Music for chapter: Suicide Silence - In a Photograph
The scream tore through camp like a gunshot.
Mayu was already shouting, her voice cutting through the chaos "Form up! Tight circle, now!" as students stumbled from bedrolls, boots kicking dirt over firepits. Beads flared across wrists, casting jagged shadows. Someone retched. Someone else sounded like they were praying.
Then the trees moved.
Five figures peeled from the dark, three lithe as starving wolves, two hulking and wrong, their joints bending too far, too smooth. The first Grunt flowed forward, all coiled rage, and a first-year barely had time to raise his blade before claws punched through his ribcage. The wet crunch of bone gave way to silence as the boy crumpled.
Aullie was already gone. Void Step, reappearing in a burst of displaced air as another Grunt lunged for a cluster of wide-eyed first years. His reinforced his body half a second too late. The impact slammed up his arm like a sledgehammer, bones grinding. He tasted blood. "MOVE!" he snarled, shoving the kids toward Mayu's rallying line.
Shinku hit the Grunt like a black meteor, all fangs and fury. His claws ripped through sinew, spraying thick, tar-like blood, but the demon twisted, nearly shrugging off the damage, its spine reforming as it lashed out.
To the left, Haru and Aki fought side to side. Aki's fire whip seared the air, slicing a Grunt's arm clean off, but the limb twitched where it fell, fingers still scrabbling in the dirt. Haru's earth construct gored the thing's gut, only for the demon to backhand him into a tree trunk. Wood splintered. Haru spat blood, visible red teeth. "Fucking! Fuck!" he wheezed, surging up as Aki hauled him upright.
Mayu's voice cut through the din: "Elites incoming! LEFT FLANK!"
The two larger demons unfolded from the treeline, their movements liquid and precise. One cocked its head, studying the students like a butcher eyeing cuts of meat.
Aullie braced. Shinku snarled.
The Elite smiled.
Then…it moved.
The Elites didn't walk, instead they pulled reality around them.
One stood taller, skin like cooled lava, split by veins of molten gold. Heat rippled off it in waves, warping the air. The other was a moving mountain, plates of stone grinding with each step, the ground bowing beneath its weight.
Mayu's swords cleared their sheaths. Lightning spiderwebbed down the left blade, hissing like live wires. Wind coiled around her right arm, sharp enough to flay skin from bone.
"Instructor line, full purge protocol!" Her voice carried over the din of battle, cold and clear. "No testing strikes. No second chances."
Then…impact.
The fire Elite moved, and it seemed like the world exploded. A twenty-foot arc of forest vaporized in its wake, trees reduced to glowing cinders in half a heartbeat. Mayu sidestepped the blast, close enough to feel her uniform singe. Her lightning blade lashed out, carving a blackened trench across the demon's chest. It barely flinched.
The earth Elite roared, and the ground answered. Boulders the size of horses tore free from the soil, hurtling toward her team. Mayu pivoted, wind affinity screaming as she sliced one projectile in half.
Too late to stop the second.
A instructor went down, leg crushed beneath stone. Someone screamed. Mayu didn't look.
She leaped, driving both blades into the fire Elite's gut. Lightning detonated inside it, sulfur and burnt meat flooding her nostrils as the thing shuddered.
Then healed, molten flesh knitting shut like closing jaws.
The earth Elite's fist came down like a landslide. Mayu rolled, ribs screaming as shockwaves tore through the dirt. She came up spitting blood.
"Again!" she snarled.
Her blades flared brighter.
The demons cackled like hyenas circling prey.
The Grunt came low and fast, a blur of whipcord muscle and snapping jaws.
Ryota's squad reacted like a machine. Fire and ice spiraled around his fists as he pivoted, flash-freezing the demon's leading leg mid-stride. The creature stumbled, tendons crackling with frost, just long enough for his follow-up strike. A whip of blue flame lashed across its eyes, boiling the moisture in its sockets with a hiss like grease on a skillet.
