Young Swordmaster's Journey

"Alright, you know the plan?" Xyn asked seriously.

The man was currently knelt on the ground, his long dark green hair done up in a small bun with only a few centimeters left to hang down the back of his skull. Both of his arms were outstretched to place his hands on the stoney exterior of a rather muscled dragon that stood at about a meter and a half tall while on all four legs.

Its scales, despite having the stoney look of the rest of Fron's bloodline, were a dark grey-ish colour, similar to volcanic rock, and its eyes were a soft, but light, green. Similar to Fron's own eye colour but quite a few shades lighter, if the headmaster had to compare them.

The dragon, in response to his question, nodded its head sharply in response, letting a small snort out of its nose. Ordinarily the headmaster might have made some kind of joke about the confidence of the dragon or its clear desire to just begin the job, but right now he couldn't afford to do so.

"Remember, we don't want to start a fight with this one." He spoke seriously, getting another sharp nod in return. "Just slide it onto your back and move it out of the building, I'll be on standby in case it wakes up."

The dragon seemed to puff itself up, getting a grim nod from the man as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Only opening them with a small grunt once he had fully exhaled once more.

"Alright, this is to protect our students, Vin. Let's get this show on the road." He slapped the dragon's shoulder and stood up, gesturing towards the ever-so-slightly ajar door.

And with all the determined grimness of a man walking into a bomb defusal, Vin took its first steps forward.

XXXxxxXXX

"Why do you think they closed the dorms?"

"I don't know but the professors won't even allow us to enter."

"I heard that they found some kind of contraband. Do you think someone managed to sneak some Zynthan in?"

"You idiot! If someone managed to sneak that in there's no way they could have kept it hidden from everyone else in the building! Besides there'd be like military personnel here too, not just academy staff."

"Headmaster Xyn-" Olivia began, standing next to Alec with a completely blank look and crossed arms, "Is a complete moron."

"I wouldn't go that far-"

"He cordoned off the entire building for this one thing when he could have just picked it up and is letting all of these rumours run completely wild."

"…Ok it is pretty stupid." Alec nodded, missing Olivia's satisfied grin at being proven right.

"There had to be better ways to do this."

"Definitely, but I still think that having another dragon do it was a better decision than the headmaster. I doubt that a completely foreign dragon like that would be very comfortable around people. Its more likely to stay calm with the dragon moving it about."

"You have a point." Olivia nodded, cupping her chin between her thumb and forefinger. "And despite all these precautions, keeping it asleep and comfortable is definitely the best outcome."

"No way? Someone was seriously stupid enough to sneak drugs into the dorms?" An awed voice echoed from the crowd to their right.

Both of the teen's expressions went completely dead once more, staring up at the building.

"I take back everything I just said. That man couldn't have done this any worse."

XXXxxxXXX

It took Xyn and Vin all of about fifteen minutes to have the sleeping dragon loaded up and out of the building without a single person seeing their cargo or exit. An impressive accomplishment considering that nearly the entire building was surrounded by students interested to see what exactly was happening and if the building, and their stuff inside, was about to be blown up or destroyed somehow.

A few had tried to keep the peace and move them all away from the building to make the professor's jobs easier and keep everyone out of the –potential– blast radius, but it had proved to be a lessen in futility when their yells and gentle nudges were ignored with ease.

Finally, however, they had been allowed inside when Xyn himself had walked up to the largest congregation of students, in front of the main entrance, and announced that the problem had been dealt with, and they could all return to their dorms without issue.

Which was how Alec found himself walking alongside Olivia down the hallways, the both of them having broken off from the main crowd due to their rooms being in a lesser filled wing of the building.

"They were quick to get it out." Alec pointed out easily, waving a finger in a small circle in the air idly, "Considering that it smacked me just for being a bit too noisy, I'm surprised they managed to move it so far from my bed."

"Well, it seems like it was in its sleep cycle." Olivia pointed out easily, getting a small nod from the teen at her side, "Which means that, honestly, they had a pretty good chance of getting it out. You wouldn't know this, but dragons sleep anywhere on a 1:2-1:3 ratio that lasts nine months to a whole year, given that it appeared in your room out of nowhere, its probably only just entered its sleeping period."

"Dragon's seriously sleep that long?" Alec blinked a couple times rapidly as he turned to look at her, clearly caught off guard.

