Chapter 407: Saving Cissel, and Securing Victory!
"I never thought you’d grow to such an extent, Mr Mirage!"
John and Ricky split up the moment they crossed the Military Department’s main territory.
Ricky had been entrusted with a vital asset: one of the specialised potions John had synthesised in a hurry when he spotted Mark’s presence, a potion that granted absolute protection against the debilitating effects of the black fog for one hour.
While Ricky moved toward his objective with the confidence of a man wearing invisible armour, John headed directly for the infirmary.
He could feel Nikolas’s shadow sticking to his side from a distance. The teacher wasn’t interfering, but he was watching out for any unexpected schemes Mark might attempt. Nikolas was the insurance policy, but John was the executioner.
The moment John stepped through the heavy doors of the medic wing, the environment shifted. The sterile, white hallway was instantly swallowed by a thick, suffocating black fog.
It roiled like a living thing, reaching out with ethereal tendrils to cloud his mind and distort his senses. But this time, John came prepared. He pulled a small vial from his inventory and gulped the contents in a single, fluid motion.
The effect was instantaneous. A clarity washed over his vision, creating a shimmering barrier that the black fog couldn’t penetrate, surrounding his body. Mark’s dirty tricks, the mind control and the illusion bounced off John’s protected body like pebbles against a mountain.
Mark’s voice sounded momentarily speechless. Through the haze, John saw the silhouette of a medic teacher, another cyborg, standing in the middle of the hall.
In Mark’s point of view, John shouldn’t have been able to stand safely inside the fog for more than a few seconds. Yet, John didn’t just stand there; he darted forward with lethal intent.
"I’d be a fool if I ended up falling for the same trick twice, right?" John snorted.
His sword flashed in the dim light, completing a perfect arc. The cyborg’s head went rolling across the floor before it could even raise its hands to defend itself. John didn’t stop there. Reaching out with his free hand, he activated his Code Destruction ability.
It was the deadliest tool in his arsenal for dealing with these mechanical pests, silent, efficient, and deadly. A hole appeared in the trunk of the cyborg’s torso. Within seconds, the cyborg fell on the ground motionless, dead for good.
As the cyborg was dealt with, the black fog dissipated like smoke in a gale. John found himself standing once more in the real infirmary.
"One time is luck, twice is work... You really have grown beyond my expectations, Mr Mirage!"
The voice echoed again, this time coming from the direction of the rooms. John moved without hesitation, without even wondering why a third cyborg was present here. The moment he passed through the door to Cissel’s room, the world flickered and turned black again.
This time, he didn’t need to consume anything; the potion’s protective effect was still pulsing through his veins. John checked his map, pinpointed the red dot representing the cyborg, and headed straight for the kill.
"This isn’t over, Mr Mirage. This is far from over..."
"Shut up!" Once John killed the cyborg and the fog dissipated, he heard the distasteful voice of Mark again. When he looked, he found a small, spider-like drone perched on the side of Cissel’s bed. Mark’s voice rang out from the drone one last time before John’s boot came down, silencing the program for good.
Cissel was still there, lying on the bed exactly as he had left her. There were no more traps, no more tricks.
"You are still sleeping like a little beauty, aren’t you?" John whispered.
He didn’t trust leaving her behind in a place where the teachers were all unconscious, and the security was compromised. After running a thorough check on her body, making sure Mark hadn’t left any ticking bombs in her body, he gently lifted her into his arms. Carrying her securely, he exited the building and began the run back to the RBM Club base.
Midway across the academy grounds, he met Nikolas. The teacher was stupefied to see Cissel in John’s arms. She looked peaceful, her breathing steady, and the relief on Nikolas’s face was palpable.
"You knew he was playing you," Nikolas said, falling into step beside John, "and yet you decided to play his game anyway? You walked right into a Club War while knowing she had nothing to force you to do it?"
"You can’t blame me," John shrugged, his pace never slackening despite the weight he carried. "If Mark is foolish enough to gift my club a promotion and a new base without us needing to do any of the administrative legwork, it’s only natural for me to accept the gift, right? I’m just being a diligent president."
"Daring and courageous... I like that attitude," Nikolas said, a small smile appearing on his face. "Anyway, I bet Ricky has already crushed through their base by now. I’ll go and take a look there myself. I’ll make sure to document the scene and take enough evidence so that no one on the board can argue about the validity of your win later."
