Now that I think about it, my initial assessment was slightly off. The reason Oberyn is here isn't just to subtly investigate some rogue anomaly in the Frozen Zone—it's much more selfish. He is here to systematically collect rare biological samples of the anomaly for his personal research, since he instructed us to bring back the remnants.
This guy is quite literally using an entire class of elite students to do his dangerous field harvesting for him, planning to collect the remnants without ever having to lift a single finger himself.
"What a heinously smart bastard."
As Seraphina, Amou, Tiamat, and I ventured deeper into the blinding white horizon, the terrain quickly transitioned from a standard academic frozen expanse into an unforgiving, hostile expanse.
The wind began to howl with a biting, razor-sharp velocity, and the sub-zero atmosphere felt weighted, heavy with a thick density of localised frozen magium. If I had to deduce the structural difficulty of this environment, this kind of harsh practical lesson was reserved for seasoned second-year or even third-year students who had already mastered advanced atmospheric stabilisation magic spells.
It sounded incredibly cruel on paper—forcing a batch of wet-behind-the-ears first-years to simultaneously battle an unforgiving arctic terrain, survive a volatile, freezing atmosphere, and successfully slay S-rank Frostfang White Bears.
But I knew exactly how Oberyn's mind worked. If the Academy Board ever attempted to reprimand him for a safety compliance breach, he would smoothly counter with a flawless administrative defence: he was accelerating the strategic growth of this year's freshman batch by forcing them to adapt to extreme environments, fostering true resilience under pressure.
Honestly, if I were in his exact shoes, I would do the same thing. Human beings only experience true, exponential growth when they are backed into a corner and forced to navigate a critical, high-stakes situation. This practical lesson did precisely that.
However, looking over at the other two massive groups disappearing into the blizzard, I would have felt a lot more assured about the overall class survival rate if Jeanne had been placed in either of them.
As playful as she acts, Jeanne is abnormally, terrifyingly powerful for a first-year student. With her on the field, the other nineteen students would have had a functional safety net. Without her, they were entirely on their own against Oberyn's 'practical lesson'.
"Master~ Why exactly can't we simply deploy our magic to instantly obliterate this entire ordeal?~" Amou whined playfully, sliding her arms around mine once more and firmly pressing her enormous melons against my shoulder.
"Because that would be entirely too easy, and frankly, it has been quite some time since I've had a proper opportunity to engage in some direct physical action," I replied. I felt a familiar flicker of annoyance at her absolute lack of personal boundaries, but this time, I didn't even bother attempting to pull away. Experience had taught me that trying to break her physical hold when she was committed to a bit was mechanically impossible, even if my life completely depended on it.
"Master, why do you insist on navigating this environment entirely without our tactical intervention?" Tiamat chimed in, walking smoothly through the deep snow beside us, her amethyst eyes scanning my face with genuine curiosity. "Doesn't refraining from using our power technically defeat the stated pedagogical purpose of this entire practical lesson?"
"Well, Oberyn's official narrative is that he wants us, the students, to learn how to properly utilise our familiars and cultivate a deep synchronisation bond with them," I explained, shifting my weight slightly to accommodate Amou's anchor-like grip. "Though I don't have the slightest intention of utilising either of you for a routine cull. Ordering you two to clean up S-rank monsters for me feels conceptually wrong. Besides, as far as the 'bonding' criteria goes, I'd say we've localised plenty of synchronisation over the past week, wouldn't you agree?" I finished, offering her a genuine, gentle smile.
"Yes, Master," Tiamat replied, her stoic demeanour melting as she smiled back at me. Under the soft, diffused light of the winter sky, she looked genuinely, breathtakingly beautiful. "You took us out to experience the city's culinary establishments, accompanied us through the commercial districts for shopping, and organised numerous other highly engaging activities." There was a profound, striking warmth embedded in her normally clinical cadence, her voice sounding entirely melodic against the whistling wind.
It was true. Instead of treating them like standard magical tools or forcing them to run errands, I had spent the previous seven days taking them out into the civilian sectors, treating them like actual people. And no, for the record, absolutely zero scandalous or naughty things occurred—despite Amou explicitly begging me to claim her virginity multiple times throughout the week with terrifying enthusiasm.
"God damn it," I groaned internally. "As if dealing with the overbearing obsessiveness of my older sister, Sophia, wasn't a massive psychological tax, I got this unhinged horndog."
As we continued our march through the white expanse, my spatial awareness caught a distinct lull to my left. I noticed Seraphina walking beside us in complete, uncharacteristic silence. She was caressing the small, sleeping white dragon cradled in her arms, her gaze completely zoned out as she stared into the shifting snow. There was a subtle, heavy hint of sadness lingering in her eyes, and the realisation of why hit me like a sudden drop in temperature.
