When arriving at our class, we both grabbed our seats near the back of the class.
There, Ji-Hye approached us.
"Good morning Seo-Jun!"
"And you must be Park Sung-Ho right?" she asked as she turned towards him.
"G-Good morning Park Ji-hye, I-I'm surprised you know me."
Ji-Hye grumbles, "My father always talks about Dong-Hyun ssi's son all the time whenever he lectures me so I can't help but remember it."
"Haha…" Sung-Ho awkwardly laughs
"Well either way, let's be friends." Ji-Hye said as she slapped his back.
"I'll be going to my seat now, see you guys later."
"A-Alright." Sung-Ho responded.
After Ji-Hye left, I began worriedly questioning him. "You're Choi Dong-Hyun's son?"
"Why do you have different last names?"
Realizing it was rude to mention their family situation, I apologized. "Oh, I'm sorry, that was rude of me…"
"It's fine, It's not anything that bad." Sung-Ho responded with a smile.
"My father and mother got divorced before I was born, and because my mother had custody of me, I took her last name."
"Though, I would constantly visit and stay with my father as he was always worried about me."
"But because we rarely show up together in public, hardly anyone aside from the people close to us know I am his son."
He started being less shy and responded excitedly as he was talking about his family.
Listening to him makes me feel bitter in my heart.
No wonder why Sung-Ho felt familiar to me, yet he wasn't mentioned in the game.
During one of the first major events in the game, each class gets assigned to a dungeon relative to their strength for a class assessment.
Unfortunately, for class F-1, despite their dungeon being weak there was a hidden dungeon connected with it.
After clearing the dungeon, class F-1 was then surrounded by the stronger monsters.
Already weakened after defeating the boss monster, they barely had the strength to run away.
Park Sung-Ho was one of the few ones who died in the dungeon, and the rest of the students were able to escape due to Park Ji-Hye forming a contract with Athena.
After Choi Dong-Hyun found out about his son's death, he would go on the battlefield and continuously fight in grief.
Eventually, his mind would get corrupted by the demons and he would turn into an enemy the main characters will face in the future.
Although Park Jung-Ho's death was predetermined, it still left a bad taste in my mouth knowing the first friend I made in this world was originally going to be killed as a plot device.
"I would like to introduce you to my father as you are the first friend I made." Park Jung-Ho brightly expressed.
It seemed like after getting closer to him, he stopped being shy and stuttering with me.
"Sure, I would like to meet him as well." I said as I smiled back at him.
At least this time, I'll do my best not to let you die and turn Choi Dong-Hyun into an enemy.
Class was about to start, so we all started quieting down.
"Good morning class~" Teacher Dan-Bi called out as she entered the class.
"Today we will be learning how to manipulate our mana to see what element each of you can wield."
"Each person who has awakened can manipulate at least up to one type of element."
"The more elements one can use, the rarer and more valued that person will be."
"But of course, if you can use light magic, that outweighs everything as it is the strongest power to use against the demons."
"The rarer type of element you can use would mean the stronger it will be, but of course there are some downsides to it."
"For example, because the element is stronger, that means it is more unstable resulting in the user needing to be more skilled at controlling their mana."
"In order to test out which element you can use, you need to slowly gather your mana and try to shape it with your imagination." Teacher Dan-Bi explains as she demonstrates with her own magic.
A sphere of water slowly emerges in her hand.
"The more mana you have, and skilled you are with the technique, the more freely you can manipulate your ability." she mentions as the water sphere slowly separated and flowed around her body turning into a shield.
"Now each of you try manipulating your mana."
After getting the okay, we all started testing out which elements we can use.
Naturally, both Ji-Hye and Sung-Ho knew which elements they could use as they already tested it out at home beforehand.
Ji-Hye was able to manipulate fire magic while Sung-Ho used wind magic.
Although they both learned it beforehand, Ji-Hye had better mana manipulation so her powers were more consistent compared to Sung-Ho's.
Focusing back on my own mana, I tried testing out the basic elements.
Unfortunately none of them worked for me so I tested out the rarer ones.
After going through them one by one, the last ones left to test out were light and dark magic.
I tried manipulating my mana trying to imagine a ball of light in the palm of my hand, but nothing had happened.
So I swapped the ball of light into a ball made out of darkness.
Although it was very faint, it had finally worked.
"Wow Seo-Jun, it looks like you can use dark magic." Sung-Ho said in a surprised voice.
"Dark magic is as rare as light magic so there is hardly anyone who can use it."
"I'm a little bit worried, my mana manipulation is pretty weak so I doubt I can use it to its full potential."
Sung-Ho tries to cheer me up and motivate me. "I believe in you, you can do it."
"Thanks."
I then checked the new additional skills given to me thanks to this lesson.
[Skill: Dark Magic Mastery lvl1
Passive - Allows the user to transform their mana into a darkness attribute]
[Skill: Mana Manipulation lvl1
Passive - Allows the user to freely manipulate their mana according to their level.]
When we had all finished testing out which type of element we could use, class had ended and it was time to start combat training class..
After entering the room, Teacher Chung-Do had instructed us to apply what we had learned earlier into actual combat..
I walked up to a training dummy and concentrated my mana onto my dagger, although faint, it had coated the blade.
After slashing the neck of the training dummy, it had created a corrosion effect reducing the auto regeneration of the dummy.
The usage of dark magic is really strong, but there was a current downside with me using the ability.
Although it was strong, after using my mana once or twice, it used up all of my mana completely tiring me out.