Old ruins were scattered about me, their faces covered with moss, giant trees sprawling from them into a wide forest that stretched as far as I could see. There was some light, but not enough to give me a clear view. I decided to activate soul vision, glancing around me. I couldn’t see any auras flashing in the ethereal world of souls. Good. For now, I should be safe.

  Yeah, right.

  Damn it! That guy really did that? Sent us into some forest through a magical trick? And it was supposedly due to the word of a certain individual? The Severer, was it?

  My new Master sure didn’t seem like a kind person. He was probably watching me from somewhere. So, I had to show my worth to him somehow. Not that I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it.

  Of course, I could.

  After all, he’d only taken me in because my dear Mother basically bought her way into the academy by gifting him a world. Who’d do that, really? And now, understandably, this mysterious Runemaster wanted to see if the disciple had any actual talent to his name.

  Fancy that.

  I took in a breath, grasping Beatrice’s handle to calm myself down. As a Knight with a set of Runes, I wasn’t particularly scared of anyone in this place. It was just that I doubted my new Master would appreciate it if I blasted my way through my opponents like a simple Knight.

  For all I knew, he wished to see my Rune talents. How could I show him that I was worthy of becoming his disciple?

  “It’s you and me now,” I muttered, stroking Beatrice’s surface with a finger. My sword might appear a simple weapon from the outside, but it had undergone a true change after my last visit to the blacksmith. She was a Runed weapon, one that could make any Knight here salivate with envy, but she alone wasn’t enough.

  I had to be clever about this whole thing.

  Finding a giant tree, I crouched low and went through my ring, thanking myself for leaving some of my resources inside. That was another lesson from Belfray. Always carry a good supply of things you’d need in case shit goes wrong. Always be prepared for your life to get messed up in this way or that.

  I had a good stack of magical leather with me, a bottle of ink, and a pair of quills. Those would work. Food wasn’t a problem, either, since I had enough to last me through the day. I even had spare clothes inside my ring.

  All in all, I was in a pretty good spot.

  Nodding to myself, I tried to place the badge that supposedly represented my survival into the ring, only to pause when the thing refused to be sucked into the dimensional space. It was like trying to fit a giant rock into a small crack. It simply wouldn’t fit.

  That was odd. So they wanted us to keep things on our persons. On second thought, it made sense. The only way to go through someone’s ring was to sever the connection with its previous owner and bind the ring yourself. The best way to do that was to kill the owner, but since we had a fine healer watching over us, that wasn’t going to happen.

  Okay.

  A deep breath.

  Good.

  If this was supposed to be my coming out of the rune closet, then I’d better arm myself right from the get-go. Sitting down on the mossy ground, I pulled out my magical leather and other tools. I still had my Practical Runes on my person, the utility types mostly, but for this occasion, I had to be creative.

  The possibilities were endless in a forest like this one. For one, I had a lot of trees around me. I liked trees. Using their branches barely demanded any soul energy. The ground was rock solid, though, which was a problem. Opening holes would probably take serious effort.

  To better articulate the rune sequences and prepare myself for any occasion, I decided to go with a limited scope rather than aiming for grand blasts. A small hole. A branch shower. A rain of needle-like leaves. Sudden vibrations from small rocks. That sort of thing.

  It took me more than half an hour to come up with about a dozen new Practical Runes, during which I witnessed a variety of peculiar sights. Of them, the firebolt was my favorite. It shot straight from the forest, a mile or so away from where I stood, then dissolved into a sparkle of lights that fell like a mini meteor rain. Then a lion’s roar echoed across the forest, followed by four low-pitched roars.

  These were, to my thinking, gathering calls from all the students who were familiar with each other. It seemed like those bastards had come prepared. That wasn’t good. I had hoped I would have to deal with the other students one by one, but if they came in groups of four or five… things could get a bit hectic.

  Anyway, I had about a dozen new Practical Runes. I’d better focus on those. And since the number was higher than I’d usually handled, I had to come up with a different way of utilizing them. As in, I needed better triggers than, say, pulling at my finger or scratching my palm. Instead of being physical about it, I decided to go with words. I attached one-word triggers to every one of them before putting the magical leathers into my pocket. I ended the mini-prep session with a bacon sandwich and cherry juice.

  It was now time to hunt.

  ……

  I trudged out of the particular stretch I’d found myself in and was making a silent stroll across the forest when I caught a flash of silver lights behind the thick treeline. There were three of them, with the one in the middle flashing brighter than the other two.

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  Closing in, I saw the owners of those silver lights. They all wore Knight uniforms. Clasped in their hands were swords made out of quality iron, but otherwise as normal as they could be. There was a cautionary feel to their steps, and they walked while keeping a healthy distance from the treeline.

  That was clever. You’d never know what sort of horrors would leap out of the forest, after all. Instead of taking that gamble, they wove their way through the sparsely scattered bushes, around the half-broken walls of the ruins, trying to be as silent as possible.

  Without soul vision, I couldn’t have picked them out from where I stood. There was barely enough space to squeeze through between those trees.

  Now, in a situation like this, a normal Knight with a fairly normal Manual wouldn’t risk a fight. If he had to, he would be very careful with his timing. Wait for them to stop for a breather, or hang around just long enough to catch one of them pissing. That would be the clever way to go with this. I didn’t need to be clever yet. Three was not that big a number.

  Still, I waited. Information scarcely mattered when you were hot on the tail of a fox. That wasn’t the case with the Knights. The Creator’s Academy didn’t just pull in watermelons from a random market. They picked their talents with purpose, and that meant something about these three guys was special.

