His words hadn’t cooled, and Lance struck first—not at the foe, but at the ground.

Secret Sword Blazing Fire! A ring of fire carved the earth like a red-hot saw; heat boiled up, and the snow burst into a sky of white mist.

“Tch, damn it!” The Frost Knight and his men sank into the blizzard veil; eyes hunted like owls in fog, yet Lance’s shadow was nowhere.

Seconds slid by. White ground steamed and drifted, the world hushed like a held breath. The Frost Knight’s line watched every angle, rigid as statues trapped in a snow globe.

Then Lance surfaced—behind a fallen battle mage like a knife’s reflection behind a throat.

“You go first!” His shout cracked, and the Sirius Sword flowed into a long spear. He drove it for the waist, straight as a lightning rod.

A stab, a rip, a wet sizzle. The mage bled out and collapsed like a cut cord.

“You bastard!” the Frost Knight barked, anger biting like sleet.

He had thought the field his—one Earth Knight and eight mid-tier battle mages. But the Blazing Fire Knight’s field control burned like a ring of torches, and his craft was old-soldier sly; one exchange, and no opening showed.

Not that it meant defeat. Lance slipped back into the snow-mist, and the Frost Knight snarled, “Don’t get cocky. You’ll be a cold corpse soon.”

To gut his hiding, the fallen mages raised targeted spells—

Third-circle Domain Sense: Seek Target.

Sigils cooled; faces lit with sudden dawn.

“There!”

Then came Fourth-circle Elemental: Dispel Fog.

A strange wind combed the snow, and the called-out patch blew clean, baring Lance’s crouched silhouette like a deer in thinning brush.

But they were battle mages, sharp as hawks. One glance, and—“An illusion!”

When the mirage shattered, Lance had to edge out from a tree trunk, breath smoking.

He barely showed his head before spells fell like a storm of arrows.

Magic missiles tore in like hail. Lance tumbled and sprinted, skirting one killing wave by a hair.

“Whew, that was close,” he muttered, heart drumming like war drums in ice.

“Yeah. Real close,” the Frost Knight sneered, already ghosting into Lance’s path like frost creeping over glass.

He unleashed the battle skill Frost Blade; ominous violet ice crawled over his sword. He lifted it high and hewed down like a falling glacier.

Lance felt the trap—no room to slip, no wind to borrow—so he set his jaw and took it head-on.

The Sirius Sword snapped into a shield; he braced it like a wall against a winter tide.

It didn’t help.

This was a naked collision—raw strength on raw strength, no smoke, no mirrors.

Fulin’s Lance build had Charge 8. Strong for a knight, not Earth Knight strong. He couldn’t match a Frost Knight whose body was swollen by corrupt godfire.

Charge 8 against Earth 1—the result was obvious.

CLANG.

The shield held, but Lance’s thin Battle Aura couldn’t drink the shock. He skidded back, gouging seven meters of furrow into the snow. The Sirius Shield caved inward, dented deep like a bowl punched from brass.

He didn’t fall. The ember still smoldered.

But the field didn’t turn.

His hands, tight on the grip, filled with a wrong kind of weakness—no simple numbness, but a slow, sinking drain.

It began at the fingertips, crept through the palms. Feeling leeched away like heat at dusk. Even his Battle Aura stuttered—

The flame that had surged like a forge went dim like a hearth about to die.

What is this— Panic pricked; he tore a glance at his palms.

And froze.

That violet frost clung to his hands like rot on fruit.

It ate in. His flesh went ashen, corpse-gray. At the worst fingertips, a stink rose—the sour rot of carrion.

The Frost Knight’s strike had seeded corruption in his hands.

“How is it? A little gift straight from the Earth Mother,” the man crooned, watching the gray creep from palms to forearms like twilight climbing a wall.

“You’ll be a puppet corpse soon. Hahaha!”

The fallen mages chuckled, hands idle. They stood with the Frost Knight, content to watch the fire gutter out.

I can’t die here. Fear bit; will snarled. Lance forced both hands up, as if lifting the sky.

But even raising a weapon felt like pouring out his last blood. Every heartbeat, the rot worsened.

At last, the academy’s reinforcements arrived like a bell at dawn.

With the crowd evacuated, a dedicated battle-mage squad cut through the snow to Lance.

