Never Die Villain

"But why are you guys moving in groups? Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if you spread out and hunted on your own?"

Ilya looked around at the students surrounding him, genuinely confused by how many of them had gathered in the same place.

There were enough people here to cover several sections of the forest separately, yet they were all traveling together and competing for the same beasts when only one person could receive the points from each kill.

One of the students stared at him.

"Easy for you to say."

"What?"

"You’ve been flying around killing everything you see." The student pointed upward. "How are you even doing that?!"

Ilya glanced toward the sky as if he had somehow forgotten what he had been doing for the past several hours.

"Practice."

"What kind of practice lets you fly?!"

"The kind where you practice flying."

"That doesn’t answer anything!"

"It answers exactly what you asked."

The student stared at him with his mouth slightly open, apparently unsure whether Ilya genuinely believed that qualified as an explanation.

Ilya, meanwhile, saw absolutely no reason to elaborate on the blizzard, especially when explaining it would require explaining Niflheim, which would inevitably create far more troublesome questions than the one currently being asked.

Besides, he wasn’t technically lying.

He had practiced quite a lot, actually.

"I’m not even really flying anyway," Ilya added. "I’m just being pushed through the air."

"By what?"

"Something."

"What something?"

"The thing pushing me."

"You’re fucking with me."

"...A little?"

A few of the students exchanged glances, and Ilya caught one of them looking toward the trees behind him before quickly returning his attention to the conversation.

He didn’t think much of it at first, especially when the student in front of him immediately spoke again.

"Fine. Forget the flying." He crossed his arms. "How many points do you even have?"

Ilya tilted his head. "Why?"

"You’ve been stealing beasts from half the people in this section. I’m curious how much you’ve actually gotten from it."

Ilya thought about it.

"Six-seven?"

"...Six or seven?"

"Somewhere around there."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I don’t particularly care whether you do."

The student narrowed his eyes. "You’ve been flying around the entire field killing everything you come across, and you’re telling me you only have seven points?"

"Six or seven," Ilya corrected. "I haven’t checked in a while."

"You’re so full of shit!"

Ilya shrugged.

Announcing the actual number sounded like an excellent way to make them even angrier, so six or seven seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer.

Apparently, they disagreed.

"How much do you have?’

"I have thirty-two."

"That’s not bad."

"Don’t fucking comfort me."

"I wasn’t."

Another student lowered his catalyst. "...I have forty-one."

"See? You’re doing better."

The argument continued, yet something about the students had begun to bother him. They were angry, certainly, but none of them seemed particularly interested in actually leaving.

More importantly, nobody was attacking him anymore.

They had been willing to blast him out of the sky without even knowing who he was, yet now that he was standing directly in front of them, they seemed perfectly content to argue about his score and how he had accumulated it.

Ilya glanced toward the trees.

Another student immediately spoke.

"So how many Elite Beasts did you kill?"

Ilya looked back. "Why do you care?"

"I want to know."

"Three, I think."

"You think?"

"I stopped counting."

The student’s expression twitched, and Ilya was about to say something else when he noticed another quick glance past him.

The student’s eyes had moved toward something deeper in the forest before returning as though nothing had happened.

Ilya narrowed his eyes.

He had seen that more than once now.

Ever since they had started talking, several of them had been doing the same thing, occasionally glancing past him or toward different sections of the forest, and despite how angry they supposedly were about him taking their kills, none of them seemed particularly interested in actually doing anything about it.

Then the student standing in front of him smiled.

Ilya finally understood.

"You guys aren’t here because you’re angry about me taking your kills, are you?"

He looked around at the people surrounding him, and their silence told him enough.

"Aha! You’re stalling me."

The student’s smile widened. "Took you long enough."

Ilya immediately looked toward the direction they had been checking, but he was already too late.

He could feel mana gathering beyond the trees, then from another direction, followed by several more signatures appearing almost simultaneously around the clearing.

Whoever had organized this had clearly positioned people around him before the conversation had even started.

"You shouldn’t be wasting your time like this," Ilya said, already preparing to move. "There are still beasts around, you know."

"You probably have the most points out of everyone here, Belozersky."

The student took several steps back, putting more distance between himself and Ilya as the mana around them continued to build.

"So if we can eliminate you now, we won’t have to worry about you taking any more."

"...Eliminate me?"

The student grinned. "Nobody said we couldn’t attack each other."

Ilya opened his mouth to respond, but the sky above him lit up before he could get another word out.

Spells came tearing through the forest from several directions at once, converging on the clearing in a coordinated barrage that made the explosions from earlier look almost halfhearted by comparison.

"Of course."

Fireballs, compressed bolts of lightning, blades of wind, and several spells Ilya couldn’t immediately identify tore through the air, all converging on the exact place where the students had kept him standing.

The group scattered the instant the spells appeared, retreating in different directions with expressions that made it obvious the argument had been a setup from the beginning.

Ilya immediately threw himself backward, letting the blizzard surge around his body and hurl him away from the center of the clearing.

He had barely moved when the first spell struck the ground where he had been standing, exploding with enough force to tear apart the earth.

Boom——!

A second spell landed before the first explosion had even finished, followed closely by a third, and within seconds the entire clearing disappeared beneath a barrage of magic.

Fire and explosions tore through the trees, chunks of dirt were thrown high into the air, and spell after spell crashed into the area as the attackers continued firing without giving Ilya any opportunity to recover.

The students who had surrounded him had already retreated to a safe distance.

Several of them watched the clearing disappear behind smoke and debris, and judging by the smiles on their faces, this was exactly what they had been waiting for from the beginning.

Farther away, well beyond the section of forest visible from the clearing, another student slowly lowered his hand.

Tristan Amaury de Bellacourt stood atop a rocky rise overlooking the trees, accompanied by several first-years who had positioned themselves around him and were waiting for his next instruction.

From where he stood, Tristan couldn’t see Ilya directly through the dense vegetation and the smoke rising above the forest, but he didn’t need to.

The students below had kept Ilya exactly where Tristan wanted him, and the first barrage had struck the location he had given them without issue.

"Good. Keep firing."

The students around him immediately began preparing another round of spells, but Tristan kept his attention on the smoke in the distance.

Bringing Ilya down once wasn’t enough, especially after watching him spend most of the examination moving through the sky faster than anyone on the ground could reasonably follow.

"Don’t give him time to get back into the air," Tristan continued, raising his hand again. "The moment he gets above the trees, we’ll lose the advantage we just worked this hard to get."

One of the students beside him glanced toward the distant clearing. "Do you really think Belozersky is worth gathering this many people for?"

Tristan didn’t answer.

Only a few hours ago, he might have asked the same question.

He had known Ilya Belozersky was participating in the examination, of course, but nothing had given him reason to expect that the former Knight Department student would become the biggest problem on the field.

"If we could deal with him easily," Tristan said, "I wouldn’t have bothered gathering all of you."

His hand dropped.

"Fire."

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