Sparrow raised his hand slowly. The wind around him screamed as Vel finally took shape, a massive lance of condensed steel and raging wind, its surface vibrating violently as if barely contained. The air warped around the weapon, pressure crushing downward as more than a dozen wind spears hovered behind him, rotating slowly like predators waiting to strike.
He lifted Vel high above his head, laughter spilling from his mouth, manic and unrestrained.
"Whatever you do now won't matter," Sparrow said, his voice sharp with madness. "At the end of the day, you're just a kid." His grin widened, eyes bloodshot. "But rejoice. I'm not underestimating you in the slightest. I'll show you everything. The full force of the wind essence."
The wind howled louder as his essence surged.
"These spears will bore holes through you," he continued, teeth bared. "And what's left of you? My wind will tear it apart."
He laughed again, high and unhinged, his twisted expression making Muliad's stomach churn. For a moment, it felt less like facing a knight and more like staring at a demon wearing human skin.
"What a distasteful sight," Harian said calmly.
His voice was low, flat, and cold, but it carried clearly through the wind.
Sparrow's laughter died instantly. His face contorted with rage.
"I'll rip that filthy mouth off first," he snarled.
As Sparrow steadied himself, preparing to release the spears, Harian's mind moved elsewhere. He knew it clearly. He couldn't block that many wind spears. Not like this. And Vel, fake or not was still a catastrophic threat in Sparrow's hands. He understood the power behind those attacks better than anyone.
So he searched for the best option. And he found it. It was simple actually.
Harian began drawing in the condensed essence around him, pulling it inward and converting it into void essence. The air twisted unnaturally as the dark energy gathered, warping the atmosphere and swallowing the surrounding light. The humming grew deeper, heavier, almost alive.
He lowered his stance, crouching slightly. One fist pulled back, muscles tightening, while his other hand opened, palm forward. His posture shifted completely, no longer that of a desperate boy, but of a seasoned fighter who had stood in countless battles.
[CONFIRMATION. TECHNIQUE OPTIMAL.]
Vex's voice echoed in his mind. The technique Harian had learned from the steel essence user was perfectly suited for this situation.
Harian felt it too. The stance came naturally. The essence flowed smoothly, guided and stabilized by Vex's calculations. Every movement aligned, every breath measured.
This wasn't defense.
He wasn't going to endure the attack. He was going to answer it. He would defend....with offense!
Sparrow watched Harian carefully. The boy stood in a stance he had never seen before, calm to the point of being unsettling. That alone set off alarms in Sparrow's head. He immediately accelerated the flow of essence into his weapons, forcing more wind into the spears until the air screamed in protest. The condensed essence gathering around Harian made Sparrow's skin crawl. The control was too clean, too precise. He had never seen anything like it before not even from his master.
Then he felt it.
The humming intensified, vibrating through the forest and scraping painfully against his ears. The essence around Harian twisted unnaturally before collapsing inward, condensing toward his clenched fist. Sparrow's breath caught. Whatever the boy was doing, it wasn't something he could afford to wait and observe. He raised his voice and shouted the command.
"Hail Wind!"
In an instant, every spear launched forward. The sound was explosive, a violent boom as they broke the sound barrier. As they tore through the forest, the air itself screamed, the high-pitched shriek growing sharper the faster they traveled. Trees were shredded. Rocks were carved apart. Nothing stood in their path as they converged on Harian, Vel flying at the center like the head of a guillotine.
Muliad struggled to even stand. The raging winds made it nearly impossible to gather essence properly. When he saw the storm of spears rushing toward Harian, a single thought crossed his mind. This is it.
Then Harian smiled.
Vex's calculations unfolded instantly in his vision. Every trajectory. Every convergence point. Even Vel's path was laid bare. Right before the spears could overlap and strike him as one, Harian moved. Calm. Measured. He swung his fist forward without hesitation and spoke.
"Shadow Ascend. Void Star Fist."
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could swear Vex muttered that it was a cringeworthy name, but it didn't matter.
Muliad watched in horror as the dark essence erupted again. The void surged outward, swallowing everything in its path. The wind spears vanished as if erased. Even Vel was consumed, its violent winds silenced in an instant. A second sonic boom followed, far louder than the first, as the attack expanded violently, growing larger and more destructive by the second.
The black storm roared forward going straight towards Sparrow. Sparrow stood frozen, staring at the incoming devastation, a single thought echoing in his mind.
As the raging mass of dark essence closed in, Sparrow couldn't even comprehend what he was seeing. His instincts screamed at him to move, to run, to do something, but his body refused to respond. He desperately tried to gather essence, forcing the wind around him to answer, but it came sluggishly, scattered, as if the world itself was recoiling from what was about to happen.
He looked up just as the attack loomed over him, an expanding wall of void that swallowed trees, stone, and air alike. Everything in its path was erased, not shattered, not torn apart simply consumed. All of this… because the boy had swung his fist.
It was absurd. It was insane.
This level of control, this level of output, was something Sparrow had only ever seen from grand knights. Even then, the mental strain alone would cripple most warriors. The focus, the authority, the sheer dominance over essence required for something like this was beyond what a divine knight should ever be capable of.nHis chest tightened as panic finally broke through his composure.
"How is this possible?!" he screamed, whether at Harian or at the world itself, he didn't know. "How is someone like you allowed to exist?!"
The void surged closer, blotting out everything else. The pressure crushed down on him, suffocating, overwhelming, making his bones feel like they were about to shatter. In that final moment, as the black explosion engulfed him completely, Sparrow's voice broke.
"Monster…"
And then the darkness swallowed him whole