Chapter 94: Battle Of The Behe Pass

’Yomogida Sakura, huh?’ Koya thought as he looked at the blonde-haired Professor. ’I don’t remember her from the manga.’

But then again, the plot had already deviated far beyond what he could reliably track.

’She’s a really hot woman though.’ He thought as he looked at her some more without meaning to. Her body reminded him of Mirei… they both had voluptuous figures that could pull a man’s attention without trying. ’It’s been a while since I saw that Succubus. I hope she’s not planning something behind my back.’

Sakura’s eyes met his for a moment and then Misora jabbed Koya on the shoulder, snapping him back to reality. It was really easy to get lost in those eyes without realizing it was happening.

“Pervert. You have a hot girl sitting right next to you.” Misora muttered under her breath and Sakura straightened up properly.

“Uhm…” She shyly looked down at the desk.

She was far more in tune with killing than standing in front of a classroom, especially when a great deal of the male students were making no real effort to hide where their eyes were going.

She found herself enjoying the fact that her Master’s husband… who was now her Master as well had been watching her.

The other gazes were considerably harder to stomach. “So the Academy official said that we’ll have to move quite fast to prepare for your Mid-terms but your last Professor finished a good number of topics so we won’t have to rush too hard.”

She looked out at the students. “So for today… We will be talking about the Battle of the Behe Pass.”

“Professor.” One girl raised her hand and Sakura turned toward her, at least relieved it was a woman. “Could you write your name on the board…? I can’t spell it.”

Sakura blinked and picked up the Holo-marker, turned around to write the kanji of her name on the board and immediately regretted it.

Every single student was staring at her ass.

Girls and boys alike, some openly, and some with the barely-concealed focus of people trying to look like they weren’t looking. She could feel all of it pressing against her back like a physical weight and she puffed her cheeks out.

Was it her fault she was built this way?

She turned back around.

“So that is how you spell my name.” She gave the girl a smile and the student flushed before sitting quickly. ’Maybe I should change into heavier clothing… I wore this to catch the Master’s attention but he’s barely looking at me now… Damn it.’

“Now…” She picked up the Holo-cane from the table and looked at it with mild uncertainty.

She had been briefed on how ALI’s equipment worked but holding it was a different thing entirely. “Let’s get started with our History lesson. Does anyone know what or where Behe Pass is?”

There was silence…

For most of the students it was the first time they had heard the name and for Koya it was the same.

“Oh, so you don’t?” She tilted her head with a small smile. “Then it’s my job as an educator to fix that.”

She moved toward the Holo-board and shoved the cane against it on instinct then blinked as the board immediately erupted into several floating expanded tabs she hadn’t intended to open. She straightened up.

“I meant to do that.”

She selected one of the tabs and it expanded to fill most of the board, revealing an aerial image of what looked like an enormous flattened city.

Unlike the Outer Zone there were no standing structures, no remnants of walls or towers… it was just open flat earth with deep craters punched into it at irregular intervals.

The craters were wrong somehow… they weren’t the kind of thing a monster’s body made when it landed.

“This is Behe Pass. It’s one of the few pre-Apocalypse cities from which we managed to recover the original name.” She cleared her throat. “It used to be known as New York City and it was one of the largest places humanity had settled before the world changed.”

Several sounds of awe moved through the class.

Koya squinted at the image.

’That’s New York? I see… I’ll find out more about it as the class goes on.’

“Now you must be wondering… something flattened an entire metropolis and left craters that deep. What could do that?” Sakura tapped the Holo-cane against her palm. “Well. In the early days of the Apocalypse, while humanity was still in shambles and the idea of Supercities was nothing more than a desperate plan being passed between survivors… the monsters that existed were considerably worse than anything currently in the field.”

She touched the Holo-board properly this time and the aerial image collapsed, replaced by six expanded tabs each containing an illustration.

These were hand-drawn reconstructions sourced from the White King’s interviews and the accounts of the surviving Clan Elders, they looked rouh but detailed enough that several students shifted in their seats and Renji sat up a little straighter with his jaw tightening.

One of the illustrations showed something that the eye kept trying to categorize and kept failing.

The shape was bear-like in the same way a rotting structure is still technically a building… the silhouette was there but everything beneath it had gone deeply wrong.

It was massive and far larger than any Gold-class monster Koya had seen documented, and its body had the quality of something that had grown without any internal agreement about direction.

One shoulder sat nearly a full meter higher than the other while the torso bulged outward on the left side in a way that suggested something large was pressing against the skin from inside.

Where fur should have been there were patches that were clumped together like something perpetually wet that had never dried but between those patches the skin underneath was exposed and across every inch of it ran grooves, they were very deep ones.

