Agatha wasn’t sure why, but she trembled on her feet. Maybe not quite a tremble, it was more like she was walking on hot coals and needed to keep herself on the move lest she burned herself. Surprisingly, that same reaction could be seen in the rest of the students.
It was early in the morning, the sun had come out less than an hour ago, and they were out in the training grounds in their uniforms and backpacks as the chilly spring morning mist greeted them. Only one person looked remotely comfortable, and that was their teacher. And even he wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine either.
“Good morning, students!” Teacher Dago shouted. “Today you will be having your last exam of the year, and nominally, the most important. This exam will be a bit different from the rest because, as you know, it is a military exercise. You will make an expedition across the Cracal mountain range. As you might know, there is an entrance to the depths nearby, so you might find yourself with a monster or two. These are not anything you cannot handle already, so the exam values your ability to make it through the mountain range, to reach the goal in a timely manner, and to reach the goal unscathed.”
A student raised his hand. A girl who looked familiar to Agatha, but she couldn’t quite put a name to her. Though at the same time, all the students looked familiar to her by virtue of having shared a classroom for a whole year. In any case, the problem lay within her for not knowing her fellow students’ names yet.
“Yes, Miss Rivera?” René Dago acknowledged her.
“When you say that we have to make it through the mountain range, do you mean that we have to do so alone?” The noble girl said with a hint of nervousness.
“Alone… is not quite the word,” the black-uniformed soldier chuckled. “I will not assist you through your journey, though I will do my best to watch for your safety. You will be allowed to travel in groups of up to four people, and the goal is the entrance to the Cracal depths. The journey will take up to three days on foot, so the plan is to camp for at least two nights. There will be a ‘main’ camp each night, but as it is impossible to keep track of everyone and as not everyone also does not have the same sense of orientation, staying at the camp during the night is not mandatory. You have sleeping bags with you, so if you do not find the way to the camp, you are more than welcome to sleep outdoors. You are adults, after all.”
A lot of groans were heard after that statement, but Agatha didn’t have any issues with it whatsoever. Perhaps because she was one of the few commoners in the class – and perhaps the only truly lowborn as technically Shayla and Mateo were commoners, though Agatha wasn’t so sure of Christie’s status – so this wouldn’t be her first time sleeping outdoors.
“Having said so, let us start marching down the academy. You can form your groups on our way to the mountain foot,” René Dago clapped loudly, likely assisted by lithorica, and started marching away.
It was followed by a handful of groans and grunts, but the class quickly assembled and started marching behind him. The first stop of their march was the lift down the academy, and more than one student professed their doubts about the lifting capacity of the contraption, her roommate included. Though René ignored the wails of his students and just stepped onto the platform, waiting for the rest to join them.
Considering a lot of people were so uneasy, now Christie didn’t look so out of place with her fear of heights.
“How can you not be scared?” The redhead whispered in her ear, a gesture that was even more apparent as the warm breath clashed against Agatha’s cold ears.
“About the platform failing and falling?” Christie nodded vivaciously as she spoke, and the dirty-blond girl couldn’t help but find the gesture cute. Oh! It’s been a while since she behaved like a bnnuy! The girl who was a head taller than her only looked like a scared bunny to her eyes. “Two words: Control Anchor series.”
“Those are three words,” her roommate squinted at her.
“Bah!” Agatha protested. “You know exactly what I meant.”
“You-Ah!” Christie yelped as the lift finally started moving. Agatha was more scared than the tall girl as she had thrown herself onto her, and the jump almost took the heart out of her petite body. For several reasons.
Whether it was out of shame or composure, her roommate rapidly relaxed and acted as if nothing had happened. Though that didn’t stop the redhead from staying close to her. Not that Agatha complained.
As soon as the platform made it to the ground level, their military march started. René Dago had never directly taught them how to march, but considering how several of the exercises he made his students do during physical education were about matching the rhythm of others, soon the whole class snapped in a near-homogeneous rhythm.
The cacophony conjoined harmoniously, making their steps very loud as they stepped out of the academy grounds and away from the capital. It took them only a quarter of an hour before they were well outside Knight’s Landing as the Skyscraper Academy was already placed on the outskirts.
Then everything blurred.
