Past Life Hero, ch 11

Max's room definitely wasn't bad. In fact, he was mildly surprised that it was as good as it was. After all, after seeing more of the Summoner Academy on the way, he hadn't been too impressed by the rest of the grounds. Earth was a no-mana, high-technology world, and it had pretty decent facilities, at least in the richer countries. But in Albion, in Max's past life, there’d been good facilities as well. Just because a world has low mechanical technology didn't necessarily mean the overall technology of the world had to be low. Albion’s civilizations had learned to use mana instead of electricity to make their lives more comfortable.

The Summoner Academy was a little more rustic than Max would have guessed, but his room was thankfully less…bare bones. It sort of reminded him of a college dorm back on earth. Although it was pretty small, it had a small but decent bed, a little desk, and a closet. But the size of the closet was respectable. All in all, Max wasn't too dissatisfied.

There was a shared common area between his room and one other.  The common area had a sitting room, a bathroom, and a kitchenette.  If he had a roommate, he wasn't sure who it was because the door to the other room didn't open the entire time he was there, even after somebody knocked on the outside door and brought food.

There was a water tap in the kitchenette area along with mugs, so there was plenty of water and a chilled box that wasn't quite as good as a refrigerator back on Earth, but seemed to serve the same purpose. With his basic needs being taken care of, Max decided to read all of his pamphlets. The first one was about Summoners in general, the second was about the Summoner Academy and the world that it existed in, as well as the history of the Quartets being established. The third one was about the different classes offered in the Summoner Academy, and what prerequisites they required, if any. The fourth one was about The Eternal Struggle and how worlds were destroyed by portals and monsters. This pamphlet was the shortest and had a brief history, but most of it seemed to be conjecture rather than fact.

Max made a face after flipping through that last pamphlet and decided it wasn't really worth much. He already knew that Earth was under attack, after all. What he wanted to know was why and how. And the pamphlet he'd just skimmed didn't really seem to answer those questions, so he lost interest. After that, he returned to the first pamphlet, the one about Summoners in general, and as he read through it, his heart sank. Now he understood why the angel had considered Summoners so weak.

It turned out that Summoners were very different from what Max had assumed they might be. In his mind, a Summoner would be pulling dragons out of nowhere to fight in their stead, sort of like maybe a necromancer, but using monsters instead of the undead. He’d been envisioning a “summoner” class in some names on earth.  But this was not the case. There were several other classes the pamphlet listed that could perform similar feats. Conjurers, Necromancers, and Beast Tamers all had similar powers to what Max had been imagining.

Instead of creating random constructs or…making monsters or pulling them from somewhere else out of thin air, a Summoner was actually a bit closer to a beast tamer, except instead of living animals, a summoner made contracts with individual entities that could exist in the astral or spiritual plane. Sprits. And since summoners had to convince spirits to sign a contract with them through coercion or force, each summoner's ability to contract and manifest a spirit was directly related to their willpower, creativity, and luck.

What this meant was that the average summoner had maybe one, if not two, spirits that they could manifest for various things. And the way a summoner fought was usually ordering the spirits to carry something, or fight for them, or frighten or distract an enemy. Of course, the problem was that spirits in general were not very strong or coordinated. And if an enemy was dumb or bloodlusted or disciplined enough, no amount of shrieking or whispers in the ear would have any effect. Meanwhile, the average Conjurer could create several monsters out of thin air using mana. They weren't very powerful Path either, but Summoners were worse. The pamphlet tried to sugarcoat this fact, but Max could read between the lines and he sighed.

At face value, Summoners definitely seemed very underwhelming. He tried not to let it get his spirits down though. Max had basically already made the decision to be the best Summoner he could be. Any tool or weapon he could pick up before heading back to Earth was a good thing.  This attitude had served him well in his past life, and later on Earth.  As usual, whenever he thought of Earth, his thoughts began straying to his parents and a background worry started to bubble up.

He ruthlessly suppressed his worries.  Obsessing bout things that he couldn't control right now would not be helpful and might even start him on a spiral of depression. He didn't need that.

It was getting late.  He no longer had any light coming through his window at all. So he turned on the magic lamp at his desk and continued to read his pamphlets.

