The Strongest Student of the Weakest Academy-Chapter 471: The Heavens Shall Fall (XII)

There wasn't anything to say about Kael's fight.

He was simply thoroughly humiliated by his opponent, getting the biggest beating of his damn life.

And of course, he came to his seat with the face of someone who just wanted to dig a hole and hide himself there.

He sat down and simply didn't say anything.

Just stared at the platform below with both hands on his knees and his hair messier than it had been going down, and a new addition to his left cheek that was going to be interesting tomorrow morning.

Tyrian and I looked at him.

"Mid-rank nobody," Tyrian suddenly spoke, almost holding back his laugh.

"...I'll fucking end you!" Kael sharply retorted.

He didn't move while saying this, and didn't even look at either of us.

"Don't feel bad. He was a peak 7✯ True God," spoke Tyrian, gently tapping his shoulder.

"I know what he was," Kael added flatly.

"You fought well for the first exchange."

"Tyrian."

"The first half of the first exchange, even."

"I'm going to need you to stop talking."

Tyrian stopped talking.

Twelve seconds passed.

"...He didn't have to do the last part," Kael muttered.

"That was completely unnecessary."

"Pfttt..."

We both laughed at his words.

The competition fights continued, with some familiar classmates joining in as well, but nothing too interesting.

The other faction's win rate was well above ninety percent, since only I, Thaliel, and Emyria were able to beat our opponents.

"...When is this shit going to end?" Kael muttered in a bored tone.

At this point, the fight had become extremely boring, just like I had said, and everyone probably already wanted to leave.

I was considering leaving myself.

Then the official's voice filled the arena again.

"The final match of the competition."

That got the crowd's attention back. The thinned tiers filled with returning noise, people leaning forward, the faction sections straightening in their seats.

"Representing the Primordial Court... a special high official."

The Primordial Court section, empty all day, suddenly felt less empty in a way that had nothing to do with anyone sitting in it.

"Representing the Divine Academy..."

I was already thinking about the exit.

"...Aestrea Moon."

I stopped thinking about the exit.

My eyes went to the bracket board.

No second match was registered under my name. I checked the bracket this morning, then again after my match with Seran, and there was nothing.

And yet my name was sitting in the final slot in clean official script like it had always been there.

Kael turned to look at me slowly.

Tyrian turned to look at me slowly.

I looked at the bracket board for another second.

Then I stood up.

"...Did you know about this?" Tyrian asked carefully.

"No," I said.

I straightened my collar and made my way down toward the platform entry without another word, the crowd noise shifting around my name in the specific way it had before, recognition spreading through the tiers in a wave.

The platform felt different the second time.

I stepped onto it and rolled my shoulder once, looking at the opposite entry point where my opponent would appear.

The arena waited.

Then the entry opened.

And I went very still.

He walked out slowly.

"...Y-you."

There were six wings on his back, having what someone would call an ancient face.

There was no doubt about it...

He was Caelid... the leader of the army that tried to kill me when I got back to the Divine Realm.

However, something about him was fundamentally, deeply wrong in a way that I registered before I identified the specific details.

His skin had taken on a grayish quality, the color of something that had been left too long without something it needed.

His eyes, which I remembered as ancient and cold and carrying the specific weight of the second-in-command of the Primordial Court, were clouded.

His movements as he crossed to his mark were slightly off in their timing, almost delayed from where they should have been, like a clock that was still running but had lost its accuracy.

His six wings dragged slightly at the trailing edges.

I looked at him across the platform distance.

I had killed him.

I made sure. I specifically made sure. The Karma authority doesn't miss. It doesn't leave room for... anyone to survive.

Caelid opened his mouth.

The voice that came out was his and not his simultaneously.

"...Aestrea."

My blood ran cold at his call.

His power, surprisingly, was still the same... at least in matters of Divine Energy.

"[D-Domain of Destruction]"

THRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

The domain expanded in a single second without even leaving me time for reaction. After all, who would use their domain in the first second of the fight?!

One moment, the arena was an arena, and the next it was something else entirely, Caelid's Domain of Destruction swallowing every surface simultaneously.

