Time soon passed after the escape and three days went in the blink of an eye.

For three agonizing days and nights, the remnants of Class F had been running through the jagged, muddy labyrinth of the Neutral Zone. They didn’t stop to sleep. They barely stopped to drink from the muddy streams that trickled through the canyon floors.

Lukas stumbled over a jagged root, falling hard onto his knees in the damp earth. He didn’t use his hands to catch himself. He couldn’t. Without the Dwarven Magitech Gauntlets that Prince Hephaestus had forged for him,

his biologically fried arms were useless, reduced to blistered, agonizing dead meat from his past injuries . He let out a ragged, dry heave, his chest heaving as he stared at the mud.

"Get up, Lukas," Alaric grunted, his voice sounding like two stones grinding together.

Alaric wasn’t faring much better. The giant boy was a walking casualty.

His breathing was heavy, and the mechanical thumping of the Titan’s Capacitor fused to his sternum had slowed to a weak, strained rhythm]. But the heaviest burden wasn’t his exhaustion—it was the weapon strapped to his back.

The newly transformed Sword of Heroes, the colossal gunmetal buster sword laced with golden veins of divinity, had become an anchor. When he first pulled it from the pedestal, his sheer, stubborn willpower had commanded the blade.

But now, running on fumes, the divine artifact was rejecting him. It demanded a master with a pure, overwhelming Order, and Alaric simply didn’t have the mana or the mastered intent to synchronize with it. It weighed him down like a literal mountain, dragging a deep trench into the dirt with every step he took.

"I can’t," Lukas wheezed, rolling onto his back and staring up at the sliver of grey sky visible between the canyon walls. "My core is empty. I don’t have the gauntlets... I’m just a liability."

"We are not leaving you," Elena said firmly.

The High Elf Princess glided down from a scouting position on a nearby ridge. Her pristine white uniform was stained brown and red, and her emerald eyes were dull with extreme mana exhaustion. She tapped her temple, wincing as a sharp migraine spiked through her skull.

"But Alaric... they’re here," Elena whispered, her voice trembling. "The temperature is rising too fast."

The damp, chilly air of the canyon suddenly vanished. The mud beneath Lukas’s knees baked into dry, cracked clay in a matter of seconds. The ambient mana in the atmosphere ignited, suffocating the oxygen out of the narrow pass.

"Did you rats truly believe you could outrun the Empire on foot?"

The voice echoed down the canyon walls, dripping with arrogant, suffocating malice.

At the end of the pass, the air distorted with violent heat waves. The Imperial Knights marched into view, their armor gleaming with the reflection of impending fire. But it was the man floating at their front who made the students’ blood run cold.

Lord Pythios, the Master of the Flame Tower.

The Peak 6th-Order Arch-Mage looked entirely different from their last encounter. His crimson robes were singed, and his eyes burned with a maniacal, humiliated wrath. Alaric had shattered his petrified dragon bone staff three days ago, an insult that demanded total eradication. He floated without a focus now, relying entirely on his overwhelming, raw authority over the elements.

"You broke my staff, brute," Pythios sneered, looking down at Alaric. "You made a mockery of the Imperial Vanguard. And for what? To die tired in the mud?"

Alaric didn’t answer. He gritted his teeth, the veins in his neck bulging as he reached over his shoulder. He wrapped both hands around the hilt of the Sword of Heroes.

"Move," Alaric commanded his own body.

He tried to heave the massive buster sword forward, trying to channel the kinetic output of the Titan’s Capacitor. But the sword didn’t hum. The golden veins remained dormant. Without the explosive burst of his absolute SSS-Tier Willpower, the blade was just a dead slab of divine metal. It struck the ground with a dull thud, refusing to lift.

"You haven’t even mastered the relic you stole," Pythios laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "You are children playing with weapons of the First Era. Let me show you the reality of this world. Let me show you the gap between a student and a Master."

Pythios raised both of his empty hands toward the sky. He didn’t chant. A 6th-Order Arch-Mage didn’t need words to command reality; they imposed their will upon the world itself.

[Domain Expansion: Purgatory of the Ashen King]

The world turned orange.

The canyon walls began to melt, turning into bubbling slag. The oxygen combusted. It wasn’t just a fire spell; it was a localized dimension where the concept of "Heat" was the only absolute law.

Elena screamed, throwing her hands up to cast a vacuum barrier, but the sheer, crushing density of the 6th-Order Domain shattered her 4th-Order spell before it could even form. The absolute gap in Orders was insurmountable. A 6th Order was a walking calamity; a 4th Order was just fuel for the fire.

