Once the matches for that day were over and they were all back, everywhere was buzzing with talk about all that happened that day.
By that time the dorm hallway was louder than usual by the time Leon made it back, with other students still buzzing from the preliminaries, clustered in doorways and along the corridors.
As he he walked past on the way to his own room, he couldn't help but catch parts of conversations about himself.
"—guess his opponent just wasn't taking it seriously."
"Right, Seth's third year but he's never been ranked that high anyway. Not exactly a name."
"Still, it's a win. Even if the guy wasn't top tier, he's still a third year."
"Yeah, but come on, everyone knows Carter's summon is trash. He probably got lucky with the redirect."
Leon walked through it without slowing down.
There were some certainly interesting takes. He was not offended by any of it, but even then, he couldn't help but think how much the original Leon had it bad. Thinking about it though, the guy was from a particularly prestigious family after all, this much was normal.
Just then he walked past a group near the stairwell and they fell quiet as he passed, then picked back up in lower voices the second he was far enough away not to be listening. He let them have it.
'Not sure that's normal behaviour, but ok?'
Raul and Dustin had gone ahead of him, so they were already in the room by the time he got back, and just like everyone outside, they were also discussing the fight that happened.
"Yo, Leon. Can you believe it? They're saying Seth underestimated you," Dustin said, arms in the air as he expressed himself, clearly annoyed on Leon's behalf. "If I wasn't there it'd be one thing, but come on! That thing didn't even look like it was trying that hard and it still wrecked a Grade 3 summon in under thirty seconds."
"People believe what's easier to believe," Leon said.
"Yeah, well, it's stupid." Dustin shook his head. "Even if Seth wasn't taking it seriously, he's still third year. Doesn't matter how unranked he is, that's still two years of training over you."
"Don't mind him, he ended up in quite the heated argument about it before he reached the room. Had to drag him away." Raul said, though quiet as always, just watched Leon for a moment. "You don't seem bothered."
"I'm not."
Raul studied him a little longer, like he was trying to read something underneath that answer, then let it go. "Alright. We'll see you later, going down to grab a bite."
"Sure. Make sure you have your keys, in case you don't find me inside when you return." He said.
"Of course." Dustin replied, while Raul just shook his keys in his hand before sticking them into his pocket.
Leon himself didn't linger around for too long. After a quick bath, he came out, had a change of clothes, then left the room.
As always, he walked to an empty area just close to the dorms. He no longer chose to go to the forested area, instead he had found an unused section of their building, where he could be sure he would be discreet without being noticed.
This part of the day had become quite the familiar process.
The door answered before he had even fully settled into the reach for it, materializing in the middle of the room with the same low theater it always brought, the temperature dropping by degrees as the death energy rolled outward and pooled at the edges of the space. The carvings along its surface seemed to illuminate strangely, just as always.
From within the door, the familiar weight of something ancient and patient breathed out from the dark beyond the threshold. There was always a bit of drama.
Leon watched expectantly, waiting to see what would walk through.
Certainly not to his greatest surprise, it was a skeleton warrior.
Same greatsword, same build, same fixed posture he'd seen dozens of times now, nothing new about the type. He'd long since stopped being disappointed by another one of these and accepted his accursed gacha styled summoning.
With a soft sigh, not really disappointed, he reached to store it in his summoner's space the way he would always… unless, nothing happened.
Leon paused.
He tried again, focusing more deliberately this time, expecting the familiar sensation of the summon settling into that internal space where the rest of his collection waited, but the reach came back empty.
'Well that's new…'
He frowned and tried a third time, more carefully now, actually paying attention to what the space was doing rather than assuming it would simply comply the way it always did, and this time he felt it clearly, 'Is that, a wall?' He thought to himself.
'Did these things every have capacity limit?' He wondered. It wasn't something he had ever heard of.
But then again, thinking of the fact that nobody in the history of Summoners existing had ever tried—not that they could if they wanted to—to raise an army of summons, it made sense.
He stood there for a second with the new skeleton warrior standing quietly beside him, greatsword resting, waiting for an instruction that wasn't coming yet, while Leon processed the fact of the new development.
One might have wondered why he wasn't panicking, but then again, that wasn't really in his nature, and certainly not with this kind of problem.
He went through his summoner's space carefully, one entry at a time, actually counting rather than glancing over the collection of undead the way he usually did. He had gathered quite the plethora of them, some more interesting than others, a few he genuinely hadn't looked at closely in weeks because there had never been a reason to, especially as they were low rank.
After a brief stock taking, he realised that he already had fifty undead skeletons of different kinds inside, and that appeared to be the limit for the time being.
'Well that goes my plans and ambitions.' He thought to himself. And here he was thinking about how he would build an overwhemingly plenty army of skeletons, now this?
That was the part that actually caught him, not the wall itself but the fact that he'd built an entire strategy around unlimited accumulation without once confirming whether the space he was accumulating into had no bottom.
Perhaps, after seeing that vision at the beginning, he had assumed he would naturally control such a mass scale of an undead army… 'Perhaps this is all part of character development? Even games have a growing portion allotted the protagonist, right?' He thought to himself in consolidation, his dream was not over! Only starting.
If reading countless manga and watching a crapton of anime had taught him anything, it was that very fact.
'Great, now I need to suffer this cruel fate and let go of my precious undead.' He almost shed a tear.
The plan, up to this point, had been simple. More undead equaled more options equaled more power available to draw on whenever a fight called for it, equaled overwhelm the enemy when all else fail. Every night was another card added to a hand that was only ever going to keep growing, and the entire logic of how he was building himself had rested on that continuing indefinitely.
That logic was gone now. Or at least, it had a ceiling attached to it that he had not accounted for.
Now, the new question wasn't 'how many can I get', it was 'which ones are actually worth keeping'… and that was a completely different kind of problem.
Well, it wasn't one that scared him, exactly. He'd played enough RPGs in his old life to recognize the shape of it immediately, with party management, unit slots, and such. It wasn't unfamiliar as a concept.
It was just unexpected as a limitation on something he had assumed had none, and above all else, stressful.
'And I never even liked tactical RPGs to begin with,' he thought, staring at the wall that had just appeared in front of him. 'I was really looking forward to an unending army.'
The skeleton warrior was still there, standing and waiting, greatsword resting quietly against the floor, entirely unaware that it might be the first ever summon to be dismissed without retention.