Ed probably spent about an entire month at the school. Sitting through his classes like a ghost, nobody noticing him. He spent most of the time distracting himself with the spells Serah’d shown him, messing with random things around the buildings, forcing out a few laughs at their confused reactions when he would move a stack of papers or something. Or, and now that he had the time to really look at it, the whole system thing he had going on.

The blue box was still there, if he brought it up from the cross button that is. Though while it was still very barebones it was slightly more filled out now.

Ed was currently sprawled back across one of the large gym spotting blocks that he’d dragged out onto the field between classes, watching the clouds through the blue screen as the afternoon gym class flowed around him like a school of confused fish. It was football month and Ed had never quite gotten over the fact they somehow managed to play the game just fine despite a giant block in their way.

It was rather funny looking now that he thought about it. Not quite as funny as his status though. He still couldn’t quite get over the fact he was now level two. When he’d first got around to checking it he’d noticed the cross had been slightly glowing and when he’d brought up his status there’d been a little notification that for ‘surviving a minor point of contention’ He’d been awarded five experience, then about halfway through the month the little dust bullet spell he’d been fiddling had given him a second notification, awarding him twenty experience, popping up as a ‘dockable skill’ and pushing him over the top and into the next level.

That had been a surprise. He’d been playing around with it due to its low mana cost and an unwillingness to dip too far into the coins Serah’d given him but after that little revelation he’d started to be quite a bit more generous with the reserves. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he was a little disappointed that besides pushing his mana bar up to ten, leveling hadn’t actually done anything else. Not that he wasn’t grateful. He’d need a bit of a larger sample size but after figuring out that practicing spells probably made skills and unlocking skills gave him experience, he’d taken to casting thrall on as many bystanders as possible.

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Casting it didn’t do anything to them, and Ed was still rather leery of taking the reins but out of all the other spells it seemed the most versatile given the disproportionately large amount of humans to non-humans.

Ed looked down from the clouds, much like that first day in the classroom, the football game had frozen around him. Though after a couple seconds of that, the ones leading up to the walkways jerked to attention before stiffly stepping aside. Walking down from the bleachers like perhaps some sort of modern moses parting the sea, Liah strode up to him.

He’d learned a while ago that she absolutely hated her birth name and had gone out of her way to make sure people forgot it. He’d even checked a roster one time and to his surprise it’d been just Liah, nothing else.

When she was about ten or so meters away a sort of grassy mound rose up out of the ground and she made a T pose, before dropping back into it. It rose to about the height of his spotting block before stopping.

The game resumed around them, and Ed realized about half the players had a little pink charmed statuses over their head now. They were also very much ignoring the new additional mound in their midst.

Ed went back to practicing his thrall on the uncharmed members. One of the first things he’d tested was its effectiveness on them, but he found it simply sort of slipped off of most people with a status effect. Though, he had gotten the feeling that if he pressed hard enough perhaps that would change. He wasn’t going to do that though. Especially when he was pretty sure Liah was the one behind all the statused people in the school.

Unlike the other two, she didn’t seem to have very many reservations about using rather flashy and large scale bits of magic.

“What’s the point of that?”

Much like the first time, Ed didn’t actually realize it’d been aimed at him until a good few seconds after the fact.