Shock hit first; to Hazel, everything happened at once.

Adelaide’s silhouette split into layered states, like petals overlapped in wind.

A bottle hanging midair burst into glass rain.

Dozens—then hundreds—of razor syllables screamed in chorus, like wires thrummed tight.

Mana in the air thrummed, a trembling harmony like a struck gong.

A circle nearly a hundred meters bloomed from the void, a mandala unfurling.

The vast room’s walls were carpeted in roses and thorns in a blink, a garden turned cage.

All omens arrived in the same heartbeat.

Her mind lagged; Hazel couldn’t even react.

Every mote of mana sang with summoned joy, dancing like fireflies.

Their chorus became a pure mana storm that swept the cavernous space, floodwater rushing to fill every corner.

What happened?

Panic rose; Hazel forced her eyes open in the runaway gale.

A transparent dome encased her, a bubble of cold glass.

Through it, she saw Adelaide frozen mid-motion, a statue within a storm.

Her hand was raised high; a pale-violet veil lifted by the tempest.

Underneath, a face ghost-pale yet bliss-drunk, like moonlight tasting wine.

Then, a snap, a spark in dry grass.

“rúcina - súlë——”

Soul Detonation—

Along with Adelaide’s syllables came countless silent shrieks, like knives plucked on the soul’s string.

It wasn’t sound through eardrums; it was a resonance from the heart.

Hazel had felt something similar near the Ghoul Warden Golem’s head.

This was a hundredfold stronger, oppression turned to a physical shockwave, a hammer falling on water.

Even with the ward’s protection, even if the shrieks didn’t target Hazel, her breath jammed, lungs bound in wire.

Outside, the Ghoul Warden Golem wasn’t so lucky.

Its counter-array flared for a heartbeat, then compressed beneath its skin, ink pressed thin.

As the array shrank, invisible impact stripped its hide; muscle melted like ice.

In a blink, only bone and the head still held, bare branches in winter.

In that moment, Hazel saw fear tint a featureless face, a shadow on blank snow.

Pitch-black liquid poured from its head, shrouding bone as makeshift muscle, tar for sinew.

A conglomerate of corpses, a pinnacle of wicked craft—the Ghoul Warden was afraid.

It wanted to flee; the thought blew away like ash on wind.

“merillë vanda——”

Rose Prison—

Adelaide’s voice rang, and every rosevine on the walls woke like serpents.

They surged and grew, spears of green lancing the golem’s mountain bulk, pinning it fast.

“Kneel.”

It wasn’t a spell, just a command.

The golem’s brute strength failed; vine-cords yanked it down like a toy, knees to stone.

Thorned brambles became a beast’s jaws, roaring as they dove for its crown.

They bit and tore, peeling the head layer by layer like an onion, white rings exposed to air.

Meanwhile, the hundred-meter array behind Adelaide began to rotate, tightening with each turn, a wheel closing its petals.

By the time the thorn-beast gnawed the head to nothing and bared the soul crystal, the array had shrunk to a violet mote in Adelaide’s hand.

Compared to the last two spells, the violet mote looked plain, a seed instead of a storm.

Yet Adelaide’s cheeks flushed with the stain of heavy mana, like wine blooming under the skin.

“Starte nas (Tarkus Point-Pin)——”

With a high, rasping chant, a blood-red bowstring formed in Adelaide’s hands.

The mote became an arrow; it flew, plain as rain, at the soul crystal.

In that instant, the counter-array on the crystal blazed at full force.

Like most defenses, its strength rose as its radius fell; the smaller the circle, the fiercer the wall.

On a soul crystal that small, it peaked exponentially; even the Rose Prison’s teeth couldn’t bite through.

But before that arrow, it didn’t hold for half a second, paper before flame.

Next, a mass of mana exploded at the point of contact, washing Hazel’s sight to white, snow-blind and ringing.

When the white noise cleared and Hazel opened her eyes again, she saw the moon, a silver coin in ink.

It wasn’t a metaphor or flourish; Hazel truly saw the moon.

She thought her eyes were wrong; she rubbed them and looked again.

There it hung in the night sky, half full, a lamp that matched the time she’d been underground.

If the great hole overhead wasn’t a hallucination, only one thing remained, the sky torn like cloth.

The aftershock of Adelaide’s single shot had punched through hundreds of meters of earth and speared the surface.

...

Hazel turned.

Adelaide still stood where she was, one hand to her chest, breath shallow, like a flower after storm.

Only then did Hazel learn the answer to her earlier question, old doubts cracking like shells.

At first she’d been misled by tales that demonized Blood Mages, thinking Adelaide’s chantless casting might be common among them.

Now she knew that was impossible.

Soul Detonation, Rose Prison, Tarkus Point-Pin—three legion-class spells unleashed together.

That alone stepped beyond Hazel’s idea of what a mage could be, beyond the horizon of the known.

Legion-class means spells vast in power and reach, the kind that tilt a battlefield like a tide.

The price matches the might: offerings far beyond normal spells.

Gathering materials can take months; inscribing arrays can take years, winter after winter.

In other words, they’re “legion-class” because only legion-level resources can bring them forth, iron and grain and wagons of will.

Harder than those external costs is the casting itself, threading a needle in a storm.

Before Adelaide arrived, Skela had been chanting about an hour.

That was for Holy Radiance, the shortest of legion-class spells; most others take even longer, sand slow in the hourglass.

Sure, a caster can try to speed the chant, but it backfires; the world’s response is limited.

Just as Mira can’t quicken her casting with the Time Domain, most mages face fixed time for legion-class magic, a river that won’t run faster for a shout.

The one exception is dragons.

At the apex of magic, their ancient speech brushes the world’s root.

No arrays—just opening their jaws to resonate with the air’s magic.

Through dragonbreath they can release legion-class spells fast; that’s their terror, mountains speaking and storms answering.

Yet even dragons can’t do what Hazel just saw—three legion-class spells loosed in a single instant, three comets at once.

Hazel swallowed; Adelaide looked her way, a moonblade of a gaze.

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?”

Her voice carried a touch of fatigue, but the familiar tease lilted like small bells.

As if she’d plucked flowers from a roadside shrub on a stroll, then joked at a friend’s shock.

In an instant, ice slipped down Hazel’s spine.

Only now did she understand: last night’s talk with Adelaide hadn’t given her a key or a sword, no lantern, no blade.

She had been given a legendary ancient dragon, an avalanche in a woman’s shape.