The two opponents stood before one another, Jusen in a casual stance, while Fenrir stood with his spear ready. For a moment, he hesitated. To Fenrir, what constituted a fight was that at least one side must intend to cause the other serious harm, and as such his sparring with Yerin and her father did not count. Nor did the capture of the bandits in the forest; they hadn’t even been aware of his existence. This would be his first time in combat since that day five years ago…

The day the Demon King “died”.

The day he attained his freedom.

The day the war with the races finally ended.

His tenth birthday.

The day his parents died by his hand.

Closing his eyes, Fenrir took a deep breath. When he opened them, his irises flared with a brilliant light, like the glow of molten gold. His left pupil changed to resemble that of a cat, except rather than a single, vertical slit, there were two; one horizontal, and one vertical. Shifting his center of gravity downwards, he leaned slightly forwards, his stance somewhat resembling that of a sprinter moments before the gunshot. He began to move…

And then he disappeared.

Suddenly, Fenrir was in front of Jusen. His spear extended through a gaping hole in his opponent’s stomach, caused purely by the force of his movement, rather than the sharp tip of the spear. Beyond the hole, the blood, flesh, bone, and organs that had once filled the now empty space had been transformed into a bloody mist by the sheer power of the impact.

“...Eh?” A sound of incomprehension escaped Jusen’s lips.

“Ah… AHHHHHHH!!!!” After a moment, the transmigrator finally registered the mind-numbing pain of the wound. After all, the death of his original body had been almost instant, and before that he had lived a rather comfortable life, growing up in a middle-class family in a first-world country. Obviously, he had never experienced such pain before.

“AGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” Though he had materialized some of the energy of the hollow world to boost his level in swordsmanship, it all became useless as he collapsed to the ground and writhed in pain. Or at least, his upper body did; his spinal cord had been severed by the attack, and his lower body was paralyzed, in the sense that it could not move; [Avīci: Immortal’s Hell] made it so that he could still feel one sensation from his bottom half: namely, pain.

[Avīci: Immortal’s Hell] kept the target alive by not forcefully keeping the soul within the body, using discomfort as a medium. As such, even if the body was torn into two separate pieces, the soul would still feel the pain from both pieces, but any other sensation would only be felt if it could be communicated to the brain through the nervous system.

The moment Jusen collapsed, Fenrir had moved the spear out of the way. As the examiner screamed in pain, Fenrir cocked his head. Perhaps he had gotten lucky. As an examiner of the Imperial Academy, the man before him should have enough pain endurance to at least partially bear the pain of the wound. At the very least, he wouldn’t be in the state that he was. Demons, who placed high value in strength, be it strength in combat or strength in intelligence, very rarely came into contact with nepotism or bribery; it was simply against their instinct. Even those carrying the sin of Greed couldn’t be bribed; rather, they would just forcefully take what they wanted from those who were weaker than themselves. As such, the idea of Jusen having gotten into his position through money or connections simply did not occur to Fenrir, and the boy correctly thought that this abnormality was probably caused by the Void Soul tampering with the cycle of reincarnation. This would be useful because that a soul from another world would not be under Fenrir’s jurisdiction; while he could still examine the soul, he would not be able to detect the energy of the Hollow World if it was embedded in the core. At least, without destroying the soul in the process. Of course, Fenrir only held suspicions; with only this as evidence, it was quite possible that it was merely a coincidence. To break a soul over mere suspicions was something he would not do. Deciding to try and confirm his idea, Fenrir blinked and began a close examination of the man’s soul. However, the soul was practically the same as those of the humans in Avalon. There were small variations from the average soul, but that was within the margin of error; every soul was slightly different, just as every body is, even if the difference is only the fingerprint. It didn’t seem like the soul from a different world; just as people from different areas had different traits, souls from different worlds have different traits as well.

It seemed that it was a misunderstanding, after all.

Fenrir shrugged. He had never expected it to be easy to find the culprit, after all. And, this still did not change the primary motivation for the beating in the first place: the examiner had pissed him off.

With a sigh, Fenrir raised his spear over the barely-conscious Jusen.

Time to continue.