Oz fell into a routine over the next couple of weeks as the beginning of semester approached. He started his day at the gym, working with the Physical Club to push himself.

  Then there was study.

  Despite his earlier worries about the Ozzer taking over his brain to study, it was not that Oz had been a bad student. He was just average. Aiming for the minimum needed to enter the Ranger Corps. If he had just aimed at being an army grunt his grades and attributes would have been well above the cut off. The army was after all keen to get everyone it could get, hell it even took those with abysmal grades, but they often had to do remedial training at a local scab lands base.

  The army did not want to pay to relocate a load of crayon munchers. Crayons, while plentiful, were more expensive in central districts.

  Doing basic training only a few towns over would have been unacceptable. That would have meant being stuck surrounded by the rusting street signs, the dust that got everywhere, and the sneering looks for another six months before getting shipped off to wherever the army wanted him.

  That was why he had been aiming for the Ranger Corps. Higher standards and they would have shipped him to one of their hidden training centres.

  Oz’s new task of remaining at the academy had initially felt insurmountable. More memorisation, more staring at numbers till they got nervous and sorted themselves out, more looking at old tests to work out how to pretend the answer to a question like “Why did Champion Darielaz denounce Architect Otmon?” was anything more than “Otmon was a thieving bastard who was chatting a lot of shit”.

  He would be screwed if the Ozzer was not a total nerd.

  Oz did not actually have anything against nerds, if anything he liked them. They left him alone, only occasionally gloating when they knew things he did not.

  The Ozzer was just a lot.

  It was not just the way he hijacked his brain, forcing him to focus, drowning him in knowledge that he drank up by the bookshelf.

  It was the endless questions.

  The Ozzer was never happy in knowing part of something, he was voracious. Presumably he would stop when he knew everything about a topic, but so far that had not happened because the slagheap went on tangents. Angie did not help with that.

  Oz had opened up about a lot, but explaining the Ozzer was a step too far. So when his housemate and fellow scholar sat with him to help him study she was only too happy to indulge in discussions that took them far off the beaten track into the dark woods of academic theory.

  This was not helped by Oz’s own nature.

  Oz’s teachers, in a desperate attempt to give some positive feedback, often remarked on how focused he was when he decided to apply himself. Put a challenge in front of Oz? He. Got. It. Done. The challenge right now was to absorb enough information that he could pass for a Scholar and not spend his whole time asking stupid questions that would expose him as getting in through merit of his fists.

  If Angie had not explained just how “competitive” the Dynasty kids were likely to get when hearing that Oz might have just revealed it.

  Many big names had failed to get through on that path. People who would take exception to being outperformed by some guy from the frontier.

  Noxarcer would keep him safe, but Oz already had enough enemies and did not fancy adding more.

  So despite the headaches he got, and the odd sensation of rising out of a fugue state to find a stack of notebooks to his side, he persevered.

  Oz learned about dungeonomics, which seemed to be maths, logistics, and psychology all rolled into one. Given that dungeons were meant to offer rewards that made sense, what he had not realised was how complicated the whole process was. Apparently the economies of entire realms could be destabilised by dungeon loot.

  This generally got the dungeon core cracked. Professional teams came through at a much higher tier and steam rolled the defences, till they forced the core to be exposed. Destroying it, and everyone tied to it.

  Oz paid extra attention to that.

  Then there was Duneoneering, which was basically the art of the difficulty curve, spacing the traps, monsters and loot at the right pacing to keep delvers interested. It read like a guide from a predatory casino.

  The rest he skimmed through enough to have the language down. There was no way he could fit years of education into two weeks, but he did at least manage to know most of the words so he could start to nod at appropriate moments. He enjoyed reading the combat manual in particular, learning more about the very much written rules of engagement in a dungeon turned it more into a spar in his mind and less a desperate struggle for survival that he had unconsciously started to perceive it as.

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  However it gave him an itch.

  His afternoons involved sparring with Angie. The wolf rabbit combo opened up a whole new range of options for her in combat. She was a backliner, her focus outside her Overseer advice was in potions. She knew enough alchemy to create enhancement potions and some poisons. She could defend, and would be good at protecting others on the backline, however her true focus was on empowering her team.

  Combat was something she had to know, but had never been her focus. She was used to rapid strikes and fades. Her wolf transformation did seem to encourage her to be more aggressive, and she was learning how to manage that.

  She was getting better, agonizingly slowly.

  He had also finished out his build, [Stance of the Menhir] had thankfully fit into his class skills. The power allowed him to massively boost his defences as long as he maintained a low stance that favoured very little leg movement. [Move Earth] had taken up his last skill slot, but that was temporary, apparently they would all be given a skill from the academy’s library after the first couple of weeks once they better understood their classes.

