Chaos Dance
"Come at me, then. All of you at once."
Silence fell.
Every gaze turned toward Simon. He was leaning back lazily, legs crossed, wearing a perfectly relaxed smile.
It radiated pure confidence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Hector who reacted first.
[You're telling us to all come at you?]
His pupils constricted to slits.
[Know your place, Simon Polentia!]
The dragon's maw gaped wide, and a torrent of flame welled up from the depths of its throat.
Hwooooooosh!
A searing sphere of fire came hurtling toward him, trailing a repulsive wake of smoke. Simon calmly rested a hand on his hip—then sidestepped lightly out of the way.
KWAAA-BOOM!
"Kyaaaah!"
Strange—the attack had been aimed at Simon, yet Elisa's scream rang out from behind him.
Apparently she'd been sneaking something together back there again.
Fwoooosh! Fwoosh!
Having blasted Elisa, Hector kept his breath attack firing in rapid succession.
Simon, weaving between the attacks, drew a Spear of Chaos from his hip and hurled it into the air.
[What the—!]
The unpredictable spear, whirling in dizzying spirals through the sky, came streaking down at Hector before long.
CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACK!
Hector hastily folded both wings forward to intercept it.
But this was no ordinary Chaos Spear. Crackling violet sparks erupted on impact and began to fog his mind.
Simon's newest chaos technique.
Rather than the piercing power of the Chaos Spear, it prioritized spreading confusion through the enemy.
<Chaos Stinger>
Before the other startled Top 10 members could even move, Simon acted first.
He hurled Chaos Stingers skyward one after another, the chaos magic stitching unpredictable arcs through the air before raining down toward Merida, Jules, and Elisa—the three who hadn't yet been struck.
Jules deflected his with the hilt of his magic sword, and Merida sent her toys scrambling to take the hit in her place.
"Hrk—!"
Elisa, crawling out from the wreckage, shrieked at the sight of a Chaos Stinger landing inches from her face.
Simon really was taking on everyone single-handedly.
And while the rest of them scrambled to evade the chaos magic, Simon completed his most devastating technique yet.
'Come forth.'
Where his palm struck the ground, a summon rose—a slender frame wearing the grinning mask of a jester, armed with a long scythe.
<Chaos Reaper>
Then Simon and the Chaos Reaper began to move as one.
[You don't get to leave.]
RUMBLE!
At Merida's command, toy soldiers came pouring out from one side of the alley, but Simon simply lobbed a Chaos Stinger in that direction.
The moment the Stingers struck the narrow passage, they spread like an electric current, throwing the summon's command chain into disarray.
"Hnngh!"
Jules charged forward, reaching for the hilt of his magic sword—only to be cut off by the Reaper's sweeping scythe.
Everyone was in disarray. Hector, apparently afflicted by the chaos effect, was shaking his head violently while firing his breath attack wildly in every direction; Merida was struggling to keep her toy soldiers under control; and Elisa was darting back and forth, dodging Chaos Stingers raining down at random from the sky.
Truly, nothing beat chaos magic in a free-for-all.
'That should just about do it.'
Simon slowly raised his arm and clenched his fist.
At once, the Reaper locked in combat with Jules melted away, dissolving into hundreds of streams of chaos energy that surged skyward.
<Simon Original – Chaos Dance (혼돈난무)>
KUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKU!
A rain of great chaos fell.
Violet blades of light slashed madly down through Merida's dream city. The Top 10 had no choice but to abandon every offensive action and simply defend or flee.
For a while, the battlefield fell into an uneasy lull with no one daring to attack anyone else. Brushing aside a Chaos Spear with his scale-covered arm, Hector roared in irritation.
[Simon Polentia!]
"Simon."
Merida, risen into the air atop her floating blanket, closed her eyes.
Flickering chaos energy was rippling across her body. The madness-inducing effect of chaos had taken hold.
"I wasn't finished talking."
Merida's Trance—the No-Self Dream—began now.
The world inside her dream unfurled at breathtaking speed. It was a power mighty enough that, if she wished, she could swallow this entire island into her dream.
Just as the toy city was expanding, its dimensions stretching outward, Simon glanced back over his shoulder.
"Merida."
Then he pointed to the side.
'?!'
Sensing that something was wrong, she snapped out of her trance and lifted her head.
So that was why it had felt so strangely hot.
KUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGU!
Magma was coming down.
