Chapter 236: Dungeon Crawl (IV)

Neither demon moved.

Ellen’s hand rose slowly, and her fingers curled around the hilt of the rapier at her hip.

The blade left its scabbard without a sound.

It was a slender thing, almost delicate in appearance, the kind of weapon that looked decorative until the person holding it decided otherwise.

No mana pulsed visibly along its edge or elemental affinity crackled at its tip.

It simply existed in her hand, perfectly still, perfectly level, the way a needle was still before it passed through something.

“Time’s up.”

The first demon moved.

He crossed thirty meters in a fraction of a second, demonic mana erupting from his frame in a dense, suffocating wave as his fist came down in an overhead strike that would have leveled a section of the academy’s outer wall.

CLANG!

Ellen’s rapier was already there.

The impact produced a shockwave that cracked every remaining intact stone tile across the battleground simultaneously, a ring of pure force expanding outward in all directions and flattening against the barrier’s inner wall.

She hadn’t moved her feet.

“Wha—”

Fwip, fwip, fwip!

Three thrusts, each one faster than the last.

Each one landed at a different pressure point along the demon’s mana circulatory lines with the kind of precision that came from having mapped the demonic physiology so thoroughly that finding those points was no different from breathing.

The first demon staggered backward, his left arm going partially numb, his mana flow interrupted in three separate junctions at once.

The second demon arrived from behind her.

CRACK, BOOOOOOOOOM!

His strike detonated against a Saint-level pressure field that had materialized around her without her visibly constructing it.

The explosion of colliding energies sent a pillar of displaced air screaming upward and hammering against the barrier’s ceiling.

Ellen turned, and her coat had shifted slightly from the pressure.

“You’re attacking the joint points of my demonic body,” the second demon snarled, his composure cracking at its edges for the first time.

“That’s not standard swordsmanship. That’s simply—”

“—Anatomical deconstruction,” Ellen interrupted him.

“I’ve been refining it for nineteen years.”

She stepped forward.

At the Saint realm, a single step carried the intent that lesser cultivators experienced physically.

The pressure in the enclosed space redoubled, the air compressing so aggressively that visible distortion rippled outward from her position like heat haze rising from scorched earth.

The first demon, still recovering his mana flow, raised both arms and detonated a full-output Demonic Seal, a black and crimson lattice of compressed destructive energy that expanded outward in every direction as a last-resort area technique.

Swish!

The rapier moved once.

A single horizontal line, drawn through the air at waist height.

The Demonic Seal split cleanly down its center axis and collapsed inward on itself, its energy folding into harmless dispersion before it had traveled three meters from its origin point.

The first demon stared at his own technique’s remains.

“…That’s,” he started.

“Saint-level mana compression along a single edge,” the second demon finished, his voice now stripped of every trace of its earlier amusement.

For the first time since the barrier had dropped, something genuine moved behind his eyes.

Fear.

Actual, unperformed fear.

“…She’s not a mere saint!” he told his companion.

“She’s at the Perfected Saint Realm! The information given to us was wrong!”

Ellen’s rapier lowered to a resting angle at her side.

“I’ll ask you once,” she spoke in a cold tone.

“Who sent you?”

The two demons exchanged a glance.

Whatever silent calculation passed between them took less than a second.

Then they ran.

Fwooom!

Straight up, burning every reserve of demonic mana they had left into a single vertical escape vector aimed at finding a weak point in the barrier’s upper boundary, because staying inside the enclosed space with her for another thirty seconds was a conclusion neither of them was willing to reach.

Ellen watched them rise with a cold sneer in hr eyes.

At the Early Saint level, movement stopped being movement in any conventional sense.

It became displacement, the simple fact of being somewhere other than where you were, with no observable transition between the two states.

She was above them before they cleared ten meters of altitude.

The rapier came down in a single vertical thrust, and the shockwave that followed it was not an explosion or a burst of elemental energy but something quieter and infinitely more final.

A column of pure, concentrated pressure that drove both demons back toward the ground like stones dropped from a great height.

BAAAAAAAAM!

They hit the stone hard, cracks spreading outward from the impact points in jagged, overlapping lines.

