The forest-city had shrunk into a cramped killing ground.
What had once stretched for dozens of kilometers was now compressed to barely two. Buildings that had stood at the outskirts were gone, erased as if they had never existed.
Trees that had towered in the distance now pressed close from every direction, their trunks overlapping and their roots tearing up broken streets.
Only twenty candidates remained.
Even that number was dropping quickly, one flash of light at a time.
High above the chaos, four figures lay hidden among the thick branches of a colossal tree that had stood in the city's center since the exam began. Its trunk was wide enough to house a small building, its crown spreading like an emerald canopy over the shrinking battlefield.
They had survived by never joining the chaos directly.
Instead, they watched. They waited.
They hunted.
