Hero or Villain, Both

"It's too dangerous." Nerina said without any hesitation.

The looks on her face and the faces of the teacher made it clear that they didn't plan on negotiating this at all.

However, it wasn't as if I was about to let this chance escape my grasp.

This was the only way that I could go to that place without raising any suspicion, so I had to convince them to take us with them.

"It'll be safer for us to go with you than to stay at the main camp. At the same time, we'll be able to help if we come with you."

The teachers clearly didn't seem to agree with this, but I just summoned out the two medium grade spirits to show them a display of might.

When they saw this, they couldn't help hesitating. Especially since they could feel the power fluctuations that were coming from these two spirits of mine.

These teachers might be teachers of the Verdant Academy, but they only had medium grade spirits themselves. Most of them didn't even have two spirits, most of them only had a single one that they contracted.

So in terms of spirit magic, they were actually weaker than me.

In terms of mana, they might not be able to match me either since I had the shared mana pool of six different avatars.

But that wasn't something that they knew, so they thought that they were superior to me in magic.

After seeing these two medium grade spirits, it seemed like they were slowly wavering.

That was when I pulled out the two green shards that we had gotten from the boss monsters that had spawned.

"I think that this should be more than enough to show how strong we are."

They were all surprised since as teachers, they had naturally attended the Verdant Academy before. They had also gone on the field trip just like we currently were doing and knew what shards of the level that I was holding meant.

That was why they couldn't believe that we actually had shards of this level.

After a long silence, Nerina finally said, "Stay close and listen to all orders that I give you. If you don't, then I'm sending you back right away."

A smile appeared on my face when I heard this before I said with a nod, "I'll listen to all your orders if you let us come along."

Nerina gave a sigh before waving at the teachers, "Come on, we've already wasted enough time. We need to reach the core as soon as possible so we can take care of this situation."

The teachers nodded in agreement, but they also moved so that they formed a circle around us.

Even though they had agreed to let us come along with them, it seemed that they were still intent on doing their jobs as teachers and wanted to protect us.

I didn't say anything as I followed behind them since that was the condition for us to come along. There were plenty of chances to help later, so there was no time to argue now.

Though the one thing that I found strange was how agreeable Fae was.

From the beginning, she had been the one that had opposed all of this and didn't seem to want to go along with this at all. But now, it seemed like she wasn't saying anything about this now that we were following this group of teachers.

Was it because she just accepted that it would be safer or was it something else?

Regardless of what it was, it didn't matter right now.

The most important thing was reaching the place at the center of the forest.

However, it wasn't that easy to reach that place since the forest itself was in a mess.

After leaving the area around the main camp and heading a bit deeper into the forest, there were monsters that suddenly came to attack us.

However, the teachers didn't allow us to fight as they stepped forward to take care of these monsters themselves.

There was a reason why they were teachers that were in charge of the trip.

The monsters that appeared were just like the ones that we encountered this morning. These were monsters that were a mix of two different animals, which made them more powerful than the monsters from yesterday.

But even then, the teachers were able to handle these monsters without a problem.

Or that would have been the case if it wasn't for the number of monsters that appeared.

It seemed that as we headed deeper, there were more of these monsters that were present.

It didn't take long before our group was actually surrounded by these monsters.

With how they were surrounded, it was clear that it was getting harder and harder for the teachers to deal with them.

That was when I pulled out my bow.

When one of the teachers seemed to be in a bad position, I didn't hesitate to release an arrow.

"Pop!"

The teacher was shocked to see the head of that monster pop in front of them, but then he slowly turned to look at me before bringing the other monster that he was facing into my line of sight.

When I saw this, I didn't hesitate to shoot another arrow.

The other teachers naturally also took note of this when the one teacher that I saved started helping them as well.

In response to this, they also started creating line of sight for me to shoot the other monsters that were here. Since they were creating these lines of sight for me, there was no reason for me to reject them as I shot out more arrows.

In no time at all, the monsters started falling one by one until there weren't any of them left.

Once all of the monsters had been taken care of, the teachers couldn't help looking at me with strange looks on their faces.

But I just looked back at them and said, "There's no time to waste."