Neither of them got up immediately.

Ellen landed beside them without sound, her rapier resting at the first demon’s throat before he had finished processing what had happened.

Her glasses caught the faint light of the barrier above.

“I’ll ask again,” she said pleasantly.

The first demon, breathing hard, his demonic energy circulatory system in ruins across four separate junctions, looked up at her with the expression of someone who had made a severe, poor decision.

The first demon’s lips parted.

Whatever calculation had been running behind his eyes finally reached its conclusion, and the conclusion was that the alternative to talking was considerably worse than talking.

He drew breath to speak, but just then his hand moved toward his own chest.

Ellen was faster.

Fwip!

The rapier’s tip traced a precise, shallow line across the meridian points of his right arm before he had completed the motion, and the arm dropped uselessly to his side, every major mana channel along its length severed with a terrifying efficiency.

He was crippled, not injured.

She turned without pausing.

The second demon had already begun the hand seal for a self-detonation sequence, his remaining demonic energy compressing inward toward his core in a specific pattern.

CLANG.

Fwip, fwip!

Two strikes.

The first shattered the hand seal mid-formation.

The second collapsed his core’s compression reflex entirely, scattering the gathered demonic energy outward into harmless ambient dispersion before it could reach critical density.

The second demon crumpled, his cultivation base locked, his body no longer responding to his intent.

Ellen straightened.

She looked down at the two of them with the expression of someone who had simply crossed a minor administrative task off a list.

“No more interruptions,” she said quietly.

“Now.”

The first demon looked at his useless arm… and, gritting his teeth, he opened his mouth to speak.

SPLURT.

Both bodies suddenly detonated simultaneously, not from within, but as if something external had simply decided they were finished and acted accordingly.

The remnants scattered outward in every direction in a radius that covered most of the battleground in an instant.

Ellen was already surrounded by her passive forcefield.

The dispersal wave broke against it without leaving so much as a stain on her coat.

She stood in the center of what remained and said nothing for a long moment.

Her eyes moved slowly across the scattered evidence…

The self-detonation hadn’t come from the demons themselves.

Their cultivation bases had been fully sealed. They had been physically incapable of generating that kind of output on their own.

Something else had ended them.

Something that had been watching the entire exchange from beyond the barrier’s boundary, patient enough to wait, powerful enough to act through an Emperor-level Containment Barrier without disturbing its outer surface, and deliberate enough to choose the exact moment when one of them was about to speak.

Ellen’s expression didn’t change, but her grip on the rapier’s hilt tightened.

“…Dammit.”

She looked at the barrier above, still intact, still humming with the residual mana of two demons who no longer existed.

“A high-tier demon. Operating with enough range and precision to detonate through a Containment Barrier without triggering its collapse.”

She let the rapier rest at her side.

“This is beyond my current level.”

Her gaze dropped to where the first demon had been lying.

They were targeting Seraph for some reason, but besides her being the Eldest Princess, there wasn’t anything that special about her except her swordsmanship talent.

And the Demon Realm wasn’t the type to kill people who could turn into possible threats, which meant that it may have been the work of a high-tier demon.

Or someone who had contact with demons…

Ellen turned toward the academy’s direction, her expression turning cold by the second.

“…It seems the Headmistress will need to act herself.”

…

Thud!

The last Master Realm beast dropped without ceremony.

Vivienne pulled her sword free, rolled her shoulder once, and stepped back into formation without being asked.

Silence settled over the first section’s final corridor like dust after a collapse, broken only by the sound of steady breathing and the faint drip of water somewhere deeper in the stone.

“Rest,” Gray said.

No one argued.

The girls dispersed into a loose perimeter along the widened junction they had reached, a natural cavity in the labyrinth’s structure where three corridors converged into a broader space before narrowing again ahead.

Enough room to breathe.

Enough visibility in all directions that Seraph’s rear anchor position could relax fractionally without compromising coverage.

Weapons were kept drawn, but grips loosened.

Orin moved quietly between her squadmates, checking mana reserves with a quick efficiency that didn’t require asking.

She would press two fingers lightly against a wrist, read the circulation, note the number somewhere behind her eyes, and move on without comment unless something concerned her.

