Chapter 128: Return
The brilliant golden light of the emergency teleportation portal flashed violently across the grand stone plaza of the Ascendant Academy.
Within a few seconds, the spatial mana settled down, and the thousands of freshman students who had been forcefully ejected from the Drowned Valley Sector materialized back onto the solid floorboards.
A very heavy, suffocating silence immediately blanketed the entire plaza.
None of the ten thousand elite Crusaders were cheering, and none of them were boasting about their combat achievements.
Instead, every single recruit was standing completely still, their bodies shaking slightly as the cold reality of what had just happened began to sink into their minds.
They had all entered the trial realm that morning with supreme confidence, believing they were the greatest geniuses of their respective infinite races.
Yet, within a matter of hours, their proud alliances had been thoroughly liquidated, and their hard-earned score counters had been ruthlessly wiped back to absolute zero.
As the different sub-divisions began to look around and compare notes, a wave of profound horror washed over the crowd.
"You guys got wiped out too?" the red-scaled warrior from the second sub-division asked, his voice cracking with emotion as he grabbed the shoulder of a nearby elven mage. "Our entire two hundred-man refinery alliance fell in a single second. My muscles are still shivering from the seizures."
"It wasn’t just you," the elven mage whispered, her face completely pale as she stared down at her empty hands.
"The five hundred-man sky fortress unit was deleted in less than a minute. The one thousand-man underground bunker alliance vanished right after us. The entire planet-sized map was completely cleared out."
Slowly but surely, the traumatized students began to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
They realized that they had not been defeated by the Gold-ranked simulation monsters or the harsh environment of the sinking AI world.
They had all been systematically hunted down, mentally short-circuited, and completely crushed by a single person.
"Look at the master scoreboard," a student muttered, pointing a trembling finger toward the massive floating crystalline screen above the main stage.
Every single eye in the plaza automatically shifted upward. The golden text at the very top of the leaderboard was glowing so brightly that it seemed to mock their collective failure.
[ Rank 1: Ayla — Sub-Division 1 — Score: 98,400 Points — Status: Sole Survivor ]
"Ninety-eight thousand points..." the scaly blue-skinned student from Class One gasped, his throat going completely dry.
"She literally eliminated every single one of us by herself. She turned a planet-sized survival test into her own personal slaughterhouse."
As the realization settled in, a strange, toxic rumor began to rapidly spread through the dense crowd of students.
Humanoid recruits, scaly reptilians, and rocky-skinned warriors began to whisper in hushed, angry tones, their eyes flashing with a deep, burning resentment.
"There is no way a stupid piece of jelly could achieve a score like that naturally," a warrior with metal spikes protruding from his shoulders hissed out softly to his companions.
"Did you see the way the sky parameters distorted right before she attacked? My internal sensors picked up a massive administrative energy pulse. I bet the Nexus system was actively helping her behind the scenes."
"I heard the same thing," a purple-feathered girl replied, her hands tightening into tight fists. "The system grid usually translates monster speech and handles basic parameters, but for her, it felt like the world laws themselves were bending to protect her. It is totally unfair. She only won this exam because she is the system’s favorite pet."
A heavy wave of profound unwillingness and bitter envy quickly infected the hearts of the ten thousand students.
They were incredibly proud geniuses who had trained for years in their home planes, so accepting that a tiny, primitive slime had utterly dominated them was far too humiliating.
They desperately wanted to believe that Ayla had cheated, convincing themselves that her victory was entirely artificial.
However, despite their immense jealousy and growing animosity, absolutely none of them dared to say these accusations out loud.
The terrifying memory of her Gold-ranked pressure and the agonizing physical seizures her mind control had induced was still far too fresh in their minds.
They knew that if they spoke against her openly on the academy grounds, she might just target their soul containers again. They could only swallow their anger, letting their deep hatred fester in absolute silence.
Suddenly, the central teleportation array on the main stage flared with a soft, blue light.
