Cordelia ended the night's discussion with the authority that grief had transformed into protection. She ignored Aslam's protests regarding his inn and ordered him to occupy the luxury suite. For Marcus and Cordelia, keeping their brother under constant surveillance was the only way to prevent another disappearance. The sleep that followed was profound—a physical necessity of Kaelus's body.
At dawn, the cold air drifted through the marble windows. Marcus was already on his feet, adjusting the bandages on his hands. Cordelia, wrapped in a silk cloak, watched her youngest brother awaken. She harbored a persistent doubt regarding the safety of the training; Marcus was a war veteran, and Kaelus still seemed fragile under the morning light.
The three descended to the lower courtyard. The floor was composed of cold, damp limestone slabs. Marcus removed his tunic, displaying the dense musculature of a soldier. Aslam remained relaxed, his bare feet in contact with the stone.
— Marcus, you have a habit of exaggerating with new recruits — she said. — Kaelus is not a frontier soldier.
Marcus proposed they begin without the use of magic.
— He isn't a recruit, Lia. He's a competitor — Marcus stated, without taking his eyes off his brother. — Kael, in position. No formalities, Kael. Like we used to do at home.
Aslam merely nodded. He adjusted his stance, keeping his weight distributed equally across the soles of his feet.
Marcus advanced. The Commander delivered a straight punch aimed at the chest—a fast, heavy blow devoid of mana. Aslam rotated his torso to the left, allowing Marcus's fist to pass through the empty space. In the same instant, Aslam seized the fabric of Marcus's tunic at the shoulder and his extended wrist. He took a short step back and crouched, pulling Marcus's arm in a downward motion.
Marcus felt his balance vanish. The weight of his own advance was used as a lever. He flipped through the air and hit the limestone floor with a dry thud, executing a roll to gain distance. He stood up immediately. He didn't ask what had happened; in his mind, he analyzed the mechanics of the movement. Kaelus's weight hadn't changed, but his center of gravity seemed to be in constant flux.
— The technique is efficient — Marcus commented, closing his fists again. — But war is not merely physical.
The Commander initiated uniform strengthening. Expansion mana enveloped his skin, creating a layer of bluish density. The pressure in the courtyard shifted. Marcus delivered a roundhouse kick. The displacement of air was thunderous.
Aslam contracted his mana entirely within his system, coating nerves and tendons with an infinitesimally thin film. Marcus observed his brother and frowned. In his analysis, Kaelus wasn't trying to block. There was no energy leakage, no glow in the knuckles. He projected his energy to strike the trajectory where Aslam would dodge.
The sorcerer applied total release. His knees gave way. Tension abandoned Aslam's body from his ankles to his neck; balance was deliberately lost.
Void Dash.
He fell forward. Marcus's attack swept through the space where he had just been. The contact was brief and raw. The force accumulated in the fall exploded forward, launching him flush to the ground. The Void Dash occurred; Aslam vanished from Marcus's line of sight and reappeared behind him.
The air displaced by the sudden movement was still hissing when the veteran reacted. Foregoing a defensive rotation or even looking back, he detonated the mana accumulated in his epidermis.
— Expansion Pulse! — Marcus roared.
A bluish shockwave exploded from his back—a dome of pure pressure designed to hurl any pursuer meters away. The limestone beneath his feet cracked from the energy's rebound.
To most, mana is seen as a fuel or something solid, but in Aslam's understanding, it was a malleable fabric, sometimes so fluid it felt like a liquid. In the instant the wall of pressure hit him, he did not resist. Instead, he tuned his own internal frequency to the peak of Marcus's wave. It was a phenomenon called "Phase Nullification." By matching the oscillation of his brother's mana, Aslam transformed what should have been a solid concrete wall into a fluid current.
Before Marcus could readjust his guard, Aslam delivered three rapid taps. They weren't punches, but precise strikes with his fingertips against the nerves in the arm. The veteran abandoned technique for the brutality of survival. Marcus planted his left foot on the ground with such force that the limestone slab pulverized, and he swung his entire body in a devastating arc, using the arm Aslam had just neutralized.
