Lucas's words still hung in the air when he simply ceased to be there.
There was no rustle of his cape, nor the boom of boots shattering marble. The half-blood warrior vanished, leaving behind only a brutal vacuum that pulled the hall's dust into the space he had occupied a second before.
The alarm in my head didn't shout; it screamed.
*Above!*
I raised the black wooden spear with both hands in pure survival reflex, channeling the wind to create a cushion of compressed air above my head, dense enough to stop the charge of any of Sillys's captains.
Lucas didn't use his weapon. He merely descended from the ceiling in freefall like a black meteor, his fist clad in a heavy matte steel gauntlet colliding directly against the shaft of my spear.
The initial collision produced a sound of impact as if the axis of the world were cracking.
The compressed air cushion didn't hold the blow for a single second; it was vaporized instantly, shattered like cheap glass before a sledgehammer. The crushing weight cascaded down my arms, and the pain was blinding. My bones groaned in high-pitched protest, vibrating at the absolute limit before a double fracture.
There was a terrifying, almost surgical efficiency to that punch. There was no wasted movement, no useless dispersion of energy. All of Lucas's mass, gravity, and lethal intent were perfectly condensed into a single absolute point of destruction. He was the personification of refined violence.
My knees gave way, and the solid marble floor beneath my boots exploded into a five-meter-wide spiderweb, sinking under the colossal pressure.
I coughed, the air violently expelled from my lungs just from the residual shockwave that ricocheted off the walls. My vision blurred for a millisecond as the taste of copper flooded my mouth, and a terrifying conclusion paralyzed my stomach: *he didn't even draw the weapon from his back.*
Frigid terror replaced the adrenaline. Lucas wasn't just strong; he was on a completely different existential and combat level than mine. That single strike had nearly ground my arms to dust and buried me in the marble floor.
Lucas hovered over me, his face inches from mine, his expression perfectly bored. He wasn't even exerting himself.
I slid my feet back, letting the spear slip to redirect his weight, and invoked the wind to eject myself backward. I spun in the air, landing ten meters away, panting.
The Exile landed silently in the center of the crater he had just created.
"Your footwork is identical to Sillys's," Lucas murmured, his deep voice echoing through the hall. He began walking toward me. Each step was slow, but the distance between us seemed to close unnaturally. "But your weight distribution is garbage; you hesitate on your heels."
I swallowed the thick taste of iron in my mouth. I canceled every instinct to flee and dug the soles of my boots into the smooth floor. I channeled the wind straight to my heels, compressing the air until it hummed under tension.
And then, I detonated it.
The fractured marble exploded backward in a cloud of white dust, and my body launched forward, tearing through the space of the ruined hall with the blind violence of a cannonball.
The mind had to be faster than the body. Brute force against that elf was suicide.
Just as I had used the dense forest against Kaichin's murderous strength in the tournament, and the narrow ravine against Sallys's firing speed, I needed to turn the environment itself into my web. I quickly scanned the ruined hall. The dozens of colossal white marble pillars weren't obstacles; they were my footholds.
I intensely channeled the air currents to the soles of my boots and launched myself not at Lucas, but at the nearest pillar. The impact of my soles cracked the stone, and the blast of compressed air ejected me at a perfect blind angle to the next column. I ricocheted from one structure to another, gaining exponential speed with each collision, becoming an unpredictable blur that attacked from blind spots.
I found my opening and fired.
I spun low to the ground, the black wooden blade humming as it tore through the air in a low, violent arc toward the leather gap at the back of Lucas's leg, aiming to sever his tendons and bring him down.
But the blade only cut dust. Without even lowering his eyes or breaking his stride, Lucas dragged his heavy boot a half-centimeter forward. A shift so trivial that the black blade grazed the leather without even leaving a scratch.
Immediately after the failed spin, I didn't hesitate. I used the base of the spear against the ground to vault myself upward. I twisted my body mid-air, converting the rotation into pure piercing force, and shot the weapon's tip straight at the armpit of his dark armor—the only unprotected spot where the matte steel plates didn't meet—aiming to rip out his shoulder joint.
