Chronicles of the True Wizard

With the portal unceremoniously closed behind them, if Felix weren’t capable of opening a portal and leaving, he would have thought the professors were trying to kill them. Sinking into the snow past his nipples almost immediately, along with the winds that made it nearly impossible to breathe and pinned Felix’s hair to his scalp, even ripping some of it out, he had already lost a noticeable chunk of his health from the cold. The wind also carried with it chunks of ice and snow so dense, Felix couldn’t see further than a few meters.

The others were faring worse than he was except Peace, who seemed just slightly better off with a more physically focused build.

Worst of all though was Nova who suffered far more pain than Felix, despite whatever combination of materials she was trying to use to mitigate the cold. Her body was freezing faster than his and the way her consciousness was weakening and fading concerned Felix.

He pulled her into his Soul Space, which she happily accepted and just forced her to shrink herself down because of the lack of room in there. To protect himself from the cold, Felix surrounded himself in a Force Bubble and began generating heat within it but almost immediately dropped it. The mana required to hold the Bubble steady against the wind was ridiculous. He was losing millions every second and barely managing to keep up with the drain.

In less than a second of having been there, Felix’s skin was completely frozen and dead along with some of the blood in his veins. He feared icicles traveling to his heart so he stowed the frozen blood in his Soul Space to protect himself and looked around to try and see if anyone had a plan of some kind. As he did though, he noticed his group was gone.

There were visible holes where they had been just a moment ago but they were no longer there.

Looking around for a few seconds, Felix felt a tug on his sleeve and immediately realized what was going on.

He dropped down into the snow around him and used a number of Force Spells to clear, compact and stabilize the snow around them. It was still ridiculously cold in a way that threatened to freeze his flesh a little more every moment but, there was no wind and that was something.

Melody grinned a little and shook her head, “Well this sucks.”

Peace nodded, “Any of you have any idea what we’re supposed to kill?”

Felix sighed, “No but, considering they said they’d see us in a few days… we’re going to have to hunt for it.”

“From what I read from them, it’s worse than that. Neither of them expect us to actually succeed. They’re expecting us to give in.” Melody wore a grin of playful mirth and mischief.

Felix shook his head, “That was my Solo Combat exam as well, Auren wanted me to give up to prove I could.”

Adaline cut in and nodded with a serious and tense expression, “Shelter then hunt.”

Melody nodded along quickly, “Agreed. I might literally freeze my butt off pretty soon.”

They all looked at each-other one by one until Felix finally realized none of them could do anything. He thought maybe Peace had an ability or Adaline had some special bullet but it seemed neither of them had anything applicable to their situation.

Along with all the unique challenges Felix faced with his method of spell casting also came incredible versatility and harnessing that, Felix began to dig down into the snow.

First, he drilled a hole vertically through the snow that was so compact and hard, he was certain it wasn’t the same snow he knew, whether it was water based at all, he had no idea. It certainly looked how he expected it to.

His spells reached a dozen meters below them, then a hundred then a hundred more before he gave up on finding the bottom. There was plenty of room for him to dig down and so he created a meter wide shaft straight down and dropped down into it.

Once it was about a hundred and fifty meters or so below the surface, Felix used his spells to carve out the snow around him, shoving it up the shaft to get rid of it. He carved out just a simple room at first then had the others jump down and join him.

While snow was a great insulator, at least normal snow, it was still so cold wherever they were that their body heat alone wasn’t nearly enough to heat the room by any noticeable margin. Whether the air was thicker or just had a different composition than Felix was used to, there also was a massive discrepancy from the thermal mass he expected.

He had planned for that though and using mana, he began heating the room. Theoretically they could use the shaft for smoke or he could carve a new chimney but for now, they didn’t have any real fuel. He had arched the roof purposefully to trap the heat and although it took nearly half of his mana, he managed to heat the room up to a survivable temperature with spells.

With their health pools mostly stabilized, they began eating the rations they had been supplied which was incredibly energy dense jerky and dried bread. It tasted way better than Felix had expected and it wasn’t tough to eat at all. It was however, less than a day’s worth and less than they had been promised.

Felix ate just a small bit of his so his body had mass to restore his dead cells but nothing more, he didn’t need it for energy anymore.

The others, ate over half of what they were given at once and had to stop themselves before eating any more.

“So… we also need to find food it seems.” Melody chuckled slightly as she tossed her food pouch into a corner.

“Nova can handle that if we supply her with matter that isn’t super freezing.” Felix answered without looking as he continued to inscribe wards into the walls of their room.

The wards he was inscribing faced inwards and were designed just to thermally insulate the room, trapping the heat and separating it from the cold beyond as best he could using just the ambient anima. He didn’t manage inscribe his ward more than a couple meters though before he stopped. Feeling a wave of disgust that was strong enough to stand out from the normal aura Adaline exuded, Felix turned behind him and to his left where he saw her standing just a meter behind him and scowling at his work.

“What?”

She scowled and stepped forwards, “Erase that.”

Felix looked at her for a few seconds then did as he was asked, shaving off a layer of the wall to clean it. She then stepped forwards and began inscribing a ward of her own.

Stepping back himself, Felix watched her hand move many times faster than his did, not particularly fast in general and not through Agility, but as a result of her experience and Dexterity. The ward that materialized itself behind her hand put everything Felix had been doing to shame but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. He was ecstatic to observe and learn what he could.

As she moved from the first iteration of the pattern she was inscribing to the second, Felix took a half step forwards and examined the pattern. It took him longer than he thought to memorize it as he noticed something new every few moments he spent staring. It wasn’t just a shape, the line thickness varied, the distance between them was precise, their depth into the wall varied and mattered.

He couldn’t explain even half of what the enchantment did and barely a tenth of how it did it but he was somewhat sure he could replicate it.

Looking around the room, he measured as precisely as he could where enchantment would line up and carved out a few millimeters from the back wall to make sure it met up nicely. Then, he stood at the opposite end of the room from her and began inscribing the same ward she was and heading in the opposite direction.

He moved much slower than she did and despite his memory, had to check and verify with the original design a few times. Eventually realizing her subsequent connected patterns were different from the first. He quickly analyzed the three and a half she had finished and tried to figure out why they were different.

It took him longer than he would have liked to realize it mostly had to do with the shape of the room and the walls. Adjusting his ward with that in mind, he kept going and managed to finish two iterations of the pattern before she stopped and looked over at what he was doing.

So occupied in the ward, she hadn’t really noticed-or cared-what he was doing but once she did, she seethed. Staring at it, her lip twitched and she opened her mouth a few times but no words ever came out. Rather, she grumbled something inaudible then finished her ward which met perfectly with Felix’s, just as he had measured. Once she realized it had, Felix felt a wave of confusing emotions from her then she analyzed the ward Felix had done.

He stepped back and let her because there was no point in him trying to help anymore and took pride in the fact that she only had to fix 5% of his ward before continuing it and connecting the whole thing up. Powering it up with his mana from a distance, Felix was very happy she had stepped in.

Her ward was immeasurably more effective than his ever would have been and he really had no idea how.

Felix used his mana to add some more heat to the room-now that it was effectively contained-then brought Nova back out of his Soul Space.

She was reluctant to come back out at first but once she did, she happily bounded around the room and pestered Melody. Adaline glanced at Nova in complete disgust for a moment before looking away and turning back to her bullet but didn’t do or say anything so Felix didn’t really worry about it.

“So, we think this is the standard state of this planet and we have to tunnel through the snow for the next few days or we just arrived during a blizzard?” Melody looked around at all of them but Adaline didn’t really seem to be engaging.

“Whether or not the wind sticks around, we can’t even walk beneath the snow without heating ourselves up so we should probably figure that out first.” Felix looked at the other two to see if either of them had any solutions.

Peace and Melody looked at each-other then they both looked back at Felix who sighed, “I would normally just maintain a Force Bubble around myself-” Felix got a sudden outpouring of judgement and contempt from Adaline, “-and heat the inside. That hasn’t really been sufficient so far but maybe if I start with heat, it will be less costly to maintain it? Also that only works if we aren’t dealing with the wind.”

