The Class Placement Exam, Part 5
"Ugh..."
Evan forced his eyes open the instant the blinding flash receded.
"Where... am I?"
What happened?
He racked his brain, piecing together the chaotic sequence of events that had just unfolded. Albert had stalked ahead of them as though deliberately leading them into a trap, stopping before a hidden magic circle and activating it without warning. An explosive flash of light had burst forth the moment the array flared to life, and by the time Evan regained his senses, both Aria and Albert were nowhere to be seen.
Worse still, his own surroundings made no sense at all.
"I'm not... in the forest anymore?"
He wasn't standing amidst the towering canopy of the Great Rainforest, but trapped inside some pitch-black structure. A building in the middle of the woods...? No, is this even a building to begin with? Even if the academy grounds were vast and held facilities he hadn't yet explored, the atmosphere here felt profoundly wrong—stifling, unnatural, and steeped in gloom. Where on earth was he?
Scanning the shadows, Evan quickly realized that standing idly by was the worst thing he could do. If he had been displaced here, Aria and Albert had likely been scattered elsewhere. There was no telling what horrors the two of them might be facing at this very moment. First and foremost, he had to locate Aria.
Steeling his resolve, Evan took his first cautious steps into the darkness.
—I have a really bad feeling about this... Be careful, Evan.
Estel's telepathic warning sent a bead of cold sweat trickling down his temple. Evan gave a tight nod in agreement. Just as she said, something was fundamentally wrong. Calling this an ordinary trap prepared for a first-year placement exam was an absurd stretch. Even if the teleportation circle hadn't scattered them over vast distances, space-displacement magic was exceptionally rare and intricate. The idea that the academy would bury such high-level arrays out in a simple forest for a mere student evaluation was frankly preposterous.
Something deeply foul was at play.
The moment his thoughts led him to suspect an unseen orchestrator, Evan froze in his tracks and quickly reached for the emergency bracelet fastened to his wrist.
Yet—
"The bracelet... is broken?"
Did that teleportation circle fry the mechanism? He tapped and fiddled with the artifact frantically, desperately trying to trigger its distress signal, but the device remained entirely inert.
—I sense demonic energy coating the bracelet...
Estel's murmured whisper made Evan flinch. Demonic energy—that single revelation made every piece of the puzzle snap into place. Was this another demon assault?
'There is a high probability that traitors walk among us.'
Considering Headmaster Arhen's grim warning, the possibility of a second strike hadn't been entirely off the table. Even so, no one could have anticipated they would strike with such brazen audacity right in the middle of an official academy examination.
This... was orchestrated from the very beginning.
His scuffle with Albert at the start of the semester was common knowledge among the students and instructors. Everyone knew the bad blood between the Hero and Albert; rumors of their clash had spread like wildfire. That notoriety made it all too easy for someone to argue that grouping them together would foster teamwork—a virtue prized above all else at the academy. It was the perfect excuse to force them onto the same team.
And having Aria assigned alongside them had sealed the deal.
He had no idea what had been done to Albert, but the boy's uncharacteristic lack of venom earlier and his strangely stiff demeanor suddenly made horrifying sense. Evan had sensed something off about him, but he had never imagined Albert was being puppeted by demons. The absence of palpable demonic energy until now was baffling, but dissecting that mystery could wait. The demons' objective in engineering this trap had to be one of two people.
Either Aria... or me.
Aria was the Saint, and he was the Hero. But Aria had confessed with her own lips that thanks to the divine authority granted by the Goddess, ordinary attacks could never claim her life. Which meant—
Fwip!
"Kgh...!"
Evan twisted his torso by a hair's breadth, narrowly dodging a jet-black thorn that shot straight toward his throat. Whirling around, he snapped his gaze toward the projectile's point of origin.
"..."
A nebulous, pitch-black silhouette woven entirely of billowing mist stared down at him from the dark.
["That revered personage desires your death."]