"They do." She nodded confidently, "Dragons, alongside Leviathans and Drakes, work on a much longer timescale than you or I. What takes us about 7-8 hours takes them about 3 months, that's how long a dragon's sleep cycle is. Though I'm not sure if a younger dragon needs more sleep than an adult one, they might even need less."

She finished her statement off with a small shrug, though he was able to tell that she was clearly fascinated by the line of queries she had led herself down. Truthfully, he didn't really care how much sleep a young dragon needed so long as it left him alone, then it could sleep as much as it wanted, and he wouldn't have to worry about it.

"Who knows. I'm not exactly in any sort of position, or mood, to try and find that out. Besides we have no idea where Headmaster Xyn dropped the dragon off, for all we know its just in a small divot in the ground somewhere."

"You're right, we can't really go find the dragon to find out."

'I-' Alec groaned mentally, 'Would like to know when I became a part of this and how I could detach myself from it as soon as possible. Hunting down the dragon that invaded my room doesn't exactly sound appealing.'

"However," Olivia continued, seemingly unaware of the resigned expression that had crossed her companions face, "I think we may be able to ask Xyn, since there's a dragon lineage that lives on campus he probably has a fairly good idea of what kind of needs they have."

"You know what? That sounds really plausible, you should go ask him. I need to go make sure that my stuff hasn't been destroyed, though."

Let it not be said that Alec was one to let an opportunity pass him by. The teen had seen a way to escape from Olivia's interested questions without sounding like an asshole and had leapt for it the moment he had realized it was there.

"You're right. I'll be back with his answer, you make sure that you don't have to refurbish your entire dorm or something."

Alec shivered a little at the thought, all the items in his room flashing through his mind alongside all of their rough prices. Which led to his expression twisting uncomfortably, as if he had just sucked a lemon, as the –estimated– final total of replacing everything in his room flashed at the forefront of his mind like a particularly annoying neon light.

"Please don't joke about that. That would be so much money…"

"We both got payments from a [Gold-rank] quest, Dius."

"And having to spend so much of that money on something like that would be a complete nightmare!"

"Gold. Rank. Pay." Olivia stressed, rolling her eyes at the blue-haired teen beside her.

"Which I now have to supplement with [Iron-rank] quests. Imagine if you wasted all of that money and then something came up that needed most or all of it. What would you do instead, ask Noelle for money?"

Olivia went stock-still as her mind seemed to churn through that particular hypothetical and all the possible ways that it could go wrong. The young woman finding each potential outcome worse and worse as her complexion seemed to pale further and further as the seconds ticked by.

Alec felt a bit bad for pulling out the Noelle card on her, especially after having seen how the elder girl treated her and hearing Noelle's own thoughts on her family, but it was the easiest way he could think of to get his point across.

She had family that she could rely on if she got in real financial trouble, as loathe as she was to admit it, but Alec had no such safety net. Technically he could always try and send a letter to his friends through the Intercountry Courier System but there was no way of guaranteeing when it would get to them and when, or even if, they would be able to help him out.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Apart from them, he had no other options except to put himself into debt, which he absolutely, with all his heart and soul, refused to do. There was no way that he was going through the hassle of Guild Quests without getting anything in return for his troubles, no sir.

"…I very suddenly understand exactly why the thought of spending any of that money seems to hurt you." She spoke blankly, her walking pace speeding up a bit, "I'm going to go talk to Xyn now. I don't want to think about that anymore."

"Heh, alright. I'll see you around, Olivia."

"Bite me, Alec."

XXXxxxXXX

That Night, Dragon-Scale Academy

Knock Knock!

"Mnnnn." Alec groaned and rolled over in his bed, hair messed up and thrown about and having forgone a shirt entirely.

A laughter like the softly blown tinkling of wind chimes and flashes of chestnut brown hair snapped in and out of focus, entering and leaving his mind through his dream like a wet bar of soap. Leaving only an impression of emotions and feelings behind but nothing concrete for his mind to hold on to. Nothing for his conscious self to point at and go 'That! That's what caused it!'.

Knock Knock Knock!

"MNnaahh?" Bleary blue eyes slowly opened to stare at the blank wall of his dormitory.

For a moment he did nothing but stare at the wall, trying to figure out what was happening and why he had been woken up at –slowly his eyes drifted to the closed window– sometime around 2am.

