and discuss the nuances of her competencies, her interests, and her ambitions and measure compatibility.
Even if they were compatible, there was a very good chance that she would reject his offer. After all, there were many, many commercial avenues of opportunity to her simply by virtue of being a student of the Elendir Institute of Magic.
Why on Alaria would she go for a niche and highly novel start-up out of all the possibilities she had on hand.
But before they could even have a talk and he could even get to that part, she thought he was a mafia thug infiltrating the school and then simply passed out after realizing that he was a member of the student council.
If not for the fact that he himself was the one being subjected to this, he would have laughed at such a ridiculous story. Instead, he simply dropped the woman off at the medical ward, informing a nurse before leaving home for the day.
"Feidin will laugh his head off when I tell him this story."