The smoky entity hissed, its shifting form morphing into an array of lethal weapons that bristled like quills, all aimed directly at Evan.
—That's... the Demon of Delusion...!!
The Demon of Delusion...? Before Evan could even ask what that meant, the demon shifted its mass, hurtling toward him like a barrage of flying blades.
Gleaning intelligence from Estel was vital, but getting impaled while listening would render it pointless. Evan instinctively raised his sword to deflect the incoming volley of misty weapons, only for Estel's shrill, panicked cry to echo in his mind.
—Don't block it with your sword!
Evan trusted her voice without hesitation, aborting his parry mid-motion to roll sharply across the floor.
["Sharp instincts."]
The dark tendrils that missed him dispersed harmlessly into wisps, only to reconstitute into another shadowy mass that coiled to strike again. As the assault multiplied in a split second, Evan was pushed entirely onto the defensive. Whenever he dodged a frontal lunge, a strike snapped at his back from the shadows; the moment he slipped past that, another blade struck from his blind spot. Caught in this relentless cycle, stamina would inevitably fail him, and a fatal blow would find its mark.
Evan gritted his teeth. One glance was enough to tell that the black vapor was the demon's very flesh. And demons were inherently vulnerable to divine power.
In that case...!
Evan channeled his innate strength as the Hero. His mana coursed through the Holy Sword, transmuting into radiant sacred power until brilliant golden light enveloped his entire body.
"With this...!"
No demon, no matter how formidable, could easily brush off a direct counter against concentrated holiness. Draped head to toe in luminous divine radiance, he presented a lethal barrier that even high-ranking fiends would hesitate to touch. Confident in his defense, Evan surged forward to cleave the mist apart.
Yet just as his blade cleaved the air and the mist surged to clash against him, Estel's frantic shout rang out once more.
—You can't attack it!
Halting his slash mid-swing, Evan leaped backward in a massive bounding retreat, barely clearing the grasping tendrils.
"What are you saying...?"
—The Demon of Delusion is an incorporeal spiritual entity! Even if you strike with divine power, its true body isn't here, so it won't work! Worse, if that mist seeps into you, your mind will be completely corroded!
Evan's expression twisted in sheer disbelief. If physical and sacred strikes were both useless, didn't that mean he had zero means of harming it? How could something so absurd exist?
"Are you telling me my only option is to dodge and run away?"
—For now... yes.
"..."
When it came to monsters and fiends, Estel's judgment was absolute. Having fought alongside generations of Heroes across centuries, she possessed encyclopedic knowledge of virtually every demon in existence. Even knowing that, Evan struggled to accept it.
Unbelievable... To think there's a demon I can't even lay a finger on right now...
Do I really have no choice but to run...?
If he turned tail and fled, he couldn't search for Aria. Yet falling into the enemy's clutches here would ruin everything.
His agonizing hesitation, however, was not granted time to breathe.
["That personage granted me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I will not let it slip away."]
The demon's low, guttural rasp echoed through the gloom just as Evan braced himself to flee. In that terrifying instant, the creature's silhouette shattered, expanding into a tidal wave of pure black mist that flooded the chamber from wall to wall.
Danger!
Evan flared the Holy Sword's radiance in a wide perimeter, attempting to break out, but the suffocating miasma saturated the sealed chamber far faster than he could move.
"Face... your nightmare..."
As the miasma closed in like a tightening noose, twin scarlet gleams materialized within the fog, bearing down upon him like living malice. Evan swallowed hard. There was nowhere left to run.
—Evan!!
"Estel..."
Facing a nightmare, is it?
Evan let out a breath that was half a scoff, half a wry laugh. If he was being dragged into a nightmare, then so be it—he would tear through it and wake up on the other side. As the overwhelming demonic energy of the black mist encroached upon the innermost sanctum of his consciousness, Evan yielded his heavy eyelids to the dark.
Like a marionette whose strings had been severed, he collapsed motionless to the floor.