It shouldn't have been able to counter.
It did.
The Grunt feinted left, then twisted with nightmarish grace, claws raking toward the wind-user girl's guard. She jerked back, but not fast enough.
A wet crunch.
Blood arced, painting the ground scarlet. The girl collapsed, hands clutching at the ruin of her throat, tears in her eyes, mouth working around bubbles of red. Her wind affinity sputtered out like a dying candle.
Ryota didn't hesitate even after witnessing the brutality wrought on his teammate.
"Encirclement. Now."
His voice was colder than the ice still clinging to his fingers.
The squad tightened like a noose. Steel flashed. A dagger lodged in the Grunt's spine, fire beads detonated against its ribs, but the damn thing kept moving, black blood sizzling as its flesh knit itself back together.
Ryota's boot crunched on frozen grass.
A flick of his wrist.
An ice spike erupted from the ground, spearing the Grunt's thigh clean through, pinning it like a bug. The demon roared, just as Ryota's flame-wreathed sword took its head in one brutal crescent.
The severed skull hit the dirt with a thud. The body convulsed, fingers clawing at nothing before collapsing into embers and ash. A red core and a dead teammate the only proof of its existence.
Silence.
Ryota hands clenched so hard blood trickled onto his fingernails. As he stared at the dead girl, one of her boots still twitched, a nerve firing its last signal.
He dropped to his knees beside her. His hands shook as he reached out, hesitating for a second before gently pressing his fingers against her eyelids, closing them.
He stayed there, kneeling, staring at his hands. His shoulders sagged and his head fell forward. For a long moment, he didn't move, just breathed in short, uneven breaths.
Finally, he pushed himself back to his feet, wiping his palms on his pants.
"Move out," he said, already turning toward the deeper woods. "They'll have heard that."
Behind him, eyes were wet, but no one wept.
The scream sliced through the night, too young, too human.
Aullie's head snapped up as the Grunt coalesced between two first-years, its claws already descending. Void Step, his body dissolved into shadows before the thought fully formed.
Too fucking slow.
He rematerialized just as the first swipe connected. The boy came apart like wet parchment, his upper torso sliding free with a sound Aullie would hear for weeks. The girl beside him folded around the backhand that crushed her ribs, her whimper lost in the crunch of bone.
"EYES ON ME!" Aullie roared, his sword already singing through the air.
The Grunt pivoted with unnatural grace, catching his blade between claws that screeched against steel. Smart. Too smart. Its free hand shot toward his throat.
Phase.
Aullie's body flickered as the claws passed through him. The Void burned cold in his veins, every millisecond of intangibility eating at his stamina. He solidified behind the demon, driving his knee into its spine. It cracked. The Grunt barely made a noise.
Fuck me.
The brutal exchange lasted only a few seconds.
Aullie's reverse slash rolled off the hardened claws, sending sparks stinging into his eyes.
The Grunt's elbow caught him in the ribs with a sickening pop as cartilage gave way, filling his mouth with the taste of iron.
Desperate to recover, he rolled away from a phantom slash, only to realize too late he had fallen right into the demon's trap.
It's herding me.
The realization came a second too late. The Grunt feinted high, Aullie raised his guard, then its claws speared low.
Not again, notagainNOTAGAINNOTAGAIN!
White fire erupted in his side. The same angle. The same wound that had killed him in his last life where he still had phantom pains due to the nightmares. His knees buckled as the claws twisted, the Grunt's breath hot and rancid against his face.
Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, Sora screamed his name.
Aullie's vision swam. The Void bead at his wrist pulsed like a dying star. With the last of his strength, he locked both hands around the demon's wrist.
"NOW!"
Shinku hit like a black typhoon, claws covered in void finding the Grunt's spine just as Sora's spell twisted the air. The world held its breath. For one moment, the demon hung suspended, mid-snarl. One second, that's how long the grunt was trapped in Soras space shackles, invulnerable, but unable to move as a tradeoff.
