"First Year Initiate: Azi Glenn. For your insults against our great headmaster and failure to succeed. You are hereby expelled from this academy.

  Azi cannot believe the words she is hearing. Expelled? After all the work she had put in to get into the academy in the first pce. Eight months of her damned life trying to gain a foothold into the academy, all crashing down over a single snide remark.

  "B-But I—" The words catch in her throat; she knows nothing she says will change their minds. Ever since she entered the academy, opportunities had slipped from her grasp because of them.

  Azi fell to her knees, tears already welling in her eyes. "Please…"

  "Save your pride, damnit! I can't believe a prospect, even a failed one, of this exempry facility would dare beg." Azi looked up, meeting the eyes of the man who sat at the center of the academy's board.

  Dricus Howl. The headmaster of Gux Academy and the cause of the whole disaster. She had once thought the headmaster was kind and generous, even going so far as to allow her into the academy despite her background.

  She was wrong.

  It had only been a joke. A stupid, innocent joke. But Dricus had not cared. The moment he heard the joke, Azi had been dragged straight before the academy's board. A bunch of talentless hacks who paid their way into power rather than earning it.

  Everyone knew: the only ones with real power in the academy were the headmaster and a handful of professors.

  "Initiate Azi will henceforth be stripped of the privileges bestowed upon them as a student of Gux Academy of Spiritualism." The man to her left spoke, his voice booming throughout the rge chamber.

  Azi grit her teeth, holding back a myriad of emotions ready to burst. If only she had power…

  "Any and all belongings given to the named as part of their curricu will be returned to Gux at once. Tuition paid for the current year of education will not be reimbursed." Her heart sinks; maybe she could have lived with the humiliation of being expelled. But the money? It hadn't been hers in the first pce.

  A combined effort of her family and friends back home, upon learning of Azi's potential, paid for her year at the academy. Potential she had squandered and wasted, unable to contract with even the simplest of spirits.

  She gnces around the room, her gaze met with only sneers and grins as the board of hacks enjoys every ounce of her suffering. Except for Dricus, even in the man's supposed anger over the joke, his expression had not once changed. One might have been led to believe he didn't care, yet here Azi was.

  The crier continued, ying out the terms of Azi's expulsion with fir and spectacle. But Azi's focus was locked, burning with a smoldering rage towards the man at the cause.

  Perhaps it had been bad luck; maybe it had been pnned from the start. Azi didn't care; she swore to right this wrong in whatever way she could.

  Lifting her head once more, she met the gaze of Dricus. The man shifted in his seat, resting his chin against his knuckles as he looked down upon Azi.

  And grinned.

  = = =

  "Of course it's raining…" Azi sighed as the rge oaken doors to the academy smmed shut behind her. The rest of her 'trial' had been a blur. A million thoughts and emotions ran through her mind, all of it for naught. "And who builds an academy out here in the middle of nowhere!"

  She sighed again; it was a long journey to the nearest town, Dalia. The academy had been built upon a severed mountaintop hundreds of years ago and had signed a pact with the surrounding kingdoms. No settlement shall be erected within miles of the academy.

  And that was not all. If the forest surrounding the academy had been normal, she could have taken a shortcut. But every sane person knew that trekking unprepared through a spirit wild was certain death.

  Spirits, the entire reason Azi had come to the academy in the first pce. Years prior, she had learned from a passing seer that she possessed the qualifications to contract with spirits. A talent formally known as spiritualism.

  Azi had come to Gux Academy hoping to harness that potential and contract a powerful spirit. But because of how te in life she learned of her potential, it had been impossible.

  "Stupid mud…" Azi trudged the winding road that snaked its way up the mountain. She sighed again; what else could she do other than sigh? The journey from Gux to Dalia was five hours on a good day.

  And a good day it was not.

  Rain began to pour, softening the already tacky mud road to the point Azi struggled to keep her bance. Lifting her pack over her head, she used it as a makeshift umbrel, trying to keep the rain out of her face.

  "They're going to be so pissed…" Azi shakes her head; thoughts of the reaction waiting for her serve no purpose. There was already enough to deal with, and it was beginning to get dark.

