"Malandria! What happened?" asked Nilrem as he made sure to not step in the blood as he approached his severely injured colleague.
"Nilrem, we have an intruder roaming the halls and she's incredibly dangerous" she explained with strange calmness in spite of her profusely bleeding arm.
"Hold on, why aren't you stopping the bleeding with your healing magic before anything?" said Nilrem.
Malandria wouldn't be lasting much longer like that, it was a wonder why she had let herself lose so much blood without doing anything.
"What are you talking about? That's how it has always been" she responded dead serious.
"How it has always been? Your arm? I highly doubt you have always had a ripped off arm bleeding all over the place!" something was weird, she was definitely not feeling alarmed at all, but the bleeding was real, she was visibly paling as the seconds went by.
"Listen Nilrem, the intruder... She's not someone anybody here can take on, she completely nullified all spell thrown her way and has somehow been turning people into mindless beasts when she wasn't devouring them whole" started explaining Malandria, Nilrem once again tried to urge to use her healing magic but it was for naught, Nilrem himself could only use healing magic for small wounds and only on himself, his proficience didn't allow him to treat her.
"But, she doesn't have very sharp senses, stay at a distance and don't let her see or hear you, you can hide from her without any magic-" as she told him this, soft footsteps were heard heading for the room the two of them were in.
"She must have followed the trail..." muttered Nilrem.
"Hurry, hide somewhere!" said Malandria and he did as told, he was going to trust her judgement.
The footsteps stopped for a few seconds in front of the doors, it felt like an eternity and Nilrem started to think that no one would enter but a few moments afterward, the sliding doors were sent flying away as a small figure walked in.
What would first appear to be a little girl stepped in the blood with her bare foot and stopped a few meters before Malandria without saying a word.
She seemed to be wearing burlap cloak, her round, wide open blue eyes gazed inexpressively at the injured woman.
Despite what she had first appeared to be, it was clear that this was no little girl, even with just her appearance, it was easy to tell but her presence was something else, it was suffocating and overbearing.
"Who are you?" asked Malandria as the little blonde girl raised her hand.
She stayed silent and still for a moment, she didn't even seem to be breathing and was closer to a doll than a person in this instant before she finally decided to respond.
"Gluttony" she responded briefly before he hand shifted into an enormous and malformed jaw that swiftly swiped at Malandria, one could have thought that she had vanished alongside a part of the wall behind her but the loud crunch afterward made no doubt.
"Mmmh, nice organs, nicely infused with her delicious mana" Gluttony talked by herself as she once again stood still for a minute before walking away, not noticing Nilrem hidden in a closet nearby.
He waited for the sound of her small footsteps to grow silent in the distance before deciding to step out of his hiding place.
'Gluttony... One of the cardinal sins, perhaps the most mysterious of them...' he thought as he carefully took a look in the direction he last saw her taking, only seeing empty air and still unconscious people.
Another loud crunch sounded in thoughout the hallway but something was different this time, Nilrem felt a shift in ambient mana, the mana was being sucked in toward the place Gluttony had gone.
His own mana was absorbed in great amounts, leaving him only with enought to cast a few spells, even as he felt his body trying to gather more mana to recover, it was immediately drained and the mana in the air had also grow much thinner.
'Is she draining the mana in the whole academy? Even further?' he fearfully wondered but this at least told him that she had done something else to the manaless people, she had 'eaten' an other thing.
'What are her limits?' his thoughts were interrupted as he heard the unconscious manaless awaken, groaning like beasts and only speaking to complain of their hunger.
They didn't devour each other as he had almost expected but started walking around in search of something to devour.
Nilrem saw them disperse around at varying speeds and only one headed for where he was, as Nilrem looked into the room, only then did he notice that all of the blood on the ground had also vanished.
He pondered what to do in the few seconds the manaless approached the entrance.
'Could they be restored? Was it some sort of curse? Should he just kill them?' with the presence of a cardinal sin, things had changed, his hopes of curing the manaless had dwindled, especially considering what Gluttony seemed to be all about.
If she had devoured something that couldn't be seen, then he doubted anything could be done.
'Fuck it' he thought as the manaless was on the verge of crossing the entrance to the classroom, only to have a dagger stabbed in its head, from the bottom of his chin up into the brain.
The dagger made cutting through people incredibly easy, allowing Nilrem to not have to use any mana to power his strike and thus conserving his mana.
He dragged the limp body of the manaless as his thoughts were confirmed thanks to the kill notifications he received.
"Craving one huh? Not even a name or mention of their actual species..." he didn't know what she had done to them to change them so deeply but it was clear that there was no coming back from it, he doubted Gluttony would be kind enough to cough up what she had taken from them, if it was even possible.
'I need to protect what is left of the academy and the great magus, even if I can't fight her, I should be able to keep her distracted...' the memory of her aura was still fresh but was nothing in the face of his loyalty to Aeraliun.