Solflare: The Painter's Secret-Chapter 77: Only One Must Survive

All eyes snapped to the two C-rank figures standing behind Leon.

There, they seemed utterly still, like statues. The white-haired and the red-haired boys seemed frozen in their final combat stances, unblinking and not breathing.

Then, the red-haired boy moved in a terrible tilt. His head lolled forward on his neck, then kept going. It separated cleanly from his shoulders and tumbled to the ground with a soft, wet thump.

His headless body remained upright for seconds before the knees gave way and crumpled in a heap beside its own head.

The white-haired boy’s stillness broke. He turned his gaze toward the grisly sight of his fallen partner.

"NO...!" A choked, animal noise of denial escaped from him. He lunged forward and caught the headless body before it fully collapsed, and lowered it to the ground with trembling hands.

He looked at the severed head, then in a blink, his head snapped up, when his eyes caught sight of Leon’s kneeling form.

"WHY...?!" He screamed heavily and dropped the headless body gently, as if laying down a child.

He snatched up his blue-flamed sword from where it had fallen, and with wordless roar, he sprinted at Leon’s exposed back.

He raised the sword high for a decapitating strike. But the moment he saw Leon’s blazing gold eyes, he froze.

In the white-haired boy’s vision, the memory of the catastrophic blast that occurred at the hospital flashed in his mind. The sword leaped from his numbed fingers and landed on the ground.

Leon jolted up, grabbed the sword and stared at it for a minute. ’Kill him. Kill him. Kill him!’ Distant voices screamed in Leon’s thought.

He raised the sword overhead and stared at both the sword and the boy’s face.

Leon exhaled once, twice, then on the third, he closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. "You don’t deserve this death." He sighed, then loosened his grip on the sword.

The sword leapt from his fingers and crashed onto the ground.

He turned, walked twenty steps away from the boy toward the direction where the proctors stood, closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Watch your back!" dozens of voices screamed from the stands, followed by stretched fingers that shot up involuntarily.

Leon didn’t open his eyes; he simply listened. Tuned his ears to the rush of air, the crunch of boots, and the psychic scream of malice.

With a swift movement that seemed effortless, he dropped his weight and slid his body six inches to the left.

The flaming sword scythed through the empty air where his neck had been, so close that the heat seared the hairs on his skin.

The white-haired stumbled, overbalanced by the missed kill-stroke. But as he tried to recover, Leon moved.

Leon’s right arm, which had been clutching his side, uncoiled like a steel spring. It drove upward and into the side of the white-haired boy, just below the ribs.

Crunch.

The roar from the white-haired got cut off instantly. His eyes bulged as a gust of air left his body in one silent exhalation.

The impact lifted him off his feet, threw him sideways as if hit by a runaway truck.

He sailed through the air in a limp arc, clearing the high metal fence of the training field entirely, and vanished with a crashing thud.

Silence descended on the field and its surroundings.

Leon pushed himself to his feet and looked at his right fist, then let his arm fall to his side again. He turned once again to the direction the proctors stood.

From the speaker system, the proctor’s voice boomed.

"CONGRATULATIONS, LEON STORM. YOU HAVE COMPLETED YOUR SECOND WAVE. PROCEED TO YOUR THIRD AND FINAL WAVE."

Leon exhaled, a sharp, ragged breath that seemed to scrape his throat. He looked down at the blue-flamed sword, now lying on the ground where the white-haired had dropped it.

He bent down and picked it up. A warm energy hummed in his palms as he wrapped his fingers around the hilt.

Screams, laughter and insults shot up like a blast when footsteps echoed from behind him.

He turned from the carnage and faced the empty section of the field now full of five strong-looking figures closing in with him.

He steeled into a ready stance, the alien sword feeling heavy and wrong in his hands. His breath fogged in the sudden chill air.

In the distance away from the field, the fruitful trees swayed in a wind that carried no scent at all.

The eyes from the stands watched, no longer contemptuous, but wide with a new, uncertain dread.

At the proctor’s side, Lieutenant Hayes turned to Mr. Lee and smiled. Mr. Lee smiled back, but his expression died before he could cherish it.

He blinked once, twice, and thrice, then turned to Lieutenant Hayes. "They are not part of this wave... Why are – "

"They are part. They were specifically reserved for this moment." Lieutenant Hayes said, his own smile turning into a grim grin.

"But they are the top-most ones. This is a suicide fight." Mr. Lee tried pressing the red button on the table in front, cancelling the fight. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Don’t!" Lieutenant Hayes turned a sharp gaze at Mr. Lee. "He should fight them, or die by your own hands."

Mr. Lee’s face tensed with shock. He swallowed hard, tilted his gaze from the three figures that seemed to be looking in his direction, and back at Lieutenant Hayes.

At the center of the field, Leon’s face saddened as he spotted Jade, Tiger, Vera, Zoe, and the very B-ranked lady he thought to be a proctor.

’How the hell?’ he screamed in his head. The sword trembled under his grip when a soft wind blew past him.

He closed his eyes, tried calming his frantic heartbeat, but cracked his eyes forcefully open when all five faces mixed with that of the sentinels, the lizard lady, and the old woman bumped him in the blackness of his eyelid.

"Only one must survive!" a loud voice boomed from the proctor’s system.

Leon’s face turned pale as he tilted his gaze on all five figures, especially Zoe’s