Free Web NovelIt was close to dawn and Fighter Hall was all quiet when Linhart declared he had to leave.
“Although, I don’t know how I’m going to get back into my dorm room.” he sighed, “I’ve lost yet another key to Floor 8.”
“Oh, I can help you with that.”
Zoey was completely exhausted from the night’s activity, but she rolled out of bed and crossed the room to her sister’s bed where the little imp was still sleeping. Gods, she could sleep through an earthquake, this girl. Chloe resembled a cute puppy when she slept. Her arms and legs spread out every direction, her tits poking out from under her loose shirt, her long blond hair covering half the bed. But he knew better than to be fooled by her innocent appearance. He remembered the sadistic gleam in her eyes as she tried to hurt him in any way possible. Linhart suspected that Chloe might be the most evil girl he'd met in this world. The only thing that had saved him was this evil was contained in the form of a tiny girl that he could easily submit with his dick.
Linhart imagined a fully-grown Chloe, the size of Xenia, for a moment and shuddered in fear.
Zoey returned in a minute with a familiar key hanging from a length of string.
“Here’s the key that Chloe took from you last time.” Zoey said apologetically. “She keeps it around her neck at all times now. Says she’s going to use it to raid Floor 8 and… do something bad to you again.”
“Thanks, Zoey." Linhart accepted the key and hung it around his own neck, "Now I just have to get upstairs without anyone noticing that I’m naked.”
Zoey, who had been checking out his body once again, smiled. “I can lend you my jacket, but it might be a little small on you.”
Minutes later, Linhart was on his way out the door dressed in a girl’s jacket that barely covered his butt. He had taken a pair of Zoey’s panties, as well. They barely contained his manhood, but at least it wasn’t hanging down below the jacket for all to see.
Zoey gushed how great he looked in women's clothes, and Linhart promised to wear something special for her once he gave her that special something. She seemed even more excited about the prospect than he was. Was he training her or was she training him?
“You promise we'll meet again after morning classes?”
“Yes, I’ll meet you at our Midday meal. I'll give you your jacket back then.”
“You can keep it, cutie. It looks better on you anyways.”
With that, she pulled his head down close to hers and gave him a quick kiss on the lips. As he turned and rushed away, she stood there and watched him disappear down the hall towards the main stairway.
Linhart was lucky. Apparently the other boys weren’t early risers, and he was able to get all the way back to his own room without being spotted. The adrenaline rush that came with dashing across the Floor 8 meadow scantily dressed in girls' clothing was not the kind of thrill he was interested in. Maybe he could order the shy little Zoey to do something like this?
It wasn't until he was fully clothed in his own school uniform and leaving the area called Fighters’ Green that he started feeling safe out of the grasp of Xenia.
* * * * * * * * *
The Utility class and all their members were based in an area halfway down the valley, quite a distance from Fighters’ Green. It was called Binders Garden, for some unknown reason. The trees gave way to thorny bushes and the grassy hills became pebbly flats without any clear paths. Walking over the pebbles, Linhart felt they were massaging the bottoms of his feet, and energizing his whole body.
The sun was still hidden behind the lip of the valley, but the sky was turning an orange-pink. A few students were out walking now, most of them wore the togas of the Utility class.
Many of the buildings he passed now were topped with energy conductors. They were square stone buildings. The color matched the dull landscape's mood nicely. The whole area seemed to be designed not with aesthetics in mind, but to improve the flow of magical energy.
Linhart had never travelled this far into Binders Garden and he didn't know what to expect. He had heard that support magic was most frequently drawn from the energy within the earth, so he was not exactly surprised by the appearance of Utility Hall. His first impression was that this was work of epic earth-moving. He nearly stumbled over the edge, which resembled a precipice falling off like a canyon. Looking out across the tiered levels and sculpted walkways, the words that came to him were 'hole in the ground.'
It was monumental in appearance, breath-taking in its size and shape. The hole itself was a massive four-sided excavation, hundreds of feet across, which looked like an inverted pyramid going down into the ground instead of up into the sky. Terraced gardens ran down its four edges and the plants of choice seemed to be the thorny bushes he'd seen earlier.
Students were climbing the Hall's steep stairwells like ants emerging from an anthill. It appeared everyone was exiting the complex, just as he was going to enter. He circled the hole until he reached one of the four grand staircases that led downwards. There he paused for a moment to watch the flow of students out into the surrounding area.
Something that Linhart picked up on right away was that the students here often travelled in mixed groups. Quite often in an equal number of boys and girls. He was so intrigued, that he couldn’t help but approach a group of two girls and two boys that was exiting Utility Hall right in front of him.
The members of the group were all dressed in beige togas, which seems to be the standard dress for students in the Utility class. He wasn’t sure how they differentiated between freshmen, juniors, and seniors, but he did notice that the boys' togas had additional cloth that wrapped around their neck and shoulders and all the way down to their ankles. Linhart imagined that it must take a lot of effort to disrobe when you need to use the toilet.
