The Return Of The Exiled Villain

Meanwhile...

Ellen stood beside the monitoring array with her arms folded behind her back, her eyes on the administrative feed with a frown on her face.

The organizer beside her was a middle-aged man from the academy’s event coordination staff, currently explaining something about the portal synchronization schedule that Ellen was listening to with approximately forty percent of her attention.

The other sixty percent was on Seraph’s locator seal, which had reactivated twenty minutes ago, briefly, and then gone quiet again.

”...and the second phase transition should begin at the scheduled time regardless of current participant distribution, so the ranking cutoff will...”

”One moment.”

The organizer stopped mid-sentence.

Ellen’s eyes had moved from the administrative feed to the dungeon realm’s ambient energy display, a secondary monitoring panel that tracked the overall mana density of the sealed space and flagged unusual fluctuations.

The needle was moving.

Not by a small amount.

It was climbing in the specific sustained way that distinguished a fluctuation from an event, rising past the Grandmaster threshold, past the Great Grandmaster threshold, continuing upward.

”...What is that?” the organizer said quietly, noticing it at the same moment.

The needle crossed into King-level territory.

The monitoring room erupted.

”KING-LEVEL ENERGY READING INSIDE THE SEALED REALM—”

”That’s impossible, the dungeon’s ceiling is capped at Great Grandmaster—”

”Something broke the cap—”

”Who’s inside that realm right now!?”

”GET PROFESSOR ALDREN, GET SOMEONE!”

Two of the junior monitoring staff were already moving toward the emergency response array, their hands raised and their mana rising for the extraction sequence that would pull every participant out simultaneously.

Ellen hadn’t moved.

She was looking at the energy reading with an expression that had gone very still and very cold, her eyes reading the shape of the fluctuation, the specific signature of the energy involved, the way it had risen and the way it was now, not dissipating but simply... present.

”Everyone, stand down!”

”Professor Ellen!” the organizer started.

”That energy signature,” she stated, without looking away from the display, ”is not hostile to the participants.”

”With respect, a King-level reading inside a sealed Great Grandmaster dungeon—”

”I said stand down.”

The room stood down.

Ellen looked at the display for another moment, but what she didn’t notice was Aurora, who was now at her shoulder.

She was looking at the energy display with an expression that was entirely unreadable, and looked at the King-level reading for exactly two seconds.

”I’ll deal with it,” she said.

”Aurora?!” Ellen was startled.

But she was already gone.

The monitoring room was very quiet.

Ellen looked at the empty space where Aurora had been standing.

Then, at the display, where the King-level energy reading was still present, still settled, still carrying that specific quality of something that had arrived with a purpose.

She exhaled once through her nose.

”Everyone, maintain your positions,” she sighed deeply. ”Continue monitoring. Flag any change in participant vital signs immediately.”

She turned back to the administrative feed.

Her expression gave nothing away, but her eyes stayed on Seraph’s locator entry for a long moment before moving on.

.

.

.

.

Back in the dungeon.

The forest had thinned in the section Gray was moving through, the trees spacing out enough that the sourceless light reached the ground more evenly, which was useful for visibility and irrelevant for everything else.

And right at the moment, he was looking for Seraph once again.

”I should have put a tracker on her or something...” he sighed deeply, scratching the back of his head.

[It’s just bad luck. You wouldn’t know that there was a low-to-mid-tier demon in here.]

”I should’ve been more cautious.”

He was also, incidentally, moving through a section of the dungeon that apparently had opinions about being moved through, because the beasts kept coming and he kept not caring about them.

Fwip!

A scaled quadruped that had been waiting in the undergrowth to his left launched itself at him.

Splat!

It had been selected poorly.

Gray’s rapier passed through it without breaking his stride, the soul seal activating on its flank before it finished falling.

”I probably collected more than fifty qi orbs by now...”

He extended his mana sense once again, and yet, he still didn’t sense Seraph’s mana at all.

This was weird, as his mana sense could cover almost half of the whole secret realm, and yet, he still didn’t find her.

