This Is What an Academy Is
“Kallion.”
Snap!
Rumble...!!
For a moment it felt as if the surrounding air itself had twisted. It was no illusion. The sheer volume of mana pouring out, laced with the peculiar nature of the Holy attribute, was simply shoving the illusions aside.
Flash!!
A colossal dragon appeared amid the light. Without so much as a roar he raised his head with quiet dignity and unfurled his wings, brow furrowing as though the approaching phantasms offended him.
“Grrn.”
His mana-blessed body instinctively chose the magic best suited to the moment. A milky-white circle unfolded before his slightly parted jaws, then softened into billowing clouds that began to scatter crystalline flakes like snow.
The crystals circled Kallion once, settled lightly atop my head, and vanished.
The chill that had prickled my skin faded, and the emotions that had been boiling past the point of rupture simply... drained away, as if they had never been.
More precisely, my thoughts remained intact; only the feelings that had narrowed my vision disappeared, leaving everything quiet. It felt a little alien, yet my tangled mind cleared at once. That was enough. Any further and I would have rejected it myself.
Kallion knew my temperament well enough to stop exactly there. Evolution had sharpened his intellect considerably; he had learned, without a word from me, how to measure his consideration.
“...Thanks.”
“Grrrr.”
He lowered his head and offered it. I reached out and patted him the way I always had, then leapt with mana and settled onto his crown.
Shadows locked me firmly in place so I would not fall. Only then did he lift his head. Altitude surged; blood seemed to rush downward through my entire body, but I adjusted almost at once.
“Let’s go.”
“Grrrrung!!!”
His body had grown enormous and he now possessed true intelligence, yet the familiar feel remained. Wings spread and he climbed into the sky. In moments the broad forest panorama filled my sight.
Only then could I take in the strangeness of the place at a single glance.
Like a game field, the artificial dungeon’s interior divided itself into zones, each a completely different world.
From the ground only the immediate surroundings had been visible; seeing everything so clearly now made the limits of holograms and illusions obvious. The effects were probably set to flow only within designated areas per zone.
Otherwise managing this vast space one patch at a time would have been impossible. The clear view was welcome—and so were the figures tumbling about here and there.
My mind had calmed, yet I felt no urge to reverse a decision already made. I had summoned Kallion; I would confirm his new capabilities thoroughly.
“Prepare.”
“Grrng.”
Magic circles rose around us at his reply. Every milky-white array was familiar—ones I had drawn until my hands cracked when I was desperately trying to learn magic.
The most basic non-attribute general-purpose striking magic, not even ranked as first-tier.
Force.
A spell that converts mana into mass-bearing energy capable of physical force. The first magic any mage learns.
I never managed to cast it myself, but the byproduct—skillful control of mana—left me with no regrets.
Kallion gathered and compacted the energy of Force into small solid spheres, spun them with mana, and loaded them into further Force arrays. The process looked no different from an artilleryman preparing cannon.
Dozens, then hundreds, deployed across the sky at once. Even with my mana on loan and the boost from Subjugator, the manifestation was abnormal.
A mystery that even a great mage’s talent could barely realize after years of study and effort—this dragon had made it his own less than a day after learning magic.
True, the target was the most elementary of elementary spells, but I suspected that was only a matter of time. Performing this without prior study already marked him a monster.
No wonder dragons in novels grow so arrogant.
They treat the wide sky as their own backyard. Magic is as natural as breath; things others would call miracles or disasters they wield as if ordinary.
Calling it a mere racial difference felt far too unfair.
Yet my previous life had been little different. Born rich and you are blessed for life. Abandoned in some wretched place and you worry about surviving today rather than dreaming of tomorrow.
In that sense this world is generous. Struggle hard enough and you can still shine. Someone in my old life once said effort itself is a talent.
That is both true and false.
But at least here, anyone who refuses to cage themselves inside visible results and keeps working will look talented to others. Exactly like me.
“Aim.”
Whoosh!
Concentrated mana locked onto every target. Hologram beasts, watching students—nothing escaped the lock.
Buried under illusions and holograms so you cannot see? No such thing.
The skill Dragon Eyes, newly gained through evolution, pierces falsehood and discerns truth. Layer mana atop it and a secondary pressure effect appears as well.
Hum!
The peculiarity of Kallion’s prepared magic was the sparkling energy threaded through each concentration of mana.
