CH73 (203), Academic Hard Mode

The day after I visited Rose, I enjoyed the last day of the holidays, and once Arcday morning came around, the sixth, as well as the final term of my first academic year, began.

I quickly noticed a discrepancy between my regular classes and my aura-centric classes. When I say quickly, I meant that it was Dialday and that I just finished my lessons for the day.

While the regular classes were still somewhat the same in intensity and workload, my aura-centric classes seemed to have switched from normal to hard mode. Well, at least for me the shift was like that to the others it was hell mode.

The reason for that disparity was pretty obvious. I was participating in the third-year classes for my aura-centric lessons, so I was getting part of the graduation experience.

The final exams were coming up this term, and unlike the exams before this one, the final exam covered the content of all three academic years. Honestly, it was hard not to notice what was happening when your teachers straight up told you what was happening.

I mean literally, every teacher straight up told us that they were going to use the first month of the sixth term to cover the last topic, before using the last two months leading up to the exams to review the content of the last three years.

The only saving grace was that most courses only had one or two years' worth of content due to being introduced in the second or third academic year.

Still, the teachers were all smiles when they said that those who regularly reviewed would only have a slightly harder time, while those that didn't would need to cram a lot.

"Meditation III", "Emotion Sensing II", "Aura Sensing II", "Aura Speech II", "Internal Aura Manipulation", and "Combat Preparation" were the ones I had to endure, everyone else had to suffer through 12 more regular classes at the same pace.

The last topic of "Meditation III" was replacing sleep through meditation and meditating while sleeping. That was something I had been working on for some time now, but it was harder than one would think. These two exercises were actually a preparation for the things they would learn during their time at the tertiary aura academy/school.

The first one allowed one to totally relax one's body and enter a rest mode while conscious. The next step was for one to reach a state equal to deep sleep which was much much harder. I had yet to master the first part, but I could enter the rest mode. I simply could not yet keep it up for prolonged times.

The second one practically meant to remain conscious while sleeping, which was just a fancy way to say that one would be lucid dreaming. The next step would be to take control of one's dreams.

Both allowed an individual to absorb aura, but they were not the same thing. The first action allowed one to remain somewhat alert to one's surroundings, so it was possible to react to outside interference. You could still sense outsiders approaching you and react accordingly.

The second action meant that one would be in deep sleep so sensing the situation outside was not possible at this stage. It would need a rather large stimulus from the outside to wake one up like a punch or worse, so it was dangerous to enter this state while one's safety was not ensured.

This meant the first could be used in the wild or anywhere really, while the second should only be used in a safe environment. However, both had their advantages, and both could be developed further.

The last topic of "Emotion Sensing II" and the other classes also prepared one for either a third stage of the class or a new class that would be part of their tertiary education.

For "Emotion Sensing II" it was amplifying or dampening a certain emotion group. This was something that I was working on as well. It was practically increasing the feeling of happiness or contentment in others, or suppressing/dampening frustration or anger.

However, doing so with finer emotions such as resentment, love, hate, and bliss was not possible, at least not by a long shot. Doing even the slightest bit of amplifying or dampening was really hard and I had only minimal success with it.

Thankfully, all the academy class was doing was going over the theory and doing some practice. They were not expecting us to succeed or everyone would have failed.

"Aura Sensing II" decided to focus our sense on ourselves and explain how to suppress our own aura signature. This was something I had been doing for quite some time to hide my prowess. The next step of this one was to mask, and finally, completely hide one's aura.

The last one was something one would use to hide, since using it in front of sensors was dumb because everyone had a slight aura signature due to aura being synonymous with life energy.

Masking allowed one to suppress one's signature to show less than one's actual capacity and the next stage of masking was showing exactly the amount of strength/aura one wanted to, Tier 1 Second-class for example.

Important was that one could only show a weaker stage this way, not a higher one. For "Aura Sensing II" it was enough to show even a glimpse of success at suppressing one's aura to pass the test for this topic.

Funnily enough "Aura Speech II" was the only class that showed no overt change topic-wise. The lesson was still about trying to understand PokeSpeech, but if one paid attention one would notice that we were being subtly told how to lace our intent to our speech the way Pokemon did.

Now, some would think why would we need to do that, Pokemon can already understand what we are saying, but it actually had a use. Lacing our intent into our speech like that would allow us to express ourselves in much shorter sentences as Pokemon did.

That was why they only needed to make three to four sounds, like "Pi, Pika, Pi" to say "hey, dumb**s, I want some goody Ketchup pronto" or a simple "Pika" for "get your ass over here".

