Author's Notes:

Hello everyone, I'm sorry this update is so late, I was having issues with Wattpad not allowing me to save or post. I dealt with this for a little over a week while working on my other stories until I tried the tried and true method of deleting the app from my phone and then reinstalling it, and see what happened. One last thing, updates will resume with the normal schedule on Wednesday, I just see this as making up for missing the normally scheduled update.

Arthur sat at the large table on the first floor of the dorm building, bored out of his mind as Claire and Tess proceeded with their daily morning meeting. He was reminded of the mind numbing briefings he had to sit through in his previous life, where topics that didn't pertain to him nor did he really have a say in were gone over in excruciating detail. At least in this life the topics did pertain to him in some way, wether it be a change in procedure, a task he needed to do, or just a simple update on current affairs, it was for the most part important even though he didn't usually have a say in anything.

Claire was going over a change in the patrols routes, making Arthur want to close his eyes and take a nap. He wished he could go back to last weekend, it was a lot more fun. The day after getting his parents approval to spend most of his summer break with his friends in the beast glades, Tess wanted to begin preparing. This meant taking a day trip to Elenoir to get a few things Tess said she couldn't get anywhere else. Since Tess' mana core was still being restricted because of her beast will, Arthur of course came along. Although it was questionable if he was even needed. Tess had made great improvements on controlling her beast will and the restrictions on her mana core had been lightened a bit allowing her a good deal of her strength back, putting her at the equivalent of a light orange stage mana core. Regardless, Arthur and Tess went through a teleportation gate to the capital of Elenoir, and then straight to the shopping district.

As they walked down the stone road that ran between the shops, Arthur began to have a flashback to the times he and Tess walked down that very road to various shops while he was Elder Virion's student. They had walked passed many shops that Tess had taken him to before, and came to a clothing shop. The store had many items from elven formal wear to casual, but what caught Arthur's attention was clothing that looked more functional for adventurers. The clothing was on several wooden mannequins posing with swords, conjurer staffs, or bow and arrows. It was now clear to Arthur as to why Tess wanted to come there, to purchase herself a new outfit to wear as an adventurer. Tess stepped up onto a platform as a middle aged elf woman began taking measurements and a young boy, probably an apprentice, wrote them down.

Tess said something to the woman, who then sent someone to Arthur to try and help him. Arthur didn't really want to buy anything, but he did want his black cloak altered. He had grown quite a bit since Vincent Helstea had given it to him, leaving it short on his arms and coming up to his waist instead of a mid thigh. The woman didn't seem to mind, and began taking measurements, although Arthur wasn't sure why she needed to take enough measurements to make him a whole suit. Once done she took Arthur's cloak, telling him it would be ready by the time Tess' outfit would be.

Clap

Claire clapped her hands together, waking Arthur from his thoughts. "Now that the school related business is out of the way, let's get to the good stuff. Has everyone spoken to your families about our plan?" Everyone nodded. "And is everyone coming?" Claire asked excitedly.

"Clive isn't," Tess answered coldly.

"What?!" Claire replied, staring at Tess with confusion.

"Actually my family..." Clive started before Tess cut him off.

"Claire asked who was coming, not what your family said. You're not coming," Tess said with a cold sharp tone. The atmosphere in the room had changed drastically from one of excitement to an uncomfortable silence.

"Umm, Tessia?" Claire whispered in a questioning tone, hoping for an answer to Tess' behavior.

"I will explain later," Tess' whispered back in response. Claire nodded in acceptance, then looked to Clive.

"I'm sorry Clive. You can just stay if you want, but it's kind of pointless at this point," Claire said with a sympathetic expression.

Clive was clearly restraining his anger by this turn of events. He quickly stood up using his hands on the table as support, his legs pushing back his chair to a point where it almost tipped over. He stood there leaning forward for a few seconds with his eyes glaring daggers at Arthur, who looked just as confused about the situation as everyone else. Clive then stormed off from the group, leaving almost everyone remaining with a very uncomfortable feeling.

Everyone could clearly tell Clive appeared to be directing his anger from this situation towards Arthur, despite it being Tess who was the one that told Clive he was not coming. Despite what anyone thought about Tess and Arthur's relationship, they all agreed that there was a clear change in Tess and her interactions with Clive. Before Arthur arrived at the school it was clear that Clive had Tess' ear, so to speak. It was rare to ever see them disagree openly, or for Tess to reign Clive in when he decided to give a student a verbal lashing when they broke the rules. Despite the fact that Clive was the student council Vice President, he often seemed like the student council attack dog. However shortly after Arthur arrived at the school Tess appeared to be keeping a tighter hold on Clive's leash. The change wasn't sudden, it was gradual, so no one really noticed it much at first, except when it came to Arthur, the change in regards to him wasn't instant, but it was very quick. For everyone else it started with Tess taking a more active hand in matters, not being as aggressive as Clive but still stern and authoritative. As time progressed she was even seen telling Clive to calm down, that being as aggressive as he was was completely unnecessary. Tess never really undermined him in public, she always agreed when he acted, but didn't usually agree how he acted.