It contrasted with ordinary mana yet felt alien—clearly akin to the power called holy force. Akin, yet fundamentally different from what priests wield. That had to be the trait Holy.
If forced to classify it, since a dragon used it, perhaps Dragon Holy Power?
Priests of the Holy See and the churches would probably foam at the mouth, declare it a new holy force, and demand investigation.
Or brand it heresy and try to purge it. Either way, friction with church-related people was guaranteed.
Holy, at its root, means sacred and pure.
Yet the Holy seated in Kallion’s trait felt closer to divine nature—aptitude or essence of a god—than to mere sanctity.
I first suspected it the moment I felt his power. Certainty came only moments ago.
When the vomit I had spewed vanished cleanly I assumed purification by holy force. Time proved otherwise.
Not purification—erasure. Rejection and expulsion of foreign matter.
True purification would have erased the lingering taste of bile in my mouth. Purification corrects impurity and distortion; projected inside a body it rarely harms unless something exceptional intervenes.
He had not done so—more precisely, could not—because he himself sensed he must not turn that power on my body.
After thinking it through I concluded that Kallion’s trait Holy is fundamentally aggressive.
Had he applied the same principle he used on the floor to me, the organ producing the gastric juices would have been recognized as the “target” and removed.
My stomach would have been ravaged by that holy force and either vanished or burst.
The magic just now worked the same way. Excessive emotion gnawing at reason was judged impurity and calmed—by pushing the emotion out. I counted myself lucky it had not been removal.
In short, if Kallion ever chose to, he could erase a person’s mental image as easily as breathing.
Raising his intelligence and giving him independent thought had been a masterstroke after all.
I shook off the chilling hypothesis, reached out, and reshaped the shadow from sword to bow. Aiming carefully at a target Kallion was not covering, I nocked an arrow and quietly held my breath.
Wingbeats rocked us hard, yet my aim barely wavered. That, too, had to be the skill Riding.
Twang.
The instant the target was fully acquired I released the string.
Whoooosh!!
Watching the massive lumps of mana scatter sparkling light as they fell in every direction, I found myself thinking, with odd detachment, that they were as beautiful as shooting stars.
Yet one must remember: what people call shooting stars are only secondary phenomena—celestial bodies burning as they enter atmosphere.
If the beautiful trail of self-immolating light survives to reach the ground, beauty becomes catastrophe.
“...!!”
“...?!”
The violent roar of wind buried the screams below. I could not hear the words, but the panic was plain—bodies scrambling to escape the sudden apocalypse descending upon them.
The natural reaction. Anyone with even a scrap of magical understanding would know this was no illusion but a genuine attack.
And those who did not?
BOOOOOOM!!!
Caught in the blast and immediately retired. Skin tore from the shockwave alone; they bled, bounced, then oxidized into light and vanished beyond the barrier. Proof the crystals functioned properly.
It fell short of the Third Arena, yet this place was built to comparable standards.
Where the Third Arena existed for overwhelming, realistic combat, the Second focused on varied examinations.
That made it capable of handling almost any contingency; a rampage of this scale could be treated as a child’s tantrum. Indeed, the vast crater left by Kallion’s strike was already knitting itself shut.
“Next.”
“Grrung!!”
The place was wide, and full of well-built fools who possessed neither resolve nor desperate will. More would keep arriving; five hours would never be enough.
“Keep firing.”
Whoosh.
Magic deployed again—more refined, more polished than the first volley. Who would still call this basic?
In form it now resembled first-tier Magic Missile. In power and destructive force it far exceeded it. All of it possible only because of overwhelming stats—a pure cheat.
BOOM! Clang!!
Of course the overwhelming factor was pure mana volume; the spell structure itself remained simple. Soon opponents appeared who not only dodged but intercepted or even reversed the attacks.
“Oh?”
The first strike had been a surprise, so they allowed it. Once it repeated they recovered composure with impressive speed. Good. These were students of Sunrise Academy, the place that gathered only the best. Refusing to settle and thrashing about like this was exactly what they should do.
Why do people only show ingenuity when driven into a corner? If they simply performed well from the start I would not have to go this insane and everything would run smoothly.
Whoooosh!!
I deflected a beam of fire aimed at me with a shadow-forged shield while Kallion chanted and loosed a mana cannonball. Mid-flight a green flame struck it and melted the projectile as though it were wax.
