Chapter 740: Back To The Academy
The return to the Dark Knight Academy was not gentle.
One moment, the second-year students were scattered across Nalim, each of them waking, resting, hiding, walking, fighting, or simply enduring whatever final moments the realm had chosen to give them. The next, blue teleportation Myst swallowed all one hundred of them at once and deposited them inside the Eastern Grand Hall, right back where the assessment had begun seven days ago.
The grand hall looked exactly the same as it had before they left, but the students did not.
All across the wide stone floor, second years appeared in flashes of fading blue light, and almost immediately, the hall filled with heavy breaths, low groans, startled curses, and the sound of bodies nearly giving out now that they were no longer standing inside Nalim. Some students landed on their feet and managed to remain upright through sheer pride.
Others dropped to one knee the instant they arrived, hands braced against the floor as if they had spent the last several hours holding themselves together and could finally stop pretending. A few simply collapsed backward or sat down where they stood, not because they had been defeated, but because their bodies had reached the end of what they were willing to tolerate.
The condition of the students varied, but none looked untouched.
Some were covered in mud from swamps or rivers. Others had dried blood on their uniforms, torn sleeves, cracked armor pieces, scorched fabric, bandaged limbs, and exhausted eyes. Several carried weapons that looked as though they had been through more battles than their owners cared to explain.
One student had half of his chest plate split open. Another had one boot missing entirely, with his foot wrapped in dirty cloth. A group near the far left side of the hall had clearly come from a colder section of Nalim, their clothes stiff and damp, their skin pale from exposure.
Another few smelled faintly of smoke, like they had spent too much time near burning trees or had been responsible for burning them in the first place.
Yet despite the battered state of everyone present, there was also something strangely alive in the hall.
They had survived.
That realization sat underneath the exhaustion, underneath the pain, underneath the shell-shocked expressions some students still carried from what they had faced.