'What the hell?!'
Bellona and the rest of the students turned to face where the corpse of the dragon was supposed to be.
In its place was a giant pillar of golden flames.
A hand ripped forward outside of the flames and then pushed the curtain of flames to the side as if it were opening the blinds of a window. This revealed the humanoid figure of what Bellona could only assume was the dragon.
Teacher Brutus muttered under his breath as he frantically gathered the students and gently pushed them into the hole.
"I knew that bastard was playing dead."
Bellona and several other students readied their weapons instead of jumping down to safety. Of the other students, the four Eriksons, Jude, and Torm were part of this crowd.
Teacher Brutus smiled before speaking out loud.
"That's cute, but this is a transformed dragon, you don't stand a chance."
He then disappeared, and in an instant, he appeared before the dragon, and his boxing ring manifested. As it was built, shards of broken glass took the form of a dome, then, the two, as well as the mind space vanished.
Following the disappearance of the dragon and Teacher Brutus was the booming music.
Michael's wild smile slowly turned to a frown as his brow furrowed.
"Aw man, I wanted to fight it again."
Bellona felt relief, she had been fighting for so long but was rapidly growing bored. She then felt a hand on her shoulder, and her aching wounds slowly dulled to a pulsing annoyance.
Bellona turned around to see Hilia, and Hilia did not look happy.
"Bellona Finley, you disobeyed doctors' orders."
Bellona suddenly remembered what had happened earlier.
'You are going to rest now, doctor's orders. Or something like that.'
With a nervous smile, Bellona apologized.
"Oops, sorry about that."
Hilia's anger looked to slightly subside, but her face still instilled a small amount of fear in Bellona's heart.
"Now, this is the last time I'll be able to heal you. If you get hurt again, then you're going to need to head to the infirmary car."
Bellona didn't necessarily worry about anything like that, seeing as how Teacher Brutus had the dragon situation under control and all of the blood fiends were taken care of.
She smiled before taking a few steps forward to the larger pile of bloody corpses. Hilia let go of Bellona's shoulder as Bellona looked around.
Torm's booming voice didn't seem as loud as earlier, likely from the wind of the train.
"What're you lookin' for?"
Bellona responded while inspecting the pile.
"Dragon scales, I'm going to mail some back to my family when we get to the Terrarium."
Michael and Torm started digging as well, the three thoroughly sifting through bloodied cadavers. A few of the students who didn't see anything to do decided to hop down the hole made by Teacher Brutus.
However, just as they fell, Bellona felt a shift in the pile that the three were examining. A pulse of life struggling to keep itself alive, to push the corpses back to undeath.
Then another, and another. All three took a few steps back and granted them a view of the entire pile shifting continuously.
As it did, the blood fiends slowly reanimated and climbed into the form of a giant blood fiend.
'What-'
"-the hell!"
Bellona couldn't hold her thoughts to herself this time, and it wasn't only her who shouted in confusion.
Pyralis summoned a spear from somewhere and entered a stance where he could evade any attack at a moment's notice. The rest of Bellona's "crew" also summoned their weapons, Bellona had to create her own, sapping a small amount of her stamina.
The writing mass of fleshy creatures roared, well, a large amount of the blood fiends fused into each other roared. Either way, Bellona felt goosebumps appear on her arms.
The sound of a massive crash echoed down the wind, Bellona looked one car forward and found that there were multiple blood-fiend behemoths.
'I can trust them.'
She then spoke to the others.
"I'm gonna head over and help out, I'm sure that y'all can handle this guy, right?"
The Eriksons minus Hilia smiled and gave her a thumbs up. There were a few other students left on the rooftop, so Bellona started running down to the end of the car.
As she did, Mona, Torm, and Jude followed, leaving the three Eriksons and the other students to deal with the behemoth on their train car.
'I just want to rest...'
Bellona pouted internally as she ran. At the edge of the car, Bellona used her momentum and easily cleared the meter-long distance between the two cars. Bellona's muscles started burning much earlier in comparison to Hilia's previous healing.
'At the same time, I also immediately got to work, so what can I say?'
Bellona just continued forward, despite her muscle's tired pleas.
The behemoth's towering form wasn't hard to spot and run towards, it was easily taller, and also much louder, than the dragon. Well, before it transformed.
There was a group of at least twelve students evading the wide arcs and slow ground slams that the behemoth sent toward them. Most of them wielded simple ranged weapons while two or three were using the tried and true steel blades.
The blood fiends at the top of the behemoth's hulking humanoid form were all filled to the brim with seemingly magical arrows. Upon getting closer to the midst of battle, Bellona noticed more and more scattered limbs of the blood fiends.
'Explosions?'
Bellona then got close enough to see the most intriguing of all of the students. The boy was wielding a bronze gladius and round shield, but that wasn't the intriguing part, he had a pair of wings on his back.
He didn't seem to use them to fly, however, seeming to choose rapid bursts of speed. Thus, it made it extremely hard for the slow behemoth to land an attack on the winged warrior.
Bellona yelled to the group.
"Hey! Do you all need some help, or do you think you can handle him?"
The winged boy jumped over a low sweep with the help of a flap from his large, feathered white wings. He then landed in front of Bellona and grabbed her left hand, shaking it vigorously.
"Hey there! I'm Icarus, some of the others are exhausted, so it'd be nice if you and your friends could help us out!"
Bellona was slightly shook from the sheer cheeriness that the boy bore, it was as if she was looking into the sun. He had tan skin, a smile whose sheer light could peer through even the darkest darks, and had shimmering gold and brown hair.
"I'm Bellona, and sure, we'll help y'all out."
