Max stayed busy with a variety of activities. He visited group combat classes, engaged in self-study at the library, worked out, refined his mana body, and trained his martial arts students. With such a packed schedule, Max didn't have much free time to begin with. However, he somehow managed to fit in time for research and exploration in Lavinia's old laboratory.

At the end of one martial arts practice with his friends, Max was pleased to see that Lance had improved a lot. Lance was currently doing cutting practice on tree trunks cut to human height after being buried in the ground for a few feet. The goal was to cut as thin a slice off the top as possible while the target was gradually whittled down to the ground. Lance took another chop, sending a hair-thin slice flying into the air.

"When I just let the sword do the work," Lance said, turning to Max, “it is a lot cleaner. That was a good call when you told me to lean more heavily on my spirit to guide my strikes. I never thought of that."

"You were missing your cuts entirely before," said Max. "It's a lack-of-practice problem, but as you increase the efficacy of any of your senses, your accuracy will improve. Ultimately, most fights come down to timing, distance, and stamina. You have a lot of huge advantages with that sword. But you also have some good advantages as a Summoner, even with only one spirit. And don't forget, if everything else goes sideways in a future fight, what should you do?"

"Put all my focus into my defensive abilities through the sword and run like hell," Lance repeated. It was a line that Max had tried to drill into his friend's head.

"That's right. Don't get cocky just because you have some power. If you ever meet somebody that you can't win against in a relatively short amount of time and they're pressing you, that's when you know it's time to get the hell out. You are not going to be able to overcome real skill and power with just your sword."

"I gotcha," said Lance, a bit sullenly, but Max was happy to see that his friend was taking his warning seriously.

At the moment, all of his students were practicing on their own in some fashion, and Max walked among them, watching their efforts with pride. His pride was twofold—for his instruction and for their hard work to reach new levels of skill. Everyone Max had begun teaching months ago had shown explosive growth. On top of that, the mana pills that he’d been giving them had allowed them to increase their mana saturation far faster than before.

Max judged by now that all of his students were at least at the same level that his friends back on Earth had been. But on top of that, this group of students were also Summoners. Now, a few even had two or even three spirits.

Once he was done with his rounds and fully satisfied with everyone's advancement, Max went to stand on top of a short stump and called a meeting. Immediately, everyone stopped and came over to the meeting point, forming a loose semicircle. He didn't do this often, more recently just to explain a new point of more advanced martial theory. Other than Lance, all of the students he'd taken on were far past the need for regular personal instruction at this point.

"Okay, everyone," Max said. "Do you all remember the rally point?"

There were a few confused glances and expressions, but they all eventually nodded that they remembered. About a week ago, Max had taken them to the rally point, a landmark in the Summoner woods about a mile away. At the time, none of his students except Momo had any idea why he'd done that.

He explained, "If there is ever an emergency in the future and I feel like we need to meet, but I want to meet at a different place than here, I will tell you to join me at the rally point. Does everybody understand?"

There were more confused looks this time, but everyone nodded.

"Good," said Max.

Suddenly, Eolus smacked his fist into an open palm, grinned, and said, "Secret plans? It's because everybody knows we always meet here, right?"

"I don't know about ‘everybody,’" chuckled Max, "but yes, a decent number of people seem to know that we meet here now. In fact, we've had people watching before. Some of you have even told me." In reality, he'd always known if someone was watching. Lavinia's spirits were great scouts, after all. But it had been good practice to let his students discover and then develop their own healthy dose of paranoia.

"So now I will move on to my next point," said Max. "We only have a little more than two more weeks until the end of the semester. As I've told you all, I will be participating in the end-of-semester competition in order to be qualified to fight at the end of the year. I think that based on the skills I've seen all of you show, if you decide to participate as well, you will probably place and be able to participate in the end-of-year Quartet competition, too. If you need a nomination, please let me or Gantry know so that we can talk to Professor Grave Call. There's still plenty of time to do it if you'd like to.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“I'm not going to ask right now who's going to participate because I know it might change in the next week. But I want to encourage anyone who might want to give it a shot to do so. Every one of you has come a long way from when we first started training together. And more importantly, you are all dual-Path challengers now. Yes, you haven't been dual-path for very long, but if I might say so myself, you've received some excellent instruction." He winked at them.

Eolus groaned. Gantry threw a pinecone at him and said, "It's not a competition for the biggest head, Max."