The thousands of whispering students instantly went dead silent, their bodies freezing in place as a small, round ball of translucent blue liquid smoothly materialized in the center of the platform.
Ayla had officially returned from the Drowned Valley Sector.
Her newly stabilized Gold Crusader core was humming calmly deep within her fluid mass, radiating a very faint, invisible warmth that made her blue jelly look incredibly glossy under the plaza’s magical light fixtures.
She opened her golden eyes, her pupils carrying a prominent, permanent golden ring around the edges that signaled her high-tier rank transformation.
She slowly panned her gaze across the massive ocean of ten thousand students who were staring back at her with a heavy mixture of pure terror, burning envy, and silent hostility.
To the students’ immense frustration, Ayla did not look proud, and she did not look excited about her historic victory at all.
Instead, her round body let out a soft, deflating ripple that carried a heavy, unmistakable expression of pure, unadulterated boredom.
"That was completely useless," Ayla muttered softly through the mind link to Nexus, her multi-layered voice sounding thoroughly exhausted by how unchallenging the hunt had been.
"The students are even more boring than the crocodile monsters. They just freeze and drop to the floorboards the moment I use my traits. It was not a good exercise at all."
"Oh, come on, little monster, do not be so grumpy," Nexus’s voice giggled loudly inside her head, sounding incredibly satisfied with the chaotic data she had gathered.
"You completely shattered the historical records of the Ascendant Academy. Look at their faces. They look like they want to eat you alive, but they are too terrified to even breathe in your presence. That is a top-tier expression harvest."
Ayla ignored Nexus’s teasing and dropped her round body off the high stage.
She did not say a single word to the crowd, and she did not even bother to look back at the massive scoreboard that displayed her legendary name.
With a slow, lazy rolling motion, she began to waddle right through the center of the crowded plaza, heading directly toward the main exit corridor that led back to the residential suites.
As the small blue slime approached, a wave of visible panic rippled through the front rows of the student alliance. Even though they were filled with deep animosity and rage, their survival instincts completely overrode their pride.
The heavily armored warriors, the powerful elemental mages, and the scaly reptile-men frantically scrambled backward, pushing against one another to clear a wide, ten-foot path for her to pass through. None of them wanted to be within her immediate striking distance.
Ayla rolled calmly through the open path, her translucent blue body bouncing softly with every step.
She passed right by the rocky-skinned warrior and the students who had boycotted her during the orientation week, completely treating them like invisible pieces of dirt.
Watching her leave with such a bored, dismissive attitude made the students’ blood boil with a savage, helpless fury.
They had spent the entire morning being hunted like common farm animals, yet the perpetrator was acting as if the entire experience was a massive waste of her personal time.
The insult was far worse than the actual defeat, leaving their young, arrogant hearts completely mangled with humiliation.
"Just look at her..." the spiked warrior whispered through his teeth, his face turning bright red with suppressed rage as he watched the blue ball slide away.
"She doesn’t even care about the prize. She thinks we are all beneath her notice."
"Let her be arrogant for now," the red-scaled leader muttered colds, his yellow pupils fixed on her retreating form.
"The orientation trial is just the beginning. Once the real academy factions form and the Crown-ranked senior students return from the outer sectors, she will realize that a single slime cannot stand against the true weight of the infinite races."
Ayla completely ignored the dark murmurs echoing behind her back. She didn’t care about their future factions, their noble titles, or their collective hatred.
In her mind, as long as she had Nexus providing her with real-world authority and high-grade cores, these geniuses would never be anything more than regular meals meant to fuel her evolution.
She smoothly exited the grand plaza, her golden eyes already looking forward to locking herself inside her private training suite to inspect the rare Bone Fragment reward that Instructor Argenta was bound to deliver to her room.
The first harvest of the practical examination was officially over, and she had successfully laid the golden foundation for her grand ascent.
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