Chapter 29

It felt like he’d had a bad dream.

Max woke up, staring at the sky. But in less than a second, he remembered what had happened and was instantly mad as hell. He sat up, looking down at himself, and sure enough, his body was whole. He didn't know if he was in exactly the same field he had appeared in when he first came to the Quadrant, but it sure looked the same.

Lying next to him on the ground was his dagger and a spear. Max's body didn't feel stiff or odd at all; he was not in any pain. All of the injuries he'd sustained before dying had vanished. Max put the dagger on his belt and used the spear like a walking stick as he started leaving the field.

Staying on the ground and feeling sorry for himself wouldn’t accomplish anything.  He’d also made a promise to himself to listen to his instincts again before he’d gotten killed.  His instincts were telling him to move his ass.

He wasn't sure what the normal post-death protocol was, since this was the first time he'd died, but nobody was there to greet him or check on the respawn area that he could see. Once he was past the gate, Max wasn't quite sure where the Summoner Academy actually was since he'd taken a transportation portal last time. Would it have killed them to post some signs?  Then he saw a stub of a post in the distance and realized there probably had been signs at one point.  They were gone now.  He turned around, trying to find some landmarks he might recognize, and eventually thought he might have figured it out.

Then Max started an easy jog towards what he hoped was the right direction. As he ran, he thought, he stewed, he planned. One thing was for damn sure; he needed to get a one-star mana body. He needed to reach that minimum level as quickly as possible. The summoner stuff was new, and he didn't understand all of it yet, but he definitely knew how to be a Blade Sorcerer.

Suddenly, a window popped up in his vision. It read:

You have revived. Please try to be more careful. If you are being murdered or harassed, do not hesitate to tell the proper authorities.

Max eyed the window before dismissing it and wondered if any of the asshole Mystic Spearmen had actually been punished. He doubted it.

Another window popped up:

You have been awarded mana units for slaying your attacker.  Please obtain a currency pouch for the amount to be deposited.

Cool.  He felt a flash of satisfaction.  At least at the last moment he’d killed that servant, whatever-his-name-was.

Max was starting to get a better understanding of the Quartet. What he originally thought was a fair and wholesome place, where future warriors could learn martial skills, was much more complex.  In reality, this Quartet was turning out to reflect the rest of the universe. Depressing.

At first, he was just disappointed about this, but then his anger began to grow.  Like the many conversations he had before with Lance had underlined, there were massive stakes looming behind this entire system.

This was not just some corrupt business in some country on some random world.  If the Quartet didn’t work the way it was supposed to, who knew how many more people would unnecessarily die?  The fact that people with power could be this petty or incompetent when entire worlds were at stake was absolutely unacceptable.

What's more, Max had a feeling that as bad as his Quartet was, there might even be worse Quartets out there. In all the time that he’d been attacked by the Mystic  Spear students, he noticed a conspicuous lack of any professors or other authorities. He hadn’t wanted to believe Regal, but nobody had intervened.  Max only had the system.

After thinking of the system, he wondered about Lance.  Since his friend had technically committed suicide, he would be reviving later than Max had. That reminded him to check his tablet, which was miraculously somehow still on his wrist.  His badge was still sitting on his chest.

Max's tablet said that he had been gone for almost a week. It was currently Thursday. He gritted his teeth and growled; almost a week of class. He'd missed almost a week of class, and he believed Regal when the psychotic bastard had said that he would hunt Max in the central area. Old habits and ways of thinking were starting to reawaken in Max's heart and mind. He'd just spent over 20 years living in a relatively peaceful world and almost forgotten what things could be like when assholes were Regal, people with backing, could be this openly awful.  Back on Earth, at least in civilized countries, people had to be much more sneaky to fuck each other over.

Meanwhile, Max was beginning to suspect that if somebody with power had a grudge against another student, they might be able to just keep murdering that student and keep them from actually taking classes or learning how to be an effective Challenger. Which meant that when seven years were up for Summoners, that person would go back to their world and probably immediately get eaten by a monster.  At the very least, they wouldn’t be a fraction as effective of a fighter for their world as they could have been.

Max ground his teeth thinking about how Lance had been screaming and crying on the ground. Prince Regal hadn't just gotten revenge on Max; he'd also messed with Max's friends.  People who did things like that were truly the worst kind of scum.

Before Max had been killed in the Quartet, he'd been happy about going back to school.  He could admit that now.  High school and college for him on Earth had been a madhouse of studying as he graduated early, and back on Albion, he hadn't really gotten much formal schooling.  Deep down, even though he knew about the stakes, there had been part of him that had been enjoying just…being a student again. But now everything had changed.

Everything.

The steel point of Max's spear glittered in the sunlight. A spear was not Max's preferred weapon, but he could use it if he had to. More importantly, he could probably sell it. And now that Max was taking his situation seriously in a different way, he figured it was time to get himself a sword.

He realized that he'd guessed correctly and was heading in the right direction. After a couple of hours of jogging, he could see the forest in the distance where he had been refining mana before.  As he eached a wood line he suddenly heard running feet.

Trusting his instincts, he ducked down in the bushes and hid. A few minutes later, he saw a group of men in armor run past, all carrying spears. None of them spoke, but they had grim faces. They seemed to be heading towards the field that Max had just appeared in. You have got to be kidding me, he thought.

Before this, it had never even occurred to Max that Challengers from different Paths could go on the academy grounds of other Path schools. The other thing he realized was that this feud with Regal was not over, not even close. They were absolutely coming to kill him at the field where he'd just respawned.  He had no proof, but he was sure of it all the same.

