Chapter 34. Violent Meeting

“Oh my god!” Nicole exclaimed as her eyes sparked while looking me up and down. “You look just like a supermodel wearing a school uniform!”

I had put on the same uniform that Victoria was wearing. I personally didn’t see too much difference between how I looked to her, but Nicole hadn’t stopped singing praises about it as she walked circles around me.

I sighed and shook my head.

“I don’t think it’s special… although, I do like how comfortable it is,” I said as we walked on the main road of the campus.

“Wait!” Nicole said and we stopped to look at her. “I want to take a few pictures.” She pulled out her phone and pointed the backside of it to us. “Stand together, everyone.”

I didn’t understand what she was doing, but Victoria stopped to look directly at the back of the phone with a forced smile. To her right, Brian and Steven also stopped to look at the back of the phone. Brian was blushing strongly as his eyes shifted from Victoria to the phone, while Steven was brightly smiling and making a v-shape with his fingers.

“Look here, Althea,” Nicole said, and I did as she asked, turning my eyes to look at her. She tapped the phone a couple of times and then looked with narrowed eyes at the phone. “Hmm, Althea, you’re making a strange face.”

“What?” I replied, frowning in response

“Try to not look so serious!” she exclaimed.

But I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I turned to look again at the group of people standing on my right, and they all seemed to be making a smiling face for some reason, so I tried to do the same with a forced smile as I looked at Nicole’s phone and she tapped it the same way as before.

“Well… not amazing, but that’s better,” she said before putting her phone away and everyone kept moving.

“What was that?” I asked, since I really didn’t understand what was going on.

She said that she wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t see an artist around, a canvas, or any painting materials for someone to draw a portrait. I didn’t even sense any magic coming from the phone, or anyone around us that would let me know that such a thing was happening.

“Here,” Nicole replied as she took her phone out again and showed me the screen. “See? You were making a really silly face.”

I looked with widened eyes at the drawing on the screen. It was a perfect drawing of the moment that just passed, where the young group of people and myself were standing next to each other with the buildings of this academy behind us. My expression was even perfectly captured as a questioning frown and a forced smile was drawn on the painting.

“How…?” I asked yet again, since I didn’t understand this artifact at all.

“Hm? You were making this face,” Nicole said and I looked up to her.

She was over exaggerating a frown, and I in turn frowned as well.

Victoria giggled. “What are you doing?”

“Hehe,” Nicole replied with a giggle of her own. “Just poking a bit of fun at Althea. She’s always so serious. Though, she does do funny things from time to time.”

“Funny…?” I said with astonishment, since I had never been called funny in my life. Nobody would ever even dare to do so before.

“Really?” Steven said with a doubtful expression, and I turned to look at him. He quickly looked away. “Doesn’t seem to me like she does funny things…” he murmured.

“What? You scared of her?” Brian teased as he shoved him with his elbow.

“N-no, I just think that… well…” the young man awkwardly replied.

It was then that I felt something coming from behind—rather, someone. I quickly turned around and used a Mana Barrier to block. The person that had been coming slammed his flying kick against the quickly formed shield, his expression of surprise as his blue eyes looked down at the barrier. The kick was directed at Victoria, who turned around just as surprised as everyone else was.

The attacker was dressed in the same uniform as we were, the only difference with us being that the jacket was open and the white shirt under it wasn’t buttoned up like ours was. I couldn’t really tell how tall he was from the position we were in, but he was likely to be about as tall as I am, with a lean, and yet, strong build. He had a side swept hairstyle on his light-brown hair, and his skin was almost as fair as mine was.

This attack was likely an assassination attempt on the young noble girl, and I wasn’t going to let this man get away with it. I brought down the barrier before he could react and quickly dashed into him. However, it seemed like he was well trained, as he reacted just as quickly with a wind pulse mid-air, which sent him flying backwards and away from my grasp.

But that didn’t mean he was out of reach from my magic. I summoned a wall of rocks right behind him, and he turned surprised to look at it before harshly crashing into it. He had managed to empower himself right as he hit the wall, breaking it down and passing right through it.

The wall did what it had to do, as the man slowed down and I was able to grab him by the leg, pulling him down to the ground, and summoning similar rock bindings to the ones I had used on the bandits a few days ago.

These wouldn’t be enough, however, as the man was a strong fighter, being able to crack the bindings with just flexing his arms. I quickly noticed that he was about to break free, so I was forced to continuously use magic on the bindings, rebuilding them and making them denser and denser with each bit of magic I poured into them.