Timing his sword the millisecond before the spell ended.
His sword flashed.
The head hit the dirt with a wet thump. The body spasmed, ichor spraying in arterial gouts before collapsing into cinders.
Aullie followed it down, his blood painting the leaves red. Shinku's growl vibrated through his chest as the panther shouldered under his arm. Sora's hands were already at his side, her hands covered in Aether pressing against the wound to stop the blood loss and accelerate healing.
"Took...your time," Aullie rasped, spitting red onto the demon's ashes.
Sora's eyes flooding with tears. "Aullie. AULLIE! Please, Please! I can't lose you! Please just focus your Aether with mine so we can get you to a healer. Please."
Aullie put his hand over hers, in pain but smiling to for reassurance.
"I'll be okay, it looks worse than it is…kinda. But help me up, we need to get out of here and regroup, I may be out of commision for a bit but my summons can still help."
Sora looked like she was going to protest, but stopped seeing the stubborn look in his eyes.
"Fine, but put all your weight on me, I can handle it, I can handle you."
Moving gingerly, Aullie stood up and gave Sora all his weight and started walking.
They slowly made it through the woods, walking towards their friends…
Minutes later they made it to the clearing, it stank of blood and burnt ozone.
Queenie materialized, large combat form bristling, lips peeled back in a snarl. She circled the survivors, nostrils flaring at every shadow. Haru stumbled in behind her, half-dragging, half-carrying two first-years. One's leg bent the wrong way. The other clutched a stomach wound, fingers slick and trembling.
"We need to go!" Haru barked, voice raw. "Now!"
Nearby, Aki crouched over a motionless figure. The boy's chest didn't rise. Didn't fall. Her hands, covered in crimson to the elbows, hovered uselessly. "Gone," she whispered. The word landed like a stone.
Mayu's command split the air: "Rally point! MOVE!"
Sora tightened her grip around Aullie's waist as he coughed, a wet, ragged sound. "Can you keep moving?" Her voice was steel wrapped in velvet.
He managed a grin, though it looked more like a grimace. "Define 'moving.' If it's a brisk crawl, then absolutely."
She didn't laugh. Just adjusted her hold, her hands glowing faintly against his ribs.
They ran.
Behind them, the dead dissolved, demon corpses unraveling into black motes that hung in the air like cursed fireflies before winking out. The human bodies stayed.
The ridge was a knife's edge of rock, but it was high ground. They collapsed there, lungs burning. No one spoke. The only sounds were shuddering breaths and the distant crackle of dying fires below.
Aullie tilted his head back against the stone. Alive. For now.
Ryota stood motionless at the cliff's edge, the wind tugging at his tattered uniform. Dried blood cracked when he flexed his fingers - some his, most not. His left eye had swollen shut, the purple-black swelling distorting his usually perfect features. Behind him, his remaining squad members sat in stunned silence. A cocky first year who'd bragged about combat power at breakfast now hugged his knees, staring at nothing.
Mayu's boots crunched on gravel as she paced. Her breastplate bore deep gouges that glowed faintly orange at the edges - demon fire still eating through the metal. When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of command:
"Listen carefully. This was supposed to be a controlled field test. Those demons didn't just wander in, something let them through." She scanned each face. "We hold this position until reinforcements arrive. Anyone tries to run, you won't step foot in an academy again."
No objections. No smart remarks. Just the occasional wet cough from someone trying not to vomit.
Aullie sat with his back against a boulder, Sora's fingers laced tightly through his. Her thumb kept tracing circles on his wrist, checking his pulse or anchoring herself, he couldn't tell.
Shinku, back in housecat form, meticulously licked black ichor from his paws. "Three grunts," the panther mused in their minds, "two elites. And these were just the scouts." A pause as he nibbled a claw. "When the real attack comes, they won't bother with subtlety."
Aullie exhaled slowly, watching the distant tree line where shadows moved just beyond the fading ward lights and slowly drifted off to sleep.