Chapter 134: 134
As Daemion and Elijah stepped down into the dust of the arena pit, Zeke’s focus drifted away from his colleagues’ chatter. Over the course of the inter-field assessment, the faculty members had shed their usual academic detachment, becoming genuinely, raucously invested in the students’ matches. Now, with a heavyweight clash between Daemion and Elijah on the horizon, they were practically laying odds, loudly debating who would leave the pit victorious and who would be eating dirt.
Zeke had been right there with them, throwing in his own two cents. But somewhere in the middle of the noise, a cold, nagging pressure settled right into the center of his chest.
He didn’t brush it off. He tuned the voices out, letting the world blur.
He couldn’t quite put a name to the sensation—only that it carried the distinct, suffocating weight of a looming doom. Through a lifetime of accumulated, sometimes agonizing experience, his instincts had learned to signal when a truly monstrous foe was about to breach the horizon. How or why his gut knew, he couldn’t say. But the internal alarm was unmistakable.
He turned his head slightly. A few paces away, Elio sat with a rigidly set jaw. It wasn’t his usual mask of stoic indifference; this expression was harder, carved from granite. Zeke knew the look instantly: Elio was tasting the exact same dread.
Before Zeke could even open his mouth to ask, a violent tremor ripped through the foundation of the assessment grounds.
The entire academy groaned under the stress of a sudden earthquake. Zeke and the rest of the professors shot to their feet in a unified, tense motion.
"Daemion!" Zeke barked, his voice cutting through the rising panic as he signaled the boy in the pit. "Get back to your classmates. Now."
The assessment could go absolutely fuck itself. By any metric of basic survival, grades were no longer the most pressing concern.
Without a second thought, Daemion tore open a localized rift in space right beside his peers, using his spatial affinity. "Coming?" he cast a glance back at Elijah.
Elijah snorted, entirely unbothered, and stepped through the threshold behind him, effortlessly anchoring his own weight against the violent tremors using [Quake].
Left entirely alone in the center of the shaking pit, the proctor blinked, staring at the empty space where the combatants had just been standing. What about me? he joked to himself internally, trying to deflate his own rising panic before his face hardened into a dead-serious grimace.
...
Up in the judges’ section, Nox let out a heavy, weary sigh. He lazy waved his hand through the air, and in a blink of distorted displacement, the rest of the high-ranking evaluation panel found themselves unceremoniously dumped into the safety of the professors’ section. Left completely alone on the balcony, Nox looked up at the darkening sky, a resigned, bittersweet smile touching his lips.
...
"Sire?" The Grand Chancellor’s voice wavered slightly, his eyes locked onto the Emperor’s back.
"Fret not. I’m here, aren’t I?" The Emperor smiled, a flash of dangerous white teeth as his gaze pierced the gathering clouds above. Come on, Ruarc. I don’t know why the hell you’re early, but at least allow me to hit you once. No, twice. Heck, let’s make it thrice if you aren’t in a tearing hurry.
...
"HAHA! I’M BACK!!"
The colossal voice ripped through the academy, a violent sonic wave that rattled windows in their frames and vibrated deep within the bones of everyone present. "HUMANS, PREPARE YOURSELVES. THIS EMPEROR IS HUNGRY!!"
Then—absolute, suffocating silence.
The violent rumbling cut off instantly, leaving a vacuum of sound that was somehow more terrifying than the roar.
An instant later, the atmosphere changed from air to lead. A sudden, invisible weight dropped from the heavens like a falling mountain. Ninety percent of the crowd didn’t even have time to scream; they were instantaneously slammed flat against the stone floor, the sudden, kinetic deceleration fracturing bones and rupturing organs. For the weakest among them, the pressure was absolute—flesh and bone simply gave way, painting the courtyard in sudden, tragic bursts of crimson.
Even the apex students—the kings, the class of weirdos, and the core trio—were brought to their knees. The flagstones cracked beneath their joints. They fought back against the crushing gravity, muscles tearing and veins bulging against their skin as they struggled just to lift their chins.
Yet, amid the carnage and the crushing weight, Anton and Michael stood perfectly upright. They looked entirely unbothered, hands casually pocketed or arms crossed, their eyes locked onto the terrifying silhouette hanging in the sky above.