"Thanks," John said. He knew Nikolas was doing them a massive favour. By being present at the Black Ares base, Nikolas would prevent Mark from pulling any last-second stunts that might harm Ricky. "Just take this with you. Use it the moment the world starts to turn black."
John handed Nikolas a small vial of the protection potion.
"Got it." Nikolas looked at the potion with unconcealed curiosity, clearly eager to test one of John’s miracles.
Unluckily for the teacher’s curiosity, the world never turned black for him. Mark knew when a gambit had failed. By the time Nikolas arrived at the Black Ares Club base, a sprawling facility hidden in the basement of the Sparring Building, nothing like the black fog John and others described appeared.
Things happened exactly as Nikolas expected. He found Ricky standing in the centre of the lavishly decorated main hall of the club, leaning casually against a stone pillar. There wasn’t a single Black Ares student left to protect the place.
Every able-bodied fighter had been sent to the RBM walls to be crushingly defeated by Ben and Mond. As for Mark, he had clearly been too focused on his confrontation with John to spare any resources for a useless base defence.
Nikolas moved through the remains of the Black Ares headquarters with ease, capturing every angle of the defeat. Ricky, never one to miss a moment for flair, made sure to pose amidst the wreckage he caused to vent the lack of anyone defending the enemy base or fighting him.
He looked every bit the domineering victor, ensuring the documentation would show not just a victory, but a total eclipse of a former power. Once the evidence was secured, the two made their way back to the RBM base.
When they arrived, the scene that greeted them was one of absolute silence, save for the ragged breathing of the defeated. John stood in the centre of the carnage, surrounded by the broken forms of thirty elite students.
Mond and Ben had been more than a match for the crowd. The sheer scale of the violence they had unleashed had sent shockwaves through the souls of every spectator watching from the perimeter. Even students from the non-military departments, who rarely witnessed high-level combat, could recognise the brute, unstoppable strength the two had displayed.
Thirty students, nearly half of whom were in their final two years of the Military Department, had been one-sidedly crushed. To the audience, it was a terrifying realisation: the hierarchy they had known for years was being rewritten in real-time.
When John saw the state of the battle at the club walls, he was actually surprised to find that his enemies were all still alive. They were beaten to a pulp, bruised, bleeding, and shattered, but they were still breathing. Ben and Mond had shown a level of restraint that John hadn’t explicitly ordered, and he wasn’t displeased with. Dead enemies were an invitation for more trouble from their families, but broken ones were a domineering message.
"So..."
As Ricky and Nikolas joined him, John turned his attention away from the base interior, where he had safely placed Cissel. He looked at the broken frames of defeated elite students with a gaze as cold as frostbite.
"Your club lost fair and square," John began, his voice loud and clear to the farthest crowd. "I honestly don’t know what went through your heads. Did you really think that by bringing a few toys from your family, you could crush us? Did you think high-tier weapons could bridge the gap of sheer incompetence? That’s pathetic!"
John’s words were like slow-acting poison, seeping into the pride of Galbert and his henchmen, totally shattering their ego and prestige to shreds. They had been humiliated in front of the entire academy, and yet, John’s appetite for their downfall wasn’t satisfied by just claiming their building and destroying their club.
"Teacher Nikolas, may I bother you with a formal inquiry?" John said, his tone shifting to something more official. He pointed a finger directly at the shivering form of Galbert. "I heard this failure is the leader of the Formal Team selected to represent us in the upcoming inter-academy competition."
The moment the words landed, the beaten-up Galbert forced his head up. His eyes burned with a mixture of agony and boiling anger; he could already guess where John was taking this. But John didn’t care about the glares or the rising tension. He spoke as if there were nothing in the world, no teacher, no dean, no student, that could frighten him.
"To leave the fate of this academy in the hands of such failures would be a catastrophic mistake," John continued. "They didn’t just lose against lower-year students; they lost against a newly established club with only two members actually fighting. They failed in every military aspect imaginable.
They failed in planning, they failed in tactics, and they failed in properly assessing the strength of their opposition. They were impulsive, arrogant, and full of themselves. We cannot allow such failures to carry the responsibility of our academy’s honour on the grand stage. And so... I hereby declare my demands, officially."