1. Statal Examination

Agatha's agate trembled in a mixture of excitement and dread. No matter how much she tried to calm her stone, her solidified essence shook violently. Her breath was erratic, her heartbeat out of this world, and the queue was becoming shorter by the minute.

"Next!" One of the examiners announced.

She knew that the anxiety was in her mind, that whatever happened in the examination, her dream wouldn't die. She wasn't going to surrender in any case. But failing the entrance exam would certainly make her skulk for a few months. Maybe a whole year.

Two tops.

An explosion shook her out of her thoughts, and she peered at the sound's inception. The latest examinee had exploded the target in the shooting range. The previously red and white target had been volatilized, only ashes remaining on the spot. Agatha couldn't help but feel intimidated by such a bombastic display.

The girl clutched her sole agate closer to her chest. The pearl shone in her hands and rattled with more violence.

"Null and out!" Another examiner announced. "This is a precision test, not a mining operation!"

"What do you mean out?" The test taker protested. He was a savage yet rich-looking boy. "I clearly hit the target!"

"With a shockwave, you mongrel!" The examiner spat. "Your Combustion agate hit the ground; if it weren't for the following deflagration, you would not have been even close."

"But!"

"No buts!" The examiner interjected. "You have failed this test only, but if you continue to protest, I will take notice to make the other tests void. Do you understand?"

"I…" The boy bit his lip and held his tongue. "Yessir."

"Good." He hummed. "Next!"

As loud as the back-and-forth had been, it calmed Agatha down. This is only a precision test, I can do it! She led her fist to her heart to convince herself.

The queue quickly advanced as the examinees followed the simple instructions of hitting the far-away target as accurately as possible. Some test takers used wands, others did not. Most of the ones that didn't use wands were wearing poor attires with many patches – like Agatha herself with her skirt of sewn mantle pieces – but the examiners didn't call out any of the ones that used wands.

Not that there was any need.

For agate-slinging this primitive, wands brought near to no change in results. And considering some of the most dapper-looking test takers were using complex commands like forming handcannons to shoot their agates forward, a wand wouldn't have made a difference.

Why carry a focus like a wand around when you could just summon one at will?

That wasn't an option for Agatha, though.

The nobles truly took the air out of her lungs. Not only did they flaunt such fine clothes, especially the noble ladies with their frilled skirts, but they had far more agates at their disposal than she.

Everyone did.

Even her fellow village 'friends'. But the disparity between her and the nobles was so great that she couldn't help but feel intimidated.

Some succeed at this specific test, while others did not. This was the third test already, but that didn't help to calm her nerves. The first test had been a written one – which some lowborn had instantly failed by virtue of being illiterate – but Agatha was confident that she hadn't performed that badly. The second one had gone better as it had been a physical one, no Agatecraft involved. Some nobles were pathetic with their performance, whilst some poor kids demonstrated being monstrous.

Some had run faster than wolves!

Soon her turn would come, but Agatha's focus had been removed from her repetitive mantra as her eyes darted to the next examinee. She wore a breathtakingly cute pink and white dress with many frills! Oh, how many frills she was wearing! Agatha had tried sewing some into her clothes, but because she could only work with poor and ugly linen, they looked hideous. Totally unlike the fairy-tale-like sight before her.

Oh, what she would do to be able to wear such gorgeous frills!

But the noble girl herself wasn't being worn by the dress. Her skin was white as porcelain, and her hair was scarlet as the most vibrant blood agates. Such powerful color would have been intimidating if it weren't for the girl's round face, button nose, and overall frightened and shy expression.

She wasn't a doll, but a cute bnnuy!

Ehem, bunny.

Her eyes, though, were quite the striking thing as one section was red like her hair, yet another was green as grass. It was the first time Agatha had seen something like that. But she couldn't waste more time ogling at her as the scarlet bunny released her agates. Agatha's bemused visage shifted into awe and then dread as a stream poured out of the girl's wand. Stream was a misnomer. No, a whole pillar erupted from her extended arm.