Melody, being far more aware of everyone else’s thoughts and feelings-playfully rather than seriously-began tiptoeing and snuck up behind Adaline before craning her neck over Adaline’s shoulder, “Aaaaadaaaline, thoughts?”

She sighed, “I can do better than Force Spheres but only one of us has the mana to sustain them for very long.”

Felix nodded instinctually even though Adaline was still effectively staring at a wall, “Right so… if we have to hunt for this thing for days, we’re going to have to move together then? What if we make a sled and enchant that to contain us. I’ll power it while we travel then we can also enchant amulets or rings or something for the actual fight, but only rely on those for short periods.”

Adaline’s sneer was audible, “Where the fuck are we supposed to get a sled?”

Melody slapped the back of Adaline’s shoulder, “Duh, Nova.”

The confusion that radiated out of her actually amused Felix a little.

They started by enchanting their rings. None of them had actually enchanted or modified their school identification rings yet and rings were second only to amulets according to Adaline. She got to work on the enchantments for those while Felix began collecting snow, melting it down then feeding it to Nova.

His familiar then reconfigured the matter into the shape of a sleek boat with skis on the bottom. Felix had chosen the design and started from the idea of a sleigh, a snowmobile and a boat then refined that as much as possible. What they ended up with was a simple flat platform that was rounded at the front but large enough to fit all of them two by two. Below it were two sets of skis, one large set supporting the weight and a set at the front that was mostly for steering.

They also fit in a pillar in the center made of a highly mana stable material to hold the enchantments.

That was the only material Felix had specified though, trusting Nova’s judgement when it came to materials more than his own. In hindsight, he realized he should have provided some direction because what they ended up with was slightly odd. He was confident it would work perfectly, perhaps even optimally, but it was weird having the bottom of the skis and boat use pearlescent scales instead of a metal or wood.

Around the time they finished with the sleigh, Adaline had finished with the rings and handed them back to their respective owners.

Turning her attention to the sleigh, she began inscribing a very similar enchantment to the one she had put into the rings but, completely different. The effect was identical, provide a shell of protection to separate and isolate the temperatures then heat the inside as necessary. The execution was unrecognizable though and Felix had not even the faintest idea why. There wasn’t a single node or pattern he could match between the two and once again, her knowledge of arcane forms was so far beyond anything he had ever seen, save for Kyrptos’ own handiwork.

He had plenty of time to examine, memorize and analyze everything over the course of the next few hours while he regenerated his mana, passively because it was enough, while they waited for the storm to die down. In reality, they had no idea how long the storm would last and they were really just hoping it would end. It just seemed too cruel and unrealistic to expect them to fight anything in the current state of the weather.

They had decided, as a group without Adaline’s input, to start digging through the snow if the storm didn’t subside over the next 12 hours. In the meantime, they melted more snow and had Nova turn it into more food and Felix continued to dissect the enchantments, or as much of them as he could.

Over the course of those few hours, the most Adaline interacted with any of them was Melody invading her personal space and her involuntary and uncontrolled soul reactions to what they did. Felix’s examining had her react with slight disgust but also uncertainty. Nova producing rations from water like a messiah had her very confused and left her deep in thought which only subsided a few minutes later when she turned back to enchanting a bullet or something.

With just a half dozen hours left before the deadline for them to give up and start digging left, the storm began to ever slightly-but still noticeably-subside and Felix decided to approach Adaline.

Walking over and standing next to her, not in her personal space like Melody but within her sight line, “I have a way to greatly speed up this whole process but I need your help.”

She didn’t respond in any way shape or form, not even her soul reacted in a way Felix could feel, which was a noticeable improvement over her usual reaction to his presence at least.

He continued-assuming her lack of reaction at least wasn’t a sign of refusal-and pulled out a Seeing Eye construct, “I used a few hundred of these to scout the world event which resulted in my having the majority of the items for a big global ques- Anyways, they worked really well but they definitely won’t survive out there. Any chance we could adapt your enchantment to work with these so they can scout the surface?”

It took almost a minute for her to respond at which point she just held out a hand and Felix dropped the construct into it. In reality the construct was brand new as he wasn’t willing to risk being failed for something as silly as using a construct from the outside. He had instead, had Nova recreate it structurally almost perfectly then he just had to tune and adjust the form and inscribe it.

Looking down at the construct, Adaline fiddled with it for a minute trying to open it up without any luck. She handed it back to Felix who popped it open and dismantled it piece by piece then laid them out on the floor in front of her.

He noticed her stow her bullet from the corner of his eye as her glare, shifted and focused on the various pieces of the construct and more specifically, the enchantments inscribed upon them.

As she did, the confusion on her face only deepened until she finally spoke, “Explain.”

Felix nodded then went into a basic explanation of everything. Whenever he began explaining an enchantment, she pushed him to proceed with a hand gesture so it quickly became obvious to Felix she was having trouble with how it all worked together, not what the individual enchantments did. More specifically, how the soul and the lack of a mana computer controlled the body and the enchantments upon it, and how it was supplied with mana.

That wasn’t something Felix was willing to describe in detail though so, much to her frustration, he offered a basic overview but nothing more. She pressed him with single words, looks and gestures and he explained a little more mostly because she didn’t seem concerned with how he was controlling them but more with how they connected themselves to the control mechanism.

Once he realized that, he explained his use of portals and Soul Marks which was when she finally nodded and had him provide her with all the blank parts of the same construct.

The first thing she did was rewrite all the mechanics of the construct completely replacing the enchantment that moved it and adding in a shell that replicated the effects they already had on their rings. After that, she refined all the other enchantments but didn’t change them in any significant way.

It was clear to Felix she didn’t understand how the enchantments that supported the biological eye worked but she understood how enchantments in general worked. That let her refine general patterns and remove nodes in favor of more efficient ones or remove them altogether in many cases. They were still recognizable as the enchantments Felix had designed they were just much more precise.

Ironically, despite the enchantments he had designed completely surpassing anything he had seen produced in Inscripticae, looking at Adaline’s refined version brought him right back to when he was hired. He felt like a child looking a the work of a master and realizing both how much he didn’t know, how much he was getting wrong and how much he could improve. It was an exciting feeling and despite not being a part of the conversation at all, caused Melody to giggle, which Felix ignored.

The last element she overhauled was the long distance communication portal he was using. This was once again an enchantment he couldn’t explain in the slightest and yet somehow, it just worked. It was orders of magnitude more efficient than his method of shrinking portals and he has just been happy she hadn’t stopped at just adding a protective shell to it.

Done with all the upgrades and refinements, she gestured to the parts for Felix to assemble them then he handed the completed construct back to her. She briefly examined it then nodded and handed it back to Felix without even looking at him. Taking it out of her hand Felix examined it for himself as she immediately went back to inscribing the bullet in front of her.

He walked away, ecstatic with the massive upgrade and more than a little satisfied with the confused fun and curiosity her soul was emanating as he left. It was an entire second step from abhorrence at the very least.

As much as he found her interesting, he didn’t care on an emotional level whether or not she liked him or what she thought of him at all. His burning desire to learn the secrets of the universe, grow, improve and generally rabid curiosity though led to him desperately wanting to learn everything she knew and he needed her to be willing to teach him in order to do that. At least until he found a way to properly steal memories and knowledge.

Taking the construct Adaline had created as a template-and after removing a bunch of material that had become unnecessary after her refinements-Felix had Nova mass produce as many of them as she could. He supplied her with as much melted ice as necessary but that wasn’t the limiting factor. She couldn’t transform infinite matter because it tired her out in the same way Felix’s willpower was tired out over time. Higher grade materials were worse and took more out of her but she got better every time she did it. It was what she naturally did with her body but that was much less taxing for her.

She would get better over time but it was unlikely she could ever become a full blown construct factory as Felix had once-very briefly-hoped. After having that thought and realizing she couldn’t, though he quickly realized having her by his side to fill in the gaps-especially in the situation he currently found himself in-was more than enough.

