Noah stared at the trees for a mont.
Then his eyes started getting heavy.
The blood was still running from his back. He could feel it moving warm and continuous.
Which was not a good sign.
His hands were shaking where they pressed into the dirt.
The pain had been enormous a mont ago and was now starting to beco strangely distant, which was also not a good sign.
He thought about Mary.
He hadn’t made a plan to protect her. He hadn’t thought it through.
He had just done it.
His body had moved on instinct.
Maybe because she had been there through all of it.
Maybe because he had already seen or say guess, what had happened to the ones who didn’t make it.
And he hadn’t been able to stop that...but he could stop this.
He thought about the students whose footsteps had stopped in the tunnel behind him.
He didn’t feel guilty.
He knew clearly and without self-deception.
That he couldn’t have saved them.
Running had been the only option.
Staying would have ant dying alongside them. That was not a choice he was willing to make and he wasn’t going to punish himself for it.
But he had still heard them. The sound of sothing wet...sothing exploding.
He would be hearing them for a while. His vision was narrowing at the edges.
’I survive....but...can I stay alive.’ He thought.
He wanted to pull out remaining healing potions and drank them.
But his back was too injured.
Then the screen appeared.
It materialized in front of his face the sa way it always did.
It was clean and clear, completely indifferent to the blood and the dirt and the fact that he was lying broken against a tree root.
[A reward is available. Would you like to claim it? ]
[ YES ]
He had seen this before. After the dungeon with Damien. After killing that creature.
This sa screen had appeared imdiately and he had kept it like that without claiming the reward. There had been no urgency then.
There was urgency now.
The blood loss was real.
The darkness coming in from the edges of his vision was real.
He was loosing consciousness.
He was a long way from the forest edge and he had no idea how long before Morgana or anyone else found them.
The fear was simple and honest to him.
’What if I die out here before anyone reaches .’
He moved his right hand.
It took more effort than it should have. His arm was shaking and slick with blood.
And dragging it across the ground to bring his index finger in line with the glowing YES on the screen.
It felt like moving sothing that had forgotten it belonged to him.
He got there.
His finger touched it.
[ YES ]
He clicked.
---
The forest around them had stopped looking like a forest.
What had been dense woodland twenty minutes ago was now a landscape of craters and scorched earth and fallen trees.
The ground torn open in multiple places and the canopy above shredded down to bare.
But that was what happened when two people at that level decided the sa stretch of forest was where they were going to fight.
Morgana ca in low with the black spear and released the darkness mana through it in a concentrated burst that hit the groun.
Where Buer had been standing and tore a trench three ters deep through the earth. He was already above her.
Having pushed off a half-destroyed tree trunk to clear the attack, both swords coming down.
She rolled sideways and the blades hit stone instead of her.
The aura on them detonating against the rock and throwing shrapnel in every direction.
She was back on her feet before the debris settled.
Buer landed and turned to face her.
They stood across from each other in the ruined clearing.
Both of them breathing harder than when this had started.
His cracked sword had finally given out soti in the last exchange.
The blade had split fully and he had discarded the pieces.
Fighting with one sword now. Burns and cuts distributed across his chest and arms.
The damaged shoulder from her earlier spell was still affecting his range.
Morgana’s hand was still bleeding. There was a cut along her jaw from debris she hadn’t moved fast enough to avoid.
Her hair was completely loose, falling around her face, the neat bun from earlier a distant mory.
She raised the black spear.
Buer didn’t raise his sword.
He lowered it. Until the tip pointed at the ground.
Morgana’s eyes narrowed.
He looked at her for a mont, and then the expression on his face shifted into sothing that wasn’t a smile.
Like a man who had just received news or notice sothinb that was both good and bad at the sa ti.
"It seems we only managed halfway," he said.
Morgana said nothing. She kept the spear up.
Buer tilted his head slightly. "You want to know where your students ended up, don’t you?" He glanced at her coat pocket.
"You have sothing that tracks them. I know you do.... your type always does." He took one step back, his sword arm dropping fully to his side. "Check it. Go on...go save your students."
She watched him for two full seconds.
Then she reached into her coat and pulled out the tracking device with her free hand, never dropping the spear, never fully taking her eyes off him.
She clicked it on.
The projection populated above the surface.
The missing signals were back.
Not all of them... a handful of markers that had been absent since they first disappeared were still gone.
Which sent a cold blade of dread through her chest that she didn’t let reach her face.
But the majority of them were there, clustered in a location deep in the forest.
Far from the cave area and far from where they should have been.
They were alive. Most of them alive.
The relief that moved through her was involuntary and she didn’t try to stop it.
She raised her eyes from the device.
Buer was gone.
No displaced air.
Just the empty ruined clearing in front of her, the broken trees.
She stood there for exactly one second.
Her jaw tightened.
She had questions for him,
She put the device away and turned.
The direction the tracker had shown was east and deep.
She oriented on it and pushed mana into her legs. More than she had been using during the fight, the reserves she had been managing carefully now given a different purpose entirely.
She moved.
The broken forest blurred past her on both sides.
Her expression was set and cold and entirely focused.
Her students were out there.
Everything else could wait.
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