The crowd reacted instantly.

The faction sections erupting into defensive stances, divine energy flaring across every tier as hundreds of gods prepared for the obvious conclusion.

The juries dove for their emergency override, but it was too late as the domain was already complete.

Inside it, the arena ceased to be an arena and became a sealed space with two people in it, and destruction sitting in every particle of air between them.

I raised both of my swords as I knew that he wouldn't be an easy opponent.

But as I waited... he didn't move, and just stared at me, almost blankly.

SPLAT!

A sudden mouthful of blood hit the platform stone, but strangely... that blood wasn't golden, like the ordinary blood of a god, but was... black.

Caelid was bent forward, one hand pressed against his own chest, his filmed-over eyes finding mine across the distance with an expression that I hadn't seen on his face in any version of our previous interaction.

Desperation. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

"H-help me... A-Aestrea..."

I didn't lower my swords at his words.

What if this might be a trick from him to attack me in surprise?

"...Caelid?"

SPLAT.

Another mouthful, surprisingly darker than the first.

He dropped to one knee, his six wings hanging uselessly at his sides, the trailing edges scraping against the platform stone.

His skin had darkened further since he'd walked out, the grayish quality spreading into something worse, black veins crawling outward from his collar and his wrists like cracks spreading through old stone.

He started crawling.

...Toward me.

The second-in-command of the Primordial Court, one of its seven key pillars, the God of Destruction, is crawling across a competition platform with black rot spreading across his body in real time.

I watched him come without moving.

Every combat instinct I had was running several calculations simultaneously, and none of them were producing clean answers.

He stopped two meters from my feet and then looked up at me.

"Y-you're the F-Fallen God, right?"

My expression didn't move.

"I-I only n-noticed it the moment you hit me w-with your Authority of Karma..."

I said nothing.

His body shuddered.

Another wave of black spread across his shoulder, consuming it the way mold consumes something left in the dark.

His breathing was wrong, too shallow, too irregular, the breathing of something running on the last of what it had.

"T-this is a t-trap, b-by the P-Primordial Court."

"...Explain," I muttered quietly.

"T-they r-revived me. W-what you're s-seeing r-right now isn't r-really being alive." His filmed eyes stayed on mine.

"I-I'm p-probably g-going to d-die at any s-second n-now, and t-they want you to g-get the f-fault for it."

I looked at his rotting body.

At the black spreading across sixty, seventy percent of him now.

A setup...

They revived him just enough to walk out here and die in front of a full arena with my name on the match record.

High official of the Primordial Court, killed during a competition match against Aestrea Moon.

...These people are patient.'

"S-so," Caelid continued, his voice dropping further, the words coming out slower, "b-be c-careful about t-that. And also..."

He stopped and coughed.

The black had reached his jaw now.

Eighty percent.

"...Also, what?"

His eyes found mine one last time with everything he had left in them.

"P-please... d-destroy the P-Primordial C-court... t-they are in contact with Outer Go—"

SPLUUUUURRTTT!!!!!!!!!

His body detonated outward in a spray of black, viscous demonic energy that expanded in every direction from where he'd been kneeling..

Fwish!

I moved before anyone outside the domain could process what had happened.

Both hands out.

The demonic energy rushing outward hit my presence, and I pulled it inward, all of it, every fragment and particle and tendril of the black mass that had been Caelid, absorbed cleanly and completely in under two seconds.

Nobody outside the domain could see inside it.

Thankfully, my Chaotic Energy is a mixture of both Demonic Energy and Divinity, because if not, I'd probably be fucked.

This way, no one would suspect me.

Caelid's domain collapsed without its source to sustain it.

Fwish...

The destruction authority retracted all at once, the arena returning in a single breath, light flooding back into every surface simultaneously, the crowd noise crashing back in like a wave that had been held back and released.

What they saw was the platform.

The undamaged platform.

I, standing at the center of it, both swords still drawn.

And nothing else.

Just faint white wisps of residual divinity drifting upward through the arena air like smoke from something that had finished burning, catching the light briefly before they dissolved into nothing.

The arena was completely silent.