The deafening roar of the corrupted winds drowned out the shouts of the students behind him.
As Ed sprinted toward the towering pillar of dark mana, the golden interface of the System flashed in his peripheral vision, momentarily dilating his perception of time.
[System Warning: Host’s current physical parameters have a 99.8% mortality rate against a High-Ranking Spirit.
Proceeding will result in immediate death.] [Emergency Support Mechanism Activated!] [To ensure Host survival, the System allows the temporary, single-use materialization of ONE advanced technique from the assimilated template.]
Ed didn’t slow his pace as his mind rapidly scrolled through the vast, newly unlocked mental list of Arthur Leywin’s arsenal.
There are dozens of techniques here, Ed thought coldly, discarding them one by one.
Advanced elemental spells?
No, they will just be devoured by the dark domain.
Burst Step?
No, the recoil would instantly shatter my fragile legs.
I need an absolute, overwhelming physiological enhancement.
He mentally locked his choice, keeping it dormant.
[Asset selected.
Held in Standby Mode.
Duration: 3 minutes upon activation.] [System Note: Warning.
Activating this asset will place a severe burden on your body.
Use only at the final moment.]
He breached the doors of the academy’s northern practice facility, plunging into the suffocating darkness.
Back in the courtyard, the scene was one of furious disbelief.
“That arrogant bastard!” Taylee McLore shouted, gripping his practice sword tightly, his face twisted in frustration.
“We don’t even know the situation inside, and he just charges in?
He’s going to put everyone else at risk!”
“H-He’s right,” stammered Clevius, a gloomy first-year swordsman, clutching his scabbard.
“We should just wait for the professors…
we’re all going to die if we go in there…”
“Stop whining, Clevius,” sighed Elvira, the alchemy department prodigy, casually adjusting a belt full of explosive vials.
Beside Taylee, his childhood friend Aila gripped her staff nervously, her eyes locked on the dark pillar.
Princess Penia stepped forward, her royal authority cutting through the panic.
“We cannot wait for the professors.
If that pillar expands, the entire academy is compromised,” Penia commanded.
“Taylee, Aila, Elvira, Ziggs, and Clevius.
You are the vanguard.
We advance into the facility.
Our primary objective is to subdue the anomaly and secure the hostages.”
Lortelle Kehelland silently slipped into the back of the formation.
Her merchant instincts screamed that she needed to witness exactly what Ed Rothtaylor was about to do.
The vanguard team charged into the dark corridors, bracing themselves for a brutal battle.
But what they found left them entirely speechless.
There was no swarm waiting to ambush them.
Instead, the hallway was a macabre gallery of silent destruction.
A massive, mutated earth golem lay crumbled against the wall.
Ziggs knelt beside it, his eyes wide.
“It wasn’t shattered by brute force,” Ziggs murmured.
“It was cleanly bisected.
A single, surgical strike through the knee joint.”
Taylee stared at the bisected golem, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth ground together.
“How?
He’s the trash of the academy.
He barely has any mana capacity!
How could he possibly do this?”
Princess Penia touched a clean cut on the stone wall. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The precision was horrifying.
It wasn’t the erratic swinging of a desperate student; it was the absolute, unyielding discipline of a master executioner.
Deeper in the facility, Ed was entirely surrounded.
Three corrupted wind spirits lunged at him from the shadows.
Ed didn’t use magic.
Instead, his assimilated instincts tapped into a primal, terrifying weapon from King Grey’s past life: Bloodlust.
A suffocating, oppressive wave of pure killer intent exploded from Ed’s body.
The sheer psychological weight hit the lesser spirits like a physical wall, causing their erratic movements to freeze for a fraction of a second.
That was all Ed needed.
He sidestepped, moving with flawless martial efficiency, and drove his wind-coated broadsword in a tight arc, decapitating all three spirits simultaneously.
He didn’t break his momentum, moving deeper into the facility until the temperature suddenly skyrocketed.
Blocking the entrance to the main hall was Tarkan, Janica’s high-tier fire spirit.
However, corrupted by the dark mana, Tarkan had mutated into a massive, heavily scaled fire dragon.
The beast roared, inhaling deeply, and unleashed a devastating torrent of flames.
Ed immediately channeled wind mana to his legs, diving behind a thick stone pillar as the fire melted the floor where he had just been standing.
The flames continued, violently blasting through a nearby storage room wall.
Suddenly, the roaring of the fire was interrupted by an annoyed, sleepy groan.
The smoke cleared to reveal Lucy Mayrill.
The white-haired archmage was sitting in the rubble of what used to be a comfortable pile of training mats.
Her oversized hat was slightly singed.
She rubbed her eyes, looking extremely irritated.
“I was sleeping,” Lucy muttered.
She pointed a single finger at the massive fire dragon.
“Divine Punishment.”
A blinding, ear-splitting pillar of high-tier lightning magic erupted from her fingertip.
The massive bolt slammed into Tarkan’s chest, completely obliterating the dragon’s thick, corrupted fire scales and sending the beast crashing into the wall, stunned and defenseless.
Ed’s pragmatic instincts didn’t waste a millisecond.