— Ruin Impact!
The veteran's fist struck the ground, turning the courtyard into a tidal wave of stone fragments and dust. The turbulence, both physical and spiritual, caught the youth in mid-leap.
"It's over," Marcus thought, his expression neutral, almost sad. The mana of his connection ring vibrated in a deep tone, reaching the maximum level of connection.
— Domain: Collapse!
Marcus's command altered the very nature of the courtyard. That technique was a nightmare forged in the frontier wars, used to dismantle entire phalanxes and crush fortifications without firing a single arrow. In a three-meter radius, the Expansion mana stopped spreading and began to act like a gravitational magnet.
The energy dispersed in the environment—and even the vitality around it—was sucked into the center of the arena. The sudden vacuum popped in Cordelia's ears as oxygen was dragged toward the epicenter. At the center of this suction sphere, the Commander received the flow of the dragged mana; he condensed every particle of that energetic mass within his own body, serving as a vessel for an unstable force. Violent cracks echoed through the courtyard—roars reminiscent of a waking, furious dragon.
— What is he doing? — Cordelia murmured, her voice failing as she stepped back.
The sight of her brother enveloped in that devastating aura brought forth a buried memory for Cordelia. The limestone slabs of the courtyard—or what was left of them—gave way to the red, blood-saturated clay of the plains of Aethelgard.
Back then, the conflict against the Elven Conquests was reaching its peak. Although she boasted a strength superior to her brother's, nothing could have prepared her for what she witnessed in the center of the battlefield. She was fighting on the eastern wing, holding the frontline, while her brother's silhouette occupied the center of the valley, isolated and surrounded.
Even from a distance, the air around her transformed. The Commander seemed oblivious to the chaos. Facing a vanguard of three hundred elite mercenaries and magical beasts, he displayed profound boredom. That technique—a true requiem for any form of life—was a test of limits. At the peak of his mana connection ring, he dived into the absolute domain of Expansion.
The atmosphere began to be devoured.
The oxygen of the plain vanished into a single point with a voracity that imposed a deadly silence—an absolute vacuum that brought down enemy soldiers before the first impact. Deep roars of compressed mana echoed as if invisible dragons were colliding under the veteran's command. Cordelia saw the entire legion freeze; men and magical creatures clutched their throats, their faces turning purple as their lungs imploded from the sudden absence of air.
The Commander, maintaining the countenance of one performing a mundane task, clenched his right fist. The sound of the world splitting accompanied the movement. As he delivered a straight punch into the empty space before him, the charge accumulated inside his body flowed into a tunnel of light.
Matter simply ceased to exist in the trajectory of the blow. The runic armor of the mercenaries, the carapaces of the magical beasts, and every fiber of muscle in the strike's wake disintegrated instantly. The silence of annihilation replaced the screams; only the dry snap of atoms being forcibly separated could be heard. A cone of distorted transparency tore through the plain for twenty meters, erasing everything that occupied that space.
When the energy dissipated, an open wound remained in the earth. The soil, once covered by clay and bodies, had been transformed into a vitrified furrow. The extreme heat of the mana compression had melted the minerals, creating a scar of black glass that shimmered under the sun like a dark mirror. Of the three hundred lives that had surrounded the veteran seconds before, only a greyish mist remained, which the wind of the plain carried away.
The elven allies lowered their weapons for a few seconds. The warrior remained in the center of that crater of silence, wiping soot from a glove with the indifference of one performing a tedious task. He had utilized the pinnacle of his connection ring—the total domain of Expansion—merely to test if those magical creatures would offer any resistance to the vacuum. The boredom on his face was the most terrifying part of the scene.
It was on that day that the title "The Devourer of Horizons" echoed across continents.
Back in the present, the courtyard suddenly seemed much too small. Cordelia felt her heart hammer as she realized that same phenomenon was about to repeat itself, even on a controlled scale. The nature of the energy remained the same atrocity that had erased an army. And the youth before her—the brother she had always considered fragile—was tensioning every nerve to face this force without retreating a single step.