A few feet away, Yeon was a vision of sheer defiance. Her teeth ground together so hard they threatened to shatter, and her breath came in ragged, burning gasps, but she refused to let her knees touch the stone.
Noticing her struggle, Anton turned his head. A small, mocking smirk played on his lips—a silent taunt that spoke volumes.
The sheer audacity of that look injected a surge of pure, unadulterated fury into Yeon’s veins. Ignited by spite, she forced her trembling legs to straighten, fighting the Emperor’s pressure inch by agonizing inch, rising like a lone blade against the sky.
...
Over in the professors’ stands, a mere handful of figures remained upright: Elio, Camille, Beckett, Aldric, Karl, and Zeke. They stood completely unburdened by the crushing gravity, their eyes fixed immovably on the sky.
Zeke cast a brief, surprised glance toward Aldric and Karl before deciding it made perfect sense. If anything, he felt a sting of disappointment that the rest of the faculty couldn’t even manage to stand—not even the high-tier reinforcement squads Nox had just magically ferried into their booth.
Aldric’s resilience wasn’t a shock. For all the endless teasing the man endured, he possessed a legitimate, ironclad reason to be arrogant about his noble lineage; the man was a devastatingly powerful mage.
Karl, however, was a genuine curveball. The quiet, almost entirely forgettable professor was harboring this kind of strength? He was a saint, sure—but there were plenty of saints currently groveling and biting the dirt under this exact weight. That meant Karl wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill saint. He was a worthy saint.
Withstanding a conceptual weight of this magnitude required something far deeper than raw stats; it required an absolute, unyielding resolve, an internal aura working in perfect tandem with one’s soul. It was exactly like the entrance exams, when the core trio had stubbornly endured Elio’s overwhelming aura. They hadn’t been stronger than Elio back then, not by a mile, but they had stared down an apex predator, survived, and forced their own inner resolve to crystallize. Because of that, they had emerged entirely unbroken.
As for Zeke himself? Even without activating [Pride], this suffocating pressure felt almost... comforting. If he were to release his own raw aura at full throttle, it would actually be slightly heavier than this—though only slightly, considering the true source of his current pressure was arguably a step below the absolute apex.
And looking up, there was no mistaking the identity of the intruder. This was the Demon Emperor.
But why the hell was he showing up now? According to the timeline Zeke knew from Nox, the main storyline wasn’t supposed to kick off for at least another month.
Before he could lose himself entirely down the rabbit hole of systemic anomalies, a cold voice sliced through the heavy atmosphere.
"Ruarc."
The human Emperor’s voice was a drop of absolute zero. "You dare call yourself an emperor in my presence?"
In that exact breath, the crushing gravity vanished from the courtyard like a lifted veil.
Simultaneously, time seemed to fracture. The splatters and spreading pools of crimson across the flagstones violently reversed, pulling backward into the air. Blood surged back into ruptured veins; shredded flesh knit itself whole in seconds, and the dead were forcefully reformed.
The people standing closest to the newly resurrected could only stare in paralyzed, mute horror. The sheer, traumatic shock of their bodies bursting under the pressure was suddenly compounded by the miraculous, impossible rewrite of their deaths.
The resurrected citizens stared blankly at their own hands. Moments ago, they had felt the agonizing, final sensation of their bodies giving way. Now, they felt entirely whole—and there was a godlike figure suspended in the clouds above them.
Before anyone could form a coherent thought, the voice spoke again.
"You dare slaughter the citizens of my Empire?" The Emperor’s tone was terrifyingly calm, but it carried an undercurrent of pure, unadulterated killing intent.
He let out a soft, slow sigh.
In the next microsecond, the space beside the intruder tore open, and the Emperor appeared in the sky.
The crowd below watched in stunned awe as the second silhouette materialized. But hearing the Emperor’s voice boom directly from above—and hearing him call them his citizens—a profound, almost supernatural wave of calm washed over the arena. The terror evaporated, replaced by an overwhelming sense of security.
The resurrected were in a state of absolute disbelief. Piecing together their fractured memories from seconds prior, they knew they had crossed the threshold of death. Yet, here they were, breathing. Had the Emperor personally pulled them back from the underworld?