  She rounded a sharp bend in the trail, staring out through a break in the trees. The faint, glittering lights of the distant city penetrated the psing darkness.

  The halfway point.

  Azi sighed subtle relief; the first half had been a trek, but she was making good time. She might even make it to town before all the inns close up for the night.

  "I can't wait for a warm ba—"

  THWIP

  Instinctually, Azi turned toward the sound, catching a brief glimpse of something in the tree line before.

  Pain erupted in her left arm. Raising the pitiful ntern brought from home, she freezes. A crimson stream of blood trickles down to her fingertips from an arrow lodged in her arm.

  "W… Wha..?" Azi barely had time to process the arrow before a second arrow was loosed, followed by a hoarse voice from the tree line.

  "You're supposed to hit the legs, you idiot!"

  "It's dark!"

  The second arrow misses, barely grazing against her calf. However, the panic had already begun to settle in. Bandits? This close to the academy? A dozen questions rush through her head.

  "It's a paid job, you moron. If he skims our pay because you damaged the bitch, I'll neck you myself." The man grumbled as he unsheathed a bde from his hip.

  She needed to run; every inch of Azi's brain screamed at her to run, but her legs wouldn't budge. If she could make it into the tree line, perhaps she could lose them, but what then?

  "Just grab the bitch and let's go, and maybe pick a job that isn't in the rain next time." The man with the bde sneered at his partner.

  "How the fuck do you imagine I do that, read the damn clouds? I'm no damned seer." His partner replied, retrieving a rope from the pack on his back.

  Run, Azi, run!

  Frozen from her shock, Azi dashed, holding the arrow steady in her arm as she broke from the treeline. The adrenaline coursing through her body began to wane, and a dulled, aching pain jolted through her arm with every step.

  "Aaaaah, we got a runner!" One of the men bellowed.

  "A runneeeeeerrr!"

  Azi gritted her teeth and kept running. She vaguely knew the forest surrounding the academy, a benefit of outdoor csses she took. If she kept running down this slope, she would make it to the-

  "Here, missy missy~" One of the men whispered against her ear.

  "Huh?" Azi's mind froze, causing her to stumble over an overgrown root and tumble down the rest of the slope.

  "Aaa!" She screams, a burning pain erupting from her legs. Broken? She couldn't tell; that didn't matter; she needed to stand and to run. Where had the man gone? She had lost her ntern in the fall, the pitiful light vanishing into the dark, rainy night.

  Darkness surrounded her as pain filled her body. She squinted into the bck, trying desperately to make out anything.

  "Looking for me~?" One of the men mused against her ear again. Azi whipped around, trying to fight back, but it was too te.

  The man grabbed her arm, lifting her off the forest floor with ease. "Ah ah ah, not this time. As fun as a chase is, not in this rain."

  His partner appeared shortly after, deftly binding Azi's ankles with the rope.

  'Ah, I'm so stupid… if they are…'

  In the dim, rainy moonlight, the man holding her arm grinned. His figure is that of a man, but changed ever so slightly. His posture is hunched, and he stands on the balls of his feet. The ghastly outline of a tail wags behind him alongside two simirly translucent hound ears that flop down over his own.

  A hound spirit. Strangely, it reminded Azi of the hunting instructor's spirit, though far weaker by every comparison. But that weakness didn't matter; she had no spirit, and she was never going to get away.

  "W-Why are you attacking me? This is Gux Academy; don't you know—" Azi's words are cut short by a fist against her cheek, knocking her into the cold, wet mud.

  "They always beg." One of the men scoffed. The two men bind Azi's wrists, ensuring she could not escape.

  "Easy enough job, those academic types always overpay." The man's partner commented, kneeling down over Azi's motionless body.

  "Yea, well, let's get her into town and get out pay. I'm sick of this rain." The man began to lift Azi but something stopped him. The rain that had been pouring with no end in sight had strangely vanished.

  "B-Brother…" The kneeling man stammered.

  A faint glow began to illuminate the forest surrounding the three. Both men looked towards the sky and froze. Hovering above them, silent as the night and most deadly of all. A creature of legend, some believed to be nothing more than a fairy tale. The apex of all spirits and the dream of spiritualists everywhere.

  Hovering above them was a dragon.