"As expected of Folded Space B-01…"
Li Fei hovered in midair and gazed out at the awe-inspiring, suffocating sight of the colossal skeleton and its giant sword. She couldn't begin to imagine what earth-shattering battle had once been fought here.
After all, even a mythical beast like the Behemoth, hailed as the overlord of land combat, usually stood only a few dozen meters tall. Mountain giants and Titans were bigger still, yet rarely reached a hundred meters.
But the skeleton at the center of this island stood several thousand meters high! A body that could hold itself upright against gravity and tower into the clouds must have had the strength to shoulder mountains with every move. If it simply sat down, it could crush a whole swath of mid-Sequence Transcendents!
And yet a being that had evolved to such heights had been buried by the long river of years. Only when Black Nightmare Doom Island opened could students even get to see his remains…
A moment later, Li Fei swept her gaze over every direction one more time, committed the terrain to memory, and dropped quickly to the ground.
She'd noticed that she wasn't the only one. Plenty of little black dots were rising into the sky all around, so clearly the other mages were scouting the terrain from above too.
Since she was doomed to be a target anyway, Spell Encyclopedia Lady figured it was best to keep a low profile.
"Too bad I can't turn into Miss Kaname Madoka…"
She thought it with a touch of regret.
Right now, high-ranking beings were watching, studying every stir of wind and grass on the island. If Li Fei dared to use the Blazing Sun-grade Stone of Deceit, she'd probably be eliminated on the spot.
After a moment's thought, she waved a hand and released her mana. Sprites were summoned one after another and flew off in different directions.
Li Fei herself crouched low, muffled her footsteps, and slipped into the dense forest.
It didn't take long, though, before a strange sprite spotted her. Without a flicker of hesitation, it let out a piercing shriek to draw attention and give away her position.
Bastard!
Li Fei's heart clenched. She threw up a hand and sent a fireball slamming into it. The strange sprite melted on the spot and scattered into drifting motes of light.
Clearly, she wasn't the only one using the Summon Sprite spell to scout. Sprites were nimble, tiny, sharp-eyed and sharp-eared, and fast on the wing, so they made natural sentries. Summon Sprite was also a first-tier spell, the lowest of the low, with a small mana cost, a short cooldown and a big batch of summons per cast. Losing a few didn't hurt anyone.
If nothing went wrong, before long the whole island would be swarming with sprites.
"Without Stealth, it's hard to fool a sprite's eyes…"
Li Fei's gaze swept over a few thickets, but she dismissed them all just as quickly.
The forest never lacked hiding places. But to sprite sentries, who feared neither pain nor darkness nor filth, none of them were reliable enough.
She could hear sprite cries cut off abruptly here and there. Each time, it meant some mage's position had been exposed. But that was all. So far, she hadn't heard any sounds of fighting.
The situation gave Li Fei a headache. Even she had only told her sprites to look for the Altar's location. With extortion, robbery, premeditated murder and looting corpses all forbidden, she'd much rather lie low and let the snipe and the clam fight it out, then reap the fisherman's reward, than go out and eliminate opponents herself.
But now her plan had fallen through. They were all smart people, so everyone was just sending summoned units to scout and nobody dared to act rashly.
Daytime was fine. The only annoyance was the sprites screaming as they died.
But once night fell, this nasty tactic would turn deadly… Li Fei remembered that the outer ring's survival rule was "Make no sound"!
Smack!
Her long tail lashed out and swatted another screeching sprite to pieces like a fly. Li Fei kept her face grim as she analyzed the situation and reached her judgment.
"Day and night each last six hours. If the monsters on this island are as terrifying as they say… then at least half the outer ring students will be eliminated the first night! All it takes is a summoned unit spotting you and howling once, and you're basically dead meat!"
"Only those who have Stealth and are confident they won't be spotted by summoned units have a decent survival rate. Everyone else can only pray their hiding place is concealed enough…"
"So whether the outer ring has any place that's concealed enough is the key. It decides how this trial will go."
She made up her mind at once. She stopped hiding and moved swiftly through the forest, using her astonishing dynamic vision to inspect every spot where someone might hide.
"A cave? No. If I'm found, I'd have nowhere to run."
"Thickets are out too. Once there are enough sprites, thickets will be prime search targets. Dive into one and I'll be found right away…"
A few minutes later, Li Fei stopped beside a pit in the ground.
The pit was pitch black. Even with Li Fei's eyesight, she could only make out a few zhang of depth. A rotten, freezing stench rose from the rugged, narrow tunnel, as if it led straight to hell.
Not a blade of grass grew around the hole, and dark stains marked the ground. Probably blood.
