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A man in a white mask resembling a dragon paired with a young woman in a silver masquerade mask appeared behind an unperturbed Bastion, and a surprised Eden jumped.

“You scare too easily, he’s been trailing us for half an hour.” Bastion said plainly.

“That. How…” The man in the white mask seemed impressed.

“You must be Gamoderen right. Those eyes really are like a cats. Guess i’m not the only weird one.”

“More like a lizard but sure. Quite a few people with talent have various markings and odd traits on their body. My guess is one of your eyes may be magic or your ability may be in your eyes.”

“Kyrion said to give this to you.” Bastion handed him the note.

Gamodren took it. “Well you noticed me thirty minuets ago, and he noticed from the beginning. That boy has an eye for talent. Which means I have an eye for talent for picking him.”

“This guy doesn’t seem very trustworthy.” Eden whispered into Bastion’s ear.

“Yeah but it’s too late to run now. You saw the people Kyrion regards as friends this guy is probably a monster if he taught Kyrion how to fight like that.”

“Wait. Do you think he can make us that strong?” Eden’s stance shifted.

Tch!

Gamodren clicked his tongue. “It’s like were not even here. Right Tiffany.”

“Kyrion really can’t leave well enough alone. I knew he was a good kid but this is ridiculous.” Tiffany seemed disappointed.

“Ah so you must also like Kyrion.” Eden said plainly.

“Like is about right. He’s like a younger brother with all that childlike innocence. Its a face I’ll give my life to protect.”

“Ah so different than Nicole?”

Tiffany shivered. “Nicole is a bit too much. It isn’t love as much as it is obsession.”

“Yeah she’s a bit scary.”

“I mean. Kyrion is her first real friend. So I’m not surprised if our little princess got a bit too attached and wanted to push their relationship forward.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Then again, so far someone willing to try that hard for someone so free spirited has my condolences as much as my blessing.”

Gamodren coughed into his sleeve. “Looks like we have work to do. Apparently we have an agent to deal with.”

“Great. What is it?”

“Were checking on some of his Deerkin workers he had escorting a caravan. Apparently there is a mole in the country with ties to Cecil. He won’t be pleased that his prototypes are being funneled to that empire.”

“The harem guy?” Eden asked.

“Ah.. A runic prodigy, a genius among geniuses. An inventor of incomprehensible tools of war and peace. Yes, the harem guy.” Gamodren scoffed.

“It is like thirty percent of his personality. The thing is he’s also trying to be dense while building a harem yet he doesn’t have the charm or personality for it. If he wasn’t trying to play aloof then he could have almost any women that desired money over love. Quite a few vultures in the Tetsan empire would happily become one of his concubines.” Tiffany seemed bored.

Eden and Bastion looked at each other and decided to keep quiet.

“Yeah… he’s obsessed in a different way than Nicole though both are blindly motivated by their goals.” The note in Gamodren’s hand turned into a swarm of butterflies and flew away.

“Huh?” Eden and Bastion were quite surprised by the scene.

“We have work to do now. You two will need to stick to us like molasses on fingers.”

“So you’re going to lick us?” Bastion asked.

Eden blanched before backing up.

Gamodren paused. “Like bark on a tree. How does that work?”

“It’s better. So long as there are no lumberjacks.” Bastion nodded to himself.

Gamodren looked at Bastion for a hard second before smirking. “Kyrion deserves a student like you.”

Tiffany chuckled lightly.

“Was that an insult or a compliment?” Bastion asked as they were escorted to a safe house.

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Noah awoke on a bed in the infirmary, uninjured if not a bit dizzy. Two metal orbs sat next to each other. One with a six inches diameter, the other 1 foot in diameter.

“Huh, guess he was right. Kyrion knew I was holding back and punished me for it. If this was a battlefield I’d be dead and so would Iseah. What’s the use of a trump card when your opponent is three steps ahead from the get go.” Noah mumbled to himself.

“Only the strong have a reason to hold back.” Said a stoic, well-mannered man who stood in the corner of the room.

“Instructor Charles?” Noah squinted as his vision began to clear.

“You lost because you underestimated an opponent who had shown limited combat ability in the past. Holding back isn’t something you should let become a habit. Pacing yourself is something else however. If you fight at full strength don’t use up all your power too soon. It’s a thin line but with effort you will master this lesson. Then we can move onto mastering your full manifestation. You are at the middle tier of practitioner after all.” Charles adjusted his glove.

Isaiah sat up in his cot a few feet away. “He flicked me and I died. He literally just flicked me and boom. Noah I know he’s your friend and all but that was scary.”

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“I mean I could probably do the same thing.” Noah said bluntly.

“No you couldn’t.” Charles sighed.

“Is he that much stronger?” Noah looked down.

“No it’s because he’s a healer. He knows the human body on a level most couldn’t comprehend. That flick wasn’t just hard. It was precise enough to hit a place that told the wards that you were in grave danger. No, that is not against the rules. A slight adjustment to his angle could have put you in a coma even with the wards in place.” Charles approached Isaiah and whispered the following line.

“And with more force he could have killed you in a way that kept your body alive. Healers can get scary, don’t you think?” Charles stood straight up after speaking with a stoic expression.

“So he just played with us?” Isaiah gritted his teeth.

“You wouldn’t want to fight him when he’s out for blood. He was very serious in his methods. You have asked yourselves, “Why did they want two of you to fight him at once?”

“They wanted to get a gauge on his limits by testing him.” Noah said.

