Rae sent out a maze of webs as she darted around the room, terrifying the students whose eyesight was good enough to keep track of her.
“That should do it. She built an obstacle course around your existing course, made of sticky spider silk. If they catch one strand, it will ring the bell in the middle of the room, and if they catch a bunch, they will just end up tangled.” Karl explained, with a gesture toward the bell, which was now the focal point of dozens of strands of silk.
“How much light do you need to track movement?” The teacher asked.
“Zero. I can detect movement decently well even with absolutely no light, but in this room, and in their uniforms, it would be nearly impossible for me not to detect them unless they were truly invisible.” Karl explained.
“Jeff, activate your stealth skill.” The teacher instructed, and one of the boys seemed to simply vanish into the shadows.
Even thermal vision seemed to have a hard time finding him, so the skill was magical and not just a simple trick.
Karl nodded. “I should be able to track him, but not easily. Rae might do a bit better because she’s got the superior senses.”
“Alright, Jeff, you’re up first through the obstacle course. Everyone in the class has a button, they press it when the student in question activates the button at an obstacle. If they get it right, it means they have seen through the skill. It’s how we work on our stealth.” The teacher explained.
The dark-haired boy began to creep through the obstacle course, focused on keeping his stealth skill active as he approached the first obstacle with a button. But his eyesight wasn’t as good as Karl’s and just before his hand reached the platform, a soft jingle echoed in the room as his leg bumped one of the web strands.
He had to resist the urge to cuss and give his position away, but the effort he was putting into his skill was giving Karl high hopes that his [Skill Master] technique would allow Rae to learn it by watching it fairly quickly.
With visible relief, Jeff made it past the first buzzer, then immediately turned and stepped without looking and found himself stuck immobile in the spider web. The boy cursed as he struggled to get free, and only got himself more stuck. That made his stealth skill fail, and now the whole class could clearly see his predicament.
“Alright, I will cut him free, and we will keep going. Remember, there are spider webs, and you have to watch for them, not just run the route by memory.” The teacher admonished his stealth class.
The reason for the dimmed lights became obvious with the second student. His ability let him blend with the darkness, but not as well as the first, though his footsteps were rendered almost silent. Not enough that Rae had a problem following him, but enough that the other students would.
He was also agile, and doing a decent job of evading the spider webs as he made it to the first button, and then the second. Karl briefly wondered if any of these students knew their skill well enough that Rae might learn anything, but all he could do about it was to just watch and hope that something in Rae’s mind clicked and let her understand the trick.
Learning something new was usually down to the quality of the instruction that you received, but the teacher wasn’t showing off skills here, and honestly, the students weren’t much better at hiding themselves than Rae already was with her ability to change her exterior coloration.
But even though the stealth training might not be as helpful as Karl had hoped, the Bloodbath Spider was having an incredible time making security traps out of her web for them to try to move through.
It was a great exercise in tactical and practical thinking for the young spider, and as she kept adjusting it to replace the strands that were broken as the students kept running into them in the dark, she was getting better at placing them in just the right spot that students would unwittingly step into ones that should be easily avoided.
The teacher was nearly laughing by the time that the last student stumbled as she made her way over a low web, only to get another across the face, and then fall into the tangled web attached to the room’s central bell.
The bell jingled wildly as the girl flailed in the webbing, and the others began to laugh softly.
“Rae, would you mind going to help her out?” Karl asked, as the girl was now fully cocooned in the sticky silk, after rolling over in a vain attempt to escape.
The spider stalked across the room, nimbly avoiding her own webbing, while blended perfectly to the colour of the flooring. Half of the students couldn’t even see how she was avoiding the webs as she went, only her main body, which was large enough for them to keep a close watch on.
Once she got to the struggling girl, Rae cut a bit of the webbing free and picked her up with her front legs to consider how best to get her free of the tangled mess.
This, predictably, caused the student to panic at being millimetres from the vicious mandibles of the Bloodbath Spider, and flail even more, which only increased the entanglement.
But Rae had a simple solution. If she couldn’t easily pull her free, she would cut her free.
“I suggest that you do not move for this part, of you will end up having your uniform cut off you along with the webbing.” Karl warned her, and the student went completely still in Rae’s grasp.
The other students also fell silent as they realized that Karl was serious, and that this was an actual Bloodbath Spider, fully capable of cutting through them and not just the sticky silk they had all gotten caught in today.
But once the student was immobile, Rae easily slit the silk and let it fall down around her legs, before returning the student to her professor, carried on the armoured front legs like a gift package.
“Thank you, Rae. You did a fine job.” The teacher laughed as he accepted the delivery and lifted the girl out of the spider’s embrace.
With the class finished, they took a break for lunch, where Sergeant Rita looked expectantly at Karl, who had called Rae back into his mental space, to keep her from teasing the students.
Karl shook his head. “I don’t think that they’re good enough with the skills for Rae to learn them that fast. The better the teacher, the faster the results. I have a much better than usual grasp of Rend, and I could barely teach it to the Nekomata. So, I think we will either need the advanced class to teach her, or one of the professionals.”
[The problem is that they’re not better at hiding than I am. What am I supposed to learn from them? They can’t even properly blend into the surroundings, just cloak themselves with magic, which I can smell.] Rae complained, making sure Karl knew this was not her fault.
“Alright, we can work on something else. There isn’t any particular rush to get them improved, but in a way there is. The Bureau is looking forward to a return on investment, and that essentially means proof that your class can advance a magical beast beyond what it would normally be capable of.
Not just by feeding it resources, but through some innate part of your class skills.” Rita explained, while Alice nodded in agreement.
The mage smiled at them both as she began to explain. “The results are already excellent, and the beasts have already proven themselves superior to Golems, as well as proving their rapid growth speed. But in order to reclassify your marking, they want proof that it can do the exceptional, like the handful of off brand class markings that have led to Overlord Rank Elites in the past.”
That sounded like a big goal to Karl. There were only a handful of Elites above Royal Rank, and even the Royal Rank Elites who were out to the public were celebrities. Just suggesting that they would want him to make it to that level put a lot of pressure on Karl, but for some reason, Rae and Thor didn’t seem all that concerned.
Hawk knew he was already well beyond what most Windspeed Hawks would reach, it was just difficult to prove that wasn’t the result of the resources they had gotten. But with so little available for the other two, it would soon be clear that they were going to be greater than any other of their kind.