The God Of Destruction's Academy Life

Xath’rael hung motionless beneath the bleeding crimson sky, his gaze drifting down to where Carlos lay broken in the crater he’d carved into the earth. A long moment passed. Then he turned, slow and deliberate, his attention sweeping back across the students still standing below. A breath left him, heavy with something between exhaustion and contempt.

"I’ve dragged this out far longer than I should have. Once this filth is dealt with, I need to leave this place." His voice dropped, and something darker crept into it. "And I swear..."

His head tilted back, eyes lifting to the churning red heavens above.

"This time, I will kill that bitch. And I will have my revenge."

His gaze fell again, settling on the students like a predator surveying prey. He lifted four of his sixteen arms in one fluid motion, and crimson light kindled to life in each open palm. The air around him began to ripple. Small points of red bloomed into existence, scattered across the sky in every direction, faint at first, then burning brighter, swelling steadily larger. One by one, they twisted into shape, blade after blade after blade, until dozens of swords hung suspended in the air around him, each one a mirror of the ones already in his hands.

Below, Elizabeth stared upward, her knuckles whitening around her hilt. She counted them as they formed. Fifty. Sixty. Nearly seventy swords now floated in the crimson sky, motionless, waiting. Then Xath’rael raised his hand and pointed it down at them, and in that same instant, every single blade turned as one, their tips swiveling to face the students below like a field of arrows drawn taut. It happened faster than thought. Elizabeth’s blood ran cold, and she screamed.

"EVERYONE, WATCH OUT! Get ready, he’s..."

She never finished. The words died in her throat as the sky itself seemed to fall. Every sword plunged downward at once, a storm of four-foot blades screaming toward the earth like judgment raining from the heavens. Elizabeth’s eyes locked onto one hurtling straight toward her, and instinct took over before thought could. She wrenched her sword upward and caught the descending blade flat against her own.

The impact hit like a collapsing mountain. It threw her three full steps backward, boots tearing furrows into the dirt, and that same bone-deep shudder tore through her body again, the same violent ache she’d felt before. Her arms screamed from the force of it.

And when she looked up, the blade that had nearly ended her was simply gone. Vanished into nothing, as if it had never existed at all.

After blocking the blade and watching it vanish, Elizabeth lowered her sword. The force of the impact finally caught up with her, buckling her knees, dropping her down as blood spilled from her mouth. Internal damage, severe. Fractures spread through her ribs and arms. Pain tore through every inch of her body. She wiped the blood from around her lips with the back of her hand and forced herself to look around.

What she saw made her eyes go wide with horror. The swords that had rained down from the sky had punched clean through dozens of students, blades passing straight through bodies, some sliced clean in half. In the wake of the attack, nearly fifty new bodies lay scattered across the clearing. Panic seized her, and she frantically scanned the field, searching for Lyra, terrified she hadn’t survived. She spotted her a short distance away, kneeling in the dirt, one hand gripping the elbow of her other arm. From this distance, Elizabeth couldn’t tell what had happened. She forced herself upright, leaning on her sword for support, and staggered toward her.

When she finally reached her, what she saw stopped her cold. Lyra’s left arm had been severed cleanly below the elbow, the detached limb lying a short distance away, fingers still twitching faintly. Elizabeth ignored her own injuries entirely and broke into a run, dropping to her knees beside her.

"Lyra, are you okay?"

Lyra was gripping the stump of her arm tightly, pain etched across her face. At the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, she turned her head. Elizabeth looked terrible, blood smeared across her nose and mouth, bruises covering nearly every inch of visible skin. Lyra managed a weak response.

"I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong with me. I managed to save myself, at least this time." She glanced down at the ruined stump where her arm used to be. "But I couldn’t save my arm. Still, keeping my life intact counts for something." She looked up at Elizabeth properly now. "What about you? You look like you got hurt badly."

"I’m fine. Just some minor injuries. Nothing as serious as yours."

Elizabeth turned to look out over the field, and once she did, she couldn’t look away. Only a handful of students remained alive now, few enough to count on one hand. Bodies covered the ground in every direction. The earth itself had turned red with blood, as though a river of it were flowing through the clearing. Staring at the carnage, she turned back to Lyra.

