Chapter 330: Lyssaria’s Smile

A few moments ago...

The light from the simulation entry faded, leaving Class Fortis standing in the middle of a burning, wind-blown canyon filled with red stone ruins and rough salt flats. The heat hit them instantly like a wall. It radiated from the tall cliffs like an open oven.

Above, the midday desert sun beat down without mercy, baking the red dust under their boots. Deployment was pure chaos. Students stumbled over rocks and coughed through knee-deep dust under the blinding light.

"Ugh, damn it..." Riven grunted, his steel-red eyes narrowing against the bright light as he tightened his grip on his daggers. While the others panicked in the heat, a faint, cool mist of mana flickered around Riven’s boots, holding his stance steady against the shifting sand.

A few paces to his right, Caster was face-down in the sand, his legs kicking uselessly as he tried to push himself up.

"R-Riven!" Caster muffled into the dry sand. "Help! I’m stuck!"

Riven let out a low growl, stepped over, grabbed Caster by the back of his shirt, and hauled him out with one hand. "Tch. Get up, Caster."

"Thanks..." Caster panted, quickly wiping sand off his face.

Riven looked around, taking in the full scope of Class Fortis. All thirty-eight students were scattered across the dry valley, coughing through dust and shading their eyes from the blinding heat.

"Damn, this heat feels too real," a student muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead. "My skin feels like it’s peeling off."

Without any clear paths or signs in sight, the students naturally began looking around in confusion. Riven took the lead, motioning for the class to fall into a loose line as they began moving through the narrow, winding canyon pass.

After ten minutes of marching through the crushing heat, the narrow pass opened into a crumbling stone ruin built around an underground well. Standing near the entrance was a small group of seven or eight local townspeople, tired-looking villagers generated by the system to test the students’ people skills and handling of local supplies.

The moment Class Fortis approached, the villagers panicked. Three young men immediately pulled out rough iron hunting knives, their hands shaking badly as they pointed the rusted blades at the crowd of students.

Riven didn’t even bother reaching for his daggers. His sharp eyes scanned their unsteady footing and weak mana signatures in a fraction of a second.

They’re weak, he thought flatly. They won’t be able to hurt us.

"Uh... guys?" Caster whispered nervously behind him, while backing away a step. "I don’t think they’re open for a friendly chat."

Riven was about to step forward and take the knives from them himself when a soft rustle of cloth cut through the tension. Lyssaria stepped past him, her silver-blonde hair catching the harsh desert sunlight. She raised one slender hand, her pale palm open in a calm, peaceful gesture.

"We mean no harm," Lyssaria said softly, her voice smooth and polite. "You can put those down so we can talk."

The lead villager, a big, sunburned man with a thick beard, stared at her. His eyes moved from her pale skin to the pointed tips of her elven ears. His face twisted into an ugly sneer.

"Keep your distance, freak!" the man said, pointing his rusted blade straight at her chest. "Look at those ridiculous pointed ears! What kind of strange, mutated creature are you supposed to be? Coming into our place and talking like you own it?"

He spat onto the sand near her boots, gesturing toward the crumbling archway behind him.

"Leave your weapons on the sand and get out of our place!" he barked. "We don’t take orders from outsiders, especially from an ugly creature. Get back in line, or we’ll throw you all out ourselves."

The insult hung heavy in the scorching air.

Riven’s eyes narrowed. A dark pulse of shadow flared around his knuckles as he prepared to step in and break the man’s wrist.

Ignorant fools don’t even know what an elf is, he thought bitterly. Before he could take a single step, a quiet, icy voice called out.

"...Riven."

Riven froze mid-stride. He turned his head slightly, catching Lyssaria’s gaze.

She wasn’t frowning. In fact, a gentle, sweet smile rested on her lips, a smile so pleasant it looked entirely natural. But as Riven looked into her jade-green eyes, he realized the warmth didn’t reach them. They were completely flat, cold, and dead.