A familiar attack. Looking down I saw a red-haired woman astride a burning carriage charging straight toward us.
That woman from before.
The lunatic who would have rammed the castle wall carriage and all if Riri had not raised a barrier. She had been under mental contamination then, yet early-stage contamination only twists key words.
Therefore her actions and the words she spat that day were not far from her true thoughts. If anything, they were the raw, unvarnished version of her.
“<...O Sun, punish the sinner>! <Rising Thorn>!!”
As she chanted a burning whip sprang from her hand. She seized it without hesitation and swung with force enough to tear everything apart. I did not dodge.
More precisely, I ignored the whip that pretended to aim at me while actually lashing toward Kallion.
Crack!!
“<Burst>!”
BOOOOOOM!!!!
The whip struck and concurrent magic detonated the flames against Kallion’s wing. As if that were not enough, the exploding whip writhed like a living thing and began to constrict his body.
This was no first-time technique. It had to be her original combat style. She seemed to handle summons; I had assumed she abandoned the idea because it was not in the lectures, but she had simply taken this course first.
“Impressive.”
“...!”
When the expanded flames died, her pupils trembled violently at the sight of me standing completely unharmed.
I had simply reinforced the shadows for an instant. Kallion, for a slightly different reason, had no need of such measures. More precisely, he had become that way.
“Grrung.”
Sparkling mana rose from the scales covering his skin. In the thin flow of power that lightly sheathed him, the flame whip vanished without a trace.
Skill Primordial Existence.
Transformed from the reverse scale, the skill is brutally simple.
Anti-magic.
Born under mana’s blessing and able to wield magic as naturally as breath, dragons were strong. Living things evolve to face natural enemies. For creatures called the strongest, what enemy could there be?
Their own kind.
Claws and fangs evolved to counter fellow dragons tear and shear magic; scales developed the innate ability to reject, repel, and even absorb mana to harden further.
Maximizing that function under the name of a skill is the power of Primordial Existence.
“Th-that...”
“Kallion.”
I centered myself at once. Understanding my will instantly, he spun. Even on the ground his specialty had been the elegant whip-like strike of his tail.
That had not changed after he gained magic. No—because he could use magic, it had grown stronger still.
Fwoosh!!
A magic circle bloomed from his tail and brilliant golden flames erupted. The form differed, yet the appearance itself closely resembled the woman’s <Rising Thorn>.
What I had once thought monstrous when watching Riri, Kallion now recreated on the spot.
BOOM!!!
“...Kyaaaaaak!!!”
The golden-flame-wrapped tail smashed the carriage. Half-destroyed, it rocked violently; the fire-horses began to scatter. She screamed at the impact, yet her yellow eyes never left me.
Staggering, she still seized the mana reins. The unstable horses solidified into clear form once more.
“<Orbit>.”
At the short chant, magic circles ringed the carriage. I frowned.
Peculiar arrays alone would have been one thing; these took the shape of the sun and began to blaze.
“Solar Chariot.”
Anyone with even a passing interest in Greco-Roman myth knows the name. Even outside pure myth, anything tied so directly to the sun appears constantly in secondary works and subculture.
Its presence was like a halo; the figure wreathed in searing heat was the very image of the chariot that carries the sun.
This world, close to a parallel Earth, possesses its own myths.
Here the Solar Chariot belongs not to Apollo or Helios but to the priests of the Church of the Radiant Sun—a strategic weapon and magic deployed when they march to war for their chief god Astral.
In other words, this woman had obtained, by contract or some other means, something equivalent to the Church’s Solar Chariot.
“...Nice.”
So A-class was not merely for show. That venom. I liked it. Yes—that was normal. Broken yet refusing to collapse, rising to challenge again. She had been startled that her attack failed, but she did not quit.
If the previous strike was insufficient, simply bring greater firepower.
She was executing that principle perfectly. Worlds apart from the name-only S-class coward I had seen earlier. Still, there had to be a reason she was placed in A rather than S.
Personality, for instance.
However many elites this place produces, it remains a school. Raise a talent only for that talent’s twisted nature to turn them into a villain, and all the effort is wasted.
Full venom means fierce obsession with something that must be achieved. That same obsession makes one the easiest to break when faced with something overwhelmingly greater than the goal.
