Oliva did not care about Gilbert's attitude. Those eye-rolls were not aimed at him anyway.
But in that instant, he understood why Aislin had always regarded Gilbert as an imaginary enemy.
As Rute's two major disciples with real authority, he and Aislin had actually divided certain responsibilities between them.
Because of Aislin's old problem, the apprentices were basically under his management... and then the low-rank resources related to apprentices, as well as contact with the Mage Tower's Outer-Ring Mages, had naturally fallen under his authority.
Though he handed all those matters over to his own students, for someone like him, who preferred to travel further down the path of magic, that was already enough.
Those duties were enough to ensure that he could see Teacher Rute every so often... Rute was the rare kind of Archmage who insisted on knowing everything about the rising talents in his own faction.
His emphasis on apprentices was precisely why Rute's faction had never seen any particularly obvious internal disputes.
After all, within a Mage Tower, fair resource distribution was enough to let most Mages live quite comfortably.
Oliva was actually rather satisfied with the extent of his authority, but Aislin was unwilling to believe it... If that woman could apply her persecution complex to the pretty boys she kept, would so many disasters have happened?
Yet she used it in the most pointless place. If he truly wanted to compete with her... heh. Given how she had offended more than half of their junior brothers and sisters, Oliva could absolutely snatch the authority to distribute high-level resources as well.
But to Oliva, aside from its impressive title, that job had no real benefits... Well, it was not as if there were absolutely none. He could still scrape off a few crumbs from the