Hoseok tried to get up from the floor, head pounding. There was a continuous ringing in his ears, and he could feel the smell of something burnt as he tried to clear his eyes to stop seeing everything blurry. Apart from feeling dizzy, the other main reason why he couldn’t get up was because there was a limp body over him. It was Jungkook.

“Oh my god,” Hoseok exclaimed, suddenly alert as he sat up. “Jungkook! Are you okay?” he asked, frantically shaking the younger boy. “Please say something!”

Jungkook groaned. “Stop shaking me, my head hurts…” he complained.

The older let out a sigh of relief as both of them got up from the floor. He looked at the door in front of them. Half of it was destroyed, black ashes covering the broken borders. But that hadn’t been caused by the ‘explosion’ that Hoseok had heard. Rather, the cause of it was standing next to him. He clearly remembered how Jungkook had put himself in front of Hoseok, creating huge flames and directing them against the entrance of the room, the moment he turned the doorknob and opened the door. Why, he didn’t know. He eyed the younger boy, just to notice that he was wincing while holding his right hand by the wrist. He had a huge scar in the palm of the hand.

“Holy ,” he muttered, grabbing Jungkook’s hand in the most gentle way possible. “What happened to your hand?” As an answer, Jungkook just pointed his finger at a metallic piece that was lying on the floor. Hoseok crouched down to pick it up and inspect it, squinting his eyes. It was small and deformed, as if it was half-melted. But he recognized it anyway. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Is this a magic bullet?!”

The younger nodded. “Yeah. When you were about to open the door I saw a symbol engraved in the doorknob, and I knew it was a spell linked to a gun. I just… I acted out of instinct.”

Hoseok just stared at him, dumbfounded. “You saved my life.”

“Yeah, well,” Jungkook scoffed, smiling, “you’re welcome.”

The older just kept staring at him in awe, until something crossed his mind. “Wait a minute,” he mumbled, suspicious, “how come a first year knows about gun-related spells?” he asked, pointing an accusatory finger at him.

Jungkook just widened his eyes, caught off-guard, before composing himself again. “Are you seriously asking me that instead of asking yourself why would anyone set a deadly trap inside the Academy?!”

“Oh,” Hoseok gasped in realization, “you’re right.”

The younger was undoubtedly right, but that didn’t mean that Hoseok stopped suspecting him. If anything, the colors orange and purple of his aura made him suspect him even more. Caution and stress. Just what was that boy hiding?

He should worry about finding that out later, he thought as he glanced at the entrance of the classroom again. The smoke provoked by Jungkook’s fire was finally faded completely, and he could observe with precision the gun in front of the door, glinting with the reflection of the moonlight. That proved that the explosion sound that he had heard before falling to the floor was the shot of that gun. Thank god that the dorms were in a different building. He didn’t think he could have dealt with nosy students right now. However, he should call some professors, or maybe some members of the student council. Hell, this was serious enough to call the headmistress herself. But first, he had to inspect the classroom to see if he could find anything. Wary, he took small steps inside the room, followed by Jungkook, and fearing that the gun would shoot again.

The classroom was a complete mess. The chairs were everywhere, the desks were smashed, metal lockers bending on the sides. Jungkook was taken aback by the horrible view while Hoseok, scared as he was, grabbed onto his arm with force. The window panes were crashed, glasses shattered on the floor. Cracks appeared on the wall as if it had been hit by a big stone. Hoseok went further near to the blackboard, squinting as he lightly touched the big scratch that was on it.

“Who did this? This is too far,” Hoseok muttered.

He had witnessed many times messes inside the classrooms: all chairs piled up in one side of the class, or maybe walls painted with marker pens. They were pranks from students, made for fun. This was different. But again, they had nearly died from a gunshot just minutes ago. Just who the hell had made this disaster?

Jungkook kept observing the classroom, the broken desks, pieces of metal lying on the floor. He kept seeing more and more cracks on the wall. He ducked under the desks to check if he could get some scraps of evidence, but he saw nothing but dust. Black dust. He looked inside his pockets to get one of the many flasks he carried. Since Jungkook met Taehyung, some of the odd customs of the older boy had rubbed off on him. ‘A good mage always carries extra flasks in his pockets,’ Taehyung always told him. Jungkook smiled to himself as he picked the strange dust and put it inside the small bottle.

