“That was surprisingly comfortable.” Unlike Trista’s teleport or even Portline’s long-distance transit, Layla’s magic brushed past him comfortingly and when it pulled away he was just in a different place. Not even a little nausea accompanied the transition.

He surveyed the area briefly. Mereo was nothing like Genus. For example, he was standing comfortably in the light of the sun without feeling like it could bake him.

The sun was also lower on the horizon which implied that they were quite far from Genus. Surrounding this city, which was much smaller than the prior one had been. was a towering mountain range. If he had to guess, he would say the mountains were made out of the same white stone that seemed so prevalent in the city’s construction.

Everything, from the cobbled streets, to the stone buildings were carved from the same white rock. To his right sat a deep blue ocean. He bet it had white sand.

“Thank you.” She sounded proud of herself, but she had earned that right.

Cael looked down at his belongings. The box was parked just beside his foot, and Tar rested lazily on it. The flask was secured to his hip by a belt he didn’t think he owned. “Is this for a knife?” He fiddled with one of the loops in the front- “And what is this made of? No, wait. When did you put this on me?”

“As a teacher, I hate to say this, but I won't have time to answer too many questions. See that?” She pointed toward a building that vaguely resembled a smaller version of the Roman Colosseum. “We’re cutting it close enough without this conversation. There should be a whole crowd here.”

She grabbed his wrist and began walking toward the building. “But to answer what you've already asked, that is made of tegoleon leather, I put it on you when we were in transit, and that specific loop is meant to be hooked onto by any number of things. Think of it like a climbing harness.”

“What’s a tegoleon?”

“They’re a type of lizard that generally range from tier one to tier five. Their skin is rubbery and hard to cut.”

He nodded as they entered the colosseum. The first thing he noticed was that it was not a colosseum. It was an amphitheater. Its long central stage framed the ocean as its backdrop.

Looking around, it was plain to see they were late. Along the left side sat a few hundred assorted aliens uniformed in silver armor with dark blue clothes underneath. It was hard to generalize a description of the uniforms outside of that. The sheer variance in species made that difficult.

A few of them looked over, but before they could become a distraction, Layla warped them over to the end of the seats.

The right side of the stone benches seemed to be reserved for the new years student candidates. They were the ones not wearing any uniforms, and many of them sat in pairs of their species. Based on what Layla had said earlier, about half of that crowd was probably family or friends.

On the other end of the warp, only Layla was actually in a seat. Cael had been placed in a seated position on his box, and Tar lounged on his head.

The elementals tail preemptively moved to muffle Cael before he could say anything.

With nothing else to do, Cael turned his attention to the person on-stage.

At first glance, Mereo's spokesperson seemed to be a drake like Enken, only greener. However, the longer he looked, the more differences he noted.

From this distance, his scale pattern looked mottled olive and brown. Two long lines of ridged scales traced up his thick tail and his spine. He almost reminded Cael of-

‘He’s a crocodile drake variant. Pay more attention to what he’s saying.’ Tar chided.

Yeah. A crocodile was what he reminded Cael of. The crocodile drake was awesome looking. Especially so in Mereo's armored uniform.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Archangels were cool and all, but drakes just resonated with his love for dragons.

Also, it wasn’t fair to say that Cael wasn’t paying attention just because his train of thought wasn’t focused on listening. He’d been more-or-less following the speech in the background.

They had missed a bit of the beginning, but Cael had arrived in time to hear the whole description of the admission exams.

There were two stages of the exam. This year, as there were too many candidates to screen all at once, the plan was to begin with a personal ‘dungeon’ owned by Mereo. ‘Dungeon’ felt improperly translated by [Read], but that was the word he was given.

Participants would enter the— the crocodile drake had made sure to emphasize this point— specially cultivated dungeon, which would place each of them in a personalized scenario based on its own arbitrary measurement system, and then rate each student with a ‘dungeon’ generated card that displayed an estimation of an applicants capabilities.

As they filtered out, their cards would be checked for minimum threshold scores.

If they passed those, the applicants would be allowed to move on to the second part of the exam. The written portion. Cael didn't have high hopes of getting through that one.

After the explanation, the drake continued for some time about how grateful Mereo was to its sponsors, proud of its alumni, hopeful for its future, proud to be their school of choice, blah blah blah. God, Layla was totally right. Mereo speeches really were long-winded.

Eventually, the crocodile drake concluded his monologue with an advertisement for a nearby potions store.

By rows, the candidates were called down to the stage. From the top row, down, and then right to left. The order meant that Cael would be the very last person to enter, but that was fair. He had been the last person to arrive.

He watched the line attentively. An applicant would reach the stage and within a few seconds, they would vanish. He wasn’t sure what was going on even with [Mana Sight] active, but he could trace a small flare of mana back to a point below the stone of the stage. It made his head ache a bit when he tried to focus on it though, and he was about to be in a ‘dungeon’ so Cael stopped using the Skill to conserve mana.

“Cael.”

“Layla?”

“You will be entering the ‘dungeon’ soon. Though I get the feeling it would be interesting to see your results, I have a duty to my students. By the time you are finished, I will have already left. After all, their break has effectively ended during that riveting speech.”

“Uh.” It was a bit embarrassing, but Cael didn’t actually think he could pass Mereo's admissions. “What if I don’t make it?”

“It’s a tier one ‘dungeon’. If you don’t make it, then it’s just natural selection.” Her eyebrows raised flippantly. Each rising and falling in sequence. Like an eyebrow wave.

He chuckled nervously. Somehow he'd forgotten death might be a possibility. “I mean, what if I don’t get accepted?”

“Oh. Don’t worry about that. Wait around after you're done. You’ll figure it out. However, I do expect you to do well here, and I am rarely wrong. I have a Skilled intuition.”

Cael blinked at her. Did she mean to say that a Skill told her that he would do well?

“Oh! That’s you.”

He looked past her to see that the rest of the candidates had risen to enter the ‘dungeon’. They waved goodbye to their patrons and hugged their parents as they left.

“Do I just leave all my stuff here?”

She waved her hand and it disappeared. “Didn’t I already tell you to just wait around after you finished?”

He decided to just trust the lady. Even though she was basically a stranger, she hadn't done anything to lose his trust. “I guess you did. Thanks, Layla. You really didn’t have to do all of this, it means a lot to me.”

Since he didn’t really know her that well, he bid her goodbye and lined up. At the very end, of course.

In the final minute he waited, he listened to the others converse.

The conversation snippets he managed to catch were disjointed and partially stilted due to him switching between probably a dozen languages in the span of a few seconds. Sometimes the words would be simply wrong or stop completely while the skill adjusted to the change. It was pretty interesting to listen to [Read] shorten translations in order to catch back up to the flow of conversation.

Finally, all of the conversations stopped. Cael reached the stage himself and stared at the point beneath it, where he knew the ‘dungeon’ to be.

What was he actually supposed to do here?

[Read] had grown to level 10.

“All things tell their stories to those who listen.”

You are being made to listen.

Cael stumbled as the thought hammered into his mind. It was not his own, nor did it belong to Tar. He grabbed the edge of the stage to steady himself, but his hands found nothing before him.

He fell. He kept falling.

A forgotten hero wages a perpetual war against an immortal monster, but none remain to honor their sacrifice.

Their story is being recalled.