After thinking for a couple of moments, Villin decided to ask, “How do you know about Athena’s Forge? We only just arrived at the fourth grade and the year hasn’t even started yet.”

The brown-haired boy frowned before a look of realization flashed across his face, “Oh right, you guys don’t know. From the fourth grade on we are allowed to have proper contact with the outside world. Some of the higher-ups of nearly all of the guilds here have contacted the students letting us know about your existence.

Apparently, it’s looking a lot like you guys will be replacing ‘The Runic Army’ once your upper echelons graduate or quit The Academy. Hence, we have been told to treat you all kindly now that you are still small and make connections!” Once he said this much, he realized that revealing his intention was somewhat counterintuitive but now it was too late to take back his words.

Villin nodded as the situation made a bit more sense. Seeing how the boy had positive intentions, he decided to ask another question.

“So what is going on here? Is the forest a part of The Academy?”

The boy smiled at Villin’s question before responding, “This forest IS The Academy.”

Then he explained the basics of what was going on. The fourth and fifth grade lived, and took classes, together. Classes and guilds were spread across this massive underground forest. This place was probably the greatest feat any school has ever accomplished.

The forest was extremely expansive and divided up into grids. Each grid had its own ecosystem with regular, and even magical, creatures living within. The further away you go from A1 the more dangerous nature would be.

Students were clear to do almost anything. They could fight and rob. Create magic arrays and wards if they knew how. As long as you didn’t intentionally murder you were in the clear.

Classes were also spread out. The more advanced the class was, the deeper into the forest you would have to go. Here, the main thing The Academy taught was the importance of strength.

Most classes were optional, safe for a few. These few were ‘The Dangers of Magic’ and ‘Creation of a Spell Blueprint’.

Generally, students also had to sign a new magically binding contract when coming here, they wouldn’t be allowed to talk about this place and they would have to create one wooden spell blueprint every five years and one iron spell blueprint before they reached a hundred years of age.

Mission boards with teleportation arrays were also spread across the forest. The mission boards included a number of missions that corresponded with the difficulty of the location in the forest. These could include things such as helping some company defend a VIP to fighting a group of people from the western continent that intruded on their land.

The boy, whose name was Theodore, seemed to be full of praise for The Academy since they created this place. Apparently, he was in the fifth grade and this was the third year he had been here. Thus far he had been able to make it to L34, nearly dying when he made it there.

When Villin heard every ‘tile’ was ten kilometers long, he couldn’t help but feel completely stunned. This meant that the forest was at least 340 kilometers by 260 kilometers and most likely way bigger.

After a bit, Theodore ended up giving Villin a map. The map was rectangular and went up to H20. It seemed to be drawn and was pretty basic overall. Certain squared had red crosses on them, signifying more danger than usual and others had green circles, meaning there were no dangerous animals. Then a few squares were also colored blue since they mainly consisted out of water. Distinctions were also made between proper forests and swamps. Lastly, there were markings on certain tiles showing the existence of teleportation arrays. These were mostly in the tiles without any hostile animals.

After getting this, Theodore also gave him iron bracers, iron-tipped shoes, and a helmet. This was the bare minimum you generally needed to get by out here.

Villin ended up declining these since, if he wanted to get to A1 by the following day, he would have to move quickly and these pieces of armor would only slow him down.

He bid goodbye to Theodore and began getting a move on, using the fake sun in the sky to orient himself.

Every ‘tile’ had a couple of meters of no man’s land. Thanks to this it shouldn’t be too difficult to find your way, getting lost shouldn’t be a problem as long as you didn’t get into any large fights.

After losing sight of the headquarters of ‘A Dwarf’s Fortress’, Villin paused as he thought of the best way to get to A1.

He would need to move nearly a hundred kilometers in slightly less than a day. If it was on flatlands, Villin would have absolutely no problem doing this. The problem was that he was in a forest, he would even have to move through a couple of swamps, this made traversing much harder, even if he had magic to help him.

Villin sighed as he realized he probably wouldn’t be able to make it in time, but he still decided to give it a proper shot. Due to the experiments, his body and organs did improve in quality. The most important one was the lungs. Thus far, he hadn’t been able to test how much his organs had been strengthened, but well, there was no time better than now.

Only ten minutes had passed before Villin met his first bit of wildlife. There was a snake lying atop of a branch. It used illusion magic to hide, if Villin didn’t sense the mental fluctuations he might’ve accidentally gotten close and been attacked.

Villin made a wide circle around it and kept going, using his vines as support. After a while he figured out how they could properly boost him forward every time he landed, making movement a bit less tiring.

For a good hour, Villin ran while avoiding any of the creatures he could feel, but after all this time, he was forced to walk for a bit to catch his breath. It was then that Villin was forced to fight for the first time.

He had been followed for over twenty minutes at this point. He knew, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. He simply hoped the creature would lose interest or get tired before he did.

Now that he knew he could no longer keep going without weakening his combat prowess, Villin decided to stop and fight. He turned around, facing whatever it was that had been chasing him.

The bushes rustled for a bit before everything went completely silent. Villin wasn’t fooled though, he knew exactly where his enemy was even if he didn’t know what it was.

After a few minutes, the creature seemed to have realized it couldn’t hide from Villin and so it walked out from along the bushes. It was a large wolf, two meters tall and four meters long. Villin could feel a magical pulse coming from it, he also noticed that, at this point, the leaves close to the wolf froze.

It seemed that this wolf had some extent of ice magic, even if it was most likely instinctual.

Villin focused completely, he didn’t dare underestimate animals this far into the forest. He carefully pulled his wand and pointing it at the creature. Just as he was about to cast ‘Syrtim Celer’ to try and trap it, Villin heard a voice in his head.

‘I know how we can get to A1 in time.’, Ashera said mysteriously.

Villin felt confused for a moment, and then the Kitsune explained her plan, causing Villin to grin.

This wasn’t a fair fight, the wolf before him was a low-intellect creature from the canine family. A Kitsune also came from this family. The only difference was that she was highly evolved and intelligent. Knowing the plan, Villin made a slight cut into the palm of his hand, letting his blood fall on the floor.

The wolf immediately froze up as he instinctively recognized the smell. He was about to retreat when mental pressure surrounded him, forcing him to submit.

The wolf layed down onto his side as he shook, fear petrified it as it instinctively recognized the pressure of a higher-tiered species.

Villin didn’t have any intention to let him go though.

With a bit of help from the Kitsune and some mental encouragement, the wold got back onto his feet, but this time, there was a boy sitting atop of the shaking beast.

“Yip Yip!” Villin said, and just like that the wolf started running. If it could, it would most likely cry.

The Kitsune did warn Villin not to keep it around for too long though. The fear the creature felt was instinctive, but this wasn’t a mortal beast.

No matter what, it was still a magical beast with some intelligence. After a while, it would probably figure out it shouldn’t fear you and revolt. Still, something like that was unlikely to happen in less than a week as it would take some time for the instinctive fear to dissipate.

Having this mount helped a whole bunch though. Since the further they went, the weaker the creatures were, there were very few willing to fight the ice wolf. And as for those that did, they weren’t capable of catching up.