The next one he went through was about the classes offered at the Summoner Academy and all the electives he could take. This pamphlet made him raise his eyebrows.  Max was fairly impressed.

Summoner Academy had far more classes available than he would have ever imagined, some of them not even being magical in nature at all. For instance, there was a Basic Self-Defense class, a Traps class, Woodland Survival class, and even several cooking classes. Max flipped through pages and pages of course names and descriptions. He ripped a page out of the very back of the book, one with thanks and acknowledgements printed on it and tore it up.  Instant scrap page marks.  He wasn't making any decisions yet and didn't even know how many classes he'd be able to take. He wanted to save the pages that he thought might be good candidates.

The last pamphlet he read was about the history of the college and the nature of the Quartet that it existed in. This pamphlet, more than any of the others, blew his mind. The Summoner Academy was one of four schools that existed in this Quartet pocket dimension. The Quartet was larger than he might have originally assumed. As it turned out, the Summoner Academy was actually relatively fairly small. The other schools were much larger. Each Path university had its own grounds behind it, and all four schools shared a large central area between them. Where Max had appeared in the dirty field had been one of the areas behind the Summoner Academy set aside for new arrivals. Each of the other schools had a similar area, but Max was beginning to suspect that they were likely much nicer.

In every Quartet, each school was mostly staffed and even partially funded by alumni. In ancient times, the Path universities had been created by unknown or forgotten powers.  Since then, they had largely been kept running through the efforts of the surviving Challengers that had trained there.

Now Max knew why there were so many classes available at the Summoner Academy.

Any Challenger that returned to their world was not sure to win the fight. Some worlds were actually destroyed or overrun by monsters. When that happened, some Challengers were given the opportunity, or found an opportunity to return to the academy, where they got a new body that didn't age. So some of the instructors at the Summoner Academy could be hundreds of years old, if not older.

Apparently some Challengers who won the fight for their world could return too, but the pamphlet said such a thing was rare and then didn’t really explain why.

Max was floored. He would have never imagined any of this to be possible, even after all of his time on Albion. The oldest people on Albion had been the elves, but they were basically just immortal, not inhabiting some sort of mana-created, borrowed body like Max currently was. "No wonder there is a time limit for training," he said out loud.  Otherwise the Quartet could be completely full!

The pamphlet had more information on the Quarted system too, some of which Max was more curious about than others. It turned out that there were clubs and groups within every Path university, but there were also competitions between the schools themselves. The handbook that Max was reading conspicuously didn't mention any wins or losses by the Summoner Academy.  He didn’t take that as a good sign.

When he finished the handbook, he put it down and tapped his finger on the cover. "What have I gotten myself into?" he muttered. But then he grinned, deciding he was up for the challenge.

Even though Summoners seemed weak, he was confident he could find ways to make his new power work for him. More importantly, he'd already been the Hero of Albion in his past life. Although the mana concentration in the Quartet wasn't high enough for him to train his old powers very well, he knew he could recover at least some of his abilities in this place. That should mean when returned to his original body and went back to Earth, he should be much stronger upon his return than he had been in multiple ways.

Constant, low level worry for Earth, his family, and his friends were likely going to be something he lived with constantly from now on.  But the warrior in him was excited for the opportunity to achieve some of his old power and even learn this new, mysterious Path.

Max got up from his desk and checked the closet. He raised an eyebrow when he saw that the only thing hanging inside were several sleeping gowns. It made a certain sort of sense. After all, the occupant of this room could have been a man or woman or even not human. If Max had a tail, for instance, the nightgown was probably the most practical way of wearing some sort of pajamas. He shrugged, got out of his clothes, and put on the nightgown. Then he flopped onto the bed and began to fall asleep.

Before he was out, he took advantage of the elevated mana in the Quartet to give himself an alarm to wake up and set up an automated process in his body to collect and claim the mana around him. With this sort of process active, he should only need a few hours of sleep. He set his mental alarm accordingly. His last thought before falling asleep was that it would have been nice if he'd gotten a better new Path than he had. But it wasn't in Max's nature to merely accept any conventional wisdom on any world.

If there was any way to make Summoner work for him, he’d find it.

And if he avoided thinking about what was going on back on Earth, the sheer convenience of having a mana clock again was delicious.