Isabella had never liked morning classes.
Too many people. Too much fake energy. Too many wide-eyed first-years pretending they weren't terrified of exploding themselves.
So instead, she waited.
Every day, like clockwork, she stayed behind after Haku's lectures.
Technically, it wasn't required. He never called roll. Never assigned homework. Didn't even technically have students, just "observers," since his class was not mandatory and didn't have tests, as a special instructor, he could teach what he wanted, and all students could come and leave as they pleased, but Haku would give the students that came after school private lessons.
Today, it was just her and Ricardo.
Which was a problem.
Because she did not like Ricardo.
Not because he was dumb. If anything, that would've been easier. He was sharp, razor sharp, too sharp. Always had the answer, always smirking like he knew something the rest of them didn't. Like he'd already read the script, and everyone else was fumbling the lines.
Haku, for reasons beyond Isabella, seemed to like that.
She sat across the room, arms crossed, while Ricardo leaned casually on the windowsill like he belonged there.
"You're early," Haku said, walking in holding two mugs and an unfinished blueprint tucked under one arm. He handed one mug to Isabella. She accepted it like a suspicious gift. Which, in fairness, it always was.
"What is this?" she asked, sniffing it.
"Liquid coping," Haku replied. "And synthetic ginger. You'll live."
Ricardo sipped his own without hesitation. Showoff.
"So," Haku said, dropping the blueprint onto the nearest table. It was some ridiculous, over-complicated geometric mess that had no business being drawn freehand. "Who's stuck?"
Neither of them answered.
Typical.
He waited exactly four seconds.
"Fine. We'll start with silence. My favorite student."
Ricardo smirked. Isabella made a noise that was mostly sarcasm and murder.
Haku ignored both of them, rolling up his sleeves. "Ricardo, how's the resonance compression going?"
Ricardo shrugged. "Fine."
"Liar," Haku said instantly. "You're missing the fourth axis. The spell works until you rotate orientation and then collapses. Not because you miscast, but because your framework assumes the world stays flat. It doesn't."
Ricardo blinked. "You checked my notes?"
"I checked the aftermath of your little 'demonstration' in Lab 3," Haku said, sipping his tea. "If you're going to simulate a miniature collapse event, maybe don't do it under a staircase?"
Ricardo looked only mildly sheepish.
Haku turned to Isabella. "And you?"
She hesitated. That was the difference between them. Ricardo jumped. Isabella waited.
"…I can't stabilize my shielding," she admitted. "It keeps pulling instead of deflecting. Like the manas getting clingy."
Haku raised an eyebrow. "You been stressed?"
Isabella scowled. "What does that have to do with?"
"Your mental state is also the state of your mana. You should relax and rest sometimes. It's good to be eager, but know that there are limits."
It was almost hilarious how fast haku mastered the theory and combining it with psycholgy for the mental aspect and science for the phisycal he pretty much became one of the best the school had to offer in less than 5 months coming up with his own theories how things probably function and testing it with Yue and Alex in his free time he was starting to like magic somewhat.
"…That sounds fake," she muttered.
"Most useful things do," he replied.
She didn't look at Ricardo, but she could feel the look he was giving her.
"I didn't say anything," Ricardo said, far too quickly.
"I will throw this cup at you," she replied.
"Try it. You'll only strengthen the field."
"I swear to"
"Children," Haku said, raising a hand. "There's a reason I teach both of you."
Silence again.
"You're both wrong," he continued. "In different ways. But you challenge each other's wrongness. That's useful to me. Like reactive metals. On their own? Dangerous. Together? Interesting."
He walked to the board and drew a spiral, not circular, but jagged. Each edge curved in chaotic patterns. It wasn't pretty. It was real.
"This is how progress works," he said. "Not neat. Not polite. Messy. Rude. Screaming half the time. Sometimes it explodes. Sometimes it becomes an equation that redefines elemental phase shifting."
Isabella blinked. "Is that what this is?"
"No," he said. "This is a drawing I made to distract you so you'd stop glaring at each other."
A beat.
Ricardo laughed first.
