After that event, Edwin abandoned his friend group of lower nobles stating that, “Those guys would stab me in the back to get ahead. The only reason why they don’t is because they are afraid of me and my family.” This event was enough for him to acknowledge Chris, respect him even.

They decided to let Edwin join in on weekend training, and they ate together, studied together, and Chris began to ask his friends if they had any ideas for weapons or spells. He borrowed their jackets for school, sewing them with his upgraded invisibility magic. He also found that Edwin really did have a knack for fire magic.

Within a few months his friends had become much stronger, beginning to look outside of their basic elements they had been focusing on. Jenny decided that her mixing in fire with her wind magic would help with boosting explosive power, instead of just the force and slashing wind normally had. Lily focused on learning about weather, and began to research lightning. Haven, after being surpassed in fire magic by Edwin, began to solely focus on pure mana based magic. He improved his mana-bolt to the point where it could burrow a hole into a mountain. Edwin on the other hand decided to maintain his focus on fire, as it was his family's magic, and because he wanted to find the ceiling of his power.

Chris continued work, attempting magic that the book hadn’t even discussed. He used the fundamentals of his light-based magic, to create a mana layer to prevent large areas from emitting sound, and continued work on the “vision” part of the invisibility spell. By combining both a sense of echolocation, and magic sensing, it allowed for a clearer picture of location to be determined. Chris also added a second crystal to his sword, allowing it to use the Mana Slash, which allowed him to chop down part of a forest in a single slash.

They all worked tirelessly together, and Jenny slowly grew closer to Chris. After overcoming her initial fear, she couldn’t help but be amazed by how strong and fearless he was. For his age he was tall, strong, and capable. She tried to push these weird thoughts out of her head, but from time to time, she would accidentally find herself holding onto Chris during studying or conversations. Of course Chris didn’t notice, as he was intent on making his way to the top of the school, but those moments, no matter how embarrassing, meant a lot to her.

Chris was assigned with sneaking up on the instructor each day during sound magic class, as he was progressing quite quickly. No matter how much he thought he was able to, the instructor always seemed to know when Chris was right behind him. That’s when Chris realized something.

“Teacher, you can use sound-based detection magic, can’t you?” Chris looked down at his teacher. Mr. Shepard began to laugh, “I can’t believe you figured me out that quickly. It only took you a week. But Chris, if you know what sound-based detection magic is, does that mean you know how to use it?” Chris smirked, “Give me a blindfold and come find out?”

In front of the class that day, Chris and Mr. Shepard fought each other barehanded. Chris was entirely blindfolded, and the students would not keep quiet. The perfect conditions to ruin the magic for most, but Chris had worked so hard to develop his false sight, that he was not to be easily thrown off.

Mr. Shepard threw a sharp punch, straight for Chris’ face. Chris ducked, sweeping Mr. Shephard’s leg. Mr. Shepard groaned a bit, got back up and resumed. He dashed in silently, zipping back and forth, to make it hard to read his moves, but Chris easily avoided time and time again. While Chris’ detection was great, he also possessed great reaction time.

After a few minutes, teacher conceded, “You proved yourself, I guess you do know what you’re doing,” He breathed heavily between words, “I know for a fact I didn’t teach you that, and I also know you started about as skilled as everyone else here,” Mr. Shepard leaned in, “Mind telling me how you know one of the strongest forms of sound magic?”

Chris was caught off guard, his teacher no longer was smiling, and Chris realized he may have made a mistake. ‘Crap, I was having so much fun I forgot that it wasn’t normal of me to be that skilled. What do I say?’ Before he had time to process everything, his teacher’s face returned to normal. “Alright everyone, for anyone who wants to, I will now teach an advanced class skill to any who are interested!”

Everyone jumped up, ready to learn, but Chris began to panic a bit. His teacher put his arm around Chris, “Don’t worry, if you can’t tell me then I’ll just have to trust you for now,” and walked back to the practicing kids.