She managed to create another 50 constructs at which point Felix let her rest as he noticed her exhaustion through their bond. He had already started inscribing them as she finished producing the rest but it took him much longer so he was very behind. It took her a half hour to finish the construct bodies and him another 15 hours to complete them including inscribing, creating souls and binding them.

The rest of them waited patiently despite the storm having subsided just a few hours into his working as they all knew his finishing would make their jobs much easier.

Finally finished with them, Felix excitedly connected everything up to Mark then dropped them all into a Nova created bucket in the sleigh for the time being.

Using his Matter Control alone, rather than a Force spell, Felix was able to lift the sleigh up the shaft and fly up under it, lifting everything to the surface. He made sure to supply mana to the enchantment directly as soon as they left the warded bubble to protect the constructs and the sleigh itself.

Placing it onto the surface of the snow above, it sank a little into the snow but that wasn’t an issue. It was designed not to sit on the snow at a standstill but to rise up onto it as it was pushed and skim along the top. For the time being, he suspended it with a Force spell as they all boarded it one by one.

Peace and Melody both had significantly higher Perception’s than Adaline so they sat in the front while Felix sat in the back focused on supplying the enchantment with mana.

After ironing out some initial hitches in their plans and designs, the group of four began skimming across an endless and nearly flat sea of white in every direction. It was impossible to tell how far the horizon was because everything was white and reflective making it hard to focus on.

They released the Seeing Eye constructs periodically to either side so there was distance between them and because they could move much faster in the sleigh than the constructs could on their own.

Powering both the sleigh and the constructs was a lot of mana but not enough to surpass his manual regeneration now that the constructs drained about an eighth of the mana they used to. The improvement made Felix almost giddy and even more excited to spend as much of the break as he could diving into truly complex and advanced arcane forms.

They spent about 4 hours on the surface at which point Mark grabbed hold of Felix’s attention, There is a storm approaching approximately 37 minutes behind you.

Felix frowned, The constructs, are they being destroyed then?

No. I directed them to punch down into the snow and wait it out. None of them have been lost so far.

Felix physically nodded which visibly confused Adaline but he ignored her and addressed everyone at once, “There’s another storm a half hour behind us.”

Peace nodded and Melody looked back over her shoulder, “Any problems with continuing until then?”

Felix shook his head and Adaline just looked off into the endless snow, no response.

Melody shrugged and turned her attention back ahead of her where the sun was just starting to disappear over the horizon.

Damn, 4 or 5 hours are short ass days.

Creating a shelter this time was much easier as Felix punched a hole, lowered the sled down then they quickly warded an area just big enough to house them without touching each-other. There was no point in making it any bigger.

They melted snow, had Nova transform it into food and with whatever willpower she had leftover, Felix had her create another half dozen construct shells that he began inscribing.

As he did, he noticed once again the constant static on the ambient anima. It was a like an ever present buzzing sound that he couldn’t quite ignore and now that he had noticed it, now that he knew it was there, he couldn’t stop it from bugging him.

Without looking up from his enchanting, he broke the silence but addressed no one in particular, “Is there anywhere without The System?”

Melody shrugged, “Lost spaces and forgotten realms. Why do you ask?”

Felix shrugged, “Curiosity.”

“There are also other universes.” Peace added.

Melody nodded, “Honestly, it’d be just as hard for you to reach one of those as it is to find Lost Space. Whenever one is found, the gods snatch them up to use for experiments and doing things The System would disapprove of. Or more often, have conversations they don’t want overheard by System based spying skills.”

“I see.” Felix sighed, “So I can’t just find or even visit one then?”

She shook her head, “No. Not really. You know it’s funny, Adaline was just asking me about the exact same thing a few days ago, isn’t that right?”

Melody looked over at Adaline but she didn’t even look up from the bullet she was inscribing.

They sat there in silence for another half hour before Felix spoke up once again, “Any new multiversal rumors?”

Excitement raced onto Melody’s face along with a half grin, half smile, “Romar’s dating one of the giant god Utazz’s daughter’s, Uphi. Estrea, The Oracle of Existence has gone into seclusion. The recruitment is apparently going to be a little weird this time around but… you’ll see next dekad anyways. My dad put out a bounty out on Arthur’s head.”

“Woah, one at a time.” Felix shook his head quickly, “The Oracle, does that matter? What does that mean? Can they actually see the future?”

Melody shrugged, “Maybe? They do what I do and read anima but like… all the anima. They read the past and present through the experiences it carries and use that to predict the future. Estrea is the most well known Oracle for having foreseen The Great Hunt and The Lost Integration.”

Felix frowned, “Aren’t those… 100 integrations apart?”

“Yup. They were some of the most significant events that affected the entire multiverse which, actually makes them harder to predict.”

“So… being in seclusion means something she’s going to predict something big?”

Melody shrugged, “Possibly. She’s never made other predictions but she has gone into seclusion many times and come out with nothing. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Felix nodded, “The bounty, how much?”

“Well… Couple of things. He’s offering a planet in his domain.”

Felix’s eyes widened in shock, “A planet?”

She nodded, “Yes but it’s not as grand as you think. Normally, if someone True Killed one of his most promising children, he’d hunt them down himself and offer a unique magic item. Something at least Divine tier.”

“You’re saying a planet is worth less?”

“Much less. It isn’t even a particularly valuable planet, just some small D grade volcanic planet. The bounty is really just to send a message that you can’t mess with his other kids.”

Felix squinted, “So by offering just a low grade planet and staying out of it, he’s also saying he didn’t really like Talrain or…”

She shrugged, “Something like that. He was planning on killing Talrain himself anyways. You missed it but Talrain broke into our father’s vault and stole a lot of credits and a bunch of magic items. One of which was completely irreplaceable. Whether or not Arthur killed Talrain, he would have banished him from his Afterlife and killed him himself.”

“I see. So the whole bounty thing is just a message to the outside world to say even if I didn’t like him, don’t think about doing that to anyone else in my family?”

“Yup. More or less.”

Felix nodded, “Alright. Anything else I should know? Anything I should look forward to? Prepare for? How do the recruitments work?”

“Ask me about the recruitments when you get offers and I’ll walk you through them. Each one is different so it doesn’t make any sense to explain it now. Make sure you plan what courses you want next term and hand them in as early as you can, at least before the 6th term this epoch. They plan the courses but also go and recruit the necessary professors and they have to tailor their curriculum to you.”

“Alright, fair enough. I’ll take a look.”

Peace cut in, speaking up for the first time in a while, “You should also start preparing yourself for The Realms of Annihilation.”

Melody’s brows rose and her lips puckered, “Ooooh.” She nodded to Peace, “Good call. Forgot about those.”

He cocked his head, “You aren’t even going to try?”

She shook her head, “I might pop in just to see and complete a few realms but I’m not going to compete. You?”

He shrugged and dropped his head just slightly staring at the ground, “I don’t know. Haven’t decided yet.”

“Sorry, The Realms of Annihilation?” Felix looked at each of them, his face clearly displaying his curiosity.

Melody met his gaze and nodded, “Yeah. It’s a… nickname. There isn’t really a good name for them but they used to be called The Realms of Chaos. Some people still do but Annihilation is more popular these days.”

“Okay, what are they? Also, I feel like I have to ask, why the name shift?”

She chuckled once, “Annihilation because the realms are the single highest cause of C grade deaths in the entire multiverse, by far.”

He just looked at her and waited for her to continue.

“Basically… No one really knows how or why but there’s this place most people just call, Chaos’ domain, after the realms. All it is is a realm restricted to C grades. The first layer is a constant. You go in and there’s a whole city with factions set up and all that. In the middle is the entrance to another realm. That one, is random.”

Felix was leaning forwards now and had completely forgotten about the construct in his hands, he was way too distracted for that. Every level of focus he had was dedicated to sifting through the library in his head and listening.