"Stand down," Lyssaria murmured, her voice carrying a chilling, effortless composure. "I will handle our hosts."

Riven paused, his red eyes flicking to the total lack of emotion on her face. He quietly took a half-step back, rolling his shoulders as he let his hand drop from his dagger hilt. "...All yours."

Lyssaria turned her calm gaze back to the burly villager.

Crack!

The dry sand under the villagers’ boots exploded.

Thick, pale green vines burst from the empty ground, wrapping tightly around the lead villager’s ankles. Before the man could even scream, the vines whipped upward, snapping him upside down and lifting him forty feet straight into the hot desert air, leaving him hanging helplessly over the canyon drop.

The other seven villagers screamed in terror and dropped their iron knives as more vines burst from the ground, grabbing three more men by their wrists and hanging them like helpless decorations over the rocks.

"W-What kind of witchcraft is this?!" the lead villager screamed, his face turning purple as blood rushed to his head while he swung helplessly over the drop. "Let me down! Let me down!"

Lyssaria smoothed her cloths with a calm, graceful motion, her voice smooth as silk as she looked up at the hanging men.

"Now then," Lyssaria said softly, her polite tone ringing clearly through the silent ruin. "Does anyone else have any more opinions on my ears? Or where I belong?"

The remaining villagers on the ground instantly dropped to their knees, knocking their foreheads violently against the sandstone tiles.

"N-No, My Lady! We apologize! Please don’t drop us!" they wailed frantically, slamming their foreheads against the hot stone floor.

Behind her, the rest of Class Fortis stood frozen in total terror. Commoners and high-ranking nobles alike held their breath, their jaws hanging open as they watched the villagers dangle forty feet in the air beneath a smiling, completely calm elf princess.

Caster leaned in slightly toward Riven, his hands shaking as he adjusted his copper glasses. "Damn, bro... never, under any circumstances, get on her bad side. Glad it wasn’t me who pissed her off."

For once in his life, Riven didn’t argue. He just stared at her back, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of his neck as he gave a single, stiff nod.

"Yeah," Riven muttered under his breath, swallowing hard. "That woman is terrifying... She really is that bastard Roan’s sister."

Within ten minutes, the terrified villagers had dragged out a tall wooden chair painted gold, wiped it clean, stacked three silk cushions on it, and brought out palm-leaf fans, treating Lyssaria like a sleeping disaster they couldn’t afford to wake.

Which brought them straight back to the present...

She sat primly on the creaking frame, taking a slow sip of cold water while the rest of Class Fortis kept a ten-foot radius around her, whispering like nervous mice. Her jade eyes slid coolly toward the pillar where Riven and Caster were standing.

"Riven. Caster," Lyssaria called out, her tone dropping the polite sweetness she used on the villagers and replacing it with crisp, dry efficiency. "Stop whispering behind that pillar and come here. We have work to do."

Riven rolled his shoulders, pushing himself off the pillar with smooth, silent grace.

Caster scrambled up, nearly tripping on his own boots as they walked over to the flat stone in the center of the room. The local villagers scattered instantly, clearing a wide space around Lyssaria the second Riven stepped forward.

"What’s the situation?" Riven asked, leaning his hands on the flat stone as his eyes dropped to the rough map spread between them.

"I managed to get some land details out of the elders before they completely lost their nerve," Lyssaria said, pointing a pale finger at a narrow, wedge-shaped pass on the map. "We spawned in a desert valley between two steep red stone ridges. According to them, the high ground above us holds the unstable mana currents. Based on the air pressure, that is where the Gate will break open."

"What about these civilians?" Caster asked, adjusting his glasses.

"Morgana didn’t put a village in our simulation area by accident," Lyssaria replied smoothly, looking up. "From what I can guess, protecting these locals is almost certainly part of our hidden score. If we abandon them to save ourselves, we fail."

"So she threw us into a desert pass with a bunch of helpless people to guard," Riven muttered, his fingers digging into the stone edge as his steel-red eyes narrowed. "Fine. It doesn’t change anything. I’m not giving those bastards a single excuse to mark us down."

