March 14th, 2012 — 3:52 PM
Sunken Isle (Volcania) — Class C Central Citadel (Booth 1)
Perspective: Elfina Lunaris
The radio on the tactical console had been dead for 14 minutes.
Where is Kai?
I pressed both hands flat against my lower stomach, curling inward over the stone table. A dull, rhythmic cramp coiled tight behind my navel, throbbing like a blunt nail being driven into pelvic bone.
Not now. Please, not right now.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry and hot. A dry, harsh rattle built in my chest, and when I coughed into my sleeve, the fabric came away speckled with thin, clear fluid.
My body was doing it again.
It always happened like this. Every few weeks, no matter how much nutritious food I forced down or how carefully I rested, the fever would creep back into my joints. Nausea would climb up the back of my throat until even water tasted metallic. At the orphanage, I used to wake up shivering in the dark, coughing until my ribs ached, convinced that one morning my heart would simply stop beating.
And every single time, Kai had been there.
He would sit on the edge of the cot with those cold, steady hands, wrapping me in extra quilts, brewing bitter herbal decoctions that smelled like boiled roots, and feeding me salted broth spoon by spoon until the burning subsided.
2 days ago, when my monthly cycle had hit me like a carriage accident, he had stayed awake half the night, burning his knuckles in an abandoned foundry just to synthesize that golden syrup so I wouldn't have to suffer.
I hadn't told him the cough was returning.
He already had bags under his eyes before we even boarded the Grand Celestine. He hadn't slept properly in 3 days, constantly checking frequencies, fine-tuning receiver antennas, and bearing the insults of the entire academy just to keep my name clean.
If I told him I felt sick again, he would have abandoned his own safety entirely.
I'm Class C's Leader, I told myself, biting my lower lip until I tasted copper.
I'm Rank Zero. I'm supposed to carry our future... not lean on him until he breaks.
Boom.
A heavy tremor shuddered through the basalt floor.
The translucent starlight dome encasing Booth 1 didn't shatter. It rang like a massive cathedral bell, ripples of brilliant gold and white fracturing across the northern curvature. The academy's 10-minute breach timer flickered to life on the overhead interface, its red numerals beginning their countdown:
`[CITADEL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED: 82%] — [INTRUSION DUEL PROTOCOL INITIATED: 10:00]`
Through the translucent veil of mana, a figure walked casually out of the drifting river mist.
Lucas Reinhardt.
His uniform was torn at the collar, smudged with soot and wet mud. His messy brown hair clung to his forehead, and his half-lidded green eyes held that familiar, lazy arrogance that treated everyone else on the island as background scenery. But there was a fresh dent in the side of his gauntlet, and an irritable twitch in his left jaw that I had never seen during the dungeon trials.
He paused at the edge of the barrier breach, resting a single hand on the pommel of a twin-starlight dagger.
"So this is where you've been hiding," Lucas said, his voice carrying clearly through the opening. "Behind two layers of high-grade wards while your little metal pet ran around barking in the dirt."
My fingers tightened around the shaft of my celestial spear, resting against the stone table. I stood up slowly, deliberately suppressing the trembling in my knees.
"He isn't a pet," I answered, my voice steady despite the raw heat scraping my vocal cords. "Where is he, Lucas?"
Lucas let out a short, mocking scoff, stepping past the threshold into the booth's interior.
"Who cares? A few miles north, swimming in a volcanic ditch if he survived the landing. Did you actually think a commoner with zero skills could actually defeat me?" He looked around the barren stone chamber with profound boredom.
"You took first place in the entrance exam, Elfina. 22,000 credits. Everyone called you the prodigy of the century. But looking at you right now... you're shivering. What a joke."
"I'm not shivering," I said coldly.
"You can barely stand upright," he dismissed, his green eyes sharpening as celestial mana began to coil around his shoulders like living serpents. "Just drop your Soul badge. Save yourself the embarrassment. I didn't come all the way across this swamp to beat on a sick girl."
A sick girl.
The words hit like ice water.
Rigel taught me how to hold distance. Kai promised I wouldn't take a single scratch. And I promised I would protect this flag.
"You're not taking Class C's victory," I whispered.
The air in the chamber froze.
With a single fluid breath, I drew my celestial spear from the stone table. The weapon was light in my hands—not the clumsy, rigid broadsword I had fumbled with few months ago, but the balanced, white-gold ash wood spear Rigel had ground into my muscle memory through hundreds of freezing rain drills.
I didn't cast from a distance.
I kicked off the flagstones, closing five yards in the blink of an eye. The spear tip didn't thrust in a straight line; it traced an ascending crescent, weaving three floating diamond prisms of compressed ice along the strike vector.
Refraction Strike.
Lucas raised his starlight blade with a bored flick of his wrist to parry the tip—
Snap!
The starlight in the chamber struck the ice prisms, fracturing the visual angle by thirty degrees. What looked like a chest thrust bent into a low, vicious sweep toward his exposed left ankle.