“Once you get into the second layer, the first random one, the whole thing starts. You get a basic quest you have to complete and once you do, the entrance to another realm opens alongside an exit. Heading into the next realm, it’s completely random once again but slightly harder. There are a bunch of patterns to the realms too, I’m not going to go over all of it now. Once you exit though, you can’t ever go back in but as you leave, you are rewarded based on the last realm you completed.”

“I see and no ‘System saves your life’ there I take it? Hence the Annihilation thing.”

She cocked her head a little, “Yeah… That to but more so, if you die there, no afterlife. No System saving you, that’s pretty much dedicated to Eramith and don’t ask how that started because gods have been trying to make the same deal in their training areas since the school’s founding. The System seems to have just adopted the realms. It doesn’t run them.”

Felix frowned, “So it just shows you the quests?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Basically this thing has been around longer than The System has and some things don’t work inside of it. Some pretty unique skills don’t work at all and anything under Journeyman proficiency will completely fail.”

Peace cut in without looking up, “With some exceptions. Your class skills should work no matter what.”

She looked at him curiously but didn’t refute him.

Felix glanced at Peace then locked his gaze with Melody’s once again, “Are there patterns to the unique skills that don’t work? Categories?”

“Life saving skills which are so rare anyways, especially in the C grade, it doesn’t really matter. Anything that provides invincibility, impenetrable barriers, stuff like that. All of those will work by the way, just no how you’d be used to. They’re significantly diminished.”

Felix nodded as he caught on, “Instead of bringing you back from 0 it might heal you a bunch when you hit 10%?”

She shrugged and nodded, “Sure but it won’t heal you instantly and if you lose 20% of your health killing you, it just won’t activate.”

“Which defeats the whole point of the skill, got it.” Felix’s eyes drifted a little as he thought through the implications and reordered his todo list ahead of recruitment.

After a minute or so of silence, Felix looked back over at Melody, “When will everyone hit B grade by the way?”

“Not for another two epochs or so. Around and after our next exams?” She looked over at Peace who nodded in confirmation.

“Really? That late?”

Melody snorted out of her nose and Adaline released a wave of disgust from her soul instinctively, her first contribution to their conversation in a long time, “Well, it’s not exactly easy to find a source for literally hundreds of thousands of at least Epic beasts to kill around our level.”

“What about The Realms of Chaos or other dungeons?”

“Oh yeah, forgot to mention that. You don’t gain experience there. As for other dungeons… there just aren’t that many. That’s how most of our classmates will be leveling but they’re far apart and most people take time to prepare for them. Even Zeraxes can’t just wipe them out because he takes a long time to recharge. Romar could bust through pretty quickly but I’ve heard he has a lot of preparation to do before his next evolution.”

“What about just killing things way over your level?”

“I mean… you can but you also risk just dying. That’s what Romar will do, Zeraxes too a bit. Still, even harder to find worthy B grade creatures to kill.”

Damn. I was hoping to just grind out a few Hydras or something.

The storm will end at your position in 4 minutes.

Felix was a little surprised to hear Mark’s voice in his head, So soon?

It seems as though the storm follows the planet’s day and night cycle and only exists during the night.

I thought we were just on a pole or something. You’re saying the standard day on this planet is 8 hours long?

Approximately.

That’s annoying.

Felix conveyed the mechanics of the planet to the others and they all agreed to simply continue on, digging out a new hole every four hours to wait out the storm.

All the Seeing Eye constructs that had burrowed, except three, were now back to flying through the air as the storm had passed by them. Three had stopped functioning from the cold but Felix had made 6 new ones anyways so he wasn’t too worried. Theoretically he could also have their group teleport past the storm every time it appeared behind them but the others still needed sleep anyways so they had to stop eventually.

Also, to teleport past the storm every 4 hours, he would have to have Seeing Eye Constructs fast enough to chase directly behind it, which he did not. He could have guessed and gone directly across the planet but if he was off by too much, he feared completely missing whatever creature they were hunting. He was just hoping it wasn’t creating the storm around itself or lived inside of it because then it would be nearly impossible to fight.

Moving through the day time and burrowing at night, they moved across the planet as Felix continued to create and spread Seeing Eye Constructs. Every night they burrowed, he created another 6. Every day they traveled, the constructs spread further apart. Once they understood the storm’s schedule, he only lost another 4 constructs in total over the course of 15 of the planet’s days, or 5 normal days.

It was boring and uneventful and the same thing day in and day out. Melody tried a few times to search the planet using her instrument but without knowing the creature they were looking for, apparently it was nearly impossible.

It was only right in the middle of the 15th day that they finally found anything. Based on Mark’s calculations of the planet’s size, him and his constructs had explored just a few percent of it so finding anything was very lucky.

Breaking up the monotony of sitting there and powering the sled, Mark’s voice chimed into Felix’s skull, Construct 73 has found something.

Show me.

A short memory appeared in Felix’s mind and was overlaid in his vision, like he was watching a tv show. It started with the construct looking down he assumed because all he saw was snow but it was oddly dark given where the construct was, it should have been midday. The construct flew upwards and as the image zoomed out, Felix realized why it was so dark, there were cliffs of snow on either side of the construct.

It was like a chasm in the snow and ice that seemed to stretch forwards endlessly for whatever reason. Felix assumed that was it and intended on heading over to explore but the construct continued flying upwards.

As it did, he literally couldn’t control his physical reaction of leaning forwards with wide eyes as he finally saw the chasm from side to side. It was a few hundred meters deep and over 30 meters wide with a nearly identical chasm, parallel and next to it. At the bottom of each of the chasms-as the construct flew forwards into the areas that were fresher-were very obviously humanoid footprints.

Assuming similar proportions, that put the creature at 500 meters tall.

The sled skidded to a halt as Felix’s mana stopped flowing into it but the rest of the group were already looking at him anyway from his instinctive physical reaction.

“Well, I think I know what we’re hunting.”

Melody spun around even further in her seat in front of him, “You found something?”

“Yeah… You should probably just see it for yourself.”

Opening a portal in front of their sled to the approximate location of the chasm, Felix channeled mana into the sled once more and directed them through it.

He didn’t put them directly into the chasm but rather far enough away that they weren’t risking the wall collapsing and burying them. It was impossible for any of them to see anything from the ground though.

Melody squinted as she examined them, “What are they? Just… lines?”

“Footprints and the lines from something big stepping along.”

She snorted, “Nah. For a creature’s legs to cut through the snow like this, it would have to be…”

“A giant?” Felix offered.

“Yeah.” She chuckled, “Obviously that’s impossible so, it’s probably a natural creation or something.”

Felix gestured towards it with his head and crossed his arms, “Well, fly up and see. Just don’t take too long because the storm is just a half hour behind us now.”

Melody scoffed and looked at him for a moment, trying to determine if he was being serious. Then, she shook her head, took a deep breath and flew up into the air. Looking up, Felix just waited for her reaction as she flew up further and further until she was about a few hundred meters up and finally stopped.

Despite losing health from the cold and the possibility of, in her words, ‘literally freezing her butt off’ Melody stared for almost a minute before flying parallel to the chasms and following them out for a bit. She got about a kilometer out before she turned back and flew back to the sled.

She barely slowed as her body, covered in a layer of ice above her frozen flesh, crashed into the sled and Peace caught her with his stats. He placed her down next to Felix, forcing Adaline to swap positions so he could begin heating her back up with spells. The positioning wasn’t necessary but it did make it easier to be precise and therefore faster with the heat.

It took a few minutes for him to thaw her to the point she could talk and another few minutes to stop her teeth from aggressively chattering and making anything she tried to say, unintelligible.

Melody finally nodded slowly when she regained most of her bodily control but she wasn’t all the way there and Felix continued heating her up as she spoke, “Okay so… It seems there is a… giant on this planet.”

Felix looked at her then Peace, “What’s so ridiculous about that?”

Peace just grinned and let Melody answer, “Giants are… There are like… Well… They’re nearly extinct.”

“So it’s unethical to kill it?” Felix frowned a little, unsure if that was really stopping them.