KWAKWAKWAKWAKWA!
A colossal torrent of magma slid down the mountainside and swept through Merida's toy city like a flood devouring everything in its path.
And from the sky above, house-sized meteors of molten rock were raining down.
"Where did THAT come from?!"
Elisa levitated the remaining wreckage of her ghost ship, reassembling it into a small boat, and escaped upward.
Hector spread his wings and shot into the air, while Jules kicked his magic sword's power into overdrive like a booster and fell back.
"Ugh!"
Merida grabbed her floating blanket and flew up as well. In the blink of an eye, the toy tiles covering the ground were swallowed by lava.
The sky wasn't safe either. With meteors falling even from above, they had to pour every ounce of focus into evasion.
"Simon...!"
Having fully dismantled her Trance, Merida whipped her head around to look in the direction Simon had been running.
He was gone without a trace.
While the Top 10 who had advanced to the central island waged their ferocious battle—
all was chaos on the starting islands as well.
-Bend it that way, now!
-Knock them ALL out!
The risk of elimination was enormous and the potential payoff meager—an exam where there was no real need for students to fight each other at all.
But a handful of students steeped in the poison of competition stirred the waters like loaches churning mud, plunging everyone around them into a vortex of confusion. Battle breeds retaliation, and retaliation breeds victims.
And when the mid-tier students began banding together to hunt top-ranked students en masse, the top rankers naturally banded up in turn or allied with other students, forming factions of their own.
-Hahahaha! This fortress belongs to me, Raheim of Snowfield Castle!
Dick, who had carved out his own strategy of building a fortress and holding it, was one of the most prominent victims of this whole affair.
In the end, it wasn't lava that took his fortress—it was people. Raheim and a clique of elite students assaulted Dick's group and seized the stronghold outright.
Before Dick could even attempt to negotiate, another horde began attacking the fortress Raheim had just claimed, and the situation spiraled to ever greater extremes.
Dick had no choice but to scatter and flee, separated from his companions.
'Wait, why are we all sitting here killing each other?!'
It had been a miscalculation.
He'd assumed the students, cowed by the threat of expulsion, would default to a thoroughly survival-focused exam. He hadn't expected the fighting to turn this brutal. Human desire ran far deeper than Dick had predicted.
If things were going to be this chaotic anyway, it seemed better to just push on to the central island.
He was charging through the underbrush, desperate to reach the sea, when—
"Hey, you! Stop right there."
He ran straight into a group of students patrolling the area.
Dick froze in his tracks, heart slamming against his ribs.
"Wh-whoa, hold on! I'm not looking for a fight—"
"Shut it."
At that one venomous remark, Dick's mouth clamped shut. His eyes swept rapidly across his surroundings.
'A kill squad of mid-tier kids. Five of them. Damn it—can I buy enough time to run?'
As Dick's eyes darted about, the students exchanged words among themselves.
"Should we take him out?"
"Leave it."
One of them drawled, eyes heavy with boredom.
"That's Dick Hayward. He's ranked 400th."
"Ah."
"He'll drop out on his own if we just let him be."
They snickered among themselves, turned their backs, and vanished. Dick, who had been coiled and braced for a fight, let his arms drop with a hollow laugh.
'Live long enough, and even being dead last in the whole school pays off sometimes.'
Still—he was alive. That was what mattered.
Surviving the mud was the only thing that mattered, even if you had to crawl through filth to do it.
Battles were now raging across all five of the starting islands. Unless he found Simon and the others, there was no one he could trust.
'Central island first, then.'
Thank goodness he'd saved up enough points for a small boat. Dick hurried to the beach and was about to purchase one with his points when—
KURURURURURUNG—!
The volcano on the central island erupted. He could see the magma racing down the slopes.
"Ha. Talk about terrible timing."
Dick laughed bitterly and clicked his tongue.
"If you're going to blow, the least you could do is blow a little earlier."
The power of the eruption and the lava exceeded anything the students had imagined. The violet magma cascading down the mountainside swept away everything in its path, laying waste to an entire quarter of the central island.
Before long, the magma spilled into the sea.
Laced as it was with Jet-Black, this was no ordinary magma. It didn't cool on contact with the water—instead it spread even faster, racing out toward the surrounding islands.
Molten rock raining from the sky, magma crawling across the sea. Students who'd been fighting each other mere moments ago now had to flee the incoming lava in sheer terror.
