“...ne…”

Rune groaned as he heard noise and his brow furrowed. He turned his body to avoid hearing the sound.

“...Rune…”

He heard a sound once more, but was too tired to listen to it properly. He turned to the other side and tried to ignore it again.

“Rune. C’mon. It’s time to get up!”

He opened one eye into a slit and looked around. He saw that he was under a white blanket with an ornate pattern and a curtain was pushed to the side to reveal the sunlight pouring into the room. Under his head was something soft and smooth, a pillow.

There was a delicate hand on his chest that was shaking him awake. He looked up to see Sophia smiling as she saw his sleeping face. Her hair was disheveled and she was wearing a night, but she was still gorgeous.

“Rune. It’s monday. You have to wake up for breakfast.”

He slowly sat up in his bed and yawned. He stretched his arms and legs. Then he cracked his fingers and neck and got out of bed. He went into the bathroom to take a shower.

When he was fully dressed in his usual attire, Sophia had gotten out of the shower. She had only a bath towel that was extremely revealing and kissed Rune.

When both of them were ready, they left to grab something to eat on the go from the dining room. Luckily, the chef had cooked their meals beforehand, like they did every weekday, and it was placed in something like a bento box.

This world, although very similar to medieval Europe, they used bento boxes to put meals into because of convenience. They figured out that, using this method, they could remove the hassle of eating in a restaurant as well as keeping the food looking neat and delicious.

They grabbed the food that were in bags and headed off to the school. Obviously, it didn’t take long for them to reach it and many students were coming out of the dorms as well. For breakfast, they had chefs prepare food for them and delivered it around the time when people usually woke up.

The couple moved down the pathway and entered the school. Many students, mainly guys, thought that Sophia was beautiful and wanted to date her, but were far too afraid of their principal/teacher to do so. On the other hand, there was a small group of women who liked Rune and wanted to date him because of his cool and reliable personality, but were afraid of Sophia who said that she would attack those who came onto Rune.

In all situations, they couldn’t take either of them out on a date. In fact, three of the teacher were liked by the students, not including Rune and Sophia, and students occasionally made move on them.

Of course, many of the students who did not have a boyfriend or girlfriend were extremely jealous of every couple in the school. For example, Hika growled every time a couple came near her.

School was the same as it always was. Study hall, classes, lunch, more classes, and gym where you learned to kill things and survive. The tournament was rescheduled to be in one month from since the last one a month ago. However, there would be a small school festival next week where classes would set up some kind of event.

There were some clubs, but they were not things you would normally find in a normal high school. However, this wasn’t a normal high school and it had five clubs. The Spell Creation club, the Forging club, the Survival club, the Design club, and the Cooking club. However, these individual clubs weren’t doing anything for the festival.

About a week ago, Ms. Flustern came to the school with about fifty Bastets, cat people, and Rune had those older than 18 work as the school staff while those under 18 would go to school, but would all be placed in the freshman year as no one was well educated. The jobs were mainly cleaning and learning to cook. Some were even writing down books for the students, like dictionaries and such.

Ms. Flustern started to work as the home ecs teacher on saturday. There were four blocks where different classes would go to see her for lessons. She taught them to sew torn clothes, cook good food, and clean things in the house.

There were also four blocks where each of the designated four classes could either go to the forge or spend their time doing what they wanted. There were only these two classes on saturday occurred. Other than that, people did what they liked.

The forge was a two story high building on the left side of the high school where Rena spent her free time. Although she could only create weapons for two hours on saturday, she still liked to watch what other people made. Of course, the Forge club could go there after school for three hours, but Rena was in the Design club where people focused on creating more efficient weapons.

Rune was in charge of overseeing Rena’s class because they were in his first teaching block. They were apparently trying to decide between a cafe and a weapon shop. In the end, a cafe won and a bit over half the people cheered. Rune was trying hard to keep his eyes open as he watched the class choose something.

All he had to do was say whether or not what the class was doing was allowed. He nodded his head a bit to indicate that a cafe or a weapons shop were perfectly good choices that he allowed.

