A few minutes before the explosion.

Noah had sent Travis a message.

It was simple. He had told them to attack the students outside, while he had taken care of Damien and Kaelan. They wouldn’t come out of the mall for a long time.

They might be eliminated.

Seventy students from Travis’s side had been waiting in the buildings further down the road, hidden and ready.

The moment the message came through, they moved, pouring out from the doorways and side streets and breaking into a full run toward the mall’s exterior, targeting the fifty students Arisha had stationed around the perimeter.

Travis himself stayed back, out of sight. He kept hidden, just like Noah had said.

---

Arisha was standing on the roof of a tall building overlooking the area when she saw them.

Figures emerging from the far buildings, moving fast, spreading across the road in a wide line heading directly toward their perimeter guard.

Her eyes sharpened instantly.

"Everyone!" Her voice carried clean and hard across the rooftops and street below. "Get ready! Enemies incoming!"

She drew her bow in one smooth motion, an arrow already between her fingers, and locked her eyes on the advancing line.

---

Down on the road, Lyria heard the call and moved immediately.

She gripped her golden spear with both hands, the weapon blazing with intense light along its length. She looked at the six strongest students positioned around her and made a decision in less than a second.

She planted her feet and pushed her mana outward.

A massive golden magic circle erupted beneath her, spreading wide across the road surface and covering all six of them within its boundary. A soft warm glow washed over their bodies, seeping into their skin.

[Augmentation Buffer]

A strengthening spell. Not enough to transform anyone, but enough to sharpen their speed and durability for what was coming. She couldn’t extend the effect to everyone; the range had limits. So she chose the strongest ones near her and gave them what she could.

Her golden braid swayed as she pulled the spear back and drove forward.

They met the incoming B-1 students head-on.

The two sides crashed together in the middle of the road in a hard, noisy collision of weapons and spells. The street lit up with clashing mana, fire meeting barriers, spears grinding against swords, shouts and the sharp sounds of impact rolling down the avenue.

Both sides pushed against each other.

For a few minutes, it was even.

Then the ground shook.

A sound came from behind them, not a crack or a rumble but a full, deep detonation that rolled through the road beneath their feet and up through their legs. The kind of sound that wasn’t just heard but felt in the chest and stomach.

Everyone on both sides of the fight stopped.

They turned.

The mall was coming down.

It didn’t fall straight. A seven-story building rarely does. The collapse began from the base and spread unevenly, sections of the structure folding in different directions as the supports beneath gave way.

The outer walls peeled away from the frame and toppled outward, sideways, forward, onto the road, onto the smaller buildings pressed up against the mall’s exterior.

The sound built on itself, concrete breaking, glass shattering, metal twisting, rising into a continuous roar that swallowed every other sound in the street.

"No! What’s happening?!"

"The building! It’s coming down!"

"Run! Everyone run!"

The perimeter students scattered in every direction. The formation Arisha had spent the morning organizing broke apart in seconds as people sprinted away from the falling walls. Some made it clear. Others didn’t move fast enough.

Sections of the outer wall came down across the road in massive chunks, throwing up clouds of dust and debris that rolled outward like a wave and swallowed everything within thirty meters of the building.

The B-1 students who had just launched their attack were caught in it too. They had been close, too close to the building.

The ones at the front of their advance were hit by falling debris before they could change direction. Several of them went down under the collapse, buried alongside the students they had been fighting moments before.

On the rooftop, Arisha threw her arm up to shield her eyes from the dust cloud rolling toward her.

When it thinned enough to see through, she lowered her arm slowly.

The mall was gone. In its place was a wide, uneven mound of broken concrete, twisted metal, and shattered glass, spread across the road and the buildings around it in every direction.

Dust still rose from the wreckage in slow drifting columns.

The street was completely silent.

---

In the sewer tunnel beneath the road, Noah kept moving until the sounds above him had faded into a muffled rumble. He crouched in the dark, one hand against the tunnel wall, breathing steadily.

He could hear the cries and destruction above. The ceiling above him was trembling violently as broken parts of the building fell onto the road above.

"Damn... even I am not safe."

He waited.

His body was hurting just like it hurt in the real world.

He had chugged down another healing potion, but it didn’t help him too much. Still, his health was enough that he wouldn’t be eliminated.

He turned to look at the hole from where he had come.

"It’s buried with soil and concrete now. If I was a little late, I would have been buried with the ground. All because of the impact created by the explosion."

He could see cracks forming on the walls of the sewer because of the explosion.

After a moment, he pulled out his phone.

The screen lit up his face in the darkness.

He checked Travis’s reply, read it, and allowed himself a small, quiet smile.

’If I remain here for too long, the road above might fall on me,’ he thought.

Then he put the phone in his pocket and kept moving through the sewer, heading away from the collapsed mall, toward the far side of the city.