The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

We’d hoped, we’d planned, for Orion to hold the barricade for just a minute or two, no longer, but we still had more than a quarter of the queue waiting, and it wasn’t possible for anyone to hold off that mass. It wasn’t the graduation horde, it was orders of magnitude built upon it, unstoppable, and he’d simply be smothered and overrun. Except he wasn’t. The first wave of mals came at him and died so fast that I didn’t even see how he killed them, and I was watching with unblinking desperation, already tensing in agony, getting ready to do—something, anything, as wild as I’d been watching Nkoyo from the other side of the gymnasium doors. The next wave swept over him, and a handful of them made it past, but only a few steps past; he broke out of the mass of already collapsing corpses, still alight with stupid grinning satisfaction, and caught the last running sherve by its skinny rat tail and dragged it still flailing wildly along behind him as he plunged without a pause back into the fight.

Oh god… He’s forever going to be chasing this high. I can already see it. And it’s going to lead him down a very dark path. The true monsters created that day aren’t the mals they let in the school, it was Orion himself.