Read Novel Full Chapter 474: Unbecoming [I]
Chapter 474: Unbecoming [I]
A thunderous shockwave later, the silver-blue trident was buried into the chest of the serpentine girl; not too deep, since a shadow figure — an instructor — had arrived just in time to intercept the weapon.
Then, in a blur, both the instructor and the girl vanished from sight, leaving only the trident floating in that space. She was eliminated.
With her acoustic roar gone, the head-splitting pressure in Ivan’s skull abated enough for his mind to start working again.
He called back his trident, while simultaneously gripping the serrated tentacles coiled around his right arm with his free hand.
Ignoring the pointed chitinous teeth tearing into his skin, Ivan spun on an inclined axis and burned away a bit more of his timer to pull hard.
The tentacled boy’s eyes shot wide behind the visor of his armor as his own leverage was turned against him. Like a hooked fish, he was yanked straight into the path of the incoming vacuum blade.
The compressed arc of water sliced through two of the boy’s tentacles, severing them and forcing another Instructor to come pluck the screaming Cadet out of the depths before he could bleed out.
Two down, a lot more to follow.
His trident came flying back into his grip.
Ivan used the momentum from that earlier spin to collect his divine weapon and catch the razor-sharp fishing hook mid-slash between its two outer prongs.
A metallic clang resounded.
The boy wielding the hook gasped, his eyes full of panic as he tried to back off. But Ivan didn’t give him the chance to retreat.
He twisted the trident, locking the hook’s curved shaft in place, and then drove his knee straight into the boy’s exposed sternum.
KA-BOOM—!!
It wasn’t as powerful as his punch, but a shockwave still exploded off Ivan’s knee, collapsing the water pressure around the boy’s chest.
The impact shattered his armor, battered the air out of his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and sent him shooting backward into the dark depths like a cannonball.
Ivan then dodged a light spear by rolling sideways.
The glowing projectile still managed to brush his shoulder as it streaked past, flash-boiling a thin line of water and giving him a deep gash before dissipating into the murky gloom.
He didn’t give that pesky Caster a chance to charge another spell. Ivan burned away some more of his time to kick off the water and rocket himself forward like a torpedo.
Irina, still there before the caster, did her duty as a Sentry. She threw up the most powerful barrier she could manage.
But her best efforts proved to be in vain.
KABOOOM—!
It took one punch for Ivan to break the barrier, smashing through it like a sheet of brittle glass.
KABOOOM—!
It took another punch to eliminate the Caster behind her.
Irina’s left eardrum ruptured from the sheer proximity. The pressure wave blew back her waist-long curls and sent her tumbling through the water like a leaf in a storm.
Bleeding from her ear, Irina flailed her arms and legs in pain and dread. There was some small, stupid part of her that still believed Ivan wouldn’t actually hurt her.
Right?
He loved her. He had always loved her. And, yes, maybe she didn’t always deserve it.
Maybe she had pushed him away at first, maybe she always knew but pretended not to notice his affection until it was convenient for her. But he loved her. He wouldn’t—
KABOOOM—!!
Ivan huffed. Tired a little and bruised all over.
Yet, the fight was far from over.
Looking around, he saw eight more Cadets zooming in on him from multiple directions, all naval specialists — a boy with shark-like gills along his excessively long neck, a girl commanding a swarm of razor-toothed spectral piranha-like creatures, another girl in translucent blue armor with a harpoon, something that looked like a cross between a seal and a human, and so many more.
All around, more Casters and Supporters were starting to reform their lines. Uncaring, Ivan braced himself. Then, he once again used his trident to summon spiralling vortexes and fling them out of the water.
•••
Still in the skies, Viktor looked down at the turbulent waters of the Great Divide.
He was hovering alongside a handful of other Ivory aerial specialists who had managed to stay aloft. Down below, the central river was churning and boiling.
Columns of water suddenly burst into the sky like geysers, hurling screaming Cadets onto the muddy banks.
Then, under the river’s surface, explosions started going off. One at a time. From up here, it looked as though miniature suns were blooming beneath the stormy current.
Each illuminating flash was followed by another Instructor appearing in a blur of black, carrying away an unconscious Cadet before disappearing just as quickly.
“…Oh Monarchs,” someone whispered beside Viktor, shaky breath laced with fear.
That fear didn’t just stem from the sight before them, as violent as it was. It came from the realization that those weren’t random explosions. Those were eliminations.
One. Two. Three. Four…
The flashes kept marching across the breadth of the Great Divide like lightning trapped underwater.
Viktor’s fists clenched so hard his gauntlets groaned.
“Ivan…” he muttered, unable to reconcile that the monster rampaging below was the same awkward idiot he had grown up beside.
No. Not grown up beside. Protected.
He had protected that idiot.
Ever since they were children, Ivan had always been the weakest of the three. He always got picked on, apologized first, and smiled through every slight.
How… did things even get like this?
Another underwater blast erupted.
KABOOOM—!!
The river bulged upward before collapsing into itself again. A body was whisked away by an Instructor. Then another. Then another. And another and another.
“How many…?” one of the aerial Cadets choked out the words in thick silence.
Someone shook their head. “No idea.”
“Can anyone even fight that thing underwater?”
No one answered. Because no one could. The river belonged to Ivan like air belonged to birds and earth belonged to mountains.
Diving after him would be suicide.
Viktor stared at the writhing watery expanse below, then turned his furious gaze toward the riverbank.
There, several Cadets were gathered.
Some of them had managed to not get caught in the flood; others were thrown out of the water by Ivan himself, while a few successfully escaped.
“Go!” Viktor shouted at them. “Get to the Ivory Castle! Alert others!”
He looked at his fellow specialists in the sky around him.
“You all go reinforce the main front,” Viktor ordered, pointing toward the distant horizon where the rest of the Ivory army was still fighting against the invasion. “Lady Thalia needs to know what happened here. Fast.”
The aerial specialists hesitated. It wasn’t that they disagreed. They all had been waiting for Ivan to come back out. He needed to breathe eventually, right?
The plan was to then drag him out of the water and save the others. But judging by how things were looking, there wouldn’t be others left to save soon.
They understood what Viktor was implying.
“What about you?” one of them asked anyway.
“Give me Enhancement Cards. Eight, at least,” Viktor’s crimson eyes remained fixed below, glowing so intensely they started radiating heat. “I’m going down.”