“Hey—you still with us?!” The leader, Instructor Bordeaux, an archmage of body wards, planted a spell like a sunlamp.

Hex Dispel flashed; the gray crawl slowed, like winter checked by a stubborn spring.

The tide, though, kept rising. “Useless!” the Frost Knight howled. “Mere sorcery can’t shoulder divine might!”

His party whipped up a black wind, a night gale that howled against the white world.

The squad knew that wind. Faces tightened. Under Bordeaux’s command, they wove Sixth-circle Body Ward: Light’s Guard.

Before the gale hit, they flared a clean, bright field like dawn over frost.

Light met black wind, locked like antlers. The auras ground against each other, stubborn as mountains.

It wasn’t enough.

Against that surging, ink-dark hurricane, the glow thinned and bent; on the white snow, shadow swallowed dawn.

Their ward fell behind. Mages gritted teeth; the enemy moved loose and easy.

Lance stared, disbelief a cold needle.

The Frost Knight laughed, a wolf at the fence. “Keep pretending you can hold!”

Then he joined the charge.

Lance couldn’t fight; the squad had to hold the ward; Bordeaux stepped forward like an old oak in a storm.

Light and frost collided; shallow craters pocked the white like footprints of giants.

Battle mages kill with fast traps and straight-shot missiles; Bordeaux was no novice. A seasoned war-wizard, he could drop a freshly minted Earth Knight—if only.

“Have to admit… I’m getting old.” He bled the line and reached for one last spell.

The blade found him first.

The old mage spilled red over the snow and lay down like a falling banner.

One by one, the squad followed him into the cold.

“Heh—hahahaha!” The Frost Knight shook his blood-slick sword and laughed, a storm gone mad.

They stepped over a row of bodies, crunching snow and bone, and came to Lance.

The sword tip kissed his throat. “Only you left, Lance!”

Lance said nothing. His stare locked to the Frost Knight like a nail to wood.

The sight of this cornered cur pleased the man. “Lance Morrison, didn’t you boast of ‘absolute victory’? Look at you now. No matter. I’ll grant you mercy—an end to your pain.”

The blade pressed his throat—then the hand froze.

Not just the hand. The Frost Knight’s whole body locked, a statue rimed with frost.

Seconds ticked. His face soured. “Lance Morrison, you’re envy itself. The Earth Mother just whispered to me… You get two choices.”

“Die here, or…” He dragged the words like a devil’s purr. “Join us. Return to the earth. Give your soul to the Earth Mother.”

Silence. Snow breathed. Time held.

Then Lance’s easy laugh snapped it. “Hahaha…”

“What’s so funny?” Cold and confused, the Frost Knight’s eyes narrowed.

Shame fell off Lance like old bark; his voice turned cold, proud, royal. “You really dared to threaten me—the Blazing Fire Knight?”

“Lance Morrison, look at your hands. Look at the corpses. You’re a small knight. Know your cage.”

“So what?”

“You lunatic… die here!” The Frost Knight drove the blade—ice-cold steel straight for the throat—

But that wasn’t what happened.

Secret Sword Blazing Fire! On the razor’s edge, the dying flame roared, a furnace to the heavens.

Fire washed the field, a red tide that couldn’t char the Frost Knight’s pack, but it steamed the earth and burst the snow into rolling haze.

Same trick, new heartbeat. He caught them blinking.

In those few dazzled seconds, Lance vanished like a fox into brush.

“That bastard!” The Frost Knight’s fury cracked like ice on a river.

But Lance hadn’t truly escaped. They had a dozen leashes—Battle Aura sense, tracking spells, hunters’ cunning.

They would run him down. To them, Lance was a clown juggling knives in a gale.

“After him!” They sprinted along his scuffed trail.

They hesitated.

He wasn’t running to the academy. He fled toward the gorges of the Dome Mountains.

Was he begging the cliff for a grave?

Hesitation or not, cornering a fox in a dead end suited them.

Fallen mages cast Flight and skimmed low like crows over snow.

The Frost Knight froze broad swaths of drift and skated the ice like a dark comet.

Lance, once free, only ran—staggering, ragged, a wolf with arrows in its hide—yet his face wore the calm of a man with a card up his sleeve.

