The darkness that had just swallowed Sector C of the Academy was no mere technical incident.
It was a brutal siphoning of all the surrounding energy.
At the center of the paved courtyard, the azure sphere maintained by Goman Arashi flickered under the strain, struggling to repel the sudden depletion of air that was suffocating the younger students.
Beneath the peripheral galleries, the space itself seemed to distort.
Four figures concealed beneath heavy cloaks emerged from the darkness.
The man at the front carried a black polyhedron with a crimson core that pulsed like a living organ.
With every step he took, the heat rose another degree while the oxygen steadily abandoned the area.
“General alert!” Professor Viktor Kael shouted as he stepped in front of the disorganized rows of students.
His Kinetic Acceleration Spirit ignited his forearms with a brilliant golden glow.
Beside him, Professor Elara Vance struck the stone floor with her command staff, raising thick partitions of crystalline light.
Three sentries in tactical gear immediately deployed, their rifles loaded with Spirit energy and aimed at the attackers.
“You are illegally entering an area protected by the Commission!” Kael warned in a martial tone.
The stranger did not stop.
In a deep, metallic voice, he issued his orders without giving the teachers so much as a glance: “Roen Silas, clear the main axis.
Albert Thorne, break that air dome.
Kazuki Endo, scatter the fugitives.” Viktor Kael refused to let him take the initiative.
Propelled by a lightning-fast impulse, the instructor crossed the courtyard in a flash, concentrating enough brute force to tear through a reinforced door as he drove straight toward the intruder’s face.
The strike never reached its target.
The man simply raised his crimson device.
The surrounding space violently contracted.
Kael’s golden aura was instantly sucked into the artifact, absorbed like a drop of water falling onto a burning ember.
The instructor crashed against an invisible barrier.
In the same breath, Elara’s luminous defenses shattered into glittering dust, and an abnormal gravitational force descended over a ten-square-meter area.
The guards and the two elite professors were slammed into the ground by crushing pressure, unable to make the slightest movement.
Panic immediately spread through the stands.
Seeing their mentors swept aside in a fraction of a second, the aspirants scattered.
Kazuki, whose fluid silhouette blended into the air currents, drew a slender blade and lunged toward Kaïs and Tariq’s position.
Kaïs reacted instinctively, releasing a burst of compressed air that knocked the swordsman’s trajectory off course, while Tariq, stepping backward, made a spike of shadow erupt from the ground to block the thrust in a shower of sparks.
Farther away, the battle was taking on the appearance of a storm.
Albert Thorne fired powerful jets of pressurized water at Goman’s dome.
Although part of the liquid evaporated under the aridity caused by the red receiver, the heir of the Arashi clan gritted his teeth, forced to draw upon his last reserves to maintain his atmospheric barrier against the repeated assaults.
Hidden on the elevated technical walkway, Raad and Soura assessed the situation without moving.
“We’re not going down there yet,” Raad muttered, his eyes fixed on the attackers’ leader.
“That device absorbs all the surrounding Spirit.
If we attack him head-on, he’ll drain us of our strength before we can even reach him.” “Then we wait for the slightest opening,” Soura replied, his expression hardened.
Below them, the pavement trembled.
The giant known as Roen Silas charged forward with heavy steps.
His skin turned dark gray, taking on the hardness of tempered steel armor as he rushed straight toward the isolated students.
Tariq attempted to reposition himself after dodging Kazuki’s blade, but another figure cut across his path: Issa Kaneshiro.
His black braids swayed in the wind as he firmly planted his feet.
“Deal with the swordsman, Tariq,” Issa ordered with surgical clarity.
“I’ll take this one.” Roen came charging at full speed like a demolition ram, bringing his metallic mass down toward the young man.
Issa did not flinch.
In his mind, the screams and chaos of the courtyard faded away, leaving only pure calculation.
His weight is around one hundred and thirty kilos, he’s moving at fifteen meters per second, and his trajectory follows a descending vertical axis.
I’ve seen plenty of simple-minded guys like him.
A sharp click rang out.
Issa disappeared.
In his exact position, a heavy fragment of a broken marble column materialized.
Roen’s reinforced fist pulverized the block head-on, but the material’s resistance brought his momentum to an abrupt halt.
Reappearing three meters away, Issa caught his breath, already feeling his nervous system overheating after the instantaneous permutation.
“You filthy vermin!” the colossus roared as he turned around in one motion.
Roen resumed his charge.
Issa methodically retreated, luring him toward the debris-strewn section.
Kaïs’s detonations and Albert’s burning projectiles saturated the area, making it increasingly difficult to judge trajectories.
A stabbing pain shot through Issa’s temples, and a thin trickle of blood ran from his right nostril.
The colossus planted his foot on the base of a statue and leapt, attempting to crush the student beneath the weight of his landing.
If I move the concrete mass onto the ledge, it’ll be fatal for him.
But the weight compatibility isn’t right.
I’m going to take a serious hit from this one.
But I have no choice.
Issa raised a trembling palm, the blood vessels in his forehead bulging from the strain.
Total Permutation.
Issa rolled to the side, escaping the impact trajectory.
At the exact same moment, the enormous concrete block appeared in midair, directly beneath the attacker’s descending fist.
The impact was tremendous.
Unable to slow his own force, amplified by the fall, Roen slammed into the mass head-on.
His metallic carapace shattered under the backlash, and his limp body crashed heavily onto the pavement, defeated by his own momentum.
Issa tried to get back on his feet, but his balance failed him.
He dropped to his knees, his vision blurred by extreme cerebral exhaustion.
Rapid footsteps approached across the dusty ground.
Leila Amrani knelt beside him.
Without wasting time on formalities, she placed her hands, bathed in a pale green glow, directly against the injured boy’s neck.
“Don’t move,” she ordered, keeping a vigilant eye on the ongoing battles while regulating the boy’s blood circulation.
“I need to reduce the pressure inside your skull immediately, or your blood vessels will rupture.” Issa let his forehead rest, too dazed to refuse the treatment.
“You’re…
the girl from earlier,” he murmured painfully.
“The one who was with that guy with those explosions…” The respite did not last.
At the other end of the path, the man carrying the crimson device slowly turned his head in their direction.
On the ground, Viktor Kael painfully raised his eyes toward the opponent who had just neutralized the Academy’s defenses without breaking a drop of sweat.
“This fighting style…
reminds me of something,” the wounded professor whispered.
“The alert in the city was nothing more than a decoy to draw our forces away…” In the distance, the masked leader’s gaze lingered on the pair formed by Issa and Leila.
Analyzing the young woman’s ability with detached interest, he noted the biological signature of her healing: a still-raw manifestation of the Nourishment Spirit, comparable to the seeds found within basic Suppurations, but far too underdeveloped to represent an immediate threat.
The masked leader’s gaze lingered for a moment on the biological signature of Leila’s healing before he turned his eyes away and continued walking.