Anuraag Banerjee
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NGLM [Chapter 120: Exploring a sentient island (2)]
🕑 Added 2023-07-17 14:01:03 +0000 UTC---
"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
— Winnie the Pooh, (The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh)
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"What happened to Selene by the way? I didn't see her today." Ororo curiously asked as she went near Rudeus.
"Selene and Morgana decided to hunt some evil sorcerers or something. They said that most evil sorcerers are rich and always have very good magic relics in their collections, so they decided to take them off their hands. They found the existence of one such sorcerer hiding on an island in Antarctica, so they went to rob him." Rudeus shamelessly revealed.
"Oh." Ororo didn't know how to reply to that. Should she support this since they were indirectly helping the world by taking care of evil dark sorcerers or should she be worried about her friends stealing from strangers? She couldn't decide what to do, so she just wisely chose to ignore the issue.
"Anyways, I think you should go to your group. They look like they want to start exploring. The other groups are already packed and loaded, so unless you intend to lose to Emma, Vanessa, Logan, or Elizabeth's groups, you should start as well." He said with a smile knowing what was coming.
"If you think that I will let them win against me and my team then you have got another thing coming. There is no way I am going to lose against them." Ororo said with a confident smile and went to her group after giving Rudeus a small kiss.
Of course, Jean who was nearby saw this. She too sneakily came and kissed Rudeus on the cheek as well before going away to join Vanessa's group. She wasn't an adult yet and still didn't have the position of absolute trust in the hearts of the students, so she couldn't be a group leader herself for this exploration.
"Now, since everyone is ready, let the exploration BEGIN." Rudeus used the asura path of his Rinnegan to convert one of his hands into a mechanical cannon and fired into the sky with a booming sound as all four groups began to quickly move deeper into the forest.
Rudeus had designed the adventure to be fun for both adults and kids as he had made sure to place a lot of challenges and puzzles in their paths. He had designed the entire thing in such a way that different mutants needed to use their respective sets of powers, and physical and mental abilities as a team to effectively complete the exploration while having a chance to win the thing before anyone else.
He had even made a lot of rules to make this as fair as possible like not permitting anyone to fly higher than ten meters above ground, banning the usage of electronics, in-fighting of groups among each other, and stuff like that.
Now all he needed to do was just keep an eye on the groups to make sure that everyone was following the rules and everything was alright.
<(Vanessa Carlysle, aka, Copycat pov)>
"Miss Vanessa, can't we go a little slower?" A weak-looking kid complained to me as he panted with sweat all over his body.
"We can but then you will need to treat me to the one week of free premium gourmet food that we are going to miss. You have enough money for that right?" I threatened the kid.
There was no way I was going to let a weak-ass kid come in between me and my week-long free gourmet food. Normally I get to eat dishes made by Gordon every day but I knew for a fact that Rudeus would cancel Gordon for a week if I lose, telling me that he sent him to cook for the winners for one week or something. And I am not gonna let that happen.
I'll be the one winning this and maybe I could even demand something else from Rudeus as a prize. A sushi platter on his naked muscular chiseled body seems like a very tasty and legendary dish. Well, he probably will just say no the moment I request him for that but a girl can dream, right?
Just as I was trying to imagine a Nyotaimori with Rudeus as the main attraction, one of my male group members suddenly gave a girlish scream.
Huh, what the fck? Are those trees trying to give those students... a wedgie?
There were about a dozen old trees that had branches extending from themselves and were trying to get hold of the male students' underwear and trying to give them a wedgie while the female students were being whipped in their butts with vines.
Wait, don't tell me, Rudeus got the inspiration for this adventure from some hentai or something because if it seriously were the case, then we are in a lot of trouble.
***
'Seems like Krakoa understood its assignment well. Good, I'll reward it later somehow. I had thought hard about how to make this adventure a little scary and lifelike for the students. And I had come up with the perfect formula... Make it about the one thing no teenager ever gets bored of, porn or in this case hentai.
The trees will scare them so much that they will make them think that their purities are in danger making them take this seriously and do their best. But of course, in reality, those trees are harmless, the worst they can do is give tight wedgies and whip their butts but the fear alone will keep them from realizing this and will make them work hard to save themselves. I truly am a genius." Rudeus thought proudly.
