Chapter 37 – First Hunt
Three days before it started, the professor made it sound simple.
"The Academy will be conducting a joint field evaluation," he said, chalk tapping the board. "Sword, Staff, and Divination campuses. A small test of combat readiness."
The word small did a lot of work.
Half the class straightened. The other half tried to pretend they hadn't.
"The exercise will take place in the outer training zone," he went on. "Low-tier beasts only. Nothing beyond what you've already faced in practical lessons, just… more of them. You'll be assigned groups." His gaze swept the room. "You will cooperate with other campuses."
Someone in the back groaned.
The professor ignored it.
"Goal is simple," he said. "Cull as many monsters as you can and retrieve their cores. Survival is mandatory. Performance, however, will be ranked."
Tamara's eyes lit up at the word ranked.
Rion put his head down on the desk and muttered something about dying in a bush.
Lyra's hand tightened on her quill.
I sat there and watched the chalk squeak across the board.
Small test.
Outer zone.
Low-tier.
In my last life, this "small test" had a different name in the records.
Incident.
Student casualty event.
The exercise where something slipped past the wards and ate too many children before anyone realised it wasn't just another beast.
The current headmaster had resigned afterwards.
The next one never quite recovered the Academy's shine.
All the training, all the diagrams, all the battery experiments and Ark calculations—I felt them click into place around that memory.
This was one of the big knots in the timeline.
Whatever else I did, I had to get through this.
And if possible, make sure fewer people didn't.
***
They gave us three days to "prepare."
In practice, that meant the instructors yelled at Sword students to polish their forms, Staff students to revise spells that wouldn't set the forest on fire, and Divination students to stop asking whether they could just sit this one out "because the omens look bad."
I didn't change my routine much.
Mornings: class.
Afternoons: training with Tamara and Lyra.
Evenings: claymore drills alone.
The difference was where my focus went.
Every time Tamara's wind-assisted slash carved a line of fire through the air, I pictured her doing it against something that didn't stop at a bruise.
Every time Lyra's water whip snapped out with that ridiculous efficiency, I imagined it wrapping around a neck that wasn't going to fall over from a light tap.
At night, I sat on my bed with the claymore across my knees and checked every inch.
Spine channels: clean.
Battery slots: responsive, runes bright.
Mono-edge cell: holds charge.
Vibration cell: spins at command.
Reinforcement cell: pushes mana into the alloy evenly.
Ark: hum steady in the pommel, current path along the etched lines clear when I brushed it with my aura.
I tested the high-voltage loop three more times in the empty yard.
Touching it with a bare practice blade made my arm go numb for a good ten seconds.
Touching it with aura-wrapped fingers made my aura crackle, but my skin stayed fine.
Mana cost: barely noticeable.
You could power around three hundred thousand kilowatt-hours of old world demand with what this thing could throw into a blade on the equivalent of one serious spell's worth of mana.
One to four hundred, roughly.
One unit in.
Four hundred units of hurt out.
Insane.
Good.
I leaned my forehead briefly against the flat of the blade.
"All of this," I told it quietly, "is for three days from now."
The metal hummed under my skin.
***
The morning of the test, the outer training gate was a sea of uniforms.
Sword students checked straps and grips, some swinging practice weapons with more enthusiasm than sense. Staff students muttered spells under their breath, fingers twitching with nervous patterns. Divination students clustered in tight knots, clutching scrolls and murmuring last-minute protection prayers.
Instructors barked names and group assignments.
"Team One: Hailbrecht, Marion, Kester, Yulan!"
Tamara stepped forward at her name, blue hair catching the early sun. Marion, in her neat maid uniform, appeared at her side like a shadow. Two other Sword students I recognised by face but not by name joined them.
Tamara's eyes flicked toward me.
I gave her a small nod.
"Team Two: Rion, Fess, Jorren, Staff acolyte Elen!"
Rion staggered forward, looking like he hadn't slept.
"Why am I first in that list," he muttered. "That implies responsibility."
"You'll live," I said.
"I'm not worried about living," he said. "I'm worried about the number of things that will see me first when they say 'Team Rion.'"
The instructor's voice rolled over us again.
Names, names, names.
Lyra's came paired with a pair of Staff apprentices and a Divination novice. She stepped out, back straight, red hair braided again, blue eyes scanning the crowd until they found me.
She smiled, small and tight.
I lifted a hand in acknowledgement.
"Milton," the instructor called, finally.
I stepped forward.
There was a pause.
No other names followed.
I waited.
Silence stretched.
A few of the nearby students shifted, glancing between me and the instructors.