Without a word, Li Fei summoned three sprites and ordered them inside, to report back in five minutes.
When time was up, she waited another minute with all the patience she could muster, then summoned fresh sprites and told them to turn back after three minutes.
Three minutes later, the pit was still dead silent, like the maw of an abyss, unfathomably deep, ready to swallow every living thing. Once the sprites went in, there was no sign of life from them again.
That was the beauty of using summoned units to clear mines. They might not be able to tell her where was safest, but they could always find out where was dangerous.
"The monsters that prowl Black Nightmare Doom Island at night probably crawl out of here…"
Li Fei left without a moment's hesitation and kept patiently combing the island.
A full hour later, she reached her conclusion.
"There's no hiding place that's safe enough, period! Unless you dive into a pit, any way of hiding can get you spotted by a summoned unit!"
Li Fei lit a cigarette and murmured to herself:
"The others may not be as fast as me, but give them an hour or two at most and those genius mages will see the picture too."
"By then, the impatient ones will go on the offensive, trying to eliminate as many rivals as possible before night falls!"
"The indecisive ones, the ones clinging to luck, and the sneaky bastards who like to lie low will keep watching… But after the night really culls a big batch, every surviving mage without Stealth will probably drop their wishful thinking at the second dawn and fight to the death!"
"So there's no chance of everyone biding their time, waiting for the Altar to form before the real life-and-death contest!"
"Right now it's a game of hide-and-seek, and every mage is 'it.' The top prey are the ones with Stealth… but the problem is, intel is limited. Nobody knows who actually has Stealth, so all they can do is attack indiscriminately."
In the drifting haze of smoke, the light in Li Fei's eyes flickered.
Anyone qualified to be on this island wore at least a Silver brooch and counted as a genius mage. For geniuses, cross-training in two schools of Transcendent knowledge was basic.
But most mages chose two schools of magic. Next in popularity came [Magic] with [Combat], then [Magic] with [Nobility]. After all, noble mage-lords and noble aristocrat-lords had plenty in common. Wealth, refinement, hypocrisy, cold-bloodedness, perversion and cruelty were labels they all shared.
Tactics and Scouting, by contrast, were rather niche choices.
So far, among Miss Top Courtesan's housemates, only Miss Grace had chosen the route of Chaos school magic plus Scouting knowledge. Qiao'er had Nature school magic plus Scouting, but Li Fei didn't know that yet.
That meant the total number of mages with Stealth probably didn't exceed ten. They would become the target of every student's siege, drawing even more hatred than Li Fei, who hailed from Loxibrook.
"So here's the question: should I be the prey, or 'it'?"
Li Fei's gaze rested on her remaining potential points, and she felt tempted.
[Stealth] was a [Special Knowledge] of the Scouting school. Like [Summoning Magic] and [Soul Calling], it wasn't constrained by the realm of core knowledge or auxiliary knowledge. As long as her Sequence level qualified and she had enough potential points, she could max it out with ease.
Li Fei was Sequence 7 now. Five potential points would take [Stealth] to Advanced in one go: one point each for Entry, Basic and Intermediate, and two for Advanced. The next tier up would have to wait until Sequence 6.
"Potential points don't come easy. Use them, but cherish them…"
In the end, Li Fei exhaled a long breath of smoke and gave up the tempting idea.
In the current situation, [Stealth] could certainly do a lot, and it would come in handy later too. But in Li Fei's mind, its priority just wasn't high enough.
After all, once she got back to Loxibrook and advanced to Sequence 6, she'd definitely max out her Nature and Combat knowledge, which would eat up plenty of potential points. Even if she had some to spare, Li Fei leaned toward [Soul Calling] and [Chaos School Magic].
Click-clack, click-clack…
One high-heeled step came down and ground out the cigarette butt, giving it another twist against the dirt. An emerald blade had appeared in her hand at some point.
With a single slash, she split a howling Moonlight Wolves charging at her, then stopped hiding her tracks altogether and strode, head held high, toward the depths of the forest.
If you were going to be 'it,' you had to look the part.
…
"Heaven is on my side."
A boy with fluffy gray-black short hair leaned against an ancient tree, his eyes brimming with delight.
Light and shadow twisted and split across his body, refracted into different colors, so that he blended into the scenery like a chameleon and fooled the eyes of every passerby.
That wasn't all. His breathing was incredibly slow, one full breath cycle every forty seconds, supplying his body with oxygen while compressing the sound and airflow of his breath to almost nothing. The muscle tissue squirming inside him formed a soundproof layer that muffled his heartbeat. Even his body temperature had dropped to match the environment.