Melody grimaced, “No, definitely not. They’re insane and should almost always be put down. I just… don’t know that we can.”

Felix sighed, “Minimum grade or level for a giant?”

“A grade probably.”

He winced, “Okay yeah… That’s high but… not impossible.”

“They have at least S grade durability. Normally a group of S grades would be called in to deal with one. They’re not too dangerous cause they’re really slow but… I don’t even think, if it just stood there and let us hit it, we could do enough damage to kill it.”

Felix cocked his head, “Really? Using all my mana, how close would I get?”

Melody shrugged, “How much mana do you have right now?”

“150.”

She nodded a little and thought about it but Adaline cut in before she came up with an answer, “150? Aren’t you a caster?”

Felix nodded, “Was. Not anymore. Intelligence is only my second highest stat right now but I detached my mana pool from my Intelligence anyways.”

Adaline looked at him like he had made the stupidest possible decisions and she couldn’t believe he would dare be so disgusting, “What the hell did you get that was worth losing that much mana?”

Felix cocked his head, “Losing? Wait… I meant 150 million.”

He saw the shock trying to fight its way onto her face through the deep confusion that plagued her as her face twitched a few times before she looked at Melody to see if he was serious. Melody nodded then turned back to Felix, “I don’t know… 5% of its health if you were perfectly efficient? This is a guess based on stories I’ve heard though, it could be way worse than that.”

“Huh…” Felix turned to Adaline, “How many bullets you got?”

She shook her head three times before she managed to recenter herself, “Not that many. You really have a mana pool of 150 million mana?”

Felix nodded, “Should be able to make it a lot bigger soon. At the moment though, 150.” He turned to Peace, “You don’t have some super secret ability hiding inside you that can kill this thing, do you?”

He chuckled, “Definitely not. Even if I did, no way I could properly execute it, even if I had the resources in the first place.”

“Well… I might have a solution…” Felix winced a little knowing how stupid what he wanted to do was but, he didn’t really see any other way.

It took one day and night, 8 hours, to follow the trails using constructs to map them and portals to move the constructs and Felix had expected the tracks to lead them to a cave or something. Instead, they led right to the giant.

Peering through a construct it was hard to grasp the sheer size of the creature as they flew around and looked at it from afar. Especially with the entire surrounding landscape consisting of flat, white snow with no distinguishing features whatsoever, there was just nothing to compare it to.

Opening a portal a few kilometers away though, Felix guffawed upon seeing it for the first time.

[A - Legendary] Ice Giant (Lvl 3188)

Not only did its level tower above them but the creature itself was like a skyscraper from earth. Not only that, but Felix was pretty sure its height would put it amongst the tallest buildings that had ever existed on earth. It was still hard to judge scale and it was only really possible because he knew the distance between them and Mark helped him make estimates.

Other than the absurd size though, the creature was entirely human looking in shape. It’s skin was blue but it had four fingers and a thumb on each hand, a beard either made of or encased in ice, it had a nose, eyes, ears, mouth on its face. Oddly though, none of it formed any kind of expression and looking at it, Felix couldn’t help but feel like it was dead. Its face was blank, its eyes unfocused and its mouth hung open a little.

Along with the gait it took dredging through the snow, it almost looked like a zombie and Felix seriously wondered if it was sapient at all or just sentient.

After giving Melody a moment to gape at the creature, he nudged her, “So why are Giants almost extinct if they’re so hard to kill?”

He had to nudge her a few more times before she became aware enough to answer and even then, her gaze was locked on the creature before them, “They can’t breed. The only way for a giant to be born is for the Original Giant to create them… somehow. They were a primordial that… doesn’t matter, they’re dead now so…”

Felix frowned, “How?”

Peace responded from his other side, “Rhonan was forced to a little while ago. Giants are violent, territorial and not willing or capable of listening to reason.”

“Oh, so if we kill this one… the number of giants in the multiverse goes down permanently? With no chance of it being replaced?”

Melody shrugged, “Yeah. If they weren’t so problematic, everyone would just ignore them. Like this one. On this planet that apparently nothing else lives on. I don’t see what the point of killing it is. The Original started causing trouble and even exiling them to a remote corner of the multiverse wasn’t enough. They started creating giants and throwing them randomly in every direction. As durable as they are, giants easily survive in space and some of them landed on planets wreaking havoc. So they needed to be put down.”

Felix snorted at the thought of a giant throwing giant babies through space and seriously doubted the veracity of that claim, at least as she had presented it.

“Anyway, this one is just here. Why bother? If we leave it, we could come back and study it or… something? What does it eat…”

Felix shrugged, “If we don’t, we fail so…”

Peace rolled his eyes, “You know as well as the rest of us do that not killing it is probably the point.”

“Yeah yeah but fuck that. We should at least try.” Felix grumbled.

Peace nodded, “Oh yeah, I’m with you on that.”

Felix frowned, “Really? Thought you’d be against killing it?”

“Nah. Giants are too dangerous. They need to die. Plus, you’ll harvest it after, right? That’ll be huge for you.”

Felix grinned, “Yes.”

Peace’s shoulders seemed to relax slightly but Felix had no idea why. He didn’t question it though and turned to face everyone at once, “So, here’s how we kill it…”

It didn’t take more than a couple hours for them to set things up, Adaline reluctantly improving the spell form Felix had inscribed. Otherwise, there was nothing more that needed to be done other than getting in position.

Using relative portals, Felix moved the rest of his group such that they surrounded the giant from every angle.

First up, was Melody who began to play a tune that simply instilled something akin to confusion in the giant. Its purpose though was to make it hard to perceive anything at all. Peace and Felix were capable of defending their own souls but Adaline was not and so she was located as far away from Melody as possible.

She began playing causing tiny ripples of gold to echo out across the frigid air around them and as they hit the Giant, nothing happened. They had expected that though because there wasn’t anything to perceive yet so there wasn’t really any way it would notice the snow in front of it being slightly blurrier. It was also really dumb as far as they had seen.

That was the setup required though for Adaline to then begin firing off spells from every direction at the Giant. There was no buildup and no indication it was going to happen. Instead, dozens of portals and hundreds of spells all appeared at once. Most of them were Fire based because they were guessing at its resistances and so, Fireballs vanished through portals and reappeared hundreds of times bigger, lasers bounced around and traced their way along its body. Cones of flame drenched the Giant’s arms and swords and arrows of Flame shot towards it.

The amount of Fire that suddenly appeared all at once was almost enough to cover a quarter of its body and caused the Giant to spin its head around and slap spells out of the air. It couldn’t find a source but with its massive club made of pure ice-too gnarly to be an icicle-swung around at the air anyways.

Each swing trailed a mass of air around it, enough to be just as harmful as the blizzard at night, if not more.

They were ready for all of this and everything had been executed perfectly so far. The Giant was distracted and couldn’t really see giving Peace the perfect opportunity to race forwards and climb his way onto the giant.

While Peace couldn’t fly, he could jump and leap massive distances like a super powered ape and being as small as he was compared to the Giant, he definitely looked like a super hero scaling a building.

Starting from the snow he jumped right up onto its knee then from there onto the other leg and back a few times, gaining height with every jump. Once he made it up to the top of its thigh, he waited for the ice club to swing by and jumped up onto its elbow, hiding within it to protect himself somewhat from the wind. As soon as the wild swing completed, he leapt around the arm and onto its shoulder which was as close as they needed him to be.

From there, Peace simply ran into position and placed down the object Felix and Adaline had created. He inscribed the main spell and she added the enchantment to keep it steady and in place.

All that was left was for Felix to cast the spell and so, he pumped the last bit of mana into his portal spell, connecting the core of the planet to the neck of the Giant. Having seen what it did in the world event, he had no doubt in his mind it would be enough to kill the Giant, especially when it was aimed directly into its neck.

As the last bit of mana filled the spell, he excitedly watched the giant but his heart dropped. Even before the screen appeared, he felt the spell flicker out and do nothing.