Before Tarkan could recover, Ed launched himself into the air, gathered a dense, vibrating layer of wind mana around his stolen blade, and brought it down like a guillotine, cleanly severing the fire dragon’s head.
The massive spirit dissolved into embers.
Ed landed smoothly, exhaling a sharp breath.
He looked over at Lucy.
The archmage yawned, conjuring a spherical, semi-translucent mana barrier around herself.
She curled up inside it like a cat finding a sunbeam.
“You owe me three bags of dried meat for waking me up, blonde guy,” she mumbled, instantly falling back asleep inside her impenetrable bubble.
Ed merely nodded.
A fair trade.
He stepped over the ashes and kicked open the heavy double doors to the main summoning hall.
At the center of the dark room, Janica Faelover was suspended mid-air, bound by thick chains of black mana.
Floating above her was Belopher, the Dark Spirit.
Belopher was in a panic.
Its corrupted army had been slaughtered.
In a desperate attempt to survive, the dark spirit forced its tendrils deeper into Janica’s resonance, using her life force as a catalyst to tear a massive spatial rift above them.
From the terrifying abyss of the rift, a colossal, rotting hand began to push through.
It was the right arm of Glaskan, a Calamity-class entity trying to force its way into the physical plane.
An invisible, crushing gravity instantly fell upon the room.
The stone floor cracked under Ed’s feet.
The Calamity’s pressure was suffocating.
“System,” Ed commanded mentally, his eyes cold and unwavering.
“Activate it.”
[Activating Asset: Assimilate Beast Will – Sylvia’s Dragon Will (Phase 1).] Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The dark, suffocating pressure in the room suddenly shattered.
From Ed’s chest, a majestic, blinding golden light erupted.
His ash-blonde hair rapidly lengthened, turning a pure, luminescent white.
His dead eyes shifted into a piercing, sovereign lavender.
Glowing golden runes etched themselves across his skin.
Realmheart.
Out in the hallway, inside her magical bubble, Lucy Mayrill’s eyes snapped wide open.
The sheer density and ancient purity of the aura radiating from the main hall bypassed standard mana logic.
It felt like standing before a primordial god.
She immediately dispersed her barrier, standing up and rushing to the doorway, her sleepy demeanor completely replaced by intense, wide-eyed fascination.
Inside the hall, the absolute authority of the dragon will surged through Ed, granting him temporary access to Deviant magic.
Ed raised his right hand.
Absolute Zero.
The temperature dropped instantly.
A localized blast of pure ice magic struck the black chains binding Janica, freezing them brittle before they shattered completely.
Janica fell, landing safely on a cushion of conjured frost.
Seeing its hostage lost, Belopher shrieked and commanded Glaskan’s colossal arm to crush the human.
The rotting, Calamity-class hand descended like a falling mountain.
Ed didn’t retreat.
He propelled himself forward with a burst of wind, dodging the massive palm as it crashed into the stone floor, shaking the entire academy.
Using the arm as a ramp, Ed sprinted up the rotting flesh, his target locked entirely on Belopher, who was hovering near the ceiling, anchoring the summoning circle.
His lavender eyes glowed fiercely.
He didn’t chant.
He simply willed the Deviant magic to manifest.
A torrential storm of pure, crackling blue lightning gathered around his chipped blade.
Ed let out a focused breath as he swung his sword in a devastating arc, unleashing a point-blank Lightning Surge.
The overwhelming blast of electricity incinerated Belopher instantly.
The lightning didn’t stop there; it crashed directly into the massive black summoning circle etched into the ceiling, shattering the magical formula into millions of glowing fragments.
With its anchor destroyed, the spatial laws of the world violently reasserted themselves.
Glaskan let out a cosmic, world-shaking roar of frustration from the other side of the void as its arm was forcibly sucked back into the abyss.
The spatial rift snapped shut, leaving behind nothing but the smell of ozone.
The catastrophic strain of the beast will finally demanded its toll.
The golden runes vanished.
His hair turned back to ash-blonde.
Ed landed on his feet, though his legs trembled violently.
He coughed, a thin line of blood trickling down his chin.
His muscles ached, and his core throbbed in protest, but his King Grey persona refused to fall.
He wiped the blood from his mouth, maintaining his stoic, dignified posture.
He calmly walked over to the frost cradle and knelt beside Janica, checking her pulse.
She was exhausted, but she was breathing steadily.
Just as he stood back up, the vanguard team—Penia, Taylee, Ziggs, and Lortelle—burst into the corridor.
They skidded to a halt at the entrance of the main hall.
Standing near the doorway was Lucy Mayrill, completely awake, staring at Ed with a profound, unblinking intensity.
And standing in the center of the ruined, scorched room, battered but standing tall like a sovereign over his conquered domain, was Ed Rothtaylor.
The ‘trash’ of the academy had just single-handedly defeated a High Spirit and forced a Calamity back into the abyss.
Lortelle, watching from the back of the group, stared at the composed, bloodied boy.
Her lips curled into a very, very dangerous smile.
Chapter 9: The Dragon’s Authority and the Shattered Abyss