Forsaken By The Gods, I Made A Contract With the Demon King

Chapter 139 Panic

Vyse pushed away from the wall, her eyes narrowing. "Are you suggesting one of our students is-"

"I'm not suggesting anything," Kris cut her off. "I'm saying we need to ask better questions. The Shadow Walkers are expensive. Someone paid a fortune to send them after a specific student, and they didn't care how many others died in the process."

A young healer approached their group, bowing slightly. "Seniors? We've managed to stabilize the poison in most of the wounded, but... Ernest's case is different. The corruption has spread too deep. We can't..."

Derek's face hardened. "Make him comfortable. And send word to his family."

After the healer left, silence fell over the group. Finally, Sara spoke what they were all thinking.

"We failed them," she whispered. "We were supposed to protect them."

"No," Vyse's voice was sharp. "Someone used us as collateral damage to get to one target. And when we find out who..." Her bangles flared with barely contained power.

"If Lyssandra and Levi are alive," Derek said, "they might have answers. The search teams reported traces of an unknown portal signature near the evacuation point."

"And Levi?" Jin asked. "Do we report him as missing or as a person of interest?"

Kris straightened her uniform, decision made. "Both. Something bigger is happening here, and we need to understand what. For now, we focus on finding our missing students. Then..." She looked at the wounded juniors. "Then we find out why the Shadow Walkers turned our training exercise into a slaughter."

Outside the medical wing's windows, the sun was setting on what should have been a routine day of training. Instead, it painted the sky blood-red, as if nature itself was acknowledging their losses.

The real question wasn't just why the Shadow Walkers had come.

It was who their target really was.

And what was worth killing students and making the Favored Ones Academt their enemy

***

This wasn't how training exercises were supposed to go.

One minute I was standing in formation with my classmates, listening to Derek explain portal defense strategies, and the next moment the air was filled with arrows that seemed to drink in the morning light, their tips glowing with sickly purple corruption.

'What's happening?'

I didn't know and neither did I had the time to think as arrows flared and we were right in the middle of it.

"Barriers, now!" Derek's shout carried over our startled gasps. Jin's protective shields flared to life around our group, the blue essence barriers shimmering like glass in Paradise's strange light. Jin was one of our best seniors when it came to defensive essence control - we'd all seen him stop rampaging monsters during previous training sessions. But today his face showed strain I'd never seen before, sweat beading on his forehead as he struggled to maintain the shields against the relentless assault.

"These arrows... they're corrupted," Jin called out, his voice tight with effort. Each impact left spreading patches of corruption across his barriers, eating away at the protective essence like acid through metal. The sound they made when striking the shields wasn't the usual clean ping of essence meeting essence - it was a sickening hiss that made my stomach turn.

Vyse moved to the front, her essence-enhanced bangles pulsing with protective energy. The silver jewelry had always fascinated me during training - how she could channel so much power through such delicate items. "Everyone, maintain formation! Channel your essence into-"

She never finished. Dark figures emerged from the treeline, wearing masks that seemed to swallow the morning light. They moved with impossible speed, their weapons trailing corrupted essence that made the very air hiss where they passed. The grace of their movements spoke of years of training, of countless battles fought and won.

"Defensive formation!" Derek barked the command, moving to intercept the first attacker. But these weren't the usual monsters we trained against. These weren't mindless beasts or corrupted wildlife. These were hunters, and we were their prey.

The first death shattered everything.

Chen - quiet, studious Chen who always shared his notes and helped the younger students - just... stopped. One moment he was maintaining formation, the next he stood frozen, staring in disbelief at the ornate dagger protruding from his chest. Dark veins spread across his skin from the wound, corruption racing through his body like black lightning. His eyes met mine for a brief moment, filled with confusion and fear, before the light in them dimmed forever.

His body hit the ground with a finality that broke something in all of us. The sound seemed to echo in my head, drowning out everything else for a moment.

"He's dead," someone whimpered behind me. "They killed Chen!"

Fear.

Something that I haven't felt in a while covered my heart. It wans't only me, everyone went into frenzy.

Panic exploded through our ranks. Years of training, all those practice drills and emergency protocols, meant nothing in the face of real death. I found myself running with the others, pure survival instinct taking over. The careful formations we'd practiced countless times dissolved into chaos.

Kris's voice cut through the mayhem: "Get back here, you idiots! You're running right into-"

Another explosion drowned her words, the shockwave of dark essence knocking several students off their feet. The forest of Paradise twisted around us as we fled. Trees that had seemed merely strange during training now felt actively malevolent, their branches reaching like claws. Shadows deepened unnaturally, and strange flowers bloomed and died in seconds, releasing clouds of spores I desperately tried not to breathe.

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Sara's chains of light flashed behind me, trying to hold back our pursuers. The golden radiance of her essence-enhanced attacks would normally have been reassuring - the power of the Radiant One was legendary against corruption. But even her connection seemed weakened today, the light dimmer than usual, the chains breaking more easily. Everything was wrong, everything was falling apart.

I lost all sense of direction, all sense of time. Everything became a blur of green and shadow, punctuated by distant sounds of battle and screams cut terrifyingly short. The only clear thought in my mind was to keep moving, keep running. My lungs burned with each breath, muscles screaming in protest, but fear drove me forward.

Then something changed. The forest's essence patterns shifted, and a new kind of terror gripped the air. Corrupted beasts burst from the undergrowth - everything from shadow-wolves to massive vine-creatures, all fleeing in the same direction. Their fear was palpable, infectious. Whatever could terrify Paradise's monsters had to be catastrophic.

I found myself running with them, becoming part of their stampede. Every lesson about avoiding corrupted beings was forgotten in the face of raw survival instinct. My academy uniform was in tatters, blood - both mine and others' - staining the once-pristine fabric. Cuts and scrapes I didn't remember getting stung with each movement.

The monsters led me to a clearing, and there I saw it - a pitch-black portal hovering in the air like a tear in reality itself. Its edges rippled like liquid darkness, the sight making my essence pulse uneasily. This wasn't our evacuation point, but it was clearly a way out.

[Evergreen Hell]

[Capacity - 0/3]

The words appeared in my vision, Providence's gift of information. A sanctum portal - unknown, potentially dangerous, but in that moment, any escape seemed better than none.

The sounds of battle grew closer behind me - whether it was those masked killers or whatever had sent the monsters running, I couldn't tell. My heart pounded in my chest, blood rushing in my ears as I stared at the portal's surface. It looked like liquid night, promising either salvation or doom.

I thought of my classmates, of Jin's barriers failing, of Sara's desperate light chains, of Derek and Vyse trying to protect us all. The guilt of running, of saving myself, tried to surface, but survival instinct pushed it down. There would be time for guilt later, if I lived.

The portal began to shrink slightly, its edges contracting. No time left for doubt.

I ran. Through the stampeding monsters, timing my steps between their massive forms. One misstep meant being trampled or torn apart, but fear gave me focus I'd never known I had. A corrupted wolf snapped at my heels, more afraid of what was behind than what was ahead. A massive vine-creature nearly crushed me, its bulk taking up half the clearing as it charged for the portal.

The portal's surface felt like ice against my skin as I stepped through. Darkness wrapped around me, absolute and consuming, pulling me into the void between worlds. The last sounds of Paradise - screams, explosions, the roars of fleeing monsters - faded into nothing.

As I fell through that endless dark, a single thought followed me down: Nothing would ever be the same after today. The training exercise that had turned into a slaughter, the seniors who had tried to protect us, Chen's lifeless eyes - these things would haunt me forever.

If I survived whatever waited on the other side.

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