He had been bracing, without fully realising it, for the mockery to continue in some form, but instead he was sitting across from someone who had just, entirely without ceremony, offered him a genuine reframe.
"I'm guessing you're not from one of the major cities," Leon said after a moment.
Dustin laughed, open and easy. "Haha, how could you tell? Haha. Though I come from the a small town up north, I still have high hopes for myself of becoming a great Summoner in future." He said with a bright expression.
'Of course,' Leon thought. 'There's always one of you around. That's good at least.'
Raul quickly apologised on Dustin's behalf with the practiced manner of someone who had been doing it regularly, it seemed like they knew each other before coming to the academy. Dustin received this with the mild confusion of a person who had still not identified what required an apology. They talked for a little while after that, easy and without weight, and then the two of them drifted out and left Leon to the quiet.
The rest of the time passed without event. He explored his phone a little, learned a few things, and avoided calling his stepmother's contact for reasons he didn't feel the need to examine too closely yet. Nothing majorly fruitful happened. Leon had called out his summon during the night to look at it more, but it really was nothing remarkable, just another undead skeleton, which was kind of disheartening.
He dismissed it after a few minutes and lay back down.
Disheartening was one word for it, meanwhile, he fell asleep thinking about the throne from the vision he saw.
. . .
The next morning arrived with schedule attached to it, and they all found themselves preparing hastily and heading for classes.
The first proper day at Grand Phoenix Academy turned out to bear very little resemblance to what the word "class" typically suggested. Instead of settling down in a class with an instructor at a board working through theory while students took notes, instead, after a brief assembly, the first years were directed as a group through a series of corridors that opened eventually into something that stopped several students in their tracks.
It was a rather large coliseum, or something so close to it the distinction hardly mattered. The space was enormous, tiered seating rising on all sides around a central ground floor, the ceiling high enough that the upper rows felt genuinely removed from what happened below. It could fit more than a hundred thousand people comfortably from the size alone. Today it held the roughly three hundred students who had successfully awakened and completed registration, which in the context of the space made them feel like a considerably smaller number than they were.
The instructor facing them at the ground level wasted little time on preamble. "The smaller arena is in use, so we'll be coming here for a few days." He said.
The academy's philosophy, they were told, leaned heavily towards practical. Theory had its place and would be addressed in time, but the foundation they were being asked to build here was one of experience. After all, theory was what they had been learning up until awakening, so that was the last thing they needed now. Mock battles would be a recurring feature of their time at Grand Phoenix Academy, a controlled environment for summoners and their summons to develop together, to understand the realities of combat before they were standing at the edge of a dungeon with no margin for a learning curve.
Today was going to be the first of many.
After a brief introduction, the students remained in the seats while the pairings were announced. Students moved to the ground floor when called, faced each other across the open space, and the rest watched from the tiered seating with the particular attention of people who were simultaneously assessing opponents and quietly benchmarking themselves.
They began with a boy whose summon was a six-legged lizard. The creature was substantial, the size of a big school bus from nose to tail, its movement deceptively quick for something with that much mass. His opponent's summon was a black tiger, radiating the kind of threat that made the rows above instinctively sit straighter. The fight was not as one-sided as it appeared it might be at the outset. The tiger was quicker and more aggressive, better at dictating pace, but the lizard absorbed punishment in a way that gradually shifted the terms of the encounter, and when the opening came, it came decisively. The lizard's summoner took the round.
While the tiger was great at attacking, the lizard had both attack and defence covered, it was such a good summon, and the summoner used it well. Since the summoner also had a role to play during fights by providing tactical instructions for better output, the summoner's ability to analyse the situation was also highly favoured.
Right after that, the two for the second spar match were called out. The second pairing was more surprising. This time it was a girl with an eagle summon. The wingspan of the beast at full extension was roughly around four metres, and the beauty of the bird made her the immediate favourite to most watching. Her opponent had summoned a slime, an amorphous, low-to-the-ground thing that didn't immediately suggest competitive viability.
To everyone's surprise, the slime won, beating the eagle in a silly and cleaver way. As soon as the eagle had flown close, the summoner instructed the slime to latch on to the eagle and quickly climb up to its face. In a matter of seconds, the eagle was drowned in slim. Luckily, the instructor acted fast and ordered the summoner to instruct his slime to release the eagle before he damaged it enough to force it to dissipate, which was when a summon either was damaged too much and had to return to the summoner's space, or the summoner could no longer keep the summon outside once they ran out of energy.
"Be very careful next time, all of you. I'm sure you know the dangers of letting your summon suffer too much damage?" The instructor said. "Always go easy on your mates, they are not the monster you need to kill."
His words sat on the minds of everyone for a while. It was true that while there was no real danger when a summon sustained grave damage, apart from having to recoup for a long time, there was still a chance that they died permanently. It was a small chance that had several conditions to it, but it existed nonetheless.
As for energy, it wasn't something newbies had to worry about.
The bouts continued, with different grades, different types, and different styles of summons, each pairing offering something new to observe and file away. The crowd grew more comfortable in its assessments as the rounds progressed, the murmuring between students developing the texture of early analysis. There was a lot to unpack and experience, like the fact that it was possible to beat a higher grade summon if the summoner knew what to do and how best to utilize their summon's abilities or strengths, and understood their weaknesses.
As it were, summons could only do so much themselves, that was why summoners still played an active role. Only very few summons had enough intelligence to carry out more complex tasks than just fighting, and even then it was mostly later on when the bond had been strengthened and much development had been made.
The students spent their time taking note of different things, like who had underperformed relative to their summon's grade, who had exceeded it, who clearly had no idea what they were doing yet but had a summon interesting enough to buy them time to figure it out, even those with just powerful summons who won without having to put in much effort.
Some matchups felt unfair, but the instructor said it was drawn randomly, so the students could only blame luck and speculate the credibility of the instructor's words.
Leon watched all of it from his seat and said very little, and eventually, his name was called.
"Leon Carter."
...
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