The Academy's Strongest Undercover Professor

POV Zoe

It had already been five hours since he had lost consciousness. It was the longest time I had ever seen the chief of the village.

I didn't know what that man and our God were talking about for so long, but it had to be quite something. I did wonder what this man would ask in exchange for our power. After all, it was bound to be a lot…our God was a greedy bastard.

We had given up everything in exchange for protection and power. However, it had been necessary at the time with everything happening in the world. Nevertheless, I was worried that this man wouldn't come back the same as before.

There was a price for everything.

Just as I was thinking of all this stuff, Caedrel's body suddenly started shaking as if he was going through something extremely painful. His body was in agony as his veins started bulging from all over his body. His muscles contracted. It was a good thing that I was the only one seeing this, or else most of his students would have panicked.

'Just what did you offer for such a thing to happen?' I thought in the back of my mind, as this was unlike anything I had seen before in my life.

The shaking continued for one hour until he finally stopped moving. It was so sudden that I thought he was dead, but when I touched his chest, I could still feel his heart beating. However, for some reason, his body seemed to have gotten a lot weaker out of nowhere. The somewhat dangerous aura I had felt coming from him before had completely disappeared.

'Let's hope you didn't lose too much in exchange for our power…we don't have too much time, after all.'

I was worried that we might not have enough time to show Caedrel everything that he needed to learn to fight against Zero. Our power was complex, and achieving mastery would certainly take some time, especially since the training he would be doing would need to be hidden from his students.

In fact, I was thinking of training Caedrel only by myself and asking the others to take care of his students. It would make things a lot easier on me and the others, without a doubt.

Then, a few more minutes passed by, and Caedrel's eyes started to flutter. He had finally come back from the realms of Gods.

***

POV Caedrel

'Ah…where am I? What happened? I just remember losing consciousness as he finally extracted my soul out of my body?' I thought as I barely opened my eyes. 'The energy, right…the energy! Did he give it to me?'

I closed my eyes as I tried to feel it inside of my body, and I could feel it. A weak yet strong purple flame that could destroy anything in its way.

'Didn't that God mention its name? What was it again?' I thought with a frown. 'Aether? I think that's what it was.'

Anyway, after some time, I opened my eyes completely and heard a worried voice enter my ears. It was weak, or maybe it was just me who couldn't hear anything at the moment.

I opened my eyes and saw Zoe's face extremely close to face, practically screaming at me. However, even then, I could barely understand what she was saying.

My hearing was completely fucked for some reason.

I tried to push my body upwards to stand straight, but it didn't even work. My body felt terribly weak, constantly recovering because of the loss of one of my souls.

Minutes passed by, and it was slowly getting better; my hearing was getting better, and I could hear Zoe a lot more clearly, and some part of my strength was slowly coming back to me.

"Can you hear me?!" Zoe said as she shouted over my body.

She had been saying that for the past minutes, and I finally just nodded at her words.

"Yes. I can hear you, sorry. A lot of things happened, and my body got a lot weaker because of what happened with that God of yours."

"Weaker? Why did you get weaker? What did he ask in exchange for our power?"

I smiled weakly. "My soul…he asked for my soul."

Zoe's eyes widened instantly. "And you accepted such a bad deal?! How do you even have some of your strength left? You should have lost all of it by now!"

"It's complicated, and I accepted because I didn't know that such a thing would even happen in the first place. Anyway, I still have 50% of my strength because I had two souls. However, I have a different power from all of you. A power that is supposed to be superior to the one you have acquired from that God."

"Two souls? A stronger power than ours?! Just what is going through that mind of yours!"

Zoe was clearly thinking that I was crazy. She had never heard of anyone having two souls before, and that made perfect sense. After all, the only reason why I had two souls was because I came from another world.

Nevertheless, I wasn't going to say something like that to her. I planned on keeping this a secret from everyone.

Anyway, I summoned a weak purple flame in the palm of my hand to show her the power I had acquired. It was strange, but I was able to instinctively control this power to some extent as if I had done so my entire life.

"Look…this is the power I received in exchange."

Zoe didn't even need to look at it for a single second to know what that power was. It was the same energy that Phoebe was currently suffering against.

"Y-You…how is this even possible? Did our God really give you access to such a power?" She couldn't believe it. "Is that why Zale believed in you so much…"

She shook his head.

"No, it has to be the reason why he believed you could save Phoebe."