Later that night Chris looked into the book about sound based detection magic and found out a tidbit of information that he had skipped over in his overzealous need to train secretly.

This magic type was created by and for assassins, or assassination targets. Many guilds have access to this spell, and mostly those who learned it are intent on either infiltration, or escaping from infiltrators. This spell can quickly map out an area, allowing the avoidance of detection, as well as easily finding a target by honing in on any noises, or discerning general outlines.

With this Chris understood, his teacher is probably worried that someone in his class knows an assassin’s skill without being taught it directly by him. Chris calmed down, now that he knew why the teacher was worried, hopefully he will be able to clear up the issue.

During Magical Engineering, the sneers slowly began to stop, as he was able to answer almost any question, explain concepts in multiple ways, even those the teacher hadn’t mentioned, and was genuinely nice and helpful to anyone who approached him in class. There was one girl in class who was a bit similar to the teacher in her quest for engineering knowledge, who would show Chris her design concepts, asking for critiques and ideas when she got stuck. Her black curly hair bounced as she bobbed up and down nervously as Chris looked over the work.

“If you add a hole here… adding cushion here would… and finally if you threaded this part around here…” Chris gave clear and concise judgement on the designs. There weren’t many who practiced designs outside of what was required classwork so Chris was always happy to see what she was working on. Her latest designs seemed to have taken a lot of inspiration from Chris’ sword design. Most people only think of crystals as storage devices, but a novice mistake is to leave the object completely entrapped in the material you are placing it in. It makes your mana pull waste mana by having it flow into that extra material, and for Chris’ design, it's focused on being easy to push mana into as well. Airflow also works, but for something like a sword, holes are a no go.

The teacher also showed off mana string, which is what Chris spent so long crafting by himself. The teacher finally had a machine come in, since Chris spent far too long on too little of the material. ‘Showing off how easy it is after I had to use focused chantless detailed magic spells just to get a small spool of it,’ Chris grumbled in his head.

This class was Chris’ favourite as the teacher was unsuspicious when he crafted new ideas. She just wanted to “get into the mind of a genius.” It made Chris a little sad that a lot of the design principles were just in a book he kept locked away in his room, not actually his ideas. It was still up to him to adapt the material, but it felt a bit fake.

Everyday Chris’ group would spend lunch together between classes, discussing their normal classes, and during dinner they would discuss the ones they had apart. Jenny stole Haven’s spot to the left of Chris during meals and now he only gets to sit across from him.

Haven used this opportunity to try to get close to Lily, but she had almost no interest as she was far too worried about doing well in classes. Edwin also grew closer as time went on. Before he felt a bit like an outsider, but now he no longer needed to keep his distance.

Edwin still had to deal with family problems, most letters he received were rude and dismissive of his progress, as his sister was also attending, and from her perspective with what little she actually looked, he was just goofing off. While she played the good student to her parents for her final year.

He never brought up the kidnapping, he never did. They still ended up paying the church, and decided that it was his fault for being so negligent with his studies. Originally he cared about status, and whatever else, and even cared to protect his older sister, but she was probably going to get the position as head of the house before he even had a chance to graduate.

‘I guess I’ll just do my best in school, prove myself to my family, then leave on my own,’ is what he thought. No need to be loyal to those adult brats who won’t pay debts they can easily afford until their child is held hostage, all the while treating him like a dud. Edwin knew Chris was stronger than everyone in his family at the age of ten, so no matter how much it hurt his pride, he followed him to grow strong too.

Over the weekends was their training, and this time was important. Chris was going to give them one day to practice their best attacks, and the next day he was going to test them on it. He would be on the receiving end of the attack, and give a rating. The reason why this was important wasn’t for the rating, even though all four of them desperately wanted a good rating, but it was for the pointers Chris gave afterwards. He would question them, pick out flaws, allow them to look at it another way, and then they would practice and improve. Not only that, Chris said he had something special for everyone if they all did well.