"Oh wow, Jack! You made it! I wasn't sure you could come!" Silvia said with a broad smile on her face as she went to greet the group of people that just came in, taking turns to exchange basic pleasantries with everyone before showing them inside and letting them know where the party was actually happening.

  While she stood there, chatting with whoever came in to be an actually good host, as opposed to Ryan and Modak who had barely said 'hello' to a handful of people so far, someone else came into the building. It was a guy a few years younger than most of the other people here. Of course, she recognized him, since Ryan had shown her some pictures of him before.

  "Hey! You're Michael, right?" she asked excitedly, "I'm Silvia, Ryan's roommate, it's so nice to meet you!"

  "Oh, uh..." Michael nervously looked at Silvia and nodded his head, "Yeah, that's me. It's nice to meet you, too. Uhm..."

  "Ryan's out back, come on," Silvia, who had already had a little to drink by now and was well on her way of leaving the 'tipsy' category behind, hooked Michael's arm and brought him outside. Of course, Michael was taken aback, not used to someone being as touchy as Silvia was so quickly, but just decided to follow along.

  Outside, there were a bunch of people sitting by the edge of the pool, with some of them swimming and having fun. Of course, since alcohol and swimming wasn't a 'great' mixture, Ryan was out here keeping watch together with the spirits while chatting with Kim, Macy, and Mark from the former 'Aglecard Brats'. The other two, Jasmin and James, were hanging out elsewhere, mingling with people and having fun.

  However, seen Silvia approach with Michael in tow, Ryan raised his brows with a smile, "Oh, hell yeah, you made it! I wasn't sure you were actually going to come!"

  Ryan approached Michael and greeted him with a hug, patting his back as he did before pulling back, "You want a beer?"

  "Uh... can I? I don't really drink a lot," Michael laughed nervously, and Ryan shrugged.

  "Of course, why not? Don't overdo it, and you'll be fine. I'll keep an eye on you, don't worry," Ryan said with a smile, approaching one of the beer crates standing by the nearby bar. He grabbed a bottle, held the bottle's neck against the edge of the counter, and then slammed down on the top to remove the bottlecap before giving the beer to Michael. They quickly returned back to the round Ryan was standing with before, which Silvia had now joined as well.

  "So... where were we?" Ryan asked, looking back at Kim who took a sip of his beer while thinking about it, leaning against the standing table next to him.

  "Uh... You were talking about the heroics license stuff, Kim responded, and Ryan clicked his fingers with a nod.

  "Right, that was it!"

  Michael looked over a bit surprised, "Wait, you're getting your heroics license? Are you sure?"

  "Yeah! I mean, why not? A lot of the spirits have combat abilities or ones that are useful for things like rescue. It's a great way to help them level up more," Ryan explained, "The process of getting the license is such a fucking pain in the ass, though."

  Macy scoffed, "Didn't you say that the dungeoneering license took you a day to get? Typical."

  "Well yeah, it's kind of weird, but it makes sense... kind of? Dungeoneering effectively just affects you if you fuck up, but heroics is specifically about helping out others. So it makes sense one is harder to get... right?"

  "Yeah, but like, two months and two hours is a pretty stark difference, isn't it?" Mark added, while Ryan just shrugged.

  "I mean, I don't really care. I just need to get the required hours in the class, then take the tests, and I'm good," he pointed out, looking over at Michael, "What about you, do you know what you want to do with your class later on?"

  The other three, beside Silvia who already knew, looked over at Michael. Kim in particular raised his brow, "You're an Awakened?"

  Slowly pushing through his anxiety, Michael nodded, "Yeah, I'm a Hydromancer."

  "Oh shit, so you've got like, watery mana?" Macy laughed a bit, but Michael immediately nodded his head, actually pretty excited.

  "Mhm. I went to get checked out at the magic tower a couple of times, and they said they've never met a freshly awakened person with mana as close to a physical element as me," Michael admitted, though he felt awkward about bragging like that. Even so, since Ryan told him that he had every right to brag all the time, it was just starting to come out more and more.

  Kim laughed, "Yeah, sure, kid."

  "No, he's telling the truth," Ryan pointed out, "He's an 'irregular' Awakened. Michael, what's your level right now?"

  "11! Just levelled up the other day." he explained.

  "And what's your mana stat at?"

  "It reached 6 with that level up!"

  After a moment of silence, Kim snapped his head back and forth between Ryan and Michael, "His mana stat is 6? At level 10? What the hell are you talking about?"

  Michael laughed nervously, "Yeah, but in return... my spirituality is abysmal, it barely reached 0.5 by now. So even though I have that much mana, I can't really control it that well..."

  "You can say that again... But you've been getting better. With 0.5, you should be able to cast some of your spells more regularly, right?"

  "Oh, yes! I'm able to cast lowest-tier spells really well, even multiple times at once," Michael admitted, and Ryan raised a brow.

  "Wait, multiple? I've been doing mana-manipulation practice, and controlling multiple masses of mana is really hard, right? It feels like solving two or three math problems at once."

