"You said it yourself—are you ready?"
Tom's magic erupted in a sudden surge, twin wings unfurling from his back. At once, fierce winds roared across the cliffside, whipping dust into a frenzied dance. Yet around the boy's figure, an invisible barrier shimmered, blocking every gust and grain of grit from reaching him.
Every time Newt felt Tom's magic, he couldn't help but be astonished.
"All set, Mr. Newt," Tom nodded toward him.
"Three, two, one!"
Newt dropped the French flag, and man and bird shot forward almost simultaneously.
These days, Newt had become quite the experienced referee. To give Tom more of an edge, he deliberately varied the starting rhythm each time—after all, Tom could react to the signal faster than the Thunderbird.
Once the flag fell, Newt quickly leapt onto his broom to follow. There was no way he could match their raw speed, of course, but with his Eagle Eye Charm, he could at least keep them in sight over a hundred-kilometer race.
To Newt's surprise, this time Tom wasn't falling behind at all.
But the truth wasn't that Tom had gotten faster—rather… the Thunderbird had gotten slower.
For the past few days, aside from racing and training, Tom had been working on another critical mission: raising the little Thunderbird like a pig.
He didn't just study magic—he'd studied relativity.
If the opponent slowed down, it was the same as him speeding up, wasn't it?
So, over the last few days, Tom had procured vast quantities of prime-quality beef, slipping the bird a mouthful whenever he could. In that short span, the young Thunderbird had plumped up by a full two sizes.
Seeing his scheme bear fruit, Tom was overjoyed. Without hesitation, he switched into Transcendent State—his speed surged once again.
In this heightened state, his control over magic took a leap forward; he could adjust his flight far more frequently. Not only did this boost his own pace, but he deliberately positioned himself ahead of the Thunderbird, disrupting the airflow in its path.
With every push-and-pull, the gap between them steadily widened—until about one kilometer in, when the effect plateaued.
Still, as long as he could stay in the lead, even by a single centimeter, it would be counted as his victory.
But the Thunderbird, noticing it was behind, began to grow agitated. Its emotions rippled through the air, and storm clouds swelled overhead. In moments, the sky rumbled with deafening thunder, streaked with jagged spears of lightning.
CRACK!
A bolt tore past Tom, close enough to make the air tremble around him. The first strike didn't slow him in the slightest, but the next few forced him to weave aside. Even in Transcendent State, where his instincts chose the perfect evasions, his speed inevitably took a hit.
The distance between the two narrowed with each passing second. Eighty kilometers had already been covered—only twenty remained.
Newt, trailing behind, was tense. He knew exactly how much Tom had poured into this.
If he lost again… would they really have to keep feeding the Thunderbird until it was ready for slaughter?
Tom refused to let all his effort go to waste. With a flick of his wand, he hurled a spell skyward, shattering half the storm clouds and sharply cutting down the lightning's interference.
But the Thunderbird was just as desperate—it conjured more thunderclouds in an instant. Thus began a relentless duel: Tom racing forward while blasting apart storm after storm, magic pouring out of him at a staggering rate.
And then—at last—the finish line appeared in sight, marking the hundred-kilometer end point.
By now, even the Thunderbird understood what that line meant. It gave a high, piercing cry, its speed surging upward.
Tom matched its burst. He had recently developed a magic output technique that allowed him to raise his upper limit for a short span—a kind of magical overdrive.
The fusion of his two flight spells was still incomplete, but it had yielded other fruits.
Side by side, they tore toward the finish… until, at the last instant, Tom abruptly dove. Dispelling Andros's Flight Charm, he let gravity and the slipstream hurl him forward at breakneck speed. In one explosive burst, he shot past the Thunderbird by a single body length and slammed through the line first.
The moment he crossed, the fourth palace blazed with dazzling light.
But Tom had no time to celebrate—he'd come in far too fast, and now couldn't brake. He tumbled across the ground for dozens of meters, rolling end over end before finally skidding to a stop, his head spinning like a top.
Fortunately, his body was sturdy enough that he suffered no real injuries—just a good bout of dizziness.
Before he could even catch his breath, the rewards of the fortieth trial began.
A thundercloud formed above—vast beyond anything from before, stretching across the heavens like a rolling sea of lightning. From every inch of the black mass, countless silver serpents of electricity coiled and writhed.
Tom's body was lifted into the air without his consent. Newt, just catching up, froze in shock as he saw a massive lightning bolt slam into Tom.
Then a second.
Then a third.
It was as if Tom had committed some unspeakable offense, and the heavens themselves were unleashing their infinite wrath.
The air became deadly to approach. Newt held back, but through the blinding flashes, he could make out Tom's silhouette—still intact, arms and legs twitching now and then (and not from convulsions). That small detail let Newt calm himself enough to keep watching.
And indeed, Newt's guess was right—Tom was doing perfectly fine.
The lightning wasn't harming him at all. In fact, the sensation was far better than his last baptism in dragon's blood—his whole body hummed with a pleasant, tingling numbness. Even the usual agony of physical transformation was absent. More than that, he suddenly felt an odd sense of kinship with the sky above, as though it were no longer an enemy to challenge… but a domain to rule.
The final seconds of Transcendent State hadn't yet run out when sudden insight struck him—he now understood why the two flight spells had refused to merge.
Andros's Flight Charm rejected all external forces.
But… why reject them?
Instead, he could seize control of those forces, bending them to his will—just as he had mastered airflow—turning every disadvantage into an advantage.
The wings he'd dispelled earlier unfurled once more—but this time, the feathers were no longer purely black. Nearly half of them gleamed a pristine white.
Tom moved—so fast he left an afterimage where he had been, reappearing atop a distant peak in the blink of an eye.
The thunderclouds chased him, bolts raining down as he ran, but he welcomed it—diving headlong into the storm to drink in more of that raw, primal energy.
From afar came the cries of Thunderbirds—dozens of them. Twenty in all, counting the young one he had raced. Some were fully grown, others nearly so. Drawn by instinct and the call of the storm, they wheeled through the sky, eyes alight with hunger, and plunged into the lightning sea alongside him.
Newt's curiosity burned—he wanted nothing more than to discover how this storm's power differed from ordinary lightning. But one glance at his own spindly limbs told him he wouldn't even make it halfway before being roasted alive. So he stayed back, notebook in hand, scribbling furiously.
Ten minutes later, the deafening thunder finally began to fade. The cloud banks thinned, washed clean.
The Thunderbirds circled above, full and content.
And Tom—Tom descended slowly to the ground. Newt rushed to meet him, eyes immediately catching on the most striking change of all.
He was… pure white.