Rena wanted to have a weapon shop, not just because she was pretty good at designing weapons, but because the majority of the class who wanted a cafe, mostly men, also wanted the girls to dress up in waitress or maid outfits. Thus why many girls didn’t want to choose a cafe.

Rune was focused on going to the port city that Marq had talked about. He turned to look out of the window when he felt a push. He turned to see someone with a red face bowing to him. It was one of his students, Friya, a Half-Elf girl, who had bumped into him and was apologizing rather quickly.

“Ah, I, uh, I’m sorry. Uh, I, please forgive me!!”

“Hmm? It’s fine.”

She returned to her friend group and seemed to be whispering angrily at them with a face as red as a beet. She seemed to be fidgeting with her hands and was clutching something close to her chest.

Rune looked down at himself to make sure that whatever she had in her hand wasn’t stolen from him. However, the only thing he had on other than clothes was a small notepad in his jacket pocket that was still there. He sighed and turned to look back at the window.

Then he jolted at a thought. Quickly, he moved his hand through the air to click on his world map. He tried to find the unknown continent, but he could move the map past a certain area in the water. He tried to look at he journal about the map.

He read it in his head as it said, “The map is shown in the circle icon that says “Atlas”, but the map only shows areas of the world that the gods have control over. Areas not seen on the map are controlled by other gods or powerful beings.” He read it over once again and sighed. At least he now knew that his map wasn’t bugged to not see Hell’s Gate.

He closed out of it and looked at his students who were smiling as they worked. They had split up to work on different sections of the cafe. Some people were writing the menus, others were working on furniture, and the rest were sewing outfits. He looked at this scene and thought to himself, The Japanese were really smart to have a culture festival where students can work without bothering me!!

The next day, Rune was teaching his class. His students were mostly writing down notes about what not to do when they entered a forge and what tools were supposed to do what. He was waiting for the delivery of food and water to come, but had four staff members handle it at the front gates. They were also going to contact him when it arrived. He still had 13 days left until he was going to leave, but the festival would come before that.

He had spent the majority of yesterday’s afternoon inside the lab with Kelly and Jared. They had worked on weapons for about 20 days inside the room where he transformed into Cursed Armor just to work nonstop. He had produced about fifty different guns with hundreds of millions of bullets with different enchantments.

He sat down in his chair as his fourth class finished writing their notes. Personally, he thought that this class was the most quiet amongst the rest of them. They seemed tired, but also had an air of boredness hanging around them.

Suddenly, the orb on his desk glowed blue and he reached out to touch it. His eyes closed on their own and he could feel a connection with another person.

The connection was terminated and he opened his eyes. He noticed that his entire class, except one person, was looking at him as if they were curious of what just happened. Rune just looked at them and they turned back to their notes.

The one person not looking at him was busy drawing something in their notebook. They were the most expressionless person in class with the least amount of enthusiasm. Her full name was Riika Toum, a Bastet transfer student. She was first approached by many guys because of her beauty, but she gave them the cold shoulder. She didn’t have any friends and always did things by herself.

Her skills in combat were far from perfect, but she seemed to be able to analyze a situation quickly and adapt to it. Her strategic mind was one of the best in the school. Rune could only use strategy to see what order to kill in and how to do so as he wasn’t a military general or someone with a strategic background.

He waited for the bell to ring and all the students left the room. Everyone except Riika who always lagged behind. Rune got up and walked over to her and she looked up at him.

“Do you think you can help me with a mission?”

“?”

“Basically, I will be out for a while to work on a something and I want you to help provide me with a strategic outlook where I’ll be going. I would like you to be there to help.”

“I don’t know… I’m sure you won’t like someone like me being there...”

“No. In fact, I believe that you would be the only one able to help me in this case. Your strategic thinking ability surpasses mine.”

“...Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“When does it start?”

“In 13 days, we will head out and I need you to train as hard as you can when you can. I'll be counting on you.”