I hadn't spoken a single word to her ever since we crossed the threshold of the Frozen Zone. Or, more accurately, I hadn't been physically allowed the opportunity to do so because of a certain oversized, six-foot-five-inch-tall pet permanently anchoring herself to my right arm.
"Sera, why exactly do you look so downcast?" I asked, a clear edge of concern bleeding into my voice.
I gave a subtle, sharp nod toward Tiamat. Understanding the silent directive instantly, Tiamat stepped forward with absolute, clinical efficiency and smoothly detached Amou from my arm, disregarding her dramatic gasp of betrayal. Free from the constraint, I closed the distance between Seraphina and myself, matching her slow, heavy stride perfectly.
"Oh... it's really nothing at all, Amon," Seraphina murmured, blinking out of her reverie and forcing a small, fragile smile onto her face as she looked up at me. "It's just... I was feeling deeply concerned for the rest of our classmates. Do you truly believe they will be structurally capable of overcoming Professor Lockhart's extreme lesson plan without sustaining severe wounds?"
"Of course they will," I replied smoothly, extending my hand to place a firm, reassuring weight on her insulated winter shoulder.
"If you were truly, exclusively concerned about the safety indices of our classmates, Sera, you wouldn't have that specific flavour of profound, isolated sadness painting your eyes right now," I thought, an internal sigh echoing in my mind. "You are an incredibly adorable little liar, Seraphina."
But unfortunately for her, my intellectual capacity and hyper-acute sensory perception had evolved to such an absurd degree that reading human micro-expressions felt less like a tactical blessing and more like a permanent social curse. She wasn't worried about the class; she was feeling profoundly isolated and left behind by the casual intimacy I shared with the two titanic entities flanking me.
"They'll be perfectly alright, I assure you," I reassured her gently, letting my smile soften to project absolute certainty. "After all, our fellow high-tier representatives—Tia, Calisto, Jules, and Lucy—are distributed evenly within those two larger cohorts. I trust their individual calibres implicitly to lead those groups accordingly and guarantee the safety of everyone under their leadership."
At that exact moment, a sudden, violently jagged spike sliced through the localised magium density. I froze, my hyper-acute sensory perception immediately recognising the suffocating, rancid weight of the frequency.
"Dark Magium..." I murmured under my breath.
With a fluid, practised flick of my wrist, I conjured my wand directly into my hand, my fingers wrapping tightly around the grip as I swept my hidden gaze across our immediate snow-covered surroundings. Sensing the same catastrophic signature, Tiamat and Amou instantly dropped their playful antics, their expressions hardening into masks of absolute, battle-ready focus as they shifted into a protective formation around me.
"Amon, what's happening? What is that?" Seraphina asked, her voice trembling slightly as she looked around the shifting blizzard, completely confused by the sudden, suffocating shift in the air.
"It's Dark Magium, Sera," I replied, my knuckles turning white against my wand. "It is a highly volatile, corrupted inversion of standard Magium. It systematically targets and overwrites the lifeform matrix of organic beings, transforming them into hyper-aggressive, mutated entities formally classified as Revenants. These things don't feel pain, their physical constraints are entirely uncoupled, and they are stronger and more hostile than their baseline counterparts."
I watched as the colour rapidly drained from Seraphina's face, her beautiful blue eyes widening in absolute fear and sudden realisation. "Then... then the others... our classmates are in grave danger..."
"Damn it, that Oberyn bastard," I snarled internally, the final piece of the tactical puzzle locking into place with a sickening click.
Oberyn Lockhart hadn't just set up a clever proxy harvesting operation; he had consciously, structurally put the lives of thirty-eight elite freshmen at extreme, lethal risk under the flawless administrative shield of a "practical lesson."
If he was fully aware that Dark Magium had breached the academy's Frozen Zone and still dared to deploy untrained students into the target sector to flush out the anomalies, that arrogant fucker had just made a catastrophic, unmitigated error in judgment.
The average first-year student at R.S. Advanced Academy was technically adept at outputting spells up to A-rank, with only a tiny fraction capable of touching the thresholds of S-rank execution. But pitting these unrefined elites against a zombified, Dark Magium-boosted variant of an already lethal S-rank Frostfang White Bear—effectively scaling the monsters into much more aggressive, unpredictable threats—was crossing every single boundary of academic safety.
In the entire freshman roster, the only individuals who possessed a high enough Magium refinement coefficient and the specific, high-tier occult knowledge required to neutralise Dark Magium contamination without instantly getting corrupted were Jeanne and I.
The rest of the class was operating at a B-rank or A-rank refinement level, with the representatives operating at an A-Rank refinement level, at absolute best. Without the correct defensive attributes, they weren't walking into a harsh exam—they were walking directly into a slaughterhouse.