He was even thinking of making this a permanent training method for the students at the school to make them work harder. It was a good thing that nobody knew what he was thinking of right now, otherwise, he might get the title of God of sadism or God of perversion.
***
<(Ororo Munroe, aka, Storm pov)>
This was supposed to be easy, wasn't it? I thought Rudeus said that this would be pure fun. Well, I can't deny it has been fun a lot but the sudden attacks that we have to face from trees trying to bully the students has given most of them phobia against trees.
Some of the males even threw away their underwear so that they won't have to suffer from those wedgies but unfortunately for them, the trees just grew them new underwear using their leaves and barks and gave them even rougher wedgies which turned some of them into crybabies.
Even the girls were not spared as the more tomboyish girls were given the same treatment as boys while the more 'fragile' ones were just given a good whipping. Of course, that was until they began to use their powers.
Turns out that the trees will only continue to pester you if you don't do anything and rely on somebody else to come and try to save you. As long as you try to defend yourself, the trees will leave you alone.
It was actually a good lesson for the children... until the next test came. The normal challenges that the students had been facing till this point weren't really brutal but fun since they just had to do different stuff like build bridges to cross a lake or clear bushes to reveal the path or make fire either using their abilities or their normal skills and other stuff like that.
But the next test was something different. It was a combat test. And if I had to guess, it was meant to test your leadership and your ability to work together. Because the next test was basically the students getting outnumbered by hundreds of walking mini trees monsters trying to tie the students to themselves and take them, prisoners.
I thought about helping the students like I had done up to this point but decided against it this time. I think they should work through this themselves. I have already understood that none of these challenges or monsters were harmful or dangerous. This was more or less a physical version of our danger room made of pure nature.
Plus this was a good way to foster natural leaders to rise up among the students and take charge of the situation leading them all to safety.
***
<(James Howlett, aka, Logan, aka, Wolverine pov)>
"Come on kids. You can do this. I am rooting for you guys. Use your strength. Bobby use your ice power carefully. Don't hurt your friends with it. And Kurt, if you try to run away again, I'll give you physical classes detention for a week." I said while sipping a beer leisurely sitting on a tall tree.
"Easy for you to say. You are not the one fighting this unending sea of monster trees here." One of the kids said while blasting the nearby tree monster with organic blue ink in its face.
"Then you should work hard to take my place, shouldn't you bub? Until then, just make sure to not get a hug from those short tree monsters or a wedgie from the tall ones." I said dismissing the kids' complaints.
This was heaven. Rudeus was right. This is one of the most relaxing places I have been to for the last couple of years. I really needed this, especially after that laser boy twerp has been recently trying to hug me so many times.
It was seriously getting annoying. I wonder what happened to him. Did he go cuckoo or something after Jean broke his mind or was he always that... weird? Anyways, I hope he doesn't try to rub his weirdness into me or I might break his wrists one of these days.
***
Rudeus had been expecting a lot of things to happen. He had expected some kids to quit mid-journey although surprisingly nobody did. He had expected something going wrong like some kid's powers going out of control or something. But interestingly no sort of thing like that happened.
However, what did happen out of his expectations was Psylocke's group finding the X-men prisoners the fastest even before it was time for lunch.
At first, he was confused about how they did it but then he suddenly understood. Psylocke had used her powers. Unlike the other telepaths, she realized that she could use her psionic powers to track everyone on the island and she did.
She couldn't sense the trapped X-men members at first but she then realized that she could sense everything in the forest, all the groups, teachers everyone besides Rudeus. She could almost make a mental psionic map in her head using her powers but a small portion at the middle of the island was missing from the map. A small portion of the land she couldn't sense.
And then she realized that this might be the place where the trapped X-men members were kept, outside the telepathic range of any telepath. So she directed her group to that area and under her expert leadership, she was the first one to reach there and found the big amber rock made of plant sap that was trapping the four young X-men in it.
'I guess it's time to declare lunchtime and release those kids then.' Rudeus thought to himself as he looked at the grim hopeless expression of the people trapped inside the amber.
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