Chapter 80. Five Anomaly’s
Every student present, along with Xath’rael himself, turned their eyes toward one side of the forest. Their attention fixed on the five new students who had just entered the clearing.
The first was a young man with striking red hair, his build large and broad-shouldered. His features were sharp and elegant, his nose finely cut, his whole bearing carrying the unmistakable air of nobility. Just looking at him stirred an instinctive respect in the chest. This was Carlos Hilbert.
Beside him stood another student, his build entirely different from Carlos’s. He had blue hair and a frame that was slight, almost delicate. A long spear rested against his shoulder, its blade angled upward, one hand gripping the lower shaft to steady it. His eyes were green, his nose thin and refined, and his features carried a distinctiveness that set him apart from anyone standing nearby. This was Arthur.
Next to Arthur stood another young man, his build similar in proportion. He had brown hair, green eyes, and a lean frame. His features were unremarkable, entirely average. This was Simon.
Beside him stood a young man with black hair and a tall frame, his whole presence carrying a refined elegance. This was Lawrence Vander, a student from the Summoning Department.
And last stood a girl dressed in white, a stark contrast to the rest of the group. A white cloth and veil covered her head and most of her face, clearly not a uniform but something closer to religious garb. Through the thin veil, the faint outline of her features could just be made out. She was the team’s student from the Divine Studies Department, Flora Farminghame.
Carlos stepped out from the brush, hands sliding into his pockets, and looked out over the clearing ahead. The moment his eyes took in the scene, his brow hardened. He swept his gaze slowly across the entire clearing, and what he saw made his eyes burn with something close to fire. The forest floor was drowned in blood. Torn and dismembered bodies of students littered the ground in every direction. Corpses lay severed into multiple pieces, entrails spilled out and scattered across the dirt, and severed heads rolled here and there like discarded balls.
After taking in the carnage, his gaze shifted to the surviving students. Most of them were trembling, their bodies wracked with fear. It looked as though something had drained the strength out of them in those few moments, their bodies withered, as if they’d witnessed something that had changed them beyond recognition. His eyes eventually landed on a girl lying on the ground, green hair, features once lovely, now hollowed out by terror. She stared upward with a face frozen in fear, a massive sword hovering just above her.
Finally, his gaze settled on the most grotesque thing standing in the clearing. Its skin was a deep crimson red. Its head resembled the skull of a goat, crowned with two long, curved horns. Its jaw extended forward like a mantis’s, and where its eyes should have been, there were eight massive, terrifying eyes, yellow at the center, ringed in black, pupils marked with streaks of red. The back of its head was covered in something resembling a lion’s mane. Below the head, its torso was humanoid, but from each side sprouted eight arms, sixteen in total. From the waist down, two powerful legs extended, shaped like the hind legs of a lion.
Carlos stared at it for a long moment. And before anyone could say a word, he already knew what it was and what it was called. Recognition should have brought fear, should have brought hesitation, but neither came. He simply stared, and after a while, an expression crossed his face that hadn’t appeared on any other student’s. Excitement. Arthur noticed the strange, eager smile spreading across Carlos’s lips.
"To think a monster straight out of legend would stand in my way toward strength. Truly, this might be the greatest opportunity I could ever ask for on this path. A thing feared even by gods, and now it stands before me. But it doesn’t matter what it is. I will crush it. People, monsters, even gods, whoever stands in my way, I will crush them all. And I will keep my promise to her."
Beside him, Arthur took in the same scene, sweeping his eyes carefully over every detail: the blood, the severed limbs, the scattered heads. He felt nothing. His expression remained exactly as it had been the moment he arrived, unmoved, as if this horror meant nothing to him. As if he’d seen such things a hundred times before and had simply grown used to them. His face stayed calm and unreadable. Then his gaze moved to the enormous creature standing in the clearing, its violent stare fixed on the group.
At first, he didn’t recognize what he was looking at. But the longer he stared, the more it stirred a memory, an image painted on the wall of a church back in the slum where he’d grown up. That painting depicted a monster, and this creature looked exactly like it. After a moment of thought, he realized they were one and the same. He couldn’t remember its name; he’d never bothered to learn it. Even if he’d heard it once, it hadn’t seemed important enough to remember. He’d had more pressing matters back then. Staying alive. That had always taken priority over everything else in the slum.
But the rest of the team didn’t share his detachment. When Simon stepped out from the brush and took in the same gruesome scene, his entire body went cold. The moment he saw the river of blood soaking into the forest floor and the mutilated remains of the students scattered across it, his stomach lurched violently. Nausea rose in his throat. Fear turned his body to ice. Then his eyes fell on a severed head lying nearby.
The instant he recognized it, tears began pouring from his eyes, and he couldn’t stop them no matter how hard he tried. The head belonged to a girl with black hair and brown eyes, eyes that had once held warmth but now held nothing. Just an endless, permanent emptiness. That girl was Hana.
He stared at Hana’s severed head in silence, and slowly, his knees gave out beneath him. He collapsed to the ground, burying his face in his hands, tears streaming without end. He couldn’t accept it. Hana was gone. She was really gone.
Lawrence and Flora were in much the same state. The moment they stepped out, the scene hit them full force. Among the dead scattered across the clearing, they recognized friends, people close to them. Seeing their bodies nearly broke them entirely. Neither knew what to do. Tears wouldn’t even come, that was how deep the shock ran. And when their eyes finally landed on the monster standing among the carnage, their fear reached a point beyond limit. Because the moment they saw it, they recognized it too, immediately, and that recognition brought a terror without end. Their bodies turned to ice. The color drained from their faces, replaced with something hollow and grief-stricken. Their whole bodies went rigid. All of them stared at the creature with pure dread.
Xath’rael, sword still raised mid-swing, turned his gaze to the right, toward the new students who had just emerged from the treeline. The instant his eyes fell on them, all eight of his brows furrowed. He studied them with a hard, searching stare. Something about them didn’t add up, and that inconsistency gnawed at him. So he decided, for the moment, to set aside his bloodlust. He would find his answer first, then decide what came next.
He raised the sword that had been hovering inches from Natasha’s face and drove it into the ground. He did the same with the other three blades in his remaining hands, planting them into the earth. Then he turned to face Carlos and his group, taking a few steps toward them, and asked.
"How were you able to escape the Crimson Mirage?"
Carlos, Arthur, and the rest of their team had no idea what he meant. None of them knew what a "Crimson Mirage" even was, so the question meant nothing to them. But Carlos wasn’t one to stay silent in the face of confusion. He kept his hands in his pockets, tilted his head back, and stared straight into the creature’s many eyes.
"What are you talking about, you ugly insect? What is it we shouldn’t have been able to escape?"
Every student within earshot froze. Elizabeth, Lyra, and Dominic all stared at Carlos with their mouths hanging open. None of them had ever imagined anyone could speak to Xath’rael like that, let alone to his face. It stunned every student present. And it wasn’t just the students. Even Xath’rael himself was caught off guard. He had never once imagined that a human child would dare call him an "ugly insect." The sheer audacity left him feeling something close to amusement and fury in the same breath.
He decided then that they needed to be taught a lesson. He folded his sixteen arms and chose, for now, to set his blades aside entirely; he would use only his hands. That would be punishment enough. With that intent, he began advancing toward Carlos and his team. Each step he took shook the forest floor beneath his massive fifteen-foot frame.
But after only a few strides, he stopped abruptly.
Because he had just felt something. A strange, unfamiliar power radiating from within one of the five students standing before him. The moment he sensed it, a chill crawled up through his entire body, as though something catastrophic lay dormant inside that person. He turned his gaze toward that student and stared.