"Amou, Tiamat," I commanded, my voice snapping out with absolute, razor-sharp clarity as I raised my wand toward the turbulent winter sky. "Intercept the paths of those two larger groups immediately. Ensure that not a single student among them dies an unfortunate death. I will handle the cluster in this sector myself."
"Understood, Master," Tiamat responded instantly, disappearing with a thunderous crack, Amou blurring right behind her toward the second with a dangerous, bloodthirsty grin.
Left alone in the centre of the clearing with Seraphina, I channelled a massive, concentrated surge of my own refined Magium directly into the tip of my wand.
In the sky above us, tearing straight through the falling snow, three gargantuan, incandescent red magic circles manifested, their complex geometric runes spinning with a violent, rhythmic hum.
"Hellfire Rain," I uttered, my voice dropping into a cold, commanding whisper.
The sky fractured.
Massive, highly condensed spheres of pressurised, apocalyptic heat and churning molten lava shot out from the centres of the spinning circles.
The catastrophic projectiles rained down across the immediate snowscape, the sheer, unbridled thermal output instantly vaporising the hidden horde of white-furred Revenants charging through the trees before they could even let out a single coordinated roar, melting the landscape down to the bedrock in a matter of seconds.
"You're so... incredibly powerful..." Seraphina's voice was filled with pure wonder.
When I turned my head back toward her, she was looking at me with wide, completely amazed eyes, the reflection of the dying embers from the hellfire still dancing in her pupils.
"This much is really nothing special, Sera," I replied, giving her a calm, reassuring smile.
With a swift, precise flick of my wand, a brilliant wave of golden light erupted around Seraphina, completely enveloping her and the tiny dragon in her arms. I had just cast Aegis of Radiance, an S-Rank defensive Light spell.
The magic rapidly condensed into a perfectly transparent, crystalline barrier around her form, rendering her entirely invulnerable to any physical or magical damage that didn't fundamentally exceed my own absurd Magium refinement coefficient. And just to be certain against any rogue parameters, I seamlessly layered an independent, latent spatial-teleportation script into the matrix—one that would instantly snap her back to the safe zones of the main academy building the exact microsecond the barrier suffered a critical structural breach.
"What exactly did you just do, Amon?" Her expression shifted back into total confusion as she carefully examined her uniform and patted her familiar, trying to see if anything had physically changed.
"Just a little basic protection spell, Sera. Don't worry about it," I chuckled softly, feeling deeply amused by her bewildered blinking. It was genuinely refreshing to watch her completely innocent, honest reactions. It made her feel so profoundly precious, so entirely lovable.
"Anyways, I'm going to head deeper into the sector to thoroughly investigate what's actually causing this Dark Magium leak and the corrupted lifeform," I said, maintaining my calm smile as I adjusted my stance. "Do you want to come along with me?"
I was fully, structurally aware that taking her with me was a massive logistical liability. Her baseline stats weren't ready for what lay ahead. But despite all my tactical logic screaming at me to send her back, I genuinely, deeply wished for her to remain by my side as my emotional anchor.
I knew I sounded entirely selfish. I knew it defied every strategic rule and calculation. But I had faced horrific situations where I had absolutely zero hope of coming back alive, and the suffocating despair of those lonely, desperate moments was a psychological scar I could never truly erase.
Of course, I had Amou and Tiamat now—but there was a vast, fundamental difference between my relationship with them and my bond with Sera. The two Primordials were completely immortal entities, powerful beyond any comprehension. They didn't possess the biological hardware to feel the existential despair of mortality, nor could they ever truly find themselves in a desperate corner where the odds were unfairly stacked against them, simply because they were the unfair odds.
Sera, on the other hand, intimately understood what it meant to be fragile. She was a human being, just like I was beneath all my stolen power, and she was so incredibly gentle, so untainted by any form of feral behaviour. I desperately need her just to be my comfort bean.
"Are you entirely sure about this... Amon...?" Sera asked, looking up at me with deeply uncertain, hesitant eyes. "Am I truly not going to end up as a massive liability to you out there...?"
"Not in the slightest," I assured her, letting my smile soften to project absolute, unwavering certainty. "I've already deployed a high-grade structural barrier around you, and honestly speaking, I don't believe there is a single entity residing within this entire Frozen Zone capable of outputting enough force to break through it. So, if you choose to accompany me, you aren't actually presenting any form of tactical liability."
"Then... I'll gladly take your offer and go with you," Seraphina whispered.
In an instant, every ounce of lingering uncertainty completely vanished from her face. She looked up at me and smiled—a look so entirely pure, so radiantly genuine, that it felt as bright and comforting as the first rays of the morning sun cutting through an arctic blizzard.
Seeing that expression, the cold, heavy weight that usually sat in the centre of my chest loosened just a bit. Whatever happens, as long as my comfort bean was walking right beside me, I was more than ready to tear this zone apart.