"Hasan huh…" I said, rubbing my chin. "No, I have no idea who you are, old man."
The Director suddenly fell to his knees, as if he had gotten a heart attack.
"You're so cold… Also please don't call me old man, I have yet to reach seventy!" Cried the Director.
"…You look like an old man to me." I sighed.
"Blake, watch your tongue!" Sighed Evelyn, reprimanding me.
"Hahaha!" The director began to laugh, quickly standing back up again and crossing his arms. His laughter was so loud that it reverberated around the entire place. "Don't mind it, Evelyn. That's how the kid is. I like when they're honest."
The director patted my head with his enormous hand.
The moment he touched me, I suddenly felt a slight disturbance in my Mana, Ki, and Spiritual Essence.
I glanced back at him, as he suddenly showed me off a part of his Aura.
An enormous, never-ending cloud of darkness that spread endlessly into the sky.
Amongst the thunderous black clouds, two enormous red eyes glanced down at me, the furious roar of something within these clouds echoed.
It was merely an illusion formed by his own spirit's powers and his magic power, yet it made me felt like I was facing a titan amongst titans.
This man… at the very least, he's above Rank 6.
The strangest of things was that… that spirit's presence wasn't alone, it felt as if it was an amalgamation of many more.
…Just how strong is the Director?!
Amazing… for a moment, it made me realize how far I can go from now on.
No, I'll go way past that.
I'll make sure to catch up with this old man and surpass him in time record.
"Anyways, how about you kids go inside the academy for now? I am honestly excited to see what comes out of the exams scores now! Evelyn, I am trusting you in this one, don't disappoint me!"
The director's eyes glared down at Evelyn as she nodded nervously. It was clear he was pressuring her to not fuck this up and be a good instructor.
This was the first time I saw the fiery Evelyn act so obediently and nervously.
While being glared by all students here, we walked inside the Academy's vast gardens, walking down a paved path and then reaching the nearest Arena.
In there, we saw many children fighting. All instructors fighting against them were mopping the floor with the students though, not even one of them could keep up for longer than twenty seconds.
I saw a lot of spirits and talents. Fiery Birds, Living Shadows, Wooden Guardians, Holy Rabbits, Blazing Bulls, and more spirits of all kinds of types showed up one after the other. I was even able to see some Material-type Spirits such as Blazing Sword, Shadow Whip, Terra Shield, White Armor, and so on.
The average talent here was 1 star, with 2 star right after that. It seems that stars increase as one reaches max level and ranks up. But usually people have no control over what they rank up to unlike me… aside from that, as long as it is a battle-oriented talent, even if it starts off at 1 star, it can become very strong eventually by leveling up, so anything goes.
Nobles in specific are obligated to "do their service" so if they have a talent that can fight, they are kind of forced to come here most of the time. Perhaps this is why talentless people are not seen as too bad of a thing, there were a lot of talentless adventurers as well, from what I remember. Even if one is talentless, they always are born with one spirit anyways.
However, usually spirits and talents are interconnected. It is rare to find someone with no talent that has an incredibly strong spirit, usually they come in pairs with amazing talent plus amazing spirit. So usually talentless people have "useless" spirits too, sadly. Because of that, they can only rely on skills they could learn and leveling up.
Talents also determine how many skills a person can learn, and how fast they can learn them, so having no talent is very hard.
I experienced that myself. After acquiring talents, learning skills, and leveling them up became naturally faster as a result. The bonuses of Talents are a world of difference compared to not having one. I can tell why only those with one that is capable of offering some boost in battle would be accepted in this prestigious academy.
Of course, most of the time they have to be nobles or very talented children chosen by nobles, such as our group.
"Here. Alright you guys, complete this simple exam for the first score. After you're done, just give me the paper and then walk down there, you'll be assigned an Instructor to fight. Show them off everything you've got, you hear me?" Evelyn winked back at us, as she gave us the exams.
I quickly took a look at it, reading everything. The exams were incredibly simplistic, they asked about mostly common-sense stuff such as how skills worked and activated, how "receiving the blessing of the spirits" worked, which was leveling up, how magic could be conjured through magic circles, some simple magic rune questions, and also other questions about how to acquire certain skills.
There were also ten questions of math, language, and history, they were all commonsense things I learned when I was a kid too.
It was extremely easy, what is this? I thought it was going ton challenge me a bit, seeing how I was once a poor and ignorant serf, but I guess they're going easy on the students with the writing exam in case they suck at the fighting exam.
"I'm done." I said, giving the paper the Evelyn.
"Huh?! Blake not even five minutes have passed! Are you giving me something empty?" Sighed Evelyn, checking the paper.
Her face quickly changed from angered to flabbergasted.