With the consumption of some magic stones, Grimm was squeezed as thin as lasagna on the scale before he disappeared.
"Ah!" Grimm had passed through time and space to arrive at the Bramble Forest, the designated place of killing. Grimm almost vomited after the displacement. He had not dabbled with Hematology Sorcery, which could provide greater endurance and make one less prone to gross things.
Grimm was not a moron to let his guard down even though he was caught by dizziness. He observed that two students were confronting each other about ten meters away.
Grimm could discern that neither of them belonged to his academy based on the marks on their foreheads. Actually, one of them was from the Ivory Castle Sorcerer Academy, and the other came from Compass Academy. Grimm had overheard their hostile conversation before his existence was detected by them.
"They are not my academy fellas and even if they are, that are still my enemies. Things may be slightly different for members from the Death Sail League," Grimm said to himself and stealthily regarded the two students before him as irreconcilable adversaries.
Grimm was wearing his Ashen Mask and that hindered them from recognizing the mark on Grimm's forehead. Thus, they had no idea if Grimm was one of their own guys. Then again, proximity of relationships didn't waiver a person from being an enemy. The simple truth applied for Grimm and them, too.
Catching that Grimm was breathing heavily and was at the verge of sickening, they transferred their ire on Grimm simultaneously, as if there was an agreement in effect, binding them to do so.
The two students took the first strikes. With a mutter of spells, a short yet pointed knife approached towards Grimm and in a split of second, an icicle hurtled behind the knife, as if the former was chasing the latter.
Grimm was still trying to recover from his sickness and was sort of reeling when he was suddenly faced with the brutal and violent attacks. Since running or dodging were not an option, he produced the defense shield by virtue of his Ashen Mask.
As you might recall, the Mask offered extraordinary defensive power by creating a shield to assist in countering an attack, and offenses below 20 points would simply be bounced off.
"Clank, clank!" The knife hit the shield and bounced off to a stone on the ground, followed by a shower of broken pieces of the icicle.
'Less than 20 points power of attack! That is weak!' Grimm thought to himself. He was aware of their powerlessness since their weapons were both destroyed by his shield.
It was commonplace for students to not be able to produce over 20 points power of offense because most of them only had a mental strength limited within 10 to 17 degrees, with only a three-year meditation to stimulate the strength up.
The number of those whose mental strength had reached 24 degrees or more, like Grimm himself, could be counted on one's fingers.
The two students gaped anxiously at Grimm as if he was a wild animal who was ready to get them. And they wondered what power was hiding beneath that mask.
One of them came to himself apparently more quickly than the other and ran away immediately by reaching a much greater pace with the help of an Acceleration Sorcery. This condemned the other student to be a much easier prey to Grimm. And Grimm would not let go of an easy prey.
Grimm produced a firebird, which flew at the student in an agile manner.
The student caught on fire and burned wildly as he screamed miserably.
As was illustrated by Sorcerer Elaine on the Basics of Sorceries, the firebird was a fancier form of attack with much higher degrees of energy; it could be as high as 70 points. As a result, the poor student was burnt out in a few minutes.
Thanks to the killing, the mark on Grimm's forehead became clearer.
"Burp." Grimm finally had the chance to throw up.
"It could be easily mastered, but it would come with a cost. The cultivator was likely to be deformed in some way." Grimm hassled with the strong points and weak points of cultivating the Hematology Sorcery.
Grimm regained his vigor and pulled out his crystal ball from his coat to try to contact Lefay and the others.
The marked 200 square kilometers area was too expansive for the crystal ball to cover. Its coverage was, in effect, a range of merely 10 kilometers, allowing for the average level of the students' mental strength.
The contact failed. So it seemed that Grimm's team, or now Lefay's team, had been dispersed remotely.
Grimm checked the map and found no major landmarks that might lead his team members together. So he took a random road in the woods.
As Grimm drew along, he was caught off guard by a colony of nameless wasps which were antagonized for a reason that Grimm had no idea of and were buzzing in on him.
Grimm miscalculated the danger he was in. His enemies came from Mother Nature, too.
'There must be hundreds of them! I will be gone in minutes,' Grimm thought as he produced the bubble shield again.
The swarm of wasps patted on the shield heavily and intermittently like great rain drops crashing on the glass windows of the penthouses. Certainly, these little creatures didn't have sufficient offense power to crack the shield, nor did it require Grimm to consume his magical force to support it in the defense. They were coming at him stubbornly even when many of them had been sprung off.
So Grimm was entrapped, and the Ashen Mask - the producer of the shield - was not able to replenish the element energy, which was extracted from nature, to keep itself working.
But sorcerers fought tough wars using their wisdom instead of using violent means. Violence, if not properly leveraged, was tantamount to silliness.
Grimm pulled out a vial of potion, and it gave out a scent of no decent nature as Grimm opened it.
The odd scent dissipated through the shield and filled the air. The forceful wasps were dispelled and fled away as if there was a flood washing them.
The wasps gone, Grimm was covering his mouth to protect himself from the foul odor. Suddenly, a few meters away from him, something in the bush moved.
Grimm approached toward the bush for a few steps but stopped. Although the first day mirrors had not arrived and thus only a few students would have the upper hand without its help, there were gifted ones like Kyrie and Brianna, and his enemies might be from other sorcery academies of which he had little knowledge. And what if it was a wild hog or something whose impact was too strong for the shield to hold?
As Grimm was thinking how he would deal with the thing in the bush, it moved again. Grimm took a couple of steps further toward it. The thing suddenly broke the entangled and unkempt branches and emerged.
"Ha, a man!" Grimm sneered.
The man appeared rather panicked. He must have seen how Grimm defeated the former two students and the wasps and thought Grimm was too powerful to have as an enemy.. Before saying anything, he had scuttled.
Grimm extended his right arm towards the man and a vine appeared. The vine crept quickly yet tenaciously along the ground and tripped the escaping man by tying his ankles.
It was the magical tool Lefay sent him that had produced the vine.
"Humph, such a lame sorcery is gonna get me?" The man puffed and his feet slowly turned into a pair of bovine hooves and easily got out of the vine ring.
As the man stood up and got ready to run again, Grimm started the Firebird and sent the fire to chase him.
It seemed that this man was stronger than the former two, and he had mastered some quite good sorceries. Right before the fire was going to catch him, he melted into a ball of blood and spurted away.
Grimm came to where the man had vanished, looking a little bit downcast, but he found some blood stains on the ground.
"Haha, you idiot. You left your personal information? Let's see if you've raised Symbiotic Insects or not." Grimm laughed insidiously.
Grimm set up an altar and put a straw man at the center of it. He then dipped his finger on the blood stain and chanted. As Grimm was murmuring, a cloud of red mist floated upwards.
The escaping man halted a few minutes later when he had made sure that Grimm was not following and was sure that he had surely exceeded the attack range of the firebird.
"Luck is so against me! The first day being in this damn place and I came across such a freak!" The man complained.
The next second, he broke out in cold sweat and suddenly he could not see anything.
"No, no... I am cursed!" The man became desperate and scurried around in blindness.
Grimm tracked him down half an hourglass later using his enhanced odor discerning capability and found him burnt out because of the curse.
"You poor silly soul. Why did you cultivate such a sorcery for running? And you haven't bred your symbiotic insects. That is suicide."