One of the staff members cleared his throat.
"Student Milton," he said. "You… don't have a team?"
I shook my head.
"It was self-selection," I said. "Everyone else filled their groups."
Technically, they'd said "form teams of four to five." Then everyone had looked at me, remembered emperors' daughters and priest whispers and dueling ledgers and the way my sword didn't behave like anyone else's, and quietly picked someone else.
Even the ones who liked me had hesitated.
Tamara had taken one step my way.
Her noble friends had grabbed her sleeve.
Lyra had opened her mouth.
A Staff apprentice had loudly declared they needed "more spell coverage over here."
I hadn't pushed.
It was fine.
The instructors exchanged a look.
"That's… not ideal," one of them said. "These exercises are designed for groups."
"I won't slow anyone down," I said.
That was what they were worried about, officially.
Unofficially, it was the reverse.
The head of the Sword campus scratched his beard.
"Protocol doesn't forbid solo participation," he said slowly. "Just strongly discourages it."
His eyes searched my face for a moment.
"Are you certain?" he asked.
I thought of the memory from my last life—the report with too many black bars and too many numbers in the "fatalities" column.
"Yes," I said.
He sighed.
"Very well," he said. "Student Milton, you will be listed as Solo Unit. Your quota remains the same as a full group's."
"That hardly seems fair," Rion muttered under his breath.
I rolled one shoulder.
"I'll manage," I said.
Around us, murmurs rose.
"Of course he goes alone."
"He thinks he's special."
"After the empress hugged him, would you want to stand next to the target?"
Tamara's jaw tightened.
Lyra's fingers clenched on her satchel strap.
I pretended not to notice.
The instructor raised his voice.
"You all know the rules," he said. "Stay within the marked zone. Do not cross the outer wards. If you encounter something your group cannot handle, retreat and fire a red flare. Instructors will intervene."
He paused.
"Die, and you fail the course," he added. "So don't."
Nervous laughter rippled through the students.
We lined up.
The ward mages raised their staves.
Light flared along the gate, tracing lines of a temporary transport sigil. The smell of ozone and damp earth rolled over us as the outer forest responded.
"Begin," someone said.
The world jumped.
***
Trees.
The clean, sharp air of the outer training zone filled my lungs—pine, damp leaves, distant water.
We stood in a clearing, groups already forming loose circles, weapons out.
Far above, the Academy towers were just visible through a gap in the canopy, distant and small.
The test had begun.
"Teams," an instructor's voice echoed through a spell, sounding as if it came from the sky itself. "Advance. Stay within the marked perimeter. Good hunting."
A thin shimmer of mana marked the boundary of the test area like heat on a horizon.
I took a breath, adjusted my claymore on my shoulder, and walked into the trees.
No one followed.
Perfect.
I didn't want witnesses for what came next.
***
The first monsters were familiar.
Big-shouldered, dog-like beasts with too many teeth and too much mana packed into their jaws. The Academy called them "fang hounds." Someone with more honesty had once labelled them "cheap demonkin."
One lunged from the undergrowth, snapping for my arm.
I didn't even bother activating anything fancy.
Weight, angle, line.
The claymore swept down, steel edge backed by alloy spine and my aura.
The hound's head separated cleanly from its body.
It took another three steps before it realised, then crumpled.
I stabbed the tip into its chest once, enough to crack the core loose, fished the faintly glowing marble of mana out, wiped it on the grass, and dropped it into the leather pouch at my belt.
One.
More shadows moved between the trees.
Two more hounds. A cluster of smaller, lizard-like things with frilled necks and toxic spit. A horned boar-demon with red eyes and a personality problem.
I let myself fall into rhythm.
See.
Step.
Cut.
No flourishes.
No training yard restraint.
The claymore moved like a slow, heavy storm, every swing placed to end a fight in one or two blows. Aura hugged the blade, reinforcing it just enough. I only snapped the vibration on when I needed to shear through thicker bone or a core that had fused into cartilage.
To the monsters, it probably did look mindless. A blond boy walking forward with a too-big sword, not even breaking stride as bodies fell around him.
Inside, my thoughts were anything but empty.
Listening.
Watching.
Waiting for the wrongness.
The reports from my last life had been vague, but details stuck.
Outer zone.
Joint exercise.
Anomalous entity.
Flesh grotes.
Student casualties before containment.
The thing had shown up where it shouldn't, when it shouldn't, and had not cared about "low-tier" classifications.
I remembered one line in particular:
*Not suitable for student engagement. Adult staff required.*
That had been written after the fact.
This time, I intended to get there first.
