Sweat dripped down his brow. Blaine almost laughed. He hadn’t sweat in centuries! He was a True Shroud with his Embodiment. He was barely even mortal. Sweating wasn’t something he did anymore. Which was truly concerning. He shouldn’t sweat at all.

Then again, I don’t know how someone could hold up a fucking mountain and not sweat a little. He thought to himself. That was what he was doing. Moments ago, the entire mountain, literally the whole thing, shook. An earthquake originating directly underneath him, deep in the heart of the mountain.

Blaine had acted with speed and precision honed over millennia of continuous effort and the pursuit of perfection. As always, he fell short of that goal. Blaine had used conjured swords and stabbed them into key points all over the interconnected network of caverns and tunnels, manufactured and natural, that spanned Black Reach. He had prevented those tunnels from collapsing through sheer force of will and the power of his shroud.

He didn’t catch his students in time.

Truthfully, he wasn’t sure he had enough control to manage it, even if he hadn’t been too slow. He barely managed to catch himself. Even now, he was struggling to maintain control of the sword under his feet, holding him up so that he didn’t fall into the hole right after his students.

He hadn’t even managed to hold up the whole mountain. He could only use his swords inside the range of his aura. With his IP in billions, that was not an insignificant distance, but Black Reach was a mountain. Distant edges were outside his reach. He had managed to hold up every human-inhabited section, but some other areas he just left to collapse. He didn’t have the skill to hold them all.

Commanding tens of thousands of swords into precise positions, guided by his aura sense, left his mind strained to the limit. That was why he was sweating. His mental strain was manifesting as a biological reaction. In essence, his mental strain became physical. His muscles felt tired, even though he wasn’t using them, and he felt short of breath.

It tore at his conscience, but there was nothing he could do for his two disciples and their friends. They were resourceful and skilled shrouded. He had little doubt that they would manage just fine without his help. Ultimately, the Academy’s principle of succeed or die held true. This obstacle would be another catalyst for his students to grow even stronger.

With nothing else to do, as Blaine would be stuck here until something could be done to repair the damage to the mountain, Blaine fell into meditation, letting time slip past.

{}

A week vanished as Blaine meditated. His perception was entirely focused on his aura sense. He had been following his students on their adventures through the caverns and tunnels deep beneath Black Reach. He swelled with pride, watching them gain in strength as they met and overcame challenge after challenge.

Their journey had also led to some concerning discoveries. Blaine’s massive aura had let him perceive deep into the mountain long before they entered. Unfortunately, he was not as adept with his aura sense as most of his contemporaries. His efforts had gone toward advancing his aura manipulation instead.

As such, the oddities hidden deep underground had slipped his notice when he arrived at Mining Station 003. That blunder had no doubt befallen many monster hunter patrols that passed through this town in years past. Blaine had no other answer for how a conclave of revolutionaries had managed to form an entire mining operation buried in the earth. It was a massive oversight with dangerous consequences.

Blaine was even more certain that the danger posed to the town above came solely from the actions of the Revolution below when he found the gap. A hole in his aura senses that he could not overcome. Something incredibly dangerous was down there, something capable of blocking his powerful sight. Truthfully, Blaine had never experienced this before, a location that could bar his aura.

The pulsing veins of energy that spread from that location granted some insight. Blaine was well-traveled and recognized the energy profile from a large continent he had visited in his youth. In fact, he could hardly forget it, as the journey had been a formative experience for him.

It was his first time seeing a continent ravaged by monsters.

They existed, more so than the Central Authority was willing to admit. Places that had spawned monsters too powerful to make it worth the cost in shrouded that would need to be mobilized to eliminate them. This particular continent was nearly infamous. Near the border with the Fire Kingdom, this particular continent had one of the most feared monsters in existence on it.

A Magma Titan. The monster itself was not the most powerful out there, not even close. Its raw power was on the weaker side for a billion IP monster. No, the danger lay in its monster-generated item. A Heartstone of resurrection. Its sole purpose, to bring the Titan back.

It was a monster that always returned, no matter how many times it was discorporated. Trying to stop it was an effort in futility. The continent Blaine had visited was abandoned, consigned to burn in the spewing flames of the Titan. It just wasn’t worth it to fight the cursed monster.

The only way to stop one was to destroy the Heartstone, a near-impossible feat that would have required the might of one of the Council to achieve. Their time was better spent elsewhere, and none of them wanted the hassle.

Now one was here and nearing rebirth. Blaine felt despair and confusion. Despair, because his efforts had been meaningless. This town was doomed before he ever arrived. In fact, this whole continent was destined to burn. A Magma Titan was a death sentence. He was confused because the Heartstone was hidden inside the gap. As far as he knew, this kind of aura block was not a feature of the monster-generated item. It made no sense.

