The sea churned as the battle of legends began.
Renard blinked across crashing waves, space bending under his every step. Scarlett towered on water pillars, her manifestation flooding the battlefield with impossible force.
While Renard and Scarlett used their affinities to stand in the sea, Adrian started floating above.
Not on stone, not on conjured platforms. Gravity itself bent under his command, holding him aloft as if the ocean feared to touch him.
Mist curled around his form as Temporal Veil shimred. To the defenders below, he blurred into streaks of motion, three tis faster than even the fastest A-rank.
The Source blade in his hand elongated, unraveling into a whip of light. With a single crack, it coiled around the Kraken's writhing limbs and severed them clean.
Tentacles thicker than ships splashed into the sea. The monster reeled, shrieking as seawater boiled around its wound.
"Impossible," Scarlett breathed, her water walls faltering for a heartbeat. "He's matching A-rank speed."
Renard's eyes narrowed as he watched Adrian move. "That's not matching. That's surpassing."
Scarlett did not pause. Her manifestation surged, raising entire walls of the ocean and slamming them down like mountains collapsing.
And as Adrian watched, sothing stirred. The Source whispered.
Not from the volus. Not from recorded symbols. From her. From the weight of decades of battle etched into every stroke of her water.
The realization hit him. Volus were really just fragnts, incomplete. Affinities could reach further if only they dared to feel beyond what was written.
Seeing her spell, his mind turned back to his first true creation. [Starbreaker]
Born from the fusion of his and his comrades' affinity concepts, it had been the proof of his path. A spell that had grown with him, evolving as his understanding deepened.
But now… he had so much more. The knowledge of Volu III. The echoes of countless duels.
Adrian's thoughts snapped into clarity. Multiple concepts layered, fused, and expanded into Starbreaker's spell structure.
Not just gravity. Not just fla, or frost. Space, life, death, even the echoes of ti itself, everything he had absorbed from Volu Three.
They rged, spiraled, and coalesced until the spell demanded sothing more to activate other than gravity mana like before.
The Source.
He felt it with chilling certainty, this new Starbreaker could not exist on elental mana alone. It required Source mana. The spell reached closer to the truth.
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He breathed once. Then, fed Source mana into the construct.
The mist around him tightened, compressing as he poured himself into the spell.
Reality cracked.
The sea boiled beneath him, waves churning to steam. Space warped, hairline fractures spreading through the horizon.
A sphere of white-grey light condensed between his hands, pulsing with the weight of every concept. It felt as if he held the bones of reality itself.
The Kraken froze. For the first ti in its monstrous existence, its instincts scread fear.
"What is that?" Renard's voice cracked as space itself trembled around Adrian.
Scarlett's manifestation wavered, her water recoiling from the sphere's presence.
The abyssal leviathan's darkness writhed in agitation. Even the frost jormungandr ceased its advance, recognizing a predator.
Adrian cast it.
The star fell.
The Starbreaker streaked across the ocean like the judgnt of a god.
The kraken, vast enough to blot warships from sight, had no ti to react. The spell's birth and release had been re heartbeats.
With Temporal Veil wrapped tight, heartbeats were all Adrian needed.
The monster felt it before it struck. Every affinity scread inside its body. fire, frost, shadow, poison, sound, light, water. Its own essence reflected within the spell, as though the universe itself had turned against it.
Then impact.
No explosion. No clash. The spell did not strike, it erased.
Half the kraken's body vanished in an instant, devoured by an attack that acknowledged no defenses, no scales, no pride. Only absence remained where tonnes of flesh had been.
The battlefield froze.
The ocean fell silent, waves lapping against nothing where a titan had thrashed monts before.
Scarlett, Renard, and even the other two A-rank beasts all stared at the boy hovering above the sea, haloed in fractured light.
On the walls, defenders gasped, so sinking to their knees. Their minds struggled to reconcile what they had witnessed.
"By the Sentinel's light..." one whispered.
And from the sky, the arriving transports slowed. Reinforcents sent by Kael hung motionless, their passengers silenced.
Among them, Selena Valcrest stood at the viewing deck, her rune-sight locked on Adrian. Golden tattoos flickered erratically across her skin.
She, too, was struck wordless.
A quiet voice broke the silence.
"Half my mana... for that one spell." His lips curved faintly. "Not bad."
The words struck harder than the spell itself. For sothing of this scale, to cost only half his reserves?
How much mana did he truly have?
Scarlett's lips parted in disbelief, then curled into a laugh. She had seen S-rankers pour their entire lifeblood into one such strike.
But if Adrian could conjure it with half of his mana... then perhaps humanity had just been handed its greatest weapon.
In the transport ship hovering miles away, Selena's hands trembled against the railing.
"That wasn't... that couldn't have been Echo," she breathed. "No copied spell creates new concepts."
Her golden tattoos pulsed frantically, trying to decipher what she'd witnessed.
Scarlett broke first on the battlefield. She laughed, fierce and wild, her manifestation boiling the sea higher.
"Good! Then let's finish this!"
She raised her hand, and water surged one last ti. The crippled kraken never had the chance to resist.
Her torrent tore through what remained, and the titan died screaming.
The two surviving A-ranks felt it, not battle, but doom. The abyssal leviathan's darkness writhed in terror.
The frost jormungandr's eyes widened with sothing it had never known.
With a final, shuddering glance at the figure in the sky, they turned and fled into the deep sea.
For all their cunning, their monstrous willpower, even they knew when they faced sothing beyond their ability.
The fortress walls shook with Defenders' cheers. Victory cries echoed across the sea.
The tide turned, not from numbers or formations, but from the impossible spell of a single youth.
And far above, Adrian Blackwood hovered, his first Source Spell burning in the mory of all who saw it.
The birth of a Source Spell would be registered in history.
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