As expected, when Villin got to the training area, it was almost completely empty. Just like the training grounds in the first grade, it didn’t look all that impressive. The large room still looked more like a cave compared to anything else but at least the runes on the walls were shining slightly, it seemed to be entirely enchanted.

Then again in the first grade practically all the walls were enchanted so Villin didn’t find it that impressive, not according to Academy standards at least.

The massive cave-like room had a number of sparring rings. They were circular rings between twenty and forty meters in diameters. Villin spotted a faint veil surrounding each of them, Villin wasn’t sure if the veils were created by a magic array or anything else but didn’t bother much about it yet. He could study those some other time.

On the other side of the room were, what looked like training dummies made out of straw. Looking at them from a distance they seemed to be extremely low quality, obviously, Villin wouldn’t underestimate them though.

There were a total of ten dummies and currently two were in use. These two were also the only people in the entire room at this point in time. They were both boys with blue hair and identical faces, twins. They glanced at him once when he entered the room but didn’t say anything as they got back to practicing. They seemed pretty exhausted so Villin assumed they would leave shortly anyway.

Villin didn’t say anything either as he stood in front of a training dummy himself, he decided to test the object out first, little use in checking the enchantments if he didn’t know the purposes.

He started off by shooting an icy pike at the dummy’s head. It quickly shot forward and penetrated the straw for around one centimeter before stopping. The pike was then pushed out of the ‘wound’ and two seconds later the dummy looked as if it was never damaged in the first place.

Villin then walked a bit closer to the dummy before putting away his wand. He cast the fireball spell and threw it to the dummy’s torso.

This spell did even less, some of the straw was burnt a bit but the wound didn’t seem substantial at all. After a second it was already gone.

Deep in thought, Villin distanced himself from the dummy again before closing his eyes and concentrating on his web. He wanted to try out his new spell ‘Bombardo’. 

Yet, just ten minutes after he began connecting his nodes, he heard a loud yelp disrupting his concentration. He immediately opened his eyes and looked around. The twins were gone from their previous positions, it seems they had left the room.

Villin could hear sounds coming from the entrance, it sounded like spells were hitting a wall causing small explosions to take place. Without further ado, Villin grabbed his wand and ran toward the room entrance, he still remembered the Decorus attack and his heart was beating rapidly.

When Villin got closer to the entrance, the sounds from the spells stopped, it seemed that the victor had been decided. 

“You Decorus bitch. I’ll let you feel all the pain our brother felt when you fucks killed him!” an enraged voice sounded out just as Villin made his way to the entrance.

Just outside the entrance were three individuals. The blue-haired twins stood to the right; they both looked furious and only had a few scratches overall. On the other side was Elinoire. She had been thrown to the ground and her wand was laying a couple of meters away from her, completely out of her reach.

Upon reaching the entrance Villin was extremely surprised but because of what happened next he had no time to question why Elinoire was there.

“You bitch, take this! Archinae!” one of the blue-haired boys yelled before a pitch-black streak made its way toward the girl on the ground.

Even though Villin had an opportunity to block the spell, he didn’t. He already saw Elinoire as a bad person, she tried to steal their belongings and belonged to the school that nearly killed them. Even though Villin usually wouldn’t care much about the latter point, his opinion changed when she stole from them.

When the black streak hit Elinoire, she yelled loudly, a faint black glow emitted from her entire body as her screams became louder and louder, she began thrashing around on the ground in agony.

After three seconds of this, Villin couldn’t watch it anymore and spoke up, alerting the boys of his presence “Don’t use such a spell. There’s no need to be so cruel.”

Villin felt the situation had gone too far as the boy showed no intention of halting the spell. He already thought he had gone a bit overboard himself the last time when she stole from them. Now they were just plainly torturing her, for something she probably didn’t do.

The boy casting the spell continued focussing while the second twin looked at him. “The girl is the Decorus princess, back off friend, no need to stick up for someone like that.”

Even though the boy made a bit of a threat, he didn’t show clear hostility toward Villin. Nonetheless, three more seconds had passed and Elinoire was still thrashing around as wildly as she was in the beginning. Some drool was coming from her mouth and her eyes started losing focus as tears flowed out of them.

Villin never considered himself as a good person, nor did he care about being one. Despite all that he didn’t really consider himself cruel, seeing a girl being tortured was too much, even if it was someone he considered his enemy.

In all the books he read some alarming things were stated. Prolonged torture could cause the web to be ruptured, something that was almost impossible to fix. Villin steadied himself as his sense of justice prevailed. This was too far, he couldn’t let the girl be tortured like this while he was there, and trying to discuss the fact with the twins before him would take too long.

The blue-haired boy couldn’t tell when Villin was casting since he didn’t have his wand in his hand, he just seemed to be in thought.

When he realized something was wrong, Villin already had a fireball in his hand,

As soon as he saw the fireball, the boy in front of him realized what was going on as he raised his own wand.

They both paused at the same time, Villin had his arm arched back and the boy was aiming his wand toward Villin.

The first twin had also halted his spell as he realized something happened to his left.

“Let her go, that’s enough,” Villin said with the ball of flames still inside of his hand. The boy that was aiming his hand at Villin was also hesitating, Villin’s spell was said completely silently while it looked quite threatening. Even though he had confidence in the ability of himself and his brother they were both tired and his brother was almost out of magical energy after casting his spell for ten seconds.

It was also this brother that put his wand away first “It’s alright we’ve already taught her a lesson.” he said to his brother who then also lowered his wand. Then he looked toward Villin who also let his fireball dissipate.

“What’s your name?” he looked at Villin squinting his eyes.

Villin knew leaving his name might cause trouble, but at the same time he didn’t plan to hide in The Academy, furthermore, it wasn’t like there really was bad blood between him and the twins, they were unlikely to cause trouble for such a thing, hell, Villin even thought they might realize they went too far when they left, similar to how he had.

“My name is Villin, Villin Grey,” he replied calmly. The twins looked at him before leaving, allowing Villin to have a look at Elinoire.

When Villin crouched down to see how she was doing he noted she had fainted. As for her body, it was mostly alright, the worst wound was actually the severe bruise on her neck he had caused. She only had a few other cuts because of the fight that just happened. Normally Villin would’ve found this odd. After all, who would lose without really being wounded but right now he had no such thoughts, he was worried about her current mental health and the health of her web.

He picked her up and started walking toward the dormitories. If he had been thinking more clearly he would probably have found it extremely odd that she was in the halls so early in the morning, and just a dozen meters away from him at that.

But alas, everyone had times where they didn’t think clearly. And even though Villin didn’t have any positive thoughts about Elinoire, he didn’t wish for her web to be ruptured. That would be too cruel a fate for any magus.