This attack would drain the last of my mana.
And still—there was no guarantee it would work.
A gamble. That's all this was. A desperate, reckless bet thrown into the face of death itself. My final hand in a battle I had no right to be fighting.
…Why was I getting déjà vu?
I shoved the thought aside. Four seconds left.
There was no time for hesitation.
I dropped to a crouch, slamming both hands onto the shattered earth beneath me. My heart pounded—hard, fast, wild—as I pushed the last of my strength into the spell. Mana surged outward, pouring through the ruined battlefield like an unseen tide.
Three seconds.
The ground beneath us had already been fractured beyond recognition by the Tempest Warden's relentless onslaught. And that was exactly what I needed. My magic slithered into the cracks, wrapping around broken stone, curling through deep wounds in the earth like a serpent coiling before its strike. The destruction it had caused had only made my job easier.
Two seconds.
My mind burned with focus. I forced my mana into intricate formations, twisting and layering it with an urgency I had never known before. This wasn't simple spellcasting. This was precision, a desperate act of creation forged in the crucible of life and death.
It was done.
I exhaled. The spell activated.
A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.
And then—
Silence.
Pure. Deafening. Silence.
The battlefield, the swirling vortex, even the very air itself seemed to hold its breath.
Again.
Just like that time in the basem—
—The earth rumbled beneath my hands.
One second.
The ground detonated.
A person with low perception might have said that the earth simply exploded, reaching the monster in an instant. But that wasn't what happened.
What truly happened was something far grander.
The earth answered my call.
Stakes—massive, towering, monolithic spikes of stone—erupted from the ground. They speared toward the heavens, jagged and monstrous, as if the very bones of the world were ripping free from their slumber. The wind screamed against them, twisting and howling, but the stakes did not falter.
They surged forward, a relentless wave of sharpened earth, piercing through the vortex monster with brutal finality.
BOOM
A shockwave tore through the battlefield, sending splinters of stone flying in every direction. Dust swallowed the scene, thick and suffocating, masking everything in a haze of destruction.
For a moment, there was nothing but silence.
Then—
"Ha… haha!"
The laugh escaped me before I could stop it. A breathless, shaky, utterly disbelieving laugh.
I had won.
It had worked.
The reaction was natural. Expected. After all, what I had just pulled off was an absolute miracle—a gamble so reckless that any rational person would have called me insane for attempting it.
A gamble with layers upon layers of risk.
First—the spell I had used had never once succeeded before. It was a theory, an untested creation of my own, something I had refined only in the depths of my mind and the solitude of my training. I had never been able to manifest it before.
Second—there had been no guarantee that the spell would strike the Tempest Warden before its time limit was up. If I had been even a fraction too slow, it would have been game over.
And third—the greatest risk of all—even if the spell had worked, even if I had been fast enough, there had been no way to know if the attack would truly harm the monster before it countered.
And yet—it had worked.
I exhaled, slow and deep, my body trembling with the aftershocks of exhaustion.
The dust was still clearing, but I could already feel the truth settling into my bones. The stakes had pierced through the Tempest Warden. I had done it.
I had actually—
RUMBLE
WHOOSH
My blood ran cold.
That sound.
The wind shifted, howling through the trees. The same sound. The same, haunting, bone-deep sound of wind churning in the distance, growing stronger, rolling toward me like a coming storm.
The dust cleared.
And there it was.
Untouched.
Unbroken.
The massive stakes of stone had been shattered into nothing. The Tempest Warden stood exactly as it had before, its endless vortex pulsing, untouched by my attack.
The gamble had worked.
But it hadn't been enough.
A slow, horrifying realization settled over me.
The problem wasn't the plan. It wasn't the execution. It wasn't even luck.
It was experience.
I had underestimated what it meant to face a true B-Class monster. I had planned, I had executed, and I had even won for a single moment—but in the end, my lack of experience had cost me everything.
I should have realized it sooner.
The clan records had been clear. They had documented the Tempest Warden's abilities in painstaking detail. I had memorized every line.
And yet—I had failed to grasp the weight of their words.
"A Tempest Warden cannot cast a spell for seven seconds after an attack."
That much had been true.
But so had this:
"When a Tempest Warden marks you, escape is impossible. You cannot outrun the wind itself."
The meaning of those words struck me like a hammer.
The monster had never needed to defend itself.
It had never countered my spell.
It had simply moved.
My attack had been perfectly placed.
But the Tempest Warden was faster than the spell itself. It had simply outrun my attack, just as the wind always outruns those who chase it.
If I had remained calm, if I had truly considered all the implications of the records, I would have realized it before it was too late.
But now—
It was too late.
The weight of the vortex bore down upon me once more, its crushing presence filling the air, wrapping around my exhausted body like a death shroud.
The seven seconds were up.
And my mana was completely gone.
A drop of sweat trickled down my temple.
The Tempest Warden prepared to strike.
And I—had nothing left to give.