He started to leave the classroom and gave her a wave before he left. She gave a small wave back and picked up her bag. She left the room and headed towards her dorm.

Rune hurried to his house to pick up the delivery of food and water. He rushed out of the building and ran to his house. He could teleport because of how close he was to his home.

In front of his large, white house were multiple large crates where stacked in front of his front porch. There were also several large, metal cylinders with a lids on top. They were probably vats of water that Rune asked for. He put them in his storage to preserve them as anything in his storage didn’t age or rot.

The boxes left an indent in his grass and he sighed as he looked at it. Then he walked up the steps and inside his home. Now he just needed to wait five days until he could meet with Marq to talk about the ship.

Rune was sitting on a bench in a building near the docks. Marq’s secretary told him to sit while he waited for Marq to get back. It seemed that he was out getting an abundant amount of food.

Marq’s metabolism was far faster than anyone else’s and he had to eat food constantly just to not die from starvation. He was grabbing lunch at a bakery where he usually got 50 pieces of bread to eat for lunch and between lunch and dinner.

Rune had arrived on his hovering platform after searching for the large town on his map that covered half of the world. He couldn’t teleport as he hadn’t been there before and it took him two hours to search for the port town known as Porte.

After twenty minutes of thinking about his plans for the ship, Marq entered the building with a small wagon of bread. He was munching on it when he turned to Rune and stopped chewing. He gulped down the food in his mouth and spoke.

‘Hi. You here to talk about the ship?”

“Yes. I have the money. You got the ship?”

“I bought it when I got here last night. It is large and sturdy. Great for what you want. Come. Let’s talk more in my office.”

The two of them walked into a pantry room with a desk on the side. The man put his wagon on the side of the room and pulled up a contract.

“Here is the deed. Give me the money and I will bring 50 people to work on the ship.”

“Ok. However, I have some conditions. I want metal plates as the frame of the ship as well as small windows on both sides of the ship. About 20 on each side with metal shutters.”

“Ok. I would think that it would sink, but whatever floats your boat. It will be about 500 gold coins more.”

“Ok. Here.”

Rune took out two bags, one with 3,000 gold and the other with 500 gold, and placed it on his desk. Marq looked wide eyed at the money and scrambled for his drawer. He took out an orb and quickly told people to go and buy enough metal sheets to cover a battle cruiser and to bring 50 people as fast as they can.

“Ok. That is done. Let’s get to work.”

Over the next several days, Rune stayed at Porte and helped with the boat. It was huge and long. It looked to be larger than the gargantuan leviathan that Rune killed.

He had went back for the festival, but didn’t really do much other than check out the classes with Sophia. He asked her opinion about the trip and she agreed that it was necessary to go if this organization, Tiamat’s Heads, was going after Rune for his power.

The metal sheets were added and Rune welded and fused the sheets so that there were no cracks to the metal. There were 20 circular holes in each side of the ship placed periodically. They were wide enough for a man to crawl through and opened inwards with three latches and locks on each. They were made so that they could row in dire circumstances or shoot projectiles from them.

There were four large sails on the cruiser and the two in the middle were taller than most trees and thicker as well. There were two anchors on either side of the vessel and even three three floors. The lowest floor was underneath the water, but it stayed dry. Rune had enchanted everything with self repair and protection.

There were seat on the second floor where the oars were placed and the windows were located. The lowest floor had ten rooms on either side of the ship and had multiple hammocks in each. There was a kitchen located on the highest floor and the ship captain’s cabin was built there as well. The steering wheel was placed above it as stairs led up from the top deck.

After the 15th day of the month, Rune was ready to set sail. Rouna, Sophia, Riika, some staff members, and all of the Honor’s fighting class were ready to leave as well. Rune had put Hela into an amulet to take her to the continent. eeThey were all put into Rune’s party and they teleported to the ship. It was large enough and extravagant enough to call it a landmark even though it could move.

They all climbed aboard the massive vessel as they waved off Marq as no one else could make it in time or had a ride back. They set forth to the unknown continent, Hell’s Gate.