Lukas curled into a ball, his blistered hands shielding his face. Alaric stood in front of them, using his massive body and the broad side of the dead sword as a physical shield, his skin blistering as the heat reached thousands of degrees.

"Burn to ash and be forgotten!" Pythios roared, bringing his hands down to compress the Domain into a single, incinerating singularity right on top of Class F.

Alaric closed his eyes. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t fight. The heat was melting his very thoughts.

KRA-KOOOOOOM!

A sound tore through the canyon. It was a sound louder than thunder, deeper than an earthquake. It was the sound of the atmosphere itself snapping in half [4, 5].

The unbearable, suffocating heat of Pythios’s Domain suddenly vanished. It wasn’t pushed back; it was instantly erased, as if someone had snuffed out a candle in a vacuum.

Pythios froze, his hands trembling mid-air. The molten canyon walls rapidly cooled, turning into jagged, black obsidian. The Imperial Knights behind him stumbled, their armor groaning as a terrifying, unfathomable pressure descended from the sky.

"What..." Pythios gasped, his eyes wide with horror as he looked up. "What is this pressure?!"

Above them, the sky was no longer blue. It was fracturing. Massive, jagged black scars were ripping through the atmosphere, leaking a primal, suffocating pressure that made the very air groan in agony. It looked as if a deity was taking a sledgehammer to the ceiling of the world.

CRACK.

The spatial boundary shattered completely.

From the bleeding rift in the sky, a blinding, majestic wave of twilight-purple light erupted. It didn’t clash with Pythios’s remaining fire mana; it simply devoured it. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

The sheer density of the aura pouring out of the crack forced the Peak 6th-Order Arch-Mage to his knees, his jaw slamming into the dirt.

Three figures stepped out of the dimensional tear, floating effortlessly in the air as they descended toward the canyon floor.

The two figures flanking the center were legendary. On the left was a towering man radiating an absolute, suffocating darkness that swallowed the light Theron Voss, the King of Darkness.

On the right stood a woman of breathtaking elegance, her silver-white hair fluttering like a banner of war, wrapped in illusions and blood-red lace Elizabeth Voss, the Empress of Deceit. They had survived the apocalyptic, world-ending war against the Rotting King in Layer 9 of the Abyss.

Although he had just arrived, he sensed what was going on and quickly stopped here, as for Isabelle he had used Alfred’s transfer ability to send her somewhere else

Now wearing a pristine black suit and a flowing trench coat that swallowed the light. His face was covered by an elegant white porcelain mask marked with a singular, jagged "0".

But it wasn’t his attire that froze the blood in everyone’s veins. It was his aura.

He possessed an Eclipse Core a perfect, flawless fusion of the tyrannical Golden Dragon Aura and the absolute void of the Hollow King’s Shadow.

The two opposing forces swirled around him in a seamless, breathtaking mantle of 8th-Order supremacy. He wasn’t just a mage or a knight; he had become a living, breathing Concept of Domination.

Alaric, trembling on the ground, looked up. His grey eyes widened in utter disbelief. He recognized the posture. He recognized the terrifying, arrogant confidence.

"Professor..." Lukas whispered, tears cutting through the soot on his face.

Damien Voss landed softly on the obsidian ground, stepping between his battered students and the paralyzed Imperial Army. His twilight-purple eyes, split by horizontal and vertical cross-shaped pupils, swept over the broken forms of Class F.

He saw Alaric’s blistered skin. He saw Elena’s exhaustion. He saw Lukas’s ruined hands.

The air around Damien dropped to absolute zero. The playful, mocking aura of the Professor vanished, replaced by the cold, wrathful judgment of the Greedy King. He turned his masked face toward the trembling Master of the Flame Tower.

"Y-You..." Pythios choked out, struggling against the crushing 8th-Order weight.

"The terrorist... Zero... impossible... you were banished to the Abyss!"

Damien didn’t draw the Pantheon Sword. He didn’t need to. He simply adjusted his cuffs, the gold and black mana dancing off his knuckles like dying stars.

A terrifying, genuine smile spread beneath his porcelain mask.

"It seems I came at the right time," Damien whispered, his voice resonating through the very fabric of reality.

"You were just about to show my students the gap between Orders."

Damien took a single step forward. The ground shuddered.

"Allow me," Damien said coldly, his 8th-Order Intent locking onto the Arch-Mage,

"to return the favor."