That left the "Internal Aura Manipulation", and "Combat Preparation" classes. I have noticed that the low-key goal of our "Internal Aura Manipulation" class was to create a sixth sense. A danger sense so to speak.

Until now we had been focusing on enhancing our regular 5 senses. Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and currently Touch. When I say touch I don't mean just the sense of touch in our hands, but all of our body/skin. Now, I had my suspicions before but Ms. Yu confirmed them during the last lesson while introducing touch as our last topic.

She told us that one of the advanced applications of "Internal Aura Manipulation" was to use aura to simultaneously enhance all 5 senses in small amounts so that they would work in concert to detect immediate danger to us.

Obviously, achieving that was not easy, and getting it under control was even harder, but that was not something that was expected from us anytime soon, which I personally translated to/interpreted as "I'm just telling you it's possible, but you probably won't manage to learn that even during your tertiary education".

Finally, there was "Combat Preparation". That one seemed to have reached a stage where the preparation part could be left out. Mr. Koetsuji informed us that the last term would have proper combat for us where we had to apply what we learned to "real" fighting.

Well, more like sparring, but the "you can get really hurt doing this" kind of sparring. During our first lesson of the new term he showed up with a bunch of Machop and after a brief explanation of what was going to happen, he had everyone "spar" against the Machop.

The usage of moves was obviously forbidden on Machop's part but except for me as well as a few others like Ace and Weiss, everyone else kind of got their ass kicked.

They were not prepared for the Machop to go that hard, which was why I said "spar". Except for not using any moves, the Machop were not holding back all that much, which was why a majority of my classmates were covered in a lot of bruises.

There were even a few with sprains or cracked bones, but that was nothing that wouldn't heal in a day or two. Luckily, for them, Mr. Koetsuji seemed to have expected everyone to perform like this during their first time, which was why the Machop were only at the (high) iron stage.

At the end of the first lesson, he told us that he had evaluated our performance and that those who did well would receive new "sparring" partners for our next class.

Just like he promised, Mr. Koetsuji showed up with Machop and Machoke for our next lesson. Ace, Weiss, and the others that did pretty well during the last class along with this humble one had to "spar" against the Machoke Mr. Koetsuji brought along, while the rest had to keep "sparring" with the Machop.

The strength of the Machoke ranged from (low) to (high) bronze, and there were only three students that started out with a (high) bronze-stage Machoke as a "sparring" partner. Obviously, those three were Ace, Weiss, and I.

Personally, I enjoyed the new arrangement, and Ace, as well as Weiss, agreed with me, even if the others were grumbling a bit about getting hurt, the majority of the students were actually enjoying the chance to "fight".

At the end of the second lesson, Mr. Koetsuji said that whoever managed to get a (high) bronze-stage Machoke as his or her "sparring" partner, would get the "privilege" of "sparring" against different kinds of fighting types in each class.

However, all fighting types would be at the (high) bronze stage as well. Everyone else would keep "sparring" against Machop and Machoke. He told our trio that Hitmonchan would be our next "sparring" partner.

All in all, I had a pretty busy first week and I honestly had more fun during lessons this week than I had before. Well, fun was not the right word, I enjoyed the increased difficulty. Actually, that did not sound good as well. It made me sound like a maniac/masochist.

Anyway, I actually liked the change of pace of the last term, but I was sure everyone else would disagree. Still, this week made me think about my second academic year.

It was a fact that after I aced the final exams I would be done with the aura-centric classes, at least as far as the secondary (aura) education system was concerned.

That meant starting my second year I would only have to attend my regular classes which would reduce the number of lessons I had to attend by roughly 40%. Well, there were two or three ways I could see this going down.

One, I would start attending the lessons of the tertiary aura academy, but I was pretty sure that this one was the most unlikely option. The reason for that was quite simple actually. They would have allowed early graduation if that had been the case.

What was also possible was that they would provide books on the content of those lessons for me to self-study. Nevertheless, that was unlikely as well, since they generally oversaw any practical use of aura for safety reasons. At least they did so for the first few tries in case the students hurt themselves.

The last option was that I would simply have more free time since I would fewer classes I would have to attend. In that case, I could think of a few things I could do with that new free time.

One was focusing on learning how to properly use a weapon. Another would be to devote more time to my aura and psychic training, and the last was to use the time to focus on my side projects like ball crafting or performing some experiments.

I'll have to ask Mr. Burn about that on Arcday, but if it was the third option, then I still had a few months to think about what to do with that free time. I'll probably do a mix of all choices but first I would have to see what Mr. Burns was going to say.

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