Hero

After reading the headmaster's message, Pan Long opened his results page.

His score really had soared by an unimaginable margin.

The numbers alone did not make it obvious, but the "score graph" at the bottom of the page showed his score shooting to an incredible height in the space of a moment.

His score had already been climbing quickly before, tracing something like a forty-five-degree slope with the occasional jump of a notch or two. It looked like a stock market in a booming economy, rising steadily day after day.

But what had happened just now could hardly be called a steady rise. It was more like some cryptocurrency leaping from a few hundred to several thousand all at once.

The jump was so astonishing that it hardly felt real.

He took a couple of breaths and examined the detailed results log.

Each person's record was separate, and the headmaster couldn't access it. According to the story's setting, every Hero-in-Training had a Magic Device Core—something like a game system—and could check only their own details. The headmaster's central core could display everyone's records, but that was all it could do.

To learn exactly what had happened, the headmaster would have to ask each person.

One glance made Pan Long's eyes go wide.

August 18, 4399, 8:40 PM: Killed the Demon King Avatar.

"What the hell! The Demon King Avatar?!"

He turned blankly toward the headless corpse, which was still spewing miasma. His brain seemed to have stopped working.

Was this the Demon King Avatar? Then what was inside the Seal?

Could it be that the Demon King had already escaped, and there was nothing inside the Seal?

How had it gotten out? Had the Seal failed?

Or had the Demon King never been sealed inside it at all?