He shook the bottle, putting it against the moonlight to analyse the dust. It was unnervingly odd but familiar at the same time. Then, something in his head clicked. If Taehyung ranted about anything, that was animals. That dust wasn’t made by humans.

“Hoseok, I don’t think this is a ‘who’...”

The older had no idea what Jungkook was talking about, so he walked slowly to his side and widened his eyes when he saw what he was holding. “That…” he whispered as he pointed at the flask, “that’s from a dark creature.”

“What?!”

Hoseok nodded. But how could it have gotten in? The Academy’s security was high. There were hundreds of guards in the gate and the surroundings, plus, they had the headmistress’ magic seal. And only a very powerful mage could summon a creature big enough to make that kind of destruction, he thought as he glanced around the classroom one more time.

“I think we have to call the headmistress.”

Jungkook nodded.

Seokjin rubbed his face, tired. Minutes ago he was finally falling asleep, right after he had moved Namjoon in the perfect position so he’d stop snoring, when suddenly Hoseok had banged the door like there was no tomorrow. That startled Namjoon, making him fall off the bed, and Seokjin had groaned in annoyance. When they opened the door and they saw Hoseok’s face, they knew something serious had happened, and they followed him through the empty corridors of the Academy in the middle of the night, while he explained something about an attack, and how the headmistress was waiting for them in the place where it had happened. They arrived, and they saw the headmistress with her arms crossed, always dignified—even in her nightgown—, surrounded by some of the professors and the staff of the school.

Hoseok wasn’t exaggerating at all, Seokjin thought. The classroom was a complete chaos. It looked like someone had dropped a bomb, or some kind of wild animal, to destroy everything there. The most disturbing thing was the magical mechanism they saw at the entrance, with that gun pointing at the door. It looked out of place between all that disarray. There was an atmosphere of panic and uneasiness in the room as the professors and the staff talked all at the same time, raising their voices, trying to theorize or figure out who could have done something like that, if it was just a one time thing, or if they were really in danger. They also were pretty concerned about for who had been destined that gun. Seokjin felt kind of useless in those moments, because even though he was the president of the student council and he was supposed to calm everyone down and apport some reassuring and ideas to the professors, he was speechless. He had never imagined that something like this could even happen in his school years. No matter how mature and responsible he was, he was still a student.

The headmistress raised her voice above all the ruckus, and the room fell silent as she quietly spoke. She gave instructions to clean the classroom as she (and the rest of the people who followed her) exited the room, and ordered the guards to search the perimeter of the Academy for anything suspicious while she walked through the corridors. She gave a task to each person present until they arrived to her office and she dismissed all of them, except for the three boys of the student council.

Or so Seokjin thought.

It wasn’t until the headmistress dismissed everyone that he saw four other students behind her, most of them looking kind of lost. For what Seokjin had been told by Hoseok, Jungkook had been with him when he found the classroom, so he kind of understood why he was there. But he didn’t have the faintest idea what Jimin, Taehyung and Yoongi were doing there. Hoseok later told him that when they were about to see the headmistress, they received a bunch of texts from Taehyung, who was worried because he was alone in their room (and he hated being alone). So then, they told him the situation, and of course Taehyung had to spam his best friend with texts to explain him the situation and to tell him to come along.

Yoongi didn’t look happy. At all. He didn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night by a series of annoying beeps that came from a phone that wasn’t his, while the owner of the phone slept like a stone. In the end he had thrown at Jimin what he had more at hand (a small book he had been reading that was in his nightstand) while yelling ‘turn that bloody phone off, I swear to ing god!’. The pink haired boy had whined, complaining, rubbing the area of his head where the book had hit him, and he had sleepily looked over the messages that were flooding his inbox. He immediately sat up, wide-eyed, and Yoongi knew that that couldn’t be good. So of course he had come along with them when Jimin told him that Jungkook w