Night surged over the land like a tide, swallowing the sunny, tranquil facade of the day and revealing the treacherous, eerie side of this isolated island.
Ghostly shapes swayed through the forest, as if beasts that hunted men lay in wait deep in the darkness. Even the soft soil underfoot looked rotten and dried out.
Now and then a figure flitted past, trying to find some place to hole up in the dense woods.
Crack…
A sharp sound suddenly rang out. It wasn't loud, but in the silent night it was piercingly clear.
A young mage, drenched in sweat and pale as a corpse, lifted his leg and stiffly lowered his head.
Under his foot lay a short length of broken dead branch.
His eyes had barely gone wide with horror when a huge black shape pounced and dragged him into the darkness, trailing a heart-rending scream behind it.
…
Li Fei crouched in the fork of a tree, a vial of mana potion clamped between her teeth, burning through mana to cast Summon Sprite again and again.
Each time a summoned unit appeared, it glanced at the note Li Fei had written, then flew off without a sound, its figure vanishing into the night.
Plenty of other mages were doing the same thing, without any coordination.
That meant more and more summoned units on the island. The sentries, with blank faces and sealed mouths, drifted silently through the forest in groups, tireless.
But the moment they spotted another mage, they threw themselves at them without hesitation and let out a scream.
Black Magic Doom Island wasn't big. How could it withstand patrols like this?
Terrified shrieks and furious, anguished roars kept tearing through the night, and the smell of blood slowly crept into the air.
Li Fei turned a deaf ear to all of it and focused on summoning more sprites.
Only when a short scream came from not far away did she pause and turn her head to look.
"Go to hell!"
A teenage mage refused to wait for death. He roared and swung his arms, eyes bulging, and an orange-red ray shot out as he tried to fight his way out at the cost of his life.
But the ray, which could melt steel into liquid and punch through a Transcendent's body in an instant, landed on the monster's jet-black shell and only peeled away a layer of skin, exposing pink muscle underneath.
The boy's eyes bulged in horror. His sweat-soaked face twisted with fear into something hideous.
He never got to make his next move. Another black shadow silently lunged out from behind him.
Crack…
With the sharp snap of his cervical vertebrae, the young mage collapsed, his body below the neck no longer answering him.
Only then did he think to summon his mana by will alone and trigger the spell shield on his gear, but the huge black shapes pouncing one after another smashed the gleaming barrier with ease.
"I surren—"
The terrified, distorted, shrill cry burst from his trembling lips and cut off abruptly.
Great gouts of foul blood sprayed out. This genius mage, once the pride of his hometown, didn't even get to finish his dying scream before he became a steaming lump of meat, the pink muscle still twitching.
He was truly, completely dead, with no chance to start over. And the cause was his own reluctance: he hadn't crushed his purple badge in time.
…
A few kilometers away, a girl hiding in a pit watched warily as a small black dot drew closer.
It was a little sprite, drifting silently between the trees, its hollow eyes sweeping every direction.
Any other time, the girl could have wiped out not just one sprite but a hundred without effort.
But this was Black Magic Doom Island, and it was night on Black Magic Doom Island.
The slightest noise meant elimination, a waste of a priceless B-01 Folded Space entry ticket, and a missed chance at the Altar.
The sharp-witted girl kept her cool. She poked her head out to scan her surroundings and quickly picked an escape route.
To be safe, having watched students die with her own eyes, she even held her purple badge in her hand. The badge was fragile and couldn't be kept in the palm the whole time, or one slightly firmer squeeze would make her an eliminated student.
Once her route was settled, she quietly climbed out of the pit, her movements smooth and agile. She kept one eye on the sprite sentry's movements and used the other to check the ground, avoiding dead leaves and twigs and loose stones that might trip her and make a sound.
She didn't care about the dirt smearing her pretty face. Hunched over, she moved a little slowly but steadily and silently. Each time she stepped forward on a slender, firm calf wrapped in black stockings, the heel of her short boot touched down first and sank slightly into the soft soil, and only then did her whole foot press down slowly, erasing every trace of footsteps.
Walking like that was exhausting, a mental torment, but she poured all her focus into getting every step right.
She had been born into a fallen noble family that couldn't possibly afford her tuition.
Her sister, only a few years older and the only family she had left, swallowed her pride every night to please different noblewomen and rich merchants' wives, and that was how she earned enough for her little sister's fees.
