The Return Of The Exiled Villain

Thruuum!

THRUUUUM!

Suddenly, the crimson light that flooded outward from beneath the serpent’s lowered head was continuous, not a pulse but a sustained surge, and its color had changed from red to a dark hue.

The mana vents along the walls responded instantly, their vapor changing color to match, the entire chamber bathing in that deep, dark light.

Slowly at first.

Its coils tightened around themselves, scale grinding against scale in a sound like boulders shifting deep underground.

Grrrmmmmmmm...

The vibration of it traveled through the floor and up through every set of feet standing on it.

Then the serpent raised its head.

Its eyes were still closed.

But the fifty meters of its body had begun to straighten from its coiled position, rising, filling the chamber’s vertical space in a way that made the hundred-meter diameter suddenly feel considerably smaller.

The raw mana bleeding from the gaps between its scales thickened from thin streams into something closer to rivers, pouring upward and outward and feeding back into the chamber’s ambient density until breathing became genuinely difficult.

”It’s entering the final phase,” Orin said, her voice tight.

”We need to interrupt it now!”

”Gray isn’t here yet,” Wren said.

”We really can’t wait,” Cassandra replied.

She was already moving.

”Everyone. Everything you have. Now!”

They didn’t hesitate.

FWOOOO!!!

Darya’s fire hit first, a full-output column aimed at the serpent’s exposed spine where the scales had separated, the hottest and most concentrated technique she could produce.

It crossed the chamber in under a second and struck the serpent’s mid-body with a detonation that should have carved through the scales of anything below Peak Great Grandmaster.

The flame spread across its surface and died.

Like water hitting a hot stone.

...Hssss.

The serpent didn’t react.

”Again,” Cassandra said.

CRACK, BOOM!!!

Her scythe strike landed at the base of the serpent’s nearest coil, body-strengthened to its absolute limit, every gram of her output behind it.

The impact of the shockwave cracked the floor beneath her feet from the rebound force alone.

A single scale chipped.

Just... a single one.

The serpent’s coil shifted slightly, the way a sleeping person shifted when a fly landed on them, an unconscious, irritated adjustment that required no attention and no awareness.

Cassandra stared at the chipped scale and gritted her teeth

”Maelis,” she said.

Maelis was already on the move.

She spread both hands, and the gravity field that collapsed around the serpent’s upper body was not the restrained, precise technique she had used on the guardian.

It was full output, unrestricted, the kind of gravity compression that had once caved in a reinforced training hall ceiling during a practical examination that the academy pretended had never happened.

THRUUUUUUUUUUM!

The serpent’s raised head slowed.

Then continued rising anyway, pushing through the field with the unhurried, inevitable momentum of something that had simply decided gravity was a suggestion.

Grrrmmmmm...

The sound from its body deepened.

Maelis’ expression didn’t change, but the strain around her eyes did, her output increasing as the air around her hands started distorting visibly as she pushed the technique beyond its comfortable range.

The serpent kept rising, though, almost like her spell didn’t have any effect at all.

”It’s not enough,” Ysolde said quietly, almost to herself.

”Its natural forcefield... It’s already partially King Realm. We can’t penetrate it.”

”Seraph,” Cassandra said.

Seraph was already at the front.

She had been building since the guardians fell, standing apart from the group in the relative quiet, her sword held low at her side, the sword qi along its edge no longer the contained, restrained presence it had been during the guardian fight.

It was considerably larger now.

It pressed outward from the blade in a way that made the air around her feel wrong, a wrongness that several of the girls near her instinctively stepped away from without consciously deciding to.

The density of it was not something that should have existed in a student’s hands.

As everyone knew, Sword Qi was something... that one could only get at the King-Realm.

It was simply true.

It was the kind of energy that the human cultivation system was not supposed to produce below that threshold.

Seraph stepped forward and drew the sword back.

After that... she released everything.

KRRAAAAAANNNG!!!

The sound the technique produced as it left her blade was not like the guardian strike.

This was the bell tower itself, a resonant, massive, total sound that hit the chamber walls simultaneously from every angle as the sword qi crossed the distance to the serpent in a single straight line and struck its body at the primary scale segment over its core.

The impact produced a visible crater in the forcefield.

Not just a penetration, but a crater.

A depression in the natural defensive barrier that surrounded a semi-King Realm entity, visible for exactly two seconds as the sword qi pushed inward against resistance that had no right to exist at this depth of a Great Grandmaster dungeon.

