Magic Academy Mayhem: A Class Full of Maniacs - Chapter 17

Chapter 17

“Have you lost your mind?” The heavily made-up woman saw her husband get hit and immediately sprang to her feet, rushing up to Cynthia. She raised her hand to slap Cynthia across the face.

But how could Cynthia possibly just stand there and let herself be hit?

Under everyone’s stunned gazes, she caught the woman’s wrist with perfect precision, then slapped her hard several times in return.

Smack, smack, smack!

The crisp sound of slaps rang out as bloody marks bloomed across the woman’s face. Seeing that the woman had been beaten senseless, Cynthia flung her aside. Then, without missing a beat, she turned and kicked Zhen Weiren away just as he was about to launch a sneak attack from behind.

In an instant, Zhen Weiren was sent flying. The moment his back slammed into a stone pillar, a mouthful of blood sprayed from his lips.

“Have you gone insane?” Zhen Weiren had never expected her to be this strong. Enduring the piercing pain, he roared, “What the hell are you doing? This is your master’s funeral!”

The people around them also began to jeer.

“You little brat, do you not want your master to rest in peace?”

“He really raised an ungrateful wretch!”

“If you ask me, you’re the one who should’ve died, not your master. He was clearly taking the disaster meant for you.”

“Bodyguards! Tie up this crazy bitch!” Zhen Weiren’s hypocritical mask fell away as he said viciously, “Since you refuse the toast only to drink the forfeit, don’t blame me for sending you down to keep your master company.”

Too noisy, Cynthia thought. If only she had a blade.

The very next second after the thought surfaced, her familiar twin blades appeared before her eyes.

Under everyone’s horrified stares, Cynthia picked up the twin blades and hurled them straight at Zhen Weiren, who was hiding in the back with a twisted expression.

His head separated from his neck so quickly that not even a line of blood appeared at first.

With a thud, the head, eyes still wide open, rolled to the ground.

The sound of it hitting the floor sent a chill through everyone’s heart.

Chaos erupted all around. Cynthia tried to use magic to recall the twin blades, only to discover that her magic was still sealed. Even automatically recalling her Spirit Weapon was difficult.

Cynthia didn’t panic. She dodged the bullets fired by the bodyguards, slid across the floor to the corpse, and gripped her curved blades once more.

Then, with astonishing speed, she flashed in front of the bodyguards who were still shooting and killed them with a single slash each, without exception.

Blood gradually dyed the entire funeral red.

Corpses piled into a dense little mound.

Only after the surroundings had gone completely silent did Cynthia put away her twin blades.

Her body was covered in blood. Both her hands looked as if they had been soaked in red paint, dripping and terrifying.

But not a single drop of blood was hers.

Even after killing countless people, Cynthia’s expression remained faint and indifferent.

She rose and walked to the mourning hall, kneeling before it. Facing the black-and-white photograph, she kowtowed several times, each one heavy enough to strike the floor with a dull sound.

She said nothing, nor did she want to say anything.

No matter how many words she had buried in her heart, she knew very well that this was only an Illusion Realm.

A scene… of regret buried deep within her heart.
In her previous life, she had been an orphan. From the moment she could remember, she had lived with her master.

According to him, he had picked her up from a river-a poor little thing nobody wanted. He had thought she looked oddly endearing, lost his senses for a moment, and adopted her.

That moment lasted thirteen years.

Unlike the world most people knew, Blue Star was not as peaceful and tranquil as it appeared on the surface.

In the shadows of the world, there were also vicious monsters that fed on humans.

And certain families, whose lineages had continued for hundreds or even thousands of years, bore the duty of exterminating these aberrations and protecting humanity.

Her master was the head of a family that stood at the very peak of that pyramid.

And she had been fortunate enough to become his first disciple, as well as his only successor.

She began training at the age of four. At nine, she entered the regions beyond the world’s boundaries to hunt aberrant monsters. On the surface, she still had to maintain the life of an ordinary person and deal with all sorts of messy interpersonal relationships.

That continued until she was thirteen.

She had thought her life would pass in such an uneventful way. But on the very day of her birthday, that old man, who was usually so shrewd it was infuriating, actually died in a car accident.

A strange old man who could survive fighting monsters at the border of the world had died in a car accident.

How could she possibly believe that?

But at the time, her master’s adopted son-Zhen Weiren-led a whole swarm of the family’s worst relatives out of the woodwork. They used every method they could think of to brainwash her and make her give up her inheritance rights.

