The shockwave ca out of the skull’s mouth like the world itself had decided to exhale.
It moved through the chamber in every direction at once, and the first thing it found was Marbas.
His body didn’t fall. It simply ca apart in flesh and bone. And everything that had made up the demon Marbas, reducing itself to particles in a single instant.
It was brutal yet efficient.
The particles becoming mist, the mist becoming blood that hung in the air for a while before dropping to the stone floor.
There was no scream. There was no final expression. One mont he existed and then he simply didn’t. The shockwave kept moving.
The students who had fallen behind reached its edge one by one.
Noah heard them.
He didn’t turn around. He made a decision not to turn around and kept running forward. But he heard each one. He heard a sound coming from behind.
There was a wet, percussive sound. It was repeating itself down the line of running footsteps behind him.
The sounds were not sothing he would forget quickly.
He kept running.
’I need to run!’ He said.
He knew that those students behind him, they were getting killed on by one. The door was right there. He lunged forward and hit the fra.
He threw himself through the gap, tumbling out the other side.
Then he hit the ground hard, rolling once before stopping face down on the stone floor.
He lay still for a second.
His lungs were working. His hands were on the ground. He ca through that door.
From behind the door, the red light pulsed.
That red lightly mostly because of the blood.
Noah glanced behind.
There slow and deep red liquid moving through the stone. And painting the floor.
He watched it just for few seconds. And everything clicked to him, what might happened.
He could feel sothing was coming toward him.
He trued to get up.
Just then.
Hands grabbed his collar.
"NOAH!!"
It was Mary who grab him. Her grip was tight and urgent, pulling him upright with more strength than he would have credited her.
"I’m here," she said. His voice ca out rough and urgeng. "I was waiting for you here."
She said. Her short black hairs end sticking to her skin with sweat.
Her expression worried and with fear.
"We need to move." Her face was pale behind the round glasses but her eyes were steady. "Right now...we need to move."
He got his feet under him and looked back at the door.
The red glow from the chamber ca through the gap in another slow pulse. Stronger than the one before it.
"Close it," he said.
"Can’t lock it from this side...I don’t know.." she said hurriedly.
The pulse ca again. The stone under his feet vibrated faintly with it.
Noah grabbed Mary’s arm.
"Then we run as fast as we can."
They started to run.
The tunnel ahead was rough cave rock on all sides, dark except for the light coming from the exit visible ahead.
A pale natural opening maybe fifty ters away where the tunnel t open air.
The sound of their boots on stone filled the passage as Noah and Mary pushed toward it.
Few students still running forward.
Then sothing ca through the door behind them.
It was not the skull. It was the sa force of it. The force past through the door.
A pressure wave moving through the tunnel like a fist through a corridor.
Hitting the walls and the ceiling and compressing down the passage at speed.
The whole tunnel shook, loose stone dropping from the ceiling in fragnts.
Noah registered it coming and didn’t think.
He stepped in front of Mary, grabbed her, and pulled her into his arms.
Turning his back to what was behind them, putting himself between her and it.
Mary’s black eyes went wide. "Noah!!! what are you—"
He lifted her and ran faster.
"Protecting you," he said. "I think."
"Why—"
The wall of ice he had thrown up across his back shattered.
Sothing hit him.
"ARRGHHH—!!"
The force drove him forward off his feet entirely.
Both of them launched through the air, covering the last stretch of tunnel in a way that had nothing to do with running.
His back felt like it had been opened. His coat was gone, shredded away, and the skin beneath it was shredded too.
He couldn’t tell exactly what the damage was.
The pain was too large and too general to read specific details from it. Blood hit the air behind them in a spray.
His skin on back was tear apart. As if it was peeled by soone. All remained was bloodied back.
They ca out of the tunnel exit.
The open air and the green of the forest hit Noah’s face as they tumbled out into it.
The light sudden and sharp after the darkness of the tunnel.
Mary ca out of his arms and rolled across the grass and into a low bush at the side of the clearing.
Noah hit a tree trunk back-first and bounced off it and went down face forward into the dirt and roots at its base.
He lay there.
He could hear the forest. Birds sowhere above. Wind in the canopy.
Completely ordinary sounds existing alongside the fact that he was bleeding heavily from his back and couldn’t currently feel his legs properly.
The evening orange light pass through the canopy of trees.
He turned his head to the side.
Other students were scattered around the clearing.
The ones who had made it through ahead of him, who had co out further from the exit and taken less of what he had absorbed directly.
They were down too, so unconscious, so groaning quietly. Injured and so more admaged. But breathing alive.
Less damage than him. Considerably less.
Damien, Arisha, Kaelan and others lay the.
He looked back toward where the tunnel exit had been.
There were just trees.
Green and ordinary and completely calm.
As though the cave and the tunnel and the chamber with the carved eye had never existed here before.
The rock face was gone. The opening was gone. The darkness inside was gone.
Whatever that place had been, it had taken itself away.
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