Julius charged down the hall, putting as much distance as possible as he could in a small window of time.
As he paced, he reviewed his memory, comparing the events to his plan and confirming a lack of error in his plan.
He suddenly thought back to when he visited the akashic records with Thurid, as a palpable ache throbbed in his back.
"If the keeper hadn't pursued me there, then I wouldn't have had an opportunity to take some glow bugs, since I wouldn't have ever broken one of the aisle lamps." Julius
He then recalled the very recent exchange, how he had distracted Adrian and then cunningly thrown a sack of glowbugs with explosives.
"An explosion from that range definitely would stun him," Julius concluded.
This was because of the planned execution that made it possible, making use of an opening that Julius himself created.
"I would've preferred if he blocked that tray. My throw would've been more accurate if he didn't move, but if he caught it, then he might've used it to block the glowbugs." Julius continued to internalise, a thousand thoughts churning in his mind like a grinding machine tearing logs to wood shavings.
"Most of the glowbugs died in that lamp I broke back when Thurid fought the keeper; the few I had wouldn't have been enough to affect him if he had time to prepare for them, which is why I had to make him vulnerable." Julius continued as he neared the end of the hall.
He ran whilst confirming his plans, as he simultaneously tried to think up ways of leaving a trail behind.
"Damn it, I left that pen in class." He cursed internally, his jaw straining tighter with frustration.
This plan, although effective, was way too half-baked.
Julius had carelessly lost his cool and tried to fight Adrian without a plan.
"If Thurid hadn't hit me..." Julius tried not to give any attention to the thought, feeling relieved, but forced the lingering dread of alternative ideas out of his mind.
If something did not serve him, then Julius would discard it for the sake of efficiency.
Julius had lived the kind of life where such a mindset had grown important, but he couldn't dwell on those memories right now; he had to focus.
One small mistake will mean everything here, but Julius was aware of any mistakes before he made them; he wasn't like those ignorant students so lost in their own trivial lives.
His mind was like a tide sweeping against the shores; he knew the shores too well, consciously mapping them and letting the tides soak the shore time and time again.
Julius had developed such battle calm over the course of many arduous experiences; he had many disadvantages and couldn't afford to let anything distract him.
He thought this and reached for his collar, unthreading his tie and throwing it behind him onto the floor.
He turned the corner and reached into his blazer, not reaching for a token but instead for something cube-shaped.
"That useless skeleton should've taken this from me by now...Did something happen?" His mind dangerously edged toward a new set of calculations before Julius masterfully steered his thoughts to the present.
"Whatever, I have this for now..." He said as he finally stilled, pulling the cube out from his blazer.
It was a chrome cube, with golden trim outlining every edge.
On the sides was a strange clockwork pattern made from dark metal, with a small purple oval sitting in the centre of one side.
Julius pressed his thumb onto the eye, then directed the eye to face in front of him as he turned to face the corner he had just passed.
...
A great bang had triggered a flash of light to erupt, drenching the room in ungodly amounts of brightness before fading almost instantly after.
A few students cried sharply, feeling their curious gazes burn to black in an instant, their vision temporarily wiped.
In the darkest corner of the room, a boy with long purple hair sat under the table in deep thought, his hand on his chin as he stared into the floor.
"Hmm..." Tryx thought, whilst the groaning of students quietly continued outside the table.
He had heard the story of this morning's earlier incident; he heard that Julius flew into an uncontrollable rage and punched Adrian so hard that it broke the skin clean off his own hand.
Though just now, Julius had acted like a completely different person.
Earlier, Tryx had whispered to a student and made them lie to Julius, accusing Adrian of saying something he did not, for the sake of starting a fight between them by enraging Julius.
The student who delivered the lie was Wang Yi, a small, timid student.
Tryx had shown small hints of kindness to him, since such a gesture was so rare for the boy, Wang Yi had foolishly placed trust in the charismatic and cunning devil.
"Just now, Julius was completely different to how I was told he acted in the story..."
Tryx hummed to himself quietly, thinking deeper as the sound of students recovering faded from his awareness.
"Did I get it wrong? Maybe if the story about this morning was wrong... But many people confirmed it... "
"No, I definitely saw him storm over... He smashed that tray on Adrian because he was angry...So how could he have been rational enough to think of such a plan? Why didn't he use magic either?"
Tryx's mind was occupied, a thousand chains wrapped around his mind; he could feel something wasn't right, it was just that he didn't know enough.
"So, it's either that he can still think rationally while he's that angry or he calmed down enough to think?"
Tryx theorised heavily, conjuring many possible conclusions as he explored each and every one.
"But that can't be the case, this morning he tried to fist fight Adrian, I heard it only stopped because Thurid stepped in..."
"A person can't change that quickly. My plan definitely worked, and that's why he stormed over."
"So how was he able to suddenly become rational?"
Tryx had planned to use a vulnerability of Julius's, striking a nerve in order to make Julius find fault with Adrian.
His plan was flawless; he had assumed, based on what he heard from their first exchange, that Julius would've acted rashly like a wild tiger.
However, he instead acted strategically, making a fool of the son of Zeus without even a hint of magic!
Tryx couldn't comprehend it, through no fault of his own, because he missed one tiny variable.
The unpredictable slap of the fiery, friendly powerhouse!
The pain that ravaged Julius, even with insurmountable willpower, had managed to shock him just enough to ground him the moment he launched out of his seat.
In that moment, within the minuscule hair of time he had, his mind whirled into a concoction of consciousness.
Realising the mistake he was about to make again, he thought up a plan, grabbing a metal tray as he passed it.
Though Tryx had no way of knowing any of that!
He had planned to use illusions to trap Julius, not knowing he had already sunk deep into the scenery that Julius displayed back like a ribbon of mist curling around him unknowingly.