Perhaps it was due to the fact that it was very early in the morning still, or perhaps because they had intimidated themselves in a herd behavior, but no student talked. Only once they were an hour into the march did the first voices arise. By then, the march became a bit more asynchronous as people shifted around and they gathered into groups. Both consciously and subconsciously. Before Agatha noticed, Shayla Belkadi and Mateo Librar were walking right beside her.
“So,” she was the first one to talk, “I guess we are a unit, then.”
“Pretty much, yes,” Shayla affirmed.
“Well, I guess we are your only option,” Agatha giggled. “I doubt anyone else would want you.”
“Agatha!” Christie snapped at her. “That is not nice!”
“To be fair, she is right.” The one who spoke wasn’t Mateo, but Shayla herself.
“Why would you say that?” The redhead said in a panic. “She was badmouthing you!”
“No, she was telling the truth,” the Intaksolfani shrugged. “I do not know if it is a Crochetan or formal thing, but you all are really averse to telling the truth. Agatha is not. Simple as that.” Christie slightly flinched at those words, and even Mateo, who hadn’t joined the conversation, shrank. “Having said so, you speak with a lot of courage considering you are in the same boat as me, Agatha.”
“I think people would still want me, if just to have more firepower in their arsenal,” the villager countered. “And even if that were not the case, Christie would still want me, right?”
She looked at the tall girl, and Christie just looked away and muttered a half-hearted “I do not know…”
“Oh, come on!” Agatha groaned. “How is it that I get pestered about entering mock sapphire mode, but I cannot recriminate you about being mock yourself?”
“I literally did not say anything, mock sapphire~” Christie whistled innocently.
Neither Shayla nor Mateo said anything, but the both of them shared a look and rolled their eyes, which made Agatha want to hit them hard on the head.
“Stop yapping and march!” René Dago shouted from the front of the formation, and whilst the cry wasn’t directed to them personally as their group was rather silent compared to the howls of others, the warning was enough to cow them into silence for at least the next half an hour.
A couple of hours later into the march, their teacher finally stopped. Agatha set down her backpack as it was starting to hurt her shoulders a bit. Her strength was in her lower body, not her upper one. And with everything René Dago made them carry, she was actually more loaded than when she had been travelling with the caravan. Food, change of clothing, first aid supplies, a sleeping bag, and a lot more paraphernalia that ended up weighing a lot. An excursion that would last less than a week produced far heavier baggage than a journey that had lasted a month.
“This will be the starting point of your journey,” René Dago announced with a bombastic voice that echoed through the whole clearing. “To get to the entrance of the depths, you need to get through this forested valley. There will be a bit of mountaineering and climbing needed here and there, but if you cannot handle it, you are not ready to be a soldier either way. I will keep watch from the skies, but consider that the longer the days go on, the further you will end up from one another, so if anything happens, do not expect immediate help. You will need to behave like soldiers and not students. Have that in mind. Having said so, the exam has started!”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The black-uniformed soldier didn’t waste a single second before he took to the skies and became a splotch not unlike an ant in both size and coloration.
“Well,” Shayla clapped, making a mockery of their teacher’s antics. “Should we get going?” And they did.
Their group was one of the first to march into the forest. They started walking together at the start, but soon their march degenerated into a mess as everyone followed their own rhythm, and the uneven terrain of the forest certainly didn’t help in the slightest. Agatha wasn’t an expert forester by any means. Malachite was inside a forest, but she had never really explored it deeply, barely keeping herself to the village’s outskirts. And even then, she spearheaded the group by a lot.
Surprisingly, Mateo was the second one. He looked a bit roughed up, but he navigated the undergrowth with far more ease than the others. Next was Shayla, and whilst she was third, she looked far fresher than the lone boy in the group. It was clear that the Intaksolfani was walking relaxedly, as if she were just having a stroll. Unsurprisingly, however, the last one was Christie.
Her roommate had built a lot of stamina and muscle over the last year – Christie no longer looked like a stick that might be blown away by a breeze – but all that effort was still not enough to trek in an inclined forest with several dozen kilograms of load.
“Can we take a rest?” The redhead suggested between heavy pants.
“We have only been inside the forest for half an hour, Christie,” Shayla said.
“But we have been walking for a handful of hours before that without a rest,” Mateo replied with a bit of a haggard breath.
“He is right, we should take a rest,” Agatha said and took her backpack out. “Right here is a good spot already, sit down on that rock if you do not want to sit on the grass. Shayla, watch my bag while I am gone.”
“Where are you going?” The dark-skinned girl squinted at her.
