Time at Seoul Academy sometimes flowed strangely, or at least it felt that way, even after he’d stopped worrying about having gotten himself into trouble.

  Sure, he’d had to have a variation of the “I want to be my own person, if you want to talk to Isaac/Viktoria/Tanja’s younger brother instead, go fuck yourself” conversation every couple of weeks, but it was usually accepted, even when he had to get through the entire speech and reach down into the deepest depths of his store of profanity, which had happened … oh, twice, maybe? Still two more times than he’d been hoping for, but nowhere near as bad as it might have gotten.

  So, eventually, he’d settled on time being his worst enemy.

  A lesson on magical theory could drag on forever, whereas a practical one could fly by in what felt like the blink of an eye, with him sinking into a flow state as he blew up wooden targets with increasingly intricate tricks … at least until something exploded in an unexpected way and everyone froze, trying to figure out whether or not this time it was something to be concerned about …

  Point was, practical stuff was fun, though Zillman’s prediction about how much Derek would wind up breaking had come true and then some. Though in his defense, why the hell had there been electrical wires right behind that wall? Had that been a practical example for what could happen if you failed to account for overpenetration, or was it just proof that stupidity could be found even in this place?

  Maybe. Both were possible, but Derek mostly just tried to forget that particular episode.

  Some teachers had started unspectacularly but also kept the expectations appropriate, staying at a level of excitement that they could maintain with the occasional high note thrown in, while others had started with something spectacular only to later regret it as they were unable to maintain the standards they’d set.

  For example, even though Captain Amos turned out to be an excellent educator for someone whose actual profession was one as radically different as a naval officer, the fact that he’d started with letting them “experiment” with the parts of an actual warship, albeit ones that barely worked anymore, meant everything he did afterwards had been rather weak sauce by comparison.

  And it most certainly had left his replacement with incredibly high standards to live up to when his ship was fixed, and he was recalled to do his actual job.

  His absence had been felt even more keenly during the discussion of interstellar communications, which could not have been a more blatant recruiting pitch if the teacher had been trying.

  In essence, interstellar faster-than-light communications could work either via one of a mere handful of [Skills] that allowed for it … or a handful of very finicky, very hard to make, pieces of technology.

  There were a few examples of what was effectively FTL radio that worked, but were highly range-limited and far from secure.

  And then there’d been the quantum-entanglement communicators, which used a pair of entangled particles that mirrored each others’ state regardless of distance, but were also utterly impossible to make without magic, glued together by spellcraft and duct tape, yet simultaneously being able to reach from one end of the universe to the other, limited by the fact that they only lasted a couple of years after creation.

  They needed some pretty specific magical and [Skill]-based abilities that the navy paid very well for … Derek had sat there for a good thirty minutes while the teacher extoled the virtues of a naval job. And that had been the last time he’d seen that teacher, the blatantness apparently having crossed the line to the point where he was immediately tossed out.

  Having the navy offer teachers for that class made sense from both the perspective of the academy and the navy itself, the former got expert teachers and the latter got a chance to directly pitch to potential recruits, but that didn’t mean there weren’t limits to what was allowed.

  Anyway, that was the huge fucking mess that was FTL comms that had had been sending the scientists who tried to understand them into asylums for decades.

  Not that that had stopped them from experimenting with them, of course, in fact, building “modern” technology without magic was the holy grail of science in many ways. After all, once you could build something entirely without the help of the [System], you could start putting the magic back in, layering [Skill] upon [Skill], spell upon spell, into the tech until you wound up with something infinitely superior not only to what it had started out as, but also to the previous, magic-dependant, version.

  All in all, Derek’s first year at the academy had passed in what had felt like the blink of an eye, and he’d learned literally nothing … or so it seemed to him, at least.

  At least he’d stopped blowing up stuff he didn’t mean to, for the most part.

  Overall, the “strategy” of moving from dungeon to dungeon had made it hard to figure get a good handle on how everyone had improved.

