Pure chaos descended upon the training arena. Panic and confusion erupted throughout all of the students gathered around, and in an instant people were screaming, running, and desperately trying to escape. However, there was no escape. A barrier that enclosed them within the training arena had already been erected. Along with that, the massive explosion had kicked up so much dust and smoke that it was pretty much impossible to see anything. Many students began to have panic attacks, and many even passed out.
Things were spiraling out of control quicker than anyone could react. Even for myself, I couldn't help the chills that ran down my spine and all the images of being trapped within Theta that replayed in my mind. Still, I used a small lightning spell to shock me out of my daze and keep my brain clear. That was the most important part of handling an unknown situation. Keeping calm. The first thing I did was realize that the best way to understand what was even happening would be to get a full bird's-eye view of everything that was happening.
Channeling my mana, I activated a wind spell; however, I was beat to the punch by Yuri, who used his guns to generate a large-scale wind spell, grade A at the least. The smoke and dust were blown away, revealing the center of the training arena. It was empty. Completely bare aside from the plants and trees that were always there. Besides that, there were no signs of any life. Even Credo had vanished.
All around me, people were panicking and desperately trying to find ways out, which made it hard to focus; however, I zeroed in my attention on the ground. It was moving, almost as if there was something under it-
And then the ground exploded, and something stuck its hand out from the ground. Quickly, a multitude of holes opened up in the ground all around the training arena, and hands began to sprout from the ground, clawing at the dirt for leverage before lifting bodies out of the ground. Horrid creatures that not even a mother could love emerged from the ground, crawling, stumbling, and walking their ways towards the wall. The creatures had deathly pale skin and were so skinny that their bones resembled twigs.
In less than a few moments the ground of the training area below was covered in these creatures. Slowly but surely they began to drag themselves up the wall, using their sharp nails and bones to stick into the wall and climb up.
A horde of what could only be described as the walking dead was steadily approaching. For a moment, all of the students froze and just stared at what was going on below them. Nobody understood what was going on, and things didn't look like they were going to make sense anytime soon. However, in that moment the battle instincts began to kick in, and students began to fight against these horrendous creatures.
Launching large-scale flame spells and using wind and earth magic, they rained down ceaseless attacks on the army of rising dead. The creatures took the attacks head-on, showing no initiative to dodge or anything of the sort. They were blown apart by the attacks, burned to death, or they had their limbs completely sliced apart. Still, despite the fact that they went down easy, the sheer number of these creatures was the true threat.
In the time that a few of them went down, a hundred more took their place with renewed vigor. Every new wave seemed to move even faster and acted with even more hunger. In seconds they would be on us. However, the students were already prepared. Almost as if it were instinct, students organized themselves into formations that would allow them to fire magic while alternating, giving the next formation time to prepare a new, more powerful magic sequence.
Many students worked together to pool their mana into powering massively powerful grade S spells that ravaged the creatures below. We had quickly adapted, developing a strategy to force the dead back. And everybody was working together seamlessly. At the head, I could hear Alice organizing the whole thing, shouting orders and filling in the gaps where it was necessary.
"Pull back, and next group, maintain fire! The rest of you, charge up your mana for a large-scale flame spell. Fire is their weakness. Anybody with knowledge of barrier and teleportation spells, help develop a barrier around the glass walkway in order to prevent the creatures from easily overwhelming us!"
In seconds she had organized everybody and was quickly adapting to the situation, providing a strategy that revolved around blocking the creatures' progress with teleportation and barrier spells while infinitely raining down powerful magic spells upon them. With the help of her, the students organized themselves and acted like a true military force that had battle strategy. It may have been a sudden shift from the scared and panicking students of only just a few moments ago, but it was a testament to how everyone had shifted since the attack of the Fangless Python. Our minds were seamlessly able to switch into the locked-in battle state they needed to be in if we wanted any chance of surviving this situation. I was planning on joining the team responsible for the barrier when, in the corner of my eye, I caught something.
