"But since I am a humble servant of the one and only Prima Lux, I shall comply." I clasped my hands together and bowed my head with tremendous false reverence. "Just listen to me, heathens, and all shall be well."
Silence. Then Bakra opened his mouth.
"Sacrifice her."
One voice joined in, then two. And the next thing ten voices joined up in unison.
"Sacrifice her."
"SACRIFICE HER."
"SACRIFICE THE LIGHTNING MAGE!"
The chant swelled through the trench like a warcry, warriors pumping fists, mages nodding along with the grim enthusiasm of people who had just found religion. My beautifully constructed speech had achieved absolutely nothing.
'Incredible. I invoke Prima Lux and they still want me dead. Faithless heathens, the lot of them.'
I backed up against the muddy wall, my mind racing through my pathetic list of skills. The shouts were getting louder. I could feel the collective gaze of the surviving mages and warriors settling on me like a physical weight. Bakra's rocky fists were still glowing, his jaw set with the grim practicality of a man who had already made his decision.
'Nonononono. I am not going back to the beginning of this tutorial. Nope, I categorically refuse.'
I had to get this situation under my control.
"Wait!" I shouted, raising both hands. "I can be the bait! I'll distract it!"
Bakra scoffed, eyes wild. "With what? You're just about handling the plague creatures! You're dead weight and you know it! At least go out with a mage's pride."
Mage's pride, my ass. Would a mage's pride help me complete this level? No.
"I have a heavy skill!" I yelled back, my voice cracking slightly at the edges. "My secret weapon. It has massive area of effect. If I let it get close and hit it point blank, the flash and the sheer noise will completely disorient its senses. I just need you to hold it in place while it's blinded!"
Bakra's rocky fists didn't dim. His eyes dragged over me slowly, weighing survival odds with brutal honesty.
"You expect us to bet our lives on a spell we haven't even seen you cast?"
Before I could answer, a timid voice cut through.
"I... I can help with that."
I turned around to look at the beautiful angel who had jumped in at the right time. A girl pushed past Bakra's massive frame, barely reaching his shoulder. Brown hair pulled back messily, robes that were clearly designed for someone with significantly less going on in the chest area. Her shirt was straining at the buttons in a way that suggested it had long since made peace with the situation. She twiddled her hands nervously. It was the support mage. What was her name again? Something... something.
"I'm Elia."
'Ahh yes, Elia. Elia the brave, Elia the beautiful… Elia, get me out of this situation right now.' The young mage continued trying to convince the crowd that my plan could potentially work.
"Bakra, as you know I am a support mage. I can buff attack output directly, though I'm not too useful for anything else really."
Her voice was quiet like a flame that could go out at any time. She took a deep breath as if resolving herself to the commitment that she had made. "If she genuinely has a high tier lightning spell, my amplification will force it to overcharge. It'll produce more than enough sensory disruption."
Bakra stared at her, then at me as if deciding. The action pissed me off quite a bit. Since when did he become the defacto group leader.
'Oh well my fate is in his hands.'
Meanwhile Luna was already looking at me. Her eyes moving across my shaking hands, my mud-soaked robes, the complete and undeniable lack of anything resembling competence I had demonstrated so far. I could read every thought crossing her face. She thought I was walking straight into the jaws of death. She thought this was the end of my run.
'Oh don't give me that look again.'
I held her gaze and didn't break it. Whatever she saw in my eyes, whether it was the stubborn, unreasonable, slightly unhinged refusal to die or maybe something else completely , it made her exhale slowly through her nose. The air around her boots crystallising into thin white vapour.
"I need thirty seconds," Luna said, her voice cutting clean over the noise of the battlefield. "If you can genuinely blind it, Kura, I can cast an advanced binding. Thirty seconds is what I need, not one less."
Thirty seconds in a boss fight. Thirty seconds might as well be thirty years.
"Deal," I said. "Hey fatso wolf, look who's here!"
