A week passed. Cloudy wasn't just tormenting the puddle in the basin anymore—she was full-on chasing water streams through the air, making them loop and swirl with the grace of a trained dolphin.

  At some point, she decided she was ready for a spar and hurled a fairly substantial water projectile at me. I didn't even flinch. I simply "exhaled" my mana toward it—and her stream instantly shattered into fine spray, losing all structure.

  She frowned, watching her attack turn into mist.

  "How do you do that?! What kind of trick is this?"

  "No trick," I yawned. "I’m just filling the space with my mana, pushing yours out."

  "What?.."

  "Never mind," I waved it off. "You’ve still got a long way to go before you reach that level."

  "Fine—" she put her hands on her hips. "Since you're so smart, give me an exam. Show me what I’m capable of."

  I stood up. Well, here we go.

  "Alright. Make a perfectly round sphere."

  She pulled the water from the basin. What came out was... well, let’s just say a vague semblance of an oval suffering from a mild case of obesity.

  "Next. A square. A triangle. A pentagon. A cube."

  The shapes were tough. The water stubbornly wanted to be just a pile of water, not a geometric solid. In the end, the cube resembled a bar of used soap, and the pyramid looked like a pile of jelly. But, I had to admit, there was something close to the truth in it.

  "Now, let's complicate it," I took a stick and drew a complex labyrinth on the ground: straight lines, sharp turns, spirals, forks, loops. "Drive the water exactly along these lines. Forward, backward, in a spiral, and then split the flow into two parts and merge them back together."

  She began. The stream of water obediently crawled along the drawn paths. It trembled at the turns but obeyed. She was sweating; her face grew focused.

  At the end, gasping for breath, she approached a thick old tree. She decided to use a "saw"—driving the water back and forth, trying to grind through the bark.

  "Ineffective," I tossed back.

  "Then what is effective?!" she snapped.

  "Watch."

  I created a ring of water that encircled the trunk. I poured in a rotational impulse. The water turned into a razor-sharp jet moving at a frantic speed.

  ZIP.

  The tree collapsed with a dull crack, sliced perfectly in half.

  "Like that," I said.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She remained silent, staring at the fallen tree. After this "exam," she looked thoughtful and somehow... quieted.

  I stood there feeling a strange mix of emotions. I was teaching her, trying, explaining... but it was as if she were catching everything on the fly just by observing me.

  Is this how teaching is supposed to happen? I asked myself. When the teacher just shows how not to do it, and the student figures out how to do it right on their own?

  A strange feeling.

  I crawled out of the shelter, squinting at the morning sun. Cloudy was already sitting on the threshold, propping her chin on her fist, staring at me as if I were some bizarre insect.

  "Hey," she said. "Why are your eyes different colors?"

  I froze, walked over to our stone basin, and looked into the water.

  One eye was the usual black Void. The other was gray today. My black hair was disheveled; my skin was pale as a corpse's.

  "Whoa..." I smoothed my bangs. "What a handsome guy, huh? Tell me, aren't I magnificent?"

  "Freak," the demoness cut me off laconically.

  I sighed. That actually hurt. Hearing that from a being who looks quite decent—it was a blow to my already fragile ego.

  Lesson number three: creating water from nothing.

  I sat down on the grass next to her.

  "Look. A real water mage isn't always lucky enough to have a river or even a basin nearby. Но water is everywhere. It’s in the air, it’s in your breath, it’s in the ground. It’s just hiding. And also... it’s changeable."

  I held out my palm. A thick white steam began to rise above my fingers. A second later, the steam condensed into a transparent sphere. Another moment—and the water in the sphere froze, turning into a perfectly even ice crystal.

  "Steam, liquid, ice. It’s all the same thing, just different densities. Your task isn't to haul water from a bowl, but to make it appear."

  I pointed a finger in her direction.

  "Just imagine mana accumulating in your fingertips. Gather it into a point until it becomes heavy. Feel the cold and the moisture. Allow the energy to become matter." (What a load of gibberish.)

  Cloudy stood up and stretched her hand forward. Her face tensed as if she were trying to move a mountain. The aura around her palm began to vibrate; the air shuddered from the excess of power.

  A minute later, something... vaguely resembling water began to ooze from her fingers. A murky, viscous substance that reluctantly gathered into drops. She was spending so much effort on it that a bead of sweat rolled down her temple.

  a month passed. The most boring, tedious, and gray month of my current life.

  The days turned into one endless sequence of watching Cloudy torment water. I sat on my favorite stump, propping my cheek with my fist, and watched her methodically fill the stone basins. First a drop, then a stream, and now—a full-on flow. She was already managing to fill a bucket from thin air in just a minute.

  For her, it was a breakthrough. For me, it was just another reason to yawn.

  My eyes continued to live a life of their own. Every day, a new color. Today the right was black, the left a soft lemon. Tomorrow it would be purple. Or orange. I was already too lazy to check the reflection in her basins.

  The world outside this forest gradually began to feel like a fiction. As if there were no Academies, no Kingdoms, no wars, and no princesses. There were only these trees, the smell of damp earth, and a demoness stubbornly trying to become a water-carrier.

  It was strange, but Cloudy began to treat me... more loyally? There were no more sudden punches to the jaw or screams of "Die, you freak." She just silently accepted my remarks, sometimes even nodding.

  Or maybe I just got used to it?

  When you sit in the same room with a tiger for a long time, at some point you stop noticing its claws and start noticing how funny it is when its whiskers twitch in its sleep.

  "Hey," she wiped her wet forehead and looked at me. "I’m finished. Fifth bucket today."

  I lazily opened one eye.

  "Congratulations. You can officially replace a small cloud over a vegetable garden."

  She didn't flare up; she didn't growl. She just huffed and sat on the grass beside me.

  "Are you always this bored?"

  "Always," I answered honestly.

  "But here, at least, the silence is quality. No one asks you to do anything supernatural."

  I closed my eyes, listening to the noise of the forest. Perhaps that was my greatest achievement this month—I had learned to find peace in the company of a being who had sworn to destroy me.