The girl had sworn to work hard at her cultivation and repay her sister.
She put all her time and energy into study. She forgot sleep and food over Meditation and spell research and fought for every resource she could. And she succeeded: despite talent a notch below the top geniuses, she made it to Silver-rank student.
Of course, that might also be thanks to a certain respected Vice Dean being added to her sister's list of patrons.
But no matter what, this girl knew how hard such a chance was to come by. However rough the road, she would walk it gladly, so long as she didn't let her sister down.
In that moment, her sister's gentle smile rose in her mind.
The girl kept advancing in that awkward posture, treading as if on thin ice, yet she felt lighter than she ever had. If she held on to the end and won the Altar, she'd be promoted to a mid-Sequence mage as a matter of course. Then she'd have the means to build a good life for herself, her sister, and their daughter, and say goodbye for good to those hateful women…
A happy smile curved her lips and her eyes shone, as if she weren't on a deadly island at all but in a warm bedroom, stroking her sister's belly and talking to a daughter who couldn't yet understand.
Suddenly she heard a loud, short click beneath her foot, and numbness spread from her sole up to her calf.
An arcane trap!
Her heart lurched, and cold sweat broke out at once.
Only death and nature mages could summon, but that didn't mean the other mages would sit around waiting to die. They had their own ways of ambushing opponents.
Hidden arcane traps on the ground, for instance.
Their numbers and killing power were limited, but the noise one made when it went off was lethal enough on Black Magic Doom Island at night.
This was the spot her sister had worked so hard to win!
Pregnant, she had gone on a trip with the Vice Dean and her three wives for a full week…
Reason told the girl to crush the sweat-soaked badge in her palm right now.
But the thought that her sister had risked a miscarriage on that week-long trip to win her this place, and had come back to find that even her… had been shaved perfectly clean, froze the girl's hand.
She couldn't bear to let a chance bought with such a sacrifice be thrown away on a cheap trick like an arcane trap.
Thoughts churned in her head as she scrambled for some way to salvage the situation.
And that split second of hesitation had terrible consequences.
Squelch—
In heart-rending agony, the girl felt skin, sinew and bone being torn apart by brute force. Then her body felt lighter, and where her right arm had been, there was only emptiness.
A cold black shape had appeared behind her at some point, rasping out a low, hoarse howl. A pale, gleaming arm was flung far across the dark and landed in the mud.
In that hand, a purple badge was still clutched.
"?"
She instinctively looked at her right shoulder.
The arm was gone, replaced by a bloody gash. She could see her displaced spine, jagged tears of muscle like interlocking fangs, and hot blood gushing out, while her organs, nearly dragged out with it, still squirmed inside her.
"No—"
Her face twisted. She triggered her shield and lunged for the arm in a frenzy.
She couldn't die. She had to go home and be with her sister.
But the monsters clearly had no intention of giving her the chance. They slammed into her, and the spell shield collapsed at the first touch.
Then her left arm snapped, her pelvis caved in, her chest was punched through…
"Get away from me!"
Tears of blood streamed down her face as she struggled, kicked, and screamed like a madwoman.
Splat—
Another black shape burst from the woods, and a jet-black clawed foot came crashing down, flattening the fingers of that severed arm.
The badge clutched in its palm shattered in that same instant.
Sadly, luck that arrived a few seconds late couldn't save a body torn into pieces.
…
The night was only half over, and the outer ring students were already being eliminated and killed in droves.
Screams that appeared out of nowhere and cut off abruptly jolted the heart of every young person there.
In that warped and terrifying atmosphere, the prodigies of the Magic Academy had all turned into sociopaths.
They trembled and prayed in the dark, kept shifting hiding places, and lived every moment in dread. And they summoned sprite sentries and laid traps like madmen, hoping to knock out their classmates as fast as possible.
The sprites were getting more numerous, yet they were rarely attacked. Perhaps the monsters in the dark had such badly degraded eyesight that they couldn't spot sprites flying openly but without a sound, and could only track prey by noise. Or perhaps those picky, cunning monsters weren't satisfied with hunting summoned units and chose to lurk behind the sprites, patiently waiting for the geniuses killing each other to flush out prey for them.
A green-haired sprite flitted tirelessly through the forest. Whenever she saw a thick-leaved tree, she slipped into the canopy, deftly dodging branches, and quietly and carefully searched for any possible target.
