"Everyone done?" Nathan called out, and his four classmates looked over at him. "Come here if you are."

They all moved over to the corner he'd claimed, his backpack already tossed up onto the bleachers above.

"I need to hurry and get all of that cleaned off," Keith told him. "So that it can dry and I can repaint the runes. We're estimating at least eight days and it's only been about five. Also, it's night, so that's considered docile."

"It'll take time for them to get back up here," Nathan waved a hand dismissively. "For now, I need to be filled-in on what's going on. I'm sure we can handle it if something comes up here while we're waiting.

The four of them filled Nathan in on what had been going on, which was mostly the same as when he and Samantha had been there, though with each of them working in pairs to farm monsters. He thought for a few minutes, then told them to aim for a thousand earned Points, if they hadn't already reached it. That would guarantee that they're at least in the top half.

"Alright," Nathan said, then looked directly at Keith. "Is there anything I need to know?"

"Your body will probably continue to adjust the better senses over the next week or two," Keith responded. "Though the brunt of the bad part probably happened while you were unconscious. I wasn't expecting you to be that powerful. And you've at least three times the 'safe' mana amount, based on how much you vented. By the time someone reaches a third of where we are, they need a familiar."

"Why?" Nathan asked.

"I don't know," Keith shrugged. "I just know that it's necessary. And we can't get one here."

"Okay," Nathan said. "Why do you know it's necessary?"

"Because magicians who exceed that much mana," Keith informed him. "Start showing symptoms. The more over it they are without a familiar, the worse they get, and eventually, they die. Having a familiar stops that. If I didn't have a familiar, I'd be dead right now, due to being roughly triple the point at which someone needs one."

"Can you call upon your familiar?" Nathan asked.

"Yes," Keith responded. "He's actually here. Familiars are bound to us through the soul, and when the game began, I felt him pulled into this. He's pulled into every instance I'm in when I'm pulled into them. Well, was, I bound him to my body."

"To your… what?" Nathan asked.

"My body," Keith responded. "We can do that, too. It merges them into us, sort of. It actually augments our magic a bit, though it's generally better to have him out during a fight, since the augmenting to my own magic doesn't make up for the lack of his own abilities.

"How are you feeling?" Keith asked. "You aren't shaking, which is a good sign, but getting light-headed, being shaky, your teeth aching, these are all things that start to happen once your mana exceeds the amount where you absolutely need a familiar."

"I feel fine," Nathan answered. "Any other important information I should know?"

"No," Keith answered. "But look out for those symptoms or anything else feeling out-of-the-ordinary. We can't contract you a familiar here, since that requires actually finding a magical creature, and these things more than likely don't count, and they need to agree to it, too."

"What kinds of things are familiars?" Nathan asked.

"Commonly," Keith responded. "They're cats, frogs, birds, and the like. Most magicians can't actually contract with magical things due to a lack of power. How powerful a familiar you can contract is based both on how much mana you have and how powerful you are. I've met a few people who have pixies or fairies contracted as their magical creatures, and there are those with fire salamanders and other things like that."

"And you?" Nathan asked.

"I'd rather keep mine as secret as possible for now," Keith answered. "If we do end up needing to fight each other, the fewer who know, the better, especially if I have to fight Madeline."

"What are the stronger types of familiars?" Nathan asked.

He then opened up his backpack and fished out a container of dried fruit and a package of jerky, then pulled out a water bottle from one of the pouches and began snacking. The others all looked at him for a few moment, then realized they were hungry, too, and put the conversation on hold so they could grab some food.

Once they had all returned to Nathan, Keith answered his question.

"There's the Grand Set," Keith told him. "Which consists of things like griffins and thunderbirds – nearly all things in it can fly. They're all extremely powerful and have mastery or affinities for several elements. They're third on the list of most-powerful types of magical creatures. There's a witch a few hours from here who has a thunderbird as her familiar.