The boy's smile grew even larger as he took a step back.
"Thanks!"
He then leaped several meters to a group of rangers and started a conversation. All the while, the other two melee-fighting students managed to keep the blood behemoths' attention and also to stay alive, even without injury.
Torm and Jude ran forward and immediately started assisting the other students, all the while Bellona's right hand suddenly felt a weight lifted from her grasp. She looked down to find her sword entirely missing, Bellona looked around and then up.
Mona was on top of the behemoths, stabbing the creatures on the top of this twenty-meter-tall creature of bleeding flesh.
Bellona then realized how disturbing the blood fiends truly were, they were walking, breathing, and bleeding corpses.
'Ugh.'
She created a zweihänder and began hacking at the links between the blood fiends that acted as the behemoth's left leg. She then activated Ruination and every few swings, used its destructive secondary activation.
Her stamina was low, but she could still fight.
As she avoided a low sweep and a stomp, Bellona started hatching a plan.
'Summon swords... go up... heart?'
She yelled to Torm and activated Creation, letting the flames of ruination fade into nothingness.
"I need your help!"
Torm looked at Bellona and rushed her way, taking four large and swift strides before reaching her side.
"What'cha need help with?"
"I need you to boost me!"
Bellona dropped her zweihänder and had two spears in her hands. Torm shrugged and got in a low position, dropping his hammer as he knelt.
Bellona took a few steps backward before barreling towards the tall boy with a red aura. Upon getting her right foot on his intertwined hands, she was launched into the air, easily clearing several meters.
Upon reaching the apex of her leap, she stabbed one of her spears into the skull of a blood fiend. Several of the blood fiends immediately near it opened their mouths and wailed in great pain.
She then stabbed her other spear and swung onto the first spear. She then started swapping between Ruination and Creation rapidly, using Ruination to analyze and prepare her next spear location.
Climbing wasn't too difficult, it was the constant swapping between two intensive abilities that was.
It seemed that one of the ranged students down on the ground saw her plan and started assisting. Large iron bolts started appearing above Bellona, instead of constantly activating Creation and Ruination, she started leaping between the iron rungs.
It didn't take long for Bellona to reach her destination. She climbed one final iron rung before standing just before the behemoth's chest. The iron rung was quickly growing too unstable underneath the shifting and turning blood fiends acting as the body of the behemoth.
It didn't help that there was blood constantly splattering over the iron rung.
She summoned a rapier and activated Ruination, stabbing the burning needle into a conglomeration of writing blood and flesh. She reached as far as she could before reaching deep within her ability of ruination and bringing it forth.
It was a secondary activation, sure, but Bellona was piling more and more power and stamina into the attack, driving all she could to create a giant flame of black flames.
It was then that the chest of the blood behemoth seemed to cave in on itself. Bellona's only support fell away and she was quickly swept into freefall.
A fall from the height that she was at was surely fatal, but as she just passed the blood fiends acting as thighs, her fall started to slow. It was then that she was quickly swept away from the fall, her trajectory changing from downwards to sideways.
She didn't have the time to fully understand what was going on, but she internally prayed to the mother of magic that she would be safe. She formed a circle with her hands and closed her eyes as she prayed.
'Oh lady of the night, please grant me safe passage onto the next day.'
As quickly as she finished her internal prayer, her feet touched the ground. After being put upright, she felt the train car lurch, and she opened her eyes.
The behemoth stumbled after losing balance and took an awkward step, the monster then took two more unbalanced steps. It attempted to take one more and rebalance itself, but all that its foot met was open air, with each mouth on the creature opened, a shrill wail filled the air and it quickly disappeared.
'Well, that was fun.'
Mona took a step around Bellona and started singing her praises.
"Well, Bellona Finley, it looks like you're a natural at fighting Lunarians! That's going to make your life much, much easier."
Bellona started walking towards the next car with her muscles complaining much more than earlier.
"I thought that they were people failing to pray enough."
Mona chuckled before replying.
"It's a lie, they just use controlled Domain completions to bring a bunch of the bloody freaks into our world."
Bellona shrugged and Jude spoke up.
"I wouldn't put such atrocities past those bloodthirsty freaks."
Bellona looked at Jude with a slightly shocked expression. Despite only knowing the boy for three hours, she would have thought him to be more... modest with his words.
Torm chuckled, which sounded more like tanks shooting their shells more than anything else, he then spoke in his casual booming voice.
"That's funny, Jude always gets that look when he says something out of pocket like that. He isn't the good boy his looks say."
Icarus appeared with the sound of flapping wings following him shortly after. He spoke up with a cheery attitude and an energy that seemed to never diminish.
"Hey there, guys! How would you all feel about having another one in your ranks?"
Mona shrugged and looked at Bellona while the twin Solaces didn't seem to mind. Bellona didn't particularly care it was better if there were more of them to help fight the heaping and hulking blood behemoths
"Sure."
Icarus beamed a smile, and it felt as if Bellona was having a flashlight beamed directly into her eyes in the middle of the night. She found it slightly humorous that the boy could probably blind someone and stifled a chuckle.
It was soon after that the group reached the next coupler and cleared the jump with relative ease.
They saw the situation of the next behemoth and found that there wasn't much to do outside of general cleaning up. One of the students, or many of them, had managed to destroy massive chunks of the behemoth.
That left the five-teenager crew to keep the behemoth busy while the big damage dealers did their job.
After a swift goodbye, the group reached the next car, and the teachers were fighting the Champion of the Pale Moon as the students fought another behemoth.
Bellona sighed.
They all rushed forward to assist the students fighting the behemoth, they'd help the teachers soon after.