Through the deafening gale, Vigo's voice sliced with apathetic, impossible clarity. "I was looking for you, Cedric. Come here." He fed the colossal magic circle entirely with his left hand, leaving the syringe hanging loosely at his right side. "Our dream is nearly complete. I just need to verify the calculations once more... right after I deal with this intruder."
Alaric roared, the tendons in his neck pulling taut against his collar. Lacking Vigo's mana-enhanced acoustics, his warning fractured against the roaring winds. "Do not listen to him! He has manipulated you before! His words cannot be trusted!"
Arthur offered no sign he heard the desperate plea. His amber eyes went completely dead, his posture sagging into mindless subservience. Dragging his feet in a hypnotic, stilted rhythm, he trudged directly toward Vigo's exposed flank.
"Good," Vigo murmured. He matched Alaric's desperate, two-handed output with a single palm, his monocle catching the emerald light of the clash. "Go to my desk. Fetch the top stack of paper from the third cabinet."
Arthur drifted closer. Silent. Empty. Vigo's right hand—cradling the grotesque masterpiece of his life's work—remained perfectly relaxed.
The instant Arthur breached striking range, the illusion evaporated. A hidden dagger snapped from his sleeve, locking into his palm. His muscles coiled and unleashed in a vicious, upward arc, aiming the steel directly at the glass barrel of the 'unguarded' syringe.
Vigo's reflexes proved monstrous. A curved, geometric shield flared to life a hairsbreadth from the blade, stopping the steel with a jarring crack.
Die, Arthur commanded in the absolute silence of his mind.
A deathly-black aura erupted from his core, washing over his body and bleeding into the dagger. It was the total absence of mana—a suffocating void that actively chewed away the ambient light.
Vigo's visible eye widened. Where the black void kissed his shield, the flawless geometry violently spider-webbed. Recognizing the existential threat, the Head Instructor flicked his right wrist. A crude, concussive blast of wind exploded from the hand clutching the syringe.
The shockwave launched Arthur backward, but his trajectory rejected natural physics. His body folded through the air with an alien, impossible grace, instantly re-anchoring his center of gravity. His boots met the stone without a sound. Silver flashed in the dimness as his Arcanite sword cleared its scabbard in a single, ringing draw.
"Alaric," Arthur said. Through the Nameless Arts, he manipulated the kinetic vibrations of the room, threading his voice through the screaming tempest with chilling, supernatural calm. "The elixir is in the syringe. The volume is vastly increased—he's scaled the dosage for his own biology."
Sweat stung Alaric's eyes. He shot a frantic, bewildered glance at the boy. Where did Cedric learn to move like that? The strike possessed the cold-blooded lethality of a guild assassin. Gritting his teeth, Alaric forced his focus back to the roaring emerald vortex. Focus. It is my duty to handle this. I am the adult here.
But the reality of the magic clash was a crushing weight. Even constrained to a single hand, Vigo's output was an immovable fortress. Alaric felt his internal mana reserves combusting like dry parchment in a furnace. He's too powerful, Alaric realized, panic beginning to fray his logic. He will bleed me dry.
"I'm going to dictate the terms and redirect his flow," Arthur's voice pierced the gale. "Sever your spell on my signal. Prepare to counter."
Alaric hesitated, his protective instincts warring against stark tactical failure. But as Vigo's grinding vortex swallowed another inch of space between them, Alaric tilted his chin in a single, rigid nod.
Arthur didn't waste a breath. He dragged his navy Academy coat over his white shirt, the dark fabric instantly devoured by the undulating, light-eating aura. Then, he vanished.
He didn't charge the Head Instructor. He launched himself toward the periphery, scaling the architecture with a velocity that shattered biological limits.
He's blinding me, Vigo realized, his eye tracking the abyssal blur.
Vigo's scowl deepened. Maintaining the primary vortex with his left palm, he finally raised his right. Two condensed, emerald circles snapped over the syringe. With rapid, dismissive flicks of his wrist, he unleashed a barrage of compressed wind slashes—razor-sharp crescents screaming through the air, intent on vivisecting the student.
Arthur never broke stride. He twisted and folded through the volley in mid-air. The crescents he evaded gouged the stone walls, detonating in showers of powdered rock. The crescents he chose to parry met his Arcanite blade—and simply ceased to be. The moment the magic touched the black aura, it withered into dead, harmless air.
"What is that aura?!" Vigo roared, his tone vibrating with furious, hungry curiosity.
