Vol 3. Chapter 102: Vinny Transformed

“Kamov Mountain’s hot-spring inns are really famous. It’s the single most famous, most popular tourist spot in all the northern tribes. Good thing it’s the off-season now instead of peak season. Otherwise, with this many of us, there wouldn’t be nearly enough rooms—we wouldn’t be able to cram in at all.” Ferdi did the explaining for the two of them.

“In the past, Kamov Mountain used to be a holy mountain of the northern tribes. The tribes live in bitterly cold lands, but the area around Kamov Mountain stays warm all year round. So in ancient times, the tribes treated it as ‘a sacred place blessed by the Conquered Grand-Emperor Domos.’”

“As the various tribes fought and scrambled, and as Spirit Soul magic kept iterating and upgrading, the tribes no longer needed to trek to Kamov Mountain to warm up during the dead of winter. Once the ruling families of each tribe all had world-ending magic at their fingertips, they slowly started to think Kamov Mountain wasn’t anything special anymore. So the halo around Kamov Mountain gradually faded. Add in the fact that it’s a borderland, and it ended up turning into a tourist resort instead,” Ferdi explained.

“So, is this still a holy mountain of the tribes?” Vinny asked.

“In name, yeah. Supposedly the title is still there, and each clan and tribe still comes once a year to do a symbolic ritual. But it’s nowhere near as inviolably sacred as it used to be. Back then, forget foreigners—even if you weren’t from a ruling family or someone with status and rank among the tribes, you could forget about ever getting close to this place.”

“Us being allowed to travel here at all is basically eating the dividends of the times. Otherwise, how could a holy mountain of a whole people possibly be open to outsiders?” Ferdi said.

“But a holy mountain of a people, and they just straight-up turned it into a resort? These tribes really are laid-back.” Vinny raised a brow.

“They don’t really have a choice. That’s baked into northern tribal culture. The tribes are a place where the strong rule. Here, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman—whoever’s fist hits harder has the final say. A holy mountain with only symbolic meaning can’t stay very ‘holy’ for long in that sort of environment. In the eyes of tribes who believe in the weak being eaten by the strong, its status was never going to last,” Ferdi said.

“So from that angle, these tribes are pretty pragmatic, huh?” Vinny arched his brow again.

Anything that didn’t do work and didn’t serve a purpose wasn’t worth keeping. They’d just leave it a title, and turning it into a tourist spot was fine. As long as they came once a year for a symbolic ritual, that was enough.

“According to the rules on the tribes’ side, it’s only during their yearly ritual at Kamov Mountain that tourists and outsiders aren’t allowed in. The rest of the time it’s open to the public,” Ferdi went on.

“Didn’t expect you to know this much,” Vinny commented.

“Haha, little bro Vinny, who do you think I am?” Ferdi said, smug.

“Ferdi, if you put the energy you use learning this stuff into your actual studies, your academic scores wouldn’t be lagging this hard,” Vinny teased.

“Tch! So what? How’s that your problem?” Ferdi shot back. “Anyway, we’re already at the encampment-town at the foot of Kamov Mountain.”

“Encampment-town? This looks like a city to me.” Vinny looked at the tribe-flavored town up ahead, baffled.

“The tribes call a city an ‘encampment-town.’ Or you could say they don’t have ‘cities’ at all, only encampment-towns. You can just treat this place as one of the tribes’ cities,” Ferdi said.

“And this is all you get for an important city built around a holy mountain? Isn’t it a bit on the small side?” Vinny frowned, looking at the town at Kamov Mountain’s base.

What could he say? By the Kingdom of Camella’s standards, this place would already count as a small city. For a city built around a holy mountain, shouldn’t the scale be bigger?

“Maybe lower your standards a bit? That’s cultural differences. Tribes don’t like building cities; they prefer encampments and forts. For the tribes, this is already a very respectable city-state,” Ferdi said with a laugh. “Don’t let the other students from the tribes hear you. They’ll think you’re disrespecting their culture and pound you.”

Vinny glanced around. The three of them were walking pretty far off to the side, with no students nearby, so no one had heard their conversation.

When they reached the town gate, Vinny saw the tribal guides who’d been walking with the teachers step out from the group and chat with the guards. Then a teacher from Carillian Academy produced a document. Once the guards saw the seal on it, they quickly waved them through.

