The wind screamed.

It wasn't the gentle kind that whispered through valleys or tugged playfully at cloaks. This wind howled, raw and violent, tearing across the peak of the highest mountain on the continent like it wanted to peel the world open and see what bled.

I stood at the summit anyway.

Far from the Human Empire.

Far from kingdoms and borders and treaties that pretended order still existed.

At the edge of the continent.

At the edge of sense.

Calibirus.

The Death Zone.

Even among death zones, this place was infamous. Not because of monsters alone, but because reality itself was unstable here. Energy anomalies erupted daily, sometimes hourly, tearing holes in the laws that governed mana, dualflow, and vespera alike.

Vespera storms rolled across this land like living gods.

Not the pale, diluted mana tempests seen near imperial borders. Not the kind academies used as training grounds.

These storms were thousands of times stronger.

Black-violet cyclones of raw vespera, shredding mountains into dust, warping gravity, collapsing time into jagged, overlapping shards. A single storm could erase an army, a city, or a bloodline without ever touching them directly.

And yet—

Here.

This was where I had felt him.

A sliver.

So faint I almost dismissed it as wishful thinking.

Sebastian's aura.

The last trace of it on the entire world.

The moment I sensed it, I didn't hesitate.

I killed space.

Again. And again. And again.

Thousands of miles vanished with every step. Distance folded inward like pages of a book being flipped too fast to read. Mountains became suggestions. Rivers became interruptions.

I traveled for over a day like that.

Constantly.

Relentlessly.

By the time I arrived, even my body, this body, felt the strain. Killing space was not effortless, not even for me. Each use tore at the fabric of reality, and reality resented it.

But I had arrived.

And Calibirus welcomed me with blood.

The first thing that attacked me wasn't subtle.

The ground exploded.

Rock and bone erupted upward as something massive tore itself free from beneath the mountain's spine. The air shook. The peak groaned, cracking under the sudden shift in weight.

A minotaur emerged.

Not the crude beasts of myths or lower zones. This one was colossal, easily thirty meters tall, its body a grotesque fusion of muscle, stone, and plated bone. Its horns curved like scythes, each etched with glowing runes that pulsed with dualflow. Its eyes burned a dull crimson, intelligence flickering behind the rage.

Every step it took fractured the mountain.

It roared.

The sound carried authority.

A challenge.

I didn't answer.

I stepped forward.

It swung a fist the size of a siege tower, air detonating around it from sheer mass and speed. I ducked beneath it, the shockwave tearing half the peak away behind me, then drove mana straight up through its torso.

Not vespera.

Just mana.

Pure.

Condensed.

Ruthless.

The blast punched a hole through its chest, but the creature barely slowed. Dualflow surged, reconstructing muscle and bone mid-motion as it backhanded me across the slope.

I slid for kilometers, carving a trench through rock before stopping myself.

I sighed.

"So dramatic," I muttered.

The second monster arrived before the first finished turning.

A manticore dropped from the sky.

Its wings were vast, membranes reinforced with crystalized vespera veins that crackled with energy. Its body was leonine, sleek and lethal, but its tail was the true horror, a segmented whip of barbed bone, each segment dripping with corrosive shadow.

Its humanlike face smiled.

That alone told me enough.

SS-rank.

Intelligent.

Predatory.

It screamed, not a roar, but a psychic shriek that stabbed directly into the mind, attempting to fracture thought itself. The minotaur roared in response, the two monsters briefly acknowledging each other before focusing back on me.

I closed my eyes.

And exhaled.

Fine.

I fought them for a full day.

Not because I had to.

But because I chose to.

I did not draw Vespera.

Not once.

I relied on mana and dualflow alone, weaving death-adjacent principles without crossing the final line. Every strike was measured. Every dodge precise.

The minotaur fell first.

I severed its connection to dualflow, collapsed its core, and let its own weight crush it as the mountain gave way beneath its corpse.

The manticore was smarter.

It adapted.

Used the terrain.

The storms.

Tried to bait me into releasing Vespera.

I refused.

When it finally died, impaled through the skull by a blade of condensed space, its body disintegrated midair, scattering into glowing ash that the wind carried away screaming.

Another day passed.

Only then did I stand alone again.

The mountain range around me was… gone.

Erased.

Reduced to jagged stumps and floating debris suspended in warped gravity fields. The sky above was bruised black, vespera clouds churning, lightning flickering within them like veins of living darkness.

I stood at the highest remaining point.

And stared out at the sea.

This was it.

The edge.

Where the continent bled into the endless ocean, where maps stopped pretending they understood what lay beyond.

This was where Sebastian's aura ended.

Vanished.

Cut cleanly.

I raised my hands.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

The sky split.

Not metaphorically.

Reality tore open above me like rotten cloth, black clouds pouring through the wound, thunder cracking so violently the sound arrived before the lightning. A bolt of black lightning fell directly onto me.

The ground ceased to exist.

Not shattered.

Not broken.

Erased.

When the light faded, Belle Ardent was gone.

What stood in her place was death given form.

Black armor encased my body, seamless and organic, as if grown rather than forged. It absorbed light rather than reflecting it, edges too sharp, too precise, like they were cutting the air simply by existing.

My blindfold remained.

Some things did not change.

In my right hand rested a sword darker than darkness itself, a blade that devoured meaning, that reduced concepts to silence. In my left, I held its sheath, forged from the same impossible material, etched with sigils older than written language.

I gripped them tighter.

The sky recoiled.

Black lightning tore through the clouds again, striking around me, each impact obliterating kilometers of land. The mountain range finally gave up what little structure it had left, collapsing into a graveyard of floating stone and molten scars.

There was no sunlight.

Not because clouds blocked it.

But because the sun refused to look at me.

This was who I was when I stopped pretending.

Not a vice-principal.

Not a teacher.

Not a guide.

I am the Reaper of Humanity.

And I knew...

I wasn't alone.

The feeling had been there since the first step onto Calibirus.

A presence.

Watching.

Waiting.

Patient.

I shifted my weight slightly, armor humming in response.

Another flash of black lightning split the sky.

And someone stood behind me.

I didn't turn.

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