They didn’t look like scars but rather they looked like channels and every single one of those paths converged on the face.

The face was where the illustrator had clearly spent the most time and expended the most dread… there was eyes everywhere, not two of them… not four but dozens, scattered with no logic or symmetry across the muzzle, between what might have been brows, clustered along the jaw, and even one sitting completely alone just below where an ear should be.

All of them, without exception, had dried dark fluid running from them in tracks that stained the grooves below… after that was the mouth which was open in the illustration, and Koya’s eyes moved away from it after one second because the inside had rings.

There were concentric rings of teeth with each one curving inward like a fish trap.

’What was the author smoking when he created this abomination?’ Koya couldn’t help but blink.

The second illustration was worse.

It was a tree or something that had decided to be a tree… it was stretching so high the top had been cut off by the tab’s edges, the bark was thick and along every inch of it were eyes.

Dozens… hundreds perhaps and they were all open in different sizes, positioned with the same unsettling randomness as the bear’s.

The vines reaching from it went into ground that looked completely drained. At the very top center of the trunk, rendered in careful detail, was a single enormous eye staring directly outward.

Even in illustration form, it felt like he was being observed.

“These are the Alpha Monsters.” Sakura said into the silence. “They rank above Gold-class… A single one could end a Supercity and everyone inside it within seconds.”

Several students swallowed. “We are still here because of one person. The White King.”

She almost clicked her tongue. Every thread of recorded history eventually looped back to that man one way or another, even when she tried to approach a topic from a completely different angle. She was a History Professor now and that meant she had to do this properly regardless of her feelings about it.

The six tabs collapsed into one and the illustration that replaced them was a portrait.

It was a white-haired who was mid-thirties in appearance with crystal white eyes and long white hair as well with the kind of face that had clearly been a problem for people throughout his entire life. Several girls in the class went pink almost simultaneously.

Koya looked at the portrait and felt something he didn’t have a word for… he suddenly felt very insecure about his own face, how was it legal for a man to be this beautiful?

「Hehe Host is gay 😊」

’Jokes on you… I have two wives.’ He thought and dismissed the screen.

“We digress.” Sakura said briskly, waving the portrait tab away. “The Battle of Behe Pass.”

She pushed the textbook to the side of the desk and the students blinked at her.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Well… Professor Shusuke usually read directly from the History textbook and told us to do external research.” One student offered carefully.

Sakura pressed her hand against her chest, which had the unintended effect of making several students very focused on that part of the room.

“What kind of professor does that?” She said with genuine feeling. “It is the job of a Professor to read the source and translate it so the students can actually absorb it. That is the entire point.”

She caught the look on their faces and felt heat in her cheeks. “Wh… Whatever. Just listen.”

She cleared her throat and moved into a proper stance with both hands behind her back, beginning to pace.

“The Battle of Behe Pass occurred in the early days of the Apocalypse… approximately three years after the rifts opened where Supercities were still a plan and most survivors simply tried to stay alive long enough for someone to come up with one.” She reached the end of the podium and turned, continuing without breaking pace. “New York City had become Behe Pass during this period and it sat at an important position… passing through it and beyond the Mountain of Ruinage would bring you to what is now this Supercity’s Outer Zone… Any questions?”

A student stood.

“Professor… What is the Mountain of Ruinage?”

“Good question.” She smiled at him. “All of you will take that as homework.”

Nobody complained… It was already a better class than anything Professor Shusuke had run and she hadn’t touched anyone’s IP balance.

“Now… Behe Pass had a reasonable concentration of crest users among its population and they built it into something of a stronghold with walls, rotation shifts, and organized defense. It held for a while… then one day, without warning or pattern, one of the Alpha Monsters surfaced inside the settlement’s boundaries and tore through it.”

The room was very quiet.

“The monster in question… the one that destroyed Behe Pass, its exact shape has never been officially recorded because the White King refuses to speak about it in any detail. What is known is its behavior.” She paused. “It consumed women… Young girls, elderly women, it made no distinction between them. For pregnant women it would locate the foetus and extract it directly, if the child was male, it would kill it and if female, it kept it.”

She let that sit for a moment. “It was not a clean death for anyone in Behe Pass that day… The monster’s reach was total and its tentacles had spread through every exit route before most people even understood what was happening. There was nowhere to go.”

The unease in the room was unanimous.

Even Koya, who had developed a certain numbness toward killing felt a bit disgusted… There was a difference between a monster that killed and a monster that sorted between kills.

“The White King heard what was happening and came.” Sakura continued. “He was a Blue-liner at the time and newly advanced at that. What he found when he arrived at Behe Pass was not a monster rampaging through an open battlefield… It was a monster that had already won and was simply finishing.”