A pillar of solid agate.

Ah. Agatha moaned in defeat as the colossal pillar burst through the target as if it were paper. No. Worse, air. It's all about precision! She told herself. She hasn't even landed on the center of the target, so it isn't as if she will have a great score on this test. You can do it! Agatha tried to be her best supporter, instead of her worst enemy, for lack of other ones. The shock of failing the statal examination held so much pressure in her mind that Agatha didn't even consider if it was possible for a human to hold tens of times their weight in agates inside her body.

"I said next!" The examiner voiced impatiently, only for Agatha to notice it was her turn.

"Y-yes!" She snapped out of her trance and positioned herself behind the white line on the sand.

"As you have been told before," another of the examiners said, "this is a precision test. Firepower or flamboyancy have no place here and will not be evaluated. You will have a single attempt. Understood?"

"Yes!" Agatha responded with far more resolution.

"Then feel free to make your shot."

Agatha was not hotheaded enough to directly shoot at the target. She first assessed her aim with a cold mind. The target's at about thirty meters. Any slight mistake will be greatly magnified at this distance. The lowborn girl knew she didn't have all the time in the world to make her shot, and if she showed no movement in the coming seconds, the examiners would pressure her like they had done with the previous test takers, and she didn't want that at all.

Peer pressure was the last thing she wanted now.

She moved before someone shouted at her and took her wand. With her left hand, she grabbed the wand's base, and with her right hand, the tip. Slowly, as she took aim, she pulled her right hand backward.

"What in the depths is that? Is it supposed to be a wand?" The chuckle of a boy landed in her ears. "That's a slingshot, you hick-girl, not a wand!"

The girl didn't let the mockery faze her. She had made it this far because she ignored the ridicule and only listened to herself. Now that she had a shot at lithic education, she wouldn't let the opportunity escape her grasp.

Agatha took a deep breath and materialized her sole agate on her right hand's fingertips. It was a perfectly spherical agate, almost as clear as glass – if you were a novice glassmaker – with a blue crystallized core resembling a sapphire.

With a single agate, she didn't have enough potency to make a shot this precise with enough strength to dent the far-away target. Thirty meters was a LONG distance. She had seen villages compressed in a lesser span than that. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

The stone in her fingers slightly morphed to become more aerodynamic; instead of spherical, it took the shape of a cylinder with a conic head and small flaps reminiscent of the fletching of an arrow.

Whilst she had hunted a bird or two with a sling before, she wasn't exactly a sharpshooter. That's why the command she imbued in her agate wasn't Speed, Combustion, or something that would launch it, but Control.

Control was a simple command that allowed a person to control their agates remotely, even allowing the stones to float. But it had a short range, so that was why no one had used it in this test.

Or that was what they believed.

Once she had a clear enough image, Agatha pointed to the skies and let loose the string of her wand. Some spectators were astonished at her aim; she had shot nowhere near the target, but that was because they thought she would use a speed-boosting command on the agate, which she had not.

She only had a single agate, meaning that she could only give a single command at a time.

Because she wasn't able to give any movement commands at the moment, she aimed high, giving the agate as much of an arc as possible so it would reach far. No one, no matter how good their slingshot was, would be able to shoot a stone at a distance of thirty meters. Perhaps with a sling instead of a slingshot, but her aim with those left a lot to be desired.

The second that the agate reached the apex of the arc, it had only moved about a third of the way there, but it was hard for Agatha to estimate the exact distance as she was now standing perpendicular to the agate instead of to the side as before. Common logic said that because the agate had reached the halfway point of the arc at a third of the distance to the target, it would fall short. But common logic couldn't be applied to agates.

Wondrous agates!

The shot agate was precipitating fast to the ground, but instead of becoming agitated, Agatha only grew more confident.

She closed her eyes and felt her connection with her perfect agate. Lonely but beautiful. Her agate was her essence, and her essence was her very being. She and the flying stone were but one entity.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Control! She uttered the command on the solitude of her mind, much like the loneliness of her essence.