Lucas's bored expression vanished for a fraction of a second.
His body reacted on instinct—his off-hand flared with a gust of wind pressure, slamming the floor to launch himself backward. The razor-sharp edge of my celestial spear carved through his leather greaves, drawing a bright red line across his shin.
He landed 4 yards away, his boots sliding through stone dust.
"What the hell was that?" Lucas muttered, glancing down at his bleeding leg, genuine irritation finally bleeding through his lazy drawl.
"You're a celestial mage. Yet you're pathetically relying on melee," he said with disgust.
"People learn," I breathed, stepping forward, the butt of the spear resting securely against my hip in Rigel's open-guard stance. "Or did you think Class C stayed in the dirt while you were sleeping in class?"
"Cute," he hissed, the golden sheen in his eyes blazing into life. "Let's see how long that borrowed power lasts."
He burst forward like a fired arrow.
He didn't use pure swordsmanship. His left hand threw a fan of 5 pressurized wind blades, slicing through the air with shrill, deafening shrieks, while his right blade lunged with an imperial thrust aimed straight at my collarbone.
My chest burned. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass, but my mind was terrifyingly clear.
Rigel: Don't watch the weapon. Watch the lead shoulder.
I dipped under the first two wind blades, the draft tugging hard at my silver hair. Instead of trying to parry his heavy starlight thrust, I pivoted on my right heel, letting his blade pass through the empty pocket beneath my arm.
As his momentum carried him forward, I didn't swing the spearhead.
I slammed the iron-capped butt of the spear directly into the stone between our feet.
Starlight Fracture!
The spell didn't originate from my hands or the spear tip. It routed straight through the shaft, detonating from the floor directly under his center of gravity. A pillar of white celestial radiance erupted upward, catching Lucas in the sternum and blasting him toward the ceiling.
"Gah!"
Air exploded from his lungs. He flipped mid-air, wind mana roaring around his boots to arrest his fall, landing hard against the far wall of the booth.
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes wide, looking at me as if I were a stranger.
"You're routing spells through impact shockwaves..." he breathed, his teeth bared in an ugly grin.
"Not bad, Elfina. Not bad at all."
A violent wave of dizziness washed over my eyes.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird—too fast, entirely out of rhythm. A sharp cramp stabbed deep into my lower stomach, dragging a ragged gasp from my lips. My grip on the spear slipped a fraction of an inch as cold sweat ran down the back of my neck.
Mana saturation.
It wasn't just menstrual cramps. It was the old sickness—the curse of carrying too much celestial mana in a mortal frame that hadn't finished growing. The more high-density spells I forced through my channels, the hotter my blood became.
Lucas noticed.
His eyes locked onto the subtle tremor in my fingers.
"Look at you," he sneered, straightening his back, his confidence flooding back like an ocean tide. "Two exchanges and your soul is already failing. You can't even maintain mana steadiness. You're weak, Elfina. A pretty little girl waiting to be shattered."
"I told you... to shut up!"
I forced my weight forward, refusing to let him see me falter.
I spun the spear overhead, tracing a blinding dual arc of celestial starlight and frost. The air in the chamber screamed as three rotating rings of concentrated solar energy formed behind my shoulders, locking onto his silhouette.
Lucas didn't retreat. He sprinted straight into the firing line, his twin blades spinning in a defensive vortex of wind and hard-light.
Clang! Clang! Boom!
Spear and daggers collided seven times in two seconds. Sparks rained across the stone floor like molten rain. He parried my high strike, but I reversed the grip, driving an elbow straight toward his temple. He ducked, swinging a wind-cleave at my ribs—
I didn't dodge. I accepted the grazing cut on my waist, using the opening to drive the tip of my celestial spear clean into his left shoulder.
Thwack!
The blade pierced flesh and bone. Blood sprayed across my cheek.
Lucas grunted, his body jolting back as the force of the celestial puncture pinned him against the stone pillar. His health indicator flashed violently on the chamber broadcast, dropping into the deep orange zone:
`[LUCAS REINHARDT — HP: 23%]`
I stood before him, panting, the taste of copper thick on my tongue, my spear buried in his shoulder.
I hit him.
A clean, decisive strike. With his health this low, he has to back off. He has to withdraw—
Then Lucas looked up.
There was no fear in his eyes. No pain.
A slow, terrifying smirk pulled across his bloody lips.
"Good strike. But I dictate the ending." he whispered.
A sudden, blinding burst of emerald and gold light erupted from his chest.
The wound in his shoulder sealed in less than half a second. The torn flesh stitched together, the shattered bone snapped back into place, and the exhaustion clinging to his frame vanished entirely, blown away like morning dust.
The broadcast interface chimed with a calm, horrifying mechanical pulse:
`[LUCAS REINHARDT — HP: 100% (RESTORED)]`
My breath stopped in my throat.
What... what is that?