  Michael seemed a bit confused, "Uh... no, not all? It's still the same process. Right?" he looked over at the others in the circle for help. Both Silvia and Kim agreed.

  Though her magic expressed itself uniquely, what Silvia was doing when she 'painted' things was still a sort of magic that was presenting itself externally, so she had a much easier time relating to regular casters than Ryan. And Kim was an alchemist, who often had to keep objects, materials, or liquid solutions infused with mana over a long period of time, so the process was often compared to what spellcasters did to use their magic outside of their body.

  The half-orc slowly nodded his head, "Yeah it's like..." he glanced over at Silvia, coming up with a good analogy, "When you paint two circles on a piece of paper, you can acknowledge both circles at once. It's not 'one circle', and 'one circle', it's just 'two circles'. That's the simplest I can say it, really."

  Ryan narrowed his eyes for a moment, glancing up at one of the windows in the attic, "... Mhm. Okay. So... That's not how I've been doing it."

  The others were still confused, so Ryan patted the 'horn of shapeless water' and pulled out three small streams of water, manipulating them above his head. Though, right now, he was really just doing it to give form to the three individual orbs of mana that he was manipulating the entire time as per Morgana's instructions. Every 12 hours, she had him add another sphere to the mix. It was getting super annoying, but he figured she knew what she was doing.

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  What Ryan was doing of course drew the attention of some of the other party-goers as well, who were gathering around curiously, while the three magic users stood around Ryan with baffled expressions. Even Michael, whose spirituality was the lowest of the three, was able to tell that the process that Ryan was using was completely different to what was normal.

  Usually, when you used 'multiple' spells at a time, each individual spell was just an exact copy of the first in that series. Everything down to the mana signature. In something like these spheres, it would be visible through the same, or even synchronized, ripples travelling across their surface, but that was not what was happening at all.

  "I'm... I'm only able to cast multiple spells by expending a ton of mana... each subsequent spell-cast costs me about 30% more than the one before it..."

  "Huh? I mean, it's a bit tough to keep them up at the same quality, but these still just use the same amount of mana," Ryan seemed to be the most confused out of everyone, though the non-awakened onlookers were really just enjoying the view quite a lot.

  "Wait, have you also been doing this the entire time?" Kim asked, his voice lowered quite a bit.

  "Mhm. Morgana taught me that it's a good way to increase your familiarity with magic."

  "... You're running three different spellcasting processes while drunk? Do you have a skill to split your consciousness or something?"

  Silvia gasped lightly, "Wait, is it that?" she suggested, and Ryan looked back at her, slowly catching up to what she was thinking.

  "Oh, yes! I have a skill that let's me link to the spirits, and I can see through them and stuff, so it's like I have multiple minds in my head. It was really hard to get used to at first, but it's been getting easier."

  Since Ryan was finally talking about the spirits, instead of them just sitting around in the dark, almost hiding away where others weren't able to spot them that well, the crowd that had gathered started getting even more curious. Of course they were. Considering that New Riverside University had such a, comparatively, high amount of Awakened, everyone here knew at least a couple on a personal level. Obviously - otherwise they wouldn't be here today anyway. But Ryan was special even amongst the awakened at uni.

  As far as almost everyone here was concerned, Ryan had awakened to a unique class. Hydromancers and Alchemists, while not the most common, were still common enough that people knew the general range of their abilities. Soulspark Artist was a class that hasn't publicly shown up for quite a while, but those that were interested could at least figure out a couple details online.

  But Ryan? The 'Spirit Keeper'? Nobody knew anything about this class if it didn't come straight out of the horse's mouth.

  "What, do you guys wanna see something?" he asked with a slight groan, looking around at everything, "I'm not a performer, you know?"

  Though, just as he said so, Jester appeared on top of Ryan's head in a puff of smoke.

  "He is, though," Silvia laughed, hanging onto Ryan's shoulder, "Come on... you know what you've gotta do."

  "No, man, like... I'm not going to... I'm drunk, and if I..." all the deep stares from the people around Ryan were pushing him more and more toward a particular direction, and he just turned around with a loud groan while approaching the metal steps leading to the outside door of his bedroom, "I thought we were all taught that peer pressure fucking sucks!"

  Kim looked over at Silvia, "Is he going to..."

  "Mhm."

  "The jester one?"

  "Mhm~!" Silvia grinned broadly, "I love it when he wears that one, it's so cute. He doesn't usually wear that much colour."

  "Wait, what are you guys talking about?" Michael wondered, basically asking what all the other party-goes were wondering and muttering about, but Silvia just assured everyone that the wait would pay off. Though, for her, another payoff quickly came. As she turned around and was chatting with some of the people that had gathered, she noticed someone approaching in the distance.

  It was a woman with canvas-white skin and splotches of colour moving around in waves all over her body, from her feet all the way to the tips of her hair. Silvia excitedly pushed through the crowd, quite literally jumping at her girlfriend, wrapping her legs around Fae's waist before giving her a kiss, "You're so late! And here I thought you wouldn't show up!"

