Chapter 20: Team Three’s Cheat

Viren stared at the screen with a huge grin. It was blindingly bright after Ryland had cast that spell of his. Everyone focusing on Team Three was forced to shade their eyes against the ferocious glare.

When the light cleared, Ryland’s team was perfectly fine. And the glacier they had been standing before was now gone.

“Yes!” Viren pumped his fist. “That’s right! You go, sir!”

Slowly, he realized his surroundings had grown particularly silent. He turned and found that nearly everyone nearby was watching him. He cursed himself. Was this how Ryland felt whenever he did something and Viren gawked at him?

The real problem was that the others were looking at him like sharks sensing blood…

Oh boy, he might need to be careful here.

Cracks split the air, gold-edged rents tearing open in space. Ah, good. Despite being an artificial space within a Reality Demesne constructed from Living Mana, Ryland’s rifts still found a way through.

They still managed to bring down the sun itself.

As unrivalled heat blistered through the air, as light and noise turned incandescent enough to drown their senses, as the glacier began vaporizing immediately while his teammates yelled out, Ryland calmly strode forward.

It was always an interesting exercise to pit his own spells against each other. His Soul Glyph of Rift was in direct competition against his Soul Glyph of Aegis. The difference was that the former was more or less “borrowed” power, while the latter encompassed Ryland’s true magical might.

As such, when the sun’s devastating heat and light powered through the sundered reality, he couldn’t help but feel a smidge of satisfaction that his barrier let nothing through.

The heat was strong enough to scorch the rocks themselves, starting to slowly melt it into lava. Superheated steam from the vaporized glacier fizzed fast enough to act as sawblades. Radiation pummelled them so hard that matter threatened to disintegrate entirely.

And Ryland felt none of it.

A quick look confirmed that his teammates were fine too. Well, physically. Mentally was another matter.

“Weren’t you saying we’re short on time?” Ryland asked.

“What in the name of the Calamities did you just do?” Alendra asked, clearly unable to decide whether she should be shocked or just continue glowering.

Sint had grown tremendously pale, while Kendren had frozen entirely at the display of magic.

Ryland waved a hand in front of him. “I cleared a path through the glacier.”

“What glacier? It’s gone.”

As the steam swirled away, Ryland supposed he had to agree. Where there used to be a massive mountain of ice blocking their path forward, all they had now was an equally large heap of rapidly fleeting steam and nearly-molten mountainous land.

“Well, my point stands, I think,” Ryland said brightly. “Let’s forge onwards.”

This time, Ryland went in the lead and remained in the lead as his teammates took their time to catch up.

“I’m going to ask again,” Alendra said as they trudged through the overheated muck. “What in all the Realms did you just do?”

Ryland’s barrier was working overtime to keep them all unaffected by the blast zone’s effects. He couldn’t even feel a lick of heat. After taking in a deep breath, Ryland was about to launch into an explanation, but Sint went first.

“He’s right,” Sint said, clearly not appreciating the taste of the words coming out of her mouth. She licked her fangs. “We can’t just rely on a Glyph of Search to find the designated area.”

Kendren laughed. “We certainly can if our odd friend here can vaporize anything in our way!”

“We are not vaporizing everything in our way,” Alendra said tightly. She rubbed her temple. “You said you know the actual way forward, right?”

Ryland smiled. “Indeed. I believe I can get us back on track.”

Alendra grumbled, probably annoyed at the implication that she had led them astray, but she didn’t say anything about it. “Alright, let’s go.”

Ryland got going. Once they gained some distance from his last spell’s blast zone, he dismissed the barriers around his teammates, having already dispelled [Sun Summoning].

He acknowledged his thought process there was somewhat faulty. On the one hand, he didn’t want to make things too easy for his teammates and thereby take away from their accomplishment. If he did everything and was the sole reason they “won”, then their judges would no doubt look upon them poorly.

And yet, he kind of already had made things easier, hadn’t he? Eradicating the obstacle presented by the glacier. Now leading them on along the right path they needed to follow.

Ryland was team three’s cheat.

He looked around at the mist-shrouded lands. At the reality constructed by the Trial Zone.

While the glacier might have seemed insurmountable at first, it was merely a way to test the prospective students’ ingenuity. If they were really worthy of enrolling into Arcoryx, then they’d have found a way to get past it and get to the Designated Area in time.

The thing was that the Trial Zone wasn’t static. When Ryland had first taken the test, he hadn’t gone through what was essentially an asteroid belt made of broken mountain chunks. Even now, Kendren’s mirror revealed other teams going through a wide variety of tests. Plus, the Academs had stated the actual challenges would reflect the capabilities of the participants.

So the question remained if the Trial Zone would attempt to modify the obstacles it presented now that it saw that the first one had been dealt with so easily.

Had that seemingly insurmountable glacier been put in place because of Ryland’s participation?

In either case, his teammates might just have been screwed.

By him.

Amazing. And Ryland was only just starting to feel like they had begun to see him in some sort of positive light. He had to wonder how many of them were thinking the same thing…

“We need to move fast,” Sint said as they leaped across another series of floating, broken rocks. “That explosion probably drew everyone’s attention.”

“It wasn’t that big,” Ryland said.

Alendra rolled her eyes. “Stop trying to be modest. That was enormous!”

Kendren flashed his mirror at the rest of them. “I can confirm that several other teams were flabbergasted by the severity of Ryland’s blast. It’s what let us get ahead, honestly. How did you do that, Ryland?”

“Don’t tell me the others have your blasted mirrors too…” Alendra muttered.

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Ryland took a deep breath before he began explaining quickly. There was a lot to cover so he had to rush a bit. “I learned how to master the magic of rifts using my Soul Glyph of Sundering, where I figured out a Conceptual Glyph for distances and then essentially Sundered it, which ended up creating a tear in space that I couldn’t initially travel through to reach other Realms—”

“I knew it,” Alendra said, apparently only able to catch the last bit. “I knew you were from other Realms. You’re too damn odd.”

“That sounds almost insulting,” Ryland said, minorly hurt.

Kendren scoffed. “Lots of people have been to other Realms. I’ve been to several too.”

“No, you dolt,” Alendra said. “He’s been to other Realms by himself. Not using your silly little teleportation circles and whatnot. He’s been there and back using his own magic.”

“That’s… insane.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say!”

“Hey!” Sint suddenly called out. She had gone ahead of the rest of them. “I think I can see some of the other teams.”

“We can already see them,” Kendren insisted, waving his mirror around.

Ryland was on Sint’s side. It was one thing to observe them remotely, which wasn’t that dissimilar from standing outside the dome and watching the competitors participate. It was wholly another to be standing at the edge of a broken cliff and directly spying on fellow candidates from far above.