"Second on that list," Keith continued. "Are elementals. They're extremely rare and are embodiments of their individual element. They're limited to it, but with all things, there are ways around that. There are only two people in the entire world alive right now who are known to have an elemental as a familiar, and odds are low that there is anyone else who does.

"Finally," Keith said. "You have the Ultimate Trinity. There are only three on this list, but they're the most powerful of all creatures. They've also each only been contracted as familiars once before – and all of them to the same person. The most powerful magician ever recorded."

"Merlin," Nathan concluded.

"Yes," Keith nodded. "Merlin himself once contracted these creatures. A unicorn, a creature of magic with the power to nullify nigh any enchantment or curse. A dragon, a creature that could destroy nigh anything. A phoenix, which could heal nigh any injury, even if it were the cusp of death itself."

"So those are all real?" Samantha asked.

"Yes," Keith nodded. "And keep in mind that in order to have a familiar, you need to be powerful enough to have it. If you're taking on several at once without neutralizing the contracts, you need to be powerful enough for them at the same time. So, actually, the System makes it easier to explain. Say you have 20 Magic, and you want to contract two different creatures. One of them requires you to be at 18 Magic, and the other, at 14 Magic. You can only contract one of them, as you'd need to be powerful enough that you're at or above 32 Magic to contract both. It might work different functionally, but there's no way to know, and that's a comparison I'm making here."

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"I get the point," Samantha said. "You have to be powerful enough to support both at the same time, not individually."

"Merlin had all three at once?" Nathan asked.

"Yes," Keith nodded. "It's one of the reasons that he was actually so well-known back then, to be honest. If he hadn't contracted the unicorn and the phoenix after the dragon, he may have actually ended up lost to records for the most part – just that there was an extremely powerful magician in that time who had contracted a dragon."

Nathan thought on that for a few moments, then closed his container and package and returned them and the water to his backpack, before standing and looking down at the others.

"Alright," he said, then stretched. "I'm not feeling the signs here, but after we leave, I'll look into contracting something. Know where any phoenixes, dragons, or unicorns are?"

Samantha broke out into laughter, and soon, all four of the students still sitting were laughing at Nathan's sudden and casual inquiry. Nathan himself just looked at them, his face neutral, and waited for them to calm down.

"I was serious."

"I know," Samantha told him. "It's just… the way you said it made it sound like contacting them was like driving over to Hicks Dome on the theory that a phoenix lived in volcanoes, and that could potentially qualify as one."

"They do, actually," Keith responded. "But there's no phoenix there. There is a dragon living in the Appalachians, though. He's rather temperamental, though, and the government's managed to placate him through shiny things. It's expensive as fuck, though – I think they pay him something like thirty or forty billion a year in gold and other precious metals and precious stones just to keep him from going on a rampage and revealing that magic exists."

The other students all stared at Keith in response to that news.

"How much of our government's expenditure goes to stuff like that?" Nathan asked.

"It increases every year," Keith responded. "I think something like three hundred billion for last year."

"Damn," Michael whispered. "More dragons?"

"There's a covert government agency that deals with the supernatural," Keith said. "Though there is another dragon over in the Rockies, but it doesn't want as much gold. I think only five or ten billion dollars' worth of shinies each year placates it. The Department of Supernatural Investigative Service is expensive to run, though, and makes up probably half the budget each year. We'll probably be dealing with their agents, once we get out of this."

"It was them you hacked that caused you find out about this, wasn't it?" Nathan asked.

"Yes," Keith nodded. "Just a routine hack for me, they haven't figured out I've been hacking them yet. Or at least, haven't revealed they have."

"Wouldn't spending that much," William asked. "Cause a problem? That much precious metals and stones would be noticeable, wouldn't it?"

"Maybe," Keith shrugged. "But they manage somehow."

"So," Nathan said. "Trying to contract with him would probably be problematic?"

"Probably," Keith nodded. "He'd probably throw a fit if you approached him and asked for a familiar contract, and that would reveal things to the world. The dragon in the Rockies might be reasonable, but there's also the question of whether or not you're powerful enough to actually contract it. It's lived there longer than the US has existed."