He wasn't thirsty, he didn't need to go to the bathroom, he definitely hadn't gotten enough sleep. Why had he woken up?

For a few seconds he wondered if some kind of burst of mana somewhere in the campus or city had woken him up, but even that theory was thrown out after a few seconds of allowing his foggy mind to churn through it. If a burst of mana had woken him up, he'd know about it, either through the ambient mana in the air around him, or the feeling of adrenaline pumping through his veins to get him ready to move at a moment's notice.

But there was none of that, no change in the mana in the air, no screams or fires in the distance, no adrenaline or panic in his system. Which meant that he'd woken up for no reason at all, wonderful.

With a stifled yawn, he closed his eyes again to go back to sleep, hoping that he wouldn't have any issues doing so, considering how tired he felt.

KnockKnockKnock!

'Ah. That's why I woke up.' He'd thought the knocking during his dream –what was it about again? He remembered that it was important– had been something that his mind had made up, apparently not.

"I'm comin'." He mumbled, unsure if whoever was at the door could even hear him, and not really caring either way, if he was honest.

With a haphazard swing of his arm, his blanket flipped off of his form and flopped messily over itself, allowing him the freedom he really wished he didn't need right now.

A small groan left his lips as he rolled backwards across his bed, letting his upper body drag just a little bit so that his legs rolled off the bed first, letting him place his feet firmly beneath him as he sat up and then, mournfully, stood up to go answer the door.

Idly, as he half walked and half stumbled to the doorway, he wondered who it could be that was at the door. It could be Headmaster Xyn or Olivia, but he had a feeling that they would have called out through the door instead of just knocking silently, so it most likely wasn't them. Perhaps Callum? It was the most likely option out of those that Alec knew within the Academy, though even that felt wrong to the teen.

"It's 2am what do you-" Alec grumbled, as he swung his door open, only to stare at an empty hallway.

Slowly, unbelievingly, he leant forward and looked left and right down the hallway. There was not a single soul in sight.

"There's no godsdamn way…" He muttered to himself, rubbing his eyes just to make sure that he wasn't missing anything that he should actually be seeing.

Still nothing.

A noise to his left drew his attention, making him look over just in time to see Olivia, cloaked in a mildly pricey-looking white nightgown, step halfway out into the hallway while yawning and rubbing one of her eyes.

"Who the hell was knocking on your door so incessantly, Dius?" She muttered, the annoyance clear in not only her tone but also the dark look that seemed etched into her expression.

"I…I think I got Knock Knock'd." He muttered disbelievingly.

"…What the hell does that mean?" She gave him a flat look, the darkness in her eyes now focused squarely on him.

"It means-" He was cut off halfway by a yawn that caused her to almost immediately break out into a yawn of her own, "Somebody knocked on my door just to wake me up and took off running the moment they heard me get up."

For three seconds, the air between them was completely silent as they both tiredly stared at one another, the teen letting Olivia slowly work through his words and the stupidity of the whole situation.

"If I find out who it was, I'm killing them."

"Feel free, let me know if you need help digging a hole or anything." He muttered, half-heartedly waving over his shoulder as he turned back into his room and gently shut his door.

Quietly he shuffled back across his room until he got to his bed. The teen walking forward until his legs hit the edge of his bed and then just allowing his momentum to carry him forward until he faceplanted into his scrunched-up blanket. It was only after a second of lying there that he managed to find the mental willpower to actually roll onto his bed properly and throw his covers back over himself.

In future re-telling's of that very night, he'd like to say that he'd noticed what had actually occurred, had felt the shifting of his bed as he was falling asleep or noticed the unnatural warmth that soon cocooned his upper body. Unfortunately for his pride, however, he did and had not. Leaving him blissfully unaware and allowing him to fall asleep almost as soon as he got comfortable again, never once questioning anything that had happened past his incredulity at being pranked at such an early hour.

XXXxxxXXX

Later that morning

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnock!

"Wha- What the hell…?" Olivia's eyes blinked open somewhat hazily as a resounding, and somewhat frantic, knocking seemed to reverberate through her entire room.

It wasn't coming from the door; she could tell that much. It was too loud and lacked the distinct 'door-ness' of the knocking sound that she had come to subconsciously recognize.