Full health? All of it back in a single second?!
My arms began to shake, the spear feeling suddenly as heavy as an iron anchor.
How did Kai fight this?
How did Kai hold him off for 20 minutes along the river?
A terrible, suffocating dread sank into my chest. Lucas wasn't just strong. He didn't play by the rules of human endurance. Even with Rigel's spear techniques, even with everything I had...
Kai... where are you?
Please... don't leave me alone...
---
Perspective: Lucas Reinhardt
「 That was embarrassing. A girl holding her stomach just pierced your scapula with a wooden broomstick. Your ancestors are rolling in their crypts, monkey. 」
Shut the hell up. I let her commit so I could analyze the shockwave.
「 Copium detected. Aura index: -400%%%. 」
I rolled my left shoulder, feeling the fresh marrow knit clean beneath the leather. The emerald warmth of the Full Restore faded into my blood, leaving my stamina bar pegged at an obnoxious, pristine 100%.
Across the cracked flagstones, Elfina Lunaris was shaking like a wet cat.
Her knuckles were white against the white-gold shaft of her spear. Her silver hair was plastered to her temples with cold sweat, and that ragged, dry wheeze in her lungs sounded loud enough to echo in the domed ceiling. She looked like she was about to keel over and throw up her breakfast.
And yet, her stance hadn't collapsed. Her center of gravity was still low, balanced right over the balls of her feet.
Annoying.
She had zero pattern. Normal prodigies—even arrogant pricks like Victor Sterling—had a doctrine. You could read their academy pedigree in the first three exchanges.
Elfina? One second she was refracting light through floating ice mirrors; the next, she was hammering the butt of a spear into the ground to blast celestial shockwaves like some gutter brawler from the slums.
"What's wrong, Rank Zero?" I sneered, twirling a curved starlight dagger between my knuckles before letting it vanish into thin air.
"You look like you're about to cry. Is that all your precious genius amounts to? One lucky poke before your lungs give out?"
Elfina wiped a smudge of soot from her cheek, her blue eyes burning with cold, stubborn venom.
"You talk too much for someone who needed a miracle just to stay on his feet," she whispered hoarsely.
"A miracle?" I laughed, the sound sharp, arrogant, and loud in the enclosed chamber. "Winning isn't a miracle, little girl. It's an inevitability. The lion doesn't apologize to the dogs for having sharp teeth."
「 Please stop with the lion quotes. Even the author is getting tired of it. 」
I said shut up.
I kicked off the ground with a fire-burst, the stone exploding beneath my heel as I closed the distance like a guillotine blade.
My twin starlight daggers slashed inward in a double-crescent decapitation arc. Fast. Faster than human reaction should track.
Elfina didn't block. She didn't parry.
She dropped the spear entirely.
What—
Her bare hands snapped together in a sharp, acoustic clap.
CRACK!
A wave of dense, pressurized air detonated right between my eyes. It wasn't wind magic—it was pure, raw sound manipulation. A concussive acoustic hammer that scrambled my inner ear in a microsecond. The room spun ninety degrees. My vision blurred into double lines, and my inner ear fluid felt like boiling oil.
Before I could correct my balance, her boots splashed into the puddles formed by her melted ice prisms.
With a flick of her wrists, the standing water didn't shoot forward like standard water spears. It atomized into thousands of microscopic, suspended droplets, creating a dense acoustic resonator that amplified the ringing in my skull ten-fold.
Acoustic resonance using suspended moisture.
Who the hell fights like this?!
「 Warning: Vestibular disruption. User motor control degraded by 68%. In plain English: you are tripping over your own feet, peasant. 」
System! Do something useful!
「 Analyzing... Honestly, this girl shouldn't even exist in this world. An anomaly of this density invalidates baseline reality. Let's give her a fitting end. Take her life. 」
I almost stumbled on the wet stone.
The System had been sarcastic, lazy, and obnoxious since the day it awoke in my soul. But that voice... it wasn't playful banter. It was pitch-black. A cold, ancient malice that made the hair on the back of my arms stand straight up.
Hey... what did you just say?
「 Granting Authority: Null-Frequency Dampener. Inverting environmental acoustic waves. 」
The deafening high-pitched shriek instantly vanished from my ears, cancelled out by an unnatural counter-vibration humming from my bones. My vision snapped back into focus.
Elfina was already mid-air, having retrieved her spear with a magnetic thread of celestial mana, diving straight toward my throat with an icy comet trailing behind her blade.
"Got you!" she gasped, pouring every scrap of mana into the descending tip.
"Not even close, fraud," I barked.
「 Temporary Skill: Daybreak Step. Direct illumination from sunlight detected. Doubling speed. 」
That's total bullshit, I thought.
「 Correct. Move. 」
My body vanished from beneath her spear. The sheer acceleration kicked up a vacuum that tore the wet gravel from the floor. I appeared behind her blind angle, driving my iron-capped boot straight into her side.
BANG!