As he'd been jogging before, he had noticed a tower that sat empty, and now he knew what it must have been for in the past: guards.  Guard towers to ensure that when the dead came back to life, they'd be unmolested. The tower had looked ancient and was obviously not being manned anymore. "What the heck is going on with this place?" Max wondered.

He briefly considered not even going back to the academy but decided that was not really an option. He didn't have anywhere else to go. Not yet.  And after thinking about it some more, he'd never seen students from other Paths on the Summoner Academy grounds themselves. He had to assume that the campus itself would be too risky for these spear carrying assholes to trespass on.

But then he wondered how this group of spearmen had come so close to catching him in the first place. Maybe there's a timer? There was still too much that Max didn't know.

He got up quietly and moved back towards the academy, sticking to the woods and staying out of sight. His mind kept moving as his feet did, and he began to prioritize goals. He needed power. He needed information too, but he needed power more. Before Max got to campus, he hid his spear, not wanting to draw too much attention to himself the moment he got back.  Carrying a spear as a Summoner would be a really easy way to give himself away to any Mystic Spear people trying to track him or who were asking questions about his whereabouts.

Max was on pins and needles as he climbed the stairs to his dorm, only nodding at the floor officer that sat at the bottom desks. It was a stranger today, not Chango.  When he got to his floor, he slowly opened the door to his shared living area and breathed a sigh of relief when nobody was there. Apparently, the spearmen weren't quite free-acting enough to find out which room he stayed in and camp it.

Max ran the water in his sink, cupping handfuls of it and dunking his face. He'd worked up a light coat of sweat while jogging.  As he cleaned himself, he thought again about the sensation of the spear blades running him through.  He’d been more or less helpless.

“Fuck!” He screamed in anger, pounding the counter top of the kitchenette in sheer frustration. His muscles bunched up and his whole body tensed as he wordlessly growled.

But then suddenly, he heard a voice behind him that almost made him jump out of his skin. It said, "What the hell is your problem? Stop making such a commotion, you crazy person."

Max whirled in surprise, his hand going to his dagger, and then stared in amazement at a pale, translucent young woman in a summoner robe. The spectre's badge declared her a seventh year.

His mouth moved, but no sound came out as he processed what he was seeing.  Then he blanked and took his hand off of his dagger. He hadn't been this surprised in a long, long time, but even through his shock, he'd remembered what he'd learned in class about Summoners.  Summoners sometimes naturally saw spirits. But he'd thought that most spirits were more abstract. This girl looked like a stereotypical ghost, and not the scary kind.  She looked like… a ghost character from a PG-rated movie on Earth.

Not fully translucent, Max could make out some color on the ghost.  She had her hair up in two pigtails, and had purple highlights.  She had on dark makeup, black lipstick, and wore a choker necklace.  Her robe was loose, not as form-fitting like many of the current female Summoner students.  It was cut short, though.  The effect was more like she was wearing a dress than a robe.  Both ears had a row of earrings.

"Wait, you can see me!?"

Max couldn't help himself; he laughed for a second, then said, "If I can't see you and I just whirled around and started staring at nothing, then I guess I really would be a crazy person, huh?"

The ghost girl lifted an eyebrow and said, "Well, isn't this interesting? I didn't think you were anything special at first, but here we are talking." Her voice trailed off, and Max, despite the weirdness of the situation, just rolled with it.

He said, "Are you the one that was making all the noises in the room next to mine?"

The girl shrugged and said, "Maybe.  Some spirits like unoccupied areas to rest in.  I do too, but I was also looking for something recently.  Maybe there, maybe elsewhere.”

"Looking for what?" Max asked.

"That's none of your business," she said. She turned as if she was going to leave but then hesitated and said, "I really am curious why we're having this conversation. This shouldn’t be happening.  I've hidden my presence, so in order for you to see me, especially only being a first year and not knowing what you're doing, not even with your third eye open, we must have some sort of crazy similarity or goals.  There has to be commonality.  A connection."

"Okay," said Max, "do you want to talk about it?  It’s not every day I turn around in my room after venting some frustration and find out that I have an audience."

“Not your room, a common area.” The ghost girl tapped her lips a few times and said, "But a chat?  It’s been a while.  Most interesting, most interesting.  This might actually not be a bad idea, unless you have a pressing date or something."

Max shook his head, "Nothing like that. I was just murdered and came back to life a few hours ago."

The ghost narrowed her eyes.  "I see.  Then perhaps it really might be interesting to talk." She pointed at the door behind her and said, "That isn't actually my room, so I can't invite you in there, or rather, I won't. But I can go in your room if you invite me in."

Max scrunched up his face.  "If I invite you in, does that mean you can go in whenever you want?"

"Yes–," she started to say.  Max tried to cut her off but she talked right over him. “Bbut if you were more than just a baby Summoner, you could keep me blocked out very, very easily whenever you wanted to."

Max blinked.  Among all the stuff he’d experienced in the last week to be upset about, this wasn’t even at the top of the list.  "Whatever.  It's been a hell of a day already, and I've only been alive for half of it. Fuck it, why don't you come into my room, and we can chat."

"Okay, good," said the ghost girl. She smiled and said, "My name is Lavinia."

"I'm Max," he replied.

Lavinia turned and went right through the door to Max's room before sticking her head out again with a somewhat embarrassed look. "Sorry about that. I haven't spoken to anybody in at least…decades? So I feel a little bit rusty with this whole communication thing.  I know this is probably pretty…weird for you.  Like…more than you’re used to." She made a face then she disappeared back through the door.

“You might be surprised,” Max muttered.  He sighed, opened the door, and followed the ghost into his room.