Chapter 52: Ambush

Night still covered the forest as Caelus made his way through the undergrowth. His steps were measured, his attention spread across everything around him without settling on any single point for long.

The Eclipse Ring had extended his awareness far beyond what it had been before. Moisture carried the smallest disturbances to him. He no longer needed to stop and search for every threat. Most of the forest announced itself before it came close.

It made traveling easier, but not safer.

A creature could still attack from outside the range he was actively watching, and the forest offered more than enough cover for that. Caelus simply trusted his perception enough to avoid wasting attention on every harmless disturbance.

He ate while walking, pulling a piece of dried fruit from his Ring inventory without breaking stride.

It wasn’t particularly satisfying, but stopping to prepare anything better would have been a waste of time.

He chewed slowly while keeping his eyes on the path ahead.

The dried fruit disappeared quickly. He considered taking something more substantial, then decided against it. A proper meal could wait until he found somewhere worth stopping.

His score was probably miserable compared with the leaders. Eve had likely accumulated hundreds by now, while the Hero should still be somewhere near the top. Caelus had no idea where he actually stood.

He wasn’t particularly concerned.

Until he knew what score was actually required, worrying about a number he couldn’t see accomplished nothing. He could guess how quickly the leaders were accumulating points, but guessing didn’t tell him the score the academy considered sufficient.

The creatures should be stronger there, and stronger creatures meant better points. The outer sections had already proven too sparse to justify staying in them.

He needed to go deeper.

There was no reason to rush blindly into danger either. Surviving the examination while preserving his strength would have been ideal. Unfortunately, someone had already made that plan considerably less convenient.

He was tired.

He had barely slept in days, and the fatigue had started settling into his body rather than leaving after rest. His senses remained sharp, but he could feel the difference whenever he moved for too long without stopping.

He had no intention of exhausting himself simply to chase an unnecessarily high score. He needed enough points to secure his place in the academy.

Anything beyond that was optional.

He cared about the result, not the performance.

Caelus’s jaw tightened.

His father hadn’t asked him to place well. He’d demanded first place and attached his life to it. A measured approach was still possible, but only if it could somehow produce the result his father wanted.

Annoying.

He pushed the thought aside.

None of this had been what he wanted.

At the beginning, he’d only wanted one answer: why had his sister killed him?

After that, he wanted very little. A quiet life. A place where he could be left alone. He certainly hadn’t asked to become responsible for a world he had once treated as fiction.

Yet this was still the world he had written.

He had written it toward destruction. He had written who would suffer, which kingdoms would fall, which characters would lose everything, and where their stories would end. Now that the people he had once treated as fictional were standing in front of him, the consequences were no longer abstract.

He couldn’t pretend they belonged to someone else.

If there was something he could change, he had a responsibility to try.

Not because he was a hero.

He simply couldn’t walk away from the damage he’d written.

That didn’t mean he had to fix everything himself.

And yet, the world refused to remain inside the boundaries he remembered. Characters exceeded the limits he’d written for them. Events unfolded differently. People he’d never expected to matter were becoming important.

The divergence wasn’t subtle anymore.

His foot stopped above a fallen branch.

Is this really the world I wrote?

He had no answer.

Thinking about it here wouldn’t give him one either. There was no one on the island he could explain any of this to without sounding insane.

Caelus stepped over the branch and continued walking.

The environment changed as he moved deeper.

Trees had been snapped and thrown aside. Patches of earth were scarred by heavy impacts, while several stretches of vegetation had been reduced to blackened remains.

Whatever had happened here wasn’t random destruction. Something had fought through this area with enough force to leave the battlefield behind.

Caelus slowed by half a step.

He studied the nearest impact mark before moving on. Whatever had struck the ground had landed hard enough to throw chunks of earth several meters away. The deeper he went, the more often those signs appeared.

The center was more dangerous than the outer sections. He’d expected that much, but what he saw suggested the difference was greater than he’d anticipated.

He kept walking.

The first corpses appeared between the trees.

Nightmare Spawns.

Caelus recognized them immediately. They were hulking, gorilla-like creatures built for raw strength, yet their agility made the comparison misleading. Even snakes looked sluggish beside them. Their claws were capable of tearing through steel, and killing one wasn’t something most C-rank candidates could do casually.

Then he found another.

The second was missing most of its upper torso. Farther ahead, another lay face-down beneath a broken tree, one arm bent at an angle that left little doubt about how violent the encounter had been.

Several more bodies were scattered farther ahead, all belonging to creatures in roughly the C-rank to C+ range.

Caelus examined them without approaching too closely. Whoever had killed them hadn’t struggled much. Some had been cut down where they stood. Others had clearly tried to flee.

That was more interesting than the bodies themselves.

He studied the wounds.

Most of the damage came from concentrated burns. Some of the creatures had been scorched badly enough that their original injuries were difficult to distinguish.

The pattern remained consistent.

Fire Affinity.

More importantly, there were no signs of several different attackers. One person had done most of this.

Judging by the condition of the corpses, they had made it look easy.

Caelus stared at the remains a little longer than necessary.

He couldn’t help feeling envious.

When was he going to be able to summon something like that?

A tsunami would be nice.

He’d settle for a storm.

The thought was sufficiently ridiculous that he discarded it and continued walking.

---

The forest went silent.

Caelus stopped.

His moisture sense returned nothing.

No movement. No breathing. Nothing living close enough to register.

That was exactly the problem.

His perception had become reliable enough that the absence of information was more suspicious than an obvious threat.

Something shifted behind a tree.

A candidate stepped out.

More followed from between the trees, spreading out without a word. Their expressions were blank, their eyes strangely hollow. There was none of the hesitation Caelus would have expected from students who had just decided to confront another candidate this deep into the examination.

Caelus studied them.

Something was deeply wrong.

They weren’t behaving like students who had cornered another candidate. No threats. No demands. No nervous glances between them. They simply watched him.

"What do you want?"

He kept his blade in the Ring.

There was still a chance he was misreading the situation.

No one answered.

Several candidates drew their swords. Others settled into martial stances while the remaining few began their chants.

That answered the question.

This wasn’t a conversation.

It was an ambush.

They were sending suicide assassins after him now?

The thought almost sounded absurd.

Then he remembered the Goddess.

She had warned him that there would be people who would eventually seek his life. At the time, Caelus had treated it as another deliberately vague statement from an entity that seemed to enjoy withholding the useful part of every answer.

Standing here now, he wasn’t nearly as dismissive.

Something about this was deeply unsettling.

The fact that a warning he’d barely taken seriously was beginning to resemble reality.

Caelus summoned his blade from the Ring. The familiar weight settled into his hand.

Whatever they were, they had chosen their side.

"This is your last warning." Caelus’s grip tightened slightly. "If you kill me, the academy will execute you. You heard the rules."

His tone remained flat.

They gave him nothing.

The final chants continued. Weapons remained raised, stances held, eyes fixed on him.

Not one of them moved to leave.

Caelus watched them finish preparing.

They weren’t going to stop.

His mouth almost curved upward.

He forced it back into place.

He’d spent the examination refining his new spells, looking for situations where he could test them without wasting the opportunity.

Now several armed students had conveniently decided to volunteer.

That was almost considerate of them.

The last chant ended.

Caelus adjusted his grip and studied the group in front of him.

He’d been tired all night.

He wasn’t anymore.