Mirabella stood near the precipice of the highest building on the New York University campus. The apocalyptic wind whipped her dark coat around her ankles, but she remained as immovable as a mountain. Behind her stood Carl and Grace, their sharp gazes fixed on the retreating figures of the Eagle Academy’s team and the military platoon, who were now cautiously heading outward through the heavily fortified gates.

​"Big Sister, I still can’t believe it." Carl said, holding up his hands and staring at his palms in quiet awe. He clenched his fists, feeling the terrifying, razor-sharp strength of a Lv400 Assassin coursing through his veins. But beneath that lethal precision lay something else, a heavy, suffocating aura—something distinctly ancient in him. It wasn’t merely a standard bloodline, which granted pure elemental or conceptual authority; it pulsed with the wild, unfathomable magnitude of the ancient god and primal deities of old, a legacy of raw, unfiltered supremacy.

​"You are the first of your kind Carl... The powers in you is far beyond my knowledge, we will discover it as times goes on." Mirabella said, her voice carrying over the wind, not looking back at him.

​Truthfully, the latent power Carl had just begun to unleash was simply too potent, a sheer anomaly that fundamentally eclipsed normal cultivation paths. It certainly didn’t belong in the lower brackets of the Second Server.

​Mirabella stared intently as the massive iron gates clanged shut, securing their territory once more. She slowly closed her eyes, letting the ambient silence wash over her, remembering exactly what had transpired to bring them to this moment.

_____

​[Three hours ago.]

​With a spatial distortion that barely rippled the air, Mirabella, David, Kent, and their group materialized directly on the main university grounds. The ten students instantly fanned out, their weapons drawn, but they quickly lowered them, their gazes moving around the place, utterly stunned.

​"Guys... What are those glowing things?" Yi Chang asked, his eyes wide. He pointed a trembling finger at the courtyard. Scattered across the cracked pavement, hovering gently above the dust, were hundreds of glowing skill scrolls dropped by the massacred horde. They illuminated the ruins in a spectrum of designated rarities: deep Purple, brilliant Orange, burning Red, and radiating from the center, one solitary, blinding Gold.

​Mirabella blinked, momentarily stunned. In her absolute focus to exterminate every monster in the university perimeter upon arrival, she had completely ignored the system drops, leaving the loot uncollected.

​"Captain! You’re finally back!" Casey rushed towards her from a nearby building, a digital clipboard projected from her Galaxy bracelet. She pointed excitedly at the sea of skill scrolls and items.

​"These appeared from the monsters you killed, we counted them and they’re 250 here. 100 purple (medium class). 100 orange (High class). 49 red (Epic class). And one gold (Legendary Class)." She stated, her voice breathless at the sheer wealth lying on the ground.

​Mirabella slowly nodded her head. With a casual wave of her wrist, the ambient energy answered her call. All 250 skill scrolls flew towards her in a luminous stream, vanishing instantly into her dimensional storage space. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

​"What about the others?" She asked, her mind already shifting to the next tactical objective.

​"They’re done with section A, B, C, D... They’re now heading to the last section, Section E. I have to admit, this University is huge." Casey answered, looking up at the sprawling, ruined architecture. She wasn’t from Earth, so the sheer scale of the human educational facilities was entirely new to her.

​Mirabella stared past her, then lowered her eyes, staring at the translucent competition timer hovering above her Galaxy bracelet. "It has been twenty minutes, how many people are here?"

​"Total number, I don’t know." Casey said with a nervous chuckle, scratching the back of her hair.

​"200 of our members are already in this school." Daniel said, walking towards them with his massive composite bow slung casually over his shoulder.

​"Okay, that’s good. We already lost ten members, so they’re still 40 outside." She tapped the interface, pulling up the Academy’s tracker. She stared at the holographic map, her blue eyes tracking all the scattered green dots blinking desperately in the hostile zones beyond the campus.

​"Listen up... Before I rescue all the 40 members outside, this school should be completely cleaned up, ask the mages to take care of it with their spells... You have ten minutes to achieve this."

​With that absolute command, she vanished. There was no sound, no displacement of wind—just the sudden, jarring absence of her presence, stunning Casey, David, Daniel, and everyone present.

​"I don’t understand, is the Captain planning to save 40 people, who are in different locations in ten minutes?" David asked in utter confusion, his brain struggling to calculate the spatial logistics of such a feat.

​The very next moment, the air warped, and Mirabella appeared directly before them, holding the collars of two severely battered, utterly stunned students.

​"....?!!"

​Before David’s jaw could even drop, she vanished again.

​"You got to be kidding me!! Get all the mages together now!!!" David yelled in sheer disbelief, his voice echoing across the yard as he scrambled to fulfill the impossible deadline.

_____

​[Ten Minutes Later.]

​A final distortion warped the air, and Mirabella appeared with the last five stranded students, depositing them safely on the grass. She smoothly moved her gaze around the school grounds. It was pristine. There wasn’t a single drop of monster blood staining the concrete, and even the massive, pulverized monster corpses had been completely incinerated or swept away by elemental magic.

​She turned to the Academy’s mages. More than thirty of them were collapsed on the ground, their spirit energy cores completely drained, breathing heavily as they fought off magical exhaustion.

​"You all did good." She nodded at them, a rare gesture of approval.

​’Even with Earth’s terrible zero-energy situation, they could still pull this off together. It seems these guys aren’t useless after all,’ she thought.

​Her heightened senses caught a shift in the perimeter. She turned toward the north direction, seeing Carl, Hitachi, Austin, Aurelia, and Rose walking purposefully towards them. Huddled fearfully behind the high-level combatants were eight trembling kids and a young man and woman, their clothes ragged and faces covered in soot.

​"Survivors?" She muttered in genuine surprise. It was an anomaly to find un-awakened humans alive in a zone this heavily infested.

​"Big sister, we saw them hiding in section E, so we brought them here!" Carl yelled enthusiastically, projecting his voice even though everyone could hear him clearly in the silent yard.

​"This is our Captain." Rose said softly, turning and smiling warmly at the kids to put them at ease. "She might look cold to everyone, but she has a soft heart." She added, her words instantly making Mirabella frown in mild annoyance.

​Mirabella shook her head lightly at Rose, dismissing the comment, and turned her piercing blue eyes to the civilian survivors.

​"What were your plan? Staying in such a dangerous place." She asked, her tone analytical rather than judgmental.

​The young lady flinched under her gaze. She turned to the guy beside her, then back at Mirabella, and shook her head sadly.

​"We aren’t students of this university, we only came for a visit. When everything started, we don’t know what to do, so we took the children with us and hid... We are lucky we survived this long." She narrated, shivering at the memory of the apocalypse falling from the sky.

​The man stepped forward protectively, taking up the explanation. "We also tried the emergency radio in section E, and after months, we finally got a reply from the military. They will be sending people over to rescue us... With the latest news, they’ll be arriving today." He revealed.