Death, Devotion, Dissonance

'Well, if I didn't get good at a spell after hundreds of times of using it, I'd really be disappointed it myself.'

When Evin became confident enough to contain the strength of his explosions to a certain degree, he had been using it more often in his mock fights. Obviously, he never set it off near their bodies, since, after all, Evin didn't want to become a murderer, but he still found many different uses for it: disrupting enemy spells, distracting or startling enemies, gathering small bits of it underground to use as a smokescreen, etc. Just like what he did to the previous group.

Evin smiled with satisfaction… sighed self-depreciatingly and decided to stop gloating about his little victory. Beating those commoner students was nothing but bullying at this point.

He pulled out the map and thought about his next decision.

'That gray tower must've been the Palace, the place where the ruler of the island lives… Well, whoever this ruler is, he or she doesn't like people flying around.'

If he thought about it, it wasn't really hard to see why. Flying way above the ground granted too many advantages over the other students. If Evin was free to do what he wanted, he could see where everyone was, and he would also be able to harass them without end if he wished to. His mock fights against some students who couldn't fly were a prime example of how big of an advantage flying gave him.

It was probably impossible to consider such an advantage fair, so the Academy had to ban it outright. Evin just wished they would simply tell warn beforehand instead of shooting casks of ketricite at him.

Sighing, Evin decided that he needed information. He still hadn't used all the mana he absorbed from these two lodestones, so he got up and flew towards the Shelter, being careful to not appear over the trees. Flying was still much faster than walking, and the forest wasn't nearly dense enough to pose him any trouble with the act.

<Keep me invisible, alright?> he reminded the Voice.

The Voice didn't reply, but Evin could still feel the layers of Thought energy surrounding his body.

After twenty minutes, Evin saw a huge open tent built right in the middle of an open area inside the forest. There were various foods and supplies lined up inside it, and Evin saw Teouka and a short, slightly plump man manning it. If he remembered correctly, the latter taught illusions to the students. Around the big tent, various smaller tents had been set up and as Evin glanced through them, he saw something familiar.

'Hey, that's the tent I bought!' he exclaimed in his head.

The teachers had apparently taken hold of the supplies that the students themselves bought and were redistributing it. Thinking logically, it was the correct move. After all, the students had already prepared all these supplies for the test, so it would be dumb of the school to buy another batch of supplies. But even though Evin could see the reason why, he still felt disgruntled about it.

'I hope they pay me back for my supplies… But why aren't there any students around the Shelter?' Evin couldn't help but think.

He decided to come to the shelter, because he wanted to gather information from the conversations between the other students, but the plan couldn't really work if no student came. Sighing again, Evin asked the Voice to make him visible and walked towards the teachers.

But just as he appeared from inside the forest, Teouka noticed him and instead of sending a friendly greeting towards him like she usually did, she started chanting. Evin felt the force that bound him to the ground increasing almost threefold, forcing him to fall to his knees - a World of Weight. The other teacher also noticed him and Evin saw a gigantic ball of water appearing above his hands and then rushing towards Evin.

Hurriedly, Evin used Qanatohm energies to balance out the effects of Teouka's spell and dashed back into the forest. After he left the open area, he could tell that the two stopped attacking him as his body became much lighter without Teouka putting extra weight on it, but Evin still didn't stop running just to be safe.

'I think I can see why there are no students around,' Evin thought with a chuckle after running for a hundred meters.

"Are you sure the Shelter is this way?"

"On the map it's straight north from the Infirmary, so we should be able to see it in just a bit."

Evin heard a conversation between two boys, who were apparently searching for the Shelter. An idea came to his mind at this moment, so he asked the Voice to make him invisible and silently jumped onto a tree branch. He watched carefully as the two students walked under him and innocently approached the Shelter.

What happened next wasn't hard to guess. Teouka made them both kneel; the other teacher caught them in his water spell (which seemed to be borderline freezing from the way the two shrieked upon contact with it) and had the wave carry them away from the open area.

Evin expected the two to run away, but the two seemed to be much ballsier than he was. "W-what was that f-for!?" one of them asked through his chittering teeth. Or maybe they were simply too cold to run and just wanted to vent their frustrations. Evin could only be glad he escaped before the water could reach him.

"You two aren't worthy yet," Teouka explained with a smile, "If you keep lingering around, we might get bored and douse you two with more water, you know?"

The two students didn't need any more encouraging and hurriedly ran back the way they came. Evin considered following them, but decided against it. After witnessing the situation, Evin understood something about the island. The place was filled with all sorts of rules and regulations and the teachers were their enforcers. Evin was positive that every location marked on the map had some kind of rule attached to it, one that the students were unaware of, but still forced to follow.

To confirm his suspicions, Evin appeared just beyond the edge of the open area and shouted, "What do I need to do to be worthy?"

Teouka looked back at him and smiled, "The island's chock full of things you can do. Surely one of them will do the trick."

This was a huge hint.

"If I do more and more deeds, do I become more and more worthy?"

"We can only answer one question a day, sorry," Teouka smiled and started chanting.

Evin dashed away from the Shelter, a smile on his face. He started floating, and flew towards a certain place. Twenty minutes later, he arrived at his destination, the Tunnels.

Unlike the Shelter, Evin couldn't see a teacher guarding the place's entrance and as far as he could tell, there were no students around. But one other thing surprised Evin. He expected the Tunnels to be a series of underground holes dug by the mana-beasts themselves, but what greeted him was a stairway down to a manmade structure.

But thinking about it a bit, he could see why. After all, rat-type mana-beasts were definitely bigger than normal rats, but they would never dig holes big enough for the students to explore. If they could, then it could only mean that the rats were, at the very least, peak tier-3. Evin could probably deal with such a beast, but there was no way in hell the normal students would survive such an encounter.

But, since the Tunnel was made by the teachers, Evin probably didn't need to worry about an army of (way too) oversized rats. Probably only a nest of tier-1s and maybe some tier-2s.

<How much mana do you think you'll need?> Evin asked inside.

He didn't need to explain things to the Voice, as he was sure that it knew what Evin was planning to do.

<Hmm… Take three and convert it all into Seyethe's energy,> the Voice replied lazily. <Ah, leave some for yourself to create light.>

Evin nodded, pulled out three lodestones to do what the Voice asked him to, but noticed something weird. The two lodestones he emptied when he woke up had already charged up.

'Doesn't it usually take a day to fully recharge?' Evin thought as he brought out the stones.

He emptied a stone to see what would happen and, like always, it started to greedily absorb the mana in the air. Normally, the process would abruptly stop due to the lack of mana in the surrounding area, forcing Evin to sometimes change locations if he wanted to fill the stones faster… but here, the stone turned brighter and brighter until it couldn't any more.

"Huh… Guess the air on this island's filled to the brim with mana? But it feels the same as always to me…" Evin pondered out loud.

Perhaps he would ask about it later on, but for the time being, he had a task to accomplish. He created some light using Lumiaris and walked down the stairway.