The dirty-blond girl smiled and took a step forward. “Exploring.” The next moment, she was up in the skies.
The Control Anchor series was already powerful, but you know what was even more powerful? The Speed Control Anchor series.
This series was two series joined into one: Speed Control and Control Anchor. Speed Control was a terrifying series, one Agatha would never forget, but the girl had trained a lot with it so nothing like that repeated would ever happen again. And even then, the next series literally avoided it from happening altogether. By limiting the movement of her agate to the y-axis, the Speed command could only shoot upwards or downwards, which made it impossible to hurt anyone.
In just a blink, Agatha had recalled the little sapphire hanging on her neck and the one she had lying in her pocket, and then summoned it whole where she was going to step. Using the Summon Shape series, she was able to summon a platform on the forest’s undergrowth, and with a simple thought, the Speed Control Anchor shot her upwards.
The weakness of the Control Anchor series was that it was limited by the carrying weight of the Control command, which was little to none. But by adding the Speed command – especially hers, which went supersonic easily – the agate now packed far more force. Still, moving a kilo at a couple of times at the speed of sound didn’t translate into much speed when moving a fifty-something load. It is probably forty-something. I am not that heavy.
But the tandem of Speed and Control was still enough to move her at a couple of meters per second upwards, enough to see Christie’s shrinking face twist into sickness as she saw Agatha rise higher and higher up. In this case, she didn’t blame the porcelain doll. A platform the size of her feet wasn’t the same as the lift of the academy. The villager had shaped the platform so it locked the soles of her boots, but that still didn’t add that much in the way of stability. A strong breeze could still topple her to the ground.
Yet there wasn’t a pebble of fear in Agatha’s body.
She had never feared the heights before, and now that she could summon her agate at will and make it so it locked her in place, it was literally impossible for her to die from heights. Recovering her step might still hurt a bit, but if she were conscious and mentally sharp, she would never ever fall again from any height.
She continued rising until she was well above the tallest pine trees. Agatha saw her teacher and saluted him. René Dago seemed to notice her, but he was flying so high up that she couldn’t tell if he had returned the salute.
Depths, I’m high up and I still can’t see the entrance of the depths… I guess, they said it was a trip on foot of about two days, so it makes sense that it still isn’t visible. And fractures, this forest is dense. I can’t find anyone from the class. She did her best to look around, but she only saw trees, more trees, and the occasional boulder bigger than a house. There were clusters of them that looked like a landslide, especially considering the number of toppled trees around them. Those are a handful of landslides… Is this place safe?
Having observed enough, Agatha made her way downward. For some reason, it was way harder to maintain her equilibrium when going down, but she managed to make it to the ground without toppling.
“So, how did it go?” Shayla asked while comfortably sitting atop a rock with a waterskin in her hand. A drop of water made it down her lips, and Agatha couldn’t help but find it oddly alluring.
“I am afraid I have not found much,” Agatha recalled her agate and put her hands in the pockets of her pants. There she summoned her not-so-little sapphire and applied the Duplicate command to get her little sapphire back, and she placed it on her necklace. “The forest is too dense to see anything, but I have spotted a handful of boulders that look like they might have come from landslides.”
“Hmm, that could be problematic. I would not like to get caught in one,” the Intaksolfani pressed a hand against her chin, deep in thought.
“Definitely,” Mateo added, and Agatha turned his head to face him. After a handful of months, the boy didn’t look as chubby as before, and the military uniform certainly helped him look more well-built. “But those are rare. Unless it rains or… a certain kind of monsters make their appearance, we should not need to worry about them.”
“Dude!” Shayla shouted at him.
“What?” The shout scared the scholarite, and he stood up. He was so agitated that he couldn’t bring himself to care about the informal address the dark-skinned girl had used.
“You have totally just jinxed us.”
“I… have done no such a thing!” Mateo said with a modicum of confusion. “I understand that in Intak Solfan superstition is deeply rooted, but my words have no effect on reality; otherwise, I would not perform as poorly as I do.”
“I doubt that Mateo has cursed us,” Christie giggled. “But if something happens, we can always blame him.”
““Agreed.”” Agatha and Shayla said at the same time.
“No!” The scholarite protested. “I do not agree!” But soon the boy found out that it was the girls who ruled in this group.