The clever use of Death school spells gave the short-haired boy better concealment than a rogue of the same Sequence.
"When I come back in triumph, Teacher Donna will definitely see me in a new light… Maybe she'll even divorce her husband!"
The boy murmured silently to himself, daydreaming about a bright future.
Just now, he'd watched a mage summon a horde of skeleton warriors and send them into a pit. Not one came out. They'd silently fallen apart somewhere deep in the earth.
That convinced him that once night came, ninety-nine percent of his competitors would have no place to stand. They couldn't possibly escape the sentries' search. Those cold, ruthless, diligent summoned units would drag the clumsy mages out one by one and then howl, taking them down together. They'd either withdraw voluntarily or be tortured to death by the monsters that came running at the noise.
As for himself…
A smile played in the boy's eyes, and his chin tilted up as he looked down at a sprite a few meters away.
The sprite brushed right past him and completely ignored the target within arm's reach. It couldn't see him, couldn't smell him, couldn't hear his heartbeat, couldn't feel his body heat.
The boy even made a lewd thrusting motion at it.
After all, sprites might be small, but their figures were proportioned beautifully. Every one was slender and soft, with delicate skin and innocent, charming features.
Minute after minute ticked by. He stayed right there, blind to the summoned units darting back and forth. Only when he spotted other mages did he slip silently up into the trees, moving as supply as a snake as he climbed.
Whenever he came across a good-looking girl, though, he couldn't resist some filthy gestures. The Altar was still a while from forming, and he needed some entertainment to pass the time.
Suddenly, the boy's gaze sharpened. He stared at the slender, lovely figure emerging from the dense forest, pushing branches aside as she walked.
She was a girl of stunning beauty, with soft black hair draped over her shoulders. Even wrapped in a mage's robe, she couldn't hide her delicate, graceful figure.
Her face looked a little worn and her lips held little color, yet her dewy eyes were clearer than a newborn fawn's. She was like a small white flower that had suddenly bloomed in the woods, fragile and pitiable, so lovely that the dappled light falling through the leaves seemed to lose its color.
"Hissss—haaa…"
At last the short-haired boy stirred. He drew in a long breath. Besides the scent of grass and trees, the fresh forest air seemed to carry a faint trace of tea fragrance.
His face glazed over with bliss, and he couldn't help creeping a few steps closer to the flower-faced girl. The light and shadow on his skin shifted and crossed in step with him, and he left no footprints at all, like a weightless, transparent man. By sight alone, it was nearly impossible to catch any hint of him.
Of course, confident as he was in his Stealth, he recognized who she was and stayed properly wary of Spell Encyclopedia Lady, keeping ten meters between them. Normally, with Intermediate Stealth and the cover of Death school spells, he was sure he could stay three meters from a Sequence 7 mage without being noticed.
That confidence came from success after success.
Take the night before he set out for Main Academy. The short-haired boy had followed a close classmate home, step by step, slipped into his house unseen, and ended up in the classmate's mother's bedroom.
The boy who called him brother at school all day was already a Sequence 8 mage. With his father away on business, he stayed busy for a full two hours.
And right until mother and son fell asleep, utterly spent, neither of them noticed the good friend who'd stood at the bedside the whole time, watching everything.
It was proof enough of how excellent the boy's Stealth was.
As for the peeping itself, there was nothing surprising about it. In Li Fei's hometown, "If you could turn invisible, you'd definitely go to the bathhouse" was just a familiar, evergreen online joke or comic premise. But the Transcendents on the Enros Continent who had Stealth could actually put such ideas into practice, and they often made a habit of it. After all, the taste of abusing one's power was wonderful, wasn't it?
Out of respect and fear for Spell Encyclopedia Lady, the boy stopped ten meters away before starting his thrusting motions. And because Li Fei was so beautiful, and a chance to be alone with her in a secluded spot might never come again, he wanted to seize the moment and go further, to defile this girl as pure and flawless as an orchid in an empty valley.
He watched Li Fei walk through the jungle with a sweet smile, seemingly deaf to his presence, and his excitement soared into a frenzy.
He flailed and danced like a lunatic in a fit, the two or three inches of gray-black hair bouncing up and down. He took off his cloak and stashed it in his storage ring, then pushed aside the white strap that cinched across his right shoulder on his suspender pants.
Before he could take the next step, Spell Encyclopedia Lady suddenly looked back, a teasing glint in her smiling eyes:
"All because I'm too beautiful, right?"
Before the words had finished leaving her lips, a streak of crimson sword light filled the short-haired boy's vision.
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