Supreme Magus novel Chapter 243

Lith went to the Headmaster’s office and because of the queue, he had to wait quite a bit. He couldn’t say it was an emergency. Lith knew there was a traitor if not more than one inside the academy, so he couldn’t afford to alert them.

When his turn finally arrived, the first thing he did was to close the door behind himself and ask Linjos to activate all of his office protections. Only when the arrays in the room started to hum, their magic so densely packed to be visible to the naked eye, Lith told him about what he had discovered.

"Anti mana toxins at the Lightning Griffon? This is indeed a serious matter." Linjos was about to use his communication amulet, but Lith stopped him.

"Not only there. They are also here at the White Griffon." His words made Linjos turn pale.

"We had no such cases here. Our average of promoted students is better than the previous years..."

"Yet the grades are dropping, remember?" Lith cut him short.

"Tanash is not only suffering from the toxins, but also from wasting three months following his father’s agenda. If he kept practicing magic, he would have probably got used to the toxins over time and his grades would have just dropped.

"Have you already forgotten about the box I found a few months ago? How it was delivered from Kandria, where the plague started?"

Linjos’s brain was spinning at full gear, reaching Lith’s same conclusions and even more.

"By the gods! It would explain a lot. Before Balkor’s attack, it would have created the perfect scenario for the old noble households. No matter if the civil war happened or not, they would have crippled the competition anyway.

"Even now, the heirs of their noble rivals and the mages of commoner origin are getting expelled or being deemed as low value assets for the Kingdom. It proves their point that magical legacies beat effort.

"If the civil war starts, they only need to increase the dosage to make all the young mages useless in battle until the problem is discovered. Even worse, the poisoning could have not been exposed until it was too late, if never at all.

The only thing I cannot understand is why they made their own children receive low grades too. Unless..."

"Unless it was part of their plan." Lith continued. "After all, the only thing that really matters is the result of the final exam of the fourth and fifth year. They can afford lowering their grades during the first two trimesters, since it has no consequences.

"During the final exam, they can perform much better and they will likely ask to be re-evaluated. That way, if the results don’t match with the daily evaluation, it will prove that your teaching methods are wrong."

"It’s worse than that." Linjos pondered. "By affecting the other academies, they managed to make it go unnoticed. Since the same thing happened everywhere, not even the Crown got worried. I can spot only a flaw in their plan.

"If all the students belonging to the old noble households get their grades back up at once, it would arouse suspicion. Unless of course, they either sacrifice the fourth year, using the winter break as a cover, to ’regain’ their talent during the last year, or they make only the elite take full marks now while the others gradually recover their performances.

"Anyway, they can’t repeat the trick again. Not now that the odds of a civil war are almost zero. My only question is: why did the White Griffon receive the same treatment instead of a worse one? If you are right and I have little doubt about it, I would have expected them to strike harder.

They need to take me out of the picture, their plan ended up helping me instead."

"My hypothesis is that they underestimated you and the control you managed to achieve over the academy. The lack of infighting and the Ballots prevented the worse from happening." Lith replied.

"Maybe." Linjos couldn’t stop thinking about how fast Balkor found out their hiding spot. Actually, he found the hiding spots of all those that followed Linjos’s protocol so fast that the attacks happened almost at the same time.

It had several implications. First, it meant that every academy had traitors or there was someone close to the Crown that leaked the information to Balkor. Either way, the situation was deadly serious.

Second, the attack had been the perfect opportunity to destroy Linjos’s work, if not to kill Linjos himself.

’Why did they let it slip under their nose? Unless...’ He thought.

"Lith, be honest with me."

Linjos had turned pale, leaving Lith surprised. The Headmaster looked like a man that had just found a venomous spider resting on his shoulder.

"How did you discover the toxin? Did Professor Marth’s diagnostic spell work?"

"I used my own spell. The one we devised during the plague didn’t work." Lith shook his head.

"It was aimed to detect parasites rather than toxins since the latter fade away over time."

"Just as I feared." Linjos nodded. "Please, check if I have been infected too."

Lith pretended to chant a spell while actually using Invigoration on the Headmaster, who didn’t miss it requiring physical contact. It was the first time Linjos had seen such a spell.

"It doesn’t make sense." Lith was flabbergasted.

"You are poisoned too, but the amount of toxin is much lesser than the one I detected in the Tanash kid."

"It makes perfect sense instead." Linjos replied.

"A student may not notice the disruption of their own mana flow, but any competent magician would. That’s why they must have started poisoning me only right before Balkor’s attack, when my mind was elsewhere. I noticed being weaker than usual, but I thought it was because of the stress.

"Also, with Hatorne disappearance, the traitors have no idea how to adjust the dosage. Balkor’s change of plans was unpredictable. I wouldn’t be surprised by discovering that poisoning me and likely most of the Professors, was a last minute attempt to get rid of me.

"Since the toxins build up over time, there was only so much they could do. Not to mention it would be hard for me to miss having my powers halved in a few hours. I would contact Manohar and it’s unlikely he wouldn’t discover the truth, just like you did."

Lith felt relieved, he had convinced Linjos of the presence of a threat to the academy despite having very little proof and without blowing his cover. The Headmaster waved his hand, making four magic crystals appear at the corners of his desk.

He put his communication amulet right in the middle, activating a secure channel with the Crown, relaying the information he had just acquired and requesting the intervention of a royal constable.

"We need to have the staff and the students examined." Lith heard Linjos expressing his immediate worries to the King.

"I can’t do it by myself without risking to alert the culprits. It’s also necessary to have all those that failed the second semester examined. Some may actually be talentless slackers, but others could as well be innocent victims..."