Once again, he looked with wide eyes down at the bindings in his arms, and I took that opportunity to get on top of him, a Mana Blade pointed at his neck as I looked down at his surprised eyes.

“Who are you? Who sent you to do this?” I firmly asked, the blade almost touching the skin of his neck.

“Hey, hold on a second,” the man replied as he looked down at the glowing blade.

But I wasn’t going to be lenient with an assassin. I had dealt with many of them before, be it from the side of the nobles who didn’t agree with me, or with demons that wanted to dispose of me quickly; they were never successful, and this one was one of the sloppier ones.

“It seems like you’re going to make things difficult,” I said and I started preparing more bindings so I could hand him over to the guards.

“Wait! This is a misunderstanding!” he shouted, but I wasn’t going to listen to him.

“David?” Victoria said from behind me, and I turned to look at her.

She was peeking from the side and was looking down with surprise at the man laying on the floor.

“Do you know him?” I asked her, not letting go of either the Mana Blade or the Rock Bindings.

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“Yes, he… he’s an old friend from school…” she said with a wry smile.

I sharply turned to glare down at him again. “Why did you attack her?”

“I wasn’t going to attack her,” he said, shaking his head.

“That’s not what it seemed to me. That kick carried enough force to do a lot of damage to a commoner,” I replied, almost pressing the blade on his neck.

He craned his back to be as far away from the blade, but there was hardly anywhere for him to go. “I just wanted to surprise her, that’s all.”

I scoffed, since that seemed like a ridiculous lie. “With a flying kick?”

“I was going to stop short from touching her so the air would mess up her hair,” he said, accommodating himself slightly under the restraints. “Although, I was hoping that she would be able to react before that and show me the power that she now wields.”

“Is that so?” I replied, taking away the blade. He smiled, but I kept the restraints as I reached down and pulled him by the collar of the shirt to his feet. “We shall see what the guards think of that.”

“Huh? Wait, I’m serious. I wasn’t going to do anything,” he exclaimed with surprise, but I just started dragging him.

“Althea, wait!” Victoria called out to me, and I turned to look at her. “You… you can let him go. I believe him.”

I raised an eyebrow, since I didn’t expect her to fall for it that easily. “It would be too much of a risk to let him go.”

“He… just likes to brag about his power… and I also think he just wanted to scare me,” she said with a low voice before doing another wry smile. “I think it worked, for other reasons.”

My instincts and experience wouldn’t allow me to let the man go, but I had learned the hard way with the Holy Gods that not everything is always as it appears, so with a heavy sigh, I decided to trust Victoria while keeping my guard up.

I stopped the mana flow into the bindings and the rocks broke off, flying all over the place from the strength that the man had been using while trying to break free. The small group of people covered themselves as a few rocks suddenly flew their way, but since they were my magic and there was still some of the flow on them, I was able to stop them before they could hit anyone.

“Shesh,” the man said while rubbing his wrists and looking at Victoria, “I didn’t think that you would befriend someone so serious.”

I wasn’t letting my guard down just yet as I glared back at him. “Friends don’t generally greet each other with a flying kick.”

He laughed and before smirking in my direction. “Maybe not your friends.” His expression then suddenly got awkward as his cheek twitched slightly. “There’s this one body training coach in the institute… a beastkin, like doing that to people, only that… the kick doesn’t stop midair.”

“A coach… would do that?” I asked, since at first I couldn’t believe it, but then again, some of my blade masters were just as harsh—although they wouldn’t do it as a joke.

“Yeah… but it’s all good, so you won’t be really injured,” he said before turning to look up and down at Victoria. “Anyway, I see that you’re all set up and ready to go, Vicky.”

“Eh?” Victoria replied, looking down at her uniform. “Well, we did have to get these.”

“I gotta say,” David continued, placing a hand on his chin while carrying a smirk. “It does look really good on you.”

Victoria looked away with a slight blush, however, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at this man’s attitude. Not only did he attack her, but now he’s trying to flirt with her. It must be a thing from nobles, since he’s supposedly an old friend of hers.

“Excuse me,” Nicole said while approaching. “You’re a higher ranked, right?”

“That’s right,” David quickly replied while nodding. “I’m on the pinnacle of getting to B rank.”

“Oh!” Steven exclaimed as he approached as well. “What did you do to get that high?”

The man proudly laughed while carrying the same smirk. “I’ve been training like crazy over the past couple of years here. Blood, sweat, and tears is what has taken me this far.”