"Will we be able to survive the next attack?"

"I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t see much hope of us beating that ancient monster. But..."

Elizabeth frowned at the pause.

"But?"

Lyra managed a faint smile.

"But he can."

The moment Elizabeth heard that, her eyes lit up. She knew exactly who Lyra meant.

"Is he here?"

"Not yet. But he’s close. The qi in the air, it’s shifting, moving. That means he’s nearby. We just need to hold on a little longer until he gets here."

A spark of hope kindled in Elizabeth’s chest at those words. For a moment, she let herself believe they might actually make it out of this.

That hope didn’t last long.

***

Xath’rael gazed down at the carnage sprawled across the clearing below. Most of the students lay dead, but a handful still clung to life, and their persistence was starting to grate on him. Two in particular irritated him more than the rest, two girls whose fate seemed to defy every law of probability. Attack after attack, they kept slipping through his fingers. And of everyone left alive, their deaths mattered more to him than anyone else’s. If he could kill them, the power he’d gain would surpass anything even the slaughter of millions could offer. He had never in his existence encountered fate so extreme, so unmeasurable, and that uncertainty gnawed at him. He didn’t fully know how much stronger he could become. But he wanted to find out.

And there was only one way to find out.

He raised a hand, pointed it toward the two girls, and a red light kindled at his fingertip. A beam of crimson energy tore free and streaked toward Elizabeth and Lyra with blinding speed.

Both girls saw it coming, watched it close the distance in an instant, far too fast for either of them to move. Their eyes went wide, frozen in place. Lyra understood, in that final heartbeat, that this was where their story ended. There would be no surviving this.

But then she felt two hands press against her, and when she turned to see where they’d come from, her eyes widened in horror, because she already knew what was about to happen and wanted no part of it. The hands shoved her hard, sending her tumbling away across the ground.

The instant she cleared the blast radius, the crimson beam struck home, and the world exploded.

"ELIZABETH!"

Lyra’s scream tore through the clearing. Smoke billowed from the crater where Elizabeth had been standing seconds before, the ground around it torn open and scorched black.

Lyra dragged herself across the dirt toward the smoking crater, unable to stand, her legs refusing to hold any weight. She crawled, inch by agonizing inch, until she reached the edge, and as the smoke began to clear, what lay beneath it broke something inside her. Tears poured down her face before she even understood what she was looking at.

Elizabeth lay there, her upper body intact, untouched. But from the waist down, nothing remained. Her body simply ended, severed clean through, and there was nothing left below it to see. The light in her eyes was already fading.

Lyra couldn’t hold back her tears. She crawled the rest of the way and pressed a trembling hand against Elizabeth’s body.

"Elizabeth, please, don’t die. Please, please, stay with me. I’m begging you. Don’t die, don’t die... ELIZABETH!"

Xath’rael, noticing that Lyra was still alive, felt his brow furrow with irritation. He decided he would finish this himself. Sword in hand, he shot toward her through the air, closing the distance in an instant, and landed directly in front of her with a thunderous impact. He looked down at her crumpled form in the dirt, then raised his blade high and brought it down toward her in a single decisive strike.

"Just die already."

The blade screamed downward, a blur of speed and merciless force.

Then...

Thud.

The sword stopped dead in midair, as though it had buried itself in solid stone, refusing to move another inch. Xath’rael looked down to see what had caught it, and what he found wasn’t stone at all. It was two fingers. A boy’s fingers, holding his blade in place with nothing but a grip.

The boy wore the same navy uniform as every other student at the academy. Tall, broad-shouldered, with silky black hair. Xath’rael couldn’t see his face; the boy stood with his back turned, his gaze fixed on the severed body lying in the dirt before him. Then, in a voice unnervingly calm, the boy spoke.

"Was this your doing?"

The moment those words left his mouth, something inside Xath’rael screamed at him, a primal, instinctive warning that told him to get away immediately or face something far worse than death. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even try. He simply vanished backward, putting nearly a hundred feet between himself and the boy in an instant, his entire body suddenly, inexplicably cold.

Lyra looked up at the black-haired boy standing above her, and through her tears, she managed to speak.

"Necrotize... you’re finally back."