The God Of Destruction's Academy Life

One day before the class assessment.

Lyra sat on her bed with a book open in her lap.

Things had improved considerably since those first difficult days. Her heightened senses still made themselves known occasionally, but they no longer ruled her nights the way they had at the beginning. She was sleeping again, mostly. The adjustment was still ongoing, but it was an adjustment she was winning.

The past several days had been, by any measure she could apply, the best stretch of time she could remember living through. Nothing dramatic had happened. No incidents. No clouds gathering overhead. No impossible things descending from the sky. The days had simply been days, and she hadn’t known, until now, how much she had needed that.

The routine had settled into something she looked forward to. Morning classes, where she would find Necrotize already seated and they would talk quietly before the lesson began. Lunch at the cafeteria, where Elizabeth would already be at a table, and the three of them would eat together. The time between these things filled with study and small, ordinary moments that accumulated into something that felt, against all her expectations, like a life she actually wanted to be living.

Her relationship with Elizabeth had changed too, shifted into something she didn’t quite have a name for. Not friendship, not exactly, but no longer the formal distance of two classmates who happened to share a table. Something in the middle, something still forming. Lyra found she didn’t need to name it to appreciate it.

Tomorrow’s assessment was the next thing on the horizon, and she was genuinely excited for it, not because of the evaluation itself, but because it would be the first time she used her abilities in front of others without apology or qualification.

She looked down at the book in her hands.

Silver Lightning Extraction Art.

Necrotize had given it to her three days ago. He had told her it would teach her how to use lightning properly, and that it covered beginner techniques, which was exactly where she needed to start. Build the foundation correctly, he had said, or nothing built on top of it would hold.

He hadn’t taught it to her directly. He had left that part to her. The mechanics were similar enough to mana manipulation that someone with her background could work through it independently, he’d said, and Lyra hadn’t argued. She didn’t want to depend on him for everything. She needed to be able to stand on her own. In front of herself first, and then, eventually, in front of others. In front of her father.

What had surprised her was how quickly the material made sense. She understood what was written in the book with little difficulty. But understanding and executing were different things, she knew, yet there was an old saying she had grown up hearing: If you understand the mountain, the mountain will help you cross it. When you genuinely grasped something, applying it came more naturally than you’d expect.

She set the first book aside and reached for the second one.

Basic Information of Qi Cultivation.

The title said exactly what the contents delivered, a thorough, clear account of everything known about Qi at an introductory level. No information on its origins or why it existed, that wasn’t the kind of knowledge that found its way into books, and Lyra had no expectation that it would. Not everyone had an Ancient Origin sitting beside them at lunch, volunteering the cosmological history of essence systems.

Much of what the book covered she already knew, the stages of refinement and their names, the pathway Qi took through the body, the mechanics of how it settled and built within the Dantian. Catherine had covered most of this. Necrotize had filled in everything Catherine hadn’t.

But tucked within the later sections were things she hadn’t encountered before.

The new information pulled Lyra further forward in her reading, her excitement building with each page. She wanted to experience all of it, every stage, every threshold, everything that lay ahead on this path. She wanted to stand in front of her father one day and give him an answer he couldn’t dismiss.

She closed the book and made a quiet decision.

Tomorrow, she would perform well. She had to. She refused to embarrass Necrotize, refused to let anyone look at what he had done for her and conclude that he had wasted it on someone weak. She would give everything she had. She would aim for first.

What she didn’t know, lying there in the quiet of her room the night before, was that tomorrow would ask something of her she had no way to prepare for.

She was not ready for what was coming.

She was not ready to watch that many people die.

***

Lyra sat on the ground.

One hand held the other at the wrist, or tried to. She looked down. Her arm ended at the elbow. Below that, nothing. There was a hint of confusion on her face. She still wasn’t able to process everything happening around her.

Her body was covered in wounds too numerous to count individually, her uniform torn open across most of its surface. In front of her, Elizabeth lay where she had fallen, everything below her waist gone, holding onto her life by a margin that was visibly narrowing.

Lyra looked past her at what remained of the forest.

It had been beautiful an hour ago. Dense and green, full of trees that moved in the wind and caught light between their leaves in ways that made the air itself seem alive. Now the trees were dead. Their leaves had curled and blackened and fallen as ash. The ground was grey with it. The air tasted of burning.

Three of her teammates lay motionless a short distance away.

She looked around. In every direction, bodies. Students with limbs missing, fighting to stay conscious. Students who had given up fighting and were simply lying still. Others calling out, begging to be let through, to be allowed to leave. But no one was leaving. A barrier had been raised around the entire forest, total containment, nothing in, nothing out. Even the professors outside couldn’t reach them.

She thought of Necrotize.

She had been thinking of him for a while now. He was nowhere. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t sense him anywhere in this. Where was he? Why hadn’t he come?

The thought was still moving through her when something fell from above and struck the ground in front of her with a heavy, final sound. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

She looked.

A person. Carlos.

Half his face was gone. What remained exposed the structure underneath, bone, torn muscle, the shapes the body kept hidden under ordinary circumstances. He wasn’t breathing.

Something broke further inside her at the sight of it.

Before she could process any of it properly, a sound reached her. A footstep. Enormous. The kind of impact that had no business being made by anything that walked on two legs.

She looked up.

Something vast was moving toward her, and whatever it was carrying in its direction of travel, she had no way to stop it.

She closed her eyes.

I’m sorry, Necrotize.

Then,

Thud.