The Return Of The Exiled Villain-Chapter 234: Dungeon Crawl (II)

Half an hour later, the battleground was already filled with the students of the Phoenix Class.

The wide stone arena stretched beneath the open sky, formation arrays faintly glowing along the edges, humming with a faint pressure.

Wind brushed against cloaks and hair as students stood in loose clusters, weapons at their sides, expressions ranging from eager to tense.

Gray stood near the front.

Then someone frowned.

"...Where are the other classes?"

"They’re late?" One glanced toward the northern entrance.

"No way. The Azure Dragon Class would’ve shown up early just to glare at us." A girl shaded her eyes with her hand and looked around.

"Did we get the time wrong?" Another student muttered.

Cassandra’s gaze swept across the empty viewing platforms.

"There’s no movement anywhere."

"Strange..." Maelis tilted her head slightly.

Whispers spread quickly.

"Are we going alone?"

"Did they cancel it?"

"Is this some kind of trap?"

"Ahem!"

Professor Ellen’s voice cut cleanly through the noise.

Every head turned toward her.

She stood atop the central platform, hands folded behind her back, coat fluttering lightly in the breeze.

Her eyes briefly swept over the class before lingering on Gray for half a second longer than necessary.

"For those of you wondering where the other classes are," she began smoothly, "I neglected to mention one small detail."

A few students groaned.

"This dungeon crawl is a competition between classes."

The murmurs grew louder.

"A competition?"

"Against the other three?"

"How are we supposed to measure that if we’re all in the same labyrinth?"

Ellen raised one hand, and silence returned.

"We will be using the Saint-Grade Mirror Dungeon."

A faint ripple passed through the array behind her as she spoke.

"With its capabilities, we have replicated the same Great Grandmaster Grade Labyrinth three additional times. Each class will enter its own mirrored instance."

"So... same dungeon. Same boss?"

"Identical structure. Identical monster scaling. Identical resources," Ellen confirmed.

"Meaning, clear time and survival rate decide the ranking."

"Correct."

"What about resource acquisition?" Another student raised his voice.

"Collected materials will be evaluated. Efficiency, coordination, leadership, casualty count, and final boss execution speed will all factor into your score." Ellen’s lips curved faintly.

The weight of that settled over them.

A few students laughed nervously.

"Do they know we have Gray?" someone whispered.

"They’re doomed," another replied under their breath.

Ellen glanced at Gray once more after hearing those comments, and then, she continued:

"Each class believes they possess the strongest leader."

Her tone held something sharp beneath it.

"Prove them wrong."

The formation behind her began to glow brighter, intricate runes lighting up in layered circles across the battleground.

"Prepare yourselves," she continued calmly.

"The Mirror will synchronize in three minutes."

The air grew heavier as spatial energy started gathering, and a hint of excitement replaced the faint look of fear in their eyes.

After all, with the plan that Gray had advised them, there’s no way they wouldn’t be able to get first place!

Swisshh...!

A few moments later, the world folded.

There was no sensation of movement, no wind or sound.

One moment, the open sky stretched above them, and the next, darkness pressed in from every direction, carrying the faint metallic smell of concentrated mana.

The dungeon exhaled around them.

Stone walls rose on all sides, carved by neither hand nor tool but shaped by raw geological pressure and centuries of mana saturation.

Faint bioluminescent moss clung to the upper ridges of the passage, casting everything in a dim, cold blue-green light.

The floor was smooth in some places, cracked and uneven in others. Somewhere further ahead, something dripped with a rhythm that felt almost intentional.

The Phoenix Class landed as a unit, their footing solid, and their swords were already drawn, or their staffs already raised.

No one panicked.

Gray had spent the thirty minutes well.

He stepped forward, turning to face them, and before anyone could speak, he was already moving.

"Reinette, Sola, Vivienne."

Three girls snapped to attention from the left cluster.

"Vanguard unit. Forward pressure and active threat detection. Reinette, your earth affinity means you’re reading ground vibrations before anything rounds a corner. I want you calling out movement the moment you feel it, not after you see it."

"Sola, Vivienne, you’re flanking her on both sides. Blades stay drawn. Nothing reaches Reinette without going through one of you first."

The three moved without a word exchanged between them, stepping into formation at the front of the group with the kind of efficiency that came from completely trusting the person giving the orders.

