William unboarded the airship with unit-1 on an unfimilar land.
As soon as the students unboarded, several conversations flared among them as students looked around.
The camp looked less of a training camp and more of a station engaged in actual battle.
Several military officers and soldiers moved around, minding their own business, and did not pay any heed to the newly arrived students.
The whole camp was a circular formation of single-floored, low-rise wooden pavilions and barracks.
In the center was a command pavilion, and around it were the rest of the buildings.
The ground seemed compacted by special means, but even the most ignorant onlookers could see that the whole camp was just made for utility and not things like aesthetics and comfort.
As the students and teachers boarded down from the ship, Major Bloodrose came to the forefront and looked at the students, instructing them to follow her.
As William walked through the entrance with others. He and almost all the other students looked around the camp in curiosity.
Though they were the top students of the top academy in the whole world, they maintained discipline and walked in straight lines. Nobody wanted to test the waters and see how strict a militairy punishment was.
It was common knowledge that in any form of military, there were norms that should not be broken, and strict discipline was a must.
Otherwise, the punishments were harsher than the actual training.
Soon they were escorted to a clearing with a minimalist wooden stage in front of them. The students were instructed to stand in neat lines while Bloodrose, along with the professor of the A1 section, climbed the stage and stood there straight, facing the students.
The students maintained utter silence.
After exactly two minutes an imposing middle-aged beast-folk man with mature wolf-like features and white hair tied into a ponytail walked towards the stage. He was flanked by several officers who stopped below the stage and turned to stand in rigid military postures.
The officer was wearing a much more sophisticated militiary uniform than the other officers.
The uniform’s color indicated his battalion, which was unsurprisingly dark green, indicating he was part of the main army.
The most common uniform of the celestial army, which was worn by the main battalions that engaged in large-scale operations and frontal wars agains demonic armies, was made of a dark green heavy fabric. It consisted of a double-breasted coat. adorned by two rows of gold buttons and other golden accents.
What made this man look special was the amount of insignias, epaulettes, and golden honor medals decorated on his coat.
The students looked at the man that had just walked up to the stage.
They immediately understood that this man’s rank was higher than Bloodrose’s since they saw her saluting to the man along with the other major ranked officers.
The Wolfkin officer walked up to the stage silently and turned to stand at the center of the stage.
His aura was intimidating for the students. They could picture the number of lives this man had taken by his bare hands for him to carry such a presence.
"Cadets," he spoke, and his first word boomed across the students.
"My name is Colonel Draven," he gave a small introduction.
"As a colonel, I should not have been here during the induction of new cadets, but times have changed, and this induction is definitely not a regular one."
"I have been told that you guys are first-year students at the World Academy, and normally I would not even think about taking in such younglings under me, but as circumstances are right now, the higher-ups have decided to prepare you folks for the hard times ahead of us."
He then scanned the faces of everyone and continued, "I don’t even need to mention how bad the situation is."
"First-year students of the World Academy standing here on a celestial army base camp is the strongest indication that peaceful times are over."
"I welcome you all to the 6th base camp of Celestial Army Western Command."
"For your information, we are not far from one of the abyssal nodes of the western front."
Draven spoke and let the revelation sink in, he saw tensed brows and grim expressions on the students’ faces, but he didn’t find what he was looking for, and that was fear. Draven nodded in satisfaction.
"It seems like Principal Adrea didn’t lie, she really sent her top 100."
before students could get happy by the praise the colonel landed another blow.
"Unfortunately for you guys, that maybe more of a curse than a blessing since you were commissioned to a very critical zone, where skirmishes with demonic entities and cultists are as common as clouds in the sky.
Draven spoke with a smile and then continued, "I do not wish to scare you. I just want you all to adapt fast and harden your hearts since surviving the training camp won’t be easy, the training will make you feel like dying"
"You guys will be training with the regular soldiers and will go through tests designed by the army at the end of these four months."
"Remember death is not a choice in the army; the greatest driving force that forces a person to adapt, learn, and survive is the fear of death, the primal desire to survive, and that is what shapes a common man into a soldier, and those soldiers shape the future of the whole civilization."
The students remained standing, listening to the speech by the colonel.
His words, when spoken, the way he twisted them, somehow hit these students harder.
Not everything was clear to them, they were unaware of how big the actual crisis everyone was fussing about really was, but on a fundamental level, they all agreed with Draven.
These students had faced the cultists head-on during the trials, and they were not completely unaware of how it felt to face a crisis and navigate when your own survival is threatened.
William was lost from the speech completely right now since his attention was occupied by Tamasya, who informed him about the reason why the academy had been emptied out.
She told him about the impending attack of demon lord bellial and the shortage of Light stones supply.
Tamasya didn’t bother with the other parts regarding Yue’s strange behavior since she reasoned to herself that it didn’t concern William much right now.
The only thing William was informed about was Demon Lord Bellial targeting the academy and the church cutting off the supply of light stones.
For William, who heard this piece of information, everything fell into place; he finally understood about the gap he had descovered in the formations while using the Array hijacking stamp.
At that time he had sensed some crucial light-based formations not working like they should be on the academy premises, so now he understood the resources that the academy was short on were the light stones.
Light stones were a type of elemental stone that were crystalline forms of pure light elemental mana.
Theoretically, every element could have an elemental stone, but these stones were not common at all in nature.
These stones were a natural creation orignally and were found in extremely scarce quantities in nature due to various reasons.
William knew that this ’light stone mining’ excuse was a facade played by the church.
Instead of mining, the church had a special way of producing such stones artificially that only the high echelon of holy son empire were aware of.
The church sold and monopolized the market with their artificially created stones that worked almost the same as natural ones.
"Isn’t there any other alternate of light stones that could run the arrays maybe in the shop?"
[Well light-based monster or beast cores might help, but such beasts are a rarity, and their cores might not act as a good source, other sources available in the shop might be considered treasures on this continenet]
William heard the system; to be honest, he did not like the church monopolizing such stones and wanted to steal the recipe from the start. The only problem was the how??.
Going against the cardinals of the church was not an option and when he had asked the system for the recipe,the cost had made him puke blood.
"Oh well, I can just purchase the recipe from the monthly purchase, maybe something even superior to the elemental stones"
For William, other things had taken precedence over the method of creating elemental stones when it came for the monthly free purchases.
Sure he could sell those and earn a lot of money but doing it straight without any established channel was a sucide, thankfully he had a budding organization under him now and such additions would help it’s growth.
He had earlier reserved that purchase for when he would start learning about arrays and formations, but it seemed that was not the case now.
William decided to purchase the elemental stone recipie after the purchase of much anticipated mental hive, for that was more important in his mind.
Fortunately in two days the purchase limit would be over and he would establish the mental hive among his slaves that would help him gather information at his finger tips.