Two weeks earlier, on a full moon night, the sky was soaked in shades of black and deep indigo. A thick quiet clung to the world, the forest breathing in shadows.
Ryuto and I had slipped away from the dorms, wandering through the Maze Woods under the cover of night.
“Ryuto? What’s your take?” Lilith asked, blowing apart an Ogre General’s skull with a casual flick of high-tier magic.
“Not enough intel,” Ryuto muttered, pulverizing another General’s head with a single backhand.
Something had been gnawing at both of us since that hundred-kilometer trek with Koharu. A detail that didn’t sit right. By nature, Ogre Generals didn’t travel in packs. They were commanders, leaders who directed lesser ogres in battle.
But what we’d seen that day told a different story. Every last one of them had been an Ogre General. No grunts. No hierarchy.
And that wasn’t just unusual. It was unprecedented.
In just under two hours of wandering—well, patrolling, technically—we had taken down forty ogres and ten Ogre Generals. Fifty corpses were left behind with barely any effort.
Even for us, that was far from normal.
“This isn’t right,” I muttered, scanning the treetops.
“What now, Ryuto?” Lilith asked beside me, her tone calm but watchful.
“What do you mean?”
“The elite class. The one Cordelia Allston belongs to.”
“The same one you belong to,” I replied dryly.
At that, she gave a small chuckle. Whatever the joke was, it must’ve landed somewhere in her own mind.
“What about the possibility of a Great Calamity?” she asked softly. “If this is an early sign, a lot starts to make sense.”
A Great Calamity, an event that caused an entire species to undergo accelerated evolution, pushing them up an entire threat tier.
Ogres evolving into Ogre Generals. Ogre Generals into Ogre Kings. Then Ogre Kings into Ogre Emperors, and, beyond even that, into Oni Lords.
An Ogre Emperor was classified as over A-rank. Equivalent to an S-rank threat.
An Oni Lord? That was an over S-rank, the kind of thing they called SS. The kind of monster that demanded the full strategic might of an entire great nation just to bring it down.
I glanced around at the quiet forest, suddenly feeling like it was watching back.
“I think we’ve spent enough time playing tag with cadets in the woods,” I said.
“Huh?”
“We need to start preparing for the worst. And honestly, it’s starting to feel like this evolution isn’t natural. Like someone’s behind it. Forcing it.”
Lilith nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“What’s the elite class’s next operation? Cordelia’s schedule?”
“A joint training exercise between the elite class and the knights… Wait, you mean that ceremony thing?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s in two weeks. Technically, it’s just a formal training march meant to prepare noble heirs from the Academy for future positions in knight orders or royal courts. It’s mostly symbolic. They’ll be marching through the Maze Woods, but they’ll stick to the main road. There’s no chance they’ll enter dangerous zones.”
No chance if things were normal, but they weren’t.
“Hey, Lilith,” I said, keeping my voice low as we moved through the underbrush.
She didn’t stop walking but turned her head slightly. “Hmm?”
“I told you, didn’t I? Plan for the worst.”
She frowned faintly, unsure where I was going with it. “Right.”
I narrowed my eyes, scanning the path ahead. “I think their target is Cordelia.”
Lilith blinked. “Cordelia?”
“Yeah. Think about it. If someone’s engineering this, artificially accelerating ogre evolution, then it’s not just chaos. It’s a directed attack. And there’s only one person worth aiming something like that at.”
Lilith exhaled slowly, the realization settling into her posture. “You’re saying we join her march.”
“We have to,” I said flatly.
She glanced sideways at me, incredulous. “Ryuto, we’re bottom class. On probation. If we ditch this training, we’ll be expelled.”
I gave a short, dry laugh. “Two weeks from now. We’ve got our own forest march, remember?”
Her brow furrowed. “You mean that march?”
“Exactly. Maze Woods training. Same forest. Same time.”
“You’re serious,” she said, not even phrasing it as a question this time.
“Dead serious.” I shoved a low branch aside. “We hijack the march, slip away mid-op, and meet up with Cordelia’s squad.”
“And the instructors? You think they’ll just ignore that?”
A smirk tugged at the corner of my mouth. “They won’t need to. I’ve got a plan.”