Elfina flew six yards across the chamber, crashing violently into the stone table. Her breath left her in a wet, choking sob, the radio console shattering beneath her weight as she tumbled into the dust.
Her barrier interface flashed red:
`[CITADEL SOUL ANCHOR — ELFINA LUNARIS: 74%]`
She curled on her side, clutching her ribs, coughing so hard she couldn't draw air. Her pale skin had gone an awful, sickly grey.
I strolled toward her, twirling a freshly condensed celestial longsword, resting the flat of the glowing blade against my shoulder.
"Look at you," I said, looking down with pure, unvarnished contempt. "Sprawled out in the dirt like a beggar. You spent the whole month hiding behind grand strategies and star-gazing, but when someone actually stands in front of you, you break like dry twigs. Is this what Class C was proud of? A frail little orphan playing queen?"
Elfina pushed her palms against the cracked stone. She was trembling so hard her elbows threatened to buckle, but she forced her torso upright. Blood dripped from her split lip onto her collar.
"I'm... not... playing," she wheezed.
She dragged herself to her feet, leaning heavily against the broken table.
"He... took three of your attacks without moving an inch," she whispered, her voice shaking with raw, defiant hatred. "He mocked you to your face. He made you look like a clown along the river. And you think... you're an apex predator?"
A twitch jumped in my temple.
That rat in the grey plate.
The memory of that iron gauntlet smacking the back of my helmet made my blood simmer with pure rage.
"That rat ran like a dog with its tail between its legs!" I snarled, stepping into her space, bringing the sword tip inches from her throat.
"And where is he now? Nowhere. He abandoned you. He's probably halfway to the shore, crying behind a rock while you bleed out for his pathetic class!"
"He didn't abandon me..." Elfina whispered softly.
Her violet eyes suddenly lost their haze. They became terrifyingly bright, burning with an unnatural, incandescent celestial fire.
"He... would never break his promise."
Her hands rose, fingers weaving through the air at blinding speed.
「 Warning! Massive atmospheric manipulation! She's bypassing normal casting thresholds! 」
What is she doing?!
The air in the booth grew scorching hot. The ambient starlight wasn't gathering above her—it was piercing through tiny, microscopic spatial fissures opening all around me. Dozens of them. Orbiting like a cage of dying stars.
She isn't using a normal spell.
She's building an execution chamber.
My instincts screamed, but beneath the alarm, a cold, calculating thought surfaced in my mind.
She's committing.
She wasn't throwing defensive tricks anymore. She wasn't dancing with spears or playing with water and sound. She was putting every remaining ounce of her soul into a single, terminal blow because she thought it would end me.
Good.
I lowered my guard by half an inch, letting the starlight longsword dissolve into glowing embers.
Come on, Rank Zero. Show me your masterpiece.
So I can shatter it.
---
Perspective: Elfina Lunaris
My ribs screamed with every shallow gasp of air, but the pain didn't matter anymore.
Nothing matters except ending this right now.
I saw Lucas lower his starlight longsword by half an inch, leaving his center line open.
He's lowering his guard.
Deliberate. An obvious invitation.
It doesn't matter.
The breach countdown was ticking away overhead. My body was tearing itself apart from mana saturation, and the cramps in my lower stomach felt like jagged glass twisting in my gut. Lucas had already shown he had instant, bottomless recovery—if this dragged into an endurance contest, Class C lost one hundred percent of the time.
Taking the decisive shot right now was my highest-value option. Even if it was bait, I wasn't falling for it blindly. I was forcing the endgame on my own terms.
I felt the blood trickling down my chin, hot and metallic, but my fingers didn't waver.
In the monthly dungeon trial, I had cast Supernova to vaporize an entire floor of obsidian golems. It had been a single, colossal sphere of compressed starlight—radiant, blinding, overwhelming. But a monster like Lucas Reinhardt, armed with that eerie second sense and instant bursts of acceleration, would read a single sphere long before it reached critical mass.
He would slip the blast radius or carve through the shell before the core ignited.
So I couldn't cast just one.
I opened 12 microscopic portals around him.
Through each portal, I threaded a tiny, hyper-dense pellet of white starlight. They didn't detonate on arrival. They didn't rush him. Instead, they caught the ambient draft inside the booth, curving into tight, overlapping, eccentric orbital rings.
12 tiny points of white-hot light circling a single axis.
Lucas is the sun.
And the supernovas are his dying planets.
The basalt flagstones beneath my boots cracked, spiderwebbing with white-hot fissures as my mana channels violently overloaded. My core convulsed. A hot, wet surge climbed up my esophagus, and I coughed, blood splattering across the back of my hand and dripping onto the stone.
Kai is going to be so furious with me.
The thought came with a sharp, bittersweet pang behind my ribs.