In the millisecond separating impact from flesh, he merely took a diagonal microstep and slightly raised his left arm.
The tip of my spear violently tore through the empty space between his armpit and torso, piercing nothing but darkness and air. Before I could twist my wrist to attempt a lateral slash or pull the weapon back, Lucas's arm dropped.
It came down with the absolute force and weight of a steel guillotine. He trapped the shaft of my spear under his armpit, crushing it against his side with inescapable pressure.
The lock was mechanical and instantaneous. All my downward momentum died brutally. I hung suspended in the air, feet dangling off the floor, both hands gripping the spear shaft that now felt cemented into the castle's very foundation.
Lucas's empty, ancient, pitiless eyes met mine.
Without changing a single line of his lethargic expression, the warrior raised his leg and fired off an ascending front kick.
The armored boot of leather and steel sank deep into my stomach with the force of a runaway battering ram. All the air in my lungs was squeezed out in a silent choke of pure agony. I was ejected backward, hurled through space like a human projectile straight back toward the pillar I had just used as a platform.
The wind hummed furiously in my ears. Pain tried to blind my consciousness, but my survival instinct snarled louder. I refused to be reduced to slaughterhouse meat on the ground.
I swallowed rust-flavored saliva and violently twisted my torso mid-freefall. I used small blasts of air from my palms to rotate on my axis and stabilize my gravity. Moments before having my spine shattered against the pillar, I twisted my hips and bent my legs.
My boots dug into the vertical marble surface. The solid stone cracked beneath my soles, absorbing the violent kinetic energy from the monolith's kick as if my legs were ballista springs compressed to their structural limit. My thigh muscles screamed in pain under the gravitational pressure, but they didn't buckle.
The insane force he used to try and break my ribs was now mine. I locked eyes on the immovable black figure in the middle of the hall. And all that recoil became leverage.
I detonated the wind currents beneath my feet once more. The column's marble finally gave way, crumbling downward as I shot back like a living missile, channeling Lucas's own destructive power to keep my deadly dance alive. I spun the spear back into my hands with a vacuum swirl, preparing for the next strike.
A split-second before the tip pierced his flesh, he simply tilted his neck exactly two centimeters to the left.
The compressed air of my weapon sawed past his face, violently swaying the loose strands of his black hair, but without drawing a single drop of blood.
An entire lethal, perfect sequence, reduced to nothing by movements that spent no more energy than breathing.
I flew right past him. My boots slammed into the floor with brutality. I dug my heels and the base of the spear into the ground, the leather and steel soles tearing across the polished marble with a shrieking screech. I kicked up a cloud of white stone splinters and orange sparks, skidding violently for nearly eight meters until friction finally halted my momentum.
Panting, my leg muscles burning, I pivoted in a single fluid motion, lowering my center of gravity and aiming the trembling tip of my spear at him once again.
Lucas didn't turn around.
He kept his back to me. The dark elf's posture remained as perfectly straight and relaxed as if he were taking a stroll in the castle gardens, rather than standing in the epicenter of our obliteration zone.
"You don't understand what you're doing here," Lucas said, without even glancing over his shoulder, his monotonous, somber voice easily cutting over the sound of the wind and the war outside. "You chose the wrong side of this conflict, kid. You believe mere bravery and courage can scratch gods."
He finally turned to face me, still wearing that look of indifference.
"Toppling the Queen isn't a simple task; it's an absolute impossibility. It would be far more merciful to drop that spear, bow your head, and accept your death now, rather than forcing your broken body to resist the inevitable."
I didn't answer with words. My response was a boom of compressed air.
Taking advantage of my skid's low center of gravity, I channeled the tension from my legs straight into my hands. I spun, sweeping the floor, the blade of the black spear tracing a lethal arc, fast and invisible like a viper's strike, aiming flawlessly for the leather side plates on his ribs.
But, with dead eyes, he simply lowered his right arm in a terrifyingly casual motion and opened the palm of his matte steel gauntlet toward my weapon.
*CRACK!*
The impact turned the hissing sound of a slash into the crash of lightning striking a pile of iron.
