Dawn Plaza basked in the melancholic, golden light of the fading sun. Students milled about, returning from their respective classes and training spars. The divide between the nobility and the commoners was painfully stark; they clustered in groups strictly segregated by bloodlines and wealth, laughing and boasting of the day's exploits.
Phantsin Dawnfire, however, felt only exhaustion—a deep, bone-aching weariness. He sat on the white stone edge of the Founders' Fountain in the center of the plaza, letting the frigid, crystalline water soothe his bruised knuckles after another brutal session in the Great Crucible.
By this hour, the Central Level was beginning to empty.
Lyla was likely buried somewhere among the endless gothic aisles and dusty tomes of the Athenaeum, the Academy's vast library erected on the northern plateau, hiding from prying eyes. Korbin, undoubtedly, had retreated to The Forge to hammer out dents in his armor or forge a new blade. Eliana Dawnshield was surely suffering through a tedious private lesson in royal protocol or tactical history, preparing for the inevitable weight of the crown.
Phantsin just wanted to be invisible.
His gaze drifted inevitably toward the imposing structure nestled between the Athenaeum and the base of the colossal Main Tower: the Hall of Echoes. It was a broad corridor that opened into a solemn, perpetually silent circular chamber, lit by ever-burning torches. It was a memorial dedicated to the fallen graduates and Mage Knights who had died in the line of duty, fighting the horrific demonic threats that poured from the rifts. Its walls were adorned with hundreds of engraved bronze plaques and melancholic oil portraits.
Among those faces watching over the academy surely rested the memories of his and Flower's parents.
He had never gone inside. He had passed by the carved oak doors several times, but his courage always failed him. He feared that if he met the painted eyes of those heroes, they would see right through his Ignis sash. They would see the purple, entropic monster he was becoming, and they would know he was a danger to the very kingdom they had sworn to protect.
"Enjoying your newfound fame as a jester, casanova?"
A cold voice, smooth and trailing like the edge of a straight razor, made Phantsin's shoulders instantly tense.
Vlad Blackthorn sauntered lazily across the plaza, flanked by two of his sycophants who both wore the black sash of Caelum. The noble wore the same standard uniform as Phantsin, but the difference in quality was insulting; his black jacket was tailor-made from expensive Solarian Empire spider-silk, and his bright red tie was pinned with a pure gold family crest depicting the Thorny Rose.
"Leave me alone, Vlad," Phantsin said, not bothering to look up from the rippling water of the fountain.
"Oh, don't be offended, commoner," Vlad sneered, stopping right in front of him and blocking the sunset. "I must admit, I'm genuinely impressed. A Silvanyan elf, and from Terra, no less. I thought her fragile kind had slightly higher standards for personal hygiene and pedigree when seeking company, but I suppose charity at this academy knows no bounds."
The two Caelum lackeys snickered derisively, eager to please the noble.
Phantsin ground his teeth and looked up, his crimson eyes flashing with irritation.
"I said get lost. There's no rumor to laugh about. It was a misunderstanding caused by that idiot Silas."
"Of course it was," Vlad mocked, crossing his arms, a smile failing to reach his cold gray eyes. "A piece of street trash with no real talent couldn't aspire to anything more. It's funny, you know? The other day I was bored and did a little research on the illustrious 'Dawnfire' surname in the public archives. Guess what I found? Nothing. No lands registered to your name. No noble blood documented in the last ten generations. You don't even own a miserable hovel in the city."
Vlad leaned forward, his smile turning openly cruel.
"I wonder what kind of pathetic, useless rats your parents had to be to dump you in a servant's manor with nothing but a made-up name. They were probably a pair of cowards who died in some gutter in the slums of Valoria, begging for a single copper coin."
The sound of the falling water in the fountain seemed to stop abruptly for Phantsin. The bustle of the plaza faded away.
His parents had been heroes. Phantsin knew that. He knew they had given their very last drop of blood to protect the kingdom.
In the depths of his mind, the mental wall trembled, and the beast roared.
Kill him. Choke the breath from him. Burn that venomous tongue. Turn him to ash until the wind carries him away.
This time, blinded by fury, Phantsin didn't even try to contain the impulse. He stood up with inhuman speed.
