CHAPTER 220: REMINDER OF TALENT (8)

As the misunderstandings born from his overwhelming charisma and the False Monarch Trait piled higher and higher, Ashok remained blissfully unaware of the tangled thoughts gathering in everyone else’s heads.

Ignoring the wary glances of disbelief, he simply drank his protein shake.

He stood there, bottle in hand, tilting it back as if it were the most natural thing to do while his classmates used their Aura to knit back their strength back together.

Ashok had no such luxury. He couldn’t feel Mana, so the point of channeling inside himself was just a comforting dream, for now.

Instead, he drew in slow, deep breaths and simply waited for his body to recover the old-fashioned way—sip by sip, breath by breath—letting his natural resilience do its work.

Around the field, silence lay heavy except for the ragged gasps of students still dragging their feet across the final stretch.

Then it happened—the last straggling student, face pale as parchment, stumbled across the finish line. He didn’t even celebrate; he just collapsed in a heap, but his final step triggered what came next.

Griselda’s voice erupted like a thunderclap.

"Don’t stand there dilly-dallying—BACK TO THE CENTER! NOW!"

The sheer weight of her tone made even the half-dead stand straighter.

Students lurched and limped toward the center of the training field, the sharp crunch of shoes against the dirt the only sound.

When they gathered, the full scope of what remained became grimly clear:

Out of the forty-five who had started, only eleven were left standing—or half-standing. And even that number was generous.

Because one of those "eleven" wasn’t standing at all.

Varnok lay sprawled on the field, unconscious, his massive frame spread out like a toppled statue.

His chest rose and fell faintly, but his presence was less of a survivor and more like a dead pig left under the sun.

Robert’s heavy boots crunched against the dirt as he strode toward the lone unmoving figure sprawled across the ground. Robert stopped at his side, and for a heartbeat, there was silence—just the faint rise and fall of the barbarian’s chest.

Then Robert casually planted his own foot on the ground, swung the other leg back like he was lining up a kick for a ball... and slammed it down.

FWOOSH!

A wave of dirt exploded into the air, a cloud of grit and dust arcing straight over Varnok’s face.

The impact was brutal and effective.

COUGH!

COUGH!

Varnok’s massive frame jerked up in an instant.

He clutched at his throat, hacking, choking, spitting as mud and grit clogged his mouth and nose.

His coughing echoed across the field, loud and ugly, as he bent forward, strings of dirt and saliva spilling from his mouth.

Blinking against the sting, he wiped at his face and finally managed to lift his head—only to find Robert standing there, smirk curved into something between mockery and amusement.

Behind him, far across the field, the remaining students were already lined up, all eyes flicking between their instructor, the looming Teaching Assistant, and him on the ground.

Varnok turned his head, face streaked with dirt, blinking rapidly as if trying to figure out where he was.

His bleary gaze shifted from the students—most of whom were staring at him with that awkward mix of pity and relief that said "thank the gods it isn’t me"—to Robert, who hadn’t moved an inch.

Robert’s smirk widened into something sharper.

"You still don’t seem fully awake to me," he drawled, lifting his leg back again with deliberate slowness, dust trailing off his boot. "Want me to give you another good morning snack?"

That did it.

Varnok’s sluggish fog vanished instantly.

The barbarian sprang up even with his dazed eyes and trembling limbs, his body understood one thing clearly: if he stayed on the ground, that next "snack" was going to come straight for his face.

Without another look back, Varnok stumbled—then jogged—then outright ran to join the line, sliding into place alongside the others.

Seeing Varnok finally lumber into place, dirt still clinging to his face and his breath ragged, Griselda’s lone visible eye swept over the formation. Her voice cut through the stillness, sharp and heavy with disdain.

"Look among yourselves! You—supposedly the so-called geniuses from all corners of the world—look at the current state of all of you!"

Her hand sliced through the air in a gesture that made several students flinch as if she might hurl it like a spear.

"More than half of you—Aether or Wyrd alike—collapsed before even completing twenty laps. Twenty. And these are the ’geniuses’ the world whispers about?"

The word geniuses came out laced with so much mockery it might as well have been spat on the ground.

She let the silence stretch for a heartbeat, her single golden eye narrowing as she took in the bowed heads, the trembling arms, the students who avoided her gaze like it burned.