They also blamed her master’s death on old injuries flaring up, claiming that was why he had failed to avoid the car accident and lost his life.

With countless pieces of evidence laid before her, she had no choice but to believe it.

But doubt remained in her heart, and she investigated in secret for two full years.
It was not until she was fifteen that she finally uncovered the truth.

From beginning to end, everything had been a conspiracy.

An undeserved disaster brought about by Zhen Weiren and the other beasts in the family, all for the sake of seizing power.

All because the old man had wanted to pass the position of family head to her instead of them. That was why those greed-blinded animals had set their sights on him.

They poisoned him. They ambushed him while her master was locked in battle with heretical monsters. Bit by bit, they wore his body down.

Even the car accident had been planned…

If only she had foreseen those beasts’ vicious ambitions earlier. If only she had insisted a few more times that he did not need to travel thousands of miles back just for her birthday…

If only-no. There were no ifs.

A layer of darkness that would not disperse rose in Cynthia’s eyes.

After learning the truth, she had used every means at her disposal to slaughter every last person involved.

But the people who mattered were gone. No matter how many more she killed, it no longer meant anything.

And this Illusion Realm, in the end, was still only an Illusion Realm…
Everything around her began to collapse. Cynthia knelt on the ground, and only after the scene had shifted did she slowly raise her head.

She had thought the Illusion Realm would dissipate then and there, but as it turned out, she had been wrong.

The scene around her abruptly changed to one hour before her transmigration.

By now, Cynthia more or less understood. Griffin had combined this with the two courses.

The former was training meant to crush both the body and the soul.

The latter dug out the shadows and negativity buried deep within the soul.

The former was easy enough to understand, but what was the purpose of the latter?

Was it meant to make them recognize their weaknesses through the Illusion Realm? So they could overcome them?

Cynthia did not feel that any memories from her life so far could become a weakness of hers.

After living for over a decade with an old man everyone called a madman, her personality had long since been set in stone.

Even her master’s death was, to her, merely a shadow she could face head-on.

What had passed would eventually pass…

Forgetting was the best choice.

People often called her cold-blooded, but Cynthia could not have cared less.

Just as she was wondering why the scene from the day she transmigrated had become the setting of the Illusion Realm, she saw herself lying on the bed, playing on her phone, suddenly clutch her heart before tossing the phone aside and going to sleep.

Then… less than five seconds later, she stopped breathing.

“…” Cynthia fell silent.

On the day she transmigrated, she had just pulled an all-nighter killing far too many people, so she had chosen to read a novel to pass the time.

Perhaps because she had stayed up too long, her heart had suddenly started aching in sharp bursts. Sensing that it was a precursor to sudden death, she, who valued her life, had immediately chosen to sleep.

Now that she thought about it carefully, before her consciousness had sunk into chaos, there had indeed been a period of suffocation. But because she had very quickly possessed the original owner’s body, she had automatically ignored it.

She had originally still had doubts about her own death, but looking at it now, the Sequence God had been right. Her cause of death really had been simple, pure sudden death…

Illusion Realms were usually projections of reality and one’s own will.

Cynthia was wondering curiously how things would develop from here, and whether her corpse would turn into a pile of rotten meat, when a sudden clap of thunder rang out across the sky.

Lightning flashed… and sparks quickly spread into a sea of flames.

Even her bones were burned to ash.

Because she lived in the suburbs, no one else was dragged into it.

That bolt of heavenly lightning seemed blatantly targeted at her. In the second after her corpse was reduced to ashes, heavy rain began to fall and extinguished the blaze.

At that, Cynthia’s reaction was: ?

Was everything all right up there…?

Without hesitation, Cynthia overturned her previous theory and arrived at a new conclusion: fake. All of this was fabricated.

Perhaps because she was simply too speechless, Cynthia abruptly awakened from the Illusion Realm.

The pain in her body and soul gradually faded. At some point, the once pitch-black surroundings had become bright.

Eli, Sangmo, and Vernel were still unconscious, probably trapped in the Illusion Realm just as she had been earlier.

As for Richter…

He seemed to have woken up long ago. At that moment, he was leaning lazily against a white jade pillar, his eyes lowered slightly as he toyed carelessly with the moon-colored bone ring in his hand.

Cynthia had just been about to look away when the young man noticed her gaze and suddenly lifted his eyes toward her.

The instant their eyes met, a smile surfaced in his calm, unruffled gaze.