Chapter 99 — A Certain Death
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It had been a few hours since the team finished consuming the meal cooked by Alyssa when they started waking up one after the other...
Alyssa was the last to wake up as she lazily yawned, stretching her body before rubbing her eyes.
"What happened?" Jik, one of the boys asked her.
"What's in the meal?" Another asked.
"Alyssa, was there something in the meal?" Magnifiza asked, her body still heavy with the strange laziness that hadn't fully left her.
"I don't know.. I also ate from it.." Alyssa shrugged her shoulder.
"Guys.. I can't find our card.." Another guy screamed out.
"What?" Jik exclaimed as he turned to look at the ladies. The two teams were in competition, so if someone was going to take the card, it would be the ladies.
"I can't find ours either." Canli blurted out, shocking the group even more.
"Where's your last team member?" Jik asked the team — and that was when the girls realized Amelia was no longer with them.
"Yes.. Where's that big fool? She's not here.. You guys might have conspired with her to run away with the crystals.." Jik added.
"Why would we need to do that when we already won..." Alyssa stated.
"And besides, we are submitting the crystals to the academy — why would we steal them? She must have acted on her own." Alyssa added.
"But why would she do that.." another guy asked.
"Who knows.. Maybe the Trueblood clan ordered her to. The crystals can fetch a lot of money.." Alyssa added.
"I never expected Amelia to do such a thing..." Magnifiza shook her head.
"She's such a snake.. I hate her.. I hate the Trueblood family.. I'll kill any one of them if I come across one..." Jik spat.
At that moment a formation flared up — the air shifting with a pressure so heavy and sudden that the white thick snow walls cracked around them, dust and ice falling from the fractures in thin streams.
The pressure that came with it was immediate and total — descending on the students like a ceiling dropping, the thick snow walls around them cracking from the force before anyone had time to process what was happening.
Then the men landed.
Eight of them. Foundation Establishment experts, dropping into the middle of the student group like stones into still water — and the world the students had been existing in for the past few seconds, the one where their biggest concern was a missing teammate and stolen crystals, ended completely.
The screaming started before anyone had consciously decided to scream.
Students scrambled in every direction — bodies colliding with each other, with the walls, with the snow — pure animal panic, the kind that doesn't consult the mind before moving. Jik grabbed the nearest person and ran. Two others followed. Magnifiza stumbled backward, her bow coming up by instinct, her hands shaking too hard to nock cleanly.
'Who the fuck are they?'
She looked around for Alyssa but the latter was nowhere to be found.
'I've to run too..' She scrambled on her feet and picked up the race.
And in the middle of all of it — Socrates.
He hit the ground from the transfer and the nearest expert was already on him before his footing was clean. The strike came across his ribs with the full weight of a Foundation Establishment cultivator behind it — the kind of force that didn't ask whether the body receiving it could handle it.
It couldn't.
He heard them crack — two, three — the sound traveling up through his side into his teeth as he was driven hard into the snow wall behind him. It collapsed around him in a cold white rush. He clawed out of it before the man could pin him, blood already running from his lip, Bloodsucker up and moving.
He caught the next attack on the blade.
The impact drove him back another step — his boots grinding through the snow, his injured side screaming at the effort of holding the deflection — and he understood immediately with a clarity that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with survival that he was not winning this.
Not even close.
These men were in a different category entirely. Each one of them alone would have been a serious problem. Eight of them, coordinated, fresh — and him already bleeding from the transfer — the math was not a fight. It was a question of how long before the answer arrived.
He moved.
Not toward any of them — sideways, cutting across the space, using the scrambling bodies of the remaining students as interference. One of the experts lunged past a fleeing boy to reach him — the boy went down from the peripheral force of the movement alone, not struck, just caught in the pressure of it — and Socrates felt something tighten in his chest at the sound the boy made hitting the floor.
He couldn't stop.
Another student — a girl, one of the ones who had been arguing about the crystals moments ago — was caught directly. The expert didn't even slow. She was simply in the space he was moving through and then she wasn't part of the fight anymore. Socrates saw it happen and kept moving because stopping was the same as dying and dying helped no one.
A blade found his shoulder from behind.