Eliminating rivals was no longer the priority. Staying alive came before everything.
KUGUGUGUGUGU—!
And then, centered on the ground the magma had claimed, lava monsters began to rise one after another, attacking the students.
The students fought desperately to reach the open sea, but—
-Grrrrrgh!
-Kiiiiee!
As the magma spread across the water, the startled aquatic monsters began to move as well—and now the students were taking attacks from both sides.
There was no more leisure for students to fight each other. Everyone pooled their strength just to escape.
And amid all this chaos, one man had actually profited from the eruption.
'Good timing.'
Simon himself.
The moment he'd sensed the volcano about to blow, he had dismissed the Chaos Reaper and unleashed Chaos Dance.
The Top 10's eyes were glued to the technique's overwhelming firepower, and the chaos effect had dulled their senses so badly that they never noticed the magma until it was right on top of them. In that window, Simon slipped free of the free-for-all.
Now he was walking along a safe stretch of shoreline.
'I expected something, but not quite this.'
He'd been ambushed by the Top 10. Simon walked at an easy pace, reviewing the battle in his mind—and then Dick's words surfaced in his memory.
-Especially the group exam coming up. There's a 100% chance they'll rig it!
Dick had been right after all.
Of course, Simon had heard the same rumors and prepared accordingly, and he was confident he could overcome whatever came his way. But this kind of sustained battle was dangerous.
Not a single one of them had been an easy opponent.
'The strangest part is that Asseraz and Merdiana—the presumed ringleaders—never showed up.'
Simon figured he could have barely managed an escape against four of the Top 10. Six, and it would have overwhelmed him.
Besides, the four who had come hadn't focused their hostility on Simon alone. They'd fought and clashed with each other more often than with him.
'Tricky.'
Simon crossed his arms.
'What on earth is happening in this exam?'
The central island. A certain stretch of coast.
"..."
A blank-faced female student was wandering aimlessly along the beach, drifting this way and that.
Her eyes had lost all focus, her expression utterly vacant.
She walked like a sleepwalker.
Fwoosh!
A lava monster nearby spotted her and approached, bristling with hostility. The monster was nearly upon her, but the girl just kept walking, utterly defenseless.
Before long, the creature swung its arm.
CRUNCH!
The savage blow sent her flying. She tumbled across the sand and collapsed, and a wave of cold seawater washed over her face before receding.
"...Hahk!"
Only then did the girl's eyes snap open.
"Cough! Cough, cough!"
She sneezed again and again, spitting out seawater and sand.
"Ugh, what the...?"
Her groggy mind was slowly clearing.
Her knees and elbows were scraped raw and bleeding, and throbbing pain pulsed all over her body—she must have been battered about something terribly.
"What was I doing just now...?"
-Grrrraaaah!
The lava monster lunged at the defenseless girl. She turned her head toward it.
KRAK!
KRAK!
In an instant, jet-black blades sprang from magic circles unfolding on all sides and shredded the monster to pieces.
The creature collapsed, and the girl rose to her feet with a hard expression.
Her identity: overall Rank 5, Asseraz Mikel.
'Why am I in a place like this...?'
Slowly gathering her concentration, she traced her memories backward.
The last point she could remember.
She and Merdiana had crossed to the central island by boat and linked up with overall Rank 4, Merida Hugh Ikel.
The two of them had been quite worn out from dodging Hector's attacks from the sky.
-All right, then. Shall we go take down Simon Polentia together? Jules should be fighting him right now.
Merdiana had said this, turning her back, and Asseraz had walked along with her.
With a major battle looming, she'd been mulling over how to handle the fight against Simon—
-I did say we'd fight Simon.
Merida's voice had rung out from behind them.
-But from this point on, it's my personal matter.
-Huh?
She had felt Merida's palm touch her back.
-You two are in the way.
That was her final memory.
Exhausted from Hector's battle, her curse resistance had been pierced in a single stroke. She never stood a chance.
"So then, Merida..."
Asseraz's lips trembled.
Merida had simply used them—conveniently—to pinpoint Simon's location. The truth was, from the very beginning—
"...she'd intended to betray us?"
Assuming that every Top 10 member who backed the New Student Council would move exactly as they wished had been a misjudgment.
It seemed they were the ones who'd been played.
'Damn it all!'
She clenched her fist tight.
The lava monsters strewn across the shore spotted her and began creeping closer, one by one.