Crowley and Vargas announce a three-day training camp in the mountains for all athletic clubs members, where the students must complete various challenges for the chance to win new club equipment, with any club that fails to complete all challenges to be disbanded.
Vargas confiscates the students’ phones and magical pens on the first day, assigning the students to gathering firewood, catching fish and finding a magestone in a nearby mine.
After helping set up camp and fishing Ace is assigned to foraging, but instead decides to take a break. He does not return to the camp that night, but his club members of Jamil and Floyd are not concerned.
On the second day the students are assigned to finding a lanternblossom, catching a catfish, and digging out a larger magestone from the mine.
Leona decides to take a nap and Deuce returns alone to the mine after looking for mage stones in order to fetch a pickaxe that he forgot.
Jamil and Floyd go to Vargas about the missing Ace when he fails to return to camp for the second day in a row, but Vargas is not worried.
Leona has also gone missing, but Ruggie is not concerned. When Jack reveals that Deuce, too, is missing, the group goes to the mine to find him. They find the pickaxe but there is no Deuce, and decide to go back to Vargas.
The cottage where Vargas had been staying, however, has bee ransacked, with Grim saying that he hear Vargas yelling for help and saw “a huge dark shadow.”
With four people, including Vargas, now missing from the camp the students decide to stay up through the night, with people disappearing when they leave the campfire.
Suddenly the fire goes out and something unseen begins to attack with boulders, scattering the students and hunting them down in the dark until only Ruggie, Floyd, Sebek and Jack remain.
They create a plan to lure the shadow into a swamp, with Jack using the magestone fragments from the challenges to use his unique magic.
Floyd is reluctant to participate as he would rather handle the situation himself, and Ruggie negotiates his assistance by offering to do anything Floyd asks, as long as there is no risk to his life, finances or future prospects and can be completed within half an hour.
Jack draws the shadow towards the swamp while Sebek and Floyd drag it in, but ultimately Ruggie needs to use his unique magic to trap it.
The “shadow” is revealed to be Vargas, who has been forcing Ace and Leona to do squats in a cabin as punishment for skipping out on assignments.
Vargas explains that the “shadow” attack was the final challenge of the camp and orders the students to pack up their tents by the time limit or have their clubs disbanded.
Floyd realizes that Ruggie used his signature spell despite how the group was presumably out of mage stones and Ruggie reveals he had more than he originally admitted to, as he wanted to sell them after camp.
Ace and Leona return to camp but Deuce does not, with Ace saying that Deuce was never in the cabin with himself and Leona.
The group returns to the mine and discovers Deuce hiding in a cauldron from a monster. Ruggie is revealed to be still holding onto a magestone that he had hoped to sell, which enables the group to use magic to defeat the monster.
Afterwards Ruggie refuses to leave the mine, preferring to let his club get disbanded if it will mean being able to dig out magestones to sell. Floyd calls in the 30-minute favor that Ruggie promised him, forcing him to leave.
They return to camp just in time but Vargas is not amused by their story of a mine monster, accusing them of lying. Crowley says he looks forward to the next Vargas Camp.
Twisted Wonderland Reference Note 