With that command, the momentum of the agate redirected, and instead of the ground, its new objective was the target.

Agatha clenched her teeth as the tether between her and her essence grew dimmer and looser with the increasing distance, but she still guided her agate with her mind.

Her destination? The target.

Her result? Dead center.

The agate boasting Control had no power at all, so it simply bounced off the target. But it bounced off from the perfect center down to the millimeter. That was why she had used Control instead of Speed. It was precision that they wanted, and precision she gave them.

The lowborn girl panted in relief, but didn't allow her posture to relax just yet; instead, she turned to the examiners.

"Passed!" One examiner announced impassively. "Go to the man with the clipboard at our left and give him your name."

"Next!" Another examiner spoke out.

Agatha fidgeted on the spot, hopping and screeching as she danced with her arms glued to her chest, left fist pointing at the skies.

"Remove yourself at once if you do not want to be failed." The impassive examiner added.

"Y-y-yes!" She replied nervously and dashed away from the shooting range, not daring to invoke the ire of the examiner.

Once she was out of their sight, she slouched forward, finally relaxing her stiff body. I hit the target dead right in the center! Sure, I don't know how they evaluate the test, but… that's bound to score a lot of points, right?

If there was one skill Agatha valued and trusted, it was precision.

She trotted to the man the examiners had told her about, and without removing his face from the clipboard, he asked, "Name?"

"Agatha," the girl responded meekly, but then took a deep breath and exploded with confidence. "Agatha of Malachite!"

***

Christie's agates went haywire. They had always been hard to control, but even when she thought she had finally gotten the knack of them, now she was forced to perform miracles.

She didn't blame her father for pushing her to take the statal examination; everyone wanted to be a lithorist, but she hadn't thought it would be this hard to perform Agatecraft. Not that she had much of a choice as the statal examination was mandatory, but surely there were ways to dodge it. Too late for that, though.

Everyone controlled their agates as if they were breathing, but Christie had to fight just to keep her agates from exploding. She had done her best to control the surge of power on the precision test, but a single leak was what her reserve needed to bust into a river.

At least she hadn't missed the target…

She couldn't help but tremble when her whole body was an unstable mess ready to free itself at a moment's notice. Perhaps that was why the girl who followed her on the test had stolen her eyes.

By looks alone, she was no one special. A lowborn girl, perhaps the daughter of a local seamstress judging by the many different fabrics that formed her attire. But the girl oozed confidence.

A confidence Christie didn't have.

Whilst she had used a river of agates to barely land a hit on the target, the patchwork girl had used a single one.

A SINGLE AGATE.

Oh, Christie wished she could have that much control. Sure, the girl's shooting had been pathetic at best, but she was the only test taker Christie had seen who landed a perfect shot.

As the girl came to the note-taker mister, Christie was reminded that she needed to rush for the next test, but as she put spring in her step, she heard the girl confidently announce her name.

"Agatha of Malachite!"

Considering the need for a preposition on the name, it was clear that it wasn't her surname, but rather her place of birth. Not that Christie expected a villager to have a surname. But where is that place… She had never heard that location before. I guess it must be a mining village. Villages tended to name themselves rather dully, so it wasn't weird to think that a village by the name of Malachite would have a malachite mine.

And Christie herself knew a lot about mining, considering her family.

But she didn't allow her thoughts to muddle her mind. Christie grabbed the skirt of her dress and pranced forward, on her way to the queue for the next test.

The examiners would inform her of the test when it was her turn, but even from the queue, she instantly understood the theme. The previous one had been precision; this one was speed. The target was bigger this time, but there were more of them and also very spread apart.

Oh, depths! She panicked. How am I going to this one? The queue was also part of the test; it was the only chance of thinking about how to approach the test. They don't seem to evaluate precision… so maybe I could get them all at once?