That fractured second of divided attention was all Alaric needed. The older mage surged forward, driving the violent apex of the clash three feet back toward the Head Instructor.
Above them, glass shattered in rapid succession. The magic lamps ruptured, plunging the perimeter into darkness until only a single, flickering bulb remained directly over the warring vortexes. The rest of the subterranean expanse drowned in oppressive shadow.
Vigo's gaze swept the gloom. The boy was gone. Swallowed entirely by the dark.
His prodigious mind spun, calculating the terrifying weight of the missing variable. A combatant who defied gravity and erased mana was currently unchecked in the shadows. Eliminate the known threat to isolate the anomaly, Vigo deduced.
He abandoned all restraint. Tucking the syringe tightly against his palm, Vigo slammed both hands forward, flooding the vortex with his colossal mana reserves. The equilibrium shattered instantly. The shrieking green tempest gorged itself, eclipsing Alaric's magic and rushing forward to grind the former Judicial officer into dust.
A fraction of a second before the gale struck Alaric, a shadow plummeted from the rafters.
Arthur landed squarely between Alaric and impending death, snapping two fingers up in an undeniable command. Alaric instantly killed his mana circulation, severing the spell.
Arthur stepped into the jaws of Vigo's uninhibited wrath, raising the Arcanite sword horizontally across his guard.
The tempest crashed into him. The roaring winds collided with the deathly-black aura and sheared violently apart, splitting around Arthur's silhouette like a river breaking against a stone. But kinetic force remained. Arthur's boots skidded backward, the friction screaming against the floor. It's too dense, Arthur calculated, his muscles burning as they threatened to tear off the bone. Even at three stars, King-rank magic carries too much mass to completely erase. I need an opening.
He got one.
Using Arthur's nullifying aura as an impenetrable shield, Alaric condensed every drop of mana he had left. A massive, hyper-rotating spear of wind shot directly over Arthur's shoulder, screaming across the room and slamming dead-center into Vigo's magic circle.
The geometric matrix shattered like brittle glass. Vigo's defense snapped with a deafening crack, leaving the Head Instructor utterly exposed for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Arthur's left wrist flicked. A tiny, poison-tipped dart cleared the distance instantly, burying itself to the hilt in the back of Vigo's right hand.
Vigo gasped. His nerves seized, his fingers splaying in instant, rigid paralysis. The heavy glass syringe slipped from his deadened grip, plummeting toward the iron grating.
Arthur lunged. I can't cross the distance in time. I have to pull it. For the first time in months, Arthur desperately scraped the bottom of his withered Mage Circuits. A pathetic, colorless magic circle sputtered into existence around his outstretched hand. He prayed for a purple mana construct—a simple, basic tether to catch the falling prize.
But his affinity was a barren wasteland. The colorless ring violently shuddered, fragmented, and dissolved into sparking dust before the spell could even take shape.
That microsecond of failure was all Vigo needed. Purging the localized neurotoxin through sheer, brute-force mana circulation, his left arm lashed out, snatching the falling syringe mere inches before it shattered against the floor.
"Enough," Vigo hissed, his voice plunging to a vibrating, demonic register. His thumb slammed against the plunger. "Since you are so determined to ruin my life's work... I will stop holding back."
No! Arthur's eyes widened in horror.
Vigo drove the thick steel needle directly into his own jugular. He crushed the plunger downward, emptying the massive volume of violently glowing elixir straight into his racing bloodstream.
Vigo's body immediately convulsed. He seized, his spine snapping backward into a rigid arch. His eyes rolled back into his skull, consumed by a terrifying, blank white void.
Seizing the vulnerability, Alaric hurled one final, desperate wind crescent straight for the exposed throat.
The blade never connected. Vigo's seizing halted with horrifying suddenness. His pupils snapped back to center, dilated and bleeding an abhorrent, suffocating light.
With a casual flick of his wrist, five colossal, interlocking magic circles erupted simultaneously. A localized hurricane of impossibly dense wind manifested on the spot, shredding Alaric's crescent to nothing and violently launching both Arthur and the older mage backward across the laboratory.
Anchored in the eye of the storm, utterly untouched, Sivan Ruarc Vigo threw his head back and laughed. The manic, booming sound rattled the very bedrock of the Academy above them—a terrifying chorus of supreme, unadulterated triumph.
"Yes!" Vigo roared into the gale, his mad dream finally realized.