Free Web NovelChapter 52: Chapter 52. One Battle Ends, Another Begins
When the boar hit the ground, the sound it made was final.
Everyone exhaled at once.
Hana and Alana sat down where they stood. Their legs simply decided that continuing to hold them up was optional now, and they agreed. Neither of them spoke immediately. The creature’s body lay in front of them, and neither of them had quite processed that they were the reason it was there.
Alana looked at Lucy and Macy. Both spirits were breathing hard, or doing whatever the spiritual equivalent of breathing hard was, visibly depleted from the effort. She dismissed them gently, sending them back to the spirit world to rest. They had earned it.
Hana stared at the boar’s body. The acid potion had done more than she had planned for, the hide dissolved in patches, the underlying muscle exposed and blackened. She had made that. She had mixed it together in a small room with basic equipment, and it had done that.
She felt pride and unease in equal measure, examined both, then set the unease aside for later. Right now there was only one thing that mattered.
They had won. ƒrēewebnovel.com
Dominic looked at his sword. Black blood on the blade. The boar’s head on the ground at his feet. He had cut it himself, the final stroke, after everything. He had never imagined he could do something like that.
I didn’t let go. I didn’t bring shame on them. I didn’t break their trust in me.
He held the thought quietly, and something warm settled in his chest alongside the pain.
Then came the sound of applause from behind them.
He turned.
Necrotize was walking toward them, clapping with genuine appreciation, his expression carrying something that looked very much like being impressed.
"All of you. That was remarkable. Defeating an Inverted Demonic Boar on your own. Truly."
Dominic tried to push himself off the ground. Necrotize stopped him with a word.
"Don’t get up. Rest for a moment. You’ve all been through something significant, and we’re not finished, there are more monsters to hunt. You can’t do that exhausted."
Dominic settled back down, crossing his legs on the ground.
"Whatever we managed, it was only possible because of you," he said.
"No." Necrotize shook his head. "I stood at the back and watched. What was accomplished here, you accomplished. And your courage genuinely impressed me."
The directness of it caught Dominic off guard. He rubbed the side of his nose with one finger, not quite sure what to do with the compliment.
Hana spoke up from where she was sitting.
"With respect, my lord, if you hadn’t bound it with those lightning chains when you did, I wouldn’t have survived that moment. The largest contribution to this victory was yours." She said it with a small, tired smile. The fear that had been sitting in her chest since the beginning had loosened somewhat. What had replaced part of it was something she was still identifying, but it felt closer to gratitude.
"Those were ordinary lightning chains," Necrotize said. "They held it for a few seconds, that’s all." He paused. "What actually impressed me was your potion. That’s far beyond what I’d expect from a first-year student. Did you make it yourself?"
Hana’s face went slightly red. She wound a strand of her hair around one finger.
"Ah, yes, my lord. It’s relatively recent. And honestly, I didn’t fully know what it was capable of. I was guessing. I got lucky."
Necrotize smiled at her answer. Then a thought occurred to him, and without thinking too carefully about it, he snapped his fingers.
Everyone looked at him.
Nothing happened.
They waited. Still nothing. After a moment, they collectively decided he had probably just done it absently, the way people sometimes do, and returned to their own thoughts.
Necrotize, meanwhile, was biting the inside of his cheek.
He had snapped his fingers to summon four bowls of ice cream. He had forgotten, in the moment, that he had sealed his power. All of it. Which meant nothing had come, and nothing was going to come, and he was now standing in front of his team having made a completely purposeless gesture with his hand for no reason they could identify.
At least they didn’t realise what I was trying to do. If they knew that the God of Destruction had attempted to summon dessert and failed, I’m not sure where my dignity would go. He considered briefly whether to unseal enough power to fix this. Decided against it, the moment he did, every creature in this forest would respond to his presence and the entire examination would be disrupted. They’ll get ice cream later. When this is over.
He filed the thought away and said nothing about any of it.
Hana had already moved. She went to her bag, retrieved a small vial of deep blue liquid, and crossed to where Sarliya was lying unconscious. She tipped the mana potion carefully past Sarliya’s lips.
The effect was immediate, a blue light spread across Sarliya’s entire body and faded just as quickly. Her eyes opened. She blinked. Hana’s face was the first thing she saw.
She lay still for a moment, assembling the pieces.
"Did we win?"
Hana nodded with a quiet smile.
Sarliya exhaled slowly and sat up. The boar’s body. Her teammates on the ground. Necrotize standing. All of it accounted for, all of it finished.
"Hana, thank you for the mana potion. Healing Dominic used everything I had. This has helped considerably."
"It’s nothing," Hana said. "We’re teammates. That’s what it means."
Sarliya looked at her for a moment, then smiled, small, genuine, the kind that didn’t need to announce itself.
"Hmm."
***
On one side of the forest, a fight had ended.
On the other side, one was about to begin, and this one carried a different kind of weight. For Lyra, it was personal in a way that the day’s other challenges weren’t. She needed to show herself something. Not others, herself first. She needed to stand somewhere and discover whether she was what she believed she might be becoming.
She would give everything she had.
