Chapter 7: First blood

Khon had already gotten himself a few friends in the class, even though he was pretty weak, which was surprising. He had plenty of charisma, which was apparently enough to carry him to not being bullied (Every other kid who was bullied was a very weak kid).

He and I shared a lot of the same classes, alchemy, mana application, science, math, battle practice, infusion etc. He was exceptionally good in class. After the first test, he had cemented himself as being good at studies.

So, me and my ego decided to challenge him to a no mana wood sword fight, thinking that I was way better than him in sword fighting. I had heard rumours he was decent at sword fighting.

Spoiler: he was good. Like extremely good. I challenged him to a spar of 3 bouts (10 points), and got thrashed in all three. And worst of all, he wasn't even using a proper "technique" or fighting style, like fencing, kendo, or English medieval sword fighting.

For example, during the second bout, I threw a stab at him, and he straight up grabbed the sword, and threw his own stab, resulting in his point. (The spar was like fencing, you touch your opponent once, and you get a point)

Another time, he threw the sword in the air, dodged my attack, grabbed the sword and hit me. On the other hand, during mana fights in battle practice, he was abysmal. His ability was something about wood.

But it took too much mana, and just wasn't fast enough to do anything. The maximum he could do was cover his hand with wood and throw wood splinters. Compared to that, everyone was way better that him.

With that said, that didn't mean that he was bad at defending himself. In fact, quite the contrary. His strategy involved showering his opponent with wood splinters, then going in true melee.

In complete contrast, was his brother, Horus. He was one grade lower than us. He was also extremely gifted in mana usage and had an insane amount of mana, with 3 affinities, ice, fire, and wind. He also had really good marks and good athletic skill. In other words, the perfect student.

A few days later, we had our first field trip. The field trip was for our grade and the grade below us. What I mean by that is a dungeon raid. The dungeon entrance was orange in colour, which meant it was a D-rank dungeon. Red meant E, yellow meant C, green meant B, blue meant A, and anything darker meant S class.

The teacher told us to put ourselves into teams of 5 people for safety reasons. Khon immediately came to me and asked me to be in his team. I was slightly taken aback and in a slight panic said yes.

A few moments later, I was officially part of Khon's team. Khon's team consisted of himself, his brother, a girl named Teigra and surprisingly Artana (My crush). Artana's ability was something about being a ruler, and I heard it was extremely good (We were now in different classes and I never saw her ability in action).

Then there was Teigra. Her ability was Jungle's Prowess, which essentially gave her some really good, animal related abilities.

The team was looking really good, except, of course, Khon himself. He himself was extremely weak, because he could realistically only do true melee with a bad ability.

Oh, and as I later on noted, for some reason, I had put my name on the paper signifying his team, for the whole term. 5 months. I had to stay 5 months with Khon as a group leader.

Realising this, I was very salty, and apparently so was Artana. And so, we entered the dungeon. All teams were assigned to a senior student. The dungeon itself was extremely easy, mainly because our team was extremely good (excluding Khon). Artana used the bow and arrow, and thanks to mana, her arrows pierced through 4 targets.

Teigra was speed and stealth oriented, and was so fast, I couldn't even see her without using mana. Horus mainly supported us by throwing us spells that would buff us, although at the one occasion he was surrounded by skeletons, he just blasted them with no tomorrow, essentially flexing on us that he could solo clear the dungeon.

I mainly just went around, making light daggers in the air, and throwing them at the skeletons, occasionally strengthening my sword with mana for a strike. And then there was Khon, who just sat around, doing nothing except dodging. He made my blood boil.

We encountered our first mini-boss, which was a giant spider. Artana showered it with arrows, and I used light daggers and the fight itself was about 5 minutes, with just the repeated attacks until it died.

Little did we know at the time, it was the boss itself, not a mini-boss. A green portal opened up, and we thought it was an entrance to the real dungeon, thinking the mini-boss was the way to open the door.

Khon just stuttered as he said, "Hold up… what?? We just cleared the dungeon you idiots."

I was already pretty angry with him so I decided to ignore him. The senior was another species of idiot, and also decided to ignore him.

Teigra actually listened to him, and so did Horus, but we still went in. I instantly regretted it. The first monster alone took as much time as the previous mini-boss. And the first monster was a ball of flame. A big one, but still.

I realised Khon was right. We just entered a new dungeon. And this was a B-class dungeon. All of us also realised this and the senior started panicking. There was no way back, and we were stuck in a hallway of red, burning bricks. This was a dungeon themed around hell-fire.

Dungeons usually had a theme, especially ones above C-class. The themes can be anywhere from flooding, to nature's overgrowth. In this case, we were in the worst possible match up.

None of us had a significant advantage in this biome/dungeon, which is very much necessary for any dungeon B-class or above, as it becomes too hard. In fact, Khon had a disadvantage in this dungeon, with his power being wood.

Khon came to me, and whispered, "Hey, you got a dagger?".

I said, "Yea, here you go."

He took the dagger, then looked at the senior. There was a demon right in front of us. And it was telling the senior something. I couldn't understand, but Khon did, and so did the senior.

Khon went to the senior and asked, "What happened? You seemed to have understood what the demon was saying"

The senior looked at us and said, "H-he told m-me to sacrifice myself."

