Chapter 449: The Demon’s Academy Entrance Exam! (V)

"Gulp..."

Someone swallowed audibly, but it was quickly interrupted by a huge shout.

"IT’S JUST A MERE PEAK SAINT! HE CAN’T DO SHIT!"

The shout broke the silence in an instant. It traveled through the crowd, breaking every single feeling of cowardice on their hearts.

After all...

He was a mere Peak Saint!

A whole wave of different demons took it as permission.

House colors, no colors, spears and chains and bare claws, countless auras flaring as they left the safer fights and ran at the torn-coat incubus standing on a pile of their classmates.

Gray did not step off the pile.

He stood motionless and tilted his head, his bloodshot eyes tracking the first rank of them as if they were weather.

’...Fuh. I’m going to need to bother that power again...’

He closed his eyes.

[Emotionless Sword Intent]

When he opened them again, they were entirely blank, not containing a single shred of emotion.

The bloodshot red was still there, but it sat in a face that had stopped belonging to a person and started belonging to a cut.

[Emotion Severing Art...]

"Hollow Sword!"

A wave of pure negative black energy erupted from his body.

It did not look like Demonic Energy, nor the pink mist he had used in a side street.

It came out of him as absence given shape, a cold that ate the red of the sky and the noise of the ring and left a taste like bitten iron.

The sword in his hand was only a handle now. Above him, the dark built itself into a blade so large the crater walls looked like the sides of a sheath.

The giant sword rose until its point hung against the crimson sky.

Students mid-swing forgot to finish the swing.

An Ashrend twin actually stopped smiling. On the rim, two instructors stood up without meaning to.

Though Vael’Zira did not stand, her slit-gold eyes narrowed slighly, which in an Archduke was the same as a shout.

The charging demons saw it and their eyes widened in complete shock at how a mere Saint could have manifested that kind of power.

Some of them still ran.

Momentum was a kind of pride.

A few tried to throw arts up at the thing as if their technique could knock a sky-blade off its line.

The black edge did not answer them. It only finished rising, hung for a heartbeat that lasted too long, and then fell.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The first thing the ring lost was the idea of direction.

The sword did not drop like a meteor, and it did not drop like a house technique.

It fell the way a verdict fell: inevitable, and uninterested in who had been brave a second earlier.

The negative energy along its length peeled the air apart on the way down. Sand went first, blasted outward in a circular sheet that stripped the crater floor to black stone.

Then the piled students under Gray’s feet were gone from under him, not cut so much as pressed out of the space the sword had decided to occupy.

Gray dropped with it, because he was the source and the sword did not leave its source behind.

His torn coat whipped up around his ribs.

The Bone-Ward necklace at his throat flared white-hot and then went dull again, confused, as if it could not tell whether he was the one being killed or the one doing the killing.

The blade hit the center of the wave.

There was no elegant split of bodies or a detonation of black and sand and screaming that the wards immediately turned into something the academy could live with.

Killing lines died against bone beads all over the front rank. Students were smashed into the crater wall hard enough to leave outlines.

A chain-user vanished from Gray’s sight and reappeared twenty paces away in a heap, necklace blazing, officially out.

A spearman tried to brace and was folded over his own weapon.

The fist-fighter from before, already injured, hit the rim so cleanly that an inspector had to drag him the rest of the way over.

The sound kept going after the impact.

It rolled up the academy towers and came back as a second boom.

Windows in the nearer halls rattled.

Flying beasts above the inner wall scattered like thrown paper.

For a moment the free-for-all was only this: a dark sword standing in the floor of the crater, buried to a third of its length, black vapor peeling off it in sheets.

Gray was on one knee beside the buried edge, palm still open as if he had been holding a hilt the size of a gate.

Blood ran from his nose now as well as his mouth.

The blankness in his eyes remained.

Emotionless Sword Intent did not care that his ribs were wrong or that his shoulder had opened again.

It only cared that the line had been drawn.

The second rank of the wave hit the residual wave of force and broke against it. Some were thrown out.

Some dropped and covered their heads.

A girl from a lesser house screamed and then stopped screaming when her ward took a flying chunk of stone that would have taken her throat.

She crawled for the rim without looking back.

"What is that?"

"That is not a mere Saint..."

"That sword..."

The professors whispered to each other in pure surprise; after all, who would’ve expected an incubus at the Peak Saint realm to have such a strong technique.

Gray stood.

The giant sword began to come apart the way a shadow comes apart when the light changes: not shattering, just failing to remain necessary.

Black energy poured back into him in a rush that made his knees dip.

He locked them.

The sword was still in his right hand, ridiculous against what the sky had just held, and he used it anyway as a point to lean on.

The crater around him was a ruin of a fight.

Outlines in the wall; the sand was gone.

And the ring was turned into some kind of wet ring of students, either unconscious, yielded, or blinking at the white glow of their beads.

The pile he had stood on no longer existed.

In its place there was a sword-shaped wound in the academy floor that would take the groundskeepers a week to pretend had never happened.

He wiped his mouth again with the same dirtied thumb.

"Hugh... huff..."

His breathing was a ragged, even thing, the kind of breathing a body did when feeling had been cut out of it and only the work remained.

An Early Monarch boy at the edge of the blast tried to be the first to recover the shout.

"Y-YOU...!"

He got as far as opening his mouth.

Gray looked at him with those empty eyes, and the boy’s voice instantly died in his chest.

"Ah..."

He fell butt-first into the ground.

The princess moved before the boy finished sitting.

She simply ceased to be where she had been standing and was there instead, close enough that the leftover black vapor from the Hollow Sword curled around her boots.

Gray’s blank eyes tracked the motion a half-second late.

"F-fuck..."

His knees went weak... causing him to fall forward.

She caught him.

Thump!

He fell into her arms with his full weight, torn coat and all, forehead knocking against her collarbone, blood from his mouth marking the front of her academy-dark robe.

Her spear was still in one hand. The other arm locked across his back hard enough to keep him from sliding.

"You idiot," she said very quietly, not a royal sentence, and it didn’t sound like one either.

Gray’s eyes were still empty, but the clearness was slowly returning.

"Ugh..."

A breath dragged into him as if he had only just remembered air was required.

The killing intent thinned, and exhaustion filled his entire body.

On the rim, Vael’Zira’s wings opened once.

"Enough."

The remaining fights instantly died in place.

A student mid-throw dropped his art and let it scatter into sparks, and the inspectors moved in along the walls.

"The round is over."

No one argued. They could count.

The crater that had held three hundred still-standing candidates was no longer that crowded.

The Hollow Sword had not needed to kill them.

The wards had seen to that. It had only needed to throw them, fold them, light their necklaces, and send them over the rim in heaps.

Inspectors were already dragging the ones out toward the west-side markings, beads still glowing, pride in various stages of collapse.

What remained inside the ring, when the last of the dazed finished either crawling out or being carried out, was one hundred.

Exactly one hundred.

Vael’Zira looked down at the sword-shaped wound in her floor, then at the princess holding the Peak Saint who had put it there.

"Those still within the ring are students of this academy," she stated.

"Those outside it are not. Do not ask for a recount, as this venerable does not owe you one."