Chirp. Chirp.
The sound was delicate, almost fragile, piercing through the heavy veil of exhaustion that draped over Ash's consciousness.
He forced his leaden eyelids open, squinting against a sudden, intrusive brilliance.
The storm had passed. In its wake, the cave was no longer a shadowy sanctuary of flickering orange embers, but a cold stone chamber flooded with the unapologetic gold of a morning sun.
The fire had long since surrendered to the damp, leaving behind nothing but white ash and the ghost of warmth.
Beside him, Fenrir remained anchored in sleep.
The wolf-kin was slumped against the wall, his breathing deep and ragged.
Yesterday's [Berserk] state had evidently exacted a toll far steeper than mere physical fatigue; it had drained his very essence.
Ash didn't wake him. Instead, he summoned the holographic interface.
The blue light flickered into existence, and for the first time since the exam began, Ash felt a jolt of genuine alarm.
[ Simulation Rankings ]
1.Isolde (900 pts)
2.Soren (870 pts)
3.Riven (860 pts)
4.Fenrir (820 pts)
5.Flin (570 pts)
6.Kael (550 pts)
7.Layla (490 pts)
8.Ron (460 pts)
9.Vill (430 pts)
10.Ash (420 pts) ]
The leaderboard had mutated overnight. Ash had plummeted to the very edge of the top ten, while Fenrir had been unseated from his throne, settling at fourth.
But it wasn't the fall that caught Ash's eye—it was the ascent.
Flin, Layla, Vill, and a new name, Ron, were surging upward with a terrifying, synchronized momentum.
Their scores hadn't just grown; they had exploded.
Ash checked the grim ledger of the deceased. The number stared back at him like a bloody accusation: 673 dead. The air in the cave suddenly felt thin.
More than two-thirds of the participants had been extinguished in less than forty-eight hours. The sudden spikes in points for the mid-tier rankings confirmed his darkest theory.
They weren't hunting monsters anymore. They were harvesting their peers.
"Just to sort us into classes?" Ash whispered, his brow furrowing in a rare display of disdain.
"Is this much blood truly necessary for a placement exam?"
"Ugh..."
A groan stirred the silence.
Fenrir's eyes fluttered open, bleary and disoriented. He stretched his aching limbs with a wince, letting out a cavernous yawn before noticing Ash's grim expression.
He raised a sluggish hand in greeting.
"Oh... morning, Ash."
"Morning," Ash replied, his voice a sharp blade.
"I suggest you check the rankings. Now."
"Hmm? Did I miss something?" Fenrir muttered, swiping his hand to call up his display.
His eyes widened until the gold of his irises seemed to occupy his entire face.
"What the—? I'm in fourth?! How?!"
"Do you notice anything else unusual?"
Fenrir squinted at the list, his predatory instincts finally shaking off the cobwebs of sleep.
"Wait... I see it."
Ash waited, expecting a tactical insight, perhaps an observation about the death toll or the hunting patterns of the new top players.
"You're in tenth!" Fenrir let out a sudden, barking laugh, his competitive spirit rebounding with annoying vigor.
"That means I'm still higher than you! Hahahaha!"
Ash let out a long, weary sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
'What did I expect from a man who measures his worth in growls and claw marks?'
With a patience he didn't know he possessed, Ash explained the reality of the "Hunter-Groups" and the massacre occurring in the forest.
Fenrir's laughter died instantly. His face hardened, the playful wolf replaced by the calculating warrior.
"We can't stop them individually," Ash concluded. "The school is tacitly allowing this. My suggestion is that we move together.
Two Openers of our caliber are a much harder target than one."
Fenrir looked at Ash. A week ago, they were strangers.
Yesterday, they were enemies. But as they stood in the ruins of their campfire, there was a gravity between them that felt more solid than any friendship.
"Fine," Fenrir grunted, standing up and testing the weight on his injured leg.
"I usually work alone, but I'd rather have a monster like you at my back than a knife in it. I'm in."
They packed their gear in a practiced, efficient silence, then stepped out of the cave's mouth and vanished into the vibrant, emerald trap of the forest.
...
The woods were a masterpiece of deception. Raindrops clung to the undersides of leaves like liquid diamonds, and the air smelled of crushed mint and damp earth.
The sun shone through the canopy in divine pillars, as if the slaughter of the previous night had never occurred.
But deeper in the thicket, the peace was being torn to shreds.
"Syra, get back!"
BOOM!
A violent explosion of orange fire consumed a patch of ferns, screeching as it engulfed a chittering nightmare.
"Kreeeeee!"
A group of six students—four boys and two girls—were backed against a wall of ancient oaks.
They were surrounded by thirteen Blade-Mantis, Semi-Spawn horrors that stood two meters tall, their forelimbs evolved into serrated, organic scimitars that caught the light with a dull, sickening sheen.
One girl was frantically supporting her companion, Lyra, whose leg was slick with blood. The others formed a desperate perimeter.
"Cover me! I'm taking the front!" shouted a boy named Gin.
He lunged forward, a gleaming longsword manifesting in his grip—the hallmark of the Core of Weapon. The forest rang with the shrill, metallic cláng of steel meeting chitinous blades.
"Step aside, Gin!"
Behind him, a younger boy named Jax drew back an invisible string. Arrows fashioned from condensed air whistled through the gaps in the melee, striking the Mantises in their fragile ocular joints.
Beside the archer stood Brom, a mountain of a youth encased in a two-meter suit of heavy iron plating.
He swung a massive mace, crushing the skull of a Mantis that had tried to flank them.
