The Archmage Became A Mushroom Tamer

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 · 1,513 words

## Ch008 - The Assessment

The training hall was built to accommodate two hundred students simultaneously. On the day of the freshman practical assessment, it was full.

The assessment format was simple: each student demonstrated their class abilities in front of the evaluating panel, which consisted of Professor Holt and two senior instructors from the combat studies department. The demonstrations proceeded in order of class rank. S-tier first. Then A. Then B through F, descending.

The S-tier students went first, and the hall was packed.

Aldric watched from the F-tier section, a roped-off area in the far corner of the hall, positioned so that lower-tier students wouldn't obstruct the view of higher-tier performances. The S-tier freshman, a tall boy named Caelen with the easy posture of someone who had never been told no, summoned a lightning construct that arced across the training hall. It struck the containment shield with a crack that made half the audience flinch. The shield held. The evaluators nodded. Respectful applause.

The A-tier students followed. Kael Dorn went among them, and his demonstration was competent, a fire lance that burned white-hot and punched a scorch mark into the training hall's target dummy. The audience cheered. Kael's entourage cheered loudest.

B-tier. C-tier. D-tier. Each demonstration was smaller than the last, the audience's attention fading. By the time the E-tier students performed, half the hall had left. The E-tier abilities were modest: a herbalist accelerating plant growth, a beast-tamer coaxing a small creature through an obstacle course, a ward-weaver producing a shield that held for twelve seconds before collapsing.

The evaluators made notes. The audience made conversation.

Then it was F-tier's turn.

The training hall was perhaps a third full. The evaluators were writing in their ledgers, occasionally glancing up with the expression of people who expected nothing and would not be disappointed. The other three F-tier students stood in a line, shifting their weight, their faces a mixture of nervousness and resignation.

Aldric stood at the end of the line. He had Fireball Mushroom Mk I (optimized) in a reinforced jar. He had rehearsed his calibration forty times in the crawlspace. The target output was modest: a thermal discharge that would register as above-average for F-tier but not so far above as to trigger questions. A controlled burst. Enough to show that Mushroom Tamer could produce something. Enough to stay below the threshold of serious scrutiny.

The first F-tier student stepped forward. Class: Corpse Collector. He produced nothing. The evaluators made a note. The audience did not react.

The second F-tier student. Class: Soil Singer. She knelt, pressed her palms to the training hall floor, and coaxed a small patch of moss to grow in a circle around her fingers. It was green. It was alive. It was, by any combat metric, useless. The evaluators nodded. Someone in the audience yawned.

The third F-tier student. Class: Water Seeker. He closed his eyes, extended his senses, and after thirty seconds of concentration, announced that there was a water pipe running beneath the training hall's east wall. This was correct. The evaluators made a note. The audience was now mostly gone.

"Mushroom Tamer. Aldric Thane."

He stepped forward.

The testing platform was a raised stone circle in the center of the training hall, ringed by containment shields. Aldric placed the reinforced jar on the platform. He could feel the stone beneath his feet, old stone, older than the hall built above it. The same foundation he'd noticed on his first day, the stone with faint discoloration patterns that looked like growth rings.

He extended his mana to the mushroom through the substrate. The mycelial network responded. He felt it wake, the thermal storage vacuoles charging, the spiral formation channels aligning the energy flow. The mushroom's cap began to glow. Orange. Then brighter.

He was calibrating for a small burst. He'd done the math. A thermal discharge of roughly two hundred degrees in a ten-centimeter radius, the same output as his crawlspace test, nothing more. Defensible. Explainable. "I optimized the thermal conversion using substrate geometry." True. Incomplete. Safe.

The mana flowed.

Then he felt it.

Not from him. From below.

The stone beneath the platform, the old stone, the foundation stone, pulsed. A vibration that he felt through his feet, through his mana channels, through the mycelial network connecting him to the mushroom. Something was rising. Energy, moving upward through the rock, through the soil, through the layers of construction and time that separated the training hall from whatever lay beneath it.

The mycelium was reaching for it. Not because he'd told it to. Because it recognized something.

He tried to pull back. To reduce the mana flow, to throttle the discharge down to his calibrated level. But the mycelium was already drawing, pulling energy up through the stone with a hunger that had nothing to do with his instructions. The mushroom's cap flared from orange to white. The spiral formation channels, his design, his precision work, amplified the incoming energy, compounding it, focusing it.

The discharge fired.

The sound was a detonation. A single, sharp crack that hit the containment shields like a siege engine striking a gate. The shields flickered. The nearest evaluators stood up from their chairs. The audience, the third of the hall that had remained, went silent.

The mushroom's cap was black. Spent. Its substrate was consumed, the mycelial network reduced to carbon. The reinforced jar had a new crack running from rim to base.

Aldric stood on the platform. His jaw locked. His hands, at his sides, were shaking.

The silence lasted four seconds. Then the containment shields stabilized with a hum that everyone in the hall could feel. The evaluators sat back down. One of the senior instructors was staring at the testing platform with his mouth slightly open.

Holt was writing.

Elara Voss, who had been halfway to the exit, had turned around. Her face held something between anger and confusion. The expression of someone whose understanding of the world had just been struck by a hammer and hadn't yet decided whether to break or bend.

Kael Dorn was not laughing.

One of the other F-tier students, the Water Seeker, whispered something to the Soil Singer. Aldric caught the edge of it: "Did... did a mushroom just..."

He retrieved the spent mushroom. He walked back to the F-tier section. He sat down.

His hands were still shaking. He placed them on his knees and applied the breathing technique he'd learned in his second century. Four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out. A physiological hack. It worked. The shaking stopped.

The assessment continued. The remaining students performed. The evaluators wrote their notes. The hall eventually emptied.

Nobody asked Aldric any questions. Not yet.

He waited until the hall was nearly empty, then walked to the exit. Holt was standing by the evaluators' table, organizing his papers. The professor did not look up as Aldric passed. But Aldric saw the notebook, small, leather-bound, the kind that could fit in a jacket pocket. Holt was sliding it into that pocket now.

Outside, the afternoon light was harsh after the training hall's dim interior. Aldric walked slowly, his mind running calculations. The mushroom had drawn energy from the ground. From the ancient network beneath the academy. He had not instructed it to do that. It had done it on its own, recognizing the network, reaching for it, pulling energy upward through the stone the way a plant reaches for water.

The mycelium had acted independently.

That was not supposed to happen. F-tier fungi did not have autonomous behavior. Mushroom Tamer's Mycelial Bond skill connected the cultivator to the fungal colony, but the colony responded to commands, not initiative. The mushroom had done something its skill tree did not describe.

Unless the skill tree was incomplete. Unless the mycelium was more than the System said it was.

He reached the F-tier dormitory. He went to his room. He closed the door.

Then he examined the spent mushroom.

The mycelial network inside the carbonized fruiting body had restructured itself. The spiral pattern he'd designed, the precise formation channels he'd spent two days scratching into concrete, was still visible. But it had been modified. New branches had grown, filling gaps he'd left in the geometry. The spiral was tighter in some places, wider in others, adjusted in ways that created a more efficient energy flow. The mycelium had improved its own design.

He stared at the carbonized remains.

Fungi did not redesign themselves. Fungi grew. They responded to environmental pressure. They adapted over generations, not minutes. What he was looking at was optimization. Deliberate, intelligent optimization.

He looked at the floor of his room. Beneath the concrete, beneath the foundation, beneath everything, something old had noticed him during the assessment. Something had reached up through the stone and given his mushroom more power than he'd asked for.

And it had improved his work.