The first demon hit the front line before anyone had finished bracing.
Mikey met it head-on, a compressed burst of wind slamming the creature sideways into a tree hard enough to splinter bark.
Beside him, Sani’s flames caught a second demon mid-lunge, and Kei’s ice bloomed outward in sharp, deliberate spears that found their mark with a precision that looked almost bored.
In the middle of it all, Nagumu simply watched.
“You want to know why I’m here?” he called out, voice carrying easily over the chaos, pitched just loud enough to be heard without seeming to try.
He hadn’t moved from where he’d first stepped out of the mist.
“Genuinely — does anyone care? I find that people rarely do, in the moment. They’re usually a bit occupied.”
“Shut up and fight!” Yuji’s thunder cracked across the clearing, arcing toward the nearest demon, who dodged it with an ease that made his jaw tighten further.
“Mm. Fair.” Nagumu tilted his head, something flickering behind his human eye — there and gone too fast to read, gone before it could become anything Yuji or anyone else had time to notice.
“Everyone’s so eager tonight. I suppose introductions can wait.”
He said it lightly.
Underneath the lightness, something in his voice had gone very still for half a second, like a door someone had almost opened and then, quite deliberately, chosen not to.
Nagi moved on instinct the moment a demon broke off toward Nicolle, sixty seconds of speed collapsing the distance between them before the creature’s claws had finished their first swing.
He caught the strike on the flat of his blade, redirected it wide, and put himself firmly between the demon and the rest of his group.
“Stay behind me,” he said, calm even now.
“I can fight,” Nicolle said, already shaping ice from the damp mist around her feet.
“I know. Just — not this one. Not yet.”
Gota slammed a wall of raised earth between them and the wider chaos, buying a few seconds of breathing room.
Kakame’s shadows lashed out toward a second demon’s legs, tangling it long enough for Nagi to close the gap and drive his sword hilt-first into its chest, knocking it back into the mist with a snarl. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
“Fifty-one seconds,” Nagi muttered, mostly to track his own limit rather than announce it.
“We hold here.”
Across the clearing, Nagumu watched Nagi’s group with the same detached, cataloguing attention he’d given everyone earlier — except this time it lingered a beat longer than it needed to.
“Interesting,” he said, to no one, the word landing softer than his usual theatrical volume.
“Sixty seconds and change, and he’s already recalculating the fight three moves ahead. Efficient.” A small, private smile, gone as fast as it came.
“Careful little thing, aren’t you.”
Then, louder, back to performance: “Kill them,” he said, sweeping one clawed hand toward the scattered students, voice dropping into something cold and commanding that cut clean through his own earlier lightness.
“Take their blood. Their power. All of it belongs to the boss now. Leave none of them standing.”
The six demons answered with a unified roar, dark energy exploding outward in a wave that sent mist scattering in every direction.
“Bring it!” Yuji surged forward, thunder wreathing both fists, meeting the nearest demon with a strike that actually staggered it.
“Everyone, stay together!” Mikey’s voice cut through the noise, wind gathering sharp around him as he moved to cover a first-year who’d frozen up entirely.
“Don’t fight alone — we hold the line as one!”
The clearing became a storm of color and sound — wind and flame and frost meeting dark energy in flashes that lit the mist from within, students who’d been strangers three days ago now fighting shoulder to shoulder because there was nothing else left to do.
Somewhere in the noise, Sani’s laughter rang out, half battle-cry and half genuine enjoyment, entirely unbothered by how badly this could still go wrong.
Nagumu remained mostly still through it, occasionally flicking a hand to redirect one of his demons or correct their positioning with the ease of a conductor mid-performance, laughing at intervals that felt just slightly too calculated to be pure madness — though nobody fighting for their life had the spare attention to notice that detail yet. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
His eyes found Nagi again in the chaos, briefly, tracking the way he moved — not powerful, not flashy, just precise, every motion spent exactly where it needed to be and nowhere else.
Something about it nagged at him, small and persistent, like a word sitting just out of reach on the tip of his tongue.
Then his attention slid, almost lazily, to the girl standing half a step behind him — the princess, still shaping ice from borrowed mist, doing her best to look useful rather than protected.
And something in Nagumu went very quiet.
It wasn’t her ice that caught him first.
It was her face — something in the set of her eyes, the particular shape of her jaw when she frowned in concentration, snagging at a memory he didn’t have any right to be having in the middle of a fight.
He’d seen that exact expression somewhere before, worn by someone else entirely, a long time ago, in a life he tried very hard not to think about.
Underneath that, fainter, a warm pressure radiated off her that had nothing to do with any magic system he recognized — the kind of thing that made every inch of his demonic half want to recoil even from this distance.
Holy.
Not trained, not weaponized yet, barely more than a flicker waiting to be noticed by its owner — but unmistakably there.
“Oh,” he said softly, to himself, the theatrics dropping out of his voice entirely for just that one syllable.
“Now that’s… unexpected.”
He didn’t chase either feeling further.
Not tonight.
There would be time enough later, he was fairly certain, to figure out exactly what kept pulling his attention back to one unremarkable-looking boy with a short sword and sixty seconds to his name — and to a princess whose face was doing something cruel and familiar to a part of him he’d buried a long time ago.
“Fight well,” he murmured, to the clearing at large, smile widening back into something manic and theatrical as he said it.
“The boss does so love it when the meal puts up a struggle first.”
Behind that grin, something colder and infinitely more patient kept watching, and kept waiting, and said nothing at all.
*End of Chapter 18*