Everyone was doing their job in suppressing the dragooun properly. If need be, they could easily capture it without needing a sealing script. But Juno thought otherwise. The thing with Wonderland creatures, especially rare ones that were barely documented, was that one should always expect the unexpected. Those creatures were outlandish and chaotic, they had no control and just acted on the instinct naturally foretold to them. 

To Juno, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

On the contrary, it was fascinating. It meant a good amount of study was neeeded to completely understand them. Because despite everything, there was still meaning behind their “uncontrollable” actions. Unlike humans of the modern age, every action an animal took meant something to them. They were constantly doing something to help themselves and others of their kind.

So to Juno, properly sealing the creature would protect it from harming itself and from harming others. Who knows what could happen to it from all the chaos happening?

But… not everything always went according to plan.

Juno was busy performing her sealing script. 

[Literary Seal Script: Elemental Antithesis Seclusion] 

A script capable of concealing creatures of opposing elemental powers. It wasn’t necessarily made for dragons, since there was no dragon with two elements, and certainly not of two opposing elements. But if the horde of undead was enough to reduce its size, the script should be more than enough to work on it.

“Ah oh,” Zoe said, who was reading her surroundings as she was told, “Erina’s out. Her energy has been greatly depleted. She’s… she’s losing a lot of blood.”

“What?” Juno stopped her script midway.

“She used all her energy to break through the dragooun’s legs, she’s the reason it’s down to the ground now. We gotta do something about her. If you can help get there, I can probably use my—”

“No… no tonic. It’s not going to heal the damage if she’s losing blood.”

Juno, a scholiast herself, knew very well what must be done, but it would be at the cost of something else. 

Now, she was faced with the dilemma of either doing her job and going through with the plan or saving her friend. It didn’t take a second for her to decide. On the surface, everyone thought of her as one who was perfect to a fault with her work. But she was still a human being with weakness toward her friends.

“But what about the script?” Zoe knew it was the right thing to do, but it was putting the plan at risk.

“This whole thing would amount to nothing if it meant losing my best friend.” Juno spoke with her still calm, yet confident, voice, “The sound thing to do would probably be going through with the plan so that her sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain. But I don’t care about that. I’m not about to lose Erina to something this pathetic. She messed up, bad. She knew the risk of breaking her limit, yet she went through with it. Her screw-up is my screw-up.”

Compared to everyone in the team, Zoe knew so little about every one of them. Despite it being a year since her enrollment, she was still the newbie among them. She had always thought of Juno as someone who was “by-the-book” and fit her the name she was famous perfectly according to all the rumors surrounding her, but it was all still completely wrong. Zoe knew all that from the start. But seeing Juno truly act like that still raised her respect for her upperclassman.

Zoe nodded, understanding Juno’s decision, “All right! Leave the rest to us!”

“Thank you!”

Juno called for her owl and flew toward Erina’s location.