Isabella followed unwillingly.
Haku didn't laugh. He rarely did in class. But he smiled, just a little. The kind that only lasted a second.
Then he turned his back and started writing something even more complicated. Something that looked like half a spell circle, half a reactor schematic.
Neither of them spoke, but they both moved closer to look.
Because even if she didn't like Ricardo, and even if Ricardo didn't particularly care for anyone but himself, they both knew one thing:
Haku didn't waste time.
If he was teaching you, it meant something.
Even if he never said it aloud.
Especially because he never said it aloud.
Ricardo leaned forward, pointing at one of Haku's equations. "That's not a spell structure."
"Nope."
"…And this variable," he tapped the page, "that's not even part of standard alchemy."
"Correct again," Haku said mildly, as if being correct twice in a row meant nothing. "I borrowed that from particle physics."
"…Particle what?"
Isabella frowned, looking between them. "Is that a new school of magic?"
"No," Haku said, drawing a circle and bisecting it with a jagged line. "It's a school of reality. From a different… theory. Let's call it a metaphor."
Isabella's eyes narrowed. She knew Haku. That meant he was about to lie through omission, or tell the truth in a way no one would believe anyway.
He tapped the board. "The reason your shielding spell fails is because your framework assumes mana acts like a static barrier, like a wall. But that's not how energy works. Not really."
"Then how does it work?" she asked.
"Like a wave," he said. "Or a field. It radiates. It interacts. You don't block force with force. You redirect it. Like vector cancellation."
Ricardo squinted. "You mean like how two opposing elemental forces cancel each other out?"
"Close, but not exactly," Haku replied, and for once he sounded genuinely engaged. "Let me show you something."
He pulled a scrap of paper from his coat, a napkin, actually, with tea stains on the corner, and started sketching. "Imagine two equal but opposite waves. If timed precisely, they collapse into nothing. The energy isn't destroyed. It's neutralized. That's called destructive interference."
He drew overlapping sine waves. Neither of them recognized the shapes, but both instinctively understood what they meant.
"Magic is usually treated like pressure. But what if it's closer to acoustics? Or electromagnetism? Think less volcanic eruption, more tuning fork."
Isabella stared. "So… my shield spell fails because I'm trying to fight a force directly, instead of letting it pass and nullify itself?"
Haku pointed at her with the chalk. "Bingo."
"And you got this from… tuning forks?"
"And quantum field theory. And wave mechanics. And several arguments I lost to an old friend," he muttered.
Ricardo blinked. "You're serious?"
"No," Haku said, without missing a beat. "I'm never serious. That's the problem."
He leaned back, brushing chalk dust from his sleeves. "Look, you don't need to memorize all this. You don't even need to understand every word. What you need is the idea: Your mana fails because you're treating it like a rock when it's closer to a song."
Isabella stared at the drawing a moment longer.
Then she erased her previous notes and rewrote her whole spell matrix from scratch.
Ricardo stood back, watching Haku like he was trying to pin him down in a box. He couldn't.
"You're not from here, are you?" he asked quietly.
Haku looked up. Didn't smile. Didn't blink.
"What gave it away?"
Ricardo hesitated. "You talk like someone who doesn't care about the rules. Not even the unspoken ones."
"That's because I already broke them," Haku said. "Now I'm rewriting them. With or without permission."
'How was that answer, cool right?'
Haku thought.
Isabella raised an eyebrow. "Are you always this dramatic?"
"I'm pacing myself," he said dryly. "You haven't seen my villain arc yet."
Ricardo looked sideways at Isabella. "Is he joking?"
"…I don't think so," she said.
Haku turned back to the board, voice quieter now. "If either of you wants to keep up, stop thinking like mages. Start thinking like engineers."
"Engineers?" Ricardo repeated.
"You want real control over this world?" Haku said, finally smiling just a little too sharply. "Then you need to understand the rules beneath your rules. Stop thinking about fireballs. Start thinking about entropy."
Neither of them understood that yet.
But they would.
And Haku was hoping that this would make recruiting them when he leaves at the end of the year more likely.