When Frost opened his eyes, his head was immediately assaulted by a throbbing headache as well as a strong feeling of vertigo.
"Aaaarghhh!"
He groaned as he clawed at his head, trying to massage the pain away, only to discover that nothing he did seemed to be helping.
After a while, he gave up and forced his eyes open, pushing himself onto his feet while listening to the strange murmurs surrounding him, most of them coming from his peers as they voiced their confusion after awakening from a similar slumber to the one he had been subjected to.
Despite the throbbing headache, he forced himself to stand upright, watching as the others continued to wake up one after another.
However, his vision was soon filled with the sight of a strange, beautiful environment.
Frost, along with his thirty or so classmates, had awakened on top of a jagged, grassy cliff overlooking an impossibly beautiful landscape filled with nothing but a vast green forest below.
'How the fuck...'
How had they made it here?
He quickly jogged his memory, trying to recall the last thing that had happened before he had passed out.
Everything came to him quickly.
The sudden freeze just before Jason punched him, the eerie silence that followed, the sound of something cracking, and the majestic voice announcing some sort of decree, as well as the beginning of a trial to become awakened.
"Holy hell..." Frost muttered.
He could not believe it. This was something straight out of a fantasy fiction story!
"Are we even still on Earth?"
That was the million-dollar question. If they were, then he would certainly be adding this place to the list of the seven wonders of the world.
Frost walked forward, ignoring the confused murmurs of those who had managed to stand on their feet, and stopped near the edge of the cliff.
He had simply never seen a sight more beautiful than the one filling his vision now.
A grandiose sun shone across the horizon, its size easily dwarfing the sun he knew, while its majestic light spilled across the world as if painted by the hand of a god.
The golden radiance cast an incandescent glow over the soft-looking surfaces of the billowing white clouds in the sky, creating the illusion that they were drifting horizontally across the horizon.
Directly to the east of the sun, he could see the faint outline of not one, but two moons. One was incredibly massive, about half the size of the grandiose sun, while the other was much smaller and darker, hanging directly in front of it.
Before long, Frost found others standing beside him, staring in awe at the vast and magnificent sight before them.
"What is this place?" he heard someone say, and honestly, they were only voicing everyone else's thoughts.
Having had his fill of the view, Frost finally glanced back to get a good look at his classmates. Everyone who had been in the classroom had appeared on the cliff.
Looking to his left, he noticed a familiar blonde beauty staring out over the horizon. Much like everyone else, she seemed lost in awe, unable to take her eyes off the impossible scenery before them.
Further back, Frost was annoyed to see that Jason had made it here as well, but the sight of the bastard tripping over a protuberant section of the cliff before falling flat on his face and cursing brought him quite a bit of satisfaction.
Lucky for Jason, no one other than Frost seemed to have noticed.
Up to now, the scenery seemed to have put everyone into a stunned silence, but the attention-seeking Jason immediately punctuated the otherwise peaceful atmosphere with his booming voice as soon as he made it to the edge.
"Wow! Would you look at that? I didn't know we had a surprise field trip planned. Maybe I won't have to report to my father that someone had the audacity to drug me."
He hadn't even wasted a moment.
Fortunately, a few people spared him nothing more than a glance, while most didn't even seem to hear him.
Frost kept a close eye on Jennifer, eavesdropping as one of her friends walked up to her.
"Where do you think we are, Jennifer?" Naomi asked.
Naomi was an athletic girl from the track and field team, with a nice bob-cut head of golden-brown hair and a tan to her skin that could only have been gotten from intentionally spending too much time in the sun.
She was kind of cute too.
Jennifer answered Naomi's question with a shake of her head, indicating their shared confusion.
'Fucking hormones!'
Frost cursed when he realised once again that he had been staring at the women for a bit too long, taking a deep breath of the fresh air to calm the heat spreading through his body.
The air here had to be the freshest and crispest he had ever tasted, and the gentle breeze could not have felt any better than it did.
Despite the ginormous size of the sun, its heat was gentle on the skin too. All in all, he felt greatly invigorated just standing in this strange place.
The only bummer was the headache that was still bothering him, but even that was slowly fading with every breath he took.
If he didn't know any better, he would have thought there was something in the air that was actively working to soothe his head.
However, the moment of peace was suddenly interrupted by a semi-transparent blue panel flickering in front of Frost, immediately grabbing his attention.
"Hmmm, what is this?"
He looked around, noticing that his classmates were looking just as confused as him, though they didn't seem to have a screen right before their eyes, at least from his point of view.
"Hey, can you see what I'm seeing? Some sort of holographic screen appeared in front of me."
"Really? Same here!"
Excited murmurs filled the place.
"How come I can't see yours?"
"That's odd. I can't see yours either."
It quickly became clear to Frost that this holographic, almost futuristic panel, whatever it was, was only visible to the individual.
The question was, what was it?
Filtering out the murmurs around him, he focused back on the blank panel, and right before his eyes, it was suddenly filled with black text, printing itself in real time.
He began reading the first line.
[Welcome to the First Ascension Trial Event, Frost Carter!]