The Academy’s Deceased Ate It All

The dragon's breath had leveled the entire area, and no one — not a single person — had seen it coming.

Not even Yu Ji-hyeok, who had unleashed the breath himself, nor Minerva, who had known he would transform into a dragon the moment he invoked her authority.

If even those two were thrown off, there was no need to spell out the state of everyone else.

A sudden, even violent eruption of mana spreading outward.

The earth-shaking roar of a dragon that followed.

And finally, that thing fired into the open sky… well, if she had to put it into words: a massive pillar of light.

And that aura — one she'd felt before.

Every single person there knew what those signs meant.

Minerva.

When the thought clicked into place, a few heads turned toward Gracius, dreading what they couldn't help but suspect.

But one look at him — past flustered and into trembling, openly afraid — and they knew this string of events wasn't anything he'd planned.

So what on earth was going on here?

The reverie didn't last long.

"Ngh… everyone, be careful!"

The first to catch on was Lee Ye-eun.

In one swift motion, she shot out her hand and grabbed hold of the person right beside her.

A small, slight body.

That person was none other than Lee Yu-na.

But it didn't matter to Lee Ye-eun whether the one she'd caught was Lee Yu-na, Han Su-yeong, Jin Ye-seul, or Choi Hyun-woo.

In her mind, what was about to happen was already playing out in vivid detail, and so she knew, with absolute certainty, that she had to stay attached to someone — that she couldn't be left behind.

"Grab someone next to you! The ground's about to—!"

Her desperate warning barely had time to register.

It was that fast.

CRACK!

Fissures shot through the floor, and before anyone could do a thing, the ground gave way beneath them.

GRAAAAH!!!

KYAAAAH!!!

The few intact undead, along with the broken pieces of the ones that had gone still, and the rubble of the shattered building — those went down first.

Sudden as it was, not one person in that group panicked over something as small as the floor giving out from under them.

Every one of them could escape a crisis of that scale through their own means.

Han Su-yeong with magic, Choi Hyun-woo with physical technique, Jin Ye-seul with 'Mirror Twins' — the legacy that let her build platforms out of thin air.

Lee Yu-na could conjure footholds with her own abilities too, and Lee Ye-eun, with the World Tree's branch in hand and the aid of spirits at her call, was no different.

But a beat later, when they realized their bodies and their mana weren't responding the way they should, the alarm on their faces was impossible to hide.

Only Lee Ye-eun, who had braced for this to some degree, clicked her tongue softly and pulled Lee Yu-na tighter into her arms.

"Ah…!"

As she fell, helpless to stop it, Han Su-yeong felt she understood why this was happening.

Minerva.

Her roar had carried a power that scrambled mana like this.

That was why, the closer you got to that massive dragon, the harder it had become to cast magic — she remembered it now.

But still….

"Ugh, what the hell…."

"This is…."

A quick look around showed Choi Hyun-woo and Jin Ye-seul flailing stiffly through the air, as if their bodies had been paralyzed.

"Hey, screw off — get your face out of mine."

"You first, asshole."

Mid-fall, the two of them collided and got tangled up, ending up nearly nose-to-nose like they were about to kiss.

In that instant, both faces went past genuine distaste straight into open disgust, and they started cursing each other out.

…She'd known those two weren't exactly on great terms — but she hadn't realized it ran that deep.

But what mattered right now wasn't that they got along worse than expected.

The two with the highest physical specs in the entire group were drifting helplessly, unable to so much as twitch a finger, like they really were paralyzed.

That was what mattered.

'Don't tell me — this scrambles mana and affects the body itself…?'

As she was thinking that, Han Su-yeong noticed she was the only one of the group who'd been pulled off on her own — and that Choi Hyun-woo, gritting his teeth, was straining to reach a hand out toward her.

But that hand wasn't going to reach.

"…Tch."

Han Su-yeong and the rest of them were pulled down, sucked straight into the underground hollow the giant had dug.

It was also the place where a massive being was making no effort to hide the pulse of its own enormous mana.

Even in that moment, Han Su-yeong couldn't help worrying more about Yu Ji-hyeok, who'd fallen ahead of her, than about her own safety.

The necklace she'd put on him — she'd told him it had a tracking spell on it, but the truth was that had been a lie.

What was true, though, was that she could feel his emotions to some degree.

She didn't know how it had become possible, but vaguely, faintly, she could pick up on his feelings and resonate with them.

And right now, Yu Ji-hyeok was thrown, startled, afraid, and in pain.

She could tell. She could feel it.

Which was exactly why, even now, she was beside herself wanting to be of help to him.

Even in the middle of falling.

"Ah, ngh…."

How long had she been out?

Han Su-yeong jolted awake and tried to sit up — and bit back a scream at the sheer pain shooting through her ankle.

It was bent in a direction an ankle was never supposed to bend.

Clenching her teeth, she snapped the ankle back into place and quickly began casting healing magic.

"Ow, ow, that really… hurts…."

She had a born gift for magic, but oddly enough, healing was the one field she had absolutely no talent for.

So even after all the effort and all the time she'd poured into it, the most she could pull off was the simplest of healing spells.

She'd originally picked the skill up so she could help Yu Ji-hyeok or Choi Hyun-woo if either of them got hurt, but ironically, it ended up being most useful for herself.

"Ugh."

The potions she'd brought had all shattered from the impact of the fall — not one of them was intact.

The staff she could've swung as a blunt weapon had been crushed in two, snapped clean down the middle, and had long since stopped being a staff.

Instead, Han Su-yeong pressed the broken piece against her broken ankle and used it as a makeshift splint.

After that bit of first aid, she closed her eyes quietly and breathed out.

Thankfully, her mana was flowing along with her heartbeat the way it should now, unlike before.