He lurched forward — the cut deep enough to matter, warm blood soaking through his torn clothing immediately — and turned the lurch into momentum, breaking into a full run as even his weapon couldn't keep up with his speed and slip away from his grip.
Not on purpose. Not tactical. Not chosen. It's just how it happens to be.
Behind him the experts pursue steadily but without rushing... They were all confident... They were all confident in their strength, confident that they could kill him...
Socrates ran through the dungeon, past the white corridors. His breathing was ragged now, the cracked ribs turning every inhale into a negotiation. Blood from his shoulder was running down his arm and off his fingers in a thin continuous drip that left a trail behind him he didn't have the luxury of worrying about.
He turned again And again.
The dungeon changed around him as he went deeper — the walls narrowing, the air thickening, the cold giving way to something older and stranger that sat against his skin differently than the dungeon cold had. The floor beneath him was different too — less maintained, rougher, the ice giving way to dark stone.
Then the mountain appeared at the end of the corridor.
He almost didn't register it as strange at first — just the corridor ending in a wall of dark rock, the ceiling rising dramatically above it. Then his eyes adjusted and he saw the lines.
Thin. Red. Running across the face of the mountain in a dense crossing pattern from floor to ceiling — so numerous and so tightly arranged that the rock behind them was barely visible through the grid they formed. They didn't hum. They didn't pulse. They just existed there in the dark with the quiet patience of something that had been waiting a very long time and was in absolutely no hurry.
Socrates stopped as he wondered what that was.
His chest heaving. His shoulder soaked through. The corridor behind him filled with the sound of eight sets of footsteps slowing to a walk as the experts closed the final distance and fanned out behind him — cutting off every direction as they chased him into the mountains..
'Either I move forward or I die...'
One of the experts moved up behind him — close, the confidence of a man finishing something — and raised his weapon.
"DIE FOR ME BOY.."
Socrates' instinct flared up instantly as he traversed into the mountain, cutting through the lasers without thinking. He didn't hesitate nor calculate, he just moved as if leaving everything to fate — the thin red lines passing across his body, over his arms, across his chest — touching him and doing nothing. The mountain accepted him the way it accepted the dark. Quietly. Without reaction.
Behind him he heard the expert follow.
One step in.
The sound the lasers made was very small for what they did — a brief sharp noise, almost delicate — and then the expert was ash. Not falling. Not collapsing. Just — converted. Between one moment and the next, the man who had been about to end Socrates no longer existed in any form that could be described as a man.
The ash drifted.
The second expert had been close behind the first and his momentum carried him half a step past the boundary before what he was seeing registered in his body — and the lasers finished the registration for him. Same sound. Same result.
The remaining six stopped.
Nobody spoke.
They stood at the entrance of the mountain and looked at the fine grey settling of what had been two of their members a moment ago, drifting slowly to the floor of the corridor — and not one of them moved forward.
"What just happened?" One of the experts asked.
"That's an energy restriction.. I've only seen it in books.. I've never seen it in reality before.."
"An energy restriction? Doesn't that mean no one can enter.." An elder frowned.
"Yes.. Unless the restriction is removed, anyone who enters will face the same fate as those two.." the expert added.
"Then how did that boy manage to get past it?" the elder asked, and the expert shrugged. He didn't believe it and decided to check it himself.
He walked forward and placed his finger on the restriction — it didn't even take a millisecond for his finger to get burned.
"This... ? It's real. We really can't enter.."
"Now that I think of it.. It does seem like that boy never used any energy when fighting us.."
"Yeah.. He only relied on physical strength.."
"Doesn't that mean he isn't a cultivator?"
"Yes.. It seems so..."
"A Gladiator being able to escape the grasp of 8 Foundation Establishment cultivators... That's a joke I can't live with." The elder said.
"We are going to wait here for him... If he didn't die behind that restriction, he's surely going to come out.. And then.. We will finish him once and for all.."
The elder announced and the five others agreed. They couldn't pass through the mountain because of the restriction — but because Socrates' body had no accumulated energy, the restriction didn't work on him.
And for the first time, Socrates not being a cultivator had saved him from a certain death.