The sensation of being forcibly pulled through the fabric of space and time made my stomach churn. The Spatial Portal Artifact we entered at the academy gates hurled our bodies with extreme roughness.
Instead of landing safely on the dewy grasslands as we were supposed to in the Outer Zone of the Forbidden Forest, the four of us tumbled and hit the ground hard. My boots sank up to the ankles into pitch-black mud that smelled incredibly foul.
"Damn portal!" cursed Ragnar with a booming voice. The giant man rose from the mud, brushing the dirt from his cloak roughly. "Which bastard noble set the coordinates for this portal?! My tailbone is nearly broken!"
I stood up slowly, letting my veteran instincts take over. My eyes sharpened, scanning the surroundings quickly.
The scenery around us did not look like the forest outskirts at all. A giant canopy of ancient trees, with trunks the size of watchtowers, overlapped above our heads, completely blocking out the sunlight and creating an atmosphere of eternal twilight. The smell of burnt ozone and dead moss rushed in, piercing the lungs with every breath drawn.
Virelith did not reply to Ragnar's cursing. The bespectacled girl was frantically tapping the magic compass in her hand. The sound of cracking glass could be heard from the expensive instrument.
"This is not a coordinate error!" exclaimed Virelith, her voice rising in panic. Her face was deathly pale as she stared at the compass needle spinning wildly without direction. "Its magnetic mana is destroyed! The mana density in this air is too thick. We are not in the Outer Zone!"
Beside me, Selena Lune brushed splatters of black mud from her uniform skirt with incredibly casual and elegant movements. The girl actually smiled sweetly looking at the giant, half-destroyed ancient stone pillars covered in thorny roots surrounding us.
"Oh, look at the rune carvings on that stone," said Selena cheerfully, pointing toward the ruins. "Isn't this authentic architecture from the First Era? A highly historical and exclusive place to die."
I tightened the strap of my sword belt, confirming Virelith's fears as well as Selena's dark joke.
"This is no accident," I said with a cold, emotionless baritone. "Orvelis sabotaged the portal. Welcome to the heart of the Death Zone."
Before my words could be fully digested by them, the silence of the eternal twilight was shattered by hoarse growls echoing from multiple directions.
Our aura of life, the warm human blood that had just landed on this cursed soil, instantly attracted local predators. From behind the ruined stone pillars and giant roots, dozens of Grave-Hounds crept out. The dog monsters were the size of adult wolves without outer skin, revealing their wet red muscles and ribs. Black slime dripped from jaws filled with jagged fangs.
Ragnar's eyes instantly blazed savagely. He laughed loudly, the laugh of a predator yearning for battle.
"Finally! A warm-up!" roared Ragnar, immediately drawing his giant greatsword from his back. "Let me mince them all into dog food, Kael!"
Ragnar widened his stance, preparing to detonate his golden Aura to sweep the horde of monsters clean in a single area-of-effect slash.
I stepped forward at lightning speed. Instead of drawing my weapon to join the attack, I held back Ragnar's broad chest with my left hand, pushing him back half a step.
"Hold your Aura, you stupid bear!" I snapped with a commander's baritone that pierced the damp air. "Extinguish your Aura right now!"
Ragnar stared at me with wide eyes, a loud protest instantly escaping his mouth. "Are you crazy, Kael?! There are dozens of them! They will chew us alive if I do not sweep them away!"
I glared sharply into Ragnar's eyes, slapping away his reckless combat logic.
"Remember the exam rules!" I hissed sharply. "Our rations are only for one day! The miasma in this toxic air drastically inhibits our mana and stamina regeneration! If you waste your energy and detonate your Aura just for petty monsters in the first five minutes of the exam, you will die of starvation and exhaustion by tomorrow morning before Nightbane's executioners even find us!"
Ragnar was stunned. Common sense slowly took over his fighting instincts. He took a rough breath and suppressed the golden Aura glow on his body.