  “You know everyone else is partying, right?” Ye-in asked. “It’s an academy tradition, the teachers turn a blind eye to all the crazy stuff as long as no one dies or loses a limb …”

  “That just means there won’t be anyone else trying to go through the dungeon,” Derek replied. “This’ll take twenty minutes, tops, then we can join them.”

  Then, together, they approached the doors to the Noob Cavern. Dungeons were technically open to everyone as long as there wasn’t someone else using them, but the teachers also warned that doing so was dangerous in the extreme. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t go in himself, but this was literally the easiest dungeon in the world, and they were going in as a pair. Just because they hadn’t actually leveled up didn’t mean they hadn’t grown stronger.

  And, purely for the hell of it, he’d try it with his rapier again, trying to beat the place with the same exact “loadout” that had given him such trouble on the first go around.

  Risky, and perhaps even pointless, but he was stubborn like that. He wanted to prove that he was capable of overcoming problems without simply outpowering them, that he could actually grow … which, perhaps, was its own kind of hubris.

  After all, there was every chance he’d run into issues he was simply too weak to confront, that were beyond him at the time, that he’d never beat unless and until he improved tangibly … but future hypotheticals weren’t what this was about; rather, he had some golems to turn into gravel.

  The first room now held a total of seven of the buggers, the dungeon having grown during the past year, likely currently in the process of approaching the point where it would stop being able to serve its purpose of giving students a first crack at combat. But that just meant that winning would be that much more meaningful … assuming he did, in fact, win.

  “Next one’s mine,” Ye-in said as she stopped in the entrance, while Derek slowly walked into the room, rapier drawn, carefully approaching the line of monsters, heading towards the leftmost one; he still needed to avoid getting surrounded.

  The monster raised its right fist in anticipation of him reaching it but he launched himself into a sprint, crossing the last couple of meters far more quickly than it expected, leaping at its face and planting both feet there, kicking off it and landing back in his original position, before he’d started running, while the monster began to teeter, about to topple, arms windmilling as it tried to regain its balance … and then Derek lunged again, this time leading with the rapier, black fire rushing to cover it an instant before it made contact, allowing the length of steel to punch clean through his target. And the one behind it, the loss of balance of the first one having caused the second to get closer in the meantime, allowing Derek to skewer both their cores in a single move and then retrieve his sword before they fell.

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  Five left, and enough room to kite them all relatively safely unless he did something stupid … which was actually not that unlikely.

  Derek backed up, letting the golems come to him, then ran at them, leaping over the first one, landing in a crouch while swinging it at the ankle next to him, the pommel hammering into the stone with enough force to crack it. And since slate was pretty brittle, all things considered, the monster’s weight began to make the cracks shoot across the limb, and even if that hadn’t been happening, Derek dodged away before any of the golems could strike out at him.

  One minute and twenty meters worth of steps later, the foot was still attached, unfortunately, but the damaged Slate Golem had still been slowed enough for it to have wound up away from the others.

  Bit by bit, Derek wove his way through the five remaining golems, poking some, jumping over others, and, all told, making enough of them hesitate or stumble or otherwise delay their motions to scatter them all over the room … except for the one that had decided Ye-in was its target was currently trying and failing to get past the magic barrier she’d set up in front of herself.

  So he began the slaughter.

  Once again, he bodily slammed into the nearest golem using the exact same maneuver he’d used on the first one, making it stumble, but this time, he capitalized on the maneuver by pushing it over, then hammering the hilt of his rapier down on its chest once, twice, thrice before it cracked open to reveal the core, which a fourth and final blow shattered into pieces.

  His rapier flashed out then, a burst of flame covering it to let it carve through two more golems in a single motion, still leaving him with half his mana and three golems left.

  That certainly seemed doable, without spending any more magic to boot.

  A kick shattered the already damaged limb of the next golem, dropping it on the ground and keeping it there long enough for him to grab a large chunk of rock from the nearest body and bring it down on the fallen monster, shattering both his “weapon” and his target’s torso, putting it down for good.

  “And then there were two,” Derek announced, feeling like he’d earned the right to at least some quips, especially now that he had the opportunity to do so.

