After having returned temporarily to Earth after spending time in a mysterious Quartet school that exists in another dimension, Max is reunited with his friend Blake. It hasn’t been very long since the Earth was attacked by monsters, but society is already in a shambles. He travels with Blake and a band of motley fighters that hunt monsters and try to save others in trouble. At an apartment complex, Max wipes out a group of Gssrell Kobolds.
With the kobolds dead, located with the use of Max’s spirits, he travels to where Blake has been staying–the dojo that Max used to teach at. There, he is reunited with his students–those he was teaching martial arts on Earth before the world changed.
Because of what he taught them, all of his students have exhibited supernatural powers.
Max quickly decides that since he only has a short amount of time to stay on Earth before returning to the Quartet, he needs to help his friends and give himself a foundation to return to after he eventually comes back to Earth for good. He accomplishes this by forming a guild, “Trifecta.” With the help of his friends, he attacks and clears a dungeon portal. Before doing so, he’d invited reporters there to see the entire thing go down.
Loot from the dungeon helps to outfit his new guild.
Once he returns to his point of origin, the dungeon he’d been trapped in from the Quartet, he continues wiping out the monsters inside. He acquires a powerful new spirit, Saliron, an entity obsessed with bones. Max finishes clearing the dungeon.
The rewards were presented to him and he had to choose three. He chose:
Bracelet of Bloody Arrows
Flask of Unending Water
Weight Reduction Adventurer Pack, Mk 4
Back in the Quartet, he is not ambushed by a group of students like he’d expected, but instead is attacked by a single man. The man is overwhelmingly powerful and defeats Max, but is shocked by Max’s skill and power. Max’s opponent is revealed to be Territ Mond, the Headmaster of the Mystic Spear Path Academy.
Mong Hao Han, the Headmaster of the Summoner academy is also present. The two headmasters recognize Max as a three Path Challenger.
They had already uncovered the plot to kill Max, and had shown up in case he could survive the dungeon. After coming back alive, their interest in him is very high. The two of them cut a deal with Max. Due to inter-Quartet politics, they desperately need a talented fighter for their own Quartet to compete against other Quartets at the end of the year.
Max is bribed with two vouchers for gear, as well as mana stones to participate and to do well in the Quartet competition. The large number of mana stones gave him plenty of buffer for his constantly-dwilindly supply, all of which he needs to improve his mana body.
He demands to execute the worker who had sent him to his presumed death. The two headmasters reluctantly agree.
At first his spirit Lavinia is concerned that the deal he made with the headmasters might have impacted their Summoner contract, but Max explains that by winning the Quartet competition, it will force other Paths to see Summoners as serious competitors. It could also help him get closer to solving some of the mysteries of the Quartet.
Taking classes again is necessary, but Max doesn’t have to take as many anymore. He shows up to group combat class and spars with the top of the class. His capabilities had improved so much during his time in the dungeon, none of the junior students are anywhere close to his equal anymore.
He continued to teach his martial arts class, helping his students grow stronger with the use of Western Wind Style. Some of the students had formed contracts with new spirits, becoming more powerful. Max begins planning to find new weapons for his students to use.
Lavinia and Max continue working together to streamline and improve on her magical research she’d begun while she’d been alive. They make great strides. Saliron helps Max store items inside a pocket dimension made with the help of a bone doorway.
Max begins deepening his friendship with Momo, who he verifies is interested in him romantically. He learns more about her own doomed world.
Communication with the sponsoring Headmasters is mostly done through letters. This slows down the back-and-forth.
Lavinia alerts Max one night that Wiley, the traitor who led Max and Lance to being assaulted in an alley by Mystic Spear Path students in an alley, was trying to escape through the woods to another academy. Max finds him, punishes him harshly, tauts Prince Regal who is on the other side of a barrier, and returns to the academy.
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He plans an outing to the central area for a shopping trip.
In order to appear more casual, he goes to the central area on a double date. Max, Momo, Lance, and his new girlfriend Belle head out to shop and try new food. However, Max’s main goal is to collect equipment and weapons for himself and friends.
The group meets Amy, Max’s shopkeeper friend. She acts strangely. Max makes a note of this.
On the way back to the Summoner Academy, the group is attacked by Mystic Spear students. Guard golems that had been following Max intervene, protecting the group. Nobody is harmed, and in frustration, Max watches the attacking students run away. With the help of Saliron, he tags them with some of Saliron’s spirits so he will recognize them later despite their face coverings.
Back at the Summoner Academy, he gifts his students who were lacking decent weapons with new ones. Lance receives the most powerful and expensive weapon that had been sold in the central area, the Shadow Sun Rising, sword of the Battleborne. Max also gives him enough mana units to tie the weapon to his soul, ensuring that Lance can take it with him to earth. Max asks his friend to begin training in martial arts during Max’s classes he holds in the forest.
He also takes inventory of his purchases, which includes a new sword for himself, the Blackmist Inciden of Actus, and a pill furnace. With the help of the pill furnace, he further improves the efficiency of refining his mana body using mana stones, and also uses the tiny bit of excess to make mana pills for himself and his friends. This allows his friends to start slowly saturating their own bodies with mana as well, despite the lack of ambient mana in their Quartet.