"Darya, Clem, Ysolde."

A second trio separated from the crowd.

"Mid-range suppression. You’re the buffer line between Vanguard contact and the main body. Darya, your fire output is the highest in this tier, so if something breaks through the front, you’re already casting before it clears Reinette’s position. Clem, area denial. Use your barrier magic laterally, not just as a shield wall. Make the passage itself work against them." He glanced at the third.

"Ysolde, I want precise single-target spellwork. Pick the threats Darya’s wide casts miss and put them down cleanly."

Ysolde’s fingers curled around her catalyst staff, and she nodded once.

"Thessaly, Orin, Wren."

Three more stepped forward from near the center of the group.

"Healing and mana support. Wren, you’re the stationary anchor for the main body. Set your recovery field and keep it running. Thessaly, you’re mobile, meaning I want you moving between squads and not waiting to be called. If someone is burning mana too fast or taking hits they shouldn’t be taking, you’re already there before they ask."

"Orin, conservation. You’re watching consumption across the entire group. The moment anyone’s reserves drop below a threshold that concerns you, you tell me. Not them. Me."

"Understood," Orin said quietly, her eyes already moving across the assembled class with a measuring, clinical attention.

"Maelis."

She was already beside him.

Not because she had moved just now.

She had drifted to his side somewhere between the second and third squad assignments, so naturally and so quietly that only Cassandra, standing a few paces to the left, had visibly noticed it happen.

Gray glanced at her sidelong.

"Close-range offensive. You’re with me."

The corner of her mouth curved by a fraction.

"As I should be," she said, her voice carrying the soft, satisfied tone of someone who had expected exactly that answer.

Cassandra’s gaze remained perfectly level.

"Cassandra."

She met his eyes without shifting her posture.

"Roving command and battlefield overview. You move freely across all squads and feed information back to me in real time. If a unit is struggling before I’ve seen it myself, I want to hear it from you first. You have full authority to redirect any non-squad member in the auxiliary group as you see fit."

She inclined her head once, and something in her expression settled into the particular kind of calm that came not from indifference but from focus.

"Seraph."

Seraph stood at the far right of the group, already angled slightly toward the passage behind them as if she had known what was coming.

"Rear anchor. Full autonomy. Anything that tries to follow us from behind is yours to handle however you decide is appropriate."

She didn’t answer with words. She simply turned completely to face the back passage and drew her sword, and the matter was closed.

The remaining students, eleven in total, filled auxiliary and flexible roles that Gray had already assigned during the briefing at the academy.

They distributed themselves accordingly without being told twice.

Within the span of barely two minutes, what had arrived as a crowd was now something else entirely.

Gray looked at them once more, and then he turned toward the passage ahead and started walking.

...

At the same time...

Ellen stood before the Mirror Dungeon’s portal, her arms folded loosely behind her back, her gaze fixed on the softly pulsing surface of the gateway.

The runes along its edges cycled through their synchronization sequence at a steady, unhurried pace, confirming that all four mirrored instances had received their respective classes without incident.

She exhaled quietly through her nose.

’Thirty-two students. Not a single complaint about formation assignments.’

A faint trace of delight crossed her face before it settled back into its usual composed neutrality.

’He really did prepare them properly.’

The battleground around her was empty now. Just open stone, fading formation lines, and the low ambient hum of the portal doing its work.

But strangely... the wind had died.

Ellen noticed that first.

All at once, as if the air itself had simply decided to stop.

The banners along the arena’s upper edge, which had been snapping steadily against the breeze moments ago, now hung perfectly still.

Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses as she suddenly felt two creepy auras closing in.

Unmistakably, irreversibly wrong in the way that only one classification of entity could feel wrong at a fundamental level.

Demon.

Swishh!

A sudden barrier dropped into place a half-second later.

It didn’t fall from above or rise from the ground. It simply appeared, as if it had always been there, and the world had only just remembered it.

Invisible to the eye, impenetrable to mana-sense beyond its boundary, a perfect sphere of isolating energy that swallowed the entire battleground whole and cut it cleanly from the rest of the world outside.

The academy was thirty meters away.

It might as well have been thirty thousand.