Transportation Facilitation Program

Violation Detected

The Transportation Facilitation Program was designed to accelerate the progression of the multiverse by facilitating the opening of portals across large distances. This Program simplifies the complex, arduous and punctilious process of opening portals with the goal of easing the transport of materials, communication and travel over long distances.

Detected Violation: Use of a portal in an attempt to transport a damaging substance onto a creature directly with the intent of harming it.

Penalty: Your access to the program has been disabled.

WHAT!? So I just… can’t open portals anymore? What. The. Fuck. If there were rules, why didn’t you tell me them before? Or give me a warning or something? Also this is at least the second time I’ve done this. Nucleus, why didn’t you tell me about this?

The Nucleus recoiled a little in his Soul Space, That protocol doesn’t exist in any of the protocols I have access to. It isn’t even… mentioned… ever.

Felix frowned, Really? Does it leave it out of the sub-Systems for compression sake? Seems… odd.

The compression runs based on a predictive algorithm so… It just didn’t expect that?

Uh…

The Nucleus hurried to add, I know it seems silly and unlikely but… I don’t have any other explanation, sorry.

Well, fucking… Was it a different violation when I destroyed The Mind Devouring Crown and tried to kill Erolan… but it was an event again so… Nucleus, can protocols be updated on a sync?

Yes but not all of them. If an extensive change to protocols is required, the sub-System will be swapped out.

So something else is going on then. The predictive model should have known what I was trying to do.

Grim chimed in but the hesitation in his voice made it clear what he thought about what he was saying, Maybe it didn’t consider Erolan a sentient at that time?

Felix exhaled through his nose, Maybe… Or it at least suspects what I did in the World Event and is punishing me. I’ll have to ask someone i-

Before he could finish the thought, a beam of fire resembling a laser melted a small line in the snow just next to his foot.

Oh right.

There was no good way for Felix to communicate the complexity of what had happened to everyone and they didn’t really plan a fallback for if things fell apart. He also now didn’t have portals to reach everyone else and collect them back up.

Using a Sound spell to blast his voice outwards, he wasn’t even sure if it would be loud enough over the small storm the Giant had spun up around itself, “RETREAT!”

Adaline’s spells screeched to a halt suddenly which was enough time for the Giant to realize Peace was still on his shoulder, just in case the item they had made needed to be moved. It reached up and slapped its shoulder creating a shock-wave loud enough to dig a shallow crater in the snow around the Giant and sink it deeper into the snow. Felix couldn’t see anything and had no idea if Peace had gotten out but Adaline was still nearby as the range on her spells wasn’t massive.

Stepping back with his right foot, the Giant swung its arm back and across the snow to try and swat her but before it reached her, a streak of black appeared from the hand and smacked into her. The wake of snow behind the backhanded strike completely obscured any chance Felix had of seeing them and apparently the Giant as well.

It scanned the ground for a few moments then roared up into the sky and began smacking its ice chunk down randomly in the snow. Smacking down, a massive explosion of snow surrounded the giant then it struck again and the Force of the next swing blew it all away again. Each strike, the club dug deeper into the snow until finally, Felix heard a deafening crack and a wall of ice instantly appeared to either side of the Giant.

As if waiting for the ice to break, a fraction of a second later a massive fish 200 hundred meters long leapt out of the water.

[A - Epic] Arctic Fish (Lvl 3712)

Guess that fish just doesn’t exist in any bestiaries yet?

It was only able to enjoy its freedom for a brief moment though as the Giant snatched it out of the air. It squirmed and tried to wriggle free but the Giant bit down on its head to kill it. Falling onto its behind, the Giant brought the fish to its mouth and took a crunchy bite that sprayed droplets of blood-that froze in midair-all around it.

“What the fuck happened? I almost died.”

Felix spun around and came face to face with a very angry Adaline and winced, “The System nerfed me. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

She looked at him like there was no way he could be serious and that she was disgusted with him for even speaking, “Look, maybe you don’t belong here if you can’t even get your own shit straight.”

Clenching her teeth, Adaline turned away from him because it was the most she could do. They were all stuck in the sled if they didn’t want to die and most of their health pools were seriously drained.

Melody looked at him with a raised eyebrow but didn’t comment. Felix met her gaze and sighed, “Any of you ever heard of the Transportation Facilitation Program?”

Melody shrugged, Peace shook his head and Adaline was busy being grumpy.

Felix shook his head in annoyance, “Basically, The System doesn’t like it when when people abuse portals.” He shared the screen he had received with all of them.

Nodding in semi-recognition, Melody squinted a little and cocked her head in thought, “I remember hearing about something… All I heard was that The System changed something about portals for Edras way back in his youth. He’s obviously figured it all out now though.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that. I do find it odd I was never warned about this.” Felix grumbled. He didn’t dare mention that he had done it before or any of what he knew about sub-System chunks.

“I’ll ask about it next time I go home.” Peace shrugged, “Never heard about this myself though.”

I guess it is kind of hard to abuse portals with a spell list. You’d have to embed coordinates in the spells and you’d be changing them constantly. Which begs the question… does Edras cast the way I do?

Melody looked at each of them, her gaze settling on Felix, “So… we can’t kill it?”

He sighed, “I don’t think I have enough damage unless we were here for half an epoch.”

A reluctant sigh echoed out from the furthest seat from Felix, “I know how we can kill it.”

Everyone turned to Adaline, both surprised she was speaking at all and surprised by the meaning of what she was saying.

It took the combination of both Felix and Adaline working together in tandem over the course of 5 days to finish everything they needed. While Adaline did most of the enchanting work, Felix’s mana senses and control helped a lot more than she thought possible, judging from her expressions. The biggest limiting factor though and the reason they almost ran out of time was Felix recharging his mana.

Without portals, he was limited to just the mana around him. Once he exhausted that, they had to keep moving or he had to just wait for the mana to equalize. Adaline wasn’t restricted in the same way as he was in terms of portals but she also couldn’t power more than a single inscribed portal at once, given how much mana it took to open one.

His constructs could still measure coordinates and he was immensely relieved Adaline had swapped out the portal just a few days ago with something else but he couldn’t use the coordinates at all. He directed all of them to return to him, if possible, over the next few days. They were stuck following the Giant’s tracks in the sled anyways and the movement alone, helped a little with reaching fresh aether for him to drain.

Luckily, it wasn’t difficult to keep up with the Giant. It moved through the storms and they had to wait till they passed and it walked faster than their sled with its massive legs but, it stopped a lot. It consumed an enormous amount of fish, not all of which jumped up into its arms forcing it to stop and reach its arm into the water to catch one. It wasn’t just its size either, scaling the proportions down, it ate hundreds of meals worth every couple of hours.

At the end of the fifth day, after having collected half a billion mana in a series of spatial pockets Adaline had created, they were out of time. The exam period was over in just 8 hours and they really weren’t sure they had enough. In fact, Adaline seemed convinced they didn’t.

Felix had long since come to a decision about what he would do if they didn’t have enough but he finally came to a decision on whether to tell the rest of his group, “I’m going to cheat.”

Peace shrugged, like Felix expected because he didn’t care about his grades at all.

Adaline furrowed her brow but Melody was the one that spoke first, “How?”

“My Pocket Home. I have a lot of mana in there. I care more about killing that thing than failing the class.”

Melody nodded, “I’m in. Can’t wait to show off the title to Fyrden. He’s gonna be sooooo jealous.”

Adaline frowned deeply and opened her mouth a few times to speak then sighed and nodded.

Opening his Pocket Home against one of the walls of the snow cave they had created, Felix stepped in and led Adaline up his tower. Starting with the Mana Engine and massive core he had set within it-after Adaline gaped at it for a few minutes-they drew out another 12 billion mana to be extra certain and stored all of it into more spatial pockets.

The devices were already ready and so all they had to do was put everything together which was, risky by itself. Any random spell powered by twelve and a half billion mana would explode. There was nothing Felix knew of that scaled that well and any nodes or spells that did, would be locked up in a God’s vault somewhere. The instability though, was what they were counting on.