"Ok so, how about we get to discussing our summer break plan," Tess said excitedly, trying to get everyone to a more pleasant topic. "Now that we've established that we all can go, the next step should be to establish a leader for when our travels begin."

"Now I'm sure that most of you would expect Tessia or myself as leader, however we both have agreed that someone with more experience would be the best. With that said Tessia and I agree that it should be one of our two experienced adventures," Claire explained.

Everyone looked as they took a moment of thought and all nodded in agreement.

"So how do you propose we decide which of them should lead?" Kathyln asked while showing just a little more emotion than usual that showed she was curious.

Tess smiled as she held her hand out and pulled a small wooden box out of her dimensional ring and placed it on the table.

"We are going to vote," Claire said as Tess opened the box and pulled out two marbles, one black and one white. "We will each be given one of each marble, black for Elijah, white for Arthur. You'll make your selection and when Tessia walks to you you will stick your hand in the box and drop the marble inside. Then after everyone has voted we'll empty the box and count out the marbles to determine our leader for the summer."

Tess took one bag while Claire took the other and starting from opposite sides of the table, the two started handing out the marbles. Tess then picked up the box and slowly made her way around the table, keeping the box just high enough for everyone to reach, but no one to see inside. As Tess returned to the head of the table she and Claire looked into the box, and Claire removed one black marble and placed it back into its bag.

"Congratulations Arthur, you're going to be leading us," Tess stated as she tipped the box over pouring out the remaining marbles, all of them white.

"Well thank you whoever voted for me," Elijah commented.

"Yeah, I just felt I shouldn't vote for myself," Arthur replied as he scratched his cheek. Elijah slumped down in his chair in defeat with a crestfallen expression, earning an uncomfortable chuckle by several of the other students sitting around the table. Kathyln, who was sitting beside him patted his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him as she said "there there".

"Anyways. We only have a month to plan and prepare, so we're going to take some time out at the end of every meeting for Arthur to discuss anything that will be needed. So Arthur if you need more time or a different time just let Tessia and I know," Claire explained moving the meeting along.

"Thank you, and thank you all for putting your faith in me," Arthur said graciously as he stood up and bowed slightly. "Is it ok if I go over a thing or two now?"

"Of course please do," Claire replied, sounding a little surprised he already had things in mind.

"Thank you. I have a few things I'd like to go over that might take some time to arrange, and since we do have a deadline it would be best to work on these now versus the last second. First off, I'll be working up a list of recommended items for everyone later this week, but for now I'll just recommend one. While we're traveling we will need to carry everything with us since there aren't always outposts to resupply close to one another, or along a route. With that said I know not everyone here has a dimensional ring, so if you can get one do, it will make it easier than carrying a heavy pack around," Arthur said as he addressed the group.

"Won't we have horses or mana beasts to ride?" Lilia asked.

"Not always. I'm still trying to plan our route, but we won't always be able to ride something to a dungeon. Either the trail could be too narrow, blocked off by a landslide, or we might get attacked by bandits that could kill one or more of our rides. Not to mention most dungeons can take several days to complete and we'll have to carry supplies in," Arthur explained, before he looked to the rest of the group. "Which brings me to my second topic. To make it to more than one dungeon, we will all need something to ride, or have two carts pulled by horses or mana beasts we can ride in. So if any of you or your families have anyone we can rent from or have any of these we can borrow, it would make things a lot easier."

"There are horse and mana beast rental businesses in the settlement we'll start at in the beast glades," Claire stated matter of factly.

Arthur gave a sheepish grin as he scratched the back of his head. "I know, but they are pretty expensive. Elijah and myself have to pay for everything out of our own pockets, and neither of us have very much money."

Most of the students that attended the Xyrus academy were of a noble bloodline, and of those who weren't were usually from a rich family, usually gaining their wealth through business. Then there were those who were neither, like Arthur and Elijah. Most of those students' families couldn't afford the high cost of tuition of the academy, and had to depend on rich business men or noble families to sponsor their children. This usually led the child to be in the service of the sponsor for many years after graduation to pay off the debt. Arthur and Elijah were luckily in the even rarer group of students being sponsored, and didn't have to worry about enormous debt to pay off, thanks to the generosity of the Helstea family. However this didn't mean they had a lot of money to spend.

