A note from Coffeepen3
I noticed that in the previous Chapter, I have described the deaths of even a child and an elderly man in a brutal way.
Though I did warn the readers before the Chapter. I apologize for the unnecessary inconvenience.
This Chapter will not have such DETAILED killings. But so Chapters in future may have.
PREVIOUSLY-
Miriel held her hand,
"I am sorry for being like this,"
She turned to Raphael,
"I am sorry for my actions. Let us help you."
A faint smile curved on Raphael's lips. His hands gripped the spike cane, which was now a short spear.
SWISH!
The wooden cane left his hands.
SHLK!
-------------x------------
Raphael's lips parted to a sharp exhale,
"Male child, approx. age 5, showing early signs of albinism."
Raphael didn't hesitate.
The sharpened cane left his hand in a blur.
THUNK.
It struck the boy's small shoulder—not fatal, but deliberate.
The child scread, staggered, and collapsed, clutching the jagged wood now buried in his flesh.
Miriel gasped, hand flying to her mouth.
"You—he was just a child!"
Raphael's expression didn't shift.
"Then why did I feel killing intent?"
He turned to the others, eyes cold.
"This test has no use for innocence. Only masks."
The boy writhed where he'd fallen, pale fingers trembling around the embedded cane. His whimpers, thin and high, barely reached above the murmurs of the crowd.
Raphael walked toward him.
Each step was asured. Unhurried. Silent.
The child looked up, eyes watery and too large for his bloodless face.
He tried to speak—maybe to beg, maybe to ask why—but no words ca.
Raphael knelt beside him. One hand rested gently on the boy's shoulder, the other gripped his spear in reverse.
"This is rcy," he whispered.
Then a swift thrust—clean, precise—angled beneath the jaw and straight through the brainstem.
The boy's body jerked once. Then fell still.
Miriel scread.
"You killed a child!"
Raphael stood, flicked the blood from his spear, and turned to face the others.
"No. I gave us ti."
He t their horrified stares with a calm that chilled deeper than any scream.
DING!
[4:00]
Raphael's eyes lifted to the spectral tir flickering above the square. Its cold-blue digits ticked with chanical precision, uncaring, inevitable.
His gaze slid sideways.
Miriel stood barely upright, her weight sagging heavily against Elira's support. Her chest rose and fell in staggered intervals, as though each breath was an effort wrestled from panic. One trembling hand clutched at the fabric over her heart, the other slick with sweat and blood that wasn't hers.
THUD.
Her knees gave way.
The sound echoed across the silent cobblestones, hollow and final.
Elira gasped, catching her mid-collapse, but Miriel still crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut, her palms scraping stone, her hair disheveled and clinging to her damp face.
Her lips moved but ford no sound, only choked air, as if she was trying to make sense of a language she no longer understood.
Raphael exhaled slowly through his nose, the sound barely audible beneath the ringing in everyone's ears. His fingers brushed the haft of his spear, idle, like a pianist rehearsing a familiar tune.
'Why?'
'Why do they fall apart so easily?'
His thoughts were calm. Detached.
'This is a trial—an illusion conjured by arcane artifice buried beneath the Academy. The townsfolk are fignts. The deaths are illusions. The screams, echoes. It's nothing but a series of simulations.'
'So why do they cry like it's real?'
He watched as Miriel folded over herself, arms around her ribs like she could hold herself together if she just pressed hard enough. Her lips moved again.
"...it was a child..." she whispered, barely audible.
She wasn't speaking to him.
She wasn't speaking to anyone.
But the words struck the air like a curse, clinging, infecting.
Elira looked up at him. Hatred—no, revulsion—etched itself across her pale face, her fingers curling around Miriel's shoulders protectively, as though he might strike next.
Raphael's eyes t hers.
He blinked once. Slowly.
No guilt stirred in him.
Only irritation.
Drelgor watched Raphael in quiet silence.
Miriel's breath hitched.
Her forehead touched cold stone, the pulse in her ears drowning the noise of the square. The world blurred — not from magic, not from trauma — but from within. The walls inside her were cracking.
She had trained for this.
Flashes of mory passed through-
She had studied rituals, recited incantations, withstood the sting of backlash mana until her bones felt brittle with frost. She had excelled in theoreticals, sparred with fire-wielding seniors, faced down summoned horrors in illusions.
But not this.
