Unlike the first student, who had been consumed by raw terror the moment the Thunder Snake coiled around his throat, the second student's eyes held a different light.
The fear that had once gripped the room like a vice now seemed diluted, its potency weakened by repetition.
The students had witnessed the spectacle unfold and in that shared experience, a realization had begun to take root.
The Thunder Snake, for all its terrifying presence, was not a spell of certain destruction—it was more like a tool of psychological warfare in the test, there is no way a teacher would ever release a spell of that caliber which was certain death of students – That easily.
Right?
The serpent was surely there to unravel thought, to paralyze reason, to turn the act of answering a question into a battle against one's own mind where fear dominated reason.
The serpent's circling was deliberate almost hypnotic.
It didn't constrict to kill—it constricted to distract.