Somewhere to the north, a flare hissed into the sky—green.
Someone had found a decent-sized pack.
Another flare, to the east. Blue. Signal of a completed quota in that sector.
I kept moving.
Monsters kept dying.
A trio of fanged apes tried to ambush me from branches.
Ark off.
No need yet.
A single sweeping cut took the branch out from under them. They fell. The follow-up downswing finished the first one before it hit the ground. A sideways flick of the tip opened the second's throat. The third managed a snarl before the claymore came down like a hammer.
Cores added to the bag.
My path was a thin line of broken undergrowth and cooling bodies.
I didn't linger.
Somewhere, I heard Tamara shouting, wind roaring around her words. Somewhere else, a burst of heat rolled through the trees as a Staff student misjudged a fire spell and got yelled at by a supervising mage.
Lyra's magic felt different—cooler, tighter. Once, a thin arc of lightning flickered through the canopy overhead, followed by the satisfying howl of something getting stunned.
Good.
They were holding their own.
Which meant I could focus on the thing that had killed them last time.
I reached a stream and paused, crouching by the bank.
The water ran clear over stones, small fish darting between shadows.
It looked normal.
It hadn't been, later.
In the old reports, this stream had been where they'd found the first body.
I closed my eyes and let my aura stretch, skimming along the ground, tasting the air.
The usual background of beast-cores and student spells buzzed at the edges of my sense.
Underneath that, faint and almost shy, something else.
Not big.
Not roaring.
Just… wrong.
A little knot of not-that, sitting somewhere downstream like a clot.
I opened my eyes.
"Found you," I murmured.
I turned and started walking along the bank, letting the forest swallow me.
***
Elsewhere in the trees, something moved that wasn't a boy with a sword.
It had not been built.
It had not been summoned, not on purpose.
It had grown.
Grown wrong.
Somewhere in the gaps of the ward lines, in the rot under a fallen tree, in the leftover sludge of ten thousand monster cores and a hundred failed spells, the mana had pooled and forgotten what it was supposed to be.
So it became something else.
Flesh, where there should have been root.
Eyes, where there should have been knots.
A mouth, where there should have been bark.
Then another mouth.
And another.
The thing crawled out of its hole on too many limbs, leaving a smear on the earth that steamed faintly.
It remembered nothing.
It knew hunger.
Food walked in the forest.
Soft, warm, full of singing mana and fast hearts.
The thing listened.
Voices.
Laughter.
Overconfident footsteps.
It flowed toward them, dragging a slick trail behind it, small enough that it could hide under bushes and between roots. It was not large. Large was for things that fought in the open.
It liked corners.
It liked backs.
It liked the moment when sound turned to understanding.
A cluster of students moved through the trees ahead, talking more loudly than they should have. Two Sword, one Staff, one Divination by their uniforms. Beginners.
The thing watched from beneath a fallen log, many eyes unblinking.
The Staff student grumbled about the quota.
"We haven't seen anything for ten minutes," he said. "Did someone else clear this area already?"
"Probably that Milton kid," one of the Sword students said. "They say he's running around alone like a madman."
"He's just showing off," the other Sword said. "I heard he—"
The thing grabbed his ankle.
Not with a hand.
With something like a hand if someone had only heard the word once and tried to sculpt it out of meat.
Fingers? Too many. Too long. Joints bending both ways at once.
The boy looked down.
For a heartbeat, his brain refused the information.
Then he saw the trail leading back into the shadows under the log, the gleam of wet flesh, the cluster of eyes opening in the dark.
His scream cut the others off.
He yanked back instinctively.
The thing tightened its grip.
Bone cracked.
He fell.
The others spun.
"What—"
The thing flowed forward.
It didn't roar.
It didn't screech.
It just… unfolded.
Mouths opened along its surface, some with teeth, some with tongues, some with neither. Limbs sprouted, grabbed bark, pulled it forward in a rush that didn't match its size.
The Staff student tried to cast.
The Divination novice tried to pull out a flare.
The remaining Sword student tried to cut the reaching limbs.
All of them did the wrong thing at once.
The flare slipped from shaking fingers and went skittering into the stream.
The spell fizzled as something cold and greasy brushed the caster's aura and scrambled his pattern.
The sword hit flesh and sank in halfway before getting stuck as the muscle clamped around it like a fist.
The thing climbed.
Up arms.
Across shoulders.
Around faces.
Mouths opened.
The forest filled with sound.
"No— no no no— HELP ME, PLEASE—"
Then there was just the wet noise of something eating where nothing that small should have been able to eat.
The stream ran clear.
For now.