The battlefield burned. Screams and roars mixed into a single endless sound, the clash of humanity and monsters shaking the very ground.
Adrian stood in the thick of it and raised his hand. Mana surged, compressed, reshaped by instinct and the Source's whispers.
Starbreaker flared into being, his most powerful creation, born from the affinities of his Vanguard peers and refined into something greater. A star of white-grey fire and gravitational collapse ignited above his palm before streaking forward like a comet.
It detonated in the midst of the D-Rank beasts. The blast collapsed space inward for a heartbeat, crushing bodies into powder before a burst of burning light tore them apart.
Dozens of monsters fell, the shockwave rattling defenders even behind him. The ground cracked in spider-web patterns, molten stone bubbling where the spell had struck.
"What in the hell was that?" Martinez staggered backward, his sword forgotten in his grip.
Adrian gasped, his vision blurring. His body remembered the first time he had used Starbreaker, how it had drained him.
Now, after his training and the growth of his mana, he could cast it more than once… but not without cost. His chest burned, his muscles screamed, and blood seeped from his skin.
He gritted his teeth, weaving healing spells across his ravaged frame. Flesh knit, bones steadied, but it was like bailing water from a sinking ship.
Still, he forced his body upright and cast another Starbreaker. The second detonation carved through a pack of Razor Wolves, their lightning-wreathed forms dissolving into ash.
"Adrian, stop!" A defender called out. "You're killing yourself!"
And another. Each one shattered lines of D-Rank monsters, each one hollowed him out further.
His breathing grew ragged. His vision swam red.
But when defenders cried out as another group of beasts broke through, Adrian did not hesitate. He was too weak to cast another starbreaker, but he blinked and appeared beside them.
He seized wounded defenders, dragging them back toward the tower and the waiting healers. His body trembled from the strain, muscles tearing with each movement.
"I can walk," gasped a young woman with a shattered arm. "Save the others."
But the battle did not ease. The defenders thinned, their formations collapsing.
Monsters poured endlessly, their numbers unrelenting. For every beast Adrian destroyed, three more took its place.
And then something inside him stirred. The Source.
It had been whispering all along, analyzing the battlefield. The lightning storms of Drake, the water torrents of Lysara, the tactical brilliance of C-Rank monsters, and even the F-Rank veterans' layered formations, it absorbed it all.
His mana capacity had grown without him realizing, fed by this ceaseless observation. Combat was the catalyst, pressure the forge that shaped his power.
Now, under pressure, it spilled over. The more he understood the basics of many different affinities, it coiled together and created something more primal!
Adrian felt it first as heat in his veins, then as a mist around his skin. White-grey, neither light nor shadow.
Not a spell. Not an affinity.
Raw Source energy, merged by many different affinities! Still half-baked, incomplete, but alive.
White-grey mist coiled around Adrian like a living shroud. Not flame, not frost, not lightning, something older, deeper. The raw half-born energy of the Source wrapped him in fragments of reality itself.
He moved. No longer casting spells but becoming one.
His fist slammed into a Razor Wolf's chest. Where claws should have met flesh, the beast dissolved into ash before impact. The mist consumed it, hungering.
A kick cleaved through a Stonehide Behemoth's rocky hide. The creature crumbled to dust, its earth affinity unraveling under the Source's touch.
"What... what is that?" Martinez stumbled backward, his sword forgotten.
The aura flared with every motion Adrian made. Fragile yet unstoppable, as if existence itself bent under his will.
Veterans who had fought a hundred battles froze mid-swing. Their eyes tracked the white-grey mist, minds struggling to process what they witnessed.
"That's not Echo," whispered a scarred defender. "That's not anything."
Adrian's vision blurred crimson. His limbs trembled like breaking branches. Blood seeped through his skin, painting him in red streaks.
But he did not fall.
A pack of D-Rank beasts charged him. The mist expanded, and they simply ceased to exist! not killed, but unmade. Their essence scattered.
"By the Sentinel..." Commander Lysara's water torrents faltered as she stared. "What is he?"
The question rippled through the defenders' minds. Unspoken but felt by all who watched the impossible boy hold the center alone.
Around Adrian, the battlefield shifted. Monsters that had pressed forward now hesitated. Their primitive instincts screamed warnings about the figure wreathed in white-grey death.
Even the C-Rank crystalline beast paused its assault on Drake. Its molten eyes fixed on Adrian, recognizing something greater. Something that did not belong.
"He's just a kid," a young defender gasped. "How is he doing this?"
Adrian raised his trembling hand. The mist gathered, condensing into something that hurt to look at directly.
The horde recoiled. Thousands of monsters stepped back from one blood-soaked boy, their collective consciousness finally understanding what stood before them.
A predator. A god-killer in the making.
The defenders felt it too, that shiver of awe mixed with terror. They watched him stand in the storm of claws and fangs, unyielding despite the blood pouring down his face.
"We're witnessing something," Martinez breathed. "Something that shouldn't exist."
In that moment, as Adrian stood alone against the tide, the world watched the birth of something beyond human comprehension.
Something that would reshape the very meaning of power itself.