The student body is troubled to learn from incoming freshmen that Bangkok enclave vanished mysteriously, along with everyone inside at the time.

Meanwhile, El is faintly outraged to discover that she has been assigned a punishingly difficult courseload and, strangely, put into a homeroom with eight freshmen.

El intends to travel the world, setting up Golden Stone enclaves; Orion agrees to go with her, provided they survive graduation.

This year, however, the gym runs rapidly become so difficult that only El, with her arsenal of destructive spells, and Orion, who takes mana from killing mals, can get through them.

El realizes that even if she saves everyone in her graduating class, the current underclassmen - and all subsequent generations of students - will still be at risk and go on dying.

Liu suggests that they “send the mals to school” - rather than make the Scholomance safer by keeping more maleficaria out, the wizards should improve conditions in the outside world by devastating the creatures’ population in a single blow.

El and her friends cast a powerful luring spell, causing mals to pour into the school through the portals that open to allow students to return home.

Once the Scholomance is full of mals and all the other pupils have departed, El is meant to jump out of her portal and trigger a spell of enormous destruction, severing the school’s link with reality.

Tasha Robinson of the Polygon wrote about the books "All her novels are compelling and immersive, and they all reimagine existing history and folklore in strikingly new ways.

The Scholomance books were partly inspired by a pair of Eastern European legends about a school of magic where Satan claims the soul of the last graduate to leave.