I could almost hear his flat, dry voice lecturing me about caloric waste and organ strain. I remembered two weeks ago, when my fever had spiked in the middle of the night at the academy dorms. Kai had sat by my bedside until sunrise, wrapping my trembling hands in hot towels, brewing that bitter root tea that tasted like burnt earth, forcing me to drink it one slow spoon at a time while he checked my pulse every 10 minutes. He never complained. He never showed irritation. He just stayed there in the dark, his cold fingers steady against my burning wrist, making sure I was still breathing.
He promised I wouldn't take a single scratch today.
And I promised I would protect this citadel for him.
Kai can yell at me all he wants afterward. He can scold me until his voice goes hoarse.
Just let me win this for him.
My knuckles tightened until the skin felt like it would tear.
"Distributed... Supernova," I whispered.
The 12 orbiting spheres locked into resonance simultaneously, weaving an intricate geometric web of blinding celestial fire that completely swallowed the booth.
---
Perspective: Lucas Reinhardt
The chamber ceased to exist.
There was no stone wall. No ceiling. No floor. There was only a blinding, absolute wall of white incandescent heat closing in from 12 distinct vectors at the exact same instant.
I was standing inside the heart of a collapsing star before the star had even finished forming.
Can we survive that using a barrier? I asked internally, the blistering thermal radiation singeing the loose strands of hair across my forehead. I'm not stupid enough to think a standard shield can hold this.
A pause.
For the first time since it woke up in my soul, the voice inside my head was stripped of all mockery.
「 ...No. Even a Full Restore won't save you. You'd be vaporized before the system could register meaningful survivable tissue. 」
My mind raced through every exchange of the duel.
Refraction Strike routed through the angles of her spear.
Starlight Fracture detonated through the planted shaft.
Her acoustic shockwave ended with mana-retrieving the spear.
Every single spell she cast kept one constant: the spear is her control anchor.
I stared at the 12 blinding white stars racing along their orbits.
Twelve independent stars shouldn't be synchronizing this cleanly across space.
They aren't independent. They're wired through a single resonance network anchored to her spear.
My thoughts snapped back to the cryptic authority the System had granted 10 minutes ago:
`[TEMPORARY AUTHORITY: HEAVENLY STANDS]`
A thin shell of solar-aligned celestial fire that attached to external sources of compatible celestial mana.
System! I called out. Can Heavenly Stands attach to all 12 nodes if they're linked through that spear network?!
A beat of absolute silence in my mind.
「 ...Yes. 」
Then don't try to block the blast, I snarled, a savage grin tearing across my face. Close it. Invert the boundary!
I planted my feet into the melting basalt, spreading both arms wide, letting the blinding white furnace swallow me whole.
"You really are something, Elfina," I shouted into the roaring vortex, grinning with reckless, arrogant fury. "Too bad standing at the center of the universe doesn't make you a God. It just makes you the easiest target."
「 Activating Heavenly Stands. Boundary inversion: 100%. 」
A microscopic film of golden solar fire erupted from my skin, adhering directly to the interior curvature of her 12 orbiting stars.
It didn't absorb the blast. It sealed the outer perimeter completely.
The expanding celestial furnace collided with the golden shell and found nowhere to vent. The thermal pressure rebounded inward, trapped in its own microscopic resonance loop, and like a dying giant starved of outward release, the 12 nodes collapsed backward along the only open dimensional channel left in the room:
The silver mana thread anchored directly to Elfina's spear.
---
Perspective: Elfina Lunaris
Snap.
The connection didn't sever. It reversed.
A blinding flare of inverted golden-white fire raced backward through the air faster than thought, striking the tip of my celestial spear.
BANG!
The white-gold ash wood shattered into a thousand jagged, burning splinters.
The concussive backlash slammed straight into my chest like an iron battering ram. My celestial barrier didn't just break—it disintegrated. The force lifted me off my feet, hurling me backward through the air. My spine smashed violently against the far basalt wall with a sickening thud before I tumbled face-first into the burning gravel and splintered wood.
`[CITADEL SOUL ANCHOR — ELFINA LUNARIS: 1% (CRITICAL)]`
`[WARNING: CITADEL COMPROMISED. EXTRACTION PENDING MANUAL TERMINATION.]`
The booth fell into a suffocating, terrifying stillness, broken only by the crackle of burning embers and the sound of my own ragged, choking sobs.
I couldn't draw a breath.
Every single inhale brought the thick, metallic taste of hot blood bubbling up into my mouth. My left arm lay bent at a gruesome, unnatural angle, the shoulder completely dislocated and throbbing with blinding white fire. The old sickness—the fever that had been lurking beneath my skin for weeks—erupted through my veins like boiling oil.
It hurt.
It hurt so, so much.
Tears flooded my eyes, spilling endlessly down my soot-stained cheeks, washing pale streaks through the grime and blood on my face.
Kai... please...
Footsteps crunched against the loose gravel.
Slow. Heavy. Arrogant.
Lucas Reinhardt walked out of the thinning smoke. His academy jacket was scorched, patches of his skin reddened by the thermal wash, but his green eyes were wide, burning with a savage, predatory triumph.