Then the forcefield closed, like water filling a hole in the ground.

The serpent’s body shuddered once.

Quiver~

Then the crimson light beneath it surged to its absolute peak, flooding every corner of the chamber in a deep, sourceless red that wiped out shadow entirely and turned the vapor from the vents into something that looked like blood suspended in air.

The serpent’s eyes opened, and those were not the eyes of a creature that had just been disturbed.

They were the eyes of a creature that had just finished becoming stronger and already wanted to test its newfound strength.

Vertical pupils, crimson from edge to edge, slowly swept across the chamber.

The serpent’s breakthrough was complete, and the silence that followed was the kind that happened after some bad shit happened.

For one single moment, nothing moved.

FWOOOP!

Until the serpent suddenly swung its massive tail at them.

One moment, the serpent’s tail was on the far side of the chamber, and the next it was crossing a hundred meters of open space like a siege weapon that had been released.

WHOOOOSH!!!

The displaced air hit them before the tail did, a wall of pressurized mana-dense atmosphere that staggered the front line and sent Thessaly stumbling backward two full steps.

”MOVE!!!” Cassandra screamed.

They scattered.

But the tail was too wide and too fast, and the chamber, for all its hundred meters of diameter, suddenly had no good places to be.

BOOM!!!

The impact point sent a crater into the chamber floor three meters deep, stone fragments exploding outward in every direction, the shockwave rolling across the ground hard enough to knock several girls completely off their feet.

Reinette hit the floor while Sola hit the wall.

Wren’s barrier snapped up half a second too late and caught the trailing edge of the shockwave rather than its center, the impact folding her barrier inward before it shattered entirely and threw her sideways.

The dust hadn’t even begun to settle.

The serpent’s tail drew back before shooting towards them again.

WHOOOOOSH, CRACK!!!

This time, there was nowhere left to scatter to.

The tail swung in a wide horizontal arc aimed at the entire group simultaneously, the kind of attack that a King Realm entity used when it had decided that the things in front of it were beneath the effort of individual attention.

Every girl still standing braced.

Maelis threw up a full gravity field.

Seraph’s sword qi flared.

Cassandra planted her feet and raised her scythe with both hands and every drop of body-strengthening mana she had left, knowing with complete clarity that it would not be enough.

The tail filled the entire field of vision.

SMACK.

Suddenly, they heard a strange sound.

Not an explosion, nor the catastrophic collision of forces meeting at their limits.

Just a flat, clean, almost casual impact, like someone swatting something away from a table.

The tail stopped completely... and even reversed direction.

The serpent’s enormous body lurched sideways from the redirected momentum, its coils scraping the chamber wall with a grinding screech that shook dust from the ceiling.

SKREEEEE!!!

The dust settled.

Gray stood in front of them.

His back was to the girls.

One hand was raised, palm still open from where it had met the tail, his posture was completely, utterly relaxed.

He had simply walked in and slapped it away.

”...What the...” Darya said.

It wasn’t a question.

It was the only word her mind produced.

”Did he just...” Vivienne started.

”With one hand,” Ysolde finished, her voice completely hollow.

”He didn’t even use a technique,” Reinette said slowly, staring at the back of Gray’s hand.

”He just... hit it.”

Maelis was very still, her gravity field dissolving unused around her fingers, her eyes fixed on Gray’s back with an expression that moved through several things in quick succession before settling somewhere between stunned and deeply unsurprised.

Sola looked at the crater the tail had made in the floor on its first strike.

”That tail made a three-meter hole in reinforced dungeon stone,” she said to no one in particular.

”I know what I saw,” Wren replied faintly.

Cassandra had not moved since Gray appeared.

Her scythe was still raised in both hands exactly where it had been the moment before impact, her body-strengthening mana still loaded and ready and entirely unnecessary now.

She lowered it slowly.

Her eyes stayed on Gray’s back.

”...He slapped it,” she said quietly.

Seraph stood slightly apart from the others, her sword still drawn, her pale eyes on Gray with that quiet, measuring attention she rarely directed at anything for long.

She said nothing, but she did not look away.

The serpent had righted itself on the opposite side of the chamber, its King Realm aura flooding outward in a furious wave that pressed against every surface in the room.

HSSSSSSSSSS!!!

Gray still hadn’t turned around.

”Stay back,” he said.

His voice was the same as it always was.

Completely calm.