Internet Mage Professor-Chapter 114: March on

Far across the shifting expanse of the dungeonland, where the terrain was dry and cracked and the mana saturation too thick for casual breathers, Chief Varros and his troops from the Black Vale Territory marched in a tide of fury.

Their black and red banners fluttered behind them, soaked in the blood of recent conquests.

The iron plates of their armor shimmered beneath a cursed sun that hovered low over the jagged horizon, their boots crunching down the brittle bones of long-forgotten beast corpses that littered the cursed valley floor.

Varros, towering and musclebound with jagged tattoos burned across his chest and face, walked with the swagger of a man who had never once tasted defeat.

In his right hand, he dragged a serrated war-axe that still dripped with the greenish-black fluids of the squid-headed monstrosities they had just wiped out.

Behind him, the soldiers laughed.

They tossed the heads of the fallen back and forth like grotesque toys, hooting and jeering at the tentacled remains.

"Ha! Did you see this one’s eye pop when I cleaved it?" one soldier crowed, kicking the crushed remains of an octopus-headed demon. "Like squeezing a melon!"

"Ugliest thing I’ve seen since that tavern girl in Marrowtown!" another cackled.

As they celebrated, one of the surviving scouts—skin pale, one eye bloodshot, face trembling with sweat—stepped forward. His voice was a whisper trying to shout. "Chief Varros... please. We shouldn’t be here. This place... this is the place."

Varros stopped. Turned. His glare fell on the man like a curse.

"What place?" he said flatly.

The scout swallowed. "This... it’s where the enemy core might be. The others saw something... something bigger than anything we’ve faced. They said we shouldn’t step too deep. That there’s a territorial magic formation here. It—"

Smack!

The backhand came like thunder. The scout stumbled to the side, nearly falling. His helmet clanged against a rock.

"Coward’s talk," Varros snarled. "You’re afraid of a territorial formation? That it’ll ’weaken’ us? Let me tell you something. If a little magic circle can make you piss your trousers, you never belonged in my warband."

The scout shuddered, breathing fast, but said nothing.

Varros sneered and gestured forward. "Just point. Where’s the formation’s edge?"

The scout, hands shaking, pointed toward a half-circle of darker ground ahead, where the mana seemed to ripple and bend like warped glass. "There... it starts there..."

"Good." Varros rolled his shoulders and grinned. "Then we don’t step there. We go around. Now move."

And so they did, pressing forward with the swagger of killers who thought they were invincible.

—

Elsewhere, bumping gently along a mana-threaded road between ruins and shallow mana lakes, a long, armored carriage rolled with muffled clatter.

Inside, sitting in velvet-lined seats trimmed with gold sigils and mana-bound glyphs, twelve young mages watched the chaos through thick glass windows.

Selin, sharp-eyed and calm, leaned her cheek against her fist.

Beside her, Ruvin traced tiny sigils into the condensation on the window, utterly uninterested in the display outside.

Erik stared ahead, legs crossed, his expression bored.

Calien yawned, resting his chin on his staff. The others—some from the Silver Blade City’s upper class, some from the commoner disciplines—sat in quiet, contemplative silence.

Outside, soldiers roared. Battle raged, but it was one-sided.

The enemy, already weakened, barely had time to scream. Steel flashed, limbs flew, spells incinerated targets in bursts of mana-fire and frost-laced spears.

The Black Vale soldiers moved like dancers through corpses, spinning and twirling their blades with calculated overkill.

A soldier with a lightning whip lashed it in wide arcs, shouting, "See that?! That’s crowd control! You kids ever seen this outside the textbooks?"

Another soldier threw up a monster’s head and cut it in half mid-air. "Hah! That’s called precision, little mages!"

The blood-slicked warriors laughed, posed, and winked toward the carriage.

The kids didn’t respond.

"They’re showing off again," Selin muttered under her breath.

Ruvin snorted. "It’s not even a challenge. Those monsters are Tier One at most."

Erik rolled his eyes. "Waste of effort. All that flash and noise for overgrown fish with skulls softer than pumpkins."

Calien scratched at his chin, "They’re hoping to impress us. Probably think we’ll cheer and fawn over them like the borderland farmers do."

Indeed, outside, the attendants assigned to protect and escort the young mages were in a frenzy of applause.

"Woohoo!! Look at them go!"

"My gods, did you see that spin?!"

"Ha! That one just melted the enemy’s armor with one fire rune!" freewebnσvel.cѳm

The men and women in service uniforms—hired from local towns and loyal to the Baron’s cause—clapped, whistled, and pounded on the carriage with excitement as the soldiers walked past in victory, dragging the corpses like trophies.

"I bet our students learned a lot from that one!" one attendant laughed.

Another nodded. "Surely! Real combat, right before their eyes!"

Inside, Calien muttered, "I’m learning how to waste mana like an amateur..."

But the soldiers didn’t care. One of the older warriors, built like a war golem, stepped close to the carriage, wiping gore from his chin with a stained cloth.

"You kids watchin’? Hah! Good! That’s real battlefield knowledge! If you train hard enough, maybe one of you’ll get into the Academy of Baron. Yeah, fifth-tier territory, noble-run! Not some backwater place like Silver Blade."

He puffed out his chest, slapping it proudly. "We fight demons, cultists, abyssals! You think that textbook magic of yours will save you? Nah! You need guts! You need rage! You need to learn how to spit in the devil’s eye and laugh while you bleed!"

The students didn’t even blink.

Selin sighed and leaned back, flicking her fingers idly. A small charm lit up over her palm, forming a sigil of silence around her head.

Calien whispered to Erik, "Is it just me or does every one of these guys think they’re the protagonist of a war epic?"

The grizzled soldier outside raised a hand, now grinning, clearly believing his words had inspired a life-changing revelation.

"You hear me, kids?" he boomed. "When the time comes, and it will come, if you don’t got the guts to swing your weapon and take a life, you won’t survive ten seconds out there!"

He jabbed a finger toward the path ahead, his voice rising. "That way lies the battlefield of fate! Beyond it? The heart of the dungeon! Learn from us! Burn this into your memory! Or die forgotten!"

Ruvin muttered, "So poetic."

Selin’s sigil pulsed brighter.

The soldier finally stepped back, winded but pleased with himself, just as another voice rang out from the outer ranks:

"Halt!"

Every soldier stopped in an instant.

The cheering attendants went silent.

The laughter died.

The battlefield, moments ago ringing with pride and noise, now stood in eerie stillness.

Chief Varros, his axe dripping and his eye twitching with the scent of something wrong, turned slowly toward the scout still standing at the edge of the formation.

That scout was trembling.

"I didn’t... I didn’t say anything," he whispered.

But the voice had not come from him.

It had come from beyond the rippling edge of the territorial formation... from the shaded fog that twisted and pulsed in the distance.

The kind of voice that didn’t just speak—it echoed through your bones. The kind of voice that carried something primal, something wrong.

And then it came again.

Not shouted this time.

Not whispered either.

But spoken like a death sentence:

"Halt."