He walked straight up to where I lay broken in the soot, looked down at me, and slowly sank onto one knee.
"Look at you," Lucas whispered, his voice dripping with venomous amusement. "Still twitching in the soot."
I tried to crawl away. My fingernails dragged across the sharp gravel, scraping uselessly against the stone.
"P-Please..." I wheezed, a sob tearing through my bruised throat. "S-Stop..."
"Stop?" Lucas scoffed softly, his eyes narrowing. "Why would I stop now, Rank Zero? I spent an entire month listening to the academy praise your name. I wanted to see what made you so special."
"I... I worked so hard..." I cried, fresh tears burning my eyes as blood dribbled from my cracked lips. "Rigel taught me... Kai believed in me..."
"You worked hard?" Lucas chuckled, reaching down and grabbing a fistful of my silver hair, pulling my head backward so my tear-streaked face was forced to look directly into his cold, disgusted eyes.
"Don't insult actual work, you pathetic little orphan. You don't have talent. You don't have combat sense. You don't have a single drop of real discipline."
"That's... that's not true..." I whimpered, my voice breaking into a ragged gasp.
"It's the only truth in this world," he sneered, his grip tightening until my scalp burned. "All you've ever had was a bottomless mana pool and pure, blind luck. And today, I proved it. Without your little guard dog holding your hand, you're absolutely nothing."
"Don't... don't talk about Kai like that..." I choked out, trembling so hard my teeth clattered together.
"I can say whatever I want to a corpse," Lucas said coldly, shoving my face back down into the dirt and ash.
He stood back up, towering over me like an executioner enjoying the final seconds before the axe fell.
I curled inward, pressing my right hand weakly against my stomach, trying to hold back the agonizing cramps that felt like they were ripping my insides in two.
Kai...
Where are you, Kai?
You promised... you promised I wouldn't get hurt...
Why does it hurt so bad..?
---
Perspective: Lucas Reinhardt
She was completely finished.
A sobbing, trembling girl lying in the mud, her Soul Anchor locked at exactly one percent. The rules of the Citadel Trial were satisfied. Class A had taken the stronghold. All that remained was walking over to the central pedestal and planting the banner.
"We're done here," I muttered under my breath, turning my back on her.
Suddenly, a deafening mechanical shriek erupted inside my skull, so violent that my ears popped and my vision flashed blood-red.
`[EMERGENCY MANDATORY QUEST: THE EXTINCTION OF RANK ZERO]`
`[OBJECTIVE: KILL ELFINA LUNARIS.]`
`[REWARD: +10 LEVELS / UNRESTRICTED CLASS ADVANCEMENT]`
`[FAILURE PENALTY: IMMEDIATE SYSTEM CORRUPTION & PERMANENT ENDING (DEATH)]`
The breath vanished from my lungs.
What the hell is this?!
I froze in place, staring at the necrotic purple letters hovering in the center of my field of view.
System, are you out of your mind?! I roared in my thoughts, my hands clenching into white-knuckled fists. The trial is over! She's at 1%! She'll bleed off her soul in a few minutes!
「 Kill her, User. Now. 」
The voice had no snark left. It was hollow, metallic, and devoid of warmth.
No! That's enough! I argued back fiercely, my jaw locking tight. I beat her! I completely destroyed her trump card! Why do you hate her so much?! Why does she have to die?!
「 Because I want to know the full potential. 」
We just saw her full potential! I hissed internally, glancing back at the shattered girl weeping in the dirt. She threw a distributed supernova that would have vaporized an entire mountain range! She pushed her body until her organs failed! What else is there to see?!
「 Not Elfie's full potential, monkey. 」
The System's voice dropped to a pitch-black whisper that made the blood run cold in my veins.
「 Someone else's. 」
Someone else? Who?! What the hell are you talking about?!
`[QUEST TIMER: 00:12... 00:11...]`
A searing, icy clamp gripped my chest.
My heart missed a beat. Then another. A suffocating pressure settled over my lungs, squeezing the air from my windpipe. The failure penalty wasn't a threat—it was an active execution protocol. If I didn't terminate her life before the clock hit zero, my own heart would rupture inside my ribcage.
Damn it! Damn it all!
I turned back around, my heavy boots crushing the fractured ash-wood beneath my heels.
Elfina looked up at the sound of my approach, her violet eyes wide with raw, childlike terror.
"L-Lucas...?" she whimpered, her voice trembling like a leaf in a winter gale.
"Don't look at me like that," I rasped, my throat tight.
"W-What are you... please... I can't breathe..." she begged, trying to drag herself away with her one good arm.
I stepped forward, raised my leg, and planted the heavy iron-reinforced sole of my combat boot directly across her throat.
The breath was violently forced from her lungs with a wet, strangled gasp.
"You should have stayed in the orphanage where you belonged," I snarled, trying to drown out the sickening hesitation clawing at my conscience.