  He used his weight to topple the second-to-last one and then smashed it on the ground, then walked over to the final monster, which was still focused solely on Ye-in, and brought down his rapier’s hilt on its torso, repeatedly.

  Oh, sure, it began to turn around after the fourth blow, but by then, it was already on the verge of shattering.

  And that was that.

  “Let’s go,” Derek suggested, gesturing towards the corridor to the next room, and Ye-in strode forward, her usual buckler strapped to her right arm for once, clearly in preparation for using it as a weapon, rather than defensively.

  And then, she proceeded to utterly dismantle the golems, exploiting their weaknesses as casually as she breathed, tiny forcefields barely larger than a credit card manifested at chest-height stopping the golems fast, then similar fields were used to trip them up.

  Barriers at ankle height for the monsters to stumble over, barriers that were stepped on but then vanished the moment a golem actually put its weight on it, and monsters that managed to head in her direction were carefully redirected with further forcefields while the living stones began to crack more and more, with her shield coming down to shatter any that were sufficiently damaged.

  Of course, it was a mana-hungry approach, even with her [Skill] being quite cheap, especially compared to Derek’s hellfire, so she ran out after a good two minutes … leaving her face four monsters, the most intact of which looked like it was made of fifty percent cracks.

  All of thirty seconds later, the pieces of the last Slate Golem crashed to the ground, and that was that.

  Ye-in turned around and flashed Derek a broad grin.

  “You know what? I take back everything negative I’ve ever said about going back here. This was a great idea!”

  “Yeah,” he shrugged. “I figured if we don’t get [Skill] levels, there’s gotta be a different way to see our progress, right?”

  She nodded and gestured at the corridor to the next one, motioning for him to go in.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, they came walking out of the main entrance to the dungeon, covered in dust and in need of a shower, but both grinning happily.

  “Shower, change, meet up at the academy?” Ye-in suggested, and Derek nodded, quickly making his way back to the apartment, pulling up the list of available [Classes] as he stepped into the shower.

  So, this was what a year of non-stop craziness bought you.

  Well, a year of craziness at the academy and ten years of training his ass off in whatever methods he’d had available at the time.

  Yep. All these [Classes]. And a whole lot more that were decidedly lesser, which was why he’d struck them from the list that now popped up whenever he pulled up the list of offered [Classes], which had changed slightly to drop the “welcome” part.

  As for the specifics …

  An interesting [Class], certainly, but also one that felt like it would be easiest to improve further.

  A melee-combat [Class] that would likely do minimal to help him when he went off to explore space, and he wasn’t a huge fan of having “precocious” in the name, but it was still a good offering. Especially the part about him growing significantly faster at the beginning of every [Class] Evolution. Granted, it wouldn’t overall make him any stronger, but before he hit the point where he had to start “paying off the advance,” he’d be stronger than anyone else on his Level.

  Granted, that was quite an advantage, but it was also one that would only help in some situations. Ultimately … a solid option, but not one he’d take. Yet.

  Then, he had the obvious “mage” [Class].

  Excellent, obviously, and the perfect springboard for eventually switching to an elemental [Class]. Nasty, lethal, and utterly unsuitable for his present mana pool, even with all the ways he could expand it until he hit the Level cap for his starter [Class]. Hellfire was just too damn expensive to use as his primary method of attack, and he needed to be able to handle himself with this [Class] while he earned himself some good choices for the next one.

  And then there was the final option …

  On one hand, it sounded like it was a great [Class]. On the other hand … the problem was obvious, wasn’t it? It was the exact kind of thing he didn’t want to become.

  Ergo: nope!

  All told, he could grab any of these right now and be probably happy with it, even if the last one was slightly troublesome in terms of self-confidence.

  But, at the same time … this was what he’d gotten after a year of self-improvement. He was only sixteen. What could he get after a decade of doing this?

  Derek genuinely did not know, but it was certainly worth finding out, wasn’t it?

  Also, there was a party to go to, it was probably time to start putting the deep philosophy out of his mind.