Sofia and Astelia stood over the spot where the bone bunker was buried with the students and skeletons inside.
“Should I teleport you inside?” Astelia asked, aware that Sofia had no mana left to spare to use the graveyard again.
“No, I have a funny idea,” Sofia answered, laughing ominously.
Only about forty seconds left on the demon form… So short.
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The students were waiting in the enlarged safe room, safely buried a few meters deep under one of the dungeon’s corridors, a few hundred meters away from the boss room. Some were sitting, some walking around in circles, impatiently waiting to be let out of there.
The safe room shook with the distant noise and vibrations of a muted impact, as if a wall fell down somewhere far in the dungeon.
The students looked at each other.
“Was the fight not over?” one of the boys asked.
“It was silent for a while…” Lola answered, sticking her ear against the wall, “And it’s silent again.”
“Could there be a second boss?” Shaily suggested, right as the room shook again.
Lola and Opal were surprised by the stronger tremor and both lost their footing, getting caught by En and Topaz respectively.
Opal seemed the most worried of the group as she knew something the other students hadn’t realized yet. The second tremor had come from much closer, she could feel it. Since she couldn’t talk, she tended to listen to things around her a lot more and had developed a very sensitive sense of hearing.
Nevertheless, the casual discussion in the safe room turned back to the hushed whispers it had been when the teachers had been fighting the boss.
A third tremor hit the room, this time much closer, enough that everyone noticed. The atmosphere was already getting tense but it suddenly got much, much worse when Pareth activated his armor and weapon, taking a fighting stance in the middle of the room. Bookie panickedly signaled to the students to sit on the floor and be silent with hand gestures.
The room was so silent one could hear a fly land.
Next came the sound of floor tiles cracking, then of the stone around the safe room getting crushed. Something was digging, and it was coming straight for them.
Some were too terrified to do anything, some instinctively prepared to use a spell, but they all knew that if the skeletons guarding them couldn’t protect them then they would have no chance to do anything.
Something hit the walls of the safe room, it was not as violent as the tremors from before, more like someone knocking at the wall. Then came a second, louder knock, and Pareth adjusted his fighting stance slightly, his sword facing the direction of the noise.
A dark-gray clawed hand burst through the wall. Some of the students screamed in terror. The hand pulled back, tearing a huge hole into the bone wall. It revealed the demonic appearance of a creature’s spiky mutated head with a disproportionately large mouth and pointy razor-sharp teeth. Half of its torso was also visible, revealing a gaping hole in the creature’s body where the heart should be.
The thing roared and threw itself arms first at the holy skeleton warrior.
Pareth’s sword disappeared at the last moment, he spread his arms and caught the demonic creature in a tight embrace. They barrelled through the room, rolling in front of the students as they held each other, and crashed into the opposite wall.
A few spells were actually fired their way, only to curve around them and harmlessly hit a wall.
Just as the dust settled, Sofia swiftly reactivated her bone armor except for the helmet, and her transformation ended. Pareth was down, back against the floor with Sofia on top, they released each other and Sofia sat up on his chest, her hair a mess in front of her face.
“Hey kids, missed me?” Sofia asked the students as she adjusted her hair.
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After a moment of silent shock, copious amounts of profanities were hurled her way as Sofia heartily laughed by herself. Astelia entered the wall through the hole a few seconds later, discreetly storing the academy’s catalyst she had been clutching until now.
“You were a fucking Apostle!?” Topaz asked, her mind blown by the nonsensical revelation.
“Did you think Vakaria was my surname? It stands for Vakariazrehafin of Sorrow,” Sofia answered innocently as if it was common sense.
“Weren’t you a Saint?!” Topaz argued back.
“Oh, yes, that too, though my patron God hates my guts.”
“How can… Did you perform one of those deranged rituals?” Topaz asked again, flabbergasted.
“Sure did, had to kill myself twice in the process. Fun times.”
“No wonder she can call shadow sprites,” Shaily mumbled to herself.