Adaline specialized in spatial enchantments, studying the work of a professor on campus who had managed to dissect a small fraction of Kryptos’ enchantments. Spatial enchantments and spells were apparently nearly lethal even with just a few thousand mana in them if they backfired because unlike the portals of the Transportation Facilitation Program, they didn’t have safety mechanisms.

Back when he discovered them, Felix was so careful to make sure portals closing on limbs didn’t sever them. To make sure instability or the portal form being damaged wouldn’t be dangerous as he set up his transportation network. Now, he realized he was completely right to be worried, it was just that The System protected them.

They had no intention of whatever ritual, spell or enchantment they had inscribed to actually cast. The goal was for them to fail violently creating what were essentially, spatial bombs.

The bombs were about the size of large bowling balls and not stable. Once Adaline actually connected them together internally, they would explode after about 20 seconds to 5 minutes. They didn’t have a fuse or a timer and they were relying on instability which was inherently, unpredictable.

Racing towards the Giant in the sled, they waited until it stopped to eat then zipped around its body to the front.

It noticed them as soon as they entered its line of sight and looking up at a humanoid face over a hundred meters wide with frozen blood splattered across its beard was one of the creepiest things Felix had ever seen. Its eyes following them for a few seconds made it so much worse.

Reluctantly, it tossed its half finished fish off to the side and grabbed its club to try and smack them.

They just weren’t fast enough in the sled to dodge the club but seeing it coming, they were all able to dash out of the way and abandon the sled.

Felix yelled out once they were in the clear, “No more shelter so we leave whether or not we kill it in 5 minutes!”

They couldn’t survive without some form of shelter and the amulets Adaline had made just weren’t enough on their own. Especially not with the winds the Giant created swinging its club.

As the Giant began to stand, Adaline connected one of the bombs and handed it to Peace who turned into a streak of black as he rushed closer to the foot, threw the bomb at its leg then rushed back as fast as he could.

The bomb smacked into its knee and plummeted to the ground a moment later, as the Giant finally rose to its feet and lifted its club up once more. This time, it swiped it along the surface of the snow and ice, all of them watching the club coming and leaping or flying over it. The club itself would instantly kill them, splattering their corpses everywhere but it was easy to dodge because it was huge and relatively slow. The wind storm it created in its wake though, was as dangerous as the night storms on the planet, even more when they were close to the club and much harder to completely avoid.

As the wind smacked into Felix and tossed him back like a fly, he felt the entire front side of his flesh freeze solid. The freezing wasn’t too deep but the heat from the rest of his body was seeping into it because of entropy and when he readjusted or moved, his skin cracked and split at all the joints like dried clay.

It wasn’t far too painful considering most of his nerve endings were literally frozen but he lost nearly a million health. Considering it was about an eighth of his body that was frozen, it seemed fitting.

After regaining its balance from the first swing, the Giant opened its mouth and slammed its head forwards to try and bite Felix in the air. The move shocked him but it was just as easy to dodge and didn’t have nearly the same wake of freezing air behind it.

He positioned himself behind its head which was fun for a little while, dodging the slaps and distracting it but most importantly, he couldn’t risk it taking a step in any direction. The bomb was probably going to go off at some point and he needed the Giant on it when that happened.

So, as the Giant looked as though it was about to lose its balance by swatting at Felix behind its head, he quickly flew around to the front to make sure it didn’t step back.

As soon as he was within eyesight of the Giant, it reached up faster than he had seen it move thus far and tried to pinch him in the air. He immediately activated his Reaper’s Skills, kicked off a Phantom Step and blasted himself with a Force Spell.

The wake of air from its fingers pinching together along with the thunderous clap that followed behind him were enough to throw him off course, just as his Reaper’s Skills were expiring which made it so much worse.

He couldn’t see anything and had no idea which direction he was flying in as his body flipped around and spun through the air then suddenly, he was pulled downwards by a huge gust of air as his ear drums exploded.

He desperately tried to stop himself from spinning and moving entirely, his head already so dizzy he couldn’t process what he was seeing.

Finally halting his movement, Felix looked around and saw the Giant toppling over as its left foot and ankle were just missing. Blood spurted outwards, was frozen nearly instantly, then shattered and pushed along to make way for more blood spurting out from its severed shin.

Looking down, he saw Adaline using her white revolver to shoot herself along the ground as Peace ran next to her, readying the next bomb.

Catching itself with its hand and left knee, the Giant swatted down at them so Adaline tossed a bomb to Peace and shot herself backwards. Peace, with his Reaper’s skills active, was much faster and rushed into the swing, alongside the Giant’s arm. Leaping up, he tossed it at the Giant’s armpit before kicking off the arm and zipping away leaving an afterimage trail of black shadow tracing his movements.

Man, I can’t wait till I can use that skill more frequently. I definitely need to spend some time on that over the break.

The second bomb, was much faster than the first and nearly instantly exploded and so, Felix got to witness the effects first hand. The explosion itself was anticlimactic in that it was small and quiet. He somewhat expected 4 billion mana to essentially be equivalent to a nuclear bomb, instead it was just a hundred meters or so in diameter. A swirl simply appeared in the air like reality itself was twisting in on a point then it flashed black for a second and it was gone. Everything that had been there before simply wasn’t.

Air rushed to fill the void and provided Felix with the sound he was hoping for and the explanation for why his ear drums had instantly exploded. Luckily, his repairing them manually wasn’t an issue this time because he was far enough away but the rush of air was still enough to freeze over another 8th of his body, the rear this time.

Felix could only tell where Peace was from the streak that followed him and so he watched as he raced up to the Giant’s head as Adaline flew over to meet them. To keep it from swatting down, Felix flew around to the other side and began showering it in flame as Melody switched the tune to something Felix could only describe as grating and awful.

It definitely distracted him and the Giant seemed less interested in Peace running up its body but that could have equally been from the pain it felt.

Covering its eyes in Fire Balls and shooting at its remaining hand, Felix dodged out of the way as it swiped up at him and subsequently fell to the ground. Adaline in the air was fine but Peace was thrown off its body into the snow as it rolled over.

Unsure if he would recover quickly, Felix flew straight at Adaline as fast as he could and dropped down next to her. She nodded, primed it then handed the bomb to him immediately and he rushed off towards the head.

She leapt off using her white revolver and took up Felix’s previous task of distracting it. She didn’t have many fire bullets left, having used most of them in their last attempt, but she used everything else she had-other than cold-to distract it.

Flying over its chest, Felix slowed down slightly as Adaline’s spells caused it to turn its head on the ground and ran up onto its face. In the worst case scenario, the bomb would explode any second so he pushed himself and activated his Reaper’s skills one last time.

With his increased speed, he dashed up, avoiding its beard of ice, and slam dunked the bomb into its ear canal then leapt up and flew off to get as much distance as possible, as fast as possible.

He managed to fly a few hundred meters out and the bomb still hadn’t gone off so he switched directions and flew into the snow off to the Giant’s side.

The blood spurting out of its arm was covering and freezing a solid layer on the surface which made it impossible for him to see the hole Peace’s body had created, not that it would have been easy to spot in white snow. Landing on the crimson ice, he reached inwards and screamed with his soul, the same way Peace had taught him when they were hunting beasts and still trying to move up in Group Combat.

A moment later, he felt a pulse he recognized and plotted a path to it around the blood ice. He used a Force shield to carve through the snow and slammed right into Peace when he found him. Wrapping his arms around him, Felix flew back out and started heating them both with spells as heard a chattering, “Th-th-th-th-tha-tha-nks.”

Felix didn’t bother responding as they flew out and into the air just as a blast of air slammed into the two of them, freezing the both of them just a little more. It didn’t matter though, it was over.

Ding You have slain an [A - Legendary] Ice Giant (Lvl 3188)

Ding You have gained 24 levels in [C - Ancient] Reaper

Stupid reduced group experience.

Congratulations!

You have earned a title and upgraded a title.