One of the creatures had managed to sneak up onto the walkway and was currently locked in battle with Erika. And unlike all of the other creatures, it was fast and agile, and it made use of a weapon. The weapon was just a sharpened stick, but the creature imbued it with mana and was now dueling Erika.
Erika ducked under the creature's slash before slicing both of its arms clean off with her flaming blade. Pivoting into a spinning kick, she knocked the creature back down, and it disintegrated against the barrier. Looking around, I noticed that even more of these creatures had managed to make their way into the skywalk, and they were attempting to infiltrate the ranks of battling students. Hikaru, Nova, and Yuri were already locked in battle with them.
I dodged under a kick and slid under the smash of a massive hammer as two of the creatures were on me. As I turned to face my two attackers, I came to a horrifying realization. The creatures were adapting. While they started off as mindless entities only capable of charging towards us, it seems like within seconds they had begun to adapt, learning how to use weapons and use mana to break through the barriers. They even began to develop battle tactics.
Just as quickly as the students had managed to divide themselves into ranks under the help of Alice and a few other brave leader students, these creatures had done the same. They were literally copying our own strategies and expanding on them. They were getting into formations. They had vanguards that pressed up close and long-range mages that used magic spells to pressure us from afar. They were literally using the same spells that we had. Not to mention they were sending fast, agile, and strong fighters in to flank us. In real time we witnessed these creatures change their whole strategy.
The creatures were adapting along with us. Before we knew it, the tides of the battle had shifted once again. Quickly, I was beginning to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of creatures that were surrounding me. It seems they were resorting to the strategy of overwhelming us with numbers. And without a doubt their idea would work because they were infinitely spawning out from the ground, with no end in sight. Backflipping over another attack, I slashed my blade again and decapitated another three monsters. Sliding backwards, I used 'Hallowed Wind Scythe" to cut down massive amounts of creatures from the waves that were attempting to surround us in our formation. However, those creatures were replaced by new bodies before I could even blink, and I knew this battle wasn't going to go our way.
Despite the fact that we were miraculously able to pull ourselves together and battle as an organized unit, we were still under threat of being completely overwhelmed. I could see Hikaru and some other students doing their best to gather and protect all of the students who had fainted or fallen unconscious during battle. But they were also being overwhelmed.
Everywhere I turned to look, all I could see was the fact that we were being completely overrun. This battle would end soon, and it wouldn't be ending in our victory.
Distancing myself from the wall of creatures approaching, I tried to think through how we would break through this situation in the first place. Everything had happened so suddenly. With Credo's harsh words on the reality of the world, to him snapping his fingers and this hellish situation descending. The very first thing I could glean from this was the fact that this situation was not real. There is no way a threat of this scale would be possible in any sense. First of all, these creatures aren't something I've ever seen before. While that didn't mean they weren't real, the fact that there were so many of them spawning so indefinitely shouldn't have been possible. There was also the fact of Credo's words before this whole thing began.
He was the one who initiated this whole thing, and before he snapped his fingers, he had said something about this being our first test. That was information enough for me to believe that this wasn't real. And finally, there was the fact that this training arena was filled with students of a magic academy. Credo simply couldn't kill or even hurt us. The outrage from that fact alone would be enough to forever end him. We were not only students but also the children of very important people. No matter how much of a nutjob the guy was, even if he was willing to throw away a position at the top of the world to teach, he wouldn't risk ending his entire life to kill some kids over an ideological disagreement.
With that out of the way, my next course of action was figuring out just what exactly this was if it wasn't real. Obviously it had to have been an illusion of some sort; however, illusion magic was the one kind I wasn't familiar with. I knew the basics of it, the fact that it relied on using mana to mess with your opponents' five senses; however, I knew that it had a major drawback in the case of believability. While you could fool your opponents' basic senses, large-scale illusions that were consistent amongst a large group of people were practically unheard of.
It simply required way too much mana to individually manipulate everyone's senses into seeing the exact same thing. Even through an extremely complicated magic sequence, that would still take way too much mana to actually execute. There were over a hundred students gathered within this training arena. It would cost too much to use illusion magic on every last single one of us.