Not the child's wide eyes.
Not the gurgle of the sweet-seller's last breath.
Not the warm body slumping beside her, neck half-sawn.
A scream crawled up her throat, but she swallowed it.
'It's fake, Raphael had said.'
'A simulation.'
'Nothing real. Nothing permanent.'
But grief didn't ask for logic's permission. It just was.
"Miriel," Elira whispered, voice tight, holding her like sothing breakable. "You need to breathe. Please—"
But Miriel wasn't listening.
Inside, sothing else stirred.
Two halves of herself stood at odds.
One—the girl raised in sanctified towers of spellcraft, trained to observe, not feel. To weigh threat and react with precision. That part of her whispered cold truths.
"They're illusions. You must pass. You want to be an Archmagi, don't you? You think trials end in classrooms?"
The other half—the one who still rembered clutching her little brother during a storm, the one who read old fairy tales under candlelight and wept when the wolf ate the lamb—that half scread.
"It doesn't matter if it's real. It matters that I felt it. That I still do. If I stop feeling, what's left?"
She closed her eyes.
'Raphael was wrong.'
'But he wasn't wrong.'
'He had clarity. His hands were already stained, but steady. Every thrust of his spear was purposeful. Efficient. Emotionless.'
'And maybe he was the monster they needed.'
'But I can't beco that.'
'I won't.'
Her hands clenched slowly against the stone floor, knuckles whitening.
'I will pass this test — but I would not forsake my heart. I will grieve the child, even if he was made of smoke and magic. I would cry for the dead, even if they disappeared when the tir ended.'
That was her strength.
Not water. Not ice. But grace under ruin.
And she would find a way to pass this labyrinth without losing what made her human.
Miriel opened her eyes.
They were still misted, still rimd with red. But they were steady now. She rose, slowly, with Elira's help, her spine no longer crumbling, but taut with quiet resolve.
She turned toward Raphael, her voice barely above the hush of wind:
"You do what you must, Raphael... but don't expect to beco like you."
She wasn't accusing him anymore.
She was choosing a different path.
But the scene before her made her resolve crumble into pieces.
DING!
[STAGE (1/2) COMPLETE!]
A woman crumpled, arms still wrapped around her stomach, as if she could protect the life inside even in death.
Raphael was facing the bench the woman sat on.
"Lone woman, pregnant, third trister."
Silence fell like ash.
Drelgor looked away. Elira retched behind her hand.
Miriel staggered back, tears streaming.
"You're a monster," she whispered.
Raphael looked at her, expression unreadable.
"No. I'm efficient."
DING!
[COMNCING STAGE (2/2)]
Slowly, the atmosphere twisted.
The people of the town square—those faceless vendors, laughing n, gossiping won—began to fade like mist caught in morning wind. Their features dissolved into ash, crumbling mid-gesture, leaving only the echoes of mundane joy behind.
The sky bled.
A deep, arterial red spilled across the horizon, bleeding into the clouds like ink in water. The sun—if it still hung—was nowhere to be seen. Its warmth had long abandoned the world.
CAW!
A harsh cry split the silence.
Dozens of crows wheeled overhead, their wings slicing the air, obsidian bodies like falling shadows. They spiraled in uneven circles, their cries not rely caws, but sothing almost chanting, as if heralding a dirge.
Elira's eyes widened as the last of the illusion dissolved. Her fingers tightened around Miriel's arm.
"Did we... not clear it?" she asked, her voice barely holding its shape. Fear and confusion twisted her features into sothing brittle.
WHAM!
The sound ca like a thunderclap.
Raphael—sharp-eyed, ever-alert Raphael—was gone in an instant blur, a projectile hurled across the square. He slamd into a wooden stall with bone-snapping force. The structure shattered, splinters exploding like shrapnel.
Dust billowed.
His body crumpled to the ground amidst shattered fruit crates and cracked boards. His spear clattered sowhere out of reach.
Miriel's scream caught in her throat.
He lay still, chest rising, but faint—shallow.
Sowhere in the fog of wood dust and red-stained wind, sothing moved. Heavy. Inhuman. The sound was not footsteps—it was more like wet rope being dragged over stone. Slow. Intentional.
Elira whispered, "It's not over..."
And above, the crows circled lower.
The real trial had just begun.
"Hahaha!" Raphael's laughter cracked through the silence—ragged, unhinged, echoing like a saw through bone.