Without any more options, he decided to ask for Jasmine’s help.

”Jasmine? Can you feel Seraph’s mana anywhere in here?”

[...Give me a moment.]

He kept walking, cutting through another beast that crossed his path without looking at it properly, his attention turned toward Jasmine’s search.

The forest moved around him, indifferent.

A few seconds passed.

Then something happened that Gray hadn’t seen before.

A faint luminescence gathered in the air directly in front of him, shapeless at first, then pulling itself into something more defined, the outline of a figure that existed for approximately two seconds before dissolving back.

Jasmine’s spiritual form.

He had seen it before, but Jasmine rarely showed it.

Swish...

She dissipated completely before he could examine it further.

[...I had to extend further than usual.]

”And what did you find?”

[...I actually found Seraph’s mana, but...]

She stopped talking for some unknown reason.

”...And? Is something wrong with her?”

[Gray... she’s not in the realm.]

He stopped walking.

”...What? Say that again.”

[Her mana is outside of it... Beyond the dungeon’s boundary. I don’t know how, the realm is sealed, the extraction array hasn’t been activated, and there’s no portal sign I can identify.]

[But she’s not in here. She’s been moved outside somehow.]

Gray stood in the thinned forest with the sourceless light falling evenly around him and said nothing for a moment.

His expression didn’t change dramatically.

Tck!

A presence suddenly appeared beside him.

He turned to the side and instantly spotted Aurora, whose face, instead of its usual ”warm” expression that she always had in front of him, was now dead serious.

She looked at him with serious eyes.

”Where’s Princess Seraph?”

”She got out of here somehow,” Gray said.

Aurora’s eyes moved across his face for exactly one second, reading whatever she found there.

”...A demon?”

”Yes,” Gray nodded lightly.

”Tsk.”

She clicked her tongue, reached out, and grabbed his arm.

”Let’s go get her then.”

She snapped her fingers.

Fwooom...

A dark-red portal instantly opened beside them, glowing ominously.

Aurora walked toward it without hesitation, Gray’s arm still in her grip, and pulled him through without even asking for his opinion.

”...Ugh.”

He felt a little nauseous after entering the portal, but as he looked at the surroundings, he frowned almost immediately.

The sky, if it could be called a sky, was the color of old bruises, deep purple bleeding into black at the edges, lit from somewhere beneath the horizon by a sourceless red glow.

There were no stars or moon at all.

Then, in front of them, stood a grand fortress.

It was built from stone that wasn’t quite stone, dark and glassy and slightly translucent at the edges, the kind of material that looked like it had been compressed from something else entirely under pressure that had no natural equivalent.

The walls were thick, angular, rising in irregular tiers that had no architectural logic.

Towers rose from the upper sections at uneven intervals, their tops lost in the bruised sky above.

Along the walls, crude iron structures jutted outward at intervals, functional rather than decorative.

Gray was speechless looking at it.

Then he turned to Aurora, and she was already looking at the fortress with a flat expression, with a hint of killing intent forming in her eyes.

”I’ll go make trouble,” she said simply.

”Aurora...”

”You go and find Seraph.” She glanced at him sideways.

”She’s in the underground dungeon. I felt a trace of her mana from the boundary. It was faint, but it came from below the fortress foundations.” She looked back at the walls.

”The entrance will be somewhere on the eastern side. These structures always put their holding cells below and east.”

”How do you know that?” Gray frowned and directly asked.

She didn’t answer that question, and instead waved her hand at him, almost as if it was dismissing him away.

”Go.”

Fwish!

She dissipated from his view, leaving Gray standing at the edge of a Nether Realm fortress with her hand no longer on his arm and the bruised sky pressing down from above and the dense demonic atmosphere sitting against his skin like something that had decided it knew him.

He looked at the space where she had been and then turned back to the fortress.

Then at the eastern wall, which rose against the ugly sky with the patient, indifferent solidity of something that had been here a very long time and expected to be here considerably longer.

He exhaled once through his nose.

After all, she had left him in the Nether Realm.

The place where all the demons lived.