Chapter 101: Idiot
Upstream, at a place where the terrain rose slightly, the creek bent sharply. The current had worn against the rock face and ford a shallow hollow on the shaded side.
Calling it a cave would have been a stretch. It was more like a natural rock shelter half-hidden behind dense hanging vines. The entrance was narrow, but the interior was large enough to shelter three or four people. The ground inside was relatively dry, with smooth pebbles scattered across it.
Ryan carefully examined the area outside the entrance for a while and found no traces of recent activity by any large creatures, only the faint signs left behind by small lizards and insects.
He parted the hanging vines and ducked inside.
The rock shelter was filled with the faint sll of damp earth and water vapor.
He set down his backpack and first took out the palm-sized tal disc from inside—the core of his portable warning array. After placing the sub-nodes in two hidden cracks just inside the entrance and above the shelter, he activated the main disc.
A nearly invisible layer of magical light flashed across the entrance like a thin mbrane, then disappeared.
The device could warn him whenever a creature above a certain size passed through that mbrane. It could not block anything, but it could buy him precious reaction ti.
Next ca the fire.
He cleared a space in the center of the shelter, ringed it with several flat stones he had picked up by the creek, then took a small iron box from his backpack. Inside were dry tinder fluff soaked in grease and a bundle of kindling.
He had prepared this himself. It was far more reliable than rubbing wood together to start a fire.
He lit the tinder with flint, carefully fed in the kindling, then added several slightly thicker dead branches. Before long, a steady cluster of orange-red flas rose up, driving out the cold, damp chill that had accumulated inside the rock shelter and casting flickering shadows across the stone wall.
The fire brought warmth, but it also brought a sense of security.
In the wild, a burning campfire itself was the best warning to most beasts.
As for food, the provisions he had brought were mostly hard flatbread, jerky, and energy blocks. They could fill his stomach, but their taste was hardly sothing to enjoy.
Ryan rembered seeing fish shadows in a pool along the creek while heading upstream earlier.
He picked up the retractable probing rod, modified its tip into a sharp spearhead, and went back to the creek.
The dusk had deepened. Beyond the reach of the firelight, the creek had beco a stretch of dark water.
He chose a calm eddy near the bank and stood there silently, adjusting his breathing until it beca long and steady.
Magic–martial training improved more than just strength and technique. It also sharpened control over every inch of the body’s muscles, along with focus and patience at crucial monts.
A shadow darted beneath the water.
His arm thrust out sharply.
The tip of the probing rod broke through the water’s surface, and he felt a clear resistance.
He pulled it back. A silver-scaled fish about the length of his palm had been skewered on the tip, writhing fiercely.
He repeated the process, and before long he had caught a second one as well. It was hardly a feast, but it would be enough to restore so of his strength, and at least it offered a fresher taste than dried rations.
Back in the rock shelter, he cleaned the fish neatly with a small knife, threaded them onto two relatively straight twigs, and set them beside the fire to roast slowly.
Fish oil dripped into the flas with a soft sizzle, and before long, the sll of roasting fish began to spread.
While waiting for the fish to cook through, he sat back against the rock wall and, by the light of the fire, began sorting through the day’s gains and his thoughts.
Eight runes lay quietly in the insulated compartnt of his backpack.
Through the faint resonance of the Life-Preserving Rune Stone, he could roughly distinguish five different types of attribute fluctuations: water, earth, wood, tal, and one that carried a faint trace of life or aura, which was probably that bluish-violet rune.
Three attributes had already appeared more than once.
Those three people by the creek today… No, more accurately, two had acted openly, while a third had probably been farther away, either keeping watch or preparing to provide a second response.
They had clearly been cooperating with intent.
The assessnt rules only set a limit on the amount of equipnt each individual could carry and forbade deliberate killing or maiming. They did not prohibit students from forming teams.
From the perspective of survival and collection efficiency, teaming up did indeed offer obvious advantages. They could divide the work of exploration, take turns standing watch, and deal with danger together.
But why had those two only been carrying two runes?
Ryan tore off a small piece of fish roasted to a golden brown and put it into his mouth, chewing slowly.
The fish was tender, though unfortunately it had no seasoning.
There were two possibilities. One was that they had not been tead up for very long. They had only just joined forces, imdiately tried to open a new source of profit, and ended up kicking an iron plate.
The other was that they had concentrated the runes they had collected in the hands of the third person—the probable lookout—in order to reduce the risk borne by the two who actually engaged in combat.
The latter seed more likely, and more organized.
That revealed two things.
First, the rune collection progress of the larger groups was probably slower than he had initially expected. If even teams were only doing this well, then solitary students were likely doing worse.
Second, so people had already begun treating the plundering of others as a faster way to obtain runes than searching for them on their own.
The competition in the forest was evolving. It was shifting from simple survival and exploration into sothing more complex and openly confrontational.
Finding eight runes in a single day was astonishingly efficient, but that was due in large part to the resonance perception of the Life-Preserving Rune Stone, the support of the surveyor, and his deliberate strategy of avoiding crowds and focusing solely on exploration. Even so, he had already encountered duplicate attributes.
“I need to collect every type as quickly as possible.”
Ryan stared at the jumping flas, the thought becoming crystal clear in his mind.
In the end, the assessnt would judge the total number of runes. But if his speculation was correct—if the number of rune types was indeed limited, and duplicates did not count toward the number of effective types—then blindly gathering more runes of the sa attribute was nothing but wasted effort. He had to gather as many types as possible before most people realized this and began deliberately competing for the scarce attributes.
Attributes… So far, the ones he had encountered were water, earth, wood, tal, and life. According to Basic Elental Theory and the common classifications of magic, there ought to be at least fire and wind as well, and perhaps rarer variants such as light, darkness, or even space.
Could the total number really be twelve?
Twelve runes, corresponding to twelve types?
For tomorrow, his provisional goal would be to prioritize finding attribute runes he had not yet obtained, especially common ones like fire and wind, which he still had not encountered.
At the sa ti, he needed to be even more wary of groups ford by other students. An ambush like the one from today would certainly not be the last.
The firelight cast his silent profile onto the rock wall, bright one mont and dim the next.
His thoughts drifted without his noticing, and he found himself thinking of the little maid at ho, who had seed sowhat distracted lately… By now, she should already have returned to the dormitory, shouldn’t she?
This was the first ti since entering Saint Roland Magic Academy that he would not be in the dormitory at night.
Would that child be afraid?
Would she curl up in a corner of her room and keep her eyes open until dawn?
He rembered the way she had first learned to write, clumsily gripping the pen in her fingers, tracing each stroke with utmost seriousness. Whenever she wrote sothing wrong, she would bite her lip and secretly try to wipe it away with her sleeve, terrified that he might be dissatisfied.
He rembered the tea she brewed, always at exactly the right temperature. He rembered the way she had looked up at him this morning before they parted, her hazel eyes filled with worry she had tried her best to hide, yet could not fully conceal.
“…Idiot,” Ryan murmured softly, not even sure whom he was talking about.
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