Miriel and Elira flinched. They instinctively stepped closer to one another, eyes scanning the town square, unsure if the real threat had passed—or just begun.
"You can stop pretending now," Raphael said, rising from the shattered stall, sawdust clinging to his shirt.
He spoke with unnerving calm, his earlier laughter vanishing like a severed head rolling into silence.
"I said stop pretending."
He crouched, fingers wrapping around the shaft of his spear with casual intent.
"Co on now," he whispered, voice dipping into a low snarl,
"How long are you gonna keep praying, angelic b*tch?"
He pointed the spear at the statue.
Nothing.
Then—click.
A faint grinding sound, like bone dragged across stone.
The statue's smile stretched.
Too wide. Too knowing.
The warmth was gone. The kindly expression—just a mask.
Raphael's grin deepened.
"She's wearing the veil."
Cracks slithered across her cheeks like fractures in porcelain. Her mouth yawned open—not with compassion, but with rows of pointed stone teeth, jagged and mismatched. A grotesque grin.
Her closed eyes peeled apart, revealing pits of blackness, deep and infinite, void of light, soul, or rcy.
Then—
Crack.
Her wings quivered. The stone shell ruptured. From within unfurled tendons of white, downy feathers, gleaming and soft, too soft—too real—like they had been stolen from sothing sacred and grafted to sothing profane.
She rose from the pedestal.
PLOP.
Eyes—hundreds of them—bubbled open across her body. Each one different. Human, bestial, alien. They blinked wetly in unison, each focusing on a different mber of the group.
Miriel stumbled back, hand to her mouth.
Elira whimpered. "What—what is that—"
The statue's head snapped back.
"KRAAAAAHH!"
Her shriek split the air like a thousand crows screaming through a cathedral. Her jaw had split into layers of teeth—not rows, but tiers stacked like the legs of a centipede, chattering against raw, wet pink flesh.
Miriel stared, wide-eyed, her lips trembling.
Elira collapsed to her knees, clutching her ears.
"Th-That's not divine," she whispered. "That's-That's—wrong."
Behind them, Raphael dragged his spear tip across the stones, grinning.
"Well. Took her long enough to say hello."
"Kraaaa!"
BOOM!
The angel struck again.
Her clawed arm swept across the air like a guillotine.
CRACK!
Raphael's body hurtled across the town square like a broken doll.
He raised the shaft of his spear just in ti, the blow connecting with a jarring tal-on-flesh thud. The force rattled through his bones—his grip fractured for a heartbeat.
"Aaargh!"
A guttural grunt tore from his throat as he crashed into a stone well. Wood splintered. Stone cracked.
SWOOSH! THUD! THUD! THUD!
Miriel and Elira rose their wands.
A barrage of projectiles—compressed spears of water—shot from the fog at breakneck speed. They slamd into the statue's chest and limbs, blasting thin craters into her stone-and-flesh skin.
Mist erupted into the square, dense and blinding.
"Kraaannn!"
The angel shrieked—an unnatural blend of a hawk's screech and a woman's dying breath.
Then silence.
A mont too long.
SCHLIK!
The mist tore apart.
From it, she erged like a nightmare rising from a birth of steam. Her body blurred by the haze, claws slicing the air, she lunged.
Her hand closed around Miriel's throat.
CHOK!
Fingers like steel cords crushed down. Miriel gasped—a sharp, helpless noise—and her body stiffened, eyes wide, veins bulging beneath her skin.
"Too slow," the angel hissed, her voice echoing in ten different pitches.
"You're really fast and durable."
Raphael's voice sliced through the mont.
From behind them—
FWWIP!
His spear whistled through the air, a blur of steel and vengeance. It stabbed cleanly between them, grazing Miriel's arm and embedding into the angel's shoulder with a stoney crunch.
Then ca Raphael.
He twisted mid-air, montum bleeding into a spin, and drove his right boot into her torso.
WHAM!
The impact echoed like thunder. Ribs cracked audibly. The angel recoiled, crashing backward in a storm of feathers and dust, wings curling reflexively around her.
Miriel fell to her knees, coughing, claw marks already blackening on her throat.
Elira rushed to her side, while Raphael landed, one knee bent, spear already drawn again.
His eyes burned.
"Round two," he murmured. "Let's rip that smile off her face."
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