Titan Killer: Legendary => [A] Titan Executioners: Legendary: This title is given to those who participate in slaying a creature in the A grade while they are still in the C grade, the rarity corresponds to the slain beast’s rarity.

Slayers: Giant: This title is given to those who have participated in slaying a Giant.

Felix immediately activated both of his rings, too excited to wait and watched a thick stream of white gold pour into one ring, instantly destroying the half formed remnant, as multiple streams of crimson poured into the other. The white stream was done in less than a second and looking into the ring, Felix couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed with the quantity of anima. It just felt paltry in comparison to the sub-System chunks he had harvested.

He was happy for the soul nonetheless as he would be able to extract at least some of its stats, something he could not do with the sub-System chunks at all.

The crimson streams though just kept pouring in for half a minute then they stopped. The majority of the body was still lying before him though and looking in, he groaned as he began moving around the cells in the ring however he could so he could keep as much of it as possible. He only really needed some of everything, not all of it though so he reluctantly disposed of what he didn’t need.

Even then, he couldn’t get more than half of it so the rest, he had Nova drag into his Pocket Home while he helped as much as he could and heated her up to keep her from freezing. It was long, slow and painful but the rest of the group stayed warm in his Pocket Home so they weren’t dying. They couldn’t split up the body because they couldn’t cut it so he was stuck shifting and moving it in tiny increments. Luckily he was able to lift it slightly but it took a third of his mana pool just to lift it for a moment.

Once it was all stuffed in there, stretching the bounds of his Pocket Home, they all stepped outside and Adaline filled the portal form she had been inscribing in the meantime back to Eramith.

Stepping out onto the grassy park in the middle of the campus, all of them fell to the ground in different ways. Peace laid down face first, Melody fell to one knee then rolled onto her back and stared up at the sky, Adaline stayed on her knees and Felix rolled around a few times, using the relative heat of the ground to help melt his body.

“Holy shit. That. Was. AWESOME!” Melody pumped her fists into the air before letting them fall back to the ground beside her.

“I…” Adaline coughed, “can’t believe that worked.”

“It only took 12 and a half billion mana.” Felix chuckled.

“Yeah but that was… fun.” Peace offered a slight grin, his head turned up just enough that half his face was visible above the grass.

Melody shot up into a sitting position, “It is such a bummer The Tournament of the Abyss is still on indefinite hiatus. We’d actually have a shot at winning the Group portion.”

Felix just turned his head towards her from his position lying on his back, “The what?”

Peace responded, slightly muffled by the dirt, “Tournament of the Abyss. Used to run in the second epoch of Eramith cycles for Gods to show off their recruits and show how great they are.”

Felix sighed, “Let me guess, broadcast to the world to attract recruits from outside the school?”

Melody turned her head to him and nodded, “And to advertise all the other sponsors. Like Raidran’s for you for example?”

“Oh, of course. What kind of events ar-” Felix cut himself off as he saw the tall and lanky Chancellor of Eramith step into sight in the middle of them.

“Correlation or causation that the source of most of my problems for the last dekad survived the world event when we lost a quarter of the class.” The Chancellor looked down at all of them lying on the grass.

Felix quickly sat up but Melody shrugged from the ground, “Causation for sure, we started the big war after all.”

He nodded, “Well, the happenings of events are not my problem. In fact, it tends to lessen my problems.”

Felix looked up at the Chancellor who was looking off into the distance, “What did we do to cause so many problems for you over the last dekad?”

He sighed, “You’ll see in… 12 hours or so. May I ask why you are all rolling around in the grass?”

Peace spoke through the grass once again, “Just got back from Group Combat exam. Ice planet. Really cold.”

“Really?” He looked at them contemplatively then cocked his head, “Harris submitted all your grades… 5 or 6 days ago if I recall.”

Felix snorted, “Son of a bitch. Any chance you know where to find him?”

He nodded, “Ask El about the campus bar. She’ll know what I mean.”

“Oh, one more thing. Have you ever heard of the Transportation Facilitation Program?”

The chancellor shook his head, “I have not. Is it a train system?”

Felix sighed, “Alright, thanks. We’ll head over there now.”

He nodded to them politely then walked off as they all slowly rose to their feet and made their way to the portal room. Asking El about the campus bar, she laughed but opened the portal all the same.

They all stepped through one by one and Felix realized why they were laughing when he looked around and saw a wood cabin with a bar, many bottles and two professors. Not a single other soul was around and he was pretty sure the building was either Harris or Auren’s office on the planet like Adaline’s mentor and Ked’s lab.

Walking over to the table they were sitting at, Harris had slid down and slouched into the booth looking very drunk and Auren sat across from him but sat with perfect posture and the same focused gaze he always had. Harris saw them and sighed, “What do you want.”

Melody crossed her arms, “We just got back from our exam.”

He snorted, “Took you long enough.”

Felix glared at Harris, “So, were we supposed to kill anything? Did you expect us to kill that thing or just run away and survive?”

He looked completely confused and taken aback as did Auren though he showed it less so, “Kill what? Planet was deserted.”

Peace scoffed, “No it isn’t. There’s an entire ocean biome beneath most of the planet with fish at least.”

Haris shrugged, “Oh, you kill some big fish then?”

Melody grinned, “No, we didn’t even realize the ocean was beneath us until we found the creature we did kill on the surface.”

“Yeah right.” Harris scoffed, “Nothing could survive the night blizzards on that planet.”

She nodded, “Right well. Ice planet. 8 hour days means it’s huge. What could possibly survive the Night Blizzard? What is one of the only creatures.”

Harris scooted up into a normal posture and shook his head, Auren looked at each of them in turn with a hard analyzing gaze.

Finally coming to a conclusion, Harris slapped the table, “Bullshit.”

The grin on Melody’s face only grew as she equipped the two titles one at a time and watched Harris’ face drop. Auren’s hardened into a deep frown at the same time which was less satisfying.

Harris choked on his own tongue a little, “Ho- How did you possibly have the damage to kill a fucking giant?”

“Great question.” She shrugged, “Does it matter?”

Felix’s face contorted in disgust a little, “So were we just supposed to give up? Do we fail no matter what?”

Harris snorted, “What, no. We watched for a day, you worked together to survive, that was all we needed. After that, we weren’t going to fail you for leaving, that’s what we expected you to do.”

Pulling himself up Harris pointed at Adaline, “You’re a monster in Solo Combat, completely destroying anyone you fight but the extent of your working with anyone is paying attention to them and not hitting them.” He pointed at Peace next, “You just do whatever-” He pointed at Felix, “-is best for him who has the most disjointed set of abilities ever and keeps pulling bullshit out of nowhere and also, sucks at working with other people.”

“Then there’s you-” He finally pointed at Melody, “-who barely participates, more with this group than the last, but still you do enough to be valuable and nothing more. You don’t even try. Nothing I can do would push any of beyond what you are so I just made sure you could work together and otherwise, I don’t need to see anything else to grade you. You all suck at Group Combat in your own ways-whether purposefully or not-and yet, you are by far the scariest group out of all the classes. I legitimately don’t think Zeraxes or Romar could kill a Giant even working together.”

Melody grinned and looked at the others to see if they shared in her excitement. The rest of them though, all wore mostly blank expressions.

Harris sighed, “Kind of bummed I didn’t see that fight but honestly, I don’t think it would have changed much.”

Felix nodded to acknowledge what he was saying then changed the subject, “So, our grades?”

He waved them off like he was shooing a bug then dropped back into the booth, “You’ll see tomorrow. I only have to present them to you personally if you got an S so… If I could do it now, I would but Kairune would… I’ll see you tomorrow, Melody.”

She grinned a little and nodded then they all walked out the door of what appeared from the outside, to be a large cottage made mostly of stacked logs.

I can’t fucking portal back… AHHH!

None of them knew which direction the campus was but luckily Melody was somehow friends with the planet so, she knelt down and placed her palm against the ground for a moment. A few seconds passed and an arrow appeared in the grass as the blades themselves moved and shaped themselves.

Felix pulled Nova out to fly Peace and they all headed back to campus.