Save People First, Would You?

Tang Yue, Zhang Jianguo, and Chen Weiliang all stood frozen.

Head Instructor Zhankong had only just flown into the cave. No matter how fast he moved, there was no way the beast could already be dead by his hand.

So how had the Gloom Wolf Beast died??

"When a Summoner's Summoned Beast dies, the summoner suffers a corresponding degree of mental and soul trauma," Tang Yue said. "The Gloom Wolf Beast really does seem to be dead."

The way Baiyang had looked a moment ago — those were unmistakably the symptoms of a dead Summoned Beast. That couldn't be faked.

"Wasn't the Gloom Wolf Beast chasing Mo Fan into the cave?"

"It was. So how did it suddenly die?"

"Could it be the cave was too dark, and the Gloom Wolf Beast crashed into a rock and killed itself?" Chen Weiliang offered.

Baiyang slowly turned his head. His eyes held a venom they had never shown before.

*Your whole damn family crashed into a rock.*

*My Gloom Wolf Beast is not some brainless rabbit that bashes itself to death on a fence post. The Gloom Wolf Beast has night vision — and its body is powerful and agile. How could it possibly kill itself by running into a rock?!*

*Even if all forty of those students could cast magic, they probably still couldn't kill my Gloom Wolf Beast!*

"Let's go see for ourselves," Teacher Tang Yue said.

"Right, right. Let's hurry."

"Backup is on the way to escort these students out."

Inside the cave.

Head Instructor Zhankong still stood rooted to the spot, unable to believe what his own eyes were showing him.

The student named Mo Fan was alive. He was carrying a companion whose body was covered in wounds.

The berserk Gloom Wolf Beast — the one Zhankong had come here to dispatch with his own hands — was standing below... or more precisely, had been run straight through by a stalactite and pinned to the ground.

No signs of life remained.

The Gloom Wolf Beast was dead.

This beast's combat power was in no way inferior to a true Demon-Beast. Zhankong had absolutely not released it with any intention of letting these students defeat it — only to have it stand in for a Demon-Beast and give the students a genuine Field Expedition experience.

Defeat this Gloom Wolf Beast? That was an impossible task. Even a proper squad of hunters could be wiped out by a Demon-Beast, to say nothing of these students who went weak at the knees the moment they so much as glimpsed one.

So when he had chased the students inside, all Zhankong had hoped for was that as few of them as possible would die in the time it took him to end the beast himself.

But he was looking at something even he could not bring himself to believe.

The Gloom Wolf Beast was dead. Pinned there by a stalactite.

Coincidences like that didn't exist in this world. The stalactite hadn't simply come loose and happened to land on a berserk, moving target. And given the beast's reflexes, it would have easily dodged a falling stalactite before it ever came close.

"You... you did this??"

The student didn't look particularly remarkable. He had neat, close-cropped hair and a reasonably handsome face. Exhaustion was etched into his expression and his posture, but his arms were locked tight around the bloodied, slender boy on his back, and he was moving toward the cave entrance — one deliberate step at a time.

Mo Fan looked up. His own eyes held their share of shock.

*Wings!!*

*The Head Instructor has wings!!*

Wings of Wind. Mo Fan knew exactly what they were — yet he had never imagined that seeing Wings of Wind in the flesh could strike the soul quite like this.

That figure hovering in the air, those wings spread behind him like an angel's...

*Damn. That is unbelievably cool.*

"How did you do it?" Head Instructor Zhankong asked.

The words had barely left his mouth before Zhankong realized the question answered itself.

The evidence was all over the scene. This student named Mo Fan had used Fire Burst to burn through the base of a stalactite, and the falling stalactite had impaled the beast below.

But the questions and the shock churning inside him were endless.

First — how calm did a person have to be to think of luring the Gloom Wolf Beast into the cave and using the stalactites as weapons? And second — how had he made the berserk beast stand still long enough to be impaled by a falling stalactite?

In short, he was genuinely struggling to accept this: a second-year Field Expedition student had solo-killed a Gloom Wolf Beast whose power exceeded even a true Demon-Beast.

Mo Fan walked up to Head Instructor Zhankong, a grin spreading across his face. "Head Instructor, I happened to come across this blue bracelet in the cave just now. I'm not sure if that counts as completing the bounty — so, where's my Enchanted Gear?"

Zhankong shook his head hard, and then it hit him all at once.

*Oh, hell.*

*I never actually prepared any Enchanted Gear.*

The bounty was meant to be impossible. The cave was guarded by the Gloom Wolf Beast, and the blue bracelet had been placed there as a token gesture — purely symbolic, with absolutely no expectation that any student would ever retrieve it.

In Zhankong's calculations, half the students would be eliminated at the earlier stages, and the remaining half would inevitably be wiped out by the Gloom Wolf Beast.

He had never, not for a single moment, imagined... that some impossibly gifted student would actually go and *kill* the beast.

*What kind of freak is this kid?!*

A Gloom Wolf Beast that even trained teachers and instructors might struggle to handle — and this student had killed it. Alone.

As for the Enchanted Gear — Enchanted Gear was extraordinarily valuable. How could Zhankong just hand one over??

But now...

The student had clearly completed the bounty.

Mo Fan was watching the Head Instructor's expression contort into something truly indescribable, and was already extending his hand expectantly.

"Ahem, ahem... save people first. Save people first!" Zhankong finally managed, his face a picture of awkward discomfort.

"Oh — right, of course..." Mo Fan nodded agreeably. "I do remember you said it was a defensive Enchanted Gear. A defensive Enchanted Gear worth several hundred thousand!"

The Head Instructor — gliding so dashingly through the cave on his Wings of Wind — lurched mid-flight and barely dodged a stalactite coming straight at his face—

"Student! Can we *please* just save people first?!"