“Really? You didn’t get help from a company or something?” Steven continued to ask.

“No. I can’t afford any of that stuff, so I had to keep going and going with my training even if…”—his smirk faded slightly—“I had to face horrifying things…”

“Horrifying things…? Like what?” Steven asked with a complete face of curiosity.

“You’ll know when you face it,” David replied with a serious expression. “So, where were you guys going?”

“I don’t know, we were just walking around for a while,” Nicole answered while looking at me. “But I was just appreciating the uniforms, especially on Althea and Vicky, they look great on them.”

“Vicky…” Victoria murmured, but it seemed like only I heard her as people seemed to be focused on my uniform instead.

“I was planning on going to the Tainted—Capital Magic Labyrinth,” I said while looking at the mountain range in the distance.

“What!?” Steven and Nicole exclaimed. Victoria, David, and Brian just looked back at me with widened eyes.

“Are you planning on going in there, right now?!” Nicole asked this time, grabbing me by the arm. “I was planning on going to your place again…”

I realized the misunderstanding and shook my head in response. “I’m not going inside the mountain. I’m just planning to visit someone there.”

Nicole sighed in relief and the others calmed down, with David chuckling, his hands on his hips. “I was amazed just now thinking that you were already fighting monsters.”

“She is,” Nicole quickly answered and David looked at her with a questioning expression. “Just last week, she went in there and got a bunch of money for it.”

“Really?” David replied with the same expression, this time directed at me.

“I was in need for coin, after all,” I said with a nod.

His sharp eyebrows were raised in response for a moment before he nodded. “Well that’s something special—Ah!” he suddenly exclaimed. “We’ve not been properly introduced. I’m David Kirchner. C+ rank at the moment.”

He stretched his hand to me, but I refused to take it, since it could be a way to do something to me. However, I wasn’t going to ignore him either. “Althea, C rank.”

“Oh…! C rank,” he said with an awed expression, “That would explain why you could shut me down so easily.”

He didn’t lower his hand, however, as if he was still expecting me to grab it, which I wasn’t going to do, but Nicole got ahead of me and grabbed it instead, shaking it hard a couple of times. “Nicole Lain, E+ rank.”

“Pleasure to meet you. You’re more on the side of what I was expecting people with new powers to have,” David said with a smile, letting go of Nicole’s hand before looking over at the remaining people. “And you guys?”

“Steven Sainz, E rank.”

“Brian Tasis… E-…”

Victoria lagged in her response, as she was looking at us, seemingly not realizing that we were waiting for her to speak. “Eh? You already know who I am.”

“I don’t know your current rank,” David replied while shaking his head.

“And I don’t actually know your name, only that David called you Vicky,” Nicole followed up, mimicking David’s head shake.

“Okay…” Victoria said with a low voice. “Victoria Graciani, C+ rank.”

David raised his eyebrows and whistled. “That’s quite high, for someone that awoke her powers just a few days ago. However…” he tilted his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. “How come you didn’t react the same way as Althea when I approached?”

Victoria flushed slightly and pouted. “I wasn’t expecting anything to happen…”

“And who would, really,” Nicole followed up as she turned to look at me. “Althea seems to always be ready!”

There was a moment of silence as the group of people looked at me for a moment. I didn’t feel like staying here anymore, and it appeared that Victoria was right about David, so there was no need to be on the defensive either. “I’m leaving now.”

“Alright then. I’m going back to training,” David said while looking at the remaining group. “What about you?”

“I’m going home for now,” Victoria said with her usual hushed tone of voice.

“I’m going with Althea!” Nicole excitedly said, getting closer to me.

“I want to see how the higher ranked train!” Steven exclaimed and Brian followed up with a nod. “Can we go with you?”

“Sure, but be prepared…” David replied with a smirk, turning to look at Victoria. “What about you, Vicky?”

“I have my car parked elsewhere… so I’ll see you guys later,” Victoria said, waving her hand before leaving.

For a moment I was impressed by the fact that she had a car in here, but then again, she was a noble lady, so it wouldn’t be strange.

The young men all went back to another zone of the campus, with an excited feeling as they asked things to David, while me and Nicole walked to the entrance of the campus.

I had remembered while putting on this uniform and looking at the simple metal armor, that I still owed a certain demon something for the armor, and I decided to settle it with him, since I didn’t like the feeling of owing something to a demon, especially now that I have something else to wear—even if the new clothes aren’t quite as strong.

So, with Nicole right next to me, I made my way out of the campus in the same direction where the Tainted Land was.