"Did I say you could leave?"
Rowan brought his paws together.
The black smoke that was Morgana's escaping soul barely had time to twist before the sky split open. A thunderclap like a judgment call rang across the island, and a pillar of lightning slammed down with surgical precision.
Morgana screamed.
Not in rage. In pure terror.
Her soul shattered under the strike, dispersing into nothingness, erased so thoroughly that not even an echo remained.
Rowan exhaled slowly.
"So this is how it works."
The lightning he had invoked wasn't brute force. It was something far more specific. A purging thunder technique from the Yanagi family's legacy, designed not to destroy matter, but to unravel corrupted magic at its root. Against physical targets, its damage was modest. Against spirits, curses, undead constructs, and dark entities, it was catastrophic.
Only now, after studying multiple lightning systems across worlds, did Rowan truly understand the difference.
Not all lightning was the same.
There was raw atmospheric lightning, devastating in scale but indiscriminate. There were precision constructs, focused and destructive enough to tear through mountains. And then there was this. Lightning that ignored flesh and stone entirely, striking straight at the abnormality hiding beneath.
Morgana hadn't been weak. Even as a soul, she had been formidable. In another circumstance, destroying her outright would have been nearly impossible.
But she had run straight into the wrong kind of thunder.
Rowan stood there for a moment longer, letting the silence settle.
Then a trembling voice broke it.
"What… just happened?"
He turned.
Veronica stood a short distance away, pale and shaken, staring at him as though reality itself had cracked. From her perspective, she had awakened to see a panda annihilate a legendary sorceress with divine lightning.
That would unsettle anyone.
"You're safe now," Rowan said calmly. "I'm Rowan Mercer. A friend of Balthazar's."
Before she could ask another question, he placed a hand on her shoulder and vanished.
They reappeared inside David's hidden base.
Veronica staggered slightly as Rowan released her.
"You probably have a thousand questions," he said lightly. "That's fine. Balthazar will be back soon. Ask him."
He paused, then added, "Tell him I've found a way to return to human form. I'm heading out to travel. We'll meet again if fate allows."
And with that, Rowan disappeared.
There was nothing left for him in this world for now. He had learned its magic, dismantled its greatest threat, and extracted what he needed from the Book of the Dead. The panda incarnation's role had shifted.
Research. Analysis. Support.
A second mind working in parallel, untethered from urgency.
Elsewhere, under neon lights and quiet rain, Balthazar Blake stepped out of a bar, bottle half-empty in his hand. The world had changed little in a thousand years, yet tonight felt heavier than usual. David had found happiness. That should have been comforting.
Instead, it made the absence sharper.
He drove back to the base, unlocked the door, and froze.
"Veronica…"
She looked up.
"Balthazar."
The distance of centuries collapsed in an instant.
Whatever words followed were lost behind a closed door.
...
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