It had been 2 weeks since the first class of sparring. We had gone through and taught the trainees some battle 101. Things that would be useful to know and the very basics of fighting, such as "Don't hold your sword at such a funny angle, are you trying to break your wrists while swinging it?! And you, the way you tried dodging would leave you wide open to attacks from the side, go back and read the textbook on how to do it! Alfred how many times do I..." Mr.Ralph becomes a devil when training people, probably because he used to be a drill sergeant for the army and trained actual soldiers.

Today we were going to so some live combat, seeing as the students had become sufficient enough at fighting to survive for around 1 minute against me and Alex. That was a benchmark Mr.Ralph set for the students to reach and they reached it after 2 weeks of grueling training followed by us whooping their asses during sparring matches. I should say this now that Maria is still suspicious of us even though I explained our circumstances. She isn't openly hostile anymore but still gives us weird looks as if we are going to kidnap someone and make a break for it. Still, it's an improvement from "Vile scum of the kingdom that have sinned, do not even speak to me".

Anyways today's training was going to be against living beings, namely monsters. They had been captured or tamed by adventurers and brought here for training and studying purposes at the academy. When we got onto the training field there was a row of massive cages filled to the brim with monsters. The cages were made of spell-iron, a special type of iron that was soaked in large amounts of mana either naturally or by humans. It was stronger than normal iron and also had various enchantment put on to make it even tougher and More resistant to breaking. The students gulped when they saw the massive amount of Gray Wolves, Hind Bears, slimes and other monsters. There were 2 cages however that were triple layered with spell iron and even had a mana barrier around them and these cages contained a 3 Dire wolves in one, and 10 lesser corrupted in the other.

Corrupted were very hard creatures to fight as they were essentially humans that were killed by other corrupted and brought back to life as a corrupted. Long story short is that a wacko dark mage went insane and made corrupted to rule the world with. He didn't rule the world to put it short. Died in a war somewhere random and his corrupted were let loose on the world. Corrupted are broken up into lesser, mid, greater, and grand. Each tier was more intelligent and powerful than the last. Lesser and mid are as smart as monsters but follow orders of higher tiers while high and grand are as smart as a human child and a full adult respectively. Corrupted start off as lesser tier and eventually become grand tier over time. The most annoying part of corrupted is that they can contain near infinite amounts of mana in their mana gems they grow in their bodies and use that for magic, martial arts and their trademark move, rapid regeneration. You could cut a corrupted into 7 bits and it would manage to regrow all 4 limbs and head within a minute and be ready to fight once again. You only really kill them by smashing all the mana gems,depleting all their mana or making it so they don't have enough of a body to regen. The fact they don't feel pain makes shit worse since they will sacrifice their arm and head in order to kill you.

Got a little side tracked there, back to what was going on. The students were being made to fight slimes and goblins until either they were unable to fight or they killed the monsters. Several students were simply knocked unconscious by the slimes wrapping around their heads and choking them out or goblins smashing a club into their heads one too many times. There were around 13 students who managed to actually kill the slimes and goblins they fought, albeit with some difficulty. One of them was Maria who had a kill count of 13 slimes and 7 goblins., which was the most kills by anyone in the class which averages around 6 slimes and 3 goblins.

At this point it was around 12pm and everyone was eating lunch, but was also the time when a class of we one year students came out. High and mighty vorlander' s class. He didn't dare bother me and Alex in front of Mr.Ralph as the guy may be scrawny looking, but he was scary when mad. Their class fought against a bunch of Gray Wolves and even a couple of Hind Bears. They went a bit wild trying to show off to the first years, aka our class and got a couple of the cages filled with monsters with their magic attacks. The monsters didn't take too kindly to that and reciprocated with roars and smashing into the cages with various attacks. The teachers tried stopping the 2nd years who went to further make fun of the monsters. Vorlander then went and made a big mistake by slapping the cage of the lesser corrupted and making fun of them by saying "what's so special about these weird Gray skinned freaks, they look like a couple of ghouls to me. I bet I could finish them off in a heartbeat" he taunted the corrupted further and further before being yelled at by Mr.Ralph to get away from the cage, but the damage was done.

