The Leader was gone. In his place stood a tear in the fabric of the world.

It looked like a wound. Jagged, bleeding purple light, and emitting a frequency that made the teeth ache.

From the black smoke pouring out of the rift, something began to pull itself through.

It was the Leader. Or what was left of him.

The Abyss hadn't accepted his sacrifice.

Instead it had consumed him and spat him back out.

He was now a towering mass of writhing flesh and Void energy, his glass skull cracked, leaking liquid darkness.

"HUNGRY..." the entity groaned. The voice vibrated from the air itself.

It lashed out. A tendril of black slime shot toward Elena.

"Shield!" Lyra screamed, appearing in front of the students.

She slashed her daggers, creating a wall of shadow and wind.

But the black slime didn't cut. It splashed against her shadow barrier and hissed, eating through the magic like acid through paper.

"It thing eats mana!" Lyra yelled, jumping back, grabbing Elena and Lukas by the collars.

"Physical attacks only! Leona!"

"I'm a little busy!" Leona roared from the other side of the room.

The Lion General was currently holding up a ten-ton slab of concrete ceiling that had collapsed during the fight with Elder Pyre.

Her muscles bulged against her armor as she physically kept the mountain from burying them alive.

"If I let go, we'll get squashed!" Leona gritted out.

The Void Entity turned its eyeless gaze toward Mozart.

"YOU... FALSE... KING..."

It lunged. It moved with terrifying speed, a tsunami of rot and corruption.

Mozart seeing this still didn't react..

He simply reached out with his right hand, the hand that held the authority of the Greedy King.

[King's Domain: Sovereign Halt]

This, was the domain he had been working on, although incomplete but it could at least play its role here

Instantly all movement was forbidden

The air density in the room increased by a thousand times.

The rushing Void Entity slammed into an invisible wall of pure atmospheric pressure, freezing in mid-air. The dust falling from the ceiling hung suspended, held by Mozart's will.

"Sloppy," Mozart critiqued. "

He looked at Alaric, who was standing near the entrance, shivering from the sheer weight of the pressure in the room.

"Ironheart," Mozart's voice cut through the silence.

Alaric looked up. "Professor?"

"I am holding this creature. I cannot attack while maintaining the domain,"

Mozart lied. In reality, he could crush it with a thought, but that wouldn't teach Alaric anything.

"You have a new heart," Mozart said, pointing to the Titan's Capacitor embedded in Alaric's chest.

"Test it."

Alaric looked at the frozen monster. Then he looked at his hands.

The iron sphere in his chest thumped—THUMP-THUMP.

It wasn't a heartbeat. It sounded like an engine spooling up. A low, mechanical whine began to emanate from his chest.

"Don't think about magic," Mozart instructed. "Just do it!."

Alaric took a breath.

He stepped forward. The floor cracked under his boot.

He pulled his fist back. The air around his knuckles distorted, shimmering like a heat haze, unable to move out of the way of the density he was generating.

He screamed.

"HAAH!"

He punched the frozen entity in the center of its chest.

Mozart snapped his fingers, releasing the Domain at the exact moment of impact.

CRACK-BOOM.

It sounded like a cannon firing in a library.

The Void Entity quickly atomized.

The kinetic force generated by the Titan's Capacitor hit the monster with the weight of a falling building. The black flesh liquefied. The glass skull shattered into dust.

The shockwave blew the remaining black smoke back into the rift.

CRACK.

A sickening sound followed immediately after.

"ARGH!" Alaric screamed, clutching his right arm.

His arm was purple.

His shoulder had dislocated from the recoil, and the skin on his knuckles had split open, revealing the metallic sheen of his bones beneath.

"Physics, Mr. Ironheart,"

"Newton's Third Law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you hit with the force of a cannon, your body must withstand the recoil."

Mozart said calmly, walking over although the students had no idea who Newton was.

Quickly the room began to shake violently. The sudden rift was destabilizing the foundation.

"Leona!" Mozart barked. "Drop the roof! We're leaving!"

"With pleasure!" Leona roared.

She hurled the massive concrete slab toward the rift.

It slammed into the opening, plugging the hole just as the rest of the ceiling began to give way.

"My legs..." Alaric gasped, the pain in his arm nearly blinding him. "I can't..."

"Move!" Elena shouted.

The High Elf Princess didn't freeze this time.

Despite the horror she had witnessed upstairs, survival instinct took over.

She grabbed Alaric's good arm. Green wind mana swirled around her boots.

[Wind Magic: Mass Haste]

"I've got you," Elena gritted out, her eyes fierce. She grabbed the unconscious Lukas with her other hand. "Run!"

They sprinted up the stairs, boosted by Elena's wind, just as the underground facility collapsed behind them, burying the secrets of the Twilight Association under a mountain of rock and earth.

…..............

[Location: Surface – The Jungle Clearing]

They burst out of the cave entrance, coughing and covered in dust.

BOOM.

Behind them, the ground imploded, sealing the lab forever.

Elena fell to her knees, gasping for air, but she didn't stop. She immediately crawled over to Alaric.

"Hold still," she commanded, her hands glowing with golden light. "Your humerus is fractured. If I don't set it now, it will heal wrong."

Alaric gritted his teeth as she poured healing mana into his arm.

HISS.

The moment the golden light touched Alaric's skin, it sizzled.

It sounded like water hitting a hot frying pan. The Titan's Capacitor in Alaric's chest pulsed aggressively, trying to reject the foreign mana.

"It... it's fighting me," Elena whispered, sweat beading on her forehead.

"Your bones... they aren't regular bone anymore. It feels like I'm trying to heal a sword."

She forced more mana into him.

Slowly, the sizzling stopped, and the skin knit back together, though the bones beneath remained cold and heavy.

On the other end, Mozart stood at the edge of the clearing, looking back at the ruins.

He held a small device in his hand, a Mana Resonance Meter.

It was sleek, black, and stamped with a small sigil on the back: Two Crossed Hammers.

Hephaestus had mailed it to him just last week, a prototype from the Dwarven labs.

He scanned the sealed rift. The readings were catastrophic.

"Leona," Mozart whispered.

The Lion General walked over, her demeanor serious.

"What is it, Young Lord?"

Mozart showed her the screen.

"That wasn't a regular summoned gate," Mozart said quietly. "The Leader didn't open it. He just widened a crack that was already there."

Leona's eyes narrowed. "A natural fracture? Here?"

"The barrier between dimensions is thinning," Mozart murmured.

"In the original story, the Abyss Invasion began in three years. We had time to prepare. We had time to play school."

He crushed the meter in his hand.

"The timeline has accelerated. The Void concentration is already at 15%."

"What does that mean?" Lyra asked, joining them, wiping purple blood from her daggers.

Mozart turned to his partners. The silver mask glinted in the purple jungle light.

"It means we don't have time" Mozart said

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