Back within the Dark Knight Academy, the Eastern Grand Hall had fallen into a silence so complete that even the faint hum of the suspended Myst lamps seed louder than it should have been.
The massive chamber, which had spent the last several days filled with quiet analysis, asured discussions, murmured evaluations, and occasional sharp comntary from instructors watching their students struggle through Nalim, now felt as if every voice in it had been stolen at once.
Dozens of magical screens still floated throughout the hall, each displaying different students scattered across the realm, but for once, almost none of those screens mattered. No one was watching Maxwell reinforcing himself near the ravine. No one was studying Sheila’s thodical movents across the frozen riverbank. No one was making notes on Ariana’s cautious avoidance of direct confrontation, nor Dylan’s increasingly chaotic attempts to sohow survive through wit, luck, and enough destruction to make any instructor sigh.
Every eye in the hall had been drawn to one screen.
Liam Hunter’s.
The screen had already shifted into playback, replaying the events from the mont Liam had appeared between Charlotte and the Berserker, shielding her from the descending claw that should have crushed her into the forest floor.
From there, the image continued forward, showing the explosion of fla that had torn them both away from the Berserker’s strike, the reveal of the evolved Sync-class demon through the smoke, and the way its dark red eyes had fixed on Liam as if the rest of Nalim no longer mattered.
The hall watched as the fight escalated into sothing that none of them could comfortably call an assessnt anymore. It was no longer a student surviving a hostile realm. It was no longer a reckless encounter between a gifted second year and a dangerous demon.
What unfolded on that screen was a battle that belonged sowhere else entirely, sothing closer to what experienced knights and elite combat instructors expected from high-level field operations rather than a sixteen-year-old student in the middle of a mid-sester test.
The screen replayed Liam being struck through the forest the first ti, then rising again, then eting the Berserker with hybrid javelins ford from fla and shadow. It replayed the mont he launched the demon through the trees, beating it from one section of the forest to another with explosions erupting from each impact.
It replayed the river explosion where the aquatic Advanced Horror was destroyed beneath the water, followed by Liam’s return with his left arm glowing white-orange, his entire presence sharpened into sothing dangerous and unfamiliar.
Then ca the latter part of the fight, the part that made even the most seasoned instructors lean forward without realizing it. Liam’s movents had changed completely. His body, injured beyond what should have allowed continued combat, began moving with a horrifying clarity.
He was not simply reacting. He was reading, adapting, and attacking in one seamless motion, as if every decision had already been made the instant before the Berserker tried to force him into making it.
No one spoke when the screen showed the final exchange.
The Berserker opened its maw to release that dark red plasma blast again, clearly intending to end the battle in one overwhelming attack. Liam stepped into danger instead of away from it. Darkness gathered in his palm. Fla compressed around it.
The orb that ford was small, almost deceptively so, but every experienced mage in the hall felt the mory of that pressure through the playback. A few of them stiffened even though they were not physically present in Nalim.
They watched Liam drive the Umbra Star into the Berserker’s maw at close range, watched the demon’s body fold inward as the implosion began, and then watched the explosion expand outward, consuming nearly a hundred ters of forest in a single devastating sphere of destruction.
When the light faded on the screen, nothing remained of the Berserker.
Not a limb.
Not a core.
Not even enough residual matter for regeneration to begin.
The demon had not been defeated.
It had been erased.
For several monts after the replay ended, no one in the hall moved. A few instructors looked as though they wanted to speak but couldn’t find the right words. Others sat with their hands clasped tightly in front of them, faces stiff with restrained disbelief. So were not simply shocked by the fact that Liam had killed a Sync-class demon.
That alone was already absurd enough.
What truly unsettled them was the scale of the Myst output he had produced at the end, and the precision needed to compress that much destructive force into a technique small enough to deliver inside the Berserker’s body before expanding it into complete annihilation.
It was the kind of attack that could end most fights before they began, and Liam had used it while battered, bleeding, exhausted, and still conscious enough to control its direction.
Eventually, murmurs began spreading through the hall, low at first, then slightly stronger as the instructors tried to process what they had witnessed.
A professor near the second row muttered sothing about output exceeding normal six-star limits. Another instructor, seated farther back, shook his head and said that raw output alone could not explain it, because control mattered just as much.
Soone else quietly pointed out that the attack had not simply overpowered the Berserker’s regeneration but eliminated every possible anchor for it to rebuild from.
A Sync-class demon, especially one evolved from Advanced Horrors and capable of accelerated regeneration, should not have been erased by a low-tier six-star mage in a student assessnt. Yet the screen had shown exactly that.
Professor Kaine, who had remained unnervingly still through most of the replay, finally spoke in a low voice that sounded almost like it was ant only for himself and Lady Seraphina beside him. Unfortunately for him, the silence in the hall was still thick enough that everyone heard it.
"That final attack," Kaine said, his steel-gray eyes fixed on the frozen image of Liam lying near the edge of the destroyed forest, "is the sa one he used months ago during his duel with Percy Granger."
That statent shifted the atmosphere imdiately. Several instructors looked toward him. Lucia’s eyes flickered with recognition, and even Mystica’s smile sharpened slightly. Kaine did not turn toward anyone. His gaze remained forward, but his expression had tightened in a way that made it clear his thoughts were moving faster than his words.
"He won with that attack back then," Kaine continued, his tone controlled, though sothing colder pressed beneath it. "But after what we just witnessed, that duel should be viewed differently. If Hunter was already capable of producing anything even remotely close to that level of output at the ti, then Percy Granger only survived because Hunter never used it anywhere near maximum power."
The implication settled over the hall heavily.
Kaine’s jaw tightened faintly. "Not even half."
For a mont, no one challenged him, because the logic was difficult to dismiss. The Umbra Star Liam had used against Percy had been dangerous, shocking, and enough to secure victory in front of many witnesses, but compared to what he had just done in Nalim, that earlier version now looked restrained to the point of absurdity. It had been a warning shot pretending to be a finishing move. A carefully asured strike disguised as overwhelming force.
Kaine leaned back slightly, though his irritation only deepened. In his mind, mories of his class sessions with Liam returned one after another. The sparring. The exercises. The pressure drills. The monts where Liam had seed composed, efficient, and irritatingly difficult to shake, yet never as overwhelming as Kaine had suspected he could be.
He had always known the boy was holding back. That much had been obvious. Liam Hunter was not the kind of student who showed everything simply because an instructor demanded it. But this? This was far beyond what Kaine had assud.
The boy had not rely been holding back.
He had been burying entire levels of himself.
And sohow, that felt insulting.
Kaine’s eyes narrowed slightly as he watched the screen replay a brief segnt of Liam moving through the latter half of the fight with that impossible calmness. He had trained dangerous students before. He had broken down arrogant ones. He had forced talented children to understand the difference between classroom skill and real survival. But Liam had apparently been sitting inside his lessons with far more capacity than he had ever bothered to reveal.
A faint vein pulsed near Kaine’s temple.
"That brat," he muttered under his breath. "When he returns, I am going to make his life a living hell."
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