The God Of Destruction's Academy Life

A gentle wind moved through the forest. Leaves drifted down like slow rain. Somewhere above, birds traded songs back and forth, and the whole forest seemed to hum quietly with the sound of it.

Against that peaceful backdrop, five figures stood in a clearing, and the air between them had turned anything but peaceful.

Dominic, Alana, and Hana all stared at Sarliya, waiting. Each face carried a different shade of the same question. They wanted an answer. Why hadn’t she buffed them?

Sarliya looked back at them. She sighed. Then she brought her hands together in their familiar position of prayer.

"Give you buffs?" Her voice was incredulous, almost wounded. "How could you even think that? Do you not understand who we’re standing in front of right now? How could I possibly buff any of you in the presence of a god? Would you really fight in front of him relying on borrowed strength?" She shook her head slowly. "Doesn’t that embarrass you, even a little? In front of a god, we fight with what is truly ours. If we lean on outside help, what do you imagine he would think of us?"

Then she turned away from them entirely, toward Necrotize, and lowered herself into a full position of prayer in front of him.

"Oh great one, please forgive these ignorant souls. They asked for something they didn’t fully understand the weight of. I humbly beg you to spare their lives."

The moment the words left her mouth, something cold settled into the chest of everyone listening.

They turned the logic over in their heads, and slowly, uncomfortably, it began to make a kind of sense.

She’s right. If I’d fought in front of Lord Necrotize with a buff active, how would that have impressed him at all? That wouldn’t have been my own strength. There would have been something else carrying part of that victory, not just me.

That was the thought working its way through Dominic’s mind. It wasn’t only him. Hana and Alana were arriving at roughly the same conclusion in their own heads, independently, each one quietly convincing themselves that Sarliya’s reasoning made sense.

Only one person in the clearing wasn’t thinking along those lines at all.

Necrotize.

He listened to Sarliya’s explanation and pressed two fingers against his brow, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. This was not remotely what he’d expected. When he’d first noticed the absence of buffs during the fight, he’d assumed there was some practical reason behind it. A strategic call, a resource consideration, something rational.

He had not, even once, considered that the reason might be this childish.

It showed on his face, though no one watching could quite read what it meant.

"Seriously, Sarliya, you didn’t need to do this." He sighed. "And why would I care if they used buffs? I’ve told you before. Stop kneeling in front of me like this. I don’t like it."

Sarliya stayed in position for a moment longer before rising back to her feet. Then, as if needing one final confirmation, she asked again.

"My lord, am I permitted to use buffs on them going forward? Would that please you?"

"Yes."

"Then it’s settled." A small smile crossed her face. "From now on, I’ll use buffs on them."

Necrotize let out a sigh. Then they pushed forward again, deeper into the forest.

A short while later, Alana called out that she’d spotted a Rank One monster ahead. This time, no one hesitated. No one hung back out of fear, and no one bothered trying to sneak around it. They walked straight toward it with their full confidence intact. This time, they didn’t even need the whole team to bring it down.

Alana handled it almost entirely on her own, using Macy to finish it off.

By the time the rest of them reached the spot, the monster was already dead on the ground. They extracted its demon core and moved on, continuing the hunt, one monster after another, in steady succession.

But the targets had changed. They weren’t going after anything especially dangerous anymore. Most of what they engaged now sat comfortably at Rank One or Rank Two. Manageable. Almost routine. A Rank One monster usually fell to a single member of the team acting alone. A Rank Two might need two, or at most three, working together.

Through all of it, Necrotize did nothing.

He simply walked along with them, hands in his pockets, essentially along for the ride. There was nothing for him to do, and strangely, that suited him just fine. There was a particular kind of satisfaction in watching a team operate well without needing him to step in. He found he liked it more than he expected to.

What he didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that this quiet, easy satisfaction wasn’t going to last much longer.

Soon, everything in front of him would come apart.

And when it did, there would be nothing he could do to stop it.

***

Outside the circular star, the figures in black robes finished their incantation.

The black blob suspended within the star had grown considerably since they began. Large enough now that, if a grown man stood beside it, he wouldn’t even reach its height.

Inside the writhing mass, thousands of human faces surfaced and sank in an endless, restless cycle, pushing toward the surface only to be dragged back under, over and over. From somewhere deep within it, screaming poured out. Not ordinary screaming. The kind of sound that carried pain, suffering, and an agony with no end in sight. The kind of noise that would unmake the sanity of anyone forced to listen to it for too long.

And yet every robed figure standing around it remained perfectly still. Perfectly calm. As if the sound didn’t reach them at all.

Then one of them spoke.

"Let Death rain upon you."

The instant the words left him, the blob began to rise, lifting slowly off the ground, climbing higher and higher until it hovered nearly a kilometer above the earth, suspended there like something that had simply decided gravity no longer applied to it.

The man who had given the opening speech raised both hands toward it and began another incantation. As the chant progressed, strange threads of white began to bleed out from within the black mass, faint at first, then brighter, more numerous, until the blob was practically streaming with light from the inside out.

The moment the chant ended, the blob burst.

There was no explosion. No shockwave. No violent sound at all. By any normal measure, nothing destructive happened.

But what did happen sent every professor watching from outside the forest bolt upright in their seats, eyes wide, breath caught. Even Eric, composed as he always was, found himself dropping to one knee, staring at the screen as if his legs had simply given out beneath him.

The instant the blob detonated, a barrier began spreading outward from the point of impact, expanding so fast that within the space of a single blink, it had already engulfed the entire forest.

The barrier itself wasn’t what stunned them.

It was its rank.

It was a Rank Ten barrier.