  "... And I thought I'd be able to get here before you're this drunk," Fae replied with a smile, leaning her head in while pulling Silvia closer to her.

  From what was essentially the small balcony of his bedroom that the steps were attached to, Ryan looked down at Silvia and Fae. If he was completely honest with himself, he was a little jealous. Obviously, not because he had feelings for either Silvia or Fae. The idea of having a crush on Silvia felt the same as having a crush on your sister - just wrong, through and through. And Fae? She was nice, but nobody he could ever see himself with either. No, he was just kind of jealous of what they had. More and more, especially since he was constantly surrounded by lovebirds in this damned house, he couldn't help himself but get more and more curious about what it was like to be in love, and whether he could ever find someone that he could really fall in love with.

  And it wasn't as though Ryan wasn't trying - since he had that conversation about love with Silvia during their run back then, he had been actually talking to people to see where things could go, but nothing ever felt right. Though, he did make a lot of new friends. His sociability stat certainly helped with that, too.

  Though... with the appearance of another one of the guests, who could count as a surprise guest at this point, it was time to get this show started. Ryan looked at the minotaurean lady walking in through the garden's side entrance. And so, Ryan pulled down the mask he had pushed up onto his head and readjusted his hood, making sure that the blue piece of glass in the shape of a spirit core around his neck was well tucked-in and wouldn't get in the way.

  He snapped his finger, and immediately linked with Jester. As the thread of mana appeared between the two of them, and Ryan began to see that clear view of his surroundings from the harlequin's perspective, he almost felt like he was sobering up right away.

  The spirit jumped down onto one of the tables in the centre of the group, pulling out a small stick out of thin air - a conductor's baton. To be honest, Ryan didn't know why Jester had so many spells centred around instruments, since he wasn't a 'musician spirit' but a 'harlequin' spirit, but he figured that wasn't the most mysterious things about the spirits anyway.

  Acting as though he was stretching for a few moments, while Ryan was just mentally getting ready, Jester made sure to get everyone's attention.

  "Ooh! They're starting!" Silvia said excitedly, climbing off of Fae before looking around to see where Ryan was. And then, she spotted him, standing on top of the railing in front of his bedroom's door.

  'I sure as hell hope Liam's not watching this...' Ryan thought to himself before he pushed off the railing. A light gasp could be heard, before Jester swung his baton, and a glistening, silver balloon appeared in the air, right underneath Ryan's foot as one of the harlequin's spells began to be cast, meant to both help ally movement while restricting enemies. He kicked off it as soon as he even touched it, and the balloon popped to release a cloud of glitter and confetti. Soon, Jester swung the baton again and the next balloon appeared, and the same thing happened again. Ryan was just jumping around through the air, probably five metres above the ground, doing flips and everything. He even kicked off one of the balloons with his hand, leading into a double front-flip.

  At the end small 'show', which was perfectly synced to the song that was currently blasting through the speakers that Modak had set up, Ryan jumped over toward Yanna, who had been watching him approach the entire time. Of course, Ryan had sent Maximus to warn her beforehand.

  With a slight laugh, already knowing what to do, she stretched her hand up high and pushed up her flat palm, which Ryan immediately landed on, doing a one-handed handstand to finish off the small show.

  The minotaur that had caught him laughed loudly, "You damned psycho, don't do that without warning."

  "Hey hey, I figured a famous Awakened League fighter would be able to handle something as basic as this," Ryan responded from under the mask, playfully tilting his head as he jumped back down and was caught in Yanna's arms. He laid there, leaning back in Yanna's powerful hold, and crossed his legs while placing a hand against his cheek, "Well, now, let's not make Modak jealous, shall we?"

  Yanna scoffed and just let go of her friend, who quickly caught himself on the ground in crab-pose. In a flexibility and body-control that most wouldn't expect from him, Ryan kicked himself off with his feet and entered a low handstand, quickly walking through the crowd like this.

  Of course, when not wearing the Urban Harlequin outfit, this wasn't something he could do, but with the extra 'link' boost from the outfit that Silvia made, he was able to do this much at least.

  He reached the table that Jester was standing on, and the harlequin quickly jumped onto Ryan's foot, quickly bowing to the crowd who cheered, whistled and clapped for the show. With that, the spirit disappeared back in his domain, and Ryan interrupted the link.

  He dropped back onto his feet and groaned slightly while taking off the mask. The party-goers were complimenting him and patting him on the back, while Yanna came over and smiled.

  "Seriously, you keep getting more and more insane, don't you?" she asked, and Ryan let out a long,

  annoyed groan.

  "Yeahh... it looks like drinking a bit made it a lot worse..."

  Michael, who wasn't quite caught up to what Ryan meant and was still reeling in excitement at what he just saw, looked over at the spirit keeper with a curious expression, "What got worse?"

  It seemed as though Yanna also wanted to know. She wasn't perfectly in the loop for a while now, and Ryan groaned while stretching his neck a little bit, "Recently, especially when wearing the outfits and linking with the spirits... their personalities have been bleeding over into mine."

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