Not before long, the whole group got walking again. As before, Agatha was the spearhead and Christie the rearguard, not that the latter did that out of pleasure. Their pace was constant until they rested again a handful of hours later to lunch. They had been given military rations meant to be eaten cold, but Agatha had other plans, and she took out a pot and started a fire with dry undergrowth and her lone agate. Previously, making fire with her little sapphire would have been a no-go, but now that she could apply Control to the Combustion command, she could make flames reliably instead of burning everything in her path.
I think this is the best change of the Second Stratum, as I was never able to use Combustion without creating forest fires, though I guess it doesn't matter much now that I am on the Third Stratum.
“I still consider this a waste of our precious drinkable water,” Mateo commented as her looked over Agatha’s shoulder as she stirred the stew.
“You can not eat,” she responded dryly.
“I never said that…” He said sheepishly and walked back.
“Does anyone care if I take off my boots? They are killing me,” Shayla said.
“Nope,” Agatha said while still focused on the stew.
Mateo seemed like he wanted to say something, but the recent intimidation had left him mute for the time being. The Intaksolfani didn’t waste time on removing her boots, and also her thick wool socks. Then she started wiggling her toes.
“Can you not do that?” The scholarite looked at the dark-skinned girl with a grossed-out gaze.
“Why not?” Shayla raised her legs and wiggled her toes a bit more.
“Because we are going to eat?” He replied. “I do not want your dirty tootsies to pollute my food.”
Agatha would say that Shayla could continue wiggling her toes, but alas, her willpower prevailed against her intrusive thoughts. For having undergone the same training as everyone else, the merchant’s daughter had beautiful feet deprived of any imperfections or blisters. Depths, I would like to have such feet. At least they hadn’t walked enough to get blisters. Yet.
“Oh, stinky are they?” Unapologetically, the Intaksolfani continued wiggling her toes, reaching them ever-so-slightly closer to the boy, even if he was standing meters away.
“Bah! I am going to relieve myself,” and he walked into the forest.
“I hope it is not the type of relieving that I am thinking!” Shayla humorously shouted.
“Aaaaaah!” A mighty grunt could be heard deep into the forest.
“Congratulations,” Agatha said. “I think you managed to make him angry.”
“Oh, thank you~” The citrine-eyed girl pressed her hands against her chest in gratitude.
“It was not a compliment,” the azure-eyed girl squinted tiredly.
Definitely a character… Agatha sighed as she continued to work on the stew. Christie had been silent for the whole conversation, but it wasn’t that she wasn’t paying attention, as the girl was slightly blushing during the whole ordeal; she had just decided not to intervene as she rested in the shade of a tree. Her roommate looked a bit pale, so Agatha gave the first serving to her.
“Here,” she offered to the bunny-looking girl.
“Thank you,” the redhead smiled softly at her as she took the wooden bowl in her hands.
“Are you feeling well, Christie? You are quite pale.”
“Oh, I am fine. It is just that this is the first time I have walked this much, we have been walking for almost half a day already, and the idea of walking more is just making me sick.”
“That sounds like you are not alright,” the dirty-blond girl crossed her arms.
“I am! I am! I just… I thought I could take on more punishment than this.”
“Everyone has their rhythm, do not worry about it,” Agatha looked around and saw how Mateo came back and poured himself a serving of stew. The petite girl closed on the tall one’s ear and whispered. “You are not bleeding are you?”
“What? No,” Christie swayed her head. “Depths, I doubt I could have made it this far if I were.”
“That is what I thought; I just wanted to check.” Agatha honestly only kept track of her roommate’s cycle because it just happened to coincide with the end of her own, and considering she was a few days due, it could be completely possibly that Christie’s just came sooner than expected. Oh, fractures… I am going to bleed in the middle of this excursion, am I not? The dirty-blond girl groaned.
“Are you okay?” The redhead giggled.
“For the time being, yes,” she sighed. “Great emphasis on the ‘for the time being’.”
“Oh,” her roommate muttered in realization. “Should we then make haste?”
“No, regardless of how fast we are, I am still going to go through it. Better if we conserve our strengths. In any case,” Agatha scoffed, “we should ask Shayla how she is doing. You do not know about her schedule, do you?”
Christie swayed her head, “I will try asking when we are on the move. Could you try taking away Mateo when I do so?”
“Consider it done,” the villager gave her roommate a thumbs-up. “Now, if you excuse me, I want to get a serving before these two leave me with nothing.”
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