"That's too bad, Eolus, you fop. You would likely be the automatic winner," crowed Benjamin.

"Oh Gods, not you too," said Gantry. “Benjamin, don’t encourage him.”

"The competition is about fighting, not talking," said Tessa. "It is too bad though, because if there was a competition for waiting time and gossiping, Benjamin and Eolus would definitely be tied for first."

"Even you, Tessa?" cried Eolus.

The group began good-naturedly ribbing each other, but Max tapped a tree next to him with a stick, getting everyone's attention again.

"I have one more thing to tell everybody," he said, “and actually something to give out.” The serious nature of his voice calmed his friends almost instantly. He took a few simple necklaces out of his pocket, each one nothing more than a string with a single bone bead on it. There was one for every person there.

Max had had a breakthrough two days ago. He'd been spending serious time and thought on Momo's request to return with him to Earth. Ultimately, Max had decided it was impossible to actually take her with him. But transferring her to Earth after they were back on their own respective worlds was theoretically doable. Perhaps the two largest problems were the power requirements and locating her in the rest of the universe. The power issue should eventually be solved on its own as Max continued to develop his mana body, but locating her was going to be difficult. If a Bead Sorcerer was powerful enough, they could theoretically use their arts to locate things in the rest of the universe.

At high levels, bead sorcerers could theoretically use their beads in combination with written spell equations to do truly miraculous things. Then distance or even most dimensional interference wouldn't matter when it came to transport. The greatest weakness of Bead Sorcery, an extremely rare Path, is a lack of raw power. But as a Blade Sorcerer, in the future Max would have power in spades. There would be great synergy between the two Paths.

However, Max had not reached anywhere close to that level of power yet. Even if he did in hte near future, he likely wouldn’t get a good enough read on his friends to trust an attempt to move them through time and space. A million things could go horribly wrong.

But he'd had an idea. Similar to how Saliron had used bones as a catalyst for magic processes that were normally outside of Max's capability, there might be a way to use bones and Saliron’s power as a catalyst to increase efficiency, and therefor power. Using an anchor, or beacon, it might be possible for Max to still get a read on his friends' unique soul signatures without actually being strong enough yet to locate or transport them.

He handed out one necklace to every person and said, "If you put these on now, after about a week, I should be able to have memorized your soul signature. This is helpful for lots of reasons. For instance, in the middle of a battlefield, I can find you more easily and also differentiate my friends from my foes better. But in the future, if you ever would like to see my world or visit me, this is how I could potentially transport you there. I’m still working on some sort of communication method, too. Just remember that when you put this one, you need to make a conscious decision that you are allowing me to read your soul signature. It’s a little bit like when a spirit taste our soul, but obviously much more simple than that."

“Thanks Max,” said Gantry. “I don’t think I’ll be needing you to summon me, but wearing this thing shouldn’t hurt anything right?”

“No way,” said Max. T”o anyone but me it is just a bead. All it does is help me passively connect and scan a person so I can find them later.”

“So it’s like a bluetooth connection,” said Lance. “Or maybe like a radar tracker.”

“Exactly! But nobody else is going to get the reference.” Sure enough, everyone who wasn’t from Earth looked confused.

Momo was the first to put her necklace on. She caught Max’s eyes and gave him a look of hope and challenge. He wasn’t sure what that was all about, but smiled back at her in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

Then it was time to get back to practice. “Okay people, everyone get a practice weapon. We’re doing rolls practice. Do rolls from one end of the sprint field to the other. If you drop your weapon, or you get hit by the rocks I throw at you, you’ll have to do thirty pushups. The usual.”

Eolas groaned, but everyone else just frowned.

Max hated doing training like this too. As usual, whatever training his friends did, Max always did the same, and usually for longer. Roll practice was even harder and more unpleasant to do alone. Pelting his friends with rocks like this made their training easier and was for a good cause.

At least by this point, he wasn’t exactly worried anymore that any of them would immediately die after Returning to their own world. It was not a humble thing to think, but he was sure now that they were likely on par with most of the Summoner academy 7th years, or maybe even stronger.

The Mana Swordsman Path gave them power and durability. Their Summoner path gave them versatility with limitless growth potential. Theoretically.

It was too bad there was not more mana to go around in this Quartet or they’d really be a fierce group.