The lesser corrupted may only have the thinking capacity of monsters but it didn't mean they didn't understand humans. They were fuming in anger and starting unleashing a torrent of spells and claw swipes. Explosions wreaked havoc in the cage instantly braking the mana barrier defending the cage before sending spell-iron chunks flying. The mages on standby tried to reinforce the cages and using their taming spells but it barely worked. Only 3 of the 10 were pacified while the rest ran amok trying to get to their target of hate. Vorlander realized he made a big mistake and backed away in fear as fast as he could before cowering behind his classmates. By this point the men in the academy had been raised and teachers started rushing to the training grounds while evacuating the students. "Alex we should probably get ready for battle, yknow just in case those things break out and go wild" I say while setting up some trap spells around me. Alex just smiled and responds with " You fry em and I'll dice em" and pulls out his axe and starts enchanting it. Shortly after that we saw that the last layer of spell-iron bars were torn asunder and out of the cage flooded 6 of the 10 lesser corrupted as 4 had been pacified at this point. They saw that their target had escaped and started sniffing the air and looking around to find him but were intercepted by the teachers and guards on duty.

Dozens of fireballs rained down from the sky hitting the lesser corrupted, courtesy of Ms.Sylfa. They shrugged them off with 4 losing an arm and 1 losing his head, with all of them burnt in various places. They started recovering from their wounds almost instantly as the burnt portions healed and started growing where they lost body parts. Before that could finish however, several knight guards stepped up and started cleaning at the lesser corrupted. The first 2 were chopped up into dozens of pieces but they didn't stop cutting and called for a mage to burn the body parts while jumping back. The bits of gray and black flesh were lit on fire while the remaining 4 were staring at the knights with an almost palpable hatred visible in their completely black eyes and purple pupils. They knew they couldn't win and that even though they lost some members from their pack, the best choice was to flee.

They scattered and 3 fled towards the forest with knights and mages hot on their heels but one decided to rush the only other direction available to it, us. "Here it comes Matthew, better be ready with those traps by now!" Alex yells as he got in front while brandishing his war axe, so I answered his yell by launching ice spears, but instead of straight forward I aimed downwards towards the ground. My goal was to pin the corrupted bastard to the ground with a dozen or so ice spears so Alex could slice the thing to bits and afterwards I would light it on fire to finish the job. Unfortunately lady luck wasn't on my side as most of the spears were dodged by the corrupted and 2 simply grazed its sides which did literally nothing to it as it felt no pain and regenerated those wounds shortly after. It reached Alex and swiped its left arm at him which he dodged, or tried to. The thing was much faster than you would expect for a dead person brought back to life as an entirely new race. The claws gouged his side's after piercing straight through his leather armour. Alex swung his axe sideways while releasing paralytic gas and then used wind magic to send it flying at the corrupted's face but he missed since he was slightly panicking due to being gouged in his left side.

I summoned ice spikes out of the ground which hit its legs and immobilized it. As it was tearing its legs free I yelled "Alex now!" so he cleaved the thing in two from the head down through its groin before cutting it in half again horizontally, slicing it into 4 pieces. Alex managed to cut the mana gem near its neck which resulted in the thing actually screaming in pain for once. It seems like having its mana storage shattered and having mana go wild in its body didn't feel too good, even for the gray bastard. I didn't miss the opportunity and swiftly shot a viscous substance that lit on fire upon touching air. It stuck to the corrupted and didn't come off as long as I supplied it with mana or the affected parts were cut off. It was a custom spell made by a hero 90 years ago, I believe he called it a Napalm strike? Hero's are very weird, they know a whole bunch of random things that make no sense and are ridiculously powerful from the get go and only get more powerful as they train. Sometimes I wonder if the hero's world is filled with hundreds of thousands of humans as strong as dragons because it seems very likely.

The lesser corrupted gave one last cry of anger before burning to ash and with that the fight was over. I went to Alex and immediately cast healing spells while asking Alex "Are you ok? That looks like it hurts quite a bit. Seriously, if you were going to be that slow then you should have let me deal with it." I ranted towards Alex who smiled and said "c'mon man it didn't hurt that much. Also did you see my new spell? It gave me a whole bunch of ideas. I could make a spell that fires poison gasses like a cannon! OOH what if I combined the stickiness of the napalm spell you used and make my poison gasses into sticky poison gasses. How would that work though..what about.." I smiled while Alex continued his magic filled rant of devious new spells because it meant Alex was completely fine, even though he's injured. I just wonder where the corrupted ran off to. I don't want more of those bastard running around near the city.