The Terror Wolf didn't wait for an invitation. It had already locked onto me again , those red eyes sweeping the trench with methodical, predatory patience. The black sludge across its haunches rippled as it lowered its massive head. The ground groaning beneath its weight as it jumped over multiple people opting to move in close instead of a ranged attack this time.
'Okay Kura. Wait for it. You have to wait for it.'
Have you ever sat through a five second unskippable cutscene before a boss attack? Waiting for the exact frame where the animation committed and you could finally dodge? This was exactly like that except the cutscene weighed two tonnes and wanted to eat me specifically. Luna closed her eyes. Her breath turned to thick white fog as the chant began, low and steady beneath the chaos.
"Ice that is eternally cold, bind thy enemy in shackles that may hold..."
"...like the never-ending winter of the glacial lands, winter's death..."
Twenty feet. The ground shook with every bound. Mud erupted behind it in great dark clods. The sheer mass of the thing blotted out everything else — the battlefield, the smoke, the church spires in the distance. Ten feet. Its jaws split open. I could see individual strings of black saliva stretching between teeth the size of daggers.
"MAGE, MOVE!"
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"
"SHE'S GOING TO DIE!"
The shouts tore through the trench behind me. I could hear Bakra's voice loudest among them, though whether he was genuinely concerned or simply annoyed his bait wasn't performing correctly I couldn't tell. Luna's spell still needed at least an additional 15 seconds. Seven feet.
"...winter's death..."
Luna's chant didn't waver. Not once. I could feel her presence behind me like a drop in temperature, steady and cold and utterly focused. I risked the smallest glance. Her eyes held worry, knuckles white around her staff, frost spreading outward from her feet in thin crackling veins across the mud. Her brow was creased, it was clear she was panicked but trying to maintain her concentration. She wasn't going to stop.
'Good.'
Five feet. The hot rancid breath hit me like a wall. The jaw dropped wider and wider, the darkness inside it absolute.
"SUICIDAL IDIOT!"
"WELL THAT'S IT FOR HER!"
Two feet.
'Now.'
Zip Dash.
[Zip Dash (Lv.1) Activated] [Daily Uses Remaining: 2/3]
My body dissolved like sugar in water as the wolf's jaws shut close at where my body had been mere seconds before. A violent crack of displaced air split the trench and I materialised exactly five metres to the right of the creature, the world snapping back into colour around me. The wolf's jaws snapped shut on nothing. Its own momentum betrayed it. All that mass and velocity carrying it forward with nothing to stop it as it crashed headfirst into the mud directly where I had been standing a fraction of a second prior.
Before it could recover, Elia had already started casting a spell towards my back. The heat was immediate and unnatural , flooding through my veins like boiling water, my core surging with a terrifying pressure that expanded to the absolute edge of what I could hold. It felt like being stretched from the inside.
'Do not explode. Do NOT explode.'
This was the moment of truth. Everything that I had learnt was being put to test. Earlier I had compared the tutorial to a school class test, well now it was time to show what I had learnt.
As a former test cheeser, this was my moment. I raised my hand, lightning surging upward. Wrath's Thunder pulsing in my mind like a loaded gun. This spell again. Last time I used it I nearly fried myself. But right now? Right now I was extremely motivated. I felt a sense of euphoria that felt like a drug. As if all puzzle pieces were connecting like building blocks. Every death, every reset, every painful miscalculation stacking on top of each other like building blocks clicking suddenly, finally, into place.
People had called me lazy my entire life. Untalented and unfocused. A parasite due to not having hunter powers. Teachers, classmates and society, people who looked at me saw someone who would never amount to much and didn't bother hiding it. And maybe they were right.= Maybe I was lazy.
'So what.'
A grin split across my face that probably looked insane given the circumstances.
'So what if I'm a lazy lightning mage. I'll show you exactly what I can do.'
"HEY FLEA-INFESTED MUTT!" I yelled.
