With a burst of screams, several escaping students fell down from the gray sky from various directions. Only one managed to leave the mirror during his fall.

On the ground, a person in a large robe casually glanced around at the falling students. His muddy eyes showed nothing of surprise. A gust of wind which carried the smell of the First-years Trial blew and lifted up his robe, revealing his extremely ugly face. It was covered in numerous, black and red bumps, which further spread over to the skin on his neck and below. He looked like a disgusting toad!

"What's wrong with my master, why did he ask me to expel a guy that belongs to the Black Tower at such a moment? How annoying this task is! Fine, let my 'babies' collect that poor guy's body information since he is gone." The man in his robe murmured.

While the Black Shadow was speaking, glowing creatures the size of small dots forced their way out of his repulsive bumps one after another. They then gradually spread out their wings and swirled around in the air.

These buzzing "dots" were creatures similar to mosquitoes!

Through some arcane mental connection between the man and the mosquitoes, he gave an order and the hundreds of thousands of these "mosquitoes" flew around and started to collect the target's information. Soon, the mosquitoes had faded away into the distant sky.

"Just hurry up and collect some marks. Hope that woman has left section 12 and went somewhere else. Otherwise I'll have to deal with her ice tubes and that bloody bird. That would be troublesome. " Holding his magical crutch, the man faded into distance.

If somebody had a closer look at him, he or she would notice that the mark of the School of Campus in section 12 was on the man's bump-infested forehead.

In section 15.

With the sharp snap of fingers, a person who was fleeing was suddenly stopped in the sky. It was as if the person had been attacked by some invisible shock wave. The person then exploded and became a cloud of blood. The slaughter was similar to the scene when Fake Faceless had slaughtered the sailors and students on the ship.

The attacker felt the recently added chain mark on his forehead and murmured: "It's strange this student didn't destroy his badge at the first sight of me. Only a very few guys have the courage to do so in this section."

Amidst cloud of blood, grains of sand and dirt fell down from the high-rising stone columns. No ordinary students could damage the columns in this forest.

The attacker flipped a badge with his thumb, caught it with his hand, and repeated these gestures.

Suddenly, he flipped it so hard that the badge was shot away as quick as a bullet. The man didn't even care to throw a look at it. He just complained: "Hear what noise this trash is making! Why did my master give me such trash? Don't tell me he wanted me back at the school that has kept me for 100 years. No way! That place is bloody boring. Maybe only the Holy Tower of Seven Rings will bring me some fun in fighting against foreign worlds."

At the thought of fighting, he started laughing furiously in his coarse voice.

"Forget it. I'm so bored in collecting marks in section 15. People either fled or destroyed their badge as soon as they saw me. That's no fun at all even if I get the 'prize'. I'd better go to the other sections and try to have some fun there..." He said. After a clear clanging sound, the man flew up and disappeared immediately into the which were full of columns.

THe strange point about him was the fact that his chest had a bowl-sized hole that went through his body. In the middle of the hole, a metal ring clanged at the rhythm of a human heart.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back in section 12.

The nauseous sensation of getting transferred finally stopped. Sam adjusted himself after the space transmission, opened his eyes and saw the dark sky as well as the skyrocketing stone columns.

"Are the columns built specifically for students who will take the Holy Tower Tryout?" Sam pointed to a column and flicked his Dark Crow element towards it.

The element hit the column and spread but left no trace on it.

"As expected," said Sam. He quickly spread out his black wings, and flew to the sky. He finally stopped and perched on the top of a column and looked around. Dozens of eyes appeared on his face, each blinking and looking around consistently.

He appeared like a monster.

The eyes looked very different. Some were scarlet, with a white pupil of in the size of a pinhole; some were apricot and had black, vertical pupils each; some were like the eyes of flies. There was even a snail-ish eye on his forehead looking like the ones on the face of Greed Flame Giants.

In a blink of an eye, all of the eyes disappeared. There was no emotional change on his face and he fell into deep thought.

"The columns are getting taller in this direction. Does it lead to the center of the designated area of section 12? There are four similar forests beyond this one, corresponding to the other four schools. Laid in this way, I think the rule is for us to collect the marks inside our own territory and then those who are powerful enough will go to the others for further collection. "

"These signs..." Sam flew to a column and studied the signs on it, which were invisible to ordinary people.

A moment later, he mumbled: "The signs are part of magic matrixes: for life waves searching, positioning, space transmission and so on. But...this one is...energy conservation enclosement?!"

His voice trembled. He seemed to be in great fear of enchantment sorceries.

It took Sam a long while to calm down. He then said to himself: "There's no way the Holy Tower would do this to the students. It makes no sense at all! Maybe the Holy Tower Tryout has encountered some changes. Maybe ten days later unexpected things might happen."

Sam flew away from the column, but his mind was still on the enclosement signs.

"The more power the enchantment sorceries carries, the more likely they're to be neutralized by external energy. But when the battle is one on one, and when the practitioner is fully prepared, the enclosement may be the most powerful. But its vulnerability to third-party interruption and the time-consuming preparation make it more suitable for high-level creatures in their suppression against the lower level ones, or for massively gathered lower-level creatures to fight against a single higher-level creature. But for fighting between people with equal powers, this sorcery is seldom used."

He shook his head abruptly. "No! I mustn't take the risk. I need to find some teammates to make sure I'm at an advantage."

Therefore he took out his crystal ball and tried to contact, in his opinion, qualified teammates.

Based on his actions, Sam seemed no less farsighted than Glenn.

Before the majority of the students could understand the loneliness a sorcerer was going to face, Sam had already tried and made friends during his school life.

The solidarity of his friendships was nothing the same as the one existing among Lafite's team though.

"Sam, you're around. That's great! I can also roughly sense that Kyrie and a student who arrived at the school before us. If we four stick together, we'd fear no students, even though our enemies are the four head men in charge of the four major leagues," said Bionna. She smiled like an angel, showing great excitement on her porcelain-like face.

Upon hearing of 'another student', Sam recalled Roga, the student who nurtured water and earth elements at the same time.

With his power...

Sam thought carefully for a moment and stopped contacting the others of the Death Sail League. He nodded to Bionna and said, "Okay, I'll come to join you...wait a moment, the second batch of students are just transferred here. Let me collect some more marks first."

"Sure."

Bionna looked up at the sky and answered with excitement.

Sam spread out his black wings and then plumes of black smoke began to come out of his body. The smoke moved surrounding his body and gave off an image of a giant crow. And as for Sam himself, his body began to be covered in the thick smoke as his eyes burned with blue flames.

The atmosphere was ominous.

With a whirring sound, Sam moved his hand in front of his eyes and gradually pulled out a sword which was giving off blue flames. As the sword was drawn out from his eyes, the flames in his eyes disappeared.

He then shot himself to a target as if he were a black torrent with a tint of blue. The student being attacked became totally dumbstruck at the sight of him.