Chapter 72: Wreck Class

With the sophomore competition season finally behind them, the results had settled into place, some students walking away with impressively high scores and a noticeable boost to their reputation, while others landed lower on the sophomore rankings, their standing within the school’s wider image taking a visible hit as a result.

Still, on the whole, everyone had genuinely done well, and most were commended fairly for the effort and dedication they’d shown throughout the competition.

After all, not everyone could realistically claim a spot in the spotlight reserved for the true standout stars. The freshman competition still waited just around the corner, serving as their own formal introduction to life at the school.

The junior class, meanwhile, had already settled into something considerably more rigid and firmly established, shaped directly by their own performance during sophomore year, the very foundation the student council itself was traditionally built from, typically forming by the final semester of that same year.

Every student in that class now carried a kind of permanent fixture tied to their prior achievements, something many others used almost instinctively to identify them by reputation alone.

But this remained only the first semester for the current sophomores, with plenty of activities still ahead, all designed to properly prepare them for eventually stepping into the role of the school’s leading faces once they advanced into the junior class themselves.

The senior class, by comparison, ran considerably more hectic, loosely scheduled, rigorous, and at certain points, genuinely dangerous. Seniors were barely treated like conventional students at all anymore, their activities regularly extending well beyond the school’s own premises, stretching out across various nations, sometimes even other worlds entirely.

This stretch of schooling stood as the single most critical year for determining a student’s true talent, worth, value, and overall visibility to the public, the guilds, and the ruling authorities alike.

It effectively shaped the entire trajectory of a student’s future, something the school itself took seriously, even while leaving most of the actual responsibility squarely in the students’ own hands at this stage.

Right now, the overall weight of scheduled school activity had eased up somewhat, clearing space for a more standard round of student assessments to begin before other seasonal events, like the upcoming sports season and interhouse competitions, kicked into gear.

Still, this particular stretch remained one of the freest, if genuinely riskiest, periods students regularly trained through.

Out on the training field, the combat instructor walked the sophomores through the next stage of his ongoing battle stance curriculum.

"Alright, listen up, folks! What you’re looking at here is one of the toughest, most durable constructs available anywhere. The US military’s actually used material like this before, and it once served as an emergency protective shield for a president during an active ambush." The combat instructor gestured toward a tall, heavy looking block of yellow jelly sitting at the far end of the field. In front of it stood a straight line of a dozen reinforced, bulletproof glass panels, arranged like a gauntlet of layered defense.

"Today’s lesson is all about understanding your own striking force, how much real power actually sits behind your blows once they meet a genuinely mighty barrier like this one. This should play especially well for anyone running a striking class summon. Today, we’re talking pure blunt force, wreckage potential, and raw destructive capability!" the combat instructor announced with real energy, addressing the gathered sophomores.

Somewhere in the crowd, Mark’s attention drifted through the lesson, though something about it nagged at him quietly in the background.

It centered on exactly what this particular exercise was actually measuring, the raw striking force behind a summon’s power, and something about that framing didn’t sit entirely right with him.

He’d sat through more than enough practical classes by now to recognize exactly what this likely amounted to, another quiet stream of statistics, steadily feeding into some larger analytical database maintained by the ruling authorities.

All of it, he suspected, existed purely to track caution points, weaknesses, and overall control metrics on their own student population, detailed information that could later be leveraged to manage, or outright contain, people if it ever became necessary.

That, he figured, was simply how they operated, careful never to let a genuine anomaly slip past unnoticed. Anyone showing sufficiently extraordinary talent across these kinds of measurements would likely get quietly flagged, placed under closer surveillance, kept firmly on the radar rather than risk losing track of them entirely.

Some liked to frame it as basic precaution, a reasonable safeguard against another potential Dark Summoner emerging somewhere down the line, but Mark suspected the real motivation ran closer to raw power and influence, control over the wider public and anyone showing genuine, exploitable potential among them.

Knowing that now, he intended to stay considerably more cautious than he had last time, deliberately holding back rather than showing his full capability, even knowing full well it would likely cost him in terms of grades and formal assessment scores.

He’d started to suspect the school itself functioned as little more than an extension of the authorities’ own watchful machinery. What he didn’t yet realize, though, was that the school itself was quietly holding back a few carefully concealed secrets of its own, ones meant specifically for him.

Once the instructor finished laying out the lesson, students began testing what their own summons could actually do against the prepared obstacle course.

Per the stated objective, each student needed to punch through a dozen individual glass barriers before finally landing one decisive blow against the jelly block itself to properly close out the exercise. The glass panels functioned as built in inhibitors, gradually sapping strength from the blow before it ever reached that final, conclusive strike.

Darren, the rhinoceros summoner who had once squared off against Hermione, stepped forward first for a test run. He summoned a portal that released his massive rhinoceros, its thick, gray hide armored over in something close to overlapping stone slabs.

All four horns stood ready to strike anything worth the effort, its heavy, blocklike feet cracking the ground with every stride as it advanced toward the first glass panel, punching straight through it as easily as tearing through ordinary paper.

The combat instructor watched with obvious enthusiasm, and plenty of the surrounding students leaned in, clearly just as invested in the outcome.

By the time it reached the twelfth and final panel, the rhino surged forward and slammed directly into the surface of the jelly block. The material absorbed the impact fully, seeming almost to swallow the blow whole like some casual snack, remaining otherwise completely intact.

The recoil sent the rhinoceros skidding backward several steps before it shook off the impact and charged forward again, this time firing a concentrated energy blast from one of its horns, only for the beam to ricochet harmlessly off the block’s surface instead.

Several students had to duck or leap aside quickly to avoid getting caught in the path of the deflected beam as it streaked back across the field.

Still, a faint indentation had appeared where the strike landed, though it faded again almost immediately, the surface smoothing itself back out. Darren let out a heavy sigh, shoulders slumping as he recalled his summon and stepped back from the field.

The combat instructor shook his head slightly, eyes tracking the young man as he retreated.

"Darren, next time, try actually taking that rhino of yours out for some real destructive practice between sessions. You can’t just let him sit dormant and unused inside the soul space, only pulling him out for a straightforward fight or scheduled match. That’s simply not how it works for creatures built specifically around raw striking power. Leaving it idle like that seriously stunts his real potential over time!"

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A/N: Please, if you’re really enjoying this book so far it really needs your fruitful support by gifting with golden tickets, powerstones and super gifts. This is for the betterment of the book’s progress here and I hope that you would comply.