'If having one destroyed felt like that...' He exhaled slowly, the full implication of the thought settling over him. If his collection grew, and if he ever needed to bring multiple summons out simultaneously, the spirit energy requirement alone would become a serious problem. He wasn't anywhere close to that kind of capacity yet. The pain from his first skeleton's destruction had dropped him to his knees in front of three hundred students. Scaling that up was not a comfortable thing to imagine.
'So it's not the clean transmigrator's cheat I was hoping for.' He sighed, and it was the particular sigh of a person revising their expectations downward while still maintaining a general optimistic outlook.
With nothing left to do, he made his way back to the dormitory.
The students gathered outside and in the common areas were talking amongst themselves about a sudden wave of death energy that had washed over the campus grounds a short while ago. Nobody seemed to know where it had come from. Several theories were being exchanged with varying degrees of confidence, most leaning towards the possibility of a gate opening within school grounds. Leon walked past the conversations without contributing to any of them, headed straight to his room, and spent the remainder of the evening with Dustin and Raul before turning in.
While Leon had been careful with his movements and maintaining secrecy, that much was only good for the students.
. . .
The following day brought sparring sessions again. Surprisingly, the first skeleton, which Leon had named Bone Head no.1, had recovered from the damage it received, returning to full functionality. This was the perk of undead.
He confirmed it the moment he accessed his summoner's space that morning. The skeleton that had been shattered clean through by a charging Grade 2 Bison beast the previous day was standing in his internal space with the same quiet, ready stillness as always, greatsword in hand, no visible evidence that anything had happened to it at all.
Leon stared at it for a moment.
Most summons, receiving damage of that magnitude, would be looking at a month of recovery at minimum. And even then, full restoration was not guaranteed. The summoner's space accelerated healing considerably compared to leaving a summon in the physical world, but there were still understood limits to how fast the process could work.
Apparently those limits did not apply here.
This was certainly the perk of undead, he noted. He filed it away carefully. It was the first concrete advantage his situation had produced that didn't come with an immediate and equally sized complication attached.
His sparring match that day came and went without drama. His opponent was well-mannered about it, which Leon appreciated, even as the outcome remained the same. The boy he faced had awakened a Grade 3 summon, which placed him in the top tier of the entire cohort, seniors included. More than ninety percent of the school fell below that threshold. Leon was not in the ten percent. This was not surprising. He went down, acknowledged the loss cleanly, and returned to the observation seating.
The difference this time was that there was no particular sting to it. He knew what he had sitting in his summoner's space. He knew what the door was capable of and had done twice now. The people around him whispering their assessments of Leon Carter and his Grade 1 skeleton and his evident ceiling were working with incomplete information, and he was the only one in the room who knew it. That knowledge sat quietly and comfortably in his chest while the commentary washed over him. This piece of knowledge alone gave him great comfort.
'I need to find a way to build my spirit energy,' he thought, watching another pair take the floor. 'If I can't sustain multiple summons at once, the advantage disappears before it becomes an advantage.' That was the problem he needed to solve. Everything else could be managed around it.
That evening, at the same time and in the same spot behind the dormitory, Leon made his way back to the secluded space and prepared to call the door again to summon another undead monster. He had checked already, and truly, the door had appeared once again.
He never got the chance.
Before he got the opportunity to summon the door, though, he found his world warped and spun into a spiral. It was more like the space he was standing in simply decided to be somewhere else, and took him with it without asking. The ground, the trees, the evening sky, all of it spiraled and compressed and was gone in the same instant, replaced by something entirely different before he had processed that the change was happening.
He hit the ground. Not badly, more of a graceless drop onto his back end, but the disorientation that came with it was significant. He sat there for a moment, blinking, waiting for his sense of where he was to return.
'I didn't even feel as though I got hit.'
He rose his head trying to wash off the discomfort he felt mentally. He had long been expecting to get bullied in some way physically, as was the trope of these kind of stories from the bunch he had read, but that had yet to happen. Experiencing this now, he might have been wrong. This wasn't that. Whatever had just happened to him had no aggressor he could identify, no presence he could feel retreating. Just the sensation of being moved without consent and deposited somewhere else entirely.
He looked up and took in his surroundings. 'Or have the bullies gone up to manhwa and young master level?'
All around him was stone wall, not exactly, it was more like the walls of a natural cave in a way. The place was dim, the air carrying the particular quality of a space that was deep underground and had been for a long time. There was only one direction available, which was forward. The passage ahead stretched into darkness, and the darkness ahead had the weight of something inhabited.
Leon sat on the ground of that chamber and stared into it.
'No way.'
He already knew the answer before the thought fully formed.
"A dungeon?"