  With [Stance of the Menhir] improving his defence and [Move Earth] giving him the ability to create uneven terrain and occasional shields he had tried to train more. He had practised a bit using it with Angie, only problem was that he ended up overwhelming her too quickly.

  Oz tried to ignore the growing itch at the back of his brain.

  His evenings were time devoted to working out on building up his stock of runes, and practising using his new skills. Paint Spray most of all.

  He made a couple of runed axes, and another pair of throwing knives. The enchantments were relatively simple but enough to turn the flint into something sturdy enough to hold out in a fight. Hoodlum seemed to like them too. Playing around with [Vandalize] proved he could use it help his crafting but any use of it near the runes caused all sort of issues. It seemed the power to interfere with runes or spells that was mentioned in the skill's description didn't mean he could just hit any part of a magical tool and expect results.

  The itch was all consuming.

  He focused on other things. He went into town and spent some of the money. That was its own challenge as he had needed to start ambushing the devil cabs, they had somehow got word out about him, and if he was not careful would swerve away to avoid him. It felt strange to have it, and to be faced with such options before him. He ended up picking up some heavy set rings to wear across his knuckles. It was part his dwarven nature, it was between them, dragons and goblins for who liked shiny things most. It also gave him a great weapon.

  He knew enough about the law to know that carrying a knuckle duster counted as a weapon, but a set of heavy rings, heavy rings he had carved with runes for durability and protection? That was just jewellery or at most a protective tool.

  If anything, sorting out those was a bigger problem, that made his fist itch. Tools were made to be used.

  He was briefly distracted by meeting his two new roommates who arrived in the week before term started.

  The first was a Dynasty student who surprisingly arrived before the beginning of term. Angie let him know this was normally avoided as it was seen as being a bit desperate, like you could not arrange your own travel. However for the first proper Dynasty student he had met apart from the guy from the Physique Club, she did not seem so bad.

  Helia was an Orc who Oz only ever saw briefly in the kitchen or in the gym. At both locations they rarely shared words and just nodded to each other, acknowledging each other's presence before working on their business. She seemed a woman of few words and he could respect that.

  The second arrived about five days before term started. He was a Gnome named Milo Glittershank. Oz and Glittershank got along like a house on fire with some assault and battery thrown on top. The Gnome's collection of knives was impressive. Oz could not wait to spar with him.

  The itch was driving him crazy.

  It was after he again spent most of a spar against Angie giving advice while his friend tried her best to cut him up that he decided he needed to go find some relief.

  Oz was itching for a fight.

  Years of constant fighting, sparring against his father, and brawls with the kids from Greywater meant that Oz had unintentionally come to expect combat on at least a weekly basis. Teaching Angie was like a coffee addict switching to tea, it just did not cut it.

  Worse was he had all this power and no way to test it.

  He had spoken with Oxley, and the minotaur had told him that he could not fight anyone at the academy. The risk of them realising that something was off about his level of power was too high.

  Fighting Oxley or Foxglove was out, as both were too busy for a proper bout.

  Which was why, on one of his visits to the Opal, when looking at the gathered graffiti around the wrong side of the train tracks he spotted a flyer advertising something that got his blood pumping.

  An all comers Tunnel Fighters competition. It even had an E tier category.

  Oz did not ask Oxley about this. The Ozzer did not approve, but Oz justified it as thus.

  He had been banned from fighting anyone who did not know his situation in Noxarcer. Ergo if he fought people who had nothing to do with Noxarcer he would be fine. Well not fine, he would still be pummelled a bit but that was the point.

  The chances of any Dynasty kids being there was zero, and next to no chances of the scholars being there, he had met a few more scholars outside Angie, and he had found that they tended to lean towards the more bookish disposition, or would never dabble in something that might get blood on their straight laces.

  Oz was meant to be an adult after all. The people who poisoned him were a whole realm away with no idea where he was. It totally was not unreasonable to go out to a sketchy fight club on the bad side of town and throw hands.

  He would be fine, practically no one died in tunnel fights anymore.

  Finally and most importantly, if someone tried to kill him now, he would just respawn back at Noxarcer. His soul had recovered enough that he would even mostly survive the experience.

  It was this infallible logic that he headed out one night, ambushing a cab before it could flee and getting a lift down to the city. He ignored the Ozzer's complaints and enjoyed watching the graffiti fly by.

  The likelihood of meeting anyone who had even come within a hundred yards of Noxarcer was minimal.