It’s been an eventful night, the food was great, some of the best he’s had in a while considering neither he nor his mother are great cooks. Salnys would love to stay, but he doesn’t want to go back to the academy yet. He waits until he’s sure that everyone’s asleep. He carefully exits the third floor, creeping down the stairs. He’s avoiding any parts of the floor that any of the men walked or jumped on a lot due to the risk of floorboards creaking. He makes it down the stairs again, making it to the first floor, he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be heard if he was walking normally considering the men’s snoring sounds like sawing logs.
He exits the door, mercifully the door doesn’t creak, the hinges being carefully taken care of and made of high-quality materials. He continues walking, passing by some unfinished logs and planks laying out. Right as he makes it to the tree line, he hears someone exit from the bushes across the clearing. It’s Jonny and the paladin, they’re talking about something. Salnys feels bad about ditching Jonny and probably getting him in trouble, but what he’s doing is more important.
Salnys continues on for a while, he starts to get tired and isn’t the most confident in his orienteering skills, but he should be going the right way. He stops for a moment to take a breath; he’s been walking for long enough that, through the thick tree cover, he sees the moon’s starting to get low in the sky. He definitely doesn’t know where he is at this point, the plants and trees around him looking unfamiliar, some of the plants and small animals looking unfamiliar. He hears a bush rustle and starts to ready his shield spell. He doesn’t fumble with casting it, but as soon as whatever it was reveals itself it spits, he covers himself but whatever he was holding wasn’t large enough to cover a large part of his body. He feels the front of his legs have a searing pain shoot through them and lock up, but with the last of the strength in his legs he jumps on it, he’s screaming. As he jumps onto it, he gets a better look at the monster, it looks like an enormous toad, it has teeth, and small holes next to its mouth and eyes.
Once he manages to get on top of it, he starts trying to tear at it with his hands, bashing it with his head, and he tries to kick it, but his legs don’t obey him and don’t move at all. Despite all this, the big toad only makes a deep croaking sound before spraying the dissolving liquid from the glands on its face, it hits Salnys’s chest and arms, he feels the flesh start to dissolve and his body shut down, he tumbles off of the toad, and he sees it open its mouth, after that, everything goes black.
He feels the tug at his being, it rips him into the void. He’s a bit more coherent this time, he can actually think to himself, instead of freaking out last time, though it’s extremely difficult to focus. He decides not to think about anything and doesn’t struggle. It feels like it goes faster than before, it feels like it at least.
He wakes up once again, he’s on his feet but it isn’t for long as he trips over his feet and falls. He does feel a lot better than the first time he was sent back though. he gets himself back to his feet right as Cecillian makes it over to him.
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“You alright? That was quite a trip you had there.” Cecillian states, his voice staying monotone.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Salnys responds, “Just tripped over my feet.”
Cecillian nods and goes to the front of the group to continue walking. The same thing happens as last time, with Jardon checking if he’s okay and going over to check if Salnys is okay, and they start talking about spells. They get to practicing the shield spell, but Salnys complains about it.
“I do know a modified light spell,” Jardon says, breaking up Salnys’s complaining, “It allows you to cast the spell on an item without touching it; you want to learn it?”
Salnys looks away, a little flustered, “I didn’t even learn the basic light spell for last year’s classes, I didn’t have the attention span to learn both the shield spell and the light one.”
“Oh, you’re fine,” Jardon responds, “I haven’t even tried casting the shield spell until right now.”
Jardon then showed Salnys how to cast the modified light spell, though Salnys had issues with it, so Jardon tried teaching the light spell. Salnys made some progress, now being able to make a small stick glow for a couple of seconds. After a bit, he asks to be left alone though as he has to think about something.
‘Alright, I need to figure out where I’m going from here,’ Salnys thinks to himself, ‘I don’t really want to go back to the academy yet, and I can’t go to the lumbermill because that’ll either kill me or send me back. I think I’ll try going to the city, my legs are pretty tired though.’
Salnys waits until Cecillian stops at the academy to give his speech, Cecillian gives the same speech he’s given the past couple of times. As Cecillian gives the speech, Salnys scoots to the back of the crowd like he did the last time he ran away. Once Cecillian finishes and turns around, having the rest of the group follow him, he runs back down the trail. He’s running for the next minute before stopping to rest and taking a seat slightly off the trail.
After his short rest, which was about a 30-minute power nap, he got back up and kept walking. He hadn’t actually been in the city, he had been taken from his home to the entrance of the trail by carriage and he had never needed to stop in the town. He’d wanted to go there because he heard that there are some pretty cool tourist spots and that there are parts of a new experimental travel system in the city. He gets up and starts moving again, there are some noises around him, but it mostly sounds like small wildlife and birds. He makes it near the exit, but he hears something make an especially loud noise to his right. When he looks over, he sees some rustling and notices some small markings on the tree a bit beyond the edge of the trail. It looks like it was put there by a small knife, it looks like a small X. He looks at some of the trees in front of it, and some are marked with the same symbol. Some of the plants are also a little shorter than the plants around them, it almost looks like an extremely overgrown trail. He decides to go on the path.
He’s still wary, casting his shield, but he walks a bit more confidently now. He’s pretty much confirmed that he goes back in time with death, and that this isn’t some messed up dream. Either way, what’s a bit more time wasted after all, he’s got all the time in the world, hell, he has even more than that.