Aravel

Chapter 11

Time: 2 hours and 59 minutes before the individual examination was over.

Kaze found himself in an unfamiliar location right after the teleportation happened. He was now surrounded by tress and greenery, somewhere in the middle of the forest. Right behind him located a random wooden cabin. The school decided to add small location markers like the cabin behind Kaze to add variety to the examination scenario. For example, waterfalls and small caves were also considered an addition to the grounds.

"Hmm, so the exam has already started," Kaze sighed, taking out his map.

Judging from the rough estimation of the map he had, it wasn't easy to determine where his location was at yet. In order to do more scouting, it was crucial that he had to move around even though this meant he would have to encounter other students. The school purposely didn't include the function for students to locate where they were by imbuing the map with magic temporarily, for it would cause more troubles like trap-camping or ambushes.

The cabin was the only location that stood out to Kaze as of now. While the map had multiple buildings marked around him, it did not serve to tell which was a cabin or other sort of buildings. Due to this, Kaze decided to observe the cabin first. He might be able to find a few jewels hidden inside it too.

As expected, Kaze came out of the cabin with 30 points worth of jewels, not too bad for someone who just started right off the bat. It was only pure luck that he spawned next to a location like that, because he didn't know what sort of danger that he could encounter if things went wrongly.

"For now, let's start looking around," Kaze smiled, the jewels disappearing into his bracelet and accumulating his points.

On Lunaria's end, she found herself within a denser part of the forest, which placed her in a slight disadvantage. Although it did help narrow down where she was on the map as there were only a few places which were marked as dense forest area, she was unable to move freely due to all of the leaves and bushes in the way. This was why most people chose to avoid the dense forest no matter what, even if it meant missing out on some big rewards.

"Hmm, no using fire magic to burn the forest," Lunaria mumbled, remembering one of the rules. "If we did, we would have to put it out before the fire went out of control. Let's not take that route then,"

Unsheathing her sword, Lunaria skillfully wielded it such that she was able to chop off some leaves and branches so that she could make her way through. It was tough cutting wood with a sword since that wasn't the original use for a sword in the first place, but for someone of Lunaria's calibre it was nothing. With a simple wind magic enchantment onto her sword, she could effortlessly clear her way through with minimal effort. Lunaria also did not forget to look out for jewels or challenges while she was at it, although it was mostly a lost case due to how thick the shrubbery was.

With her precise control of her magic power, she was able to quickly get out of the vicinity of the dense forest. Even if what that came after was more forestry and didn't help with showing her location on the map, it still enabled Lunaria to not be bothered by her surroundings and concentrate on gathering points.

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"Yuuji-sama, we would like to team up," one of the students who spawned near Yuuji decided to enter into a negotiation as soon as the event started. "It would be more beneficial and covers more grounds."

"Mm, I'm on board with that," Yuuji nodded with a smile. "I don't think this is counted as cheating. After all, they would have explicitly stated for us to not team up if they didn't want this to happen. Most of the students would have chosen to cooperate with whoever they could find nearby as well."