“Everyone, welcome to Kamov City.”

The tribal guards greeted them in halting, heavily accented imperial tongue.

Tribespeople speaking the imperial tongue wasn’t anything unusual. The Tyrelis Empire had lasted so long that equating its culture with “human culture” as a whole wasn’t much of a stretch.

Both the current Tyrel Empire and the Kingdom of Camella spoke Tyrelis, just with different accents—and the difference wasn’t even that large. The northern tribes that had spent half their history under Tyrelis rule were the same. Even though many tribes had switched back to their old languages, they still learned Tyrelis. After all, the tribes had always respected the strong, and in their eyes, the ones who’d beaten them from beginning to end had only ever been the Tyrelis Empire.

Once they entered the city-state, Vinny studied it as they walked. Honestly, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the city walls looked a bit strange and didn’t match the buildings inside at all.

“Kamov City—the story goes that this city-state was first founded in the Tyrelis Empire era, built by Tyrelis imperial craftsmen,” Ferdi said.

“Oh. That explains it,” Vinny said.

He’d been thinking the whole time that those city walls, with their fine ancient carvings and neat stonework, looked nothing like anything rough-and-ready tribespeople could have built.

“But after all the years of war, almost all the original buildings in the city are gone. The ones you see now were built by the tribes later on. The walls were the toughest part, so they’re what survived intact.”

“I swear, Ferdi, do you really know this place that well? Were you a tribesman in your last life?”

“What, I’m not allowed to study up? We were coming here for a study trip—of course I had to do some research,” Ferdi said as if it were obvious. “If I’m going to have fun, I want to know what I’m doing. I’m not going to play around all confused.”

“Click, click,” Vinny tutted under his breath, giving Ferdi a look of contempt.

This guy could be unbelievably invested in anything he cared about—and completely uninterested in anything he didn’t, like, for example, his grades.

He’d rather spend extra time reading up on what they were going to see on this trip than spare even a single minute to crack open a book.

Once they were inside the city-state, plenty of tribespeople cast curious looks at this wave of outsiders. But after seeing the uniforms and outfits on these young men and women, they understood what was going on and went back to their own business.

Even so, there were still quite a few curious ones who kept on openly staring.

“Hey, little bro, you guys are students from Carillian Academy, right?”

A sturdy tribal youth walked up. Judging by his direction, he’d come specifically for Ferdi.

“Yeah. And you are...?” Ferdi asked.

“I heard students from Carillian Academy are all geniuses—elites among elites on the path of the strong,” the sturdy tribesman said with a grin.

“Oh? So you’re trying to...?”

“You’ve got an impressive look to you. I want to test myself against you,” the tribesman said to Ferdi.

Now this was getting interesting.

Vinny figured the reason this tribesman had locked onto Ferdi was because Ferdi was tall and broad-shouldered. The tribesman had subconsciously pegged him as the “boss” of this group—and a strong one at that.

“Oh? Sorry, man. The Academy rules say we’re not allowed to brawl,” Ferdi said.

“It’s not a brawl. I just want you to throw one spell. See if you can punch through my wall of copper and iron,” the tribesman said confidently. “I’m skilled in earth-element magic, but I’ve never really had a chance to test my talent and affinity. How about you use your best spell and see if you can break my earth-element magic?”

“That doesn’t count as a fight. You won’t get hurt.”

“Oh? You really want to try? Look, man, I’m saying this up front—if you get hurt, that’s on you, not us,” Ferdi said, frowning.

“I don’t need you to take responsibility. I’ve got faith in myself.”

The tribesman crossed his arms, looking utterly sure of himself.

“All right then. You go first. Let me see what you can take.”

“Okay!”

The tribesman braced his hands against the air and took a deep breath. In an instant, a thick wall of earth-element magic surged up in front of him.

“Come on! Let me see what the geniuses of Carillian Academy are really like!”

Ferdi exchanged a look with Vinny, then turned to the tribesman. “All right then, if you really insist.”

“Ferdi, for this brother here, use your main element and put in about thirty percent,” Vinny said just then.

