Journey (3) - 25

Waking up in the morning, we immediately departed Mito and continued on our way to the capitol.

During the night, Char had a "talk" with Lord Bessemer, and was able to secure us easy passage through the city, some supplies, and 500,000 gold coins.

Honestly, I had been surprised at how much money the lord was willing to spend to keep the whole incident quiet, and it seemed like he wouldn't really miss his son that much as he already had another heir to the household, and the younger son had always been the trash of the Count's Family.

Anyways, continuing on our journey, we finally reached the capitol after 5 more days of traveling.

Entering the gates of Lacorn, I was hit with a wave of homesickness, as this was the hustle and bustle that I was used to, both on Earth and in the city that the Endendyk House lorded over, Melisoñer.

Seeing all the hawkers selling their items on the streets, the people walking in large crowds, and the carriages just barely squeezing through, I couldn't help but bathe in the urbanity of the whole area.

Looking at the city, I saw two huge circular walls that surrounded the undersides and were filled with the shadows of two floating chunks of land in the air.

Our carriage proceeded slowly towards one of the walls and then eventually joined a line of thousands of carriages that needed to enter the floating institute.

Of course, if you hadn't already guessed, the floating chunk of land that we were under was the one for The Pantheon, whilst the other floating chunk of land was where the King's Court was, and also where many of the high ranking nobles had second estates.

Anyways, after a while, we finally arrived at one of the gates of the walled-in area.

Getting out of the carriage, Char presented the guard standing outside with our documentation, and after he checked the insides of the carriage thoroughly, we were allowed passage through.

Inside the walls, there was another long line, and so we were back to inching forward slowly again.

Then, as soon as we entered a circle in the ground, we were engulfed by a bright blue light.

As the light subsided, we were met with the image of being in a dark space surrounded on all sides by another wall, before we were quickly ushered into another area.

In this area, our carriage was checked thoroughly, and every single person, both adults and children, were subjugated to body checks before we were allowed to pass.

Finally, we were led up a sloping tunnel, whereafter we were able to see sunlight again as we traveled back to the surface.

Char, having been at The Pantheon before, immediately directed us to the Noble Class Dormitories, where she had stayed when she was a student here.

Entering, we surprised the worker at the front desk by announcing that we had reserved a whole hallway, before getting out keycards and finding our rooms.

Unlike the others, my keycard was different as I was an actual student at the academy whilst all the others had come as my servants.

Entering my room, I was able to make it so that the lock allowed Char and Gwen's keycards to be able to unlock my door, before seeing everybody out and collapsing on the bed.

After all, I had been sleeping on hard beds and the ground this whole trip, and, although I was used to sleeping in rough environments from my super soldier days, I had grown fond of soft, down beds.

Sinking into the soft mattress, I closed my eyes, and like a rock, I immediately fell asleep.

...

Waking up the next morning, I decided to walk around the dorms and meet some people, as the start of the school year was still a week away.

Taking a right and entering the dormitory's common room, I found many students lounging about in the couches and bar stools that were put about.

Looking around, I saw no one of interest, mostly upperclassmen, so I decided to try my luck at the training building instead.

Entering the training building, aka, the Bruiser, I quickly walked past the vile machines that gave the building its nickname and came to the area with the training scarecrows.

There, I finally found one of the people I was looking for.

Vasilie Azeal, the second daughter of the Azeal House, the inheritor of the previous hero's blood, Rank 1 of this year's freshman Noble Class, and Sister's future disciple.

I watched on as she performed the special swordsmanship of the Azeal House almost perfectly, the beautiful movements like a dazzling dance between the wind and the waves.

Honestly, she was a genius for her age, as she had almost perfected the Azeal's technique at the age of 15 (this was of course due to the broken blood of hers that she had inherited from the previous hero), and she would have been admitted into the academy earlier if it weren't for her parents trying to curb her idolizing of my Sister.

I continued observing for a while before taking out my own sword and walking up to another scarecrow a few scarecrows away from her.

Taking a stance, I tested one of my swings against one of the arms of the scarecrow.

"Clang!"

I wasn't even able to damage the scarecrow even in the slightest.

You see, these scarecrows were just named like the straw filled ones because they looked like them, but, these were much stronger, used to train the top students of The Pantheon by imbuing large amounts of mana into them to make them almost unbreakable.

Smiling at the challenge that I felt the scarecrow was issuing to me, I started taking it seriously.

After only 5 minutes, my scarecrow was smoking and in pieces.

Smiling at my handy work, I moved to another scarecrow, and turned the difficulty to max this time.

Starting once again with my own made up sword style, I soon found out that I was no match for the amount of mana in the scarecrow, as it showed no signs of damage after an hour of my consistent pounding of it.

Turning over to look at Vasilie, I found that she had already destroyed 5 scarecrows turned to max strength in the timespan of just one hour.

Seeing this, I could only shake my head at her cheat-like bloodline and then turned my attention back to my scarecrow, turning it to only medium strength this time.

I took 43 minutes and 57 seconds to destroy the scarecrow, an extremely pitiful amount of time.

With this strength, I would only be able to defeat maybe the 18th ranked in the Noble Class.

But, I was confidant that my fighting instincts were better than all of them, after all, I had been fighting my whole last life and I had spent 5 years sparring against both Char and Gwen in this life.

Maybe, just maybe, I could hold my own against Vasilie with only my instincts alone, but that was something that I could only find out after a long time.

But then, I heard someone speaking from behind me as I stood there staring at the remains of my scarecrow.

"Would you like to spar?" Asked a delicate voice quietly.

Or not...