Page | 12 eye; but a prodigy nonetheless. He’d always believed himself to possess special gifts. The Kingdom of Ranoa, which Cliff reached following a long and difficult journey, proved to be a harsh land. The food didn’t agree with him, the climate was severe, and many of the locals behaved in ways he found strange and off-putting. Still, he trusted that his sheer talent would see him through any challenge. He was a Special Student, the grandson of the pope, and the man who’d one day take charge of the entire Millis Church; surely that meant he was a cut above the rest. To Cliff’s surprise, however, he was embarrassed twice in his first year at the University. The first humiliation came at the hands of a young man named Zanoba Shirone. Zanoba was a Blessed Child, bestowed with certain divine gifts at birth. He was a somewhat unstable individual, true. But his physical strength was genuinely astonishing. Cliff had once seen Zanoba seize a man three times his weight by the head, lift him off the ground, and effortlessly toss him to one side. Despite his fearsome capabilities, Zanoba had enrolled at the University of Magic, where he studied spellcraft like all the others. By Cliff’s standards, his progress was painfully slow, but it wasn’t like a Blessed Child had much need of magic. In fact, some scholars theorized that magic had originally been developed by the ancients as a means to help common people imitate the divine powers. And, of course, a Blessed Child was a human manifestation of those very powers. There was hardly any reason for one of God’s elected to trifle with casting spells. Eventually, Cliff had approached Zanoba and pressed him for an explanation. “Why are you even bothering to learn magic, Zanoba?” “That’s simple enough,” the young man had responded. “I’m pursuing a goal that means everything to me.” Reaching into a box