"Thanks, Brom!"
"Focus on the fight! I'll hold the rear!" Brom bellowed, then turned his head toward the last boy. "Ren! Use the Word! Now!"
Ren, sweat pouring down his face, began chanting in a rhythmic, ancient tongue that hummed with power.
"Heal."
A shimmering azure circle expanded ten meters around them. Within its glow, the students felt the leaden weight of fatigue lift; their minor cuts sealed, and a fresh surge of adrenaline flooded their veins.
From the sidelines, Nia and Syra unleashed a barrage of football-sized fireballs and crackling arcs of electricity—the primal fury of the Core of Element.
Their coordination was flawless. It was a dance of survival choreographed by weeks of friendship. Within minutes, the thirteen Mantises lay in twitching heaps of green ichor.
Gin allowed his sword to dissolve into light, turning to his team with a triumphant, if weary, smile.
"Great work, everyone. That's another 250 points. Just a few more clusters like that, and we'll all secure our spots in Class 101."
Brom clapped Gin on the shoulder, his heavy armor clanking. "All thanks to our Class President. If you weren't leading us, Gin, we'd be among the 600 in the dirt by now."
Gin, the scion of a minor noble house and the natural leader of Class 101, blushed at the praise.
"It's a team effort, Brom. I'm just—"
"Aw, look at him being humble again," Jax teased, nudging Gin with an elbow.
"With that attitude, you'll never find a girlfriend, President! Hahaha!"
The group erupted into laughter, a momentary bubble of joy in a world of shadows.
Rustle. Snap.
The laughter died instantly. Six weapons were summoned in a heartbeat. The undergrowth parted, and a nightmare emerged.
It was a Blade-Mantis Spawn—a three-meter titan with four independent scimitar arms.
Behind it, twenty more Semi-Spawn variants crawled out from the trees, clicking their mandibles in a synchronized chorus of hunger.
Gin's heart plummeted. 'Twenty Semi-Spawns and a true Spawn? We're dead.'
"Run!" Gin screamed, his voice cracking.
"It's a Spawn-class! We can't win this! Go!"
The group broke formation. The girls fled toward the clearing while the boys stayed back to buy precious seconds.
The Spawn-class Mantis shrieked, its four blades blurring as it lunged at Gin. He raised his sword to parry, but the force of the blow was like being hit by a speeding truck. He was thrown backward, his boots carving furrows in the mud.
Chaos erupted. Ten Mantises cut off their retreat, surrounding the group in a ring of serrated death.
Brom's shield rang like a bell under the relentless assault; Jax and Ren were forced into a desperate scramble for their lives.
"Argh!"
A Mantis blade shattered Syra's staff before a second strike carved a deep, jagged canyon from her shoulder to her waist. She collapsed, her scream echoing through the trees.
"Syra!"
Gin's momentary distraction was fatal. The Spawn-class Mantis caught him in the flank, its blade sending him flying into a tree trunk with a bone-shattering thud. He struggled to rise, coughing blood, his vision swimming.
The Spawn-class Mantis loomed over the fallen Syra, its blades raised for the execution.
"Syra!" the boys cried out, trapped behind a wall of chittering monsters.
Swish— Clang!
In the heartbeat before the strike, a blur of silver and white intervened.
A tall, slender figure stood over Syra, parrying the Spawn's massive blade with a shortsword forged from ivory-white porcelain and platinum.
The Mantis paused, startled by the sudden resistance. Before it could react, a second, identical shortsword appeared in the stranger's other hand.
With a grace that bordered on the supernatural, he pivoted, his blades becoming a silver gale.
The Mantis's head spun into the air, severed in a single, clean stroke.
The stranger didn't stop. He became a ghost among the monsters, weaving through the Semi-Spawns with terrifying fluidity.
Seven Mantises fell in the first ten seconds, their chitinous armor offering no more resistance than silk.
"Kreeeeee!" the remaining Spawn-class shrieked in fury.
There were still sixteen Semi-Spawns and the leader. It was a suicide mission for any single Opener, yet the stranger dived into the fray without a shred of hesitation.
He moved with a rhythmic, lethal beauty, parrying three blades with one sword while the other found the soft joints in the monsters' necks. Ten more fell in a whirlwind of silver.
Gin and Brom, seeing their chance, rallied. They cut through the distracted flank, finishing off the remaining Semi-Spawns while the stranger kept the leader occupied.
Finally, only the Spawn-class remained. It lashed out in a frenzied, desperate blur of steel.
"Hold it right there!" Gin shouted, lunging forward with Brom to pin the creature's lower arms.
"We've got it! Now!" Brom yelled.
A voice, calm and melodic, rang out from above.
"Good work holding it. I'll take it from here."
The stranger leaped into the air, silhouetted against the sun.
He drove one sword into the creature's crown to anchor himself, then swung the other in a wide, powerful arc.
Thud.
The massive head of the Spawn-class Mantis hit the forest floor.
Gin breathed heavily, his sword trembling as he looked at their savior.
"Who... who are you?"
The young man turned. The sunlight caught his features, illuminating a face that was almost too perfect to be real.
He had hair that shimmered like spun gold and eyes that held the kindness of a saint. He stood there, bathed in the morning glow, his porcelain blades stained with green ichor, looking every bit like a hero from a forgotten legend.
He offered a warm, radiant smile that seemed to banish the lingering chill of the forest.
"I'm glad I made it in time," he said, his voice as smooth as velvet.
"My name is Kael Vance. I'm a Knight."