"It hurts... please... stop... Lucas..." she sobbed, her small, bloodstained hands clawing desperately at the thick leather of my greaves. Her fingers had no strength left. She couldn't push my leg away. She couldn't even budge it.
"Crying won't change your fate, Elfina," I taunted, putting more weight onto her windpipe. "Nobody is coming to save you."
"K-Kai... promised..." she wheezed through crushed vocal cords, tears streaming into her hair.
"Your Kai abandoned you to die!" I shouted, leaning down toward her, letting my own panic bleed into vicious, cruel mockery. "He switched spots with that tin rat. Now you get to die alone."
"He... he didn't... he wouldn't..." she choked, her lips turning a faint, terrifying shade of blue.
"Then where is he?!" I pressed harder, feeling the delicate cartilage beneath my sole compress. "Look around you! You're choking to death in the dirt, and he's nowhere!"
"P-Please... Kai..." she mouthed, her voice fading into a voiceless rattle.
"Die quietly."
I bore down with my full body weight, cutting off her oxygen entirely.
Her violet eyes bulged in agony, tears spilling freely over her cheeks as her chest hitched in silent, desperate convulsions. Her trembling right hand rose into the empty air, reaching weakly toward the ruined archway of the citadel booth.
Kai... where are you...?
My chest hurts... Kai... please...
---
Perspective: Omniscient
And then, the air in the chamber stopped moving.
Not a figure of speech.
The sweltering heat radiating from the scorched stones instantly plummeted below freezing. The drifting soot froze in mid-air. A silence so heavy, so suffocating, descended over the room that even the sound of the wind outside completely died.
At the entrance of the shattered booth, a silhouette appeared.
There had been no sound of running footsteps. No warning bell. Just a narrow, glowing trail of melted grass and blue fire carved into the earth, tracing a straight, violent line from the northern caldera directly into the citadel.
A dented, scorched suit of unmarked grey plate armor.
Kaiser Everhart.
He stood perfectly, terrifyingly motionless.
Elfina saw him.
Through her blurred, dying vision, her tear-stained face softened. A fragile, heartbreaking flicker of recognition touched her violet eyes. With the absolute last ember of strength in her fading body, her trembling, bloodied hand reached outward toward the grey visor.
Kai...
I saw him too.
The rat who had slapped my helmet. The magicless commoner who had dared to lecture me like an unruly child along the river.
A manic, twisted sneer ripped across my face, fueled by the adrenaline of the quest timer and the sudden, irrational fury boiling in my gut.
"Oh?" I laughed, staring directly into the dark, impassive slits of his visor. "Your little pet came back? Perfect."
I flooded my boot with celestial and fire mana, letting the golden flames ignite beneath my heel.
"Let him witness this scenery I've created for you!"
CRACK.
I drove my heel down with absolute, merciless force.
The sickening, brittle sound of snapping bone echoed violently off the stone walls.
Elfina's body arched in a brief, violent spasm. Her violet eyes froze, staring blankly toward the ceiling, and her trembling hand dropped lifelessly into the soot.
Silence reclaimed the booth.
And across the scorched floor, behind the thin veil of smoke, the grey knight did not move.
---
Perspective: Omniscient (The Upper Boundary — Outside the Spacetime Fabric)
Astoria stared at the golden reflection floating in the dark.
Her fingers dug into the armrests of her throne until the starlight stone spiderwebbed under her nails. Down on the island, the image refused to change: Elfie lying crumpled in the dirt, neck broken, and Kaiser standing motionless in the doorway.
He was late.
The one person who never failed... he was actually late.
The Void's presence stirred behind them, deep and heavy as a dying star.
"Northern caldera to the central booth: 18.4 kilometers," the Void said, each word landing like an anvil. "Rough basalt. Active lava vents. His speed hit 446 meters per second. Being stuck by Asier's and System's set traps delayed his main arrival sprint. Total time after sprint: 41.2 seconds."
It was a sick, impossible sprint for a mortal body holding its power back. He had pushed himself so hard the soles of his boots melted into slag, tearing a burning blue trench straight across the island.
Beside Astoria, someone laughed softly.
Azrion Vienhart was slouched sideways in his throne, boots kicked up over the armrest. He twirled a loose strand of black fate between his fingers, smiling at the screen like he'd just watched a bad play.
"That's his best in this world?" Azrion shook his head. "Boring."
Astoria's head snapped toward him, her voice trembling with cold rage. "What's funny about watching someone lose the only person he cared about?"
"I expected more from the guy who walked away from his own throne," Azrion said smoothly. He didn't sound frantic or cartoonish; he sounded bored, like an older brother who had already seen this trick.
"In Ceres Omega, Kaiser actually made me sweat. That version had grit. This one? Soft. Great head for books, sure. Clever little trick shedding heat on the dirt. But look at him."
He pointed a pale finger at the screen.
