The subterranean laboratory shrieked as a vortex of hyper-compressed atmosphere slammed Arthur into the reinforced stone, pinning him like an insect beneath a scholar's thumb.
Beyond the swirling debris, Sivan Ruarc Vigo shed the last vestiges of his humanity. Raw, unadulterated mana erupted from his skin—a density so absolute it bent the surrounding light into jagged halos. It radiated a boundless depth, dwarfing every celestial text and elemental spirit Arthur had ever memorized.
I failed. The realization drove an icy spike through Arthur. The sheer scale of Vigo's aura made resistance a mathematical impossibility. Survival demanded immediate retreat.
Abandoning his crippled Mage Circuits, Arthur plunged into the void of the Nameless Arts. His core ignited. A pitch-black, anti-magic aura surged across his skin, straining to sever the arcane tethers of the gale. He forced himself forward, but the weaponized atmosphere—a relentless wall of solid pressure—hurled him back. The wind sheared through the room, shredding his uniform and carving shallow, stinging lines across his limbs.
The gale wrenched the oxygen from his lungs, sealing him in a suffocating vacuum. Black spots swarmed his amber vision. Is this it? The thought tasted like ash. After sacrificing his identity, his morals, and his name to avenge Cedric, he was going to die a nameless failure. His 3-Star proficiency—his only hidden edge—was utterly meaningless against the suffocating weight of raw, God-rank mana. Deprived of air, his muscles betrayed him. The ruined laboratory dissolved into a meaningless blur of shadow, and within seconds, the roaring chamber faded into absolute, silent darkness.
For Sivan Ruarc Vigo, reality did not fade to black. It shattered into a terrifying, incandescent white.
The elixir ravaged his mortal vessel, stretching his mana pool to unfathomable dimensions. Yet, at the epicenter of this anatomical collapse, as arcane feedback overloaded his veins, his intellect honed to a diamond edge. A hyper-meticulous, logical autopsy initiated within his fracturing mind.
The elixir's exact ingredients and their agonizingly precise ratios materialized in his mind's eye. They snapped together, crystallizing into a physical script of glowing runes: DXZXQS EGCTFQFZ.
The ancient Magic Language. Mutual Covenant. A contract.
If the elixir forms a covenant, Vigo's racing thoughts eclipsed his failing heart, who is the contract with? The answer bloomed with horrifying clarity: Mana itself. The cosmic joke unravelled before him. Alchemy, Divine Arts, Black Magic, Monstrous Abilities—none of them were isolated disciplines. They were merely General Practice Magic suffocated beneath layered complexities. While standard casting demanded concise, single-word commands, these 'advanced' arts required elaborate, multi-word phrases. Humanity had remained blind simply because the Human Language and the Magic Language fundamentally clashed; they had merely stumbled upon coincidental translations.
As unstable arcana short-circuited his nervous system, a violent tremor convulsed his frame. In that final, agonizing second, the ultimate tragedy surfaced. His life's work was flawed. Scrutinizing the glowing script with God-rank perception, he detected a single, microscopic error in the formula.
Collapsing to the floor, his life force waning, a singular directive consumed him: I must pass this on. He severed the spell. The atmospheric vortex vanished instantly, plunging the devastated laboratory into a crushing, ringing silence.
Disintegrating under the impossible strain of the overcharge, Vigo dragged himself across the cracked stone to a nexus of severed Mana wires. Channeling a final, desperate sliver of energy, he reeled Arthur's unconscious body to his side.
With a trembling finger, he prepared to inscribe the necessary correction. Bitter fury warred with his fading logic; his own impatience had blinded him. He had never afforded his test subjects the time to manifest delayed reactions, allowing this fatal miscalculation to persist through years of meticulous trials.
He dragged his fingertip across the frigid stone. Mid-stroke, his vision burned away, replaced by the blinding brilliance of the volatile energy preparing to detonate within his core. Yet, he persisted. Even as his cells withered and his muscles actively rejected motor function, sheer willpower forced his hand to trace the final characters.
As he completed the final stroke, he fought to scream. His failing vocal cords betrayed him, producing only a muffled rasp. Gathering the absolute last shred of his willpower, he forced the command through the suffocating static:
"Read!"
The unstable mana within Sivan Ruarc Vigo breached its tipping point.
A deafening, concussive wave shocked Arthur awake. His amber eyes snapped open just in time to witness the genesis of the blast. Before the shockwave could vaporize him, Alaric Ordain threw himself into the path of the detonation. A vibrant green spiral of King-rank wind magic rapidly coalesced from Alaric's outstretched hands, acting as a desperate, buckling shield over Arthur. Illuminated in the emerald glow were the final characters smeared onto the floor: Sacinis .99:1.
In the next microsecond, the catastrophic explosion detonated in full.
The subterranean laboratory, carved deep beneath the House of the First Headmaster, instantly dissolved into a cauldron of blinding white energy. Dozens of high-density magic barriers—runic matrices woven into the bedrock to absorb catastrophic blowback and silence the illicit experiments within—flashed into existence. They held for exactly a fraction of a second before shattering with a synchronized, deafening crack.
The subterranean laboratory, carved deep beneath the House of the First Headmaster, instantly dissolved into a cauldron of blinding white energy. Dozens of high-density magic barriers—runic matrices woven into the bedrock to absorb catastrophic blowback and silence the illicit experiments within—flashed into existence. They held for exactly a fraction of a second before shattering with a synchronized, deafening crack. The incandescent shockwave eviscerated the chamber, atomizing the reinforced stone, incinerating the complex machinery, and erasing every physical trace of Sivan Ruarc Vigo's dangerous dream. The sheer, anomalous force devoured the containment arrays, surging upward through the earth to violently shake the foundations of the flying Academy.