Khon looked at me, then looked back at him. He came a bit closer to him, and te senior dropped to the ground, dead. I looked at the dagger, and it was covered in blood.

He had slit the senior's throat. And he did it so fast, none of us could see it, and apparently nor could the senior.

All of us looked at him, shocked.

"That liar.", Khon said, looking at the now corpse.

"What. The. F*ck. Have. You. Done.", Artana said, as shocked as the rest of us.

"The arsehole was lying. The demon told him to sacrifice one of us, not himself.", Khon said, dead serious.

"You understood what it said?", Teigra asked.

"Yes I can.", Khon said.

"So anyway", I said, attempting to take leadership and change the topic, "How are we getting out of here?"

"Well, by rushing to the boss, and avoiding conflict with anything and everything", Khon said, calmly.

"Dude you have literally no powers, just shut up for once", I said.

"Really now? Hmm I didn't know you knew more about me than I do myself", Khon said, as he started pouring dark mana onto the dagger.

"What the -"

"Well, I mean, it isn't game-changing. I can only imbue weapons or items, not make dark daggers in the air like Lucian over here"

"Then why the hell were you hiding your power??", I asked.

"To spite the principal of course", Khon replied

"What? Why? The principal is a nice person.", Teigra said.

"When did I say she wasn't?", Khon responded

I heard the flapping of wing. I turned around and spotted a horde of bats approaching us. These bats were red hot, and were dripping in an extremely hot liquid. Now here is the problem.

Each and every monster in a B-class dungeon outclassed us, they had the ability to send us to our graves with one bite or attack, and they had as much health as the spider "mini-boss" in the previous dungeon.

Khon had also spotted the bats approaching, as did the rest of the group.

"Ah sh*t. How are we going to get out of this situation?", I asked.

"Well, I have a plan", Khon said

"I think I know the plan.", Horus said, replying to anything for the first time.

"Yup you guessed", said Khon

"Is there something I am missing here?", Artana said.

"The plan is the act of turning your back to the enemy and using your legs to go away as fast as possible. Also known as running.", Horus sarcastically said, as he began to run

All of us followed suite, and it was somewhat easy, considering the bats were blind. We ran towards the bat, and dodged them, running through the hallway of fire.

Soon enough, we reached a dead end. There were a bunch of boulders, floating in the air, with ground disappearing into a red liquid that clearly seemed so hot that jumping into it would have probably led to your painful untimely demise.

The liquid was not lava, as the consistency of it was too much like that of milk or blood. But it was extremely hot, evident when a rock fell into the pool.

The jumps to the islands were too hard to clear, and risking it was not an option, as well, it could lead to your end.

We started to try to find a solution. Horus looked around. Then he charged up mana in his fist, and broke a hole into the wall. Lots of debris fell away. There was one really big piece of debris.

Horus took the debris, and threw it towards the floating boulder, after which he jumped into the pool. He, somehow, landed in the piece of debris he threw, and jumped off it, landing on the floating boulder.

All the rest of us looked at him, flabbergasted. The madman just jumped faster than gravity! Then he started using wind magic to push the boulder closer and closer to the end of the hallway.

We jumped onto the boulder, and looked at the many more boulders we had to clear. Horus pushed the boulder next to the next boulder using magic, then we jumped onto the next boulder, and then rinse and repeat.

By boulder number 3, Horus would have run out of magic, at which point he would ask one of us for mana. Then after all of us would run out of mana, we would rest for a while and regain all of our mana. And then again.

For what seemed like an eternity later, we reached the end. The end wasn't a hallway, it was just red colour land, some part of which looked like as if it was burning. We had finally reached!

The whole exercise increased our overall mana capacity by a butt ton. We looked around at our new, fresh hell. There were slimes everywhere, and they were dripping in the red-hot liquid.

The whole new world that was opened to us was weirdly shaped, some parts leading up to a ceiling, others opening up to the rest of the place.

There was also what looked like half burnt cattle, like cows, sheep and pigs that were walking like humans, carrying a sword, just walking around. Their skeletons were shown as their flesh was mostly burnt away. They seemed neutral, and weren't attacking us.

On the other hand, was a humanoid monster that was welding an axe of gold, and that looked like the axe had fused with its skin. The monster itself was like a living breathing, walking pig, but its bones were popping out somewhere, and the bones were melting. Some of them even had crossbows

This creature was very much not neutral. It was out to kill us, and worst of all there were more than one. Fighting these abominations was a nightmare.

These creatures were unusually good at sword fighting. We came up with the strategy of us concentrating at one pig boy, then going after another.

While fighting against the monsters, Artana did a big mistake. She used a bow, which meant she was supposed to be at a range from the monsters. This time, she was directly in the line of fire.

And a crossbow pig shot her. Remember how I said how hard fighting any B-class monster was? This was a prime example. She got taken down in one shot. That's all it took.

Luckily, the arrow didn't hit a vital spot. But it did hit her shoulder. Worst of all, since the theme of this dungeon was hellfire, the arrow wound burnt like hellfire, causing way too much pain for anyone to handle.

It knocked her out. I turned around, and I got distracted from my own little battle. With that and a pig boy welding an axe sneaked up on me. He took his chance and brought the axe down onto me.