Chapter 20: Some Sacrifices

[A1-7]

Cale sighed as he looked at the classroom door. He knew this classroom. How could he not? He remembered very little of the novel, but he remembered swearing at the way the author had put the first ten students in the same class out of the supposedly randomly assigned classes.

At the time he had written in the comments that this was nonsense, thinking it was a fantasy of the author who wanted the characters to be in constant contact with each other. But why was he being dragged into this nonsense?

His rank was low. Just low enough to get him kicked back a hundred places. He looked again at his rank on the cadet card he held in his hand.

[Rank 1940, Cale Rayne]

'Why am I in the same class as them?'

The more Cale thought about it the more absurd it became the more he thought about it on the weekend between the results being announced immediately after the exam.

He didn't want to be dragged into what they were going through. He just wanted to be strong and rich enough to survive.

Cale frowned, thinking that the person who had called him into this world was mocking him. When he remembered the exam, he couldn't understand why the academy had gone to such trouble.

Contrary to popular belief, the exam was not a duel, but a test of mana, stamina, agility, aura, elemental affinity, etc., conducted by various instructors.

Cale was at a complete disadvantage. He couldn't use mana or aura. He had no affinity for any element and was not a weapons master. Although his physical skills were good, they were not enough to raise his score.

Since he had no plans to be noticed anyway, it suited him. But when he found out that he was in the same class as the top ten students at the top of the list, all his comfort was gone.

He could feel it. He could already feel that he was going to be involved in the events they were dragged into.

"Are you going to enter the classroom now?" he heard an angry voice say, and he stopped sighing as he looked at the classroom door and saw a petite girl frowning at him.

Her big green eyes under her round glasses were filled with intolerance, as if Cale had gotten on her nerves. Cale knew who she was.

When he said, "I'm sorry," and stepped aside, Veronica rolled her eyes and walked past him.

"Idiot!" Cale heard her words but ignored them.

He stopped standing at the door and entered the classroom. He saw that the layout was the same as in his other classroom. Without thinking too much, he sat in the back row by the window and two people caught his eye.

Sylvie Vernon and Elliot Trevor.

Cale saw Elliot talking to a few girls with a sweet smile on his face and the girls giggling and blushing.

Cale knew that behind Elliot's outwardly gentlemanly persona was his cunning personality. He also knew that even though he loved Amy, he liked the attention he received from other women.

When Amy entered the classroom and her eyes found Elliot, she saw him frown at her. He saw her fidget uncomfortably in her seat and watched blankly as Elliot walked over and kissed her cheek.

Cale sighed as he realized that unlike a week ago, his heart wasn't troubled. He didn't want to feel any closeness to Amy, even though they were real siblings. He thought that the pain in his heart he had felt a week ago was the real Cale.

He had thought that even though the soul left the body, his habits were etched into it. It was a relief to see that he didn't feel anything now.

Amy Donovan and her mother Rosa Donovan were the only names that caused scars in the real Cale's life. When Cale remembered the time he read the novel, a sadness welled up inside him.

He remembered the scene in the novel when Cale died a miserable death and Amy and Rosa were relieved when the news reached the Donovan family.

'He's finally out of our lives for good,' was her mother's line.

'He was like a stone that kept getting in the way' was his sister's line.

Cale remembers his heart breaking at the time at these two sentences. In the novel, Cale was a side character of no importance. He had died in vain and caused someone to be relieved rather than saddened by his death.

Since his corpse was blackened by chaos energy, Amy and Rosa recognized him by the broken black earring in his ear. But to everyone else, he was just a poor human being who died of chaos energy without a name.

With Cale's death, the League learned that a group of people were experimenting with chaos energy. Now things had changed since the soul had transmigrated into this body and it was curious to see what kind of butterfly effect Cale's not dying would have.

He was snapped out of him thoughts when he saw Damien enter the classroom. As Damien took the seat next to Sylvie, he saw Sylvie smiling and saying something to him.

"What are you looking at?"

The owner of the voice looked at him with an expressionless face as he sat down next to her. Amaris Reagon looked at her with a slight smile.

"Why are you sitting next to me when there are so many empty seats?" he asked, frowning.

"Because I want to," she said and shrugged with a grin.

Cale was about to open his mouth and say something when the person sitting next to him covered his mouth. He frowned when he saw with blank eyes that the person sitting next to him was sitting in his seat, ignoring them.

"Why are you here?" Amaris said, looking at Dante with displeased eyes.

Dante answered Amaris in an indifferent voice.

"I'm not going to ask you where to sit, and I don't want them watching me like animals in a zoo," Amaris and Cale looked at the class.

The majority of the class was looking at Dante, Rank 1, and Amaris, Rank 3, and their eyes were hostile, as if I had come and sat next to them and not them next to me.

Cale prayed he wouldn't get dragged into a high school drama. On either side of him was a time bomb.

The daughter of the Reagon family, one of the most respected of the elite families, and the one who had outranked the children of all the elite families by placing first, were both seated next to him, drawing more attention to themselves.

The buzzing in the classroom stopped when a short, slightly overweight, balding man with a balding middle parting walked in wearing the robes of an academy professor.

"Hello everyone. I'm Professor Khaled Snowfield, and I'll be your guide for this semester's 'Monster Anatomy' course. Now..."

After a brief introduction, Professor Snowfield began the lecture.

[Beast Anatomy]

That was the name of the course. It was the study of dungeon monsters and monsters made of chaos energy.

Because people had been in dungeons for centuries, they had tried to gather information to learn the behavior of monsters. They obtained data by catching monsters dead in dungeons and examining their cadavers, which did not come out unless there was a mana disorder in the dungeons.

No high-ranking hunter would enter a low-level dungeon, lest the mana in the dungeons become irregular. Otherwise, the dungeon mana would become disorganized and the gateway to the world would be destroyed.

What happened to the hunters who stayed inside is still a matter of curiosity in the scientific world, but scientists offer two theories. Either they were trapped in the monster world or they were trapped in the void that connects the two worlds. Either way, in such a situation, the hunters were thought to have died.

Chaos energy was a power that humans discovered much later. It was a terrible force that polluted and dried up the land and produced beasts. Scientists wanted to study it in order to find a way to protect the ever-polluted world.

Huge investments have been made in this research. And at the time, many hunters traveled to contaminated lands to sample chaos energy. The result was disappointing.

Most hunters either went mad from the chaos energy and became aggressive like a monster or died on the spot. The only survivor was a hunter named Hugo Yu, who cut off his arm when chaos energy infected it.

Thanks to his sacrifice, researchers got a sample and did their best. But their efforts were fruitless. Hugo Yu died from the chaos energy, which he cut off his arm but still couldn't stop from spreading throughout his body.

It was tragic.

Even today, people honor his name and mourn those who died there on the anniversary of their deaths.

Chaos energy, which was a despair at the time, was still an unknown to people. A cure was still not found. People infected by chaos were still going mad and becoming violent.

The only thing scientists could do was to make durable equipment to prevent them from coming into contact with their skin.