"And the other one?"

"Flew in from somewhere about two centuries ago," Keith answered. "Though based on its size, it's at least a thousand years old. Dragons don't stop growing, they just grow slower and slower as time passes. And this one is positively massive, if the pictures were scaled right. It's possible it's going to get tired of the shinies, though, and decide to harass people for fun in the next few years, and it's a legitimate fear in both the DSIS and the magical community as a whole. It's easily one of the three most powerful dragons in the world, and there's not much we can do about it. They actually tried nuking a weaker one sometime back, and all it did was get pissed."

The other seniors took a few minutes to process that information.

"Um," William said. "I think we can continue that particular discussion after we leave this thing."

"Agreed," Nathan said. "Anything else we should know?"

"No," Keith answered. "Actually, yes. I got interrupted when the Challenge started, and we never revisited it. Something I realized."

"What?" Nathan asked.

"Why you have Charisma."

"Why?"

"Something you'd mentioned," he said. "The System registered that I had colored contacts, not that they weren't needed. What if the System registers everyone's actual stats, in addition to the accessible? It would immediately register that you were, in fact, stronger and more powerful than any of us. It's possible that's all that was needed for it to determine you were the one most likely to survive, especially with your skillset when the game began."

"Makes sense," Nathan responded.

"You already figured that out, didn't you?" Samantha asked.

"Perhaps," Nathan said. "I counted nearly three thousand monsters here. If the cap was at three thousand, then that means the school and the grounds are fairly empty right now. Is there anything that can be done during this time, while we're waiting for more to show up for us to farm?"

"A few things," Samantha said. "We could get more food from the kitchens and culinary room."

"We can?"

"Yes," she nodded. "Though they don't restock, they were still fully-stocked when the Challenge started. We can actually make some stuff, while we're waiting for the monsters to respawn. We can't exactly store things well here, but we can at least make some stuff that'll last a few days. Michael, William, and I have done that a couple of times. Keith put a barrier up in there as well, so it's probably still safe for us."

"Alright," Nathan said. "Locker rooms, too?"

"Yes," Keith responded. "Though I'll have to check to see if they're still up, after this."

"Samantha and I will check it out," Nathan offered a hand to Samantha. "They're probably fine, since the monsters were attempting to attack you guys up here."

"I should still-"

"Samantha and I will check it out," Nathan stated. "You, William, and Michael head to the culinary room. Make more of your barrier shit, too, just in case. We'll meet back up on the other side of here, since this curtain's ruined. We'll use that side from now. And make the barrier on the other side."

"But if we do that, they'll see-"

"Maybe," Nathan said. "But at least we'll be able to move the curtain out of the way before it gets destroyed if they start attacking us en masse again."

The other four seniors quickly averted their gazes.

"I expected that kind of thought process from you," Nathan looked at Michael, then looked at Samantha and William. "And you two a little bit," then he looked at Keith. "But you are supposed to be the smartest. Your runes are only about three inches tall. The curtain rests two inches into the spaces here. You'd only have an inch of it sticking out into the path, and if I'm not mistaken, the barrier is barely-perceptible?"

"Yeah," Keith nodded. "It's faint to most eyes, though a magician using their magic sight can see it clearly."

"Then what's the problem?" Nathan asked.

"They'd still see it," Keith said.

"Maybe," Nathan said. "But they aren't looking at a person. The monsters seem to ignore anything that isn't a person. You've already blocked off other areas, have they tried getting in there?"

"Well, no, but-"

"Moron," Nathan said. "That's what you four are. Morons. The monsters probably just see it as some sort of wall and think nothing of it. Only something like the stronger ones would probably think anything of it, and even then, it took them six days to do something. And that was probably because they could see you through the gaps of the curtain, along with you coming and going. We'll still come and go, but they won't see us. Morons. Samantha, let's go check out the locker rooms."

"If the barrier needs replacing down there-" Keith began.

"We'll let you know," Nathan said.