The wolf's head snapped toward me turning to the side but at that point it was too late. This time I didn't just imagine the storm.
I built it. Three images, layered simultaneously in my mind the way I had learned across my tutorial encounter, like overlapping transparencies held up to light. The clouds forming. The lightning gathering. The strike descending. All at once, all connected in a synchronised way. I slowed my breathing, guiding the mana flow, and solidifying the image with a conduit of words.
"The clouds and lightning obey me. Strike thy foe Wrath's Thunder."
The mana didn't resist. It recognised the shape and roared to meet it. The sky cracked open like it had been waiting for permission. Lightning answered, and for once, it obeyed.A hyper-concentrated pillar of lightning crashed down at point-blank range, homing in on the wolf like a missile. The thunderclap hit so hard my own teeth rattled. The flash burned the shadows out of the trench entirely, turning everything a blinding, searing white.
The Terror Wolf let out a sound I hadn't heard from it before.
High pitched, pathetic and disoriented. It thrashed in the mud, massive head whipping side to side, its sensitive senses completely overwhelmed.
"...the great ice of the north! Regalia of ice, bind thus!"
Luna's eyes snapped open. I didn't wait to see what happened next. My legs had already made the decision for me, throwing myself sideways into the mud as the temperature around us dropped so fast it burned. The temperature dropped so fast it stole the breath from my lungs. Massive jagged chains of solid ice erupted from the frozen mud beneath the wolf, whipping around its thick legs and torso with a sound like cracking rock, locking it to the earth.
The black sludge coating its fur froze solid. The beast roared in raw fury and disbelief, straining every muscle it had against the binding. The ice held.
"THIS IS OUR CHANCE!" Bakra's voice tore across the trench, hoarse and desperate. "The lightning and ice mages gave us the opening! FIRE EVERYTHING!"
Dozens of magic circles blazed to life in unison. Fireballs. Wind blades. Bakra's earth spikes grinding upward from the ground. Spells from every surviving mage in the vicinity merging as they travelled, feeding into each other, the colours bleeding together into a blinding destructive tide hurtling toward the restrained wolf. But the wolf wasn't done. It had just about recovered from my lightning flashbang.The wolf could clearly sense the danger of this upcoming attack. All the black sludge across its body moving with sudden, terrible purpose, slithered rapidly up its neck and condensing at the back of its throat as its jaw dropped unnaturally wide.
The air around its mouth warped visibly, reality itself bending as a localised beam of pure concentrated dark energy launched forward to meet the incoming attack. The two forces collided dead centre of the trench. The shockwave knocked me clean off my feet. I hit the mud hard and looked up through the smoke. My stomach dropped.The beam struggle was close. The wolf's dark energy was incredibly dense, physically grinding the combined attack of fifty mages backward inch by inch. 50/50 it was currently a deadlock. However, how long would this last. The longer it did the more the odds where in the monster's favour.
'Are you kidding me,' I thought, scrambling backward through the mud. 'This tutorial is completely rigged.'
The air which was ice cold suddenly warped with sudden suffocating heat.
"Stand your ground."
A man stepped forward, scorched robes whipping in the gale. Roaring torrents of red hot fire magic poured from his hands, feeding directly into the struggling combined attack. This was the same man who had saved me on my first run. And just like that, the momentum had flipped. The combined magic tore through the dark beam like a blowtorch through wet paper, driving the darkness back down the trench and slamming directly into the Terror Wolf with a concussive, earth-shattering explosion that rattled every bone in my body. When the smoke cleared, The Terror Wolf was on its knees.
Then it wasn't.
It hit the earth like a condemned building, the mud swallowing the impact whole. The red eyes went dark. The sludge now gone, and Luna's ice shackles disappearing. The terror wolf was no more.I sat in the mud, panting, staring at the back of the mage who had helped us' glowing robes.
'Of course,' I thought, heart still racing. 'Right on time, as always.'