小嫂子的味道

I was walking through the forest when I heard a loud crackling sound in the sky and saw a lightning flash on the other side of the island.

\'Must be Leon massacring the monsters,\' I said inwardly.

Well, that just means the plot is still moving pretty much the same even though I\'m here alive and Leon and Anya aren\'t in a relationship by now. Not that I care, honestly.

As long as the plot changes in a way that shortens the time for the Calamity to arrive, I was fine with whatever happens to the original storyline. It was something I\'d decided when I skipped my death.

So instead of trying to keep the plot the same, I was going to use it to my advantage in any way possible until all the things I\'d written in my diary turned useless, and the world takes a completely different turn compared to the novel.

I mean, that\'s why I was here on this island. There are three reasons, but all of it boils down to me using the plot knowledge at my convenience.

But this lighting reminded me of what Leon was doing and why I was in such a hurry to reach the mountains and the hidden task placed there.

If the exam went as it did in the novel—which it was going, from the looks of it—then Leon will be collecting multiple hidden task items all the time during the exam and after keeping one item each for himself, Anya, and Ellyn. He will distribute them to the rest of the girls he "randomly" runs into.

\'Well, I guess that\'s why only so many boys were able to collect the task items,\' I sighed internally.

Leaving that aside, if Leon went on like this, then he will reach the mountains by tomorrow morning and take the item from there too. That\'s why I had to walk all night if I had to reach there before him.

\'I\'ll probably reach there by midnight, even if I take some short breaks in between. Completing the task wasn\'t much of a trouble, so after everything\'s done, I should be back in the forest by morning.\'

Thinking this, I was just increasing my pace when I had suddenly come to a halt upon hearing the violent rustling in the surrounding bushes. And it was coming from all around me—from every direction.

A few seconds later, the creatures making the noise came into sight. They had pure white fur, gray paws, purple eyes along with razor-sharp horns on their head. Not to mention, their fangs and claws looked like they were ready to cut through anything.

It was a pack of six-horned wolves.

This made me wonder about how much the academy had done to make this exam hard for the students. These wolves weren\'t found in these areas, and not on an island. This means the academy had put them here specifically for this exam, and I think it was true for every other monster present on the island.

Though I didn\'t have the luxury to think much about it as the wolves were already making their moves. Moving around in circles around me, they\'d surrounded me and were using their nose to assess how much of a threat I was.

I stood still throughout the process; completely motionless. Finally, they stopped circling and all of them stood to face me. With the six of them blocking all my possible escape routes, I had nowhere to run.

The fingers of my right hand twitched, and the wolf that was in front of me growled and ran rapidly in its animal-oriented way before jumping straight at me. These wolves were bigger than the normal ones, so it\'d have been a problem if they had landed on me.

I raised my hand quickly, something hit the wolf right in the chest, and it flew back in the air until it crashed on a tree and toppled on the surface. There, as the wolf lay limp on the ground, there was a sharp shard of ice stabbed deep inside its heart.

The other wolves were stunned to see this all happen so quickly, but their guard was down only for a split second, and a split second was more than enough.

Long spikes of ice emerged from the ground beneath each wolf and without stopping, stabbing the wolves under their stomach and tearing through their bodies, came out from the other side of their body.

All of them died on the spot, although…

[Behind you!]

I turned quickly and connected a punch to the chest of the wolf that was in the midair and halfway to attack me from behind. A shock wave was released in the air as the wolf was thrown back and collided with the thick trunk of a tree.

As the wolf took its last breath, a sheet of ice started covering its body, starting from the point where I\'d punched him. Slowly the ice spread on its chest, freezing its skin, muscles, and fur.

And while it wasn\'t visible from here, I knew that the ice also penetrated its skin and tore the wolf\'s heart; that is what the attack was meant to do, after all.

I dropped my gaze and took a look at my hand, there was a white and cold mist around my fingers and palm; the sort you get after opening a freezer or what a cube of ice emits when placed at room temperature.

[If not for me, you would\'ve been dead. Yet you don\'t seem like you appreciate it at all.] Req\'s voice resounded in my head; even if I wasn\'t able to bring the sword with me, the connection with her was still stable.

\'I wouldn\'t have been dead. I already knew there was a wolf left as there were only four stabbing sounds when I launched my attack, while there should\'ve been five. I was just thinking about how to kill the remaining one more creatively.\'

[Give whatever excuses you want, I am not taking any of that shit. You owe me a favor, and that\'s a fact now.] She sounded quite happy about it, so I didn\'t interrupt. And I had other, more important things to do as well.

I shifted my gaze back to the dead wolves and examined each of them with my eyes, one by one.

\'They are not fun, not at all. Wolves who don\'t give a reaction when they are killed are just as boring as a rock.\'

***

While Zero was taking down the wolves, away from him hidden in the thick cover of branches and leaves were the faces of Seiren, Alada, and Wrena. They all were crouching down and had broken out into a cold sweat as they watched Zero with their widened eyes while he finished off the pack of wolves with ease.

"Y-You saw that? He didn\'t use an incantation," Wrena said. Her voice was low enough to go unnoticed by Zero.

"And neither a magic circle," Seiren added.

They were amazed down to their bones. After all, he was the strongest person they had seen so far, and the way he used magic doesn\'t even begin to describe how scary and fast it was.

"He\'s insanely strong. It\'s crazy how he can use magic like that!" Wrena said, her amazement and fear showing in the slightly trembling tone of her voice.

"Yeah. That\'s why we are the ones tailing him and Emmeric is who will kill him," Alada reminded, among the three she was the only one who looked somewhat calm and rational.

"I know. But as much as I hate to admit it, I doubt even he will be able to kill him," Wrena added as she clicked her tongue in frustration.

"There\'s no use thinking about all that now," Seiren said. "This is probably the best we\'ll ever get to kill him. The academy isn\'t monitoring us and if he died it won\'t be a problem since he will die during the exam, and he has signed the form. We have to do everything we can to make the best out of this opportunity."

The other two agreed with her, and thus they waited until Zero was finished with the wolves and had walked off to a certain distance.

After that, when Seiren was sure that they wouldn\'t be detected by him, she brought her right hand close to her mouth and clenched it into a fist.