Lucas caught the sharp, spinning blade right in the middle of its path, mere inches from his body. All the kinetic energy, all my strength, and the massive momentum of my spin simply... died. The force of the blow didn't push him back; it ricocheted entirely right back into my own body.
My entire torso locked in space with a jolt so brutal that my shoulder tendons screamed in agony, snapping like violin strings pulled past their limit. The shockwave dissipated in a perfect circle around Lucas's boots, kicking up a thin curtain of dust, but the man didn't budge a millimeter.
Despair prickled through my fingers.
I dug both boots into the shattered marble, clenched my teeth hard enough to nearly break them, and yanked the wooden shaft backward with all the traction my ruined muscles could generate. The veins in my neck bulged. The ground groaned under the pressure of my legs.
But the spear didn't retreat a single millimeter.
Lucas's armored fingers around the black blade were an impenetrable vault. It didn't feel like he was holding my weapon with his bare hands; it felt like the tip of the spear had been permanently welded to the bedrock of an ancient mountain.
"You walk the edge of the abyss, blindly believing you've learned to fly," he continued, his gaze finally narrowing in pure, lethal judgment. "But I feel the tremor in the wood of your spear. The strength you use doesn't stem from conviction... it comes from the panic of realizing that all your training and petty victories were nothing but a cruel joke in the face of true power."
With a terrifyingly casual yank of his wrist, Lucas pulled the spear toward himself.
The brute force nullified all my leg traction in an instant. I was reeled forward, my boots scraping uselessly across the marble. Before my reflexes had time to scream at my fingers to let go of the wood... his left fist was already buried in my stomach.
The boom came before the pain. The matte-steel-clad strike detonated at the epicenter of my stomach with the force of a runaway battering ram. My armor's reinforced breastplate offered no resistance; it imploded. Shards of twisted metal and hardened leather splintered inward, embedding themselves in my flesh.
Kinetic energy invaded my body like a seismic shockwave. All the oxygen I had was ejected in a mute gasp, and a white blindness of pure agony shut down my brain for a full second.
My feet left the floor. I sailed through the hall's air at sickening speed until my back collided directly with the center of a load-bearing pillar. The ancient marble rock didn't hold me. The entire column cracked beneath my body and exploded backward in a suffocating cloud of dust and giant boulders.
I crashed through the rain of shattered rock and plummeted violently into the outer courtyard located on the castle's inner flank, bouncing off the pitted earth. My body rolled and tore up the ground through the debris, kicking up a trail of dirt until I finally skidded to a halt, discarded against the rubble like a broken rag.
I tried to draw breath, but my lungs refused to inflate. I spat out a thick puddle of dark blood, using the trembling shaft of the black spear that had flown with me as a crutch to force myself upright. My legs threatened to buckle with every heartbeat, but I refused to stay down.
Lucas's silhouette appeared at the edge of the hole my body had gouged through the wall. He walked over the rubble with the same funereal calm, his black cape billowing slowly behind him.
"Why?" I asked, my voice tearing my throat with every syllable, yet my gaze pinned to his. "Sillys was your student. She trusted you. Why side with the crown? Why kneel so blindly to a queen who looks at you like you're nothing but a freak... a disposable guard dog?"
Lucas stopped. The invisible aura around him seemed to condense, swallowing the meager morning light filtering into the cratered courtyard.
"Sillys is a child holding a candle in the middle of a hurricane," he replied, his baritone dangerously low, utterly devoid of affection or hesitation. "She fights for ideals, for compassion. I've seen up close what the world does with compassion... it grinds it down, turning it into ash and bone."
Lucas took a step forward, the crushed marble grinding under his boots beneath the pressure.
"There is no justice out there, Suki, and there is no freedom. There is only the crushing weight of whoever dictates reality," the half-blood continued, his half-lidded eyes exuding a brutal apathy. "The strongest side will always be the victor. The Queen is the absolute storm, the power that cannot be broken. The only way not to be devoured by the world is to stand beside the monster's fangs."
