Chapter 31: Limit II

Looking at the skeleton standing in the middle of the room, there was nothing else that could be done, so Leon ended up making the tough decision.

If it couldn’t go into the space, there was no point keeping it standing around uselessly. He reached out and dismissed it, same as unsummoning any of the others, except this one he was expecting it to just fold back into nothing.

To his surprise, that wasn’t the case, it didn’t fold back into nothing.

Without him summoning it, the Door appeared and opened again on its own, and as though knowing exactly what to do, the skeleton he had just dismissed turned and walked straight back through it. As soon as it did, the Door closed behind it and disappeared like it had never been there.

Leon simply stood still for a second.

’So nothing’s actually lost,’ he thought. ’It just... goes back.’

That was such a bonus! Perhaps, with this, if he missed an interesting summon in future, there was always a chance to summon it again, right?

’That’s a relief at least,’ he thought to himself.

For the time being, he didn’t bother himself much with it and just let it be.

’This door is quite the strange stuff too.’ There were a lot of questions he had about the door that were still unanswered, but he expected to come upon the knowledge as time went by.

By the time he left the room, the cafeteria had already gone quiet for the night, so he headed out toward the food stalls near the west gate instead.

He ran into Raul and Dustin halfway there, coming from the opposite direction with the same idea apparently.

"You’re still up," Raul said, since it had been a while since they left the room.

"Couldn’t sleep." Leon said as he fell into step beside them. "You two?"

"Dustin wanted noodles at eleven at night," Raul said, like that explained everything.

"I always want noodles," Dustin said, entirely unbothered. "It’s not a personality flaw."

"It’s a little bit of a personality flaw." Raul protested.

"Yeah sure."

"And it’s not like you didn’t already have something to eat."

"IT WAS A HALF PLATE OF RICE RAUL, not everyone has the same size stomach as you, you know?"

They walked the rest of the way arguing about it, and Leon just listened. By the time they got their food and started back, Dustin had moved on to some second year he was convinced he could beat in the tournament, and Raul was doing a good job of not agreeing with him without actually saying so.

...

The next day, everyone was out early to watch and participate in the tournament.

The matches that day ran long, and Leon spent most of them sitting in the stands rather than the ring, since his own bracket wasn’t up until later.

Most of the matches followed a pattern he was already getting used to. Two summons thrown at each other, whoever had the bigger grade or the better instincts usually took it, and the crowd reacted the same way every time regardless of how the fight actually went. He watched anyway, paying attention to the parts that weren’t as obvious.

He studied those fighting, who hesitated before committing to an attack, whose summon moved on its own without waiting for a command every single time, who looked rattled the second things stopped going their way.

It was useful, watching like this. He was cataloguing without meaning to, and not everything he took note of even made sense, but it was more entertaining than watching the boring matches.

Eventhing went like that until a certain guy called Aaron Grey walked into the ring.

He didn’t know much about this Aaron beyond the name, he remembered having heard Dustin mention someone like that.

After listening to side talks from the students around, he learnt that Aaron was a third year, apparently, and from the way spoke about him, he was someone with a reputation that didn’t need explaining to anyone who’d already been at this school a while.

Their match started and his opponent called out their summon first, some kind of armored beetle the size of a small car, but Aaron didn’t summon anything at all, which was strange, he just stood there.

"Is he not calling his python?" someone behind Leon muttered.

"He’s got one of the strongest Grade 3 summons in the whole school and he’s not even using it?"

’A Grade 3?’ Leon thought to himself.

He watched Aaron’s stance shift, just slightly, and then the beetle charged and Aaron moved.

"WOAH! He’s fast!"

"Wait, he’s fighting head on?"

"How’s he doing that?!"

He was fast, and more impressive was the fact that he was going at the beast with his own body rather than calling out his own summon. His own body was doing it, and it was doing it in a way that didn’t look human anymore, sidestepping the beetle’s charge with barely any wasted motion and driving a strike into a gap in its shell that Leon hadn’t even seen until the hit landed.

Under a minute, the fight was over and the beetle went down. Throughout the fight, Aaron never called his python once.

The stands had gone properly silent by the time the coordinator called the match.

"That’s Unification," someone finally said, awed. "Deep Unification. He’s borrowing the python’s whole body without ever bringing it out."

"People train their whole lives and never get that level of sync with their summon, you know?"

"Yeah well, don’t compare ordinary Summoners like yourself with the likes of Aaron Grey, the dude’s talented."

Leon sat there taking it in. Most students in this school would have killed to have a Grade 3 summon at all, let alone one strong enough to be feared on sight. Aaron had one and barely needed to show it.

’And he couldn’t do that before,’ Leon thought about a statement he had just heard, watching Aaron walk off without any particular reaction to the crowd going wild behind him. ’I guess even the talented train harder than anyone does, or perhaps that’s the very reason.’ He thought to himself.

What Leon didn’t clock, because he was still watching Aaron walk off the arena floor, was that Aaron had already found him in the stands, and stayed on him.

While everyone else who had looked at Leon since the Seth match had done it with either mockery or disbelief sitting right there on their face—maybe with the exception of his roommates and only after they returned— Aaron’s expression carried neither, it was something different.

He just watched Leon the entire walk back to his seat, and kept watching a while after he had sat back down.

Whatever Aaron was seeing, it wasn’t a lucky win against an unranked third year. It was something underneath that, something the crowd’s easy explanation didn’t come close to touching, and it appeared to be bothering him in a specific way.

He settled back into his seat, arms crossed, eyes still on Leon across the arena.

"You’re gonna stare a hole through the guy Aaron, chillout." Someone said beside him, perhaps a friend.

Aaron looked away and back to the arena, "today’s matches are kind of boring." He said, continuing the conversation.

’He’s hiding something,’ even then it still preoccupied his mind.

There was just something he couldn’t quite place about Leon, and especially his undead summon.