As he got lost in this trap, unable to ascertain any other truth, he concluded...
"Is he also one of the greats?"
Meanwhile, outside of the table, a silver-haired boy stood with his head bent forward.
His face was placed into his hands, his palms pressing forcefully into his eyes as if he could push the blindness out.
His cool undercut slumped over, dangling over the boy's forehead like a withering rose stem.
Veins bulged from his hands, his body silently vibrating as he endured the pain.
He managed to block the explosions in time, not that they did much anyway, indicated by how his cream uniform sleeves were now torn and slightly blackened at the edges.
However, the light was still blinding and made him brace in order to keep his vision.
Though what he couldn't brace was the feelings dwelling inside him, like bubbling acid brewing in his gut.
"Damn glowbugs." He cursed to himself internally in lightning-tinged realisation.
"You're dead meat now, Sparrow...." He exhaled heat like a ghost of a flame, his arms starting to curl as his body tensed with rage.
As the students' vision began returning to them, they noticed a boy with a cool silver undercut, his Tiffany blue eyes charging with volatile power.
In the corner opposite where the commotion seemed the strongest, a boy with a bowl of snow-white hair slowly recovered his senses.
"Ugh, that was bright..." Gyasi groaned as he pressed a hand, dressed in a black fingerless glove, to his temple.
Across from him, he noticed burning pink eyes coming from a girl hiding intelligently behind the table.
She remained there, sitting observantly, seemingly having hidden before the bright impact and remained unaffected.
Between the two, at the back of their table, a fiery-haired girl blindly waved her thick arms out.
"Ahhh! What was that!?" Thurid screamed dramatically as her other hand covered her eyes.
The sensation was actually not that painful; Thurid was just unused to pain and therefore quite the drama queen.
Nagiri remained silent, her eyes narrowing with a knowing look as she observed the silver-haired boy in the opposite corner.
"Ugh, I don't know, but I've got a migraine..." Gyasi murmured, spilling the words out groggily.
"T-Thurid..." Nagiri beckoned her to look at the commotion across from them, her gaze trembling slightly with worry as she spoke quietly.
"Ughhh, what, what?" Thurid dramatically groaned, slowly lowering her hand to squint across the room.
The air around Adrian seemed to distort as his expression tensed darkly, his silhouette charging with invisible power, his eyes darkening into a lightning blue, the sound of something audible in the air like fizzing before suddenly-
BANG!
A torrent of blue sparks, like twigs from bright blue tree branches, flickered around him at rapid speeds, covering his body like a whirlwind of zapping blue light.
"Oh...That doesn't look good." Thurid gulped, already rising from the table.
"If he finds Julius..." Thurid grunted; she wouldn't let that happen.
Meanwhile, the commotion, like a storm gathering in the cafeteria, caught Tryx's attention.
He peeked out from the back of the table, standing on his knees between the bench and the edge of the table, his chin propped up by his knuckles, where he lazily rested his elbow on the table.
"Heh, I can feel the static from here..." He grinned to himself as he witnessed the blue sparks writhing underneath the ceiling, zapping violently around Adrian Zephyr like a maelstrom of blue light.
"So, this is rank six magic..." Tryx breathed a cool sigh, his eye glinting with awe as he marvelled at the sight before him.
Thurid, in the opposite corner, began marching over, her steps immediately quickening into a charge to stop Adrian.
Similar to Tryx, the students were all transfixed at the godly sight, eyes wide, their earlier pain forgotten in the face of the mesmerising lightning.
Some were even gulping, feeling pity for Julius Sparrow for bringing such wrath upon himself.
Then, as if Adrian could read their minds, he raised a foot, as if to step forward, before Thurid could close in, disappearing in the blink of an eye, leaving the ghost of blue behind him like a trail of neon blue hair.
As he moved, wind whipped past Thurid, pages from grey octagon tables scattered across the air, flying about as they swam with the sudden gust of wind.
The cafeteria felt empty all of a sudden, even as the many students looked around in disbelief, before looking at the now wide-open double doors.
Adrian was already in the hallway, surrounded by volatile threads of vibrating power.
Adrian had covered this much distance in the same time it took an ordinary person to take a single step, and as he looked down at a black tie in the halls, he knew Julius Sparrow wasn't far.
In another blue blaze, he sped out straight down the hall, rounding the corner with a steel gaze.
As he passed the corner and turned, he found a dark-haired boy standing with a messy collar, missing a tie around his neck.
He stood with a strange cube in his hand, a magical purple oval in front of the cube, his own gaze like a sea of muddy mist as his other hand disappeared past the portal.
The portal seemed to pulse with a purple outline; like an open window, it showed something through the outline.
It looked like some bookshelves on the other side, a trailing red carpet, and a dark figure who looked as though they were made from shadows, that seemed to go unnoticed by the two in the midst of their battle.
The hand retracted just as Adrian rounded the corner, the boy holding a metal object with a structure like a microscope.
The object had a metal stand at the bottom, with a plate above that curved up to connect to a thick metal rod.
Dotting the object, around the plate like harmless decoration, were a set of gears churning sparks of blue from one wheel to the next.
The moment the object pulled through the portal, the rod vibrated as it made a resonating noise like a struck tuning fork.
Adrian's lightning hissed like buzzing razors before suddenly being yanked away toward the device, like a sheet from a table.
Adrian was too busy charging his arm back, now that he had stepped close enough to Julius.
However, when Adrian took his next step, it felt slower than normal, his eyes dropping to his feet as he suddenly realised the lightning covering his body had disappeared, dragged away to the metal device.
When his eyes looked back up and returned to the dark-haired boy, he saw a flat palm spread open in front of him.
"Fireball."
end of chapter 20