Ellen stood very still for exactly one second, and then her posture completely changed as the polite, faintly exasperated expression that her students knew, and the glasses she adjusted when she was choosing her words carefully, all of it dissolved.

What replaced it was something that had no business existing on the face of someone who spent her days correcting students’ mana circulation forms and grading practical examination reports.

It was cold in the way that deep water was cold.

Thruuuum!

Killing intent poured off her like heat from a forge that had never once been allowed to cool.

It flooded outward in every direction simultaneously, blanketing the enclosed battleground in a weight so absolute that the stone beneath her feet developed hairline fractures from the sheer ambient pressure of it.

The air turned thick and immovable as the temperature dropped several degrees in an instant.

A King Realm cultivator, had one been standing anywhere within that radius, would not have had the opportunity to be frightened.

The pressure alone would have killed them before they could even feel a shred of fear.

Ellen did not move from where she stood.

"Come out," she said.

Fwoop!

At her words, two figures descended from above the barrier’s upper edge, dropping without hurry into the enclosed space of the battleground as if arriving at somewhere they had already decided belonged to them.

They landed on opposite ends of the arena with the theatrical spacing of people who had rehearsed this entrance and found it satisfying.

Both wore the layered dark mantles of Demon operatives; their faces were partially obscured with the faint crimson tracery of demonic mana visible along the exposed lines of their forearms.

They were just mid-tier, by the shape of their auras.

Confident in the way that people were confident when they believed the gap between themselves and their target was wide enough to be comfortable.

The one on the left spoke first.

"Ohoho..."

A low, rolling laugh built in his chest before spilling out with the kind of leisurely amusement that suggested he had already decided how this conversation would end.

"Professor Ellen of the Phoenix Class. What an honor. Truly."

"We expected you to panic a little more," the second one added from the right, his own smile audible even through the partial concealment of his hood.

"Most people, when they feel a Containment Barrier of this grade drop around them, tend to at least flinch. You’re very composed, for someone in your position."

"We’re reasonable beings," the first continued, spreading one hand in a gesture of magnanimous good faith.

"We have no quarrel with you. None at all. We’re not here for the academy, we’re not here for your students, and we’re certainly not here for you." He laughedo nce again.

"So there’s really no need for this to become unpleasant."

The second one tilted his head.

"All we need is a single piece of information." He let the pause breathe for a moment, as if savoring the architecture of what he was about to say.

"The eldest princess... Seraph. She was confirmed among your Phoenix Class enrollment roster. We know she entered the dungeon moments ago." His tone remained light, almost friendly.

"Tell us how to access the Mirror instance she entered. Which anchor point, which synchronization frequency, which portal key is your academy using for the replication array?" he smiled widely.

"Just that, and you walk away from this barrier with every bone exactly where it started."

The first one laughed again at that, pleased by the phrasing.

"Generous terms, no?"

Ellen had not moved.

She had not adjusted her glasses or anything.

She had not looked between them or tracked their positions with the visible, reactive attention of someone recalculating their odds.

She was simply standing there, in the center of the empty battleground, with that expression on her face and that pressure radiating outward from her like the first warning tremor before a mountain decided it was finished being a mountain.

The laughter faded slightly as the silence stretched.

"...Professor?"

"You have ten seconds," Ellen stated

The first demon blinked.

"I’m sorry?"

"To rescind the barrier." Her voice hadn’t changed in pitch or pace. "Ten seconds. After that, the terms of this conversation become mine."

A second of silencep assed.

Then the second demon laughed, louder this time, the sound bouncing against the barrier’s invisible walls with an echo that felt slightly too large for the space.

"She’s serious!" he spoke to his companion.

"Look at her, she’s completely—"

"—Eight seconds," Ellen interrupted.

The laughter stopped.

For the first time since they had landed, something changed in the quality of the air between the two demons.

Not fear, not quite yet, but just... a small phantom of it.

The recognition that the pressure filling the enclosed space was not a bluff, was not a technique being performed for effect, and was not coming from someone who had any particular interest in negotiating.

The first demon’s smile remained in place, but it had lost its ease.

"You’re one woman," he explained carefully.

"And that barrier took the combined output of both of us to—"

"—Five seconds."

Neither demon moved.

Crack...!

The hairline fractures in the stone beneath her feet spread another inch in every direction.