My Soul card is a Reaper

In the grand auditorium, all the students and teachers, both visiting and hosting academies, attended to hear the academy headmaster's speech.

As a supreme realm expert, he commanded respect from everyone sitting around. The whole place was in pin-drop silence as if the headmaster was talking to himself.

It's not like he was giving an important lecture or anything. Just a predictable boring speech given by a senile old man but everyone's concentration was quite high.

If there's anyone who looked disinterested, it is probably Azzy. And there's Aaron, who became too wary of Azzy's presence around him more than ever.

The speech went on for like 15 minutes before he ended by giving everyone his wishes for luck.

Once he was done, one of his deputies took over. And there's a change in everyone's expressions. They felt like, "Ugh, not him…" 

Jonas Meier, the administration vice principal of the academy, spoke, "The events will start at post lunch. The venue and timings were posted on the notice board outside of the administration building."

Jonas was reputed to give lengthy speeches. Hence, it took everyone by surprise when he only spoke two sentences. Furthermore, there is no smile on his face. It was as if his mood was sour at the moment.

And people could vaguely guess what it can be. Azzy felt several gazes over him for a while as he tagged along with the others.

The news regarding the destruction of the academy's treasure has obviously spread all over the academy quite quickly. And this brought a huge amount of attention from the students from even other academies.

Soon, the competitions began.

The elites were quite curious about how the students from the Emerald Academy would fare.

However, the reality turned out to be quite disappointing.

For the whole day, Emerald Academy students underperformed and the academy ended up on the last of the rankings table.

As the Arcana Festival is an academy event, the scores of the participants will be added up every time an event is over. The top 3 winners of each event will receive the scores and the rest gets zero.

And Emerald Academy is sitting on the last with a zero score. The top of the table is obviously the Dragon Academy, unsurprisingly, followed by the Heavenly Academy, and then the Light Academy.

The teachers as well as the students expected to underperform but they didn't expect they wouldn't even match the Light Academy too.

People stopped paying attention to them as the Day 2 performance was also repeated. Even the star teachers, including Flora, couldn't bring a point to the academy in any event. Since no one is performing great, Aaron didn't bother to give his all and lost to other vice principals in chess. It gave him the perfect reason to hide his real abilities.

All of them received mocking glances from fellow teenagers. The depression was so high that no one from Emerald Academy ate their lunches or enjoyed the snacks. Even Azzy was affected but he knew that he cannot help them as he wasn't confident. He was only 17 years old and didn't think he could actually compete with fellow teachers.

The only place he was confident is his battle skills. That is why he never bothered to give reply to those who told him that he should have registered for other events too.

After numerous events, only one was left. It was where Emerald Academy should have the hopes of achieving something. 

For that, even Azzy dropped his plans to send Raydon and Ace as a team. However, surprisingly, Raydon comes with Serestia and tells him that they are going to team up.

Since Serestia isn't the one who had the original contract with Hydra, she opinioned that anyone can replace her. Aaron also readily accepted their proposal for the sake of upholding Emerald Academy's dignity.

The junior tournament started with a maximum of two representatives from each academy per category. The first category is solo, then, duo, and finally, the 7-member team. The format is a knockout round.

As for the senior tournament, it is only the solo category and Duo category where Azzy and Snivy are representing the Emerald Academy. They will also be participating in both categories. 

It is not a world-class tournament where the general public is allowed. Hence, there were no hosts to introduce the participants. It was just one of the vice principals of Dragon Academy who was acting as the proctor. Azzy recognized him in one glance.

This is the same old man who tagged along with the Dragon Academy during the champions league and he demanded justice for his students as Azzy punished them by damaging their soul orbs in the final. 

He didn't address the audience (students) and just called the participants to the arena to start the final event of the festival which was allotted the highest score.

For this event, the Dragon Academy's principal has revealed one of the treasures for public display. It is called the Mirror of Erised. The mirror can be enlarged to any size as long as enough soul energy was poured into it.

Its function is simple. As long as its sunlight is reflected into an area, it creates an invisible barrier over it and the people standing outside of this barrier could see all kinds of traps in the mirror. It also works as a video camera that records the battles and later shows them to the public in slow motion.

The Dragon Academy intended to use this opportunity to enhance the knowledge of the students later on by recording the performance of experts from other academies.

Azzy and other teachers were at the stands as the participating students entered the Arena and stood together with fellow academy students. 

In the middle of the arena, a huge concrete platform of about 200mx200m in size was erected just like the other battle tournaments.

The Proctor directly started the event by calling the competitors for the solo category.

It was decided that Emerald Academy will battle the Heavenly Academy and the Light Academy will be facing Dragon Academy so that these top-tier academies could meet in the final.

The solo category has a slight breath of relief for the Emerald Academy as Ace managed to win the first match, but in the next match, he battled the 6-circle realm expert who won against 10-A's Prince Daniel Eranyl. He ended up losing. 

Still, he won against the other losing semifinalist from the Dragon Academy, giving the first score for the Emerald Academy.

Then, enter the duo who never worked together despite being classmates for several years.

Some are worried because of that and some are hopeful because of the earlier success. Of course, their individual strengths should also be taken into consideration.

Their opponents were two high-rank-5 Arcana Masters but with the possession of treasures in their arsenal. 

Both of them were twins of the Vine family, the princesses of the Llyne nation. And it's not just their faces, even their attributes, personalities, thought processes, soul energies, and the Arcana spirits were identical to each other. Both of them were beauties and enjoy a great degree of popularity too.

It is their strength and also their weakness too. Firstly, one usually cannot come up with a new idea that the other one didn't get it. And secondly, because of their tight bond and identical thinking, they fell in love with the same boy a couple of times in the past, but people cannot give the same attention to two partners even if one is interested in openly dating multiple girls at the same time. The breakup is inevitable.

Coming to the battle, both of the sisters had summoned large white tigresses, and then traditional man-made sabers but of earth grade (rank-10). On the other hand, Serestia summoned a staff while Raydon summoned the off-white dagger in his hand.

All of them are in gold grade, and even though Raydon has a higher soul power, it is clear that the one with beast-type Arcana has the greater advantage in a battle. It is like a 2 vs 4 battle rather than a 2v2 battle.

Everyone except the Emerald Academy was confident that the twin sisters will win this battle.

Eventually, the proctor blew the whistle too. The twin sisters took charge and went on the offensive with their tigresses.

Serestia raised her staff to launch a defensive barrier over her and her teammate. But, Raydon left her without any warning and charged forward, intending to battle against his opponents, by himself.

"Rayd…"

Before she called him out, Raydon surprised everyone once again by turning into a shadow and disappearing into the ground.