Max is prompted to meet with all the headmasters of his quartet in the middle of the night. This is in response to his request that Territ Mond and Mong Hao Han get the other headmasters on board with their cabal.
In the forest, Max meets all four headmasters, including Winno Smith of the Replicator Academy, and Bojana Gala Tassy A’Mind of the Elemental Shifter Academy. Bojana is the most antagonistic, and requires that Max proves his credentials at the mid-year Quartet competition before she is fully committed to the cabal, backing Max for the big competition at the end of the year.
Max requires the headmasters to pay him more mana stones, using the situation to increase his stipend. They reluctantly concede to his demands and he ultimately agrees to the deal.
While he is still digesting this new reality of being secretly sponsored by the Quartet’s headmasters, all for hidden reasons of their own, he is approached by Lavinia about something important. She explains remnant spirits to him, and tells him that one of her friends, a remnant spirit, wants to meet Max.
Remnant spirits are unique existences that have been mostly removed from the Quartet, and any mention of them has been scoured from all the records. Max meets Tom, a remnant spirit who forms a contract with Max. The process destroys Tom, and Lavinia mourns.
Due to the contract with Tom, Max gets a stronger soul, mind, and spirit. He also experiences dreams that are Tom’s memories. In his dreams, he learns of Ancilla, also known as Scorn the Ruiner, a legendary, extremely powerful Summoner who was at odds with the Quartet system, and whose existence is nowhere to be found in any of the Quartet records. From one of the visions, Max recognizes a much younger version of Bojana Gala Tassy A’Mind, the headmaster of the Elemental Shifter academy. Tom shares with Max that there is another secret he wants to tell, but can’t–all he can say is it is another thing the Quarter system is intentionally hiding.
Amy openly shows interest in Max. He meets up with her to learn more about the workers of the central area. However, the meeting goes so well, he begins a romantic relationship with her.
Max begins to learn about the competition at the end of the semester that he must participate in to maintain his sponsorship. He also continues to work with Lavinia on understanding and perfecting her old research from when she was alive. She shows him her old lab, a hidden location that is still functional to this day.
Momo has a conversation with Max about what she wants after the Quartet training. She requests that he find a way to bring her to his world. Max develops necklaces to give to his friends–created to help him analyze and memorize the unique characteristics of their souls. This is done in case he can locate and summon them later.
He takes the initiative to develop disaster and contingency plans with his martial arts students. The information about Ancilla’s existence and how he’d been killed helped open Max’s eyes to even more hidden dangers of the Quartet.
Amy discovers that Max is planning to participate in the end of year competition for the Quartet. She is greatly disturbed by this, since the competition coincides with many students leaving the Quartet. The two of them end their relationship.
After a great amount of effort, Max finally achieves a three star mana body.
He is approached by a new remnant spirit, Dura, in the form of a wolf. Dura has another spirit with him, a friend. Max forms a contract with the remnant spirit, Dura. This grants Max the concept of “disruption.” The spirit Trill that Max also contracts with is specialized in hiding. She can create a bubble that dulls the sense of anyone looking inside. Her other power is to block the sight of other spirits.
After this, Max has contracts with:
Lavinia
Slick
Saliron
Trill
And two remnants:
Tom
Dura
During the mid-year competition, his friends did very well. Then it was Max’s turn to prove himself. He wins handily, also calling out and defeating a number of Mystic Spear students that he recognizes as people who attacked him and his friends in the central area before.
His last opponent is Lim Jezzen, the talented Mystic Spear student who blasted his body apart some time ago when Max was terrorizing the Mystic Spear campus.
During the exhibition, Adjudicator Ni Na Long Swan presides over the matches. Later that night, after Max had won, she shows up at his room with Professor Munka. She bids Max to follow them through a portal that Munka creates.
On the other side of the portal, Swan murders Munka and attacks Max. He barely succeeds in killing her. She was a champion of Demeter, a Champion of a god just like Max. The power of Trill’s barrier and Dura’s concept of disruption had allowed him to break free of Swan’s control and move.
Swan had had a white dagger, a black dagger, a purple dagger, a blue dagger, and a red dagger. Max recognized two of the dagger colors from his visions of Ancilla.
Max gathers his friends and tells them all that something terrible has happened and he needs to leave. He invites them to also leave the Quartet. Only Momo, Lance, and Gantry take him up on his offer. He kills their current body with the white dagger he looted from Adjudicator Swan to eject them from the Quartet.
To allow himself to escape, Max takes a risk. He uses Lavinia’s chair that killed her and turned her into a spirit hundreds of years ago to instead transfer himself to Earth. The gamble is a partial success. He finds himself back on Earth, permanently in his Quartet body.
He gets the current date from a newspaper on the ground.
The purple dagger he’d taken from Swan talks to him, claiming it houses the remnant spirit of a god, a “divine remnant.” He leaves the alley he’d appeared in to get food.
After he’s gone from the alley, Lavinia looks at the newspaper again that Max got the date from. The headline on the other side reads, “Future Uncertain for Disgraced Trifecta Guild.”