Primordial Heir: Nine Stars-Chapter 302: The Headmaster

Nero was guided to the headmaster’s office. His teacher excused himself, leaving Nero alone with the man said to be on par with the leaders of the seven great clans.

The headmaster had long white hair and a muscular frame, and he exuded a palpable pressure even without intending to. He was an Apex Knight—the Knight of Gravitation.

"Greetings, Headmaster. I heard you wished to see me?" Nero swallowed his fear. The man before him was like an insurmountable wall. He was that strong.

"Not bad." That was all the headmaster said before gesturing for Nero to sit across from him. Nero obeyed.

And there, beyond the sealed doors, the two began to talk.

•••

The silence of the academy’s upper corridors felt thin and unsatisfying to Balrog Cassius. The memory of his duel with Nero replayed in his mind—the boy’s raw power, the wild lightning, the predictable lines of attack. It was a good lesson for the student, but it had stirred an old, familiar restlessness in the teacher. Sparring with suppressed strength was like drinking water when you craved wine. He needed to feel the edge again, to push against a will and a law that could truly push back.

He knew exactly where to go.

He found his friend in the private sparring annex reserved for A-Class instructors. The man was practicing forms, his movements creating a soft, whispering symphony in the air. Kaelen Vance, the Silent Gale. He was one of the few on staff who also wielded the Law of Wind, and his mastery was deep, almost philosophical. Where Balrog’s wind was a hurricane—direct, brutal, and overwhelming—Kaelen’s was the stealthy zephyr, the pressure differential, the cut you never saw coming. Their strengths were nearly on par; Balrog had more raw power, Kaelen had peerless precision.

Balrog leaned against the doorframe, his arms crossed. "Your forms are pretty, Kaelen. Do they actually work against someone who isn’t a training post?"

Kaelen didn’t stop his movement, a slow, sweeping arc that ended with a blade of compressed air sighing against a distant target dummy, slicing it clean in half. "They work well enough to avoid noisy, brutish distractions, Balrog."

"I’m bored," Balrog stated, walking into the room. "I just tested a promising brat. It made me itch. Spar with me. A real one."

Kaelen finally halted, turning. He was slimmer than Balrog, with sharp, observant eyes and close-cropped grey hair. He looked weary.

"We have faculty meetings in two hours. The last time we ’sparred,’ we had to explain a three-foot hole in the sub-basement wall for a month."

"Then we’ll use the sealed chamber," Balrog said, a fierce grin spreading. "No excuses. My treat."

Kaelen sighed, a sound like wind through reeds. He knew this mood. There was no refusing it. "Very well. But if you break my arm, you’re writing my grading reports."

The special underground training room was a sphere of reinforced orichalcum a hundred yards across, its walls humming with containment runes that could absorb the fury of a small army. The air was still and dead here, waiting to be filled. The two masters stood on opposite sides of the central platform, no weapons drawn. For them, their bodies were the catalysts; their wills were the blades.

"No holding back," Balrog said, cracking his neck. "Purple Knight, peak level. Show me what the ’Silent Gale’ really means."

Kaelen gave a slight, resigned nod. "As you wish, Knight of Blood." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

There was no coin, no signal. The fight began in the space between two breaths.

Balrog moved first. He didn’t step; he compressed the air behind him into a solid wall and kicked off from it. The sonic boom was deafening in the sealed chamber. He crossed the distance in a blur, his fist already pulled back, swirling with a vortex of cutting wind that turned his knuckles into industrial drills. It was the Gale Hammer.

Kaelen didn’t try to match the force. He sidestepped, but his sidestep was unnatural. He didn’t push against the ground; he created a localized high-pressure zone on his left, which shot him smoothly to the right with minimal effort. Balrog’s world-shattering punch passed through empty air, and the released wind-pressure scarred the far wall with a shriek of metal.

Before Balrog could recover, Kaelen was on him. Not with a punch, but with a touch. Two fingers tapped Balrog’s charging shoulder. "Vacuum Needle."

A thread-thin line of absolute vacuum, harder than diamond, pierced inward. Balrog felt a sting, not on his skin, but deep in the muscle tissue. He roared, more in surprise than pain, and his body erupted with a Cyclonic Aura, a tornado of shredding wind that forced Kaelen to disengage in a fluttering retreat.

"Good!" Balrog bellowed, his eyes alight. He clapped his hands together. The concussion wasn’t sound; it was a Pressure Wave, a flat plane of solidified air that shot out in all directions, impossible to dodge. It was meant to crush and stun.

Kaelen dropped into a low stance and thrust both palms downward. "Rising Column." A pillar of super-dense air shot up from the floor beneath him, meeting the descending pressure wave. The collision didn’t make a sound, but the air between them warped visibly, like heat haze, before the energies canceled out in a gust that whipped their clothes.

Balrog pressed the attack. He wasn’t a tactician like in his fight with Nero; he was a force of nature. He launched a barrage of Wind Scythes, crescent blades of screaming air that came from every angle. Kaelen became a ghost. He weaved, ducked, and flowed, but he wasn’t just dodging. With subtle flicks of his wrists, he was deflecting. He’d change the air pressure just ahead of a scythe, bending its path harmlessly away or into the path of another, causing them to cancel each other out in bursts of chaotic wind. It was breathtakingly efficient, using Balrog’s own immense power against him.

Frustration, the favorite fuel of the Knight of Blood, began to burn. Kaelen was a leaf in his storm, never where the force landed. Balrog stopped launching discrete attacks. He began to dominate the environment. He spun, his arms wide, and summoned a Grand Vortex. The air in the entire chamber began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster and faster, pulling at Kaelen, trying to drag him off his feet and into the grinding maw of the cyclone.