Lyssaria met his gaze, her eyes flat and completely calm despite his sharp tone. She didn’t scold his anger, and she didn’t offer empty words.

She knew the harsh truth of Class Fortis. Unlike other classes, they didn’t have the luxury of mistakes or the safety net of high ranking favor. In a bottom tier class, one failure meant being thrown out, and every single step forward had to be carved out through raw, endless pressure.

She simply gave a slow, steady nod.

"Good," Lyssaria said softly, her voice cool and steady. "Because you are taking the front line at the mouth of the pass."

Riven blinked, caught off guard by her blunt directness. "Just me?"

"You, and three other fighters you can pick yourself, and Caster’s trap network," Lyssaria replied, tapping three specific points on the map. "Caster, explain what you found when you checked the canyon walls."

Caster took a deep breath, the nervous twitch in his shoulders vanishing the moment he started talking about mechanics. His voice grew steady, precise, and sharp.

"The canyon walls aren’t solid rock," Caster said, laying a sheet of thin paper over the map. "It’s layers of soft red stone and brittle rock, held together by dried salt. The structure is incredibly unstable. If a Grade 4 beast hits those walls with enough force, the whole pass will collapse on top of us."

"So we can’t use heavy explosive magic," Riven guessed immediately.

"Exact opposite," Caster corrected, a faint, rare spark of confidence lighting up his hazel eyes. "We want to collapse parts of it, but in a controlled order. I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes carving compressed shock-absorption runes into thirty small stones. If we place them along the weak points at five-meter gaps, I can trigger them one by one with my Structure Affinity."

Caster pointed to the narrow neck of the canyon.

"When the first wave hits, we don’t fight them in the open. We let them crowd into the narrowest point. Then I trigger the left wall runes. Twelve tons of stone will drop straight onto their front ranks, turning a fifty-meter wide charge into a three-meter crawl. Riven, that’s where you step in."

Riven stared at the half-dwarf, his eyes scanning the precise runic calculations scribbled in the margins of the map. A quiet, reluctant respect settled in his chest.

Caster... he isn’t just a timid kid anymore. He’s grown up, Riven thought. Zane’s actually turned him into something dangerous.

"...That handles the crawlers," Riven said, his eyes shifting back toward Lyssaria. "But what if something comes from above? What if the Gate drops beasts with wings, or flying gliders that can bypass Caster’s rockslide entirely?"

"They won’t get through," Lyssaria said. She stood up from her creaking chair, her robes falling around her ankles in clean, elegant lines.

"The wind in the canyon blows strictly south. I will anchor a World Tree thorn roof across the top of the rock walls, forty feet up. It will create a living ceiling over the whole narrow pass. Any flying beast that tries to drop into our line will be impaled on fifteen-inch thorns before they can ever reach the front line."

She looked around the room. The other students of Class Fortis were watching them in dead silence, listening to the three of them take apart and rebuild a defense plan like it was a normal lesson.

"Riven holds the narrow point," Lyssaria concluded, her voice carrying cleanly over the whistling wind outside. "Caster controls the ground. I provide support and air defense. The rest of Class Fortis will form three rotating support lines behind the front line to clean up whatever crawls out of the rubble."

Riven turned toward the door, pulling his gloves tight as he unlocked the bolt. The burning heat from outside immediately hit his face.

"Don’t expect me to babysit anyone back there if they mess up their turns," Riven grunted over his shoulder.

"I do not expect you to babysit anyone, Riven," Lyssaria replied smoothly, a tiny, almost invisible curve touching the corner of her lips. "Just hold your position. It would be very annoying to hear my brother complain if you fail your evaluation."

Riven’s face flushed hot, his teeth clenching as he glared back at her. "I’m not failing anything! And stop bringing up that idiot!"

He slammed the door behind him, stepping out into the howling heat wind before she could answer.