“No, they wanted to show that they were prepared for the tournament by sending one of their weakest combatants to kick up a storm.”

“Weakest? No way!” Isaiah was shaking.

“According to my sources Kyrion doesn’t appear in ranking matches at his school as he’d been actively avoiding them. His rank is near the bottom and yet they had him fight an exhibition match against some of our strongest.” Charles explained.

“If he lost it was because he was at a disadvantage. If he wins we look bad and he looks like a powerhouse. We didn’t get out of this looking good in any way.” Isaiah sighed.

“Close. They wanted him to lose so he’d take his martial training seriously. Some of the higher ups couldn’t decide if Kyrion was worthy of being on the team for Drisil even if it was just as a healer.”

“Ah, now he has a spot whether he wants it or not.

“What about the oath? He couldn’t have lost before going all out.”

“He was going all out from the get go. Isaiah, try turning this rock into solid lead with the transmute incantation.” Charles tossed the boy a rock.

“That’s a minor incantation. What’s so special about it?”

“Just do it.”

Isaiah drew a circle on the rock in his hand. “Transmute.”

The rock shifted slightly from brown to gray before falling to the floor.

Isaiah breathed heavily. “Wow that. Was exhausting.”

“It is a mana heavy incantation the more changes are needed. From the get go he was releasing as much mana as he could to alter the battlefield. He was doing his best from the get go, had Noah transformed and abandoned Isaiah then the fight could have easily swayed in fact Kyrion would have gone down quite easily since his regeneration was off. All his mana went into the big arena altering effects.”

“He told me how to win and gave me a handicap. How did I not see that he was trying to give me a hint?” Noah hit his bed.

“I mean, I’m glad you kept me in the fight. Although I need to gain some evasive and mobility based spells. Standing in one place is more of a detriment and if shoes can fly that fast I’d hate to get hit by a dagger or bolt.” Isaiah said plainly.

“Good good. Training starts tomorrow morning, get some rest. The training will be relentless; the preliminaries begin in a few months after all.”

Kiara enters the room and looks about. “What's going on?”

“More training.” Noah smiled and waved a hand nonchalantly.

“Oh. Well I expected that much anyhow. Kyrion wanted to give you this?” Kiara bought a rolled sheet of paper.

Charles casually peeked over Noah as he opened it up, revealing a curved wand with absurd proportions and mana cost.

“That looks like an ancient dwarven weapon….” Charles mumbled.

“A what?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’re going to visit Drisil a month before the tournament for an exchange.” Charles sighed and shook his head.

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Cordelia was having tea with Ceres and Wura. The former went over all the various shenanigans Kyrion had pulled in the five years at the academy. And the latter bored out of her mind watching as the red-haired woman spiked her own tea.

Wura seemed quite surprised by the most recent exploit involving a gold coin embedded in the ground. It took three fledglings and a practitioner to remove the coin. And when they did, they found that it was just a rock made to resemble a coin. Though that wasn’t until after they fought for it. They followed him, hoping to get money from him because of his supposed wealth and generosity.

“Where did people get that he was generous?” Cordelia asked.

“He lends his friends money. Well, he lends Cecil money for his experiments and gets repaid when the items are brought to market. So Cecil makes a lot of different things.”

“Ah, investment. And the kids following him thought he did this out of the kindness of his heart.”

“Master is very kind. Offering to work as a healer while on campus for free.”

“Ah, do the other healers charge?”

“Yes, a variable amount of Academy Points, based on the level of injury. Since most don’t have endless pools of mana and time.”

“Not endless but I know what you mean. What do you mean by time?”

“He doesn’t go to half his classes, something about fulfilling their requirements early so that he could slack off later.”

“What classes does he go to?”

“Nox’s lectures on magic because she lets him sleep in class. Exac for anatomy and healing. Professor Willow because he needs to tend to his field daily. And coach Teus for private endurance training.”

“Private?” Cordelia asked.

“Its really just Coach Teus beating him until he can hardly stand so that Kyrion can regenerate himself and ignore the pain. He volunteered for said lessons.”

“That monster. What is he doing to my son?” Cordelia’s hand shook as she held her tea.

“If he’s going to be a healer the first thing he needs to be able to do is survive. If you’re too busy wallowing in your own pain how can you save others? That’s one of his tenets.”

“Did he make that up?” Cordelia asked.

“He altered another phrase.”

“You don’t get a body that strong just from pushups.”

“Has he always been like this Miss?” Wura asked.

“Somewhat, he used to get bullied by one of the local kids for being sickly. Its why he enjoyed working on the farm doing what he could. It was a way for him to build strength and people rarely told him not to help.”

“That…explains a lot. On another note can Kyrion really talk to squirrels.” Ceres asked.

“They understand him and he understands them. Little Illanda has a similar talent, apparently the pet squirrel Kyrion gave her taught her everything she needed to know about the language of animals.”

“Was he creating sentient monsters before he had affinities?” Ceres prodded.

“Can he do so with affinities now?” Cordelia asked.

“Yes, it’s something he’s been doing to help with construction. Both inside and outside of his domain.”

“Sentiance, that is a dangerous thing to play with.”

“Why? Would something happen?”

“It means he has access to a higher state of life affinity, which means one day he could have access to magic that can bring the dead back to life. At the cost of his place on Imala.”

“If he brings someone back to life he’ll die?” Ceres scowled.

“It’s complicated, just know that the cost is just as high as the reward. Resurrection isn’t a power mortals like us should possess.”

“I see.” Ceres scowled.