Arthur had been getting some money from his parents every month when he would visit, it wasn't very much, but since all of his needs were provided by the school, it did last most of the month for his little indulgence at the cafe. He also had a give and take arrangement with the artificer Gideon, where Arthur could share ideas of technology from his old world in exchange for money or anything else he might want. Arthur didn't really like the idea of giving Gideon many ideas from his old world if he didn't need to, the artificer was easy enough to control, but his thirst for world changing ideas made him very annoying to deal with. Arthur had already given him the idea for the steam engine that got him the two phoenix wyrm necklaces for his mother and sister, but he didn't like the idea of using his knowledge from another world to get something as trivial as money. But if he did use his knowledge to get money, it would have to be an equally trivial idea.

Elijah on the other hand had been using the money he had earned as an adventurer, which sadly was running out. Elijah was similar to Arthur in the fact that he didn't ever really indulge much on luxuries and was perfectly content with living off of what the school provided. However unlike Arthur, Elijah did want one thing he was willing to spend all of his money on, a girlfriend. Unfortunately for Elijah, he was in a school full of rich over privileged young girls. Many of the noble girls only wanted to involve themselves with those of other noble families, and many of the girls that weren't of noble families had dreams of marrying into one. Elijah had managed to get a few first dates with girls that didn't care that he wasn't of a noble family, however he learned quickly that sometimes beauty was only skin deep. He would take these girls to a nice dinner on campus, which was still very nice considering they were at a school, and then she would usually want to walk around some of the shops. This at first led Elijah buying her an overpriced item of some kind, clothing or jewelry usually. Then when a second date came and they tried this again, Elijah would clarify his situation with them, that he had a limited amount of money until summer break when he could earn more as an adventurer. Despite his desire to have a girlfriend Elijah did have a backbone, so when they chose to have a problem with that he would leave. Eventually he told the girls this on the first date, and most of the time had the same results. This led to Elijah now only having two gold coins remaining, which couldn't even rent a donkey in the beast glades.

"Ha, it seems that I, Feyrith Ivsaar II, must now save the day," Feyrith announced dramatically as he flipped his hair.

"And how are you saving the day?" Curtis asked as he leaned forward and looked down the table towards Feyrith.

"Clearly you all are ignorant of the Ivsaar family's endeavors, so allow me to educate you all," Feyrith said as he leaned forward resting his arms on the table, the pride he held for is family name shown clearly on his face. "Even though the house of Ivsaar is most known for its military service to the kingdom of Elenoir, there are several other branches of the family that have aided the kingdom in other ways. For instance my uncle who had trained mana beasts not only for the our soldiers to ride into battle on, but also for transporting supplies. However due to the changes over the past few years he has decided to also use his talents to aid elven adventurers in the beast glades by giving them an opportunity to barrow these mighty beasts, for a small fee."

"So you're saying that your uncle would rent to us some mana beasts for a discounted price?" Elijah asked.

"No, he'll rent them to me at a discounted price. The rest of you he would charge you no different than the rest of those merchants out renting and selling mana beasts," Feyrith said with pride.

"Ok then, well in that case why don't you be the hero and reserve a couple mana beasts and carriages for us," Arthur requested as he made a note on a sheet of paper as Feyrith sat back with a smug look on his face.

"And lastly, Claire, Tess, if one of you could speak with Professor Glory about using the training field after the final classes let out that would be great. Since half of us haven't taken any team fighting classes yet I think we all should do some training together," Arthur concluded as he sat back down.

"Umm, why can't you just ask?" Claire questioned.

"Because on this campus I'm just a member of the disciplinary committee, whereas you two are the disciplinary committee leader and student council president. Your requests will hold a lot more weight than mine," Arthur stated matter of factly.

The meeting ended shortly after and some of them started sparing. Arthur however just sat down on one of the couches and watched. Arthur had developed a schedule for when he would spar, and would only do so on the days when he wasn't training with Tess at lunch to control her beast will. Arthur and Tess both agreed that they didn't want anyone to know of her troubles with her beast will, so the only times they could train was during lunch three times a week in the private training room Director Goodsky gave Arthur access to. Today was one of those regularly scheduled days, so Arthur found it a little unusual when Tess sat next to him and confirmed they were going to be training at lunch.

As the time for some of the students to go to class approached, the sparring came to an end and most of them began to file out of the building. As they exited they were all greeted by the sight of Clive standing right outside the door, his bow in one hand and an arrow in the other.

"Arthur Leywin I challenge you to a duel!"