"Then how do we kill them without area magic?!" asked Ragnar impatiently.
"With military efficiency," I answered coldly. I stepped back, taking a command position in the center of the formation. "We are an infantry squad now. Every drop of sweat and mana is life for tomorrow."
The first wave of five Grave-Hounds leaped to pounce simultaneously from the front. Their skinless jaws opened wide, aiming for our necks.
Ragnar reflexively raised his giant sword high behind his shoulder, preparing to execute a full forward swing slash, a standard movement for greatsword users that consumed a lot of stamina and core strength.
"Do not execute a full slash!" I shouted, giving precise commands. "Your weapon is no longer a stupid block of iron! I replaced your sword with an Adamantium Sword! Its weight is now only about one and a half kilograms, equivalent to an ordinary longsword!"
Ragnar blinked, realizing the sword in his hand indeed felt as light as a chicken feather compared to its usual weight.
"Your sword's center of balance has shifted closer to the hilt!" I continued instructing. "Use your wrists!"
Ragnar grunted in understanding. Responding to my instructions without hesitation, he canceled his full swing. He lowered his sword to the front of his chest and began swinging it from left to right incredibly fast.
The giant man used purely his wrists to rotate the sword, not his shoulders. This incredibly fast and light pendulum movement created a defensive wall of steel blades in front of his body.
SLASH! SLASH!
That wall of slashes instantly cut off the snouts and front legs of the first two Grave-Hounds trying to break through his defense. Black blood spurted, drenching the mud.
However, a more agile third monster managed to dodge that pendulum swing. The monster lunged from a lower angle, preparing to tear Ragnar's neck right as his sword blade swung past to the right side.
Ragnar pulled his sword back to a defensive position in the center of his chest in a matter of milliseconds. There was absolutely no defensive gap left for the monster.
The monster crashed into the empty air in front of Ragnar's chest. Before the wild beast could even land on the ground, I issued another command.
"Thrust! Your reach is two meters!"
Ragnar grinned widely. He shifted his grip on the long sword's hilt, employing The Flash Thrust technique. He held his giant sword as if he were holding a light spear.
STAB! STAB! STAB!
Ragnar unleashed rapid thrust after thrust, aiming directly for the faces and chests of the enemies before him. Ragnar's sword attacks shot out from a distance of two meters with a speed resembling a professional boxer's jab.
The remaining Grave-Hounds in that first wave were trapped in a deadly visual illusion. Their monster eyes saw a giant sword that was supposed to be slow, but the attacks arriving to pierce their hearts turned out to be as fast as a Rapier.
Three monsters collapsed with holes in their chests without Ragnar needing to waste much energy.
Suddenly, an Alpha Grave-Hound twice the size leaped from atop a ruined stone pillar in Ragnar's blind spot. The monster aimed for Ragnar's head from above.
"Ragnar, Gravity Cancel!" I commanded without turning my head in the slightest; my eyes had read the Alpha monster's trajectory since it first began to sneak around.
Ragnar raised his sword high above his head. He prepared to swing it vertically downward, as if he were going to cleave the Alpha monster's body in two from mid-air.
Seeing the threat of a heavy slash from below, the Alpha monster responded with its animal instincts. It crossed its hard bone-plated front legs in front of its face, halting its body's momentum in the air to prepare for the heavy impact of the anticipated sword.
This was a violation of the laws of inertia, the deadliest advantage of Ragnar's newly replaced Adamantium weapon.
Right before the sword blade descended to strike the monster's leg bones, Ragnar stopped his sword completely in mid-air. There was absolutely no heavy momentum pulling his body downward.
The enemy, primed to parry an extraordinary impact, ended up parrying nothing but the wind. The Alpha monster's body was left wide open in the air without defense.
Without wasting a single millisecond, Ragnar rotated his wrist fluidly, transforming the canceled vertical attack into an incredibly sharp, sideways horizontal slash.
