This was a city that had already “died.”

  It was a scene straight out of one of those post-apocalyptic films Pandora had seen in her past life—the ones about what happens after humanity vanishes.

  Countless skyscrapers, like headless giants, stabbed straight into the leaden sky. From her vantage point, Pandora could even see higher up, the intersecting metal overpasses, like the skeletons of immense beasts, and the wind turbines, long since stilled, their colossal silhouettes now still.

  The city as a whole still felt massive, but the details had been smoothed away by time, warped beyond all recognition.

  On the wide streets, weeds grew everywhere. The hard asphalt had been cracked and broken by invasive roots, the fissures dark and deep.

  The skeletal husks of rusted-out cars, grim steel tombstones, y toppled and askew, parked silently in every corner of the streets. Some of their doors hung wide open, inside of which one could see the long-since-desiccated, curled skeletons of their former occupants.

  In the air, a complex bouquet of smells hung. The fresh scent of rain-soaked earth, the sharp tang of rusting metal, and, more than that… a familiar, nauseating stench of decay.

  More importantly, the reason “humanity vanished” was right there in front of them.

  It was the very nightmare they had risked their lives to escape.

  Zombies.

  And not the scattered, small-scale hordes they had encountered before.

  They were… everywhere.

  On either side of the wide street, winding and twisting all the way to the edge of their vision. In the narrow, deep alleys, fnked by the shadows of skyscrapers. Inside the ransacked first-floor shops, their windows shattered.

  And even, behind the dark, empty windows of that tallest building, dozens of stories up… countless twisted, swaying, vaguely human figures just stood there. Watching. Looking down upon them.

  As if welcoming a new wave of… delivered meals.

  The eeriness and terror of this sight far surpassed the cognitive limits of these “medieval people.” It was the grand finale of a civilization’s corruption and rot, a hellish tableau sufficient to drive anyone mad.

  Just then, a young woman, whose nerves were stretched taut and whose gaze was somewhat unfocused, failed to watch her step. Her foot caught on a fttened, silver-glinting tin can, still gleaming faintly on the dark ground.

  THUNK—!

  She stumbled. The sound of her body hitting the hard concrete was a dull, nauseating thud. Already on edge, she let out an instinctive shriek—a piercing scream that was unnaturally loud in the dead, silent city.

  “Aaaah—!”

  That single scream was the spark that lit the powder keg.

  What followed was a silence, brief and absolute, more profound than death itself.

  And then…

  “HRRRGH—HRRRGH—!!!”

  “HHHRGG—HHHRGG—!!!”

  “SKREEEEE—!!!”

  Countless roars exploded across the wide, silent street, one after another! The sheer number, the density, the ferocity of the sound, as if the entire dead city had been awakened by them!

  Countless zombies, slowly turning, began to accelerate, to charge, even leaping from the buildings beside them!

  It made her skin crawl.

  Even Pandora felt it.

  But, when Pandora saw Dulles’s silhouette, still standing there, perfectly still, her heart, instead, calmed down once more. She was the core of her small group. She had to remain calm. This, combined with Elsa’s consistently impassive calm, the two of them invisibly, to a rge extent, stabilized the morale of their small group.

  Aurora and the others struggled to maintain their composure, tightening their formation, staying on guard, their hands gripping their weapons tightly.

  Unlike the others around them, most people, after that immense, seemingly boundless horde of zombies had been agitated, had already lost their nerve. Fear, screaming… it had all long since spiraled out of control.

  ………………

  At the same moment, much further away, on the top floor of a derelict department store, its skeletal remains standing tall amidst the city ruins.

  A slender, red-haired woman stood quietly before a floor-to-ceiling wall of windows. Her gaze pierced through the cracked and stained gss, calmly looking down at the chaotic, nearly colpsing crowd in the street below.

  At her waist, hung an exquisitely crafted, small hookah. Between her red lips and white teeth, smoke swirled. The smoke she exhaled seemed even more turbid than the air of this ruined city.

  Behind her, another man, blond and well-dressed, was leisurely reclining in a surprisingly intact leather armchair. He watched, with great interest, the slender figure before the window and her blurred profile, reflected in the gss.

  “Poppy,” he began, a pyful smile in his voice. “Aren’t you going down?”

  “If you wait any longer, some of the ‘little Fruits’ you’re supposed to be watching might not make it.”

  The woman’s name was Poppy. The man’s was Jason.

  There was no intimate retionship between the two. If you had to define it, they were, at most… colleagues. They were both the Teaching Assistants for this year’s new batch of students.

  And those boys and girls below, like startled birds, were the “freshmen” that Poppy was responsible for guiding.

  “Don't you worry about me,” Poppy said, not even turning around, her voice as zy and indifferent as the smoke rings she exhaled. “Your way of doing things is what will really cause trouble, okay!”

  “If a few of them actually die, I’d love to see the report you file on that.”

  A Teaching Assistant’s job, of course, was to assist the “Professors” in completing the most basic teaching duties, to help these “Fruits,” freshly picked from the “Orchards,” escape the fate of rot and become true, qualified, “Demon Hunter Apprentices.”

  This process was inevitably accompanied by pain, frustration, and even… death. But a “death quota” wasn’t so easily obtained. For them, the Teaching Assistants, every mistake required lengthy reports and reviews.

  Therefore, their goal was to—with minimal actual deaths, use the most direct method possible to make these newcomers clearly understand that life at the Academy was far from as easy or beautiful as they imagined.

  Being a Demon Hunter meant walking the line between sanity and madness every single day. An apprentice needed to adapt, and fast. They needed to get used to dancing with death.

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