My training and experiments wound up taking far longer than I expected. Seven hours to be exact. Luckily, the Party was too absorbed in the fights to check up on me.
Sadly, however, I wound up missing five fights and most of the sixth.
I was still getting used to seeing double whenever my mind went blank, which happened to be surprisingly often. Due to that, I hadn't realized what time it was until I sat down to eat and saw the hulking Amazonian centered on-screen.
I developed an interest with them after learning Grandpa Lich was a half-Amazonian Devil.
While they undoubtedly had males and females, only the obvious was the distinguishing factor between the two. They had no concept of gender roles or identities, though they all had feminine natures.
What was more interesting to me, however, was their culture. They didn't care for petty things like laws or manners or even nudity. Strength was revered above all else. They went so far as to build no walls or defenses in their cities and wear no armor in combat. And they were all devoted to a single cause.
Naturally, my actions aligned with that cause. So that put Ale Nicchi on my priority list for recruitment.
He was built like Hercules and strong like him too. Able to hold a proper slugfest with a Stone Golem throughout the ten minutes it took me to eat.
He was still going strong when I left the cafeteria and even still upon my return to the dorms. Even while Zakira and the others caught me up on the fights I missed, Ale Nicchi threw hands with live stone.
Winston was the one to tell me that one of his vassals, Willard Rowe, happened to be the first to lose in an unremarkable fight against an Owlbear.
Accursed things.
Ironically, it was the same case with the vassal of Winston's 'friend,' Zeke Smeal. Edgar Lope fought and nearly got calcified by a Cockatrice, only to have Winston cover for him and Willard by saying they were more of the scholarly types and thus unfit for fighting.
A paltry excuse by my standard, considering we'd spent the last six months training our spirits to death.
Hogaz the half-orc wound up being an interesting fight, according to Slate and Kao at least. He fought a Mudhound Tortoise and fended it off expertly with a short sword that'd been 'crafted by a legend,' according to Els. And his manipulation of the nearby grasses served as an object of fascination for everyone else.
Even then, however, he was said to mostly rely on his sword and superhuman strength to break the hounds' porcelain shell while it tried and often succeeded at lacerating his legs until he still wound up taking the victory.
After that, Zakira excitedly told me about Butuss the lizardfolk ripping a Silverback Stone Gorilla to shreds and gorging himself on the remains, much to everyone's horror.
'Ale, Hogaz, and Butuss.' I pondered.
Ale was easy and almost certainly added to GetHelp. But Hogaz was a wildcard. An uncertainty in the app. His personality, goals, and ambitions were a complete unknown to me, as was most of his knowledge, other than his language and the information spawned from the place he was raised.
Which gave me an idea. Or rather, it made me remember something.
I was polylingual. English, Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic. All of them, essentially. Although those were the ones most commonly used in my later life. Mixed into an eclectic dialect known only to the denizens of Saturnia.
Now, however, English was referred to as Common, which had a noticeably high variation of dialects and accents that put it much closer to a type of underdeveloped creole. On top of that, I was taught the Drow dialect of Elvish: Under-Elvish, along with the Darkworld trade language: Undercommon.
But Els spoke Dwarvish. Slate and Kao had their own language. As did Duke and Twig. And most importantly, Urshure knew Draconic. Beyond that, Zohnos and his sister spoke whatever language Triton's spoke, Zarzok and Phelaia spoke Infernal, the Fire Genasi probably spoke his own language and so too did the sole halfling in attendance at the Bodhi Tree.
I wanted to learn them all. And Orkish and Goblin and Giant and all the other languages too.
Such a thing was only proper for a devil, after all.
In other words, I needed to make some deals. So I sat and pondered while Ale punched and pushed and suddenly backed away from the golem to pull a pair of spiked metal gloves on before he re-engaged to pummel the construct to dust within seconds.
"So he was just having fun." I laughed. Then looked around to see many of the other screens had already switched to the perspective of the elf in a dense misty swamp. 'Interesting.'