She found a new tree to check and flew straight toward the dense old tree in her sights without a moment's hesitation. Like a butterfly, she settled softly against the trunk, folded her crystal-clear wings, then crawled deeper into the canopy on hands and feet to avoid making noise.
In the swaying shadows, a graceful, porcelain-white, bonelessly soft arm reached out behind her head like a snake stalking its meal.
Then the snake struck.
Li Fei clamped one hand hard over the sprite sentry's mouth to stop any sound, while her other hand, gripping the dagger Dark Night in a reverse hold, drove precisely into the sprite's eye socket and gave it a vicious twist.
Without a sound, the sprite turned to motes of light and scattered. Li Fei drew back her dagger with an expressionless face.
Snapping its neck would have been easier, but to keep the crack of bone from alerting the monsters, Li Fei had chosen the safer way.
Then she crept up to the top of the canopy and poked out half her head to look into the distance.
With her outstanding eyesight, even in the deep night Li Fei could make out dim black shapes drifting and bobbing. Whenever some unlucky soul was spotted by sentries like those sprites and demon spawn, a scream was unavoidable, and then they were done for.
Who would have imagined that a frail, tiny Sequence 9 sprite could trade one-for-one with the Magic Academy's genius mages at a moment like this?
"I can't stay here."
Li Fei watched for a while, then reached her conclusion in silence.
Going by the sprites' movement paths, a large group would soon pass through her hiding spot. It would no longer hide anyone.
More precisely, before dawn the entire outer ring would be thrown into chaos by roving packs of sentries.
The sentries were multiplying, and in a zero-sum game, the geniuses trapped on the island were all going all out with dirty tricks to kill off every rival first. Summons, arcane traps, delayed-blast magic circles… underhanded schemes kept pouring out.
Without a doubt, these mages were weaving a net that nothing could escape with their own hands. Even knowing it would catch every survivor, themselves included, they couldn't stop. After all, everyone knew perfectly well that even if one person stopped, hoping for a fair fight, nobody else would.
"Fuck me, why the hell are you all grinding this hard? You really want to die together?"
Li Fei silently scolded her fellow students from the allied schools for their irrationality. At the same time she made good use of the time, summoned a few more groups of sprites, and gave a vicious wave of her hand to order them to knock out a few more.
Then she bent down and took off the red high heels Heartshatter, tucking them carefully into her spatial ring.
Kicking people in these things hurt like hell, and the damage was outstanding. Thanks to Succubus Dance Steps, her speed, agility and balance were no longer affected by heels either, so fighting in high heels would probably become the norm from now on, just like Lady Gwona.
But tonight was different. The special conditions forced Li Fei to say a temporary goodbye to the lovely clack of her heels so she wouldn't make noise when she moved.
She had meant to go barefoot, but the moment the tender, sensitive soles of her feet touched the rough, hard bark, her dainty, pale feet curled and wriggled on their own, uncomfortable and ill at ease.
Li Fei glanced down at the ground, covered in mud and dust, and simply pulled on a pair of fairly opaque black stockings, no shoes. That kept her comfortable and made sure her footfalls were quiet, minimizing any sound of steps.
In truth, she had wanted slightly thicker stockings to protect the delicate skin of her feet better, but she couldn't find any right now. Li Fei didn't usually like that style anyway.
Note to self: bring a few pairs of tights next time.
Having committed that to memory, she casually summoned a few more sprites and ordered them to scout, then leapt down from the trunk.
A drop of nearly ten meters would at least break bones and tear tendons on an ordinary person, but with her absurd strength and agility, Li Fei was light as a swallow. She landed toe-first, and only after bending her knees a little to absorb part of the impact did the sole of her foot settle smoothly against the ground, without the slightest sound.
Li Fei bent her leg and glanced down at the slender sole wrapped in stocking.
They were a little thin, but decent quality. A jump like that hadn't snagged or torn them, only dusted them a bit. The curve of her arch was graceful and alluring, and she could faintly see the flushed pink of her skin showing through the white.
She nodded lightly and trotted off through the deep woods, her steps soft, as fluid and elegant as a cat's.
Over ten minutes later, Li Fei found a pit with just the right amount of bush cover, a promising place to hide.
But the moment she dropped into it, a blinding flash burst out, searing her eyes, and a dull boom followed.
"I've been hit!"
Li Fei's heart skipped, and a prickling sense of danger crawled up her back and made her scalp go numb.
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