Page 29 of Zero Happily Ever Afters

“They’re so dramatic. It’s like no one here understands how Dower’s primal branch works. Fucking morons.”

“The lava swarmed the entire auxiliary gym in seconds.”

“Makes sense. Headmaster Dower was a guild master candidate back in her day.” Katherine’s admiration grounded my mind, helping pull me from the collective surprise of surface thoughts stemming from every second-year student and the scouts in attendance. “That is before they pushed her out of the industry and into education.”

I cocked my head in surprise. Few knew about that, myself among them purely by happenstance on the singular occasion Headmaster Dower’s thoughts had twisted to past regrets duringa staff training, wondering and wishing if she’d fought harder how things would have gone.

But as I dived deeper into Katherine’s thoughts, steadying my own in the process, I grasped that she’d researched every guild master in Chicago, every potential guild master, and learned the number of women dictating the industry laws were few and far apart.

She quietly analyzed the lava casting, forming theories while also pulling from the stacks of research she’d done on empowered women throughout the industry. Katherine didn’t want to simply be a talented enchanter like so many of her peers. She wanted to shape the industry, carve out the old, and introduce something new and better. To accomplish that, Katherine knew she’d need to become the best, which meant becoming a guild master in her own right.

Flashes of the youngest woman to run a guild rose in Katherine’s mind. Guild Master Campbell, who steered the helm of Cerberus Guild. While every student here pondered how to impress the scouts, hoping they’d whisper wonderful things about them to the enchanter of their dreams, Katherine hoped to catch the eye of a guild master.

Huh. I’d never had a student who thought that far ahead in their career. They all dreamed of becoming enchanters, glossing over their internship, the years of service as an acolyte, and the difficult work of the industry. But Katherine ingrained it all in her mind, calculating every step to ensure she wouldn’t falter on the way to the top.

“Don’t worry.” Chanelle hopped off the stage, and nearly everyone from the students to the scouts waited with bated breath as she landed in the molten pit and splashed her boots into the knee-high lava. “It’s as soothing as a dip in a hot tub, which should be a lovely consolation to anyone who gets knocked out of the game before it ends.”

Everyone paid complete and total attention to the rules Chanelle explained.

Scoring would be split into two forms. Individual scoring to show off the top ten students who excelled and coven scoring to show off the top ten teams that demonstrated the best collaboration.

Everyone started with a set number of points based on their ranking. The higher your ranking, the lower your starting score, and vice versa for low-ranked students.

Every wisp banished earned a point for a team member.

If a student fell into the lava pit, they lost all their points, and it wouldn’t be added into the coven scoring.

If they were thrown into the lava pit, the student who knocked them out of the game would receive their points as a reward.

They had one hour to prove their skill.

An hour? That was a long time to maintain root magics in tandem. They’d have to keep their levitation and telekinesis active the entire time. They’d need their banishment root to remove wisps. As the competition thinned, they’d need their sensory root to locate more demonic energy for more points. Most of all, they needed to keep an eye on nearly every single classmate who was their enemy for the next hour.

“Hope you’re all ready for a little fun.” Chanelle kicked a leg, splattering lava ahead of her as she released a high-pitched gleeful, laughter. “Let the game begin!”

Chapter Nine

After Chanelle’s announcement, the big screen projectors above lit up and displayed every single student with their newly updated ranking for their second year second semester. The final ranking they’d carry to impress potential guilds for internships.

Cameras soared across the auxiliary gym, catching frazzled reactions to students surprised by their changed ranking. Some remained where they were last semester, a few moved up, but it was those who’d dropped that hesitated the longest. Microphones attached to the cameras caught the mutterings of students who quickly strategized.

With so many cameras moving around, they managed to keep every student in their sights, projecting an image of them on the borders of the massive screens above. The bulk of the screen would rotate on which students or scenes of combat to display, but when the game was over, every teacher would receive a copy of the full footage. We’d take that footage and have the students analyze it, pull out pieces of their own combat, and turn the event into a skills-based project presentation for homeroom.

When the timer ticked, everyone sprang into action, banishing wisps and collecting points. It turned into a frenzyalmost immediately as students cast magic and collided with each other in a fight for points. Their Cast-8-Watches synced to the tech that tracked everything. Their rankings were projected on the screens next to their image with a second matching number that sat beside their ranking indicating their current score.Once the competition began those numbers erupted as students banished wisps or knocked fellow competitors out of bounds and into the lava pit.

Several students among the top ten—including a few of my own—immediately targeted the lowest-ranked students who started with 500 or more points. They were the easiest targets, which seemed cruel, but the glint in Chanelle’s eye drew my attention. She’d proposed this and silently observed the scouts who watched these low-ranked witches scramble to survive against the best of the best at Gemini Academy. Sure, they lost, but a few put up a good fight and drew the interest of a curious scout in the audience. Scouts who would’ve never looked twice at a student ranked so lowly. They were forced to, though, as they studied the best of the best tear apart competition to collect points.

My homeroom split apart into three four-person teams, sticking with their coven mates only similarly to most everyone else in the competition. They all wanted to impress the scouts in the audience, hit the top ten individually or as a team.

Following the cameras that displayed students on the big screen, rotating through multiple shots at once, I watched my students’ performance. I needed to compile notes on how they handled themselves during this event, keep track of which scouts showed an interest in my students, and figure out what fine-tuning I needed to prioritize for my homeroom kids before the semester ended and they moved on to the industry as interns.

Jennifer leapt ahead of her coven mates, seeking out targets in the form of students versus wisps. While Caleb calculated thecompetition rules, weighing the pros and cons of striking down peers, Jennifer grasped the objective immediately.

Once Jennifer reached two classmates, she channeled telekinesis into her palms and slammed all the psychic energy she could into this interwoven strike. The expansion of my branch gave me insight into the colorful aura of emotions she struck.

Not only did she knock the breath from their chests, but a white blob of energy circulating from Jennifer’s aura devoured all the crimson confidence circulating from those she targeted, leaving them distraught and consumed by self-doubt. They stared at Jennifer, horrified due to their magnified emotional reactions, and in their surface thoughts, they truly believed her to be a monster. Jennifer’s heavy black, scarlet, and purple makeup painted over her eyes and lips certainly fed into their fears as it gave her ghostly complexion a ghoulish appearance.

I chuckled, burying the pity I had for those students. It was a cruel, calculated tactic that proved just how impressive empathy could be when redirected into an offensive attack.

---