The guests didn't scream. They did something far more chilling. They simply moved, a silent, panicked tide flowing toward the exit. The air, stripped of the Volkov brothers' oppressive auras, felt clean and sharp, a mirror to the cold clarity in Mehandi's eyes. Leo, his face a mask of furious disbelief, was the first to act. His hands, which normally flared with crackling orange light, now felt strangely inert. He lunged forward, not with magic, but with pure, unadulterated rage, his fists a blur of motion.
Mehandi didn't move. He felt the rush of the blow, the raw, furious intent behind it. He simply stepped to the side, and Leo's momentum carried him past, a clumsy, pathetic display of brute force without its magical backing. The movement was so effortless, so serene, that it wasn't an evasion; it was a ghost simply not being there.
"This is impossible," Leo snarled, spinning around. "You're a parasite! A weakling!"
"I was," Mehandi replied, his voice a low hum that seemed to resonate with the stones of the manor itself.
Ivan, ever the strategist, did not rush. His pale face was a study in cold, calculating fear. He moved toward a display case in the corner of the ballroom, a place where their parents had kept the family's most powerful magical artifacts. His hands, unadorned by his aura, still hummed with a different kind of power—the power of knowledge and preparation. He shattered the glass with his elbow and pulled out a relic: an obsidian globe that pulsed with a dark, swirling energy.
"This is a fragment of a shadow-stone," Ivan said, his voice strained. "A remnant of our ancestor's most powerful spells. It feeds on ambient magic. It can drain you dry, brother."
Mehandi felt a tug on his newfound aetherial energy, a subtle, draining sensation. Ivan was right. This was a direct threat, a weapon forged for a kind of magic he hadn't yet mastered. It was the legacy of their family's cruelty and ambition, now turned against him.
Leo, seeing Ivan's new advantage, smirked. He grabbed another relic, a simple-looking staff with a petrified rosewood head. It hummed with a different kind of power, a stored, volatile burst of magical energy. "Let's see how a ghost fights the true Volkov magic," Leo sneered. He held the staff aloft, and a bolt of crimson fire erupted from its tip, searing a line across the ballroom floor.
Mehandi met the attack. He didn't raise a shield or conjure a barrier. Instead, he simply extended his hand, and the very air in the ballroom changed. The flames from Leo's spell, a violent and aggressive force, faltered and shrank as if starved for oxygen, before fizzling out completely just inches from Mehandi's face. The starlight-infused magic in him didn't destroy the fire; it simply unmade its violent nature, turning it into harmless heat. It was the power of calm over chaos.
Ivan's shadow-stone, however, continued to drain his energy. Mehandi felt his knees buckle, the strain of the relentless pull on his life force. He had underestimated them. They were treacherous, but they were also clever. Ivan's mind was a weapon in itself.
Mehandi looked at Ivan, then at Leo, then at the ballroom floor they had defiled with their greed. He had come here for a reckoning, not for a brawl. With a final, explosive act of will, he didn't attack them. He reached for the very ground beneath their feet. He felt the ancient, primal pulse of the earth. He reached into the ley lines beneath the manor, into the very roots of the family's power, and with a single, furious act, he pulled.
The entire ballroom floor shuddered. Cracks webbed out from Mehandi, not just in the marble, but in the very foundations of the manor itself. The walls groaned, dust raining down from the high ceilings. The floor began to split, revealing not the stone and soil beneath, but a blinding, pure light of raw, untamed magic. It was the source of the Volkov power, now exposed and laid bare by its rightful heir.
Leo and Ivan, their feet on the trembling ground, could only stare in horror. Their artifacts, their stolen power, meant nothing. Mehandi didn't just fight them; he was threatening to tear their entire world apart, starting from the ground up.
"You have two choices," Mehandi said, his voice a chilling echo in the groaning hall. "You can leave this place, or you can face me." He stood in the center of the cracking floor, his form illuminated by the blinding light from the ground below. He was not a weak boy. He was not a dead brother. He was the Ghost of the Volkov Legacy, and he had come to cleanse his family's name.