It was because of this unknown and because his students still had a chance to escape that Blaine continued to hold the mountain. If he had truly believed there was no way out, he would let the mountain fall, cutting his way to his disciples and pulling them out. Succeed or die was all well and good, but no one ever expected the first years of the Academy to deal with a Magma Titan. That would just be pointless death. First ranked or not, those young shrouded stood no chance.

So it was with great surprise that Blaine watched his students venture farther into the caverns than ever before, seemingly following the veins back to their source. Obviously, they ran into teams of revolutionaries. Blaine was mildly surprised that his students seemed to take this revelation in stride. It had certainly surprised him.

They eventually reached the gap, following a team of revolutionaries. Once they entered, he had no way of knowing what they were doing. It was nerve-wracking. They were in a space he could not see with one of the most dangerous monster-generated items known to man. If they managed to agitate it…

Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Minutes after the students entered, a pulse left the gap, surging across all the veins and spreading into the vast cave network. Blaine wasn’t intimately familiar with the abilities of a Heartstone, but he was at least aware of this one. The stone would collect the energy created from monsters discoporating. This was how it grew the veins it used to collect that energy and how it eventually fueled the resurrection.

A byproduct of those veins was an increase in the power and frequency of monster manifestations, as well as a rapid increase in the ambient temperature. Those monsters spawned because of the Heartstone had a tenuous connection to it.

The ensuing flood of monsters was enlightening. Blaine watched with pride as his disciples formed a decisive and effective defense. They obviously had some awareness of what was going on. Over the last week, they had exceeded even his loftiest expectations. Now, they smashed those heights to pieces. No student as early in their education as they were could be expected to handle even a tenth of what he saw from them.

Blaine was surprised and concerned when another surge left the gap, seemingly directly controlling the actions of surrounding monsters for a brief period with the sacrifice of a significant portion of its resurrection energy. His students had been clever to narrow the attacks down to one tunnel, but the Crystal Moles digging new entrances would be their undoing.

Indeed, the next half an hour saw a desperate battle that steadily spiraled out of their control. One tunnel, then two, pushed his students to their limits. Somehow, they stopped a third. Whatever managed to end the Crystal Moles happened inside the gap, so he wasn’t sure what had happened. He was practically desperate to learn what desperately clever plan his students had pulled off to achieve that.

In the end, it looked like that wouldn’t matter. A sea of Ash Reapers descended. Blaine watched on with grim pride as Caeden moved to stop the endless horde single-handedly. He would not succeed, despite the effectiveness of his newly achieved infusion. Blaine couldn’t help but sigh. So much potential in these four. Lost to overconfidence. They should have left something like the Heartstone alone. Blaine would have run as far as he could, and damn the town. At their level, there was nothing they could do to prevent the resurrection.

The end came suddenly. Erik was the first to fall, caught out in a misplaced dodge. Once his tunnel was no longer defended, the others would lose any chance of surviving. Nothing to do about it. The Starry Sea was no place for the overconfident. If they could not see the obvious danger in a Heartstone, then there was no way those four would survive on a true battlefield or against any monster of true power. Better they fall now when they couldn’t drag others down with them.

Blaine’s concentration almost broke as an immense force burst out of Erik’s broken body. A week of effort was nearly destroyed in the face of the ridiculous. What was this group?! Lily, a vanishingly rare evolved shroud, and now two Incarnations! Caeden had been surprising enough. Now Erik joined his roommate as a Nascent Shroud.

The mountain shivered as his concentration broke. Blaine could hardly believe his senses. An arachne Incarnation. A sentient creature type. The rarest among the rare. Blaine was witnessing the origin of a formidable prodigy before his very eyes. Before, Erik was firmly in third place inside his team. Caeden ranked a solid first, as a dual-shrouded with a shrouded weapon and a Nascent Shroud. Lily was second as an evolved shroud with a splinter.

Now, that was all thrown out. Erik’s Incarnation was of such power that it could be enough to clear the power gap between him and Caeden. So powerful it could make up for the dual-shrouds and Caeden’s unique shrouded weapon. The Council would be jealous of a sentient creature type Incarnation. Blaine didn’t even know what to think. At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if Cat somehow formed a magic shroud splinter or formed a god type Embodiment. That would truly complete the group’s set of impossibly rare powers alongside a dual-shroud and an evolved shroud. How such people found each other was truly a sign of the One True Shroud acting in the Starry Sea.

In an instant, the tables turned. Blaine wasn’t even slightly surprised that Erik’s Incarnation could single-handedly subjugate the myriad hundreds arrayed against his students. He had to laugh. They had the luck of the ages. Somehow, they pulled out of an impossible situation stronger than ever. They would annihilate the balance of power when they got back to the Academy. The Seat factions would have to tread lightly because the Forged just became the undisputed overlords of the Academy.

What Blaine would pay to see the face of the Council members when they realized their little power games blow up in their faces. It would be hilarious!