Crimson light spread over the arena while the force from the dragon core drove the other applicants toward the walls.
Allen watched from the railing without changing his expression, even when a crack opened beneath Elise's feet.
'Not a bad plan in theory,' Allen thought, tracking the violent mana locking all three in place, 'a synchronized strike against a static frequency is a textbook high-Ranker tactic.'
Lower-tier cores acted like stored fuel once they were harvested, so generations of hunters learned to treat them as batteries and forgot the living bodies they had been torn from.
'But they treated the core like a rock,' Allen thought as the heat climbed, 'a dragon core is still alive enough to identify hostile mana as an invader, then eradicate it.'
'Two minutes, perhaps less,' Allen thought as the heat distorted the air above the core, 'their internal cores will rupture before the pressure weakens on its own.'