No, it sounded like it was coming from…the wall? Walls? No, definitely just the one wall, the constant stream of knocks was just messing with her hearing a little.

But why would someone be knocking from the wall instead of the door? And she only had one dorm neighbour which was- Wait, the knocking was coming from the wall that she shared with Alec. Alec was the one that was knocking so incessantly.

"I'm going to kill that blue-haired bastard." She grumbled even as she rolled out of bed and grabbed her very real, very sharp metal blade from beside her bed in one smooth motion born of years of practice and experience.

Then, just to be safe, she pulled open the top drawer in her bedside table and curled her arm to reached for the underside of the flat top and pulled off a small item that she had taped there. A small set of lockpicking tools.

And her family had laughed when she had asked for them as a child, instead of just learning to unlock doors with mana, if only they could see her now.

With a shambled power-walk she made her way out of her dorm and down the two-meter gap between her door and Alec's. Grumbling quietly to herself as she reached for the other teen's doorknob and subtly pushed down on it to check its state.

Locked. Wonderful, just what she had thought it might be.

Hazily, out of only the periphery of her sight and hearing, she noticed a couple guys walking down the hallway in what was clearly workout gear, but she couldn't really find it in herself to care. If they wanted to gawk at her for her untied bedhead and pyjama-gown then she would let them, she didn't care about rumours started by people like them and she didn't care about their stares or anything else either.

She opened her mouth to call out to Alec, only to shut with silently about a half a second later, thinking better of that idea only after she had begun to put it in motion.

'Gods, I really am tired.'

If Alec was knocking on the wall between them so frantically, instead of shouting to get her attention or actually leaving his dorm to knock on her door, there was probably a pretty good reason for that. Either a reason he had to stay silent, a reason that he couldn't leave his dorm room, or –most likely– a reason that he couldn't do either of the above.

Which meant that calling out to him was most likely a poor idea, and that her bringing both her lockpicks and her proper blade were probably smart ones.

So, allowing the quiet murmurs of the two boys to go in one ear and right out the other, she brought her lockpicks up and had them in the handle of the door with nary a single sound. A resounding and rewarding 'click!' met her ears only a second later, much to the surprise of the two boys in the hallway, and in one smooth motion she slipped into Alec's dorm and silently shut the door behind her.

She had done it to give herself and Alec some privacy from the prying eyes for whatever reason he had been so frantic to get her attention and also because she felt it would be quite rude to allow two random guys to look into his room during what was probably a state of panic and/or embarrassment. Yet when she actually stopped and got a good look at the situation that Alec had found himself in, and the panicked look on his face, she knew that her decision to shut the door so quickly had been the correct one.

Not because Alec was in pain, at least he didn't look to be, or because he was in the midst of some embarrassing situation best kept from prying eyes and loose lips, but because what she saw would absolutely start a campus-wide panic that they had only barely been able to avoid the first time around.

Because sat on Alec's stomach, curled up with its tail wrapped loosely around one of his arms, was the exact same green dragon that had been removed from the premises not even a full 24 hours prior.

"Alec….what the hell?"

"Help. Me." The words came out in loud whispers, but Olivia had to give him props for being able to keep his voice at such a steady volume.

She knew plenty of people that wouldn't have been able to do even that much in such a situation.

"How did it even…?" She let the question hang in the air as she quietly propped her blade up against the wall and placed her lockpicks on his empty table, silently padding over to him.

"I….I thought I got Knock Knock'd last night. I think it was…" He trailed off and jerked his head in the direction of the dragon.

If it weren't a young dragon they were discussing, Olivia might have outright laughed at the suggestion that a beast would have enough intelligence to trick him like that. Unfortunately, however, it was a dragon that they were dealing with, and thus the idea of it being both smart and knowledgeable enough to pull something like that off was not only possible but highly likely.

"How do you even get into these situations…" She sighed, leaning over to stare at the tail loosely wrapped around the males arm.

"I wish I could tell you…" He sighed morosely, laying his other arm across his eyes.

"Alright. We're going to have to be patient with this, but I think we can get you out." She whispered, getting a nod from him as he lowered his free arm down.

"Now, slowly raise that arm and lets see if we can both get out of this in one piece." She sighed and hovered both of her hands over him, mentally preparing herself for the second most stressful morning of her entire life.