  Mother’s teachings rang in my ears as I crept across the forest, a shadow on their backs as I watched them from a distance. I was just about to find the courage to close in when I caught something else in soul vision.

  Someone pounced from above the trees, down through the branches, and onto the fellow on the right. The blurry streak turned out to be a young man with perhaps a bit too much facial hair. He stretched out a hand just as he was about to reach the oblivious guy on the ground, who reacted after a millisecond, only to find a lion’s head clamping down on his head.

  I blinked.

  Did that hand of the hairy young man really turn into a lion’s head? I thought it was an illusion at first, but when the sharp teeth tore a bloody gash across the other guy’s face, my heart skipped a beat.

  The guy screamed and stumbled back a step, his two companions rushing with swords to his aid. But the lion-head guy wasn’t alone. From over the trees came two figures aiming for the other two. These ones didn’t grow lions from anywhere, but instead ripped with nails harder than steel, overgrown but smooth like a tiger’s claws.

  This time, though, the group on the ground managed to mount something of a resistance. They parried the claws and took their wounded companion by the nape of his neck, pulled him back, and established a triangle against the assault. Soon after, their swords began to glow with inner light, emitting a strange orange hue and making the weapons look molten hot.

  That was… less impressive than growing animal parts out of your body, but when one of them touched the tip of his sword to the ground and a great deal of smoke billowed out from that point, I was marginally less disappointed, to say the least.

  “Beasts!” said the one in the middle, whose Silver aura was thicker than the others, pointing his sword at the lion-head guy. “Done pretending, are you? This is your home, after all, huh? You like your trees and hiding behind those damn branches!”

  “Worked well, if you ask me,” came the answer as the lion's head around the young man’s hand gulped like it was alive. “Caught one of you like the blind deer you are. Now it’s your turn.”

  “My turn, you say?” the young man answered. “Should’ve gone for my head first, you freak. It’s too late for regrets now.”

  “Larmack, there should be more of them around,” the wounded guy said, one hand clamped over his face. “The beastkin sent at least fifteen students to the academy this year. We have to be quick.”

  “Numbers don’t matter,” Larmack said. “I can deal with mindless animals all day.”

  “Jooak, let me cut this one’s tongue,” said one of the clawed companions of Lionhead. “Could use some silence. This one could.”

  “He’s mine,” Jooak said, gesturing with his other hand at Larmack. “I’ll send that bracelet to Father once I’m done with his lot. He’ll be happy to hear I’ve taught the Breaker’s son a good lesson!”

  “Naive,” Larmack said with a haughty grin. “You should’ve called a prince or two before you take a bite at us. You have them plenty, no? Or are you a prince yourself? I can never seem to tell the animals apart from each other. Can’t blame me, though, can you? You all look too similar.”

  A joint laugh was shared between the human side of the equation, with even the wounded guy finding time in his pain to bark out one. The beastkin didn’t laugh, though. If anything, Jooak seemed pretty pissed, as he should.

  He came at Larmack with a sweep of his lion hand, saliva drooling from the edges of its lips, sharp teeth threatening to tear the guy’s arm from its end. Larmack swatted it away with the blunt side of the sword, smoke hissing from where the weapon caught the lion head. Then he moved in, jerked the weapon around, and drove its tip up through the gap the swatted lion head had opened before Jooak’s front.

  A claw came screeching into the tip and caught it between the joints. Jooak gave a grunt at one of his companions for the support, then brought his knee up and crunched it loudly into the weapon’s handle.

  Even that couldn’t make Larmack lose his grip on the sword. He winced, then lurched back while passing the sword to his other hand. If I’d done that sort of move back in my training, my Mother would’ve killed me twice and said I was being a fool of a swordsman by playing around like a little child.

  Still, there were times when foolish moves worked, and this appeared to be one of those times, as Larmack hacked at Jooak from the left side, the side that he seemingly had never expected to be attacked from. The sword hissed into his left shoulder, tore a deep gash down through his arm, nearly severing his wrist. Before Jooak could bring the lion head back into action, the sword had already made a deeper cut around his ribs and burned a painful way into the skin.

  That was the cue for the other beastkin to move in, only to find Larmack’s buddies before them. That was the problem with group fights. You’d see plenty of openings to latch onto, and yet it was just as easy to forget you were giving plenty of them as well.

  What followed was a bloody back-and-forth, but from here the result was already clear. Although the beastkin fought with heart and grit, they simply couldn’t do anything against those molten-hot swords. The weapons didn’t even have to be swung with purpose. Simply landing a glancing blow was enough to leave a beastkin smarting from blisters and heat.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, this should be the Inferno Sword from the Gallath Dominion. Supposedly, it could unleash an endless Inferno at the Celestial Stage, but it seemed that at Silver Grade, the only thing it could do was make swords hot. The Breaker, who was this Larmack’s father, was one of the twelve seats of the Gallath Dominion. He was a strong guy, according to Belfray, who had dominated battles with ease.

  Unfortunately for him, and for this Larmack, Knights who practiced my Manual were the worst kind of opponents they could face. Because being burned by a sword… didn’t sound that scary to an Undying Knight.

  But this wasn’t about The Undying. I was here as a Runemaster.

  That was why I waited for both groups to tire each other out. It took surprisingly longer than I thought. By the end, only Jooak and Larmack were left standing, and I was close enough to join the fight with a single jump. Instead, I planted my eyes on the tree under which they stood and uttered a single sentence with the trigger word attached to the end of it.

  “You guys really need a… shower.”

  Then, the trees unleashed a sharp shower down on the group.

  ……