Regulus didn't retreat. His wand came up and a Protego unfurled before him.
The masked figure closed the distance and drove a fist into the barrier, knuckles sheathed in dark-blue light.
The impact boomed.
The Protego shuddered violently, ripples racing across its surface, but it held.
The defense performed as expected. The method of attack, though, caught Regulus off guard.
He could feel the force behind that punch. Physical impact, yes, and abnormally strong, but that wasn't what had made his shield tremble like that. The real threat was the magic layered over the fist: dense, saturated with penetrating force, as though purpose-built to crack a Protego.
This was combat utterly unlike anything mainstream wizards practiced.
Condensing raw magic or spell effects directly onto the body, then delivering them through close-quarters strikes. Regulus had toyed with the concept himself but never committed to developing it. It belonged to an older era, back when wizards fought without wands.
Efficient, direct and brutally dependent on the caster's control over their own magic and body.
Modern wizards rarely bothered, because the wand, as a magical amplifier, made spellcasting easier, more powerful, longer-ranged, and safer. Wrapping magic around a fist to throw punches was inefficient, risky, and left the fighter wide open to ranged retaliation.
Abyssal Whispers didn't seem to care about any of that. Or perhaps this was the point: a more primal, more direct, more corrosive way of waging war.
All of this passed through his mind in a heartbeat.
Magic stirred beneath his feet. A fist-sized chunk of rock wrenched free from the ground.
In the same instant it separated, Transfiguration reshaped it: a dense stone spike roughly six inches long, rough-surfaced, hard as iron, tip filed to a killing point.
It began to spin the moment it formed, accelerating to its limit in a breath.
At the same time, his left index finger tapped lightly against the air. A ripple spread.
Space Warp. The spike vanished.
It reappeared without warning directly behind the masked figure's skull, less than three inches away. No flight path. No transition. As if it had always been there.
The figure barely registered the killing intent at his back before he could begin to react.
Into that manufactured gap, Regulus's wand was already aimed at him again.
Decomposition Curse, first form.
The Decomposition Curse would find its mark.
The masked figure, meanwhile, had revised his assessment.
He'd assumed at first that this was a child. The boy carried himself with an unusual composure, hadn't flinched at the ambush, had even attacked first, but a child was still a child. That much was obvious at a glance.
What he hadn't anticipated was a spell of such devastating, alien power.
That grey-green light had barely grazed the hem of his robe. The fabric it touched vanished. He'd dismissed it, assumed the cloth had burned away.
Then something felt wrong at his left shoulder.
A piece of him was missing. Where skin and muscle should have been, there was nothing.
He'd lived for decades. He'd weathered every dark art imaginable.
It gave no pain. No impact. It simply revoked a part of the body's existence.
He'd cut the shoulder away without hesitation and regrown it, but he'd already tagged the boy as dangerous.
And now his close-quarters strike had failed too.
He'd relied on that technique for years: condensed magic layered over his fists, specifically designed to shatter the flimsy Protego charms of conventional wizards.
Modern casters leaned too heavily on their wands, too accustomed to trading spells at range. Close the distance and they fell apart. His magic could seep through their barriers and strike the caster directly.
This boy's barrier was absurdly hard.
The punch had set it shaking, and that was all. The shield was tougher and more stable than anything he'd encountered.
He was about to shift tactics when the killing threat bloomed behind his skull.
No warning. No buildup. It was simply there, and only years of combat instinct told him so. Something closing fast, its heat already scorching his scalp.
He didn't turn. Turning meant dying.
He dropped into a crouch, body folding low, and shoved his magic backward.
He didn't need eyes. Sensation alone placed the threat: directly above and behind, spinning at lethal speed, radiating searing heat, already plunging down.
Too fast to dodge. But the magic arrived in time.
A mass of liquid materialized behind him, conjured from the air. It was transparent but wrong, viscous and heavy, writhing and bulging like something alive. An oily sheen coated its surface, each ripple carrying a dense, compressive weight.
The attack at his back was purely physical. Instinct told him that much. So he'd meet it with physics.
The fluid wasn't a proper spell. There hadn't been time to construct one. He'd simply used raw magic to condense moisture from the air into a substance far denser than any natural liquid, something that would harden to stone on impact.
The spike hit the fluid.
Contact produced a grinding shriek. The red glow on the spike's surface flared wildly. The fluid's surface broke into churning waves as though it were alive and thrashing.
Steam erupted in white plumes.
The spike ground to a halt less than half an inch from the back of his skull. It hadn't punched through.
But the masked figure still didn't turn around. His eyes stayed locked on the boy, not daring to look away for a fraction of a second.
Compared to the threat behind him, the boy was the real danger. That expression was too calm. Those eyes were even drifting to the side, checking the other fight, as if everything here was already accounted for.
The masked figure took a step back. Then another.
He raised a Protego of his own, the translucent barrier spreading before him. Then he watched as grey-green light gathered once more at the tip of the boy's wand.
That spell.
Every muscle in his body clenched. He stared at the grey glow and poured magic into his shield, reinforcing it to the absolute limit.
He knew what that spell could do. If he hadn't been quick enough to amputate last time, he'd already be dead.
The curse lanced from Regulus's wand. The masked figure steadied himself, ready for impact.
In the next instant, the spell vanished. A heartbeat before it would have struck his Protego.
Confusion flickered behind the mask. Then something felt wrong in his chest. A piece was missing.
He looked down. A small area of skin on his chest was disappearing.
This time he saw it clearly. Within that patch, skin lost its form, breaking into separate, microscopic particles that drifted away in silence.
Muscle appeared beneath, and it was already going: texture blurring, sheen fading, dissolving into finer dust.
Then ribs. Their surface began to collapse, every composite structure that constituted bone losing its meaning, crumbling into a small heap of powder.
His vision was dimming. He watched the hollow in his chest expand inward, watched his organs lay exposed, then vanish the same way.
He tried to raise his hand. Tried to cast. Tried to do anything. His body no longer answered.
The shield dissolved. His wand slipped from fingers that had lost their strength.
Light from the spell still reflected in his eyes, but it was fading fast.
In the final moment, he looked up at the boy.
The boy stood there, expression placid, wand tip still trained on him. He did nothing more. He only watched.
Then the masked figure began to come apart.
Outward from that point on his chest, skin, muscle, bone, organs, everything that had once composed a living man returned to its most primitive state at visible speed.
The entire process lasted less than half a second.
All that remained was a small heap of ash. The sea wind caught it and scattered it into nothing.
Not a trace left behind.
A grown man, whole and breathing, gone just like that.