"I’m certain you all know, that war is no stranger to this world. Threats beyond your imagination stalk every horizon—that would love to see this world broken. I won’t waste my breath naming them; But listen well—"

She stepped forward, her boot striking the packed earth with a THUD that seemed to echo in every chest.

"Neither I nor this Academy expects you to stand alone against those threats. But whether you like it or not, the day will come when you will face one.

Willingly, unwillingly—it won’t matter. And on that day, it won’t matter if you’re a Warrior, a Mage, a Priest, or whatever Nobility title you cling to."

Her voice hardened, every word hammering down like blows on an anvil.

"In front of a true threat, you will be weak. Incredibly Weak!"

The words didn’t just land—they sank, dragging a heavy silence in their wake. Students shifted uneasily, some biting their lips, others lowering their heads further as that single truth dug into them.

Griselda’s lip curled into the faintest sneer. "And in that weakness—forget fighting. Forget spells or swords. You won’t even be able to run."

Her words sharpened, slicing straight into them now.

"How could you? How could any of you ’geniuses’ hope to run when here, today, you simply gave up? You saw others carried off to the infirmary, and rather than dig deeper, rather than push harder, you thought of the warm bed waiting there and surrendered."

"On a battlefield, that’s not surrender—that’s death. Every student dragged to the infirmary today?" She paused, her eye gleaming like a predator’s. "Consider them dead."

A ripple of unease passed through the students, shoulders tensing, heads bowing lower, the weight of her words pressing down on them like chains.

And then she delivered the last blow, her voice flat but with a sting sharper than any shout:

"Now... congratulate yourselves."

The silence that followed was suffocating.

"Congratulate yourselves," she repeated, the words dripping with bitter sarcasm, "that this wasn’t a battlefield."

One by one, the students’ heads dipped even lower, shame pooling over them like a heavy tide.

All except for Ashok.

For Ashok, speeches like this—designed to chip at willpower, to grind pride into dust—had all the weight of a breeze brushing against stone.

He stood, hands in his pockets, his eyes calm, and in his mind dismissed every word with a single, almost bored thought:

’Most of these extras will die anyway. It’s not like everyone is me.’

It was the sort of thought that would’ve sounded cruel out loud, the kind of thought that, if whispered in the wrong company, would have earned him more than glares.

It was biased, yes—how could it not be? Ashok was an extra too not to mention some unnamed third rate who simply popped out of nowhere.

But he didn’t see it that way.

In his eyes, there was a clear difference.

His thinking might be wrong if he was still sitting on his desk in front of a screen playing the game while commenting on others while in the previous world, but things change when he was here-

’If I can run beside them with a body weaker than theirs, with a talent worse than theirs,’ he thought, ’then what excuse do they have? If they fall, if they die—then they were meant to. I already have my own life to take care of it’s not like I am the King of Extras saving around extras.’

Griselda’s voice cut through the field again, dragging everyone else’s attention back.

"Raise your heads," she commanded, her tone a blade scraping over stone. "Show this pointless shame only to those it works on. Moving on-."

Her voice shifted, still sharp but carrying something colder now. "Two hours and thirty minutes. That is how long it took for forty-five students—forty-five so-called prodigies—to dwindle to a mere eleven who managed to complete twenty laps."

Her words were punctuated by Robert’s smirk from beside her, the expression of someone who had enjoyed every second of that dwindling.

Griselda didn’t let the silence stretch. "I’m sure those of you still standing have already realized why it took so long," she continued, her single golden eye sweeping across the ragged line of survivors.

"I won’t waste time pointing out every mistake one by one—reflection is something you will all do yourselves."

A few students shifted uneasily, their tired bodies betraying their guilt before their mouths could.

"The common errors are obvious enough," Griselda went on, her tone biting.

"Running like bulls, charging as if victory was decided in the first breath you took. Some of you even shouted while running—" her voice cracked like a whip, and every student could practically feel the memory of those wasted war cries burning in their throats "—throwing away stamina without the faintest thought for the laps ahead."

From the corner of their eyes, every single student glanced toward Varnok.

Griselda’s voice didn’t soften.

"Likewise," she said, "I will not praise those who hoarded their strength, who crawled along preserving everything from the start just to cross the line at the end. Because a strategy that brings you to the same finish in the same time? Is not something I will consider applauding." Her eye narrowed to a sharp feline slit.

Her gaze cut through the line like a drawn claw and landed on Ashok.

Ashok met her gaze without flinching. His hands stayed in his pockets.

He simply looked back.