Nagumu didn’t wait for the dust to settle before he moved.
He leapt backward with a burst of demonic agility, landing high on the same thick branch he’d claimed earlier in the night, as if the whole battlefield had just been a stage he was now stepping off of.
He waved his remaining hand at Kirito with an easy, playful looseness that had no business belonging to someone missing an entire limb.
“Hy hy, Kirito.” His grin hadn’t dimmed an inch.
“As much as I’m enjoying this — and I really am — I think I’d actually die if I stuck around much longer. Can’t have that.” A short, delighted laugh.
“So I’ll see you around. Wouldn’t want to get overwhelmed on a school night.”
Kirito’s eyes narrowed to something closer to fire than focus, sword gripped hard enough that his knuckles had gone white beneath the blood.
“You’re not going anywhere, Nagumu.”
He charged before the sentence had even fully left his mouth, blade glowing bright with SS-rank power, closing the gap toward the tree in a single desperate leap.
“Get back here!”
Nagumu spread his wings before Kirito reached him — vast, black, unmistakably demonic, unfurling from his back with a violent gust that kicked broken leaves and dust in every direction.
They beat once, hard, and he lifted clear off the branch, already rising.
“But I really do have to go now.” His laughter climbed with the altitude, delighted and cruel in equal measure.
“Bye, my beautiful food! Ahahaha! Until next time!”
Kirito’s jump carried him higher than should have been physically possible, sword slashing in a wide, furious arc — and caught nothing but empty night air.
Nagumu was already well above the tree line, a dark shape against a darker sky, waving mockingly with his one remaining hand as the gap between them widened by the second.
“Damn you!” Kirito’s shout tore up into the mist after him, raw with a fury that had nowhere left to land.
Nagumu’s laughter kept echoing even after his shape had dissolved into cloud and distance, fading slowly the way sound does when it’s chasing something that’s already gone.
“See you soon, Sword Master,” the voice called, thinner now, barely more than an impression of itself.
“And all you tasty little students. Ahahahaha!”
Then nothing.
Just wind, and mist, and the ringing quiet that follows something violent finally stopping.
Kirito landed hard back on the cracked ground, chest heaving, sword still raised toward the empty sky like some part of him refused to accept the fight was actually over.
Blood dripped steadily from the wound at his shoulder, soaking into the already-ruined dirt beneath him.
His face carried something complicated — fury, yes, but underneath it, the particular frustration of a man who’d trained an entire year’s worth of first-years and still hadn’t been fast enough to end the one threat that actually mattered.
Around the clearing, the surviving students slowly lowered their weapons, exhaustion settling over the battlefield in the sudden absence of anything left to fight. Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
“…He got away,” Mikey said, quietly, wind finally dying down around him.
“Tch.” Yuji spat blood onto the cracked earth, disgust plain on his face.
“Bastard just flew off like none of this cost him anything.”
“Is everyone okay?” Nicolle’s voice carried over the group, already moving between clusters of first-years, checking for injuries with a steadiness that belied how shaken she looked.
She knelt beside a boy nursing a burned arm, murmured something reassuring, and moved on to the next.
A short distance off, Gota let out a long breath and finally lowered his staff, arms trembling with the aftermath of adrenaline finally draining out of him.
“I genuinely thought we were all going to die tonight,” he admitted, mostly to Kakame, who managed a tired, humorless laugh in response.
“Wouldn’t have been the worst way to go,” Kakame said.
“At least the view was interesting.” He glanced down at his own hands, still faintly trembling from overextending his shadows for most of the night.
“Never controlled that many tendrils at once before. Pretty sure I’m going to feel that for a week.”
“You did good,” Gota said, and meant it, clapping him once on the shoulder hard enough to make Kakame stumble slightly.
“Both of us did. Didn’t think we had it in us.”
A few paces away, Sani was helping a first-year to her feet, checking a nasty burn on her forearm with more gentleness than his usual boisterous energy suggested he had in him.
“You’re gonna be fine,” he told her, flashing something that was trying hard to be his usual grin but came out a little more worn around the edges than normal.
“Kei’s got the healing stuff. Come on.”
Kei herself moved between the wounded with quiet, practiced efficiency, ice giving way to something gentler in her hands now that the fighting had stopped — cool compresses pressed against burns, careful checks for anything worse than what could be seen on the surface.
She didn’t say much.
She rarely needed to.
Nearby, Yuji sat down hard on a fallen log, wincing at the movement, and glanced sideways to where Nagi stood a few paces off.
Something unspoken passed between them — not quite gratitude, not quite an apology, but something adjacent to both.
“You good?” Yuji asked, gruffly, like the question cost him something to ask.
Nagi nodded once, wiping a smear of blood from his cheek with the back of his hand, expression as unreadable as ever.
“Yeah. You?”
“Been better.” A pause.
“Thanks. For earlier.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
It wasn’t much.
It didn’t need to be.
Nagi just nodded again, and neither of them said anything further about it, which felt, somehow, like exactly the right amount to say.
Nicolle finished checking on the last of the injured and made her way over to the four of them, exhaustion plain in the slower set of her shoulders but relief clear on her face all the same.
“Everyone’s alive,” she said, like she needed to say it out loud to fully believe it.
“Hurt, some of us badly, but alive. That’s — that’s genuinely more than I expected an hour ago.”
“Yeah,” Gota agreed, quieter now.
“Feels like it shouldn’t be true, but it is.”
Nagi looked up at the empty sky where Nagumu had vanished into cloud and mist, something quiet and considering behind his usual calm.
The strange sensation from earlier — that instinct he still hadn’t found a name for — had settled again, folded back down into the same unremarkable stillness he always carried.
“Until next time, huh,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
He didn’t know why the phrase settled into him the way it did — heavier than a simple villain’s parting line should have felt, like it was aimed at something in him specifically rather than the group as a whole.
He let the thought go before it could turn into anything more concrete, the way he let most things go, and turned his attention back to the people around him instead.
Kirito finally lowered his sword, breathing evening out by degrees, and turned to look at the assembled first-years — bloodied, exhausted, but alive, every single one of them still standing in the wreckage of a fight that should, by every reasonable measure, have been far worse.
He counted heads out of pure instinct, the way he always did after something like this, relief settling into his chest with each name he could account for.
“Everyone report injuries,” he said, voice rough but steady, some of his usual authority returning even through the blood and fatigue.
“Healers are on the way. We regroup, we patch up, and we figure out what the hell just happened here.”
The clearing slowly gathered itself back into something resembling order, students helping each other up, checking wounds, trading exhausted half-smiles now that the immediate danger had passed.
Overhead, the mist hung heavier than it had all night, settling low over the wreckage like it, too, was waiting to see what came next.
Kirito stood at the center of it all, jaw tight, eyes still fixed on the empty patch of sky where a half-demon had escaped him for the first time in longer than he cared to admit — and somewhere beneath the anger, a smaller, colder thought had already begun to take root.
*This isn’t over.
Not even close.*
He looked around at the students slowly regathering themselves, at the boy with the strange, quiet speed who’d fought alongside Yuji without hesitation, at the whole battered, exhausted group who’d survived something that had never technically been part of the exam curriculum.
Whatever this island’s survival test had been meant to teach them, tonight had taught something far larger, and far more dangerous, instead.
*End of Chapter 24*