She let out a small sigh of relief at that small mercy and slowly pushed herself to her feet.

"…Lauren. Dro. Sirpara."

Han Su-yeong began chanting slowly, layering several spells into place with care.

She had no idea what was down here, and on top of that, she was alone right now.

There was no downside to being cautious.

If she ended up having to face the undead that had fallen down with them by herself, in this kind of shape she'd struggle for sure. And if Gracius — who'd been flailing through the air on his way down — was somehow among them, things could turn very dangerous very quickly.

Above all, the thing that had just fired off that 'pillar of light' was somewhere down here.

There was no reason to go provoking it.

"For now, I need to find the others first… ngh?!"

Mumbling to herself out of sheer anxiety, Han Su-yeong squeezed her eyes shut.

A pain so massive she couldn't even fight it slammed into her, and she dropped to her knees and clutched her head.

What had started as a burning at one spot on her forehead had escalated into a headache that felt like someone was twisting a screwdriver through her brain.

"Ah, ngh. Hck…!"

It was only a moment, but it was more than enough to break her.

She wiped away the tears that had spilled out from the pain and chewed on her lower lip, muttering.

She had a pretty good idea where this pain was coming from.

"Said it was… a blessing… ugh, that liar…! A necromancer's blessing… my ass!"

And the pain on her forehead nudged at her, as if telling her to quit whining.

It was guiding her.

As Han Su-yeong gritted her teeth and pressed a hand to the ground to push herself up, her hand brushed against something strange.

She glanced down to see what it was, and her expression locked up before she could stop it.

A book.

A single book lay under her hand.

"Why is this… how?"

The one Yu Ji-hyeok had said was called the Nameless Book — the thing that had only reacted to her, the thing he'd said she was qualified to hold.

And she hadn't brought it with her.

She was sure she'd left it on the shelf, so what on earth was it doing down here?

"…Fine. So you want to do this with me right now, huh?"

Han Su-yeong all but growled the words as she grabbed the book roughly off the ground.

Then, pressing a hand against her still-pounding head, she let the pain lead her forward.

She kept moving, even staggering as she went.

The underground space was so wide and deep and torn apart that you couldn't believe there had been a shopping district right above it. The whole place was a wreck.

The dust was still so thick that she had to cover her nose and mouth with her sleeve and walk with her eyes half shut.

The hunter mask she'd put on before entering the shopping district had been wrecked during the fall too.

She walked like that for a while.

The unease was just starting to get under her skin when —

[Grrrrr…….]

"…!"

The low growl came out of nowhere, and Han Su-yeong felt the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up.

Even she — sharper than most active heroes or hunters out there — was the kind of fighter who, fully prepared, could just barely manage to stand toe-to-toe with a dragon.

A dragon was that kind of being.

And what was down here was a being so far beyond an ordinary dragon that the comparison broke down.

"……"

Worried she might let out a sound, Han Su-yeong clamped both hands tight over her mouth.

Her body trembled with fear on its own, and the strength went out of her knees.

If a thing like that caught her, in a situation like this….

'It's fine.'

She talked herself down, then carefully moved her fingers and laid down a spell to distort her line of sight.

That let her get a good look at the massive dragon while staying hidden.

Black scales, like the Seven Calamity she'd seen back then — but somehow with a touch more sheen to them.

The horns were a little smaller too, and the wings looked oddly delicate.

It was still threatening enough, of course, compared to an ordinary dragon — but with the Seven Calamity black dragon as the benchmark, there wasn't much helping that.

Once she registered that it was a different specimen, the differences from that Seven Calamity stood out everywhere.

The biggest one was that this dragon was considerably smaller.

'…Don't tell me it's a hatchling?'

It was bigger than your average dragon, sure, but compared to that Seven Calamity, the build was a lot more compact.

…Then again, she'd never actually seen a dragon in person, so she was really just guessing.

'Small tail, small wings, small claws too. Oh, the tail just twitched a little — cute….'

The ridiculous thought caught her off guard, and Han Su-yeong shook her head sharply to clear it.

What the hell are you thinking right now, idiot.

After swearing at herself, she settled in and began studying the dragon properly.

Worst case, she might have to fight it.

And before long, she came to realize that even if the dragon's body was small, the power coiled inside it was every bit a match for the Seven Calamity she'd seen before.

What was she supposed to do… that was the thought running through her mind, and she'd just clenched her teeth, when —

[GRAAAAH!!!]

"Eek — hck?!"

The dragon let out a thunderous roar.

Han Su-yeong barely choked back the scream that almost broke free, then felt the mana she'd so carefully concealed around herself starting to come apart.

No.

While she was standing there in a daze, the dragon, apparently startled by the sudden flare of mana, twisted its body and turned to face her.

She quickly tried to pull her mana up, desperate to get out of there however she could —

"…Huh?"

The instant her eyes met the dragon's, the sound that slipped out of her was just blank surprise.

She let the mana she'd just gathered settle back down and stepped slowly toward the dragon.

No way.

She muttered it under her breath.

"Ji…hyeok?"

Han Su-yeong reached out a careful hand as she spoke.

The dragon didn't move.

It just stood with its head lowered, watching her.

"Is it you, Ji-hyeok?"

Her hand met the dragon's scales.

Red human eyes and black dragon eyes held each other.

And only then was Han Su-yeong finally certain — the creature in front of her really was the man she'd known.

"F-found it…."

A voice gasping like its owner was about to drop dead muttered the words in pure rapture.

"He, hehehe…! I finally found it…!"

Gracius rattled with mad laughter, the sound spilling out of him.

Hanging in the air before him was a crimson crystalline shard that gave off a glow so distinct that even he, in his centuries of life, had never seen its like before.

It was nothing less than a fragment formed from the remains of the woman who, in another world, had killed a Seven Calamity.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!