The clearing was silent, save for the hiss of settling dust and the groans of the injured.
Students coughed and wiped their eyes, blinking through the haze. The ground around them was a graveyard of red-scaled skybeasts, their wings twisted, their bodies broken. Twenty of them—slaughtered in moments.
"How… how are they all dead?" one boy stammered, clutching his crude spear as if it might explain the massacre.
"I couldn't see anything," another muttered, shaking his head. "Something hit them. Something fast. I heard the beasts screaming, but… it wasn't lightning. It wasn't Jorin."
Feyla's hands trembled as she pressed water against a cut on a classmate's arm. She swallowed hard, eyes darting to the corpses scattered across the dirt. "It was… it was like a storm," she whispered. "One second they were in the air, and the next they were just… falling."
A girl at the back shook her head furiously. "No, I saw something—just a shape. A shadow, moving too fast to follow."
"Don't be stupid," Bren snapped, blood running down his cheek from a shallow cut. He clenched his fists, hiding the tremor in them. "There was nothing. Just Jorin. He saved us. No one else could've."
But even his voice lacked conviction.
One by one, the students fell into uneasy silence, their eyes flicking from the beasts to the dust, as though expecting something—or someone—to emerge from it.
Then the haze thinned.
And there, collapsed on the ground at the center of the carnage, lay Kael. His body sprawled in the dirt, his cloak torn, his face pale with exhaustion.
Gasps rippled through the group.
"He's alive?"
"But… how—"
"He wasn't even fighting—was he?"
Whispers rose like wildfire. No one dared move closer, as if touching him might explain the impossible.
Jorin stumbled forward, blood still dripping from his arm, his face drawn with fatigue. Yet his eyes were steady, locked on Kael. The instructor dropped to one knee beside the boy, resting a heavy hand on his shoulder.
For a long moment, he said nothing. The silence pressed on the students, thick and unyielding.
Finally, Jorin bent lower, his voice so quiet it was meant for Kael alone.
"Thank you."
The students exchanged confused looks, none daring to ask what he meant.
Kael didn't stir. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, his body limp, as though every ounce of strength had been ripped from him.
Jorin's hand tightened on the boy's shoulder, his expression unreadable. He didn't explain. He didn't need to.
The rest of the class only saw a blank collapse after a storm they could not understand.
And that was how it would stay.