The students, especially those from Astelia’s group, were looking at Sofia like she was a monster, which, to be fair to them, she was. Out of all of the teenagers, En seemed to be the less affected by the sudden scare, if anything, she looked excited to learn her teacher was even stronger than she had realized until now. On the contrary, Opal was breathing very fast, having a hard time recovering from the scare, Sofia’s roar had shaken her to her core. Frowning, she scribbled on her notepad and showed it to Sofia.
‘YOU SCARED ME!!! (♯｀∧´)’
Sofia laughed awkwardly and apologized, “Sorry, sorry, I just couldn’t help myself. Since you bunch could not watch the boss fight I thought you deserved to at least see one monster, right? We did clear the dungeon by the way, Astelia got some cute magic earrings and I also got a good chunk of Orichalcum. I’ll melt the thing into ingots and you’ll get one each as an apology for the scare, how does that sound?”
The unexpected reward instantly lightened the mood in the ‘safe’ room, and the students started asking a lot of questions to both Sofia and Astelia about the items and the boss and the demon form all at once. First, however, they were interrupted by Pareth tapping on Sofia’s back; she was still sitting on him.
“Oh! Sorry,” she apologized with a rare slightly reddened face; she stood up and lent Pareth a hand to get up.
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I guess there was nobody else going after us… I still can’t shake this weird sensation that somebody is watching me though. Maybe I really need to take more time to relax…
Waiting for the Academy to send someone to retrieve them from the dungeon, everyone was having a fine campfire meal in a clean room they had reclaimed from all the rampant vegetation.
Sofia was just getting done recounting the events of the boss fight to her class while Astelia was giving out the scores to her own students.
“Right, let me give the scores for this event, I have been keeping track, so let’s see. I won’t give the detailed breakdown, but overall, you all did very well, I’m proud!”
The students intently waited for the scores. Four of them were actually trying to compete for the first place, with only Topaz being uninterested. However, tokens were still worth one gold each, not much to the princess of an Empire, but even she wouldn’t say no to more money to spend on new weapons.
“So, do keep in mind that everyone shared a singular pool of token since it was a cooperative event, but there were a few bonuses up for grabs and that did create a small leaderboard. Everyone got at least two bonuses which is pretty good, and the overall performance throughout the dungeon was very good with minimal injuries and issues. I only had to step in once, so that’s a single penalty. Now, then. Equal in third place with the exact same number of points, we have En, Topaz, and Shaily, getting 180 tokens each.”
“So much?!” En asked, her tails standing up.
“Yeah, the events are really going to be the main source of tokens along with duels. For comparison you only get four-hundred something for stealing my teacher’s pouch so it’s both a lot and not so much. Anyway, second place goes to Opal! You barely ever missed a spell, never actually hit an ally despite the large area of effect of most of your spells, finished off a lot of monsters by yourself, overall great performance. 220 tokens.”
Opal looked embarrassed by the compliments and tried to redirect the attention to the only person left who was obviously first place, Lola.
“And indeed, Lola, congratulations on getting the most bonus points. You have improved a lot since our first class two months ago. You still have areas to progress in. I continue to think you could have some great success by fighting side to side with your guardian like I do with Pareth, but it’s good to take it step by step like you do. I’m very proud of how far you have come already. 250 tokens!” Sofia announced, clapping for Lola.
The other girls also clapped and congratulated her. Shaily looked very happy to see her friend progress so much, she had the brightest smile out of the entire group despite scoring lower.
Evan in the other group stood up during this, “Two fifty?!” he exclaimed, getting entirely ignored, before sitting back down. “I’ll admit it’s deserved…” he mumbled, sighing defeatedly.
“Evan got 220 like Opal,” Sofia informed them, “So Lola is actually first for the whole dungeon. As I said, well done. Hard work pays off.”
Saint Tartaros appeared around the time everyone was finishing their celebratory meal.
“I see that besides the student who had to be evacuated, nothing has gone wrong,” the tall Saint observed as his eyes scanned everyone in the room. “Very well, I will now distribute the tokens before we head back. I will ask the students to quickly regain your dorms, as I need to have a talk with your teachers. The next two days are off, and there will be no duels during this time, so sleep well and recuperate. Building strength requires proper rest.”
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