Chapter 64: Chapter 64: Dive Into Hell [4]

"Yuck," Raven drawled, taking a casual step back to avoid the raining blood.

He pulled his oversized sweater tighter around his chest, looking thoroughly bored.

The swarm was decimated.

But in the chaos of the crush, a few lucky rabbits actually escaped the invisible net.

They hit the ground running, and the other students quickly scrambled to kill the stragglers one by one.

One specific rabbit survived the drop and landed right behind Mia.

It was positioned in her blind spot.

The creature coiled its strong back legs and launched itself straight through the air, aiming its razor-sharp fangs directly at her exposed neck.

Mia was still panting heavily from the mana drain, totally unaware of the deadly threat flying up behind her.

Azrael felt the minor disturbance in the air and simply raised the vessel’s hand without looking.

He caught the mutated beast right out of the air by its neck.

The rabbit thrashed and snapped its jaws wildly, trying to twist around and bite his fingers.

Azrael found the desperate struggle highly annoying.

He did not swing his arm or waste energy smashing it against the stone wall. His fingers tightened the grip as the rabbit’s neck snapped with a crunch, and he casually dropped the lifeless lump of fur onto the floor like a piece of trash.

Mia turned around slowly.

She was panting hard, her chest heaving, but she looked up at Shane with an expressionless face.

Her eyes were back to normal, but they stared right through him, trying to read his intentions.

Azrael did not offer her a warm smile, and he definitely did not care if she was okay.

He just wiped a speck of dust off his knuckles.

Stepping past the exhausted girl, he walked forward down the tunnel without saying a single word, leaving the weak mortals to clean up their own mess.

The injured students who got bitten during the rabbit swarm were quickly sent back toward the front entrance.

They were escorted by a couple of the braver faculty supervisors who had dropped down to check on the loud noise.

Azrael watched the retreating figures with mild amusement.

He understood that nobody with actual combat sense would ever team up with a bleeding liability before even hitting the second stage.

Dead weight in a dungeon usually equates to a dead team, and these fragile children were already showing their cracks.

There would be no faculty members to hold their hands next time they failed to block a simple attack.

The remaining group walked deeper into the dark.

Around five kilometers inside the cave, the shift in the ambient air became impossible for anyone to ignore.

The initial rush of mana they felt at the entrance vanished entirely, replaced by a suffocating pressure.

The atmosphere here felt different against Azrael’s skin, feeling very much like breathing in a humid swamp. The wide tunnels gradually narrowed until the ceiling felt claustrophobic, and the place became eerily silent.

It was so quiet that the nervous breathing and the shuffling boots of the other fifty students echoed loudly off the walls.

The moss that previously lit up their path started to thin out to almost nothing. The reflection from the underground river slowly darkened, making it extremely hard to see what was waiting more than a few feet in front of them.

Melissa walked right beside him, tucking her hands casually into her pockets, still had not taken that scythe off her back yet, projecting an image of total relaxation despite the tense environment.

"Do Shane’s memories hinder you, my lord?"

"A few."

"How?" she pushed, genuinely curious now.

"Please explain to me what’s flashing so that I can seal those once and for all."

He let out a long sigh, then tried to recall the visions.

"His father knew a few low-level awakeners who ran local mercenary work," Azrael explained, keeping the lie smooth and practiced.

"He tagged along with them for a Cave ride a few times. He just carried their bags and collected the cheap monster cores, but he never went past the first stage. His regret about not saving his sister makes this body feel weird things. The knowledge of the future of both his and mine was collapsing at the same moment."

This boy had spent years living quietly with his fragile mortal family, learning how this pathetic world operated, and slowly building up his physical strength by running dangerous errands for cheap hunters.

’Which is exactly why it felt so awful losing them,’ a stray thought echoed loud in his mind.

Azrael clenched his jaw tightly, highly irritated by the biological grief leaking into his divine consciousness.

He forced the weak mortal memory back down into the dark before it could ruin his absolute focus.

The boy was still fighting from inside the locked core, using emotions as weapons because he lacked the mana to strike physically.

After another hour of tense walking, the human group naturally stopped in a wider section of the tunnel.

They needed a few minutes to rest, regain their physical strength, and replenish their internal stamina before moving any deeper into the shadows.

Students dropped onto the hard floor, uncorking their water flasks and wiping nervous sweat from their foreheads.

Azrael simply stood near the center of the cavern, feeling no fatigue whatsoever in his body.

A few feet away, a short boy with a buzzcut let out an exhausted groan.

He leaned his back directly against the stone wall of the cave to rest his tired legs.

"Man, is this raid not way too brutal for first-year students?" he complained loudly to his little group of friends.

"We have already had people stabbed and bitten today." 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"You are thinking about it the wrong way," a taller student replied, shaking his head grimly as he drank from his canteen.

"If a beginner D-rank cave is this brutal and chaotic, what do you think the higher-level ones look like?"

A collective chill seemed to run through the small group of mortals listening to that grim conversation.

The reality of their chosen profession was finally hitting them.

These academy caves are just the beginning training stages for new awakeners and low-tier hunters.

There are far more terrifying labyrinths hidden deep in the distant continents and isolated islands out in the dark oceans that hold horrors these kids could never even imagine.

Another uninvited memory flashed behind Azrael’s red eyes.

He felt the horror of a specific island raid from Shane’s past life. He saw vivid visions of running desperately from immortal beasts in the middle of a raging sea storm, knowing there was nowhere left to hide.

The physical chest became tight, reacting to the boy’s lingering panic about having to experience that hell all over again.

’Silence,’ Azrael commanded the secondary core, crushing the mortal anxiety under his own aura.

While the ignorant students were busy resting and gossiping, the stocky boy leaning against the cavern wall suddenly frowned.

He shifted his shoulders, looking highly uncomfortable.

"Eh?" he mumbled, patting the dark wall behind him with a confused expression.

"The stone feels soft."

Then the illusion broke.

The solid stone wall entirely lost its rigid shape and rippled like mud. The boy’s back merged directly into the rock.

Before he could even push himself away, his torso was sucked backward with brutal speed.

His body was instantly half-absorbed by the deceptive stone.