I let my head fall back. A hoarse, ugly, blood-wet laugh escaped my throat, scratching against the courtyard's silence.
"So that's it?" I whispered. I squeezed the spear's wood until splinters tore into the skin of my palms, using physical pain to keep my mind anchored. "You think bending the knee to whoever scares you makes you strong?"
"Surrendering to the strongest isn't living, Lucas," I said, raising my trembling face to meet his, fresh blood trailing down my chin. "It's just surviving."
I spat the taste of iron onto the shattered marble again, forcing my knees to stop buckling beneath the weight of my own battered body.
"I don't know what you've been through to reach this level of blind submission," I went on, my voice tearing at my throat with each syllable. "But I want you to understand one thing: Sillys is not weak like you judge her to be."
I planted both feet firmly on the cratered ground.
"You're strong, Lucas. Very strong. The most absolute opponent I've faced so far," I admitted, lifting my gaze to his ancient, dead eyes. "But, beneath all that power... I sense the fear radiating from you."
Silence reigned over the courtyard. And, for the first time since the assault on the castle had begun... Lucas's perfectly apathetic expression shattered.
His jaw muscles clenched. The killing intent that leaked from the half-blood's body was so dense it caused the pebbles and dust around his boots to levitate, defying gravity.
"The difference between us... is that you were so terrified of being the victim again that you decided to become the boot that stepped on you, rather than even considering being free and suffering again." I raised my gaze, letting the storm brew in my eyes. "You are just a frightened slave."
"Show me, then," Lucas snarled, his voice finally vibrating with genuine fury. "Show me what your arrogance can do against the boot that's going to crush your head."
The wind began to howl around me. The air itself seemed to scream in agony.
I summoned every drop of energy and control that my broken body could still endure. The wind condensed around the black wooden blade of my spear with grotesque violence. The air was squeezed into overlapping rings that spun at such an insane velocity that friction birthed electrical currents and blue sparks at the weapon's tip, producing the high-pitched, deafening screech of a colossal saw ripping the very fabric of space.
"Tatsumaki," I whispered, the word nearly devoured by the tempest I had created.
And then, the air exploded.
A horizontal hurricane, a colossal and massive drill of compressed winds fired from my spear straight at Lucas's chest. The brutality of the strike was absolute. Blocks of stone the size of carriages were swallowed and ground into white powder within seconds. Massive pillars in its path were sliced apart like rotten twigs. It was a cataclysmic attack, designed to shred heavy armor and wipe entire armies off the map.
But Lucas, clad in his armor, didn't retreat a millimeter; he didn't even cross his arms to shield his face.
Lucas simply raised his right leg and brought down his armored boot. He stomped directly against the frontline wall of the hurricane.
The clash was absurd. A seismic boom of imploding atmospheric pressure swept through the courtyard, shattering whatever stained glass remained on the upper floors. The ground beneath Lucas's pivot leg sank almost half a meter. He dug his matte steel sole right into the exact epicenter of the wind drill, using his own density, monstrous weight, and raw physical strength to ground out my technique.
My eyes widened, panic freezing the blood in my veins.
The slicing winds that had just pulverized bedrock lashed hysterically against his leg and torso, shredding his heavy black cape into tatters, but they couldn't force a single millimeter of retreat from the warrior. The annihilation barely scratched the surface of his armor or the thick, dark skin of his stoic face.
He was crushing my hurricane under his boot.
With a single, violent step forward, forcing his leg through the center of the vortex, Lucas disintegrated the aerodynamic foundation of my attack. The Tatsumaki shattered like glass under an iron sledgehammer, fragmenting into dozens of harmless gusts of wind that died out with a weak, pathetic hiss.
The vacuum left behind by my attack's destruction pulled me forward. Before I could pivot my heels to attempt a retreat, the nightmare crossed the distance.
A heavy, dark, inexorable gauntlet emerged, tearing through the suspended white dust, and clamped around my throat.
