Necromancer Academy’s Genius Summoner - Chapter 121

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Summoning Genius of the Necromancer School — Chapter 121
“On behalf of my brother and the royal family, I offer my apologies.”
Princess Molly bowed deeply in contrition. Simon waved his hands in alarm.
“No, no, Your Highness!”
“I swear on my name that neither my brother nor Dresden will trouble you again. Since I’ve slipped out without permission, please allow me to make a proper apology later. Thank you.”
She disappeared with a female student dressed as a maid. Simon let out a breath of relief.
With her backing, he had no reason to fear Andre’s retaliation.

* * *
The Practical Assessment had ended without incident, and Simon was in the club room repairing the Overlord when this happened.
“Listen here.”
Benya, who had been helping with the work, spoke up.
“You said you’re taking Professor Aaron’s class, right?”
“Yes.”
“What are you learning these days?”
Simon paused to think, then answered.
“Well, now that I think about it, lately we’ve been focusing entirely on zombies while setting aside skeletons and other undead.”
“……Zombies?”
At the mention of zombies, Benya’s expression hardened and he stopped working. Deo, a second-year who’d been lounging on the club room couch as usual, lifted his head slightly.
“Yes. Is there a problem?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. But if you’re studying zombies now, it won’t be long before…….”
Benya shook his head slowly.
“You’ll be heading ‘there.'”
“There?”
“……Ahhhhh!!”
A sudden scream made both of them turn their heads.
Deo was tearing at his hair and thrashing about.
“……Damn it, I told you not to bring that up! First-year trauma is coming back!”
“I thought it was fun though!”
“……Fun, my frozen backside — just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.”
Benya laughed loudly. Simon merely glanced back and forth between them, confused.
“At the end of Professor Aaron’s zombie class, there’s an important field exam.”
Benya explained.
“It might seem a bit horrifying at the time, but looking back now after a year, it’s become a fond memory~”
Over Benya’s shoulder as he spoke of memories, Deo wore an expression that seemed to say ‘poor guy, you have no idea what’s coming.'”

* * *
Not long after Benya brought it up, a field exam was officially scheduled for Summoning Studies. It was a fairly large-scale assessment that blocked out an entire day.
The meeting point wasn’t the usual Summoning classroom, but rather the Teleportation Magic Circle that they often visited when going on assignments.
This could only mean one thing: they were leaving the island of Rocke.
[How interesting. Take me with you!]
When Simon told Pier what he’d heard from Benya, Pier expressed keen interest.
‘Why does Pier want to go?’
[I’ve been wanting to check that place out anyway! You were definitely planning to stop by during the break.]
Pier’s eagerness pointed to one thing exactly.
[The zombie commander of the Legion, ‘Prince,’ is likely to be there!]
A lead on a new Legion commander.
Simon was, of course, all for it. Having squandered his chance to acquire Bigcrum, he wasn’t about to let any possibility slip away.
There had been no word of Kizen inspecting subspaces, and according to the seniors, once the field exam began, they would have freedom to move about—so Simon accepted Pier’s suggestion.
And so came the day of the field exam.
Simon placed Pier and numerous skeletons from the Legion into his pocket dimension, then arrived at the Teleportation Magic Circle.
‘I’m hungry.’
He’d gone all the way out to Pier’s Ruins early this morning, and his stomach was growling.
Sitting in the shade of a suitable tree, munching on wheat bread he’d bought from the school shop—
“Simon!”
Kamibarez came running down the slope, waving her hand.
Her face always wore a bright smile, and there was something about her warmth that made anyone who saw her feel good too. Simon smiled and waved back.
“Hey, Kamibarez.”
“May I sit beside you?”
“Of course.”
She settled into the seat beside Simon, drew her legs together, rested her elbows on her knees, and broke into a grin.
“You seem to be in a good mood today.”
“Yes! It’s been so long since we’ve all done a group practical assessment together!”
That was true. Aaron had made it clear that this practical assessment would be conducted in groups according to the team composition from Jane’s class. Even a glance around the cafeteria showed Class A students clustered with their teammates, deep in conversation.
“I’m a bit worried, actually.”
Simon mumbled through a mouthful of bread.
“About what?”
“The club seniors told me this practical assessment is supposed to be really tough.”
“Oh, I heard that too! They said Class C went before us and came back completely drained—apparently they were out of it for the entire next day’s lesson.”
“Oho! What’s going on with you two, huh?”
Simon looked up.
Dick was standing over them, his mischievous smile widening—he’d appeared without anyone noticing when.
“You two are getting along so well! Wow, looks like we’ve got ourselves a couple!”
“Dick!!”
Kamibarez shrieked, her ears turning crimson. Simon simply shrugged and went back to gnawing his bread.
“That’s not what this is!!”
Kamibarez bounced in front of Dick, clapping her hand over his mouth.
Dick kept squirming and muttering “Mmph-mmph!” through her palm, while her face flushed scarlet with embarrassment and she smacked his forearm repeatedly.
‘Looks like Kamibarez is the only one who’ll actually play around with me,’ Dick thought to himself.
That was when Merin arrived.
“Hey! Leave our Kamibarez alone!”
Merin approached with her sky-blue hair streaming behind her. Dick shrugged.
“I find it a bad habit to condemn someone without hearing the full story.”
“Yeah, your regular conduct.”
“Wow, that’s harsh.”
Merin shook her head.
“I still cringe thinking about how I fell for your smooth talk back at the start of the semester and made a fool of myself.”
“Oh, so you’ve built up immunity now?”
“Obviously!”
“Confident. Want to test that?”
Dick suddenly bent forward and placed his hands on his knees in a suggestive pose. Merin’s response came coldly and precisely.
“Ah, I’ve been standing in this ‘position’ so long my legs are getting stiff—why don’t you ‘touch’ them for me?”
……
Dick’s expression froze. She’d predicted his next line word-for-word.
He shifted awkwardly, trying to play it off, then switched tactics and stretched his legs wide open instead.
“What, you’re trying to beat me to the punch now?”
“Damn it, how did you—!”
“You can only milk the same old bone so many times before it goes bad. Rehashing it over and over until it’s nothing but ash—that’s just pathetic.”
“That’s amazing, Merin!”
Kamibarez applauded enthusiastically, cheering. Simon was now watching Merin’s counterattack with undisguised interest.
Dick’s face suggested he was facing the crisis of his lifetime.
“Wow, this is something I was saving for a special occasion, you know.”
“Stop spouting nonsense and get ready for the practical assessment.”
“Now I will attempt to recreate Merin’s signature victory pose.”
“Signature?”
Merin’s expression grew uneasy.
“When you won in the final assessment, it was something like this.”
Dick crossed his arms. With his left arm tucked above his navel and his right arm raised toward his face, he straightened one leg while bending the other slightly to emphasize the curve, striking an exaggerated, tilted stance.
Then, brushing back the hair at his temple with his right hand, he flashed a smug smile.
“Try harder, commoner~”
Pfft!
Hehehehe!
Other students who’d been watching in curiosity burst into laughter.
Simon spit out his bread into the grass, Kamibarez quickly covered her mouth, and Merin herself flushed scarlet with mortification.
“Ha-ha! It’s exactly right, isn’t it? Now let me try another pose——”
“Don’t you dare, you idiot!”
Merin yanked a bag out of her pocket dimension and started beating Dick with it. He crashed to the grass, reeling from the blows, and took a thorough one-sided pounding.
“Another beating ending!”
“Die!”
Joyful laughter rippled across the field.
“Ha, this is absurd.”
A female student among Hector’s clique let out a scoff.
“Seriously, she can’t read the room. We don’t even know where we’re going and she’s just sitting there all calm—stop laughing, you idiot!”
“Ow!”
She struck the back of the male student standing next to her.
While everyone was exchanging spirited conversation,
“Listen up.”
Aaron finally appeared.
Every student’s eyes went wide.
Instead of his usual disheveled t-shirt, shorts, and slippers, he emerged wearing a coat trimmed with black feathers.
‘Wow, so clothes really do make the man.’
‘He looks completely different.’
While the students were quietly marveling to themselves, Aaron spoke in his characteristic languid voice.
“No time for dawdling. Everyone, get onto the Teleportation Magic Circle.”
Aaron sent the students ahead without any explanation. As they stepped onto the magic circle, Aaron arrived at the center last.
Whirrrrrrr!
It was a familiar sensation of teleportation now. Simon felt his feet lift off the ground and closed his eyes.