Her greatest trait and paradoxically her eternal disadvantage was that she had too many agates. Christie's body held too many stones in her small frame, so much so that the individual agates collapsed into one another and turned into a flowing amalgam. There was no degree of compartmentalization available to her as the other test takers had. Her agates tended to fuse in a single entity, which made giving other commands quite difficult – if not outright impossible – because she had to constantly wield her Sleep command to make them lethargic, lest they burst out.

Drowning the targets with multiple Speed spikes seems to be my best choice… Shaping one's agates didn't count as a command – well, that wasn't quite true, but it also wasn't far from the truth – so if she were to spread them enough and release her reserves, Christie trusted she could hit all the targets at the same time. That should give me a good score, right?

Some people had the same idea as her, first taking their sweet time to aim and then unleashing a volley of agates in a swoop. This tactic, though, had a glaring disadvantage. If you missed one of the targets, you couldn't be sure which one you missed, making you shoot again in the hopes you landed on the one you missed.

Lithorica was as varied as the user's mind was imaginative.

Some chose single shots and slow cadence; others went with multiple shots and high cadence. Neither tactic was inherently bad, but the former one provided more security. Slower? Yes, that too. But you wouldn't lose time waiting for the examiner to announce that you had hit all targets.

I can do it, right? Christie doubted herself.

Soon it was her turn, and her stones threatened to pour out of her, drowning the whole field in a sea of colored stone.

She wasn't exaggerating.

"This test only evaluates speed," the examiner behind her told her. "Neither accuracy nor power will factor into your mark. You need to hit all targets. Time begins with your first shot. That is all, you can start whenever you please."

Her father told her that people needed to force their agates out of their bodies, much like evacuating in the bathroom. But for Christie, that couldn't be further from the truth. Every waking moment, she had to fight not to let her agates escape her body, much like holding it in, so the analogy wasn't that far off, just... reversed. As disgusting as the analogy was.

So this wasn't an activity of pouring her stones into the world, but how to do so in a manner that would complete the test effectively.

Please, please, please work. She prayed to every stone that shone and boasted colors. Land on the targets!

And she unleashed stone upon the shooting range.

In an instant, the expanse of sand the size of a small lake or an expansive ballroom became encased in reflecting red and green gemstones. The empty sandy field became substituted by a spiky sea of stones; the ground was no longer visible as her agate amalgam took precedence. It didn't even take a blink. She had released her grip on her agates, and the landscape changed the next infinitesimal slice of time. Simple and lethal as that.

It was an eerie sight, that of a sea with waves frozen in time, albeit spikier than wavey. Even though it had only taken an instant for them to manifest, they sprouted from her legs and formed certain waves and rings as if it truly was water that had been left to flow for a while until it became petrified.

"Erhm…" The examiner doubtfully groaned. "You pass?"

Christie didn't know what to make of that statement, if it even was a statement.

"How long was that, Suls?" She heard the same examiner whisper to one of her peers.

"Uhh…" The male examiner, who was apparently called Suls, groaned in doubt himself. "Truth be told, I didn't have enough time to activate the command, or rather, the command didn't activate in time."

"I…" The female examiner was at a loss for words.

"Do I pass?" Christie asked the woman, unsure of the previous statement.

"B-by all means, yes." She replied.

"Really?" The teenager expressed her doubt.

"Indeed…" The examiner responded. "Tell the man behind me your name. And… congratulations. You now hold the record for the speed test with a whooping zero seconds."

Christie didn't know how to feel about that; zero was never a good number. You could be the number one at something, but never the number zero.

"Oh… okay." She shyly responded and rushed to the name-taking man with a blush in her cheeks, not before spontaneously erasing the sea of stone from the shooting range with so little as a thought.

Because her agates had only flowed over the field like a wave, the sand below remained totally unchanged. So much so that it didn't even look like Christie had filled the place with stone.

One moment, a bichrome sea of stone. The next, nothingness.

"N-name?" The clipboard man, who was barely older than her and perhaps a student, asked with a hint of terror.