Before the two agile Caelum goons could even react or blink, Phantsin reached out and grabbed Vlad by the impeccable lapels of his silk jacket.
"Take back what you said," Phantsin hissed, his voice sounding doubled, guttural, and terrifying. "Right now."
Before Vlad could respond, Phantsin shoved him backward with overwhelming force.
The Solarian noble stumbled violently, his boots dragging across the stone, but he recovered his balance with the lethal agility of a predator. His gray eyes widened briefly in surprise, followed immediately by a cold, calculating fury.
"You've just signed your own death warrant, dog," Vlad spat, straightening his rumpled lapels.
The noble raised his right hand toward the sky, and the air around the fountain seemed to drop ten degrees in a heartbeat, exhaling cold vapor.
In his pale palm, a long, sharp blade gradually materialized, forged entirely of Shadow Fire. The flames that made up the sword were an ashen gray and abyssal black, burning frantically without emitting a single ounce of heat. It was the hallmark and hereditary magic of the Blackthorn bloodline: elemental fire fused with darkness. Elegant, refined, and absolutely deadly.
"Stand back!" Vlad shouted at his useless henchmen, who stumbled backward toward the classroom corridors.
Other students in the plaza began to stop, forming a fearful ring to watch what was unfolding. An unauthorized magical duel outside the barriers of the Great Crucible meant brutal sanctions, corporal punishment, or even immediate expulsion, but neither combatant gave a damn at that moment.
Vlad struck first.
He moved with the fluidity of a master fencer, closing the distance in a heartbeat and lunging with a direct, lethal thrust aimed at Phantsin's chest.
Phantsin managed to pivot and dodge at the last possible second.
The Shadow Fire grazed the sleeve of his standard-issue jacket. But instead of burning the fabric as normal fire would, the impact seemed to drain the thermal energy from the material; the cloth froze instantly in a flash of absolute zero and then crumbled to dust, leaving a trail of black, decaying frost on his arm.
"Aren't you going to use your pathetic little explosive tricks, Dawnfire?" Vlad taunted, advancing with measured steps and unleashing a flurry of rapid, suffocating slashes. "Show me the grand 'Overwhelming Force' that Ignis is famous for! Prove you deserve that sash!"
Phantsin backpedaled clumsily, dodging by a hair's breadth.
He had no weapon right now. He didn't even have refined training. He only had his bare hands, and his mana core boiled with a rage that was a second away from overflowing.
Vlad saw an opening. He pivoted on his heel and unleashed a brutal horizontal swing—a shadow cleave meant to decapitate his opponent or slice him in half.
Unable to dodge in time, Phantsin threw up his bare right arm in an act of pure, desperate instinct.
Vlad's crackling shadow sword slammed brutally into Phantsin's forearm.
But instead of shearing through flesh and bone, the sharp, spectral black blade crashed against a dense, violent flare of purple flame.
Vlad choked back a scream—not of pain, but of pure, primal terror.
The violet fire, the Void energy erupting from Phantsin's arm, was eating his magic alive.
The Void devoured the ancient Shadow Fire as if it were dry tinder, nullifying his magic and surging up the spectral blade at breakneck speed, swallowing the darkness and heading straight for Vlad's exposed hand.
It's too dark. It's pure entropy! They're going to see it, Phantsin thought in terror, panic seizing him as he watched the forbidden color bloom in all its unnatural glory under the twilight. If they see the purple, they'll execute me today!
In an act of absolute panic, using willpower that nearly tore his mind apart, Phantsin metaphorically grabbed the tide of violet energy trying to burst from his body and strangled it. He forced the violent magic to shift frequency, suddenly injecting it with all the residual red mana in his core to dye it.
The color shifted in a microsecond, transforming from the silent, abyssal purple to a deafening, blinding crimson.
But the thermal load was too massive for the confined space.
A colossal explosion of real fire erupted at the point of impact between the two boys.
The expansive kinetic shockwave sent Vlad flying several meters through the air; he tumbled ungracefully across the immaculate flagstones of the plaza. His prized shadow sword had completely disintegrated, devoured by the clash.
Phantsin was left trembling at the epicenter of the detonation, engulfed in thick, scorching, blinding smoke, coughing violently as he clutched his charred arm.
"ENOUGH!"
