The main courtyard of Astrea Academy, once a monument of grandeur, had transformed into a wasteland of cratered earth, pulverized marble, and pools of fresh blood. Amidst the carnage, a magical storm whipped violently through the air, carrying stray embers across the dark, bruised sky above the student capital.

The field commander of the dark sect—the high-ranking officer clad in skull-etched ancient armor—dropped to one knee, breathing heavily. Though his legs trembled fiercely under the suffocating mental terror of Rian’s Awakened State, the survival instinct of a cold-blooded assassin forced him back onto his feet. He refused to die here, let alone at the hands of an eleven-year-old boy.

"Damn you, brat..." the sect commander hissed, his voice raspy and boiling over with desperate fury. He threw his arms wide, forcing the blood streaming from his wounds to cycle back into his own body through a forbidden blood-magic rite.

Whoosh!

In an instant, a torrent of toxic, pitch-black flames erupted from the commander's frame, swathing his figure in a destructive mantle of fire that scorched the earth around him. This was the dark sect’s ultimate technique—Abyssal Immolation—a sacrificial art that burned away the remainder of the user’s lifespan to multiply their combat prowess a thousandfold.

Rian stood ten paces away, his expression entirely devoid of fear. The obsidian energy wings resting at his back beat with calm, steady rhythms, refusing to bow before the pressure of the enemy's black fire.

"Die with me, you little freak!" the sect commander shrieked hysterically.

He vaulted forward at the speed of sound, heaving his massive scythe blazing with black fire, intending to cleave Rian cleanly in two with a single, death-dealing stroke.

To any ordinary mage, the assault was both unevadable and unblockable. Yet for Rian—bearing the battle-tested instincts of a cross-world mercenary fused with the advanced shadow-manipulation arts of the forbidden grimoire—every movement of his opponent read like an open book.

Too slow. Your cutting angle is far too wide across the left shoulder, Rian analyzed coldly in his mind.

Rian didn't dodge. He stepped forward with millimeter precision. His right hand channeled pure shadow energy, condensing it into a razor-sharp, short-bladed edge.

Clang!

A cataclysmic clash of magic detonated across the courtyard. Rian’s shadow blade slammed squarely into the commander's black-fire scythe. The collision of two opposing dark elements unspooled a massive shockwave of energy, carving out a gigantic crater that fractured the surrounding courtyard flagstones.

"Arghhh! How is it possible that you can withstand my power?!" the sect commander roared, his eyes bulging as he poured every ounce of his remaining black-fire core pressure into crushing Rian.

"Because your fighting style is built on arrogance and the slaughter of the weak," Rian replied, his voice flat yet chillingly sharp, "while mine is forged from death and endurance."

Rian leveraged the kinetic momentum of the deadlock. With a fluid, rotational shift of his body, he slid past the commander's blind spot, ducking beneath the reach of the scythe blade before slamming his left elbow upward with maximum force straight into the enemy's ribs.

Boom!

The ancient skull-etched armor fractured into a thousand shards. The sect commander catapulted backward, hacking up a thick mouthful of dark, blackish blood.

Before the man could regain his balance, Rian blurred through his own shadow, materializing directly in front of the commander in a fraction of a second.

Rian's motion was swift, clean, and lethal. No hesitation. No mercy.

With a single, straight thrust, Rian's fingers—coated in dense, hyper-concentrated shadow energy—pierced straight through the final tier-mana shield guarding the sect commander's chest.

Thwip!

The sound of tearing flesh and pulverized bone drowned out the surrounding battlefield silence. Rian's hand drove deep into the commander's chest cavity, shattering his ribcage entirely.

The dark sect commander froze, his eyes widening in horror as his breath stopped cold. His scythe slipped from numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone ground. He looked down, staring in disbelief at Rian's hand buried deep inside his chest.

With cold, emotionless precision, Rian curled his fingers around the commander's core and wrenched a pulsing, pitch-black energy cluster free—the commander's absolute source of life.

Rian leaned in close, whispering softly into the dying man's ear with a voice cold enough to freeze blood:

"This is for everyone you took."

With a sharp clench of his fist, Rian crushed the energy core to dust. The sect commander's body convulsed violently before dissolving into a cloud of black ash swept away by the midnight wind, bringing a definitive end to one of the dark sect's most dangerous commanders before the stunned, silent gaze of the academy's surviving inhabitants.