"Em…" Words were hard to come by, especially after attracting this many gazes. The girl blushed harder. "My n-name is Christina. Christina Valasela."

"C-Christina, alright," the man himself blushed. "You can go towards the new test already."

Christie was inclined to do so, but first she turned to look at how the girl behind her fared. There was something about that girl, a confidence that made her heart flutter. Most nobles had also expressed confidence in their tests, but that was different. They didn't flaunt confidence in their skills, but in their status. No matter how they did, they would most likely pass the exams. Only the worst of the worst of the nobles wouldn't be allowed to be at the academies. Schools were for the masses, academies for the nobles, or so they said. The redhead's mind lingered on the apex of all academies in the kingdom: Skyscraper Academy. Where even nobles of the highest status had trouble getting in.

For their very saying was: "Only those who scratch the sky will reach the greatest highs."

No. The girl behind her truly believed in her skills, unlike Christie herself. Such confidence was intimidating, but also heartwarming. She couldn't help but think how lovely it would be to trust herself that much.

Once the examiner finished explaining the rules, she took a curious pose. The back of the girl in the patchwork dress was completely straight, with the left arm behind it, and the right arm pointing forward. Christie moved to the side to get a better look at her and found that the girl had one eye closed. The open one glinted like the clearest sapphire she had ever seen.

Instead of using her… unorthodox wand from before, the girl opted for something different. It was some sort of handcannon – or more accurately, fingercannon – as it was a small cylinder that she placed halfway into her index finger.

Fingercannons weren't unheard of, but… they were mostly used for playing darts. Once someone summoned an agate, unless they were using the Control command, it would plummet to the ground. Fingercannons were used to keep the agates in place, and they tended to open half-cylinders, as most agates had very irregular sizes and wouldn't be able to fit in every fingercannon.

Which made Christie think that it was a personalized fingercannon.

Not that it was expensive as anyone could do woodworking that crude, but it made her inquire how many more wands the patchwork girl had.

The girl oozed perfect confidence with her posture and slowly aimed at the left-most target. There were five spread over thirty degrees, so Christie realized that she was going to shoot them one by one.

Then the air exploded.

Alongside her eardrums.

It took her a second to process what had happened, but by that time, the girl had switched targets and shot again. This time Christie paid more attention and noticed something that made her legs wobble.

The girl's agate was moving so fast that the air around the stone broke. She had broken the air itself.

Huh? When the girl changed to the third target, she noticed something was wrong. Where are the agates? There were no agates in the first two targets, only the depression that hinted at the fact that there had been an agate at some point.

The air exploded again, and as the supersonic agate traveled through the air, the girl confidently changed to the fourth target. The agate impacted the target, it disappeared, and the girl shot again.

In a single blink.

Is she… the idea was so moronic that Christie was embarrassed to even consider it. Is she only using a single agate? No one in their sane mind would use a single agate for a speed test; she could understand why the sapphire-eyed girl could have used a single one in the precision test, but what mattered here was quantity, not quality.

Before Christie had even finished her thought, the girl made the last shot and confidently turned to face the examiners before the last shot hit the target. Not that it mattered, for before her turning was over, the agate impacted on the target and was instantly recalled.

"Y-you have passed." The female examiner wielded the same astonishment as Christie. "What's the time, Suls?"

"One point fifty-three seconds." The male examiner told.

"I… see." The woman tilted her head at the resulting time. "Well done, girl. You can tell the man behind me your name."

It was then, when the girl pranced towards the clipboard man – and therefore also Christie – that the red-haired teenager noticed the disservice she had done her. She had referred to her as 'the patchwork girl' in her mind when she knew her name.

Agatha of Malachite had hit five different targets with a single agate in one and a half seconds, when people wielding tens of times more agates had only approached double her time.

The girl before her wore rugs in the shape of a long skirt, and her blond hair was as dirty as the soot covering the body of a coal miner, yet in that instant as she confidently and happily strutted forward, Agatha seemed the most radiant agate in the world to Christina.