Leaving the camp's designated area couldn't be any easier.

The philosophy of the training officers was quite simple—whoever wanted to train was free to venture out into the forest part of the camp, where only the weakest of the monsters could venture, thanks to the robust barrier that guarded the camp's perimeter.

Sure, it was easy to get hurt or even find oneself in serious danger… But who were the camp's officers to tell cadets not to do it?

Still, with how little to no practical rewards there were for hunting those small fries down, hardly anyone even bothered to partake in this kind of personal training.

Between those two issues, the forest area of the camp lay pretty much forgotten by most, taken for no more than an element of the camp's background.

Theo, however, had no plans of sticking to the insides of the barrier. And as a spell array designed to keep monsters out, he, as a human attempting to leave, could do so with little to no difficulty.

'Now,' the young man thought as he confidently stepped over the array.

Right now, his body had laughable little in the way of mana. He never trained or worked towards the goal of increasing it in his current past, limiting his strength to mostly just his muscles.

This would, in his previous life, continue all the way until the latter years of his academia life, when the saintess pretty much kidnapped him before holding poor Theo in her basement for the two weeks during which she lectured him over all the benefits of utilizing both physical and magical strength.

It was a lecture that originally opened Theo's eyes to the world of low-rank magic, from which he could go on to develop a majority of his later kit.

Right now, all of that knowledge, all of his expertise… They were all for naught. All due to Theo's extremely lacking mana reserve.

'I'm behind everyone by at least a year or two by now, so if I want to learn better magic, I really need to make every opportunity here count.'

Theo took a deep breath… before diving into the unrestricted part of the forest, one that wasn't banned from visitation simply because no cadet would be dumb enough to ever venture there.

Only the actual young knights—trained in the same knightling camp, just on the other end of the camp's massive ground—would ever approach it, and then only with their teachers—seasoned knights themselves—and only during their final exam to obtain the qualifications to swear in.

"And even those would stick rather to this place's outskirts, huh?" Theo muttered as he carelessly just… ran into the woods, paying no mind to any of the dangers nearby.

When it came to the absolute basics of swordsmanship, he was no match for Gracian. That senior-turned-heretic would go on to become an actual ascender, a being that went beyond the whole concept of ranks.

And all of that, with nothing but a simple sword in his hand.

Theo intentionally limited himself to just the basics when training with Gracian, knowing full well their importance in the much more robust system of combat any fighter would develop for themselves. In a way, one's methods of combat were all just a logical conclusion of them playing to their strengths!

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If someone was fast, they would try to further exploit their agility. If strength was someone's forte, they would train even harder in a bid to just… overpower everyone.

'By knowing what foundation they grow their power from, you can kind of derive most of the practicals of their present style.'

Stuck deep down in his thoughts, Theo paid no mind to the pack of evolved goblins, a pair of orcs, or even a lone ogre wandering through one of the rare forest clearings hidden by all the high trees surrounding them.

When it came to swordsmanship, just like his exercise with Gracian showed, Theo could barely hold to the first rank. Now, a week of training later, he could somewhat confidently stay within the first rank, maybe starting to eye the second rank by the camp's end in half of a week's time.

The average monster of this forest would hold an equivalent of the third rank. Adjusting for their tendency to pack up, rule-excluding pretty much only the solitary species, one had to be out of their mind to venture into the place marked as rank eight danger zone.

Surrounded by the thick trees, with swaths of relatively strong monsters coming from every direction and always a bunch of apex predators lurking around to snatch free prey… one had to reach a level near the absolute mastery of their combat ability to even think about surviving.

Theo, however, was bound by no such rules.

Not because his prior knowledge somehow gave him immunity from the real danger of this place—not at all.

The monsters here would rip him apart as easily as they would any other cadet!

Theo, however, never planned to give them the chance to do so.

"That should be enough." Paying no mind to the likely presence of a few specimens smart enough to understand speech, Theo halted his dash, only to smash a bunch of herbs he picked on his way to the forest's inner layer, and spread his arms out to smash his herb-full open palms into the trunks of the random trees along the way.

The herbs burst into a greenish mist, a mist Theo then hurriedly ran into before taking as big of a breath as he could.

'Oh shit,' he thought before the intensity of everything… spiked.

In a single beat of his heart, the world around him grew just so much more complex, and with it, interesting.

In a single instant, Theo heard the small insect nearby brushing leg against leg to clean it, the creeping of a massive canine monster through the nearby undergrowth, the shallow breaths of a pack of shadow goblins already lurking around.

'The first step is always the heaviest.'

Theo thought… and leaped forth with absolute disregard for his own safety.

This was a display of primordial wilderness only the berserk bush could provide with its drug-like level induction of adrenaline into its victim's system.

It was a lethal poison, one that would erode Theo's innards within a few short minutes of getting himself high on power by literally burning his body away at the cost of leaving it in a state of random spots of necrosis.

For but a single moment, already mid-leap, Theo turned into a wild, primal beast.

He landed right by a small group of wicked monkeys hiding within a nearby treetop.

Theo swung his arm…

And three wicked monkeys, all of them fourth rank equivalent, exploded into bloody mist, torn to shreds by the rank six wind-blade Theo constructed by wringing out every last iota of the minuscule amount of mana his body commanded.

Clumps of the monsters' flesh, innards, and bones rained down all over the tree's huge branches, drenching Theo in the splatter of thick, black blood, not all that unlike what his very own blood was in the process of turning into.

As the two mixed, however, Theo closed his eyes, allowing himself just a single instant of respite.

And drenched in the monster blood, Theo opened up his entire soul to the burning sensation of the monster's miasma, the mana corrupted by its wicked will, to fill every muscle of his body.

Disregarding the slight glitter of the monster stone falling through the leaves and getting lost somewhere down on the ground, Theo took a deep breath in and opened his eyes.

'That's better.'

Monster mana flooded his flesh, eating away at its essence at a rate much faster than the spread of necrosis from the lethally-powerful drug he infused himself with before.

In simple terms, Theo cured one poisoning by subjecting himself to an even stronger curse, one that would claim his life in a matter of not hours, like the spores of the berserk bush, but mere minutes.

"And now…" Despite feeling the cold touch of death's scythe on the back of his neck, Theo smiled. "Now we ramp things up a bit."