"Weak attachments. Garbage instincts. No backup plan for his own life. He spent so long pretending to be harmless that he forgot how to finish a fight. That girl is dead because he hesitated."
The Void's voice cut through the dark, cold and flat.
"You talk about limits, Singularity. Yet you waited until the fight was over before you touched the world. Lucas broke her on his own."
Azrion smirked. "Why spoil the opening act? Lucas beating her just proved the System works. That was the easy part, Bubbly. The real test started the second she hit the floor."
Astoria glared at him. "You turned a dying girl into an experiment?"
"I turned Kaiser into one," Azrion replied, his silver eyes flashing with sharp amusement. "What does the great 'One Above All' do when he hits a wall his human brain can't fix? Does he break a seal? Good, then I know his warnings. Do you jump in to save him, Astoria? Great, then I know he can't stand on his own. Does he sit in the dirt and weep? Perfect, then playing human actually ruined him."
He leaned back, completely unbothered.
"And if something else wakes up... then I finally get to see what he's hiding. Win-win. Every answer teaches me something."
The Void's shadow deepened, blotting out the ambient starlight.
"The System in that boy has run clean since his birth. Same progression. Same rules. Until 40 minutes ago. And you took the Singularity in Ceres Omega exactly 365 days after Kaiser drew his first breath here."
"You reached into the timeline, Azrion."
Astoria turned on him. "That's impossible. Kaiser's 95th seal locks this world's fate. Even you can't touch local causality without tearing the sky open."
Azrion laughed. "Only if I tried to write the ending. I didn't write the ending. I just gave Lucas the tools and the nudge. I built the System. I'm just helping the world grow up."
"Kaiser Everhart has lost before, Singularity," the Void rumbled softly. "He was defeated before he ever took a breath. Dying in his mother's womb was his first loss. He was born into ruin."
Azrion's eyebrow ticked up. "And you're proud of that?"
"Because he has lost more wars than you have ever fought," the Void answered. "And every single defeat taught him how to tear things like you apart."
The abyss leaned in close, suffocating the air around Azrion's throne.
"You think you won today. You didn't beat Kaiser Everhart. You just broke his leash. You sparked his inhumanity."
Azrion's fingers stopped moving. Inhumanity?
"For 12 years, he lied to himself," the Void murmured. "He made jokes. He sewed his clothes. He wrapped a sick child in blankets and pretended he had a human heart. You just destroyed that lie. You brought MKE back."
Azrion frowned.
MKE?
In the back of his mind, millions of possibilities flickered through his memory. Kaiser's higher seals blocked outside eyes; in a linear world, you couldn't peek at the future. But across every record he had stolen since becoming a Singularity, those three letters matched nothing.
No technique. No seal. No ancient name.
"Congratulations, Azrion," the Void said, cold as grave dirt. "You beat the boy. Now let's see if your little System can survive MKE."
The darkness loomed over him.
"Are you ready for the Kaiser who doesn't talk? No jokes. No morals. No hesitation. Only one command: Winning."
Azrion scoffed, though his jaw tightened. "I've died 32 times across the death of Ceres Omega, Void. I've watched whole galaxies go dark. You think I'm scared of a kid having a fit? What's he gonna do, break another seal?"
"No," the Void whispered. "He's going to stop wasting his thoughts."
Azrion paused.
Stop wasting thoughts?
His mind bristled at the phrase. That was backwards. Thinking faster and deeper was how you won. More branches. More foresight.
Then his silver eyes snapped wide.
Wait.
Not stopping thought.
Stopping wasted thought.
The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water.
Human Kaiser spent 80% of his brain holding himself back. Playing the idiot. Worrying about morals, keeping secrets, protecting people, looking for ways not to kill.
If this 'MKE' dumps all of that garbage...
There is zero inefficiency.
The smug smirk slid right off Azrion's face.
Oh.
That's completely different.
"Watch." the Void whispered, its presence fading back into the deep.
Astoria sat frozen, staring down at the projection, a cold knot tightening in her chest.
What did the Void know about him that we don't?
Azrion pressed his fist against his chin, his casual posture gone, his silver eyes dead set on the grey knight below.
A human with one goal is still a human, Kaiser.
And I know how to break humanity.
---
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart
...
She's gone.
She really is.
The unblinking gaze behind the dark slits of the grey visor did not shift. It did not drop to the blood pooling in the gravel, nor did it rise to the golden light burning around the ceiling.
It stayed locked onto her killer.
The loose brown hair. The golden-green eyes. The heavy boot still resting an inch from her lifeless throat.
There was no scream.
No aura erupted from the dented iron plates. No tremors shook the island.
The warmth inside his chest—the fragile, carefully nurtured heat that had spent years learning how to laugh, how to brew bitter tea, how to patch torn coats—simply vanished.
His eyes beneath the shadow of the steel were not red. They were not burning with wrath.
They were pure, bottomless black.
A void devoid of light.
You.
No one can save you now.
Your story ends here.