So far, nothing had.

At the same time, Cassandra drifted towards Gray’s side.

“First section clear in fourteen minutes,” she reported quietly.

“Mhm…” Gray nodded lightly.

“I was counting,” she paused briefly.

“The plan said we’d lose time on the eastern branch because of the pack density Ellen mentioned. We didn’t.”

“Reinette read the vibrations early. They didn’t get to form properly.”

“She performed above what I expected.” Cassandra considered that.

“She performed exactly what I expected,” Gray replied.

Cassandra glanced at him before sitting next to him, causing Gray to smile wryly.

“Wasn’t our relationship supposed to be a secret?”

“…Currently, we’re the leading pair of the group. So, it’s simply natural for us to be together… if they ask, we can simply say that we were discussing something about the dungeon.” Cassandra replied proudly.

Gray looked at her for a moment, then he looked away with the same wry smile.

“…You’ve clearly been thinking about that justification for a while.”

“I came up with it just now.”

“Of course you did.”

Cassandra straightened slightly, her gaze moving forward with the composed dignity of someone who had absolutely not been thinking about it since the moment they entered the dungeon.

“The second section,” Cassandra spoke after a moment.

“You’re planning to push through it faster than you told them.”

It wasn’t a question.

Gray glanced at her.

“The mana density is thicker than the survey report by the girls suggested,” she continued, her eyes still forward.

“I noticed it at the boundary. If it scales at that rate through the second section, the third will be significantly harder on their reserves than your plan accounted for. So you’ll compensate by shortening the second section’s duration.”

“…Without telling them,” she added.

“Because telling them would make them rush, and rushing in coordinated pack territory is how you lose people.”

Gray said nothing for a moment.

Then, quietly added:

“You would have made a good strategist.”

Cassandra’s expression didn’t change, but her eyes showed a proud look.

“I know.”

Gray opened his mouth to respond, but he was interrupted…

THRUUUM!

The ground moved; it was that violent, but it still made a few rocks shake, and the bioluminescent moss along the upper walls flickered.

It could probably be just a small mana leakage by the dungeon’s core, but then…

THRUUUUUUUUUUUM!

Then it came again, and stronger.

“Earthquake?” Ysolde

“Earthquakes don’t happen in a dungeon,” Darya replied.

“That what’s happening?” Sola was as confused as them.

Then the sound reached them.

BOOOM, CRACK!

From the direction of the deeper sections, a rising cacophony of movement that resolved as it grew louder into the overlapping clatter of claws against stone, the scrape of scales, the percussion of dozens of bodies moving at speed through confined corridors, all of it converging, all of it heading in the same direction.

The second section’s entrance darkened.

Then the first of them appeared, not charging toward the class or forming up in the coordinated pack patterns Ellen had described.

They were running past, pouring through the junction in a frantic, disorganized torrent, Master Realm beasts and Grandmaster entities alike, their pack hierarchy completely dissolved, their tactical intelligence gone, replaced by a strange feeling of…

Panic.

Pure, unambiguous panic.

They didn’t even look at the girls standing along the junction walls.

They ran past them as if the Phoenix Class didn’t exist, as if nothing in the dungeon existed except whatever they were running away from and wherever they were running to.

Toward the boss’s room.

Every single one of them, toward the boss’s room.

The class watched in collective silence as the stream of monsters continued.

Silence returned.

No one spoke for a moment.

Reinette looked at her feet, then at the corridor ahead, then at Gray.

“…What just happened?” Rue asked carefully.

Gray was already staring at the deeper passage, his eyes narrowing slighly.

[Spirit Eyes]

He started reading something in the quality of the mana current that had shifted dramatically in the past ninety seconds, thickening and pulling in a single direction like a tide responding to something it had no choice but to respond to.

He recognized what it was almost instantly.

Swish…

The dungeon’s ambient energy was being pulled inward toward a single point, like water spiraling toward a drain.

And only one thing required that massive amount of mana.

“The boss…”

He calmly spoke.

“He’s trying to break through to the King Realm.”

The junction went absolutely silent.

Then, one by one, every pair of eyes in the Phoenix Class went wide.

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