I know better than anyone how despicable a desperate human can become.
So let us experiment. Even if an unbeatable opponent stands before her no matter how much firepower she adds, even if unbearable pain thoroughly shatters and torments her—
will she truly refuse to give up?
“Kallion.”
BOOOOOOM!!!
At my call he charged the oncoming solar chariot without hesitation. Though forced sliding backward he held. Heat that seemed ready to melt the surroundings could not pierce his scales or skin.
Golden mana sparked from his body, slowly taking the shape of a fierce dragon before sinking back into him. His sleek frame thickened; clear golden light blazed from his dragon eyes.
The effect of Dragon Battle Qi, born from the transformation of dragon blood.
Where Dragon Blood is simple physical enhancement that awakens the dragon’s blood within the body through mana, Dragon Battle Qi sits one conceptual tier higher.
It is the crystallization of the rough power dragons forged for direct combat—reshaping the body into a form more suited to battle while strengthening it.
The same applies to mana.
“GRAAAAAAAAAA---------!!!!”
With the roar the golden mana flared even brighter. Flames around him died at once. The quantity of mana had not increased; the amount invested in Dragon Battle Qi had actually reduced it.
Quality, however, had soared far beyond.
“Keuk....!!”
Gritting her teeth as if refusing to yield, she controlled the carriage’s mana through the reins. Simple firepower would lose, so she switched to technique? Not a bad choice—above all, a realistic one.
Bashing your head against an unbreakable wall only breaks your own forehead.
Kallion continued firing in that state. Where earlier attacks had been magical bombardment, these were miniaturized for greater speed and precision.
They finally looked about the size of ordinary mages’ Magic Missile. The destructive power packed inside remained unchanged.
Bang! Kagagagang!!! Boom!!!
“Keueuk, kahak...!”
Under the relentless barrage she finally reached the point where she could no longer maintain the magic and vomited blood. That crossed firmly into the realm of pain—and because I had been continuously lending mana to Kallion, the system judged it my attack.
“.......!?!?!”
A silent scream rang through the air. Clutching the place where her heart lay, she desperately endured the agony while still moving mana—yet a mana bullet slipped through that brief gap and shattered the sturdy solar chariot.
“...Ah.”
Her yellow eyes widened. Was the mark of the breaking chariot that precious to her? Her face twisted more savagely than when she had been enduring pain.
“I’ll kill you...!”
Thick killing intent coated the words, yet the focus in her eyes had long since blurred. It was not aimed at me. It was as though she saw someone else entirely in my place.
I disliked that. Running along Kallion’s body I formed a shadow staff and charged. She answered by forging a flame sword and swinging.
Clang!!! Thud!
One exchange. That was all it took for her sword to shatter—proof her concentration had already slipped. I reshaped the staff into a gauntlet, slipped past the simple fire-wrapped fist she threw, and drove a heavy blow into her abdomen.
“Keok....!!!”
Even while spilling a mixture of blood and saliva, the heart that had refused to break was shaken by something other than me. Watching her dominated by emotions she herself had created, I felt my interest cool.
So this is as far as it goes.
As her eyelids slowly closed, consciousness carved away by my final strike, the flames of the solar chariot died. I caught her by the collar so she would not fall.
“Tsk.”
I had deliberately held her, yet the crystal on her chest sparkled and signaled. Combat incapacity. An instant later light wrapped her body and she vanished.
With the source of the mana gone, the heat that had scorched the air disappeared as if it had never existed.
“...Huu.”
I drew a deep breath and let it out. The excitement of moments ago cooled as though it had been a lie. Not Kallion’s doing—simply how I felt.
The twisted heart born from the gap between previous life and present gradually settled back into place. Yes. This is not a battlefield. There is no need for me to burn like this, and tormenting them this way holds no meaning.
Only emptiness and hollowness remained. Recalling those feelings, I lay down on Kallion’s back as if fleeing the fatigue that rushed in.
“Let’s go.”
I was sick of this disgusting work. Yeah—what the hell had I been expecting like an idiot? Finish quickly and sleep.
The scenery of the particularly pitch-black space began to move. That was the last thing I saw before I slowly closed my eyes.
From that day onward rumors spread that the missions for Exploration and Monster Studies had become the hardest in academy history. But that story had nothing to do with me.