The ground cracked under the bulls’ charge, a single thundering wall of muscle and heat bearing down on the crater.

Rudrean exhaled.

Then stepped into them. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Heavenfall Wind turned light, and his body slipped forward, frictionless. He slid between the first bull’s horns like smoke through a narrow gap. His fingers dragged across its neck as he passed, flickering bright like crimson lasers.

Phoenix Flame followed the motion. A thin strand of deep red spread from the point of contact, creeping inward through the lattice like fire racing along a hidden fuse.

The bull’s head separated cleanly from its body.

No sound. No resistance.

The body ran forward for several steps before collapsing and vanishing.

Rudrean did not stop.

His palms came together, compressing Heavenfall Wind into a dense, flat disc. For a brief moment, it appeared as a distorted plane of air, its edges sharp and defined like invisible steel.

He drove it into the ground between four converging bulls.

The result was immediate.

No flame. No flash.

Only weight.

A crushing, downward force exploded outward from the point of impact.

All four constructs lifted off the ground at once. Their legs bent unnaturally, horns slicing through empty air as their massive bodies were thrown apart. The cracking of their internal structure echoed across the crater like breaking timber.

Rudrean was already beneath them before they reached their peak.

Phoenix Flame shifted.

Not spreading. Not trailing.

Condensed. Focused.

He drove both fists upward. From his knuckles, short, dense spikes of flame formed, white-hot at the tips and deep orange at the base.

Each strike pierced upward into the underbellies of the falling constructs.

Four precise impacts.

Four contained bursts of internal destruction.

The light vanished as quickly as it appeared.

Fragments of lattice drifted down around him.

Three bulls remained.

They slowed, spreading apart, circling.

Rudrean raised his right hand.

His fingers curled inward.

Heavenfall Wind gathered instantly, compressing into a tight, rotating sphere. It was barely visible, only noticeable through the distortion of light around it. A dense core of pressure, spinning rapidly in place.

He released it.

The sphere shot forward in a straight line and struck the first bull directly in the chest.

The impact was overwhelming.

The construct’s chest collapsed inward before anything else moved. The force traveled through its entire frame in a single instant. Its body lifted off the ground and broke apart as it struck the crater wall.

The second bull received something smaller.

Phoenix Flame narrowed into a single line.

A needle of white heat.

Rudrean flicked his finger.

The flame entered through the creature’s eye.

It did not exit.

The bull froze mid-step.

Then its structure unraveled from within, folding and collapsing inward until nothing remained.

The third charged.

Rudrean stepped forward and caught its horn with both hands.

Heavenfall Wind surged through his arms.

Heavy. Immense.

He redirected the charge downward.

The bull’s momentum worked against it.

Its skull slammed into the platform with full force, enhanced by Rudrean’s added weight.

The ground fractured outward in a web of cracks.

Phoenix Flame flowed from his palm into the point of impact.

Slow. Controlled.

The construct began to burn from the ground upward, dissolving layer by layer until it vanished into sparks.

[Wave 2 — Cleared]

The next wave began after five seconds.

Fifteen Black Steel Hawks erupted from the crater walls simultaneously, bodies plated in overlapping dark lattice armor, beaks narrowed to dense, rigid points. They did not circle.

They dove. All fifteen. A collapsing column aimed at one point.

Rudrean stepped aside and let the first seven crater the platform where he had stood. Stone fractured outward beneath the impact. He watched the dust rise and understood something in that moment.

They moved in formation. The formation was the threat, not the individuals.

He gathered Heavenfall Wind into both palms and stretched it outward in opposite directions, pulling it wide into a flat plane of compressed pressure, invisible except for the way light bent sharply around its edges. He angled it upward and released it like a thrown sheet.

It passed through the reforming flock horizontally.

Eight hawks dissolved where the plane crossed through them. No resistance. No sound. Their lattice structures simply stopped existing along that line.

Seven remaining hawks scattered.

Phoenix Flame condensed in his right hand into seven small spheres, each the size of a knuckle, white at the core and deep red at the rim, spinning slowly against his palm.

He opened his fingers.

All seven launched simultaneously, each curving outward in a separate arc toward a separate target.

[Isalyn: Are you possessed? You are improving crazily fast.]

Rudrean smiled. ’It feels like I am playing a game in deep dive, and it’s fun.’

Seven impacts. Seven clean dissolves.

The hawks were gone before the dust from the craters had settled.

[Wