Morgana reached the clearing and stopped.
Fifteen students scattered across the grass and roots and dirt.
Most of them flat on their backs or crumpled against the trees at the clearing’s edge.
So were breathing visibly. So were still enough that she had to look twice.
She moved imdiately.
She went from student to student in quick succession, two fingers to each throat.
Checking pulses and breathing and the visible severity of injuries.
Her expression stayed controlled throughout.
Not because she wasn’t feeling anything but because falling apart in the next thirty seconds would help nobody.
Most were alive. Injured, so badly, but they were still alive.
She found Damien on one side of the clearing.
He was lumped against a root with his sword still sohow in his hand.
She checked him. His pulse were normal, breathing regular, cuts and bruising across his arms and torso but nothing imdiately life threatening.
She exhaled through her nose and moved on.
She counted as she went. Thirteen students were found alive.
She didn’t let herself think yet about the ones who weren’t here.
The signals that hadn’t reappeared on the tracker.
She found Noah near the tree line.
He was face down, one arm extended, the back of his coat shredded away entirely.
The skin beneath it was normal and cleaned. His fair skin perfectly normal and healthy.
He was not injured.
For so reason that felt weird to her. His clothes were shredded that ans he must have been attacked by sothing. Yet there was no injury.
She turned him carefully onto his side and checked his breathing. It was normal.
She looked at the body for any other injuries again.
She decided to put that thought aside and reached into her storage ring.
The communication device ca out and she pressed the channel for the other instructors without hesitation.
"Victor. Lucia. I need everyone at my location now." She read off the coordinates from the tracker.
"Thirteen students down. Multiple serious injuries. Co prepared."
She didn’t wait for extended responses.
She clicked the channel closed and pulled out a small case from the sa ring.
Healing potions, four of them. The concentrated that were not standard issue for field trips but that she had brought anyway because she always brought them anyway.
She started with the worst cases first.
Tipping a student’s head back carefully and getting the potion down took patience she currently had to construct one breath at a ti.
The fourth potion she held for a mont, looking between two students.
By the ti she heard footsteps crashing through the forest. Coming toward her.
She stood up and turned as Victor arrived first. Broad and fast for his size.
His expression already reading the scene before he fully entered the clearing.
Lucia ca in from a different angle thirty seconds later with two of her own students who had been close to the forest edge and had dical training.
Atticus was last, and with him ca three more instructors she didn’t imdiately recognize.
Support staff from the academy group who had clearly been running since they got the call.
"What happened?" Victor asked, already crouching beside the nearest student.
"I don’t have all of it yet," Morgana said.
"Stabilize everyone first. Then we talk."
He looked at her for a mont.
At the cut along her jaw and the blood on her spear hand and the state of general dishevelnt that was very unlike Morgana Celestine and then nodded and got to work without further questions.
It took another twenty minutes to get everyone stable, loaded onto ergency carry fras, and moving toward the city.
Morgana walked beside Damien’s fra and beside Noah’s and didn’t say anything to either of them.
They were unconscious. She said it anyway, quietly, in a tone that was less warm and more like a statent of non-negotiable fact.
"You’re both fine."
Victor ca and stand beside her. As the staff were taking away other students.
Morgana remained silent and then said in serious voice. "There was a Demon in forest... I don’t think one...but multiple.."
She continued to talk telling Morgana in detailed.
---
Noah opened his eyes to a white ceiling.
He stared at it for a mont without moving, trying to get the information available to him. White ceiling.
The sll of dicinal herbs.
It was clean and slightly sharp.
The particular scent of a place where warm healing magic had been used recently and often.
Soft ambient light from fixtures along the walls rather than windows.
Which ant it was either night or the room had no windows.
He turned his head.
It was night.
Through the single window at the far end of the large hall.
The sky was a deep dark blue with stars visible between clouds.
He was in a hospital.
Oakhaven City, it wasn’t the academy dical wing, the ceiling was too high and the hall too wide and the beds too nurous.
Large enough to have taken in the entire group of injured students, which it clearly had, because on the beds around him were familiar faces, most of them sleeping.
He sat up slowly.
His back pulled when he moved tight and tender.
He reached back and touched it carefully through the hospital shirt he was now wearing.
The wounds were closed. There was no shredded skin like before. He was perfectly healed.
He lay back down and looked at the ceiling again.
His mind went imdiately to what it had been circling since the clearing.
The goat looking skull with huge curved horns.
The size of it.
The way it had co through the portal in the wall without hurrying, like it had all the ti that existed and saw no reason to use less of it.
The red light in the eye sockets moving across the chamber.
The sound the jaw had made when it closed. That shockwave that had moved through stone and air and flesh with equal disregard for what it was passing through.
The students who hadn’t made it out.
He didn’t close his eyes against the thought. He let it sit where it was and looked at it plainly.
Then his mind moved to the conversation.
The system, who’s voice he had heard only three tis before, and fourth ti today.
the sa chanical voice...but there was one more voice that ca beside it.
The man who was casual and loud. He was entirely unconcerned with whatever rules or plans or tilines which were apparently disrupted by showing up.
’Monarch of the Frost.’
Noah looked at the ceiling.
The bloodline was inside him now.
He couldn’t feel it clearly.
It was subtle, sitting sowhere beneath the surface of his awareness like sothing that had always been there and was simply now awake.
Cold in a way that wasn’t uncomfortable.
And one more thing...he felt stronger. His mana reserved looked increased.
He thought about the man’s last words.
’I think you’ll survive the rest of it too.’
He had no idea who that voice belonged to. He had no fra of reference for it.
The personality or the apparent ability to simply walk into a system space uninvited and start handing out rewards that weren’t on the approved list.
Which ant it was sothing that even system couldn’t go against.
He was not soone who was behind the system, soone who gave it to Noah. Rather he was soone else entirely.
Sothing outside that he could think about.
He exhaled slowly and let his eyes close.
Outside the window the night sky sat quiet and full of stars over Oakhaven City.
Completely indifferent to the fact that sowhere beneath it a goat skull the size of a building had briefly pushed its way into the world.
And then it gone back to wherever it had co from, for now at least.
Noah pulled the blanket up and decided that the rest of the thinking could wait until morning.
His back still hurt and he had survived sothing today that he was increasingly certain he wasn’t supposed to have survived.
And that was enough to process for one night.
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