“Oh? Got it.” Ferdi blinked. He didn’t know how Vinny could calculate it that precisely, but since Vinny had always been the most gifted and studious one among them, he chose to trust him.

Ferdi drew in a deep breath. Green light flashed in his palms, and a howling gale blasted out. The moment the windstorm slammed into the earth wall the tribesman had condensed, the wall shattered instantly, blowing apart into countless chunks.

And then the problem hit.

Those chunks of earth up in the air were all magically condensed. Now they were falling from above, scattering in every direction.

By the time Ferdi realized what he’d just done, it was already too late.

At that very instant, countless ice chains whipped out, piercing and freezing every chunk of falling earth and then slowly lowering them to the ground.

The tribesman and Ferdi turned their heads at the same time and saw the blue-haired youth standing beside them had moved.

Vinny casually raised one hand, and six ice chains shot from his palm, catching all the magical chunks of earth midair.

At the Magus realm, with [Excellent]-grade ice-element affinity backing him, that was what Vinny could do now—six ice chains from one hand.

The power was so intense that even the tribesman beside him felt a chill sink into his bones as cold air spilled outward.

“Friend from the tribes, my bro here used thirty percent of his strength and your wall still broke, and you couldn’t even clean up the mess,” Vinny said with a sidelong glance at the youth. “Don’t go around picking fights all the time. When your ability isn’t enough, you’ll just hurt yourself while you’re busy hurting other people.”

The tribesman opened his mouth, but not a single word came out.

In Kamov City, he’d always loved picking fights and playing the bully. He’d never even listened to his parents, doing whatever he wanted.

If anyone else had said something like that to him, he would have been fuming. But the youth in front of him—the one he hadn’t thought much of a moment ago—was now giving off an aura that made him shake uncontrollably.

This was a perfectly clear, in-your-face moment of realizing just how wide the gap between him and someone else really was.

The tribesman didn’t dare argue back at all. Once his brain caught up, he just nodded and nodded, as if he’d been completely convinced.

And it wasn’t just him. Ferdi and Shicodale beside him were both stunned too. He knew Vinny’s strength had to be extraordinary after advancing to the Magus realm, but how strong the Magus realm actually was—he’d never had a concrete sense of it.

All he could say was this: the way magic manifested was the single most intuitive way to display someone’s power.

“You lot! Magic isn’t allowed inside the city. You didn’t know that?”

Just then, a few guards wearing nomad robes walked up. Clearly the commotion earlier had drawn their attention.

“Ah, it was him...” Ferdi started to explain.

“I’m really sorry. I was the one who said I wanted to spar with our guests from faraway Carillian Academy. They only agreed because I pushed it,” the tribesman cut in before Ferdi could finish.

“Of course it’s you again, you little punk.”

The guards took one look and saw that the spellcasters were Carillian Academy students. They instantly knew these weren’t people they could afford to mess with. With the tribesman taking the initiative to admit fault, they had their way out, so they grabbed him and dragged him off for a “talk,” completely ignoring Ferdi and Vinny.

“Hey, you two bros—no, you two seniors! I—I’ll definitely get into Carillian Academy one day too!”

The funniest part was that even as the tribesman was being hauled away, he was still shouting back at them.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Ferdi asked.

“He should be. From the look of it, this isn’t his first time getting hauled in,” Vinny said, arms folded. “Don’t worry about him. Seeing how practiced he is at getting dragged off by guards, let’s just go.”

“Seriously though, little bro Vinny, when did you get this badass?” Ferdi stared at him, stunned.

“Shh, keep it down. Basic stuff. Just basic stuff,” Vinny said, flicking his hand.

“Screw you. Compliment you a few times and you really start putting on airs, huh?” Ferdi grumbled.

“What? You have any idea how hard it was for me to get here? And I can’t show off a little?” Vinny shot him a look. “I’m going to show off. What about it?”

“Besides, you two made way too big a scene just now. A lot of people noticed.” Vinny frowned.

“Huh?”

Only then did Ferdi look over at the cluster of teachers and students not far away.

With an explosion of magic that loud, there was no way people wouldn’t notice.

“Honestly, can’t believe you agreed to him. If they decide to get to the bottom of this, we’re not getting out of a chewing-out,” Vinny clicked his tongue.