The girls, on the other hand, wore togas that looked easy to put on and take off. The cloth ran over one shoulder and left the other bare. The coverage was minimal, leaving their legs exposed above the knee, and their material bunched at the waist on the right side, leaving the rondure of the right boob plain to see. Linhart had a clear view of the side-boob of one of the girls who was particularly well-endowed, not that he was trying to peek. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
“Excuse me, this is my first time at Utility Hall, and I couldn't help but notice that you Utility students prefer to travel in groups of boys and girls. I don’t mean to be rude, but is that because you're girlfriend and boyfriend?”
One of the boys snorted. The other boy immediately cried out, "No way! She is not my girlfriend. We are support partners and that is it."
One of the girls looked abashed and lowered her eyes shyly. The other, which Linhart had been ogling, simply ignored the boy's comment and moved in close to Linhart.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “It’s a boy Fighter!”
The four of them stopped and examined him like he was an anomaly they'd never seen before. All four of them were wearing thick, round glasses, and he felt their eyes inspect him like magnifying lenses.
“What a rare find,” one of the boys added, “Have you come to see what civilized students live like, Fighter?”
“Yes, what are you doing in the Binding Gardens?”
“Oh, I’m looking for the Stratega Utility.” he replied, surprised to find himself suddenly surrounded. “She’s expecting me. I have heard that she lives at Utility Hall with the students?”
“Utility Hall? Pshaw… No one calls it that,” one of the boys admonished him, “While you’re here, you should call it the Nexus of Binding.”
“Nexus…?”
“Yes, and you should call us Binders!” the other boy asserted.
“You are entering the heart of the Academy. The Academy is called the Nexus because of this place right in front of you,” the first boy continued in a pompous tone.
“Why did you become a Fighter, may I ask?” the curious girl was asking, peering closely at the fabric of his uniform, her hand ran along the neckline of his vest.
It was clear that the boys of the Utility class were more confident and less cautious than the boys he met among the Fighters. Linhart wasn’t sure if he liked their attitude. They seemed to be looking down on him.
The girls on the other hand were treating him like a specimen at a zoo. They didn’t show the same animalistic attraction that most of the Fighter girls displayed, but Linhart suspected that beneath their stoic curiosity, the same horny urges were waiting to get out.
“I just… want to fight using my body.” he stammered.
“Hah!” one of the boys laughed, “How ridiculous! A boy using his physical power, and not his arcane power.”
The boys were sneering now. The comment was genuinely malicious, and the shyer of the two girls jumped in to defend him.
“I think it’s great that he’s pushing his limits. Even boys can be Fighters with the right training and skills, right?” She looked to Linhart for affirmation.
He was not sure he could affirm that. Linhart reflected on his recent status as a Fighter. He now found himself without skills and back at Fighting: Level 1. As much as he wanted to, he did not feel he could defend his right to join the class.
“I just want to know where to find Stratega Octavia,” he muttered.
“Oh,” the girl’s cheeks bloomed red, “Sorry for making this awkward. I guess I don’t know much about Fighters…” freewёbnoνel.com
Now the boy came to his rescue, ending the conversation handily by saying, “The Stratega Binder is usually in her laboratory at the lowest level of the Nexus. Just follow the stairways down.”
Linhart thanked the group and left, promising himself he would not start any more unnecessary conversations with students from other classes. Maybe being a Fighter in this world is not as desirable as it was in his previous one. Especially for boys.
Linhart began to descend the stairs, which turned into a challenge of its own. The stairs were cut at a steep angle and Linhart had to focus constantly, or else he'd go falling forward down the hard stone steps to the landing below. He found the route to be confusing. He would follow the stairs downward to a wide terrace decorated with bushes, statues, and doorways to the underground of all sorts and sizes. Then he would have to skirt sideways along the edge of the Nexus, until he found another set of stairs heading downward. This happened again and again until he was unsure of which direction he had even come from.
A few times, Linhart found himself on a terrace with no stairways heading further downward. Some entrances indicated people’s dwellings or even rooms used to practice support magic, but there was no way to progress further downward. At these points, Linhart was forced to backtrack and sometimes to climb other stairwells upwards until he reached a new terrace, which had other ways downwards.
The Nexus was complex to say the least, and the sun was already shining over the rim of the valley by the time Linhart reached the shadow filled depths of the Nexus. He saw that the very bottom square was a 30 foot square floor that was lined with crushed quartz. Well, he thought it was quartz. They were shiny, pointy pebbles that resembled pink glass and stuck in the bottoms of his feet.
A single archway etched with the faces of gods and legendary beasts, carved from a single block of marble, opened into a tunnel diving deep into the earth. Beyond, somewhere in the pit-like depths beyond the archway, he thought he could see the flicker of a fire burning.
This was undoubtedly the lair of the Stratega Utility, Octavia.