I was lifted off the ground with a crack of bone. The spear slipped from my numb fingers, dropping to the ruined marble with a dull, irrelevant thud. The pressure around my windpipe was crushing, instantly cutting off my airflow. I hung suspended in the void by his hand, like a snared animal, my feet kicking uselessly in the air as Lucas's cold, apathetic eyes judged my final seconds of consciousness.
"This," Lucas said calmly, inches from my face, "is the abyss between us."
He pivoted his body and slammed me into the ground. The impact blew open a crater three meters deep in the middle of the courtyard. I felt the snap of breaking ribs.
I lay discarded at the bottom of the crater; the gray sky above me was hazy.
I tried to get up, to move my arm; nothing responded. My throat gargled blood, and air wouldn't come.
Over the edge of the crater, Lucas's dark silhouette was already there.
Slowly, he drew the massive spear from his back. The scrape of steel sliding against armor echoed like a funeral bell in the silence that settled over us.
"You dare speak of freedom and submission," Lucas murmured, his voice finally laden with the raw, frigid density of absolute fury, "when it's you who lies broken at the bottom of a hole? Where is your Sillys now that the weight of the world has crushed your bones?! WHERE ARE YOUR GODS NOW?!"
He raised the colossal blade with both hands, the weapon's shadow casting a pall over whatever light remained upon my chest.
"Drown in the abyss of your own delusions, boy."
The dark steel hovered high, dragging all the surrounding oxygen with it before its descent. But in that moment, as time seemed to freeze on the brink of death, I didn't look at the sword. I looked deep into Lucas's eyes.
Beneath all that monstrous strength, the oppressive presence, and the stoic mask, the cracks were finally visible. The fury radiating from him wasn't that of an invincible general; it was the reflection of a completely fractured man. He was a ruined fortress wall, held together only by deep scars that never healed and a blind hatred devouring him from the inside out.
The excruciating pain radiating from my shattered ribs brought me a cold, terrifying clarity.
I couldn't beat him. Not like this.
Neither my Tatsumaki nor any strategy of survival or agility would be capable of moving a warrior anchored by such despair and brutality. My body didn't need to hit its absolute limit to understand that. The trade of blows, the weight, the impact... that was Lucas's natural habitat. Fighting him as a mortal trying to tame the wind would only end with me bleeding to death at the bottom of that crater.
I needed to go beyond the flesh.
Lucas's execution strike descended with the fury of a cataclysm. The weapon tore through the space where my chest had been and stabbed so deep into the crater's rock that a localized earthquake shook the foundations of the eastern wall.
But the blade sank into a vacuum.
Lucas froze, shock locking the muscles of his arms. His dark, apathetic eyes widened for the first time. He hadn't blinked. He hadn't averted his gaze for even a millisecond, and yet, the space beneath his blade was perfectly empty.
I had evaporated from existence before his killing intent could even brush me.
Slowly, the warrior lifted his face from the crater.
And there I was. Right in front of him.
Hovering a few inches above the shattered ground, the entire world seemed to breathe alongside me. Gravity had ceased to exist around my body. Shards of rock and particles of dust floated in suspension, dancing harmlessly around my boots.
The Wind Transformation had already claimed my body. The white marks blossomed alive, pulsing up my neck, framing my face, and glowing through the cracks of my armor with the ethereal light of a cold star. My black hair whipped violently upward, bathed in the aura of a pure, silent storm. My eyes no longer bore pupils—only the luminous abyss of the sky itself.
I looked at the elf who now stared at me with curiosity.
"You are a force of nature, Lucas... an impossible wall for a mere human to move," I said. My voice didn't come from my throat, but echoed from everywhere all at once, calm and serene through the chilly breeze. "So... I have no choice but to fight with everything I have."
Lucas instinctively took a half-step back, releasing the hilt of his spear pinned to the ground. His invincible, oppressive aura finally faltered before something he couldn't comprehend.
Absolute silence swallowed the crater. The fractured man standing before me was no longer an insurmountable mountain.
"You carry your pain like an anchor, Lucas," I said, my voice echoing calmly from all directions at once, as if the castle's very atmosphere were speaking for me. "I carry mine as a motive."
And, before the half-blood could blink, I vanished.