She continued.

“Its tentacles had spread through every exit before most of the population understood there was something to escape from. The settlement’s walls… the ones they had built specifically to keep things out were already inside. The people who were still alive were not hiding, they were being held and wrapped in tentacles and positioned between the monster’s body and the only angle from which a crest user could attack.”

She tapped the Holo-cane once against the floor. “It had learned… In the time between breaking through the walls and the White King’s arrival, it had looked at the humans it hadn’t consumed yet and used them as leverage.”

The classroom was very still.

“Every account from survivors long ago describes the same thing about what happened next.” Sakura couldn’t help but lower her voice a bit… even if she wasn’t one of the White King believers, she still had to praise the man.

“A newly advanced Blue-liner should not be able to do what he did… The mana output alone was hundreds of times higher for his rank but the White King’s affinity is that of the stars so it’s understandable that he’s not a regular Awakened at all.”

“He was not choosing between attacking and protecting. That is the part the accounts keep returning to…. He was doing both, simultaneously, for hours… moving through the settlement pulling people out of the monster’s grip while cutting through it piece by piece, and every time he found an approach that worked the monster adapted, repositioned, put more people between them, and he adapted back. Behe Pass was already structurally gone before he arrived. There was nothing left of the city to save but every person who was still breathing when he got there was still breathing when it ended. He left with all of them… The craters in the ground that you had seen are not from the monster’s body. They are from the White King’s weakest attacks that missed.”

Several seconds of silence.

“Ma’am…” A student raised a hand carefully. “What about the other Alpha Monsters? The ones in the other tabs?”

“They went into hiding when the White King reached Silver Crest… All of them.. That has been the state of things since.” She said. “With one exception. The Hell Tree. It was the one in the second illustration and it is still present. The White King would have eliminated it long ago however it has grown its root system down to the planet’s core… A strike powerful enough to destroy it would take the planet with it.” She paused. “So it stays and it watches.”

Sakura tilted her head and looked out at all of them with a smile. She was enjoying this a bit.

“Are you enjoying the class…? We still have quite a lot to cover so how about I tell you about another one?”

…

Several hours later Koya was walking down the corridor following the directional signs toward the Maid classroom.

He had been given directions on his ALI phone and the route was straightforward enough.

When he rounded the last corner and found the door he was not the only one standing outside it… Itsuki was already there with his arms folded and a poker face.

The Aoyora heir glanced at him and then looked away, which was about as much acknowledgment as Koya expected.

Itsuki knocked at the door.

It opened inward and Disguise Master burst out first… the Assassin was pink in the face, grabbing Koya’s wrist before he had fully processed she was there.

“Master, we need to leave right now!” She pulled him into motion and they were already moving before the door swung fully open behind them.

“Koya-sama, please wait!”

“Koya-sama! I would be honored to serve you!”

“Koya-sama, just one moment—!”

A stream of maids poured into the corridor and Koya looked back over his shoulder as Disguise Master dragged him around the corner.

Itsuki stood at the door and watched the procession pass him with the expression of a man who had questions he wasn’t sure he wanted answered.

The last one out was Kaede,she was flushed and slightly off-center… that was very unusual for her.

“What is going on?” He asked flatly.

“N-nothing serious, Master. I’ll go check on Lady Miyuki straight away.” She moved to step past him and he gave her one look that stopped her.

“Did you invite them to lunch again? Through the maid.”

“…Yes.”

After watching his recent stream… Itsuki could seriously say that Koya was just a bit weaker than him, despite the fact that it had been a couple of days since he was just a Two-liner. He also had fire as his element, blue flames at that… meaning that he could use it at the proficiency of the Kagutsuchi.

’Thankfully Akari already offended him… I’ll ensure Koya joins the Aoyora clan. On my own terms.’

“We will wait for his reply.”

…

By the time Disguise Master decided it was safe to slow down they had put significant distance between themselves and the Maid classroom and were approaching the Cafeteria entrance.

Koya looked at her as they walked.

“What were they talking about in there.” He said.

“I-I-I… I have absolutely n-no idea what you’re r-referring to, Master, I-I genuinely d-don’t—” She stopped and swallowed. “I d-don’t know.”

She was an experienced Order operative however right now, she was too shy to even lie.

Koya opened his mouth and stopped as he saw a heroine from the corner of his eye… It was Akari.

She was standing with her hands in front of her and her lip caught slightly between her teeth.

Disguise Master went still beside him and Akari held it for one more second and then bent forward at the waist in a bow so deep and so sudden that the joints of it were audible.

“Uh… Uhm… Amagi… Koya…” Her voice came out smaller than she probably intended it to. “Would you… have lunch with me?”

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