NOVEL NEXT Chapter 87: Jolted
The mist condensed into ice-hard coils and yanked them off their feet, slamming them into each other, into trees, into the dirt.
Three water mages tried to surround her, casting a pincer formation to trap her in a bubble.
She exhaled.
Her own water magic detonated outward—not as brute force, but as manipulated resonance, causing their control spells to twist and shatter, exploding their mana circuits.
"Don't use water against a specialist," Jiang Xiao Yu said softly as the three dropped to the ground, unconscious.
A blast of heat barreled toward her, a dual spell of flame and stone.
She walked into it as a flare of blue mana erupted around her.
Pshh.
The flame died mid-air as her mist devoured the fire. The stone melted into steam-cracked fragments before it could touch her.
With a twist of her wrist, she turned the remaining mist into hundreds of razor-thin shards and launched them through the battlefield.
Screams followed. The upperclassmen fell back, bleeding, burned, and terrified.
Athena flashed to her side, blood on her arm and an annoying scorch mark across her sleeve.
Jiang Xiao Yu raised an eyebrow. "You're hit."
"Yeah, and I didn't like that shirt anyway." Athena licked the blood from her knuckles.
They shared a glance and a smile.
Then both turned and moved, one weaving through spellfire with gleaming daggers, the other gliding across mist-laced ground like a ghost.
Damien didn't even glance back.
He advanced.
Shi Yan stepped forward to replace Lu Han, frost crackling around her hands. "You think because you're fast, you're untouchable?"
She raised both arms. A sheet of shimmering ice burst into existence behind her, reflecting Damien's image.
Then her voice dropped to a whisper.
"Freeze."
The air around Damien plummeted in temperature. A wave of cold shot toward him in a visible wall of frost, strong enough to paralyze mana channels and snap bones mid-motion.
Damien didn't dodge.
He stepped through it.
His skin frosted over.
His movements slowed.
But he didn't stop.
Shi Yan's eyes widened just a fraction. "Impossible! How can you resist my cold energy that way?!"
She flung a frozen spear toward his heart.
Damien deflected it with a barehanded swat.
Then he was in front of her.
A lightning-fast jab to the stomach folded her in half. The second strike cracked against her shoulder, dislocating it with surgical brutality. He finished with a pivoting heel kick to the side of her face that spun her mid-air and dropped her like a sack of flour.
Bao Feng roared, flames surging across his arms. "You bastard!"
He didn't wait for the other two.
He exploded toward Damien with a leaping punch that left a crater where he'd launched from. Fire roared in his wake.
Damien caught the punch with one hand.
The shockwave snapped trees.
Flames curled around his fingers, but his grip tightened, absorbing the blow entirely.
His other fist slammed into Bao Feng's chest with enough force to bend his spine. The third-year spat blood and stumbled.
Damien let go, pivoted, and delivered a devastating uppercut to the chin that sent Bao Feng flying backward like a missile, crashing through two trees before hitting the ground and skidding to a smoking stop.
Only two remained.
Mu Ren and Zhou Mei.
The Earth Pillar still hadn't moved.
Zhou Mei lifted her hand, and the forest moved.
Roots burst from the ground like spears, bark twisted into jagged limbs, and thorned vines laced with venom snaked through the air like whips. The battlefield turned into a living trap—dense, suffocating, alive.
Damien didn't stop.
While the world twisted around him, while most would have hesitated or retreated, he simply advanced.
Thorns lashed toward his face—he ducked.
A root shot up from beneath him—he leapt.
A net of vines constricted from above—he spun through the gap between them, untouched.
He ignored the plants entirely.
Zhou Mei's eyes narrowed.
"He's going straight for me," she muttered. "Predictable."
She raised both arms. The earth glowed with life, and a towering wooden barrier surged upward in front of her, woven thick with enchanted bark, reinforced with mana glyphs etched by her own blood.
A defense that had stopped entire squadrons.
Damien didn't slow.
He clenched his fists, lowered his stance and…
BOOM.
His foot struck the ground with explosive force, launching him forward like a missile. His body twisted once in mid-air, momentum compressed into his shoulder.
CRACK.
He slammed into the barrier shoulder-first.
The impact reverberated like a gong through the forest.
The first layer of defense shattered instantly. Bark split open. Wooden energy sparked and fizzled. Zhou Mei's eyes widened.
He came through the splinters like a monster from a storybook.
One punch.
Right into her chest.
Her defensive barrier shattered at the point of contact. Mana shields cracked like thin glass. Her body lifted off the ground from the sheer force of it, airborne for half a second before she crashed hard into the forest floor, unconscious.
A shallow crater formed where she landed.
Damien landed softly a few feet away, unscathed.
He didn't look back at the carnage.
He simply adjusted his stance and turned his gaze to the last one standing.
Mu Ren. The Earth Pillar.
He was already shifting the battlefield.
The terrain rippled around him, stones lifting, earth turning jagged. A mountain was forming beneath his feet.
Damien walked toward him calmly.
Mu Ren raised both hands, summoning a cascade of boulders and hardened spears of stone.
They fell.
Damien dodged every single one.
No elemental energy. Just movement.
He closed the gap, spun beneath the final volley, and struck once.
Just once.
A punch, low and sharp, straight into the solar plexus.
"I'm sor…" Mu Ren gasped. His eyes rolled back. And he fell.
The earth stilled.
The forest was silent.
The five elite third years of Pearl Institute lay unconscious or broken in the dirt.
Damien stood above them, calm as ever.
His eyebrows was scrunched up slightly.
Why did Mu Ren apologize at the end?
He exhaled once.
And only then turned to look at Athena and Jiang Xiao Yu.
"I'm done."
Athena wiped blood off her dagger and smiled sweetly. "Was it good for you, Big Bro?"
Jiang Xiao Yu adjusted her hair. "You took too long."
Damien shrugged.
"Had to make sure they remembered."
But then his heart jolted.