* * *
He opened his eyes.
Simon felt as though all the images formed in his mind from stories he’d heard from seniors and rumors simply vanished cleanly. This place exceeded anything he’d imagined.
A black world.
Simply standing in this space and breathing made him feel ill.
The sky was pitch black, and here and there something like crimson clouds drifted, forming unknown currents of air. Weeds grew across the ground, and there were things that might have been flowers, but all had lost their vitality and looked withered.
The public’s assessment of calling this the Land of Death seemed accurate. The other Class A students who had come through the teleportation also bore expressions of bewilderment at this alien and desolate sight.
Rustle.
Kamibarez clutched the hem of Simon’s clothing with a frightened face. Simon gently patted her shoulder while reassuring her in a soft voice that everything was all right.
“Pay attention.”
Aaron, wearing the black-feathered coat, stepped forward to the center. The students crowded around him.
“Don’t panic. This is the southern region of the Shahad Kingdom on the continent. A place called Deathland.”
Aaron began his explanation.
“Deathland is counted among the continent’s ten greatest mysteries. Powerful Dark Magic cast upon this place mixes with natural phenomena to create bizarre occurrences, and the most representative example is this:”
Aaron picked up a faded flower lying on the ground.
“In this region, the concept of decay does not exist.”
Tap.
When Aaron tapped the flower with his finger, it crumbled with a dry crackle.
“When living things reach death, after a certain period passes, they don’t rot and decompose—their forms are preserved. Because of this characteristic, this place is called”
Aaron’s lips curled upward as he continued.
“the paradise of zombies.”
The students’ faces drained of color. And indeed, strange, eerie sounds that seemed to come from zombies could be heard intermittently from all around them.
“This Summoning practical assessment will proceed as a group project, as we announced beforehand.”
Aaron spoke while looking at the Wristwatch on his wrist.
“You’ve studied zombies up until now, and you’ve even learned the magic circles that create them. The evaluation is simple. Until the appointed hour, create the finest Summoned Zombie you can gather from this Deathland and show it to me.”
Simon’s eyes widened.
‘…A mission to create zombies!’
If that were the case, bringing natural Undead scattered throughout Deathland would be useless. Only Summoned Zombies created by the students’ magic circles would be graded.
“The evaluation criteria include the zombie’s completeness, originality, combat ability, and the magic circle used to raise the zombie also factors into the score. There are no teamwork points. All four of you will receive identical scores and rankings based on the performance of the zombie your team brings.”
Aaron’s expression darkened into a sinister smile.
“I hope there are no cowards whining about mere zombies. You are Necromancers. Approach this assessment in a manner befitting that title.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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