Through tracking spells, they saw that look. What ace could he possibly hold?

The gorge swallowed them. Gone were the open foothills; the path pinched between cliffs like jaws. The road narrowed; daylight thinned to a blade of sky, a pale seam that said it was still white night.

The Dome’s gorge is a dead road.

At its blind end, meltwater whispered down the walls like threads of glass.

Lance stopped on the stream, boots in the singing cold.

“What’s wrong? Out of breath?” The Frost Knight threw off the last of his doubts and paced forward, slow as a cat. This time, no mistakes.

The fallen mages readied real spells, a net of light and iron, so the trickster knight couldn’t slip smoke through their fingers.

Even so, Lance kept his back to them. Half his body had blackened, corruption gnawing like rot.

No road to run, no breath to barter. The Frost Knight took that picture as a verdict.

He laughed, easy now. “You can’t escape. Death is your fate.”

As if years of spite could finally thaw. But it wasn’t truth.

It was just a loser shifting weight off his own failure.

Swollen power had warped his mind and painted him a false moon.

So—

He walked step by step into the snare.

However far gone, however hate-poisoned, he was fated to be “Lance’s” stepping stone.

Three meters. At that distance, the world changed.

“No—you’re the one who dies.” Lance turned slow, and the corrupted flesh sloughed off like black mud from a mask.

“Ha… ha…” The Frost Knight tried to laugh and choked it back.

The disguise fell, and a lithe, wickedly beautiful, petite figure stood revealed.

The sight should’ve stirred love, but the blood-red eyes poured killing intent like winter rain.

That intent kicked up wind; the air’s taste turned iron-cold; the Frost Knight stood as if dropped into an ice cellar.

“Blazing Fire Knight!” he roared. He didn’t care about anything now. He couldn’t endure another turning of the board. He swore to cut down this fae before she could so much as breathe.

“That’s right—I’m the Blazing Fire Knight.” Fulin answered, her voice chiming like clear glass in spring wind.

In the next breath she became shadow, a blade-shaped darkness cutting through dusk—

Mid-tier technique of the Dark Warrior: Shadow Execution.

“Ah—” The Frost Knight’s throat split. A pillar of crimson fountained, then his hollow wail rang like wind in an empty hall as his knees gave out.

“Then it’s your turn.” Fulin’s gaze swept the fallen mages like frost rolling over reeds.

“Blood Clan!” They panicked, staring at her red eyes and grasping at straws. “Stop—this is our fault—the supreme Earth Mother wouldn’t harm Her child!”

Whatever their aim, they had already crossed her path and broken her design.

They were even trampling a simple wish for quiet days; Fulin would not forgive that.

“Die for me.” She said it like a seal on a winter lake.

Flames rolled without end—

Arcane Mage mid-tier skill: Arcane Flame.

Merciless fire swallowed the fallen mages whole. Only the crimson refused to roast; freed from flesh, it beaded in the air like dew, drop by drop seeping into Fulin—

Chaos Vampire inherent talent: Bloodthirst.

“You really are Blood Clan!” The Frost Knight froze his wound, eyes wide, breath ragged. “What are the queens after?!”

“Hmph.” Fulin looked down on him like cold moonlight on black water.

Seconds drifted by.

“Let your sins be ended.”

BOOM!!

After the violent blast, the Frost Knight was utterly erased, scattered to nothing.

By the time it was over, evening had already bled into the sky.

Lance, cut to ribbons, staggered out of the canyon like a lone traveler under a bruised horizon.

He looked up at the sky, unexpectedly clear, at that low band of fading splendor.

“What did I just do…” Lance murmured, the question heavy as wet ash.

He walked back to the Academy alone. In the end, he returned in victory—

But waiting for him wasn’t a grand welcome; it was a cluster of Inquisitors from the Heavenly Spirit Empire.

Battle Arts Class One, and the Academy staff, grudgingly gave way for these “guests,” letting them reach the couch, letting them look down from on high at Lance resting there with lazy ease.

One stepped forward, cloak snapping like a cold flag. His voice was iron and winter: “Lance Morrison, we suspect you’re connected to the Night Disciple. Under the Imperial Common Law, you must cooperate with our investigation. Refuse, and we’ll execute you on the spot.”