Chapter 67: The Last Class
Jake taught his last class on a spring morning, twenty years after his first.
He hadn’t planned for it to be the last. He’d planned to teach forever—or at least until the Academy ran out of training grounds to rebuild. But standing at the front of the lecture hall, looking at thirty students who hung on his every word, he realized that the most important lesson he could teach was knowing when to stop.
“This is my last class,” he said.
The room went silent. Thirty faces, each one carrying the potential to save a dimension or destroy one. Each one looking at him the way he’d once looked at Professor Kael—with the desperate hope that the teacher would have the answers.
“I’ve taught you everything I know about combat, crisis management, and how not to destroy the training grounds.” He paused. “That last one didn’t take, apparently.”
Laughter. Nervous, but real.
“But the most important thing I want to leave you with isn’t about power or technique or strategy. It’s about one question. The same question I’ve been asking myself since the day I got infinite mana.”
He wrote on the board, in large letters:
WHY?
“Not why do you have power. Not why were you chosen. But: why do you use it? What are you fighting for?”
“If the answer is ‘to be strong’—you’ll be alone. If the answer is ‘to be safe’—you’ll be afraid. If the answer is ‘to be important’—you’ll be forgotten.”
“But if the answer is ‘because someone I love needs me to’—then you’ll be infinite. Not in mana. In the thing that actually matters.”
He set down the marker.
“Class dismissed. Forever. Go be extraordinary. But first—go have dinner with someone you care about.”
The standing ovation lasted six minutes. Jake stood at the front of the room and let it wash over him, and thought about a confused college student who had gained infinite mana and learned, slowly and imperfectly and with a lot of help, that the most powerful thing in the universe was the choice to love.