The next morning Lupos awoke with a pounding headache, looking around the room he saw Fenrir curled up on the floor and smiled fondly at him. Although the wolf was a spirit, he reminded Lupos of his own pack before they were killed. Remembering their deaths at the hands of Mervyn Oakshield, Lupos's fists clenched.

"Morning Lupos." said Fenrir who had woken up. "Morning Fenrir, do you know where Jormugand is at the moment?" Fenrir shook his head, he'll probably be slithering around until you tell him otherwise." Lupos nodded then winced at the movement, the overuse of magic yesterday had taken a heavy toll on his body.

Noticing Lupos' pain Fenrir looked at him slightly worried. "Are you still going to attend classes today?" Lupos nodded with a determined look on his face "yes I've not got a choice, if I didn't appear the day after an unknown energy appeared I would immediately seem suspicious. It's best to just keep up the pretence I'm fine."

Fenrir nodded approvingly at Lupos's logic and looked at the door "It's only five in the morning we should hunt before it gets too late or we won't have a chance." Smiling at the idea of a hunt Lupos and Fenrir moved towards the door.

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In a different part of the school Mervyn Oakshield was addressing two figures of medium build wrapped from head to toe in black with the exception of a small slit where their eyes were. "Have you found out anything more regarding the crystal we found in the woods?" addressed Mervyn to the figures, the figures shook their heads silently and the slightly larger of the figures stepped forwards.

"No my Lord, lessons had finished by the time we sensed the magic being used, so the culprit could have been anyone of the students or faculty members with the exception of the third elder and his students who were holding a private study session at the time."

Mervyn groaned "so basically anyone in the entire school. So let me ask a different question do we have any idea what the crystal was used for?" the two figures looked at each other uneasily. "That we can tell you my Lord, we believe the crystal was used for a spirit summoning method called absorption."

Mervyn stared at the two in shock "Are you sure? Doesn't absorption need five crystals?" The figures both nodded "traditionally yes, however there is a second method that involves using only one crystal, however it limits the number of spirits they can summon to one at a time and the crystal needs to be of a significantly higher power, the chance of death of also much higher."

Mervyn paled "so assuming this person, whoever they are survived it would mean there is someone running around my school with a higher tier spirit?" the smaller figure spoke "there is no doubt the summoner survived my Lord, if they had not, then we would not have found an empty crystal, we would have found a corpse."

Mervyn stayed quiet a minute considering what he had heard "I want you two to keep a high alert, no one is to know what happened. Whoever this summoner is they obviously want to keep what they're up to a secret. From now on I want you two solely focused on the task of finding out who our mysterious summoner is before the inter school competition, understood?"

"Yes sir." reported both of the figures before they disappeared into the shadows. Alone in the silence Mervyn let out a sigh, no one had noticed the quiet slithering of a snake as it crawled through the roof above.

Jormugand laughed as he started to slither back towards Lupos's room "ssssooooo there issss someone watching issss there letsss see how they do."

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Author's note

Hi everone I'm really sorry for the super long wait between chapters I really hope you can forgive me. Iv read back through previous chapters and have tried to correct previous mistakes and I'm currently going to try to release one chapter a week on Fridays until my exams are over and I hope you can bear with me and continue to enjoy the story :)