The First Legendary Beast Master novel Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Playing The Game

With everyone limited in stamina and magical power, there were constant breaks, which also became part of the game that was played between Karl and the mages. He would sit down to recover, but still swat at attacks if someone got lazy and an attack was particularly weak or slow moving.

In the eyes of the supervisor, the lone teacher assigned to watch over the dozen mages in this class, it was the best motivation that they had seen in months. None of these students were good at self motivating, and their abilities weren't strong enough to get them a personal instructor, even one at the low level that Sergeant Rita had reached.

To his trained gaze, the warrior with the Rending Claws was likely to overtake her in power by the end of his first semester, while she had taken three years to make it to the middle of Ascended Rank combat power.

Sergeant Rita was no genius when she had to learn magical powers, but she was a great martial artist, and from what he could see, a superb teacher. Not only had she motivated her own student, it was motivating his as well.

Karl and the others trained together until lunch, after which the mages would be moving to theoretical training to help them learn new spells, and Karl would be moving on to either close combat training or theory classes on how to care for a magical beast and research assignments on the chances of increasing its power more than its species would normally allow.

"Come with us for lunch. It looks like you awakened a pretty cool combat ability right from the start with the ranged claw attacks. Most warriors are boring until they're at least reaching the end of the Awakened Rank, and they can start to hit targets more than two metres away from them." One of the mages informed Karl.

She was a tall and buxom blonde, but with the growth spurt that he had undergone the last few days, she was only a little taller than he was now, and Karl had hopes that he would reach an acceptable height before he had enough classes with others that his reputation as a shorty would precede him. At the very least, everyone seemed to respect his abilities.

None of them seemed to notice that Karl covered an entire plate of raw meat in a drizzle of mana infused monster blood, or that it simply vanished into thin air, they were all more eager to discuss the ways that they had thought of to use their spells to get around his defences.

"I think that if we increase the speed and fire them as double balls instead of a single, we can get at least one through to the target." One of the mages was suggesting.

"Better if you send them a few metres apart, so that the other claws don't hit. Or better, at slightly different speeds, that will make it harder to guess when they will arrive." Another mage sighed. His specialty was ice, and he had a terrible time getting the ice shards to hit the target when they were so easily knocked off course.

"This is a different cafeteria than I'm used to, where are we?" Karl asked.

"Oh, this is the cafeteria in the mage district. There is another in the warrior training area as well, for students who were a long way from the dorm cafeteria at lunch. The foods at each are totally different because they are specialized for the different groups.