SLASH!
The steel blade instantly decapitated the Alpha, severing its neck before its feet even touched the ground. The monster's defensive rhythm was entirely shattered by the visual deception of the weapon. The skinless head rolled away, falling into a puddle of mud.
Leaving Ragnar to slaughter the remainder of the front line without breaking a sweat, I looked back to manage our formation's crowd control.
Five other Grave-Hounds tried to flank us from the left side.
"Virelith!" I shouted. "Conserve your area mana! Do not use large-scale magic! Create a single stone spear from underground, aiming for their soft bellies right as they leap over their fallen comrades!"
Virelith, trembling with fear, immediately obeyed my command. Her thick glasses reflected the dim light. She pressed her staff to the ground.
Her Earth magic manipulated the rocks beneath the mud. A sharp stone spear shot upward with extreme precision, piercing straight through the bellies of two monsters simultaneously just as they hovered in the air.
"Trajectory calculation complete, Commander!" reported Virelith with ragged breath.
In the back right flank, Selena Lune raised her magic staff. She prepared to cast a high-powered light spell to incinerate the remaining surviving monsters. The tip of her staff began to shine blindingly bright.
I stepped quickly and immediately swatted the tip of Selena's staff downward with the back of my hand.
"Selena! Hold your mana!" I snapped, staring into her blue eyes. "Do not cast any offensive magic unless one of our members is fatally injured! You are our healer. Every drop of mana in your body is our lifeblood for tomorrow!"
Selena blinked in surprise at my audacity to snap at her. However, slowly, an incredibly sweet sociopathic smile bloomed across her face. The deadly aura of command I radiated apparently gave the girl a thrill of elation.
"As you command, Commander," whispered Selena obediently, lowering her magic staff and stepping back to take cover behind my back.
The opening skirmish concluded very quickly and efficiently. We were panting slightly, but not a single one of us was injured, and most importantly, no massive amounts of mana had been wasted.
Ragnar immediately crouched over a puddle of black blood, beginning to dissect the monster corpses with a dagger to extract the Mutant Cores from their chests.
"Catch," said Ragnar, tossing a leather pouch filled with small, blood-smeared crystals toward me. "Ten cores in the first five minutes. Your energy-saving strategy is quite decent, Commander. I haven't even broken a sweat yet."
Virelith wiped cold sweat from her forehead. The girl's face was still very pale as she examined the blank map on her parchment.
"Kael, our probability of death in this sector reaches eighty percent," reported Virelith with a trembling voice. "We have absolutely no navigational guide. We must move immediately to find an exit toward the Outer Zone before larger monsters catch the scent of these carcasses' blood."
I walked slowly to the center of the pile of Grave-Hound carcasses. I swung my Blood-Iron sword once to the side to clear the remaining bloodstains from its blade.
I did not look toward the outside of the forest, where freedom should lie. My eyes instead stared straight through the thick fog, locking onto the darkness of the First Era temple ruins in the distance at the heart of this forest.
A cold, calculating smile spread across my face.
"Exit? Who said we are looking for an exit, Engineer?" I asked softly.
Virelith's eyes widened, the glasses on her face nearly slipping off. "W-what do you mean, Kael?! We will die if we stay in this zone!"
I sheathed my greatsword back onto my back. I raised my right arm, clad in a leather glove, pointing straight into the darkness of those ancient temple ruins.
"If Orvelis Nightbane threw us into this hell, then the executioners he hired will surely follow us here soon to ensure we truly become corpses," I explained with an absolute tone. "We will not run like terrified prey. We will enter those ruins..."
I turned to look at my squad members with fiercely glowing red eyes.
"...and we will turn that place into a graveyard for them."
I spun my body and stepped deeper toward the heart of the ruins. I left my squad mates stunned stiff behind me, forcing them to realize one horrifying fact. Their commander had no intention of merely surviving in this forest, but intended to start a war of slaughter.