She could always call up a lava-spewing volcano in the lunchroom that would parboil all the nasty students glaring at her.
She could do that.
I mean, that’s what they expect from her anyway, right? And boy, would that wipe the sneers off their faces!
But Galadriel “El” Higgins won’t do that. Really, she won’t.
El may have been prophesized to someday be a world-destroying terror. Most students probably see her as a noxiously evil sorceress in the making. And now that she’s in her senior year, she’s really shown a skill set for mass destruction. (I mean, if someone’s written a spell that’ll destroy cities, slaughter crowds or torture people, all she has to do it glance at it and it’s in the old noggin.)
But that’s not El. Not really.
Besides, big destructive spells take large amounts of mana. That’s a limited resource that requires hard work to generate. And El isn’t going to waste all of hers just to melt the faces off some kids who tick her off at lunch. Not if she wants to graduate from The Scholomance.
The Scholomance is a magic school that has no teachers or administration. It teaches the kids itself–magically delivering everything from meals to books and lesson plans. That is, of course, when it’s not directing lethal “maleficaria,” or “mals” for short, in the youngsters’ direction.
Mals are part of the learning curve, you might say. They pop out of every crevasse and heating vent when you least expect. And if you don’t have the proper store of mana or the right spell at the ready, you are quite literally monster meat.
So, stirring up volcanoes in the lunchroom just doesn’t make sense, no matter how you slice it. And that’s especially true in light of the fact that nearly three-quarters of every graduating class is dead and devoured in the school’s graduation ceremony each year.
Yeah, learning ain’t easy. Of course, living … might be even harder.