One match every half hour. Ten per day, with students venturing through portals to some far-off lands to fight monsters.
'But… where?'
I opened the Map in my Eternal Eye and immediately regretted not making the most out of the map found in the library. From what I could see, however, the Bodhi Peninsula was attached to Nonus by a mountain range far to the north, and essentially all the land between served as our proving grounds during our outings. A realm utterly void of any badlands or burning forests.
The Bodhi Tree itself was at the south end of the peninsula. Centered atop a sheer cliff with northern and southern borders of thick woods.
I'd seen it many times. Every day for the last nine weeks. Crater Lake. An unmoving blue sheet that stretched to the horizon. In passing, I always assumed it to be the World Sea. But it was a lake. Crater Lake. I was aware of that the whole time. And the realization that I had remained ignorant of that fact was more painful than any wound I had ever received, both in this life and the last.
The only way in or out of the grounds was through the Bifrost. At least that's what the Staff said. What's more, the fact that we could spectate these matches with ease implied they were held within the Headmaster's territory.
The breadth of that territory was something I elected to find out at once. The call of the library pulled and pulled at me, but my interest remained on the elf strolling through the marsh.
Zaos Torhorn was his name. A Wood Elf, according to his dossier. He was short and lean, standing 165 centimeters tall with brown, almost copper-hued skin, black hair, and vibrant green eyes that looked out at his surroundings with the same wonder I often had.
His shoes- boots made of what appeared to be stitched leaves much like his clothes, flowed silently through the paddies of tall grass and mangroves until he suddenly stopped.
He pivoted with the grace of a dancer and was found facing about in the blink of an eye, an arrow knocked, his longbow drawn to the limit of its function, and a vortex of mana swirling in front of his arrow before it was let loose in a muffled shockwave.
Like a suppressed high-powered rifle, the arrow arced into the distance and without hesitating, Zaos eased his body forward to enter the vortex and strode hundreds of meters forward in an instant.
The screens flickered and Zaos was seen knocking two more arrows into his bow while a blanket of mana formed around his chest. His body lurched and his feet kicked out to drag him up to the face of a rickety old crone, clutching the first arrow he'd loosed in her fist.
<
Like before, a vortex appeared in conjunction with Zaos' outcry, yet the hag ducked away in an incredible display of speed and sent out a blood-curdling scream of her own.
Zaos jumped away, covering his ears in time to protect himself from a crimson wave of mana erupting from the hag. Then the ground below him erupted.
He tried to pounce away but the mass of roots sprouting from the ground was faster. Like faceless snakes, they reached for and constricted around Zaos' legs. Yet Zaos remained in place. He lazily pulled his arm upward as if he were putting his hand in his pocket and stopped halfway and the mana responded by compressing into a shard to dig through the veins before it gained enough traction to peel off towards the Hag like a stock car.
She slapped it away like a mosquito had been flying up to bite her. Shattering the mana into countless particles of brilliant light that occluded her emaciated form on retreat.
With a wave of Zohnos' hand, the mana in front of the hag began to compress into a web of thin needles scattered across her path. She dug into the ground at once to halt herself and swiped at the shards with her claws while Zaos closed the distance, waving all the while to spawn more and more needles at her back.
She spun, swiping again, breaking the needles into smaller shards that hung around their primaries like remora chasing their hosts for protection.
Bow knocked, Zaos reacted this time by kicking off the ground to cut right and spawn a final wave of needles to surround her. And in another vortex-induced burst of speed, he achieved the flank he was aiming for and unleashed a proverbial Gatling of arrow and needle-fire into the hag.
She fought with all her might. Swiping and ducking and spawning walls of vines to protect herself up until the moment she couldn't.
The moment her strength ran out, another bloodcurdling burst of mana deflected the first wave of arrows and needles to bypass her failing guard. Then Zaos released an omnidirectional downpour of magical ordinance to rip her into an unrecoverable pile of viscera and plant matter.
And when she was gone, he turned his aloof eyes back to the misty swamp around him and stepped away.