That begged the question, what was Credo using to fool us?
I didn't have time to ponder over the thought for long, however, because in the next moment I was dodging lasers and sword slashes and kicks and punches. In my frenzy of dodging, I nearly crashed straight into Yuri, who was fighting against the endless waves. Twisting around each other and going back-to-back, we spun in a circle and output constant magic, creating a sphere of magic that pushed all of the creatures back.
"I noticed you from afar, and you're in seriously deep thought! Did you figure something out?" Yuri asked.
I nodded. "I figured out that we're under some sort of illusion; however, I have no idea where it's coming from!" Normally, to break out of an illusion spell, you'd only need to coat yourself with even more mana to cancel out the sequence that was causing the illusion; however, with experienced and strong illusion masters, you'd need to break off the processing at the root. That was nearly impossible while under illusion, making illusion magic without a doubt one of the scariest types to go against. The best way to fight someone who used illusion spells was to always be on your guard and never get caught in the first place; however, in this case we had failed to meet that requirement.
It didn't help that there was no chance we were finding Credo in this mess of a situation, so our only other option of stopping this illusion was out the window. That meant we were all under Credo's mercy. This illusion could only end when he decided that he had seen enough. We had to either fail or pass this test; there was no in-between.
"You wouldn't happen to have any conveniently timed sparks of memory that return in order to give us the knowledge needed to break out of this situation, right?" I asked, seriously praying for a dues ex machina of sorts to save us, all the while I chided myself for being so off guard that I allowed this to happen. If Credo had been a true enemy, we would all be dead right now, without a doubt.
"Funny guy, aren't you?" Yuri fired back as he amped the strength of his magic. "Unfortunately, I'm just as clueless as you are!" I noticed his facial expression shift and his eyes widened. He had come to some sort of realization because he started to frantically look around. "Well, while I was rebuilding my database of spells and working on my processing ability, I ended up reading lots of books about magic, courtesy of that extensive library Ms. Tamaki had! I remember reading in a book that while illusion magic was without a doubt the most dangerous to face 1 on 1, when used on large groups it was significantly weaker!"
Interested in what he had to say, I let my guard down, and a beam of mana flew by me, singeing off some of my hair. "Oh yeah, and why is that!?"
Yuri was silent as he increased his focus on pushing back the waves that were getting closer. At this point we were surrounded on all sides, and there were so many that we couldn't see anything going on around us anymore. We continued our 360-degree back-to-back spinning while firing magic. It was the only way to stay alive. If we left even a momentary gap, the mob would be on us, and that would be game over.
"It said that in order to efficiently use an illusion on a larger group of people, you needed to display the illusion through a catalyst! I skimmed over it; however, it said something about it being like a mirror and large and something that all of the people could see!"
I know Yuri was seriously regretting skimming over that passage, and I was seriously regretting not putting more effort into studying illusion magic. That was now on my checklist for things to study up on if I even managed to make it out of here.
Catalysts? Mirror? What did that mean?
Ariel didn't respond, and it felt exactly like that time with the Witch of the Vainglory. It seems that for some reason my connection with her was cut. I couldn't turn to her for an answer, so instead I desperately began to look around, and that's when I noticed it.
The sun. Or rather, the eclipse in the sky. The moon had shifted to block out the light of the sun. Despite the fact that it was an eclipse, I could stare directly at it without pain in my eyes. The face of the moon had a pair of large perpendicular black lines on it that resembled a pupil. And that was when I figured it out. I smiled inwardly to myself before shouting at Yuri.
"On the count of three, I want you to release the biggest explosion of magic you can! And hold back the creatures for as long as possible!" Yuri stared at me as if I were insane; however, he decided to trust me.
"One!"
The creatures were pushing closer.
"Two!"
In less than a second they'd overrun us in a massive mob of bodies!
"Three!"
At the exact same time, I and Yuri let out massive explosions of pure mana that blew the creatures away, creating a massive area of clear space. As soon as they were blown away, I began to channel all of my mana, and I turned to face the eclipse in the sky.
By reflecting his illusion off of the moon, something that everybody would be able to see, he essentially used it as a catalyst to get everyone in the wide area to fall for his illusion. And of course, he couldn't use the actual moon, because it would be impossible to call an eclipse out of time unless you were a godlike being. So instead he had artificially created one. Using a large piece of rock, he created a fake moon to create a fake eclipse, and then he reflected his magic sequence off of that. Because it was so large, no one could miss it, and everybody fell under the illusion.
It was genius and creative. But still, I had managed to crack the code. With a little bit of help from Yuri, of course. Pushing off my feet just as the creature rushed forward, I blasted myself towards the rock in the sky. Imbuing my blade with powerful lightning magic, I activated Electrification on my body in order to amp my speed and strength.
I activated my ability, perfect counter.
At the same time, I used the move I had developed when I beat Thor.
"Cloud-Shattering Slash."
With one fell swoop I separated a rock easily the size of a mountain clean in half, and the slashes of my ability diced it even further. In that moment the illusion shattered in a brilliantly bright light.
At the same time, I felt my heartbeat spike rapidly, and I realized that the effects of electrification on my heart were not good. I had only used it for less than a second, and yet my heart felt like it was going to burst.
Stunned by the light and the near heart attack I had, I began to fall.
I was sure I was going to fall to my death when my momentum was suddenly halted.
Opening my eyes, I looked down to see that the training arena had returned back to normal. I looked around me to see that all of the students were still in battle formation, shocked at the fact that everything was returned to normal.
I then looked up, and I saw Credo. He had stopped me from falling by grabbing a fistful of my blazer. I was currently hanging from the end of the glass skywalk, his tight grip on my blazer the only reason I hadn't fallen.
Now that I was nearly face-to-face with him, I could get a closer look at his features. He was taller than I thought, and his scar was much larger and more jagged than what I had originally expected. Looking into his eyes, I noticed that he had heterochromia. One was deep blue, and the other was a red vermillion color. The same as the color my eye had changed into. I currently have it under a black eye contact to avoid the stares and questions. However, Credo's was different. He seemed to have more than one pupil. They circled around his central pupil, and it reminded me of the Sharingan. Not only that, but Credo gave off an insane, oppressive pressure from his body.
Just as quickly as I had seen it, the extra pupil disappeared. "Congratulations. I was genuinely impressed by your performances during that first test. That one was to test your ability in a high-stress situation that you weren't prepared for. And you passed. However, don't get too comfortable. That was only the first. From this point onward, without warning, you will receive a random test based on one aspect of the Fangless Python attack. That will be your introduction into my class."
Despite the fact that he praised us, his voice was just as unemotional and noncommittal as it had been before. Soon, the students around erupted into chatter. As they began to talk amongst themselves, Credo returned his gaze to me.
"I'm impressed. I didn't think anybody would be able to see through the illusion."
"I didn't do it alone." I replied. "But enough of that. Why?"
I wasn't even sure myself what I was asking him about, but I asked the question anyways. Those were the only real words I could form.
"Preparation. I did it in order to prepare you." I got an ominous vibe from the way he framed his answer. "That's what everything has been and will always be about. Preparing for the inevitable. Making sure you're ready to face tragedy. Preventing disaster." He put extra emphasis on that last word. He stared deep into my eyes as he said it, as if he was trying to hint at something.
I just stared at him, not able to comprehend what was going on at all. But that's just how things always were around here.
"You were able to cut through it this time, but that was only a fake. An illusion. Tell me, Raiden Chisaki." I didn't even have time to react to the fact that he knew my name, because just then he snapped his finger, and the contact covering my vermillion eye shattered, falling to the floor of the training arena below. Credo simply stared deeply into my eyes for a few moments. Shivers went down my spine, and I could feel sweat running down my brow.
"When the time calls for it. Will you be able to cut through the moon?"