A voice thundered across the courtyard with the force of a rockslide, rattling the cobblestones.
Commander Brynja Stonefist, who had been patrolling near the tactical classrooms, sprinted toward them, her ironwood staff drawn and ready.
Seconds later, the air cooled drastically as Magister Selena Vyshaan materialized in the center of the smoke in a swirl of bright blue energy. With a simple, elegant wave of her hand, she conjured a gust of freezing air that instantly snuffed out the crimson flames still burning on the remnants of Phantsin's clothes and the nearby planters.
Even Eliana Dawnshield, who happened to be passing through the plaza after finishing her private protocol lessons and was heading toward the bridge of The Spire, stopped dead in her tracks. She hurried toward the commotion, her blue eyes wide with shock.
"Unauthorized magical dueling in the first month of classes!" Brynja roared, her runic tattoos glowing with rage. She grabbed Vlad by the collar of his ruined, expensive silk shirt, hauling him off the ground like a ragdoll. "I'm going to hang you both by your thumbs from the dome of the astronomical observatory and leave you there until the gargoyles get bored!"
"He... he attacked me first..." Vlad stammered, deathly pale. He was trembling, unable to tear his gaze away from where the purple flame had been, still trying to process what in the hells had just devoured his hereditary magic.
Phantsin tried to speak, tried to defend himself or curse Vlad again, but he couldn't make a sound.
The herculean effort of suppressing the pure manifestation of the purple fire, followed by the forced crimson detonation, had completely drained his mana core, leaving him at absolute zero. The overwhelming stress of fighting his own destructive nature quickly took its toll on his physical body.
The world began to spin. For Phantsin, everything faded into a blurred, gray haze.
He knew he would probably wake up in a white bed in the Infirmary—that massive facility located beyond the Crucible, run by the healers of Terra, where the smell of alchemical ointments and medicinal herbs wouldn't mask the fact that he was surely facing a disciplinary council or outright expulsion.
Brynja's angry shouts, Selena's icy tone, and the frightened gasps of the surrounding cadets began to sound incredibly distant, muffled, as if he were submerged beneath the dark waters of a deep lake.
Phantsin slumped forward, collapsing unconscious onto the still-hot, smoking stone of the plaza.
Far from the commotion, atop the tallest single structure in all of Valoria—on one of the majestic, windswept stone balconies of The Spire, the dormitory for the Aether faction—a solitary figure watched patiently as the instructors carried the unconscious boy away.
The figure lowered a delicate pair of silver binoculars enchanted with zooming magic, pulling them away from her eyes.
She looked like a girl no older than nineteen, though for her race, that meant very little. Her black jacket was immaculate, and her sapphire-blue tie perfectly matched the trim of her Aether faction uniform. Her pale, gleaming platinum hair was bone-straight, cascading elegantly over her shoulders.
But what truly stood out was her skin, as dark as polished obsidian. She had long, pointed ears and almond-shaped eyes that glowed with a faint, dangerous crimson light.
She was a Dark Elf, an exile from Silvanya. A dangerous rarity and a master in the arts of entropy and decay, capable of decomposing matter and life force with a mere thought. To her, the other races were inferior, and the academy students were nothing more than interesting insects to play with.
The girl had watched the entire duel from on high. She had seen the provocation. And most importantly, through her enchanted lenses, she had clearly seen the brief but terrifying flash of purple before the boy forced the clumsy crimson explosion. She had felt the fleeting signature of pure entropy caress the air.
"Fascinating," the girl murmured, in a silky, lethal voice, very different from her usual condescension.
The stray mongrel of Ignis has teeth. Very, very dark and twisted teeth.
She licked her lips, painted a deep, almost black red. She smiled, revealing a malicious, calculating, and utterly predatory grin.
"So much truly dark potential, miserably wasted playing the noble hero..." she whispered to the cold, high-altitude wind, drumming her sharp nails against the stone balustrade. "I wonder what would happen if someone shattered that annoying little mask of his. I wonder what would happen if someone tamed him."
With a fluid, arrogant sweep of her skirts, the dark elf turned around, retreating into the shadows of the tower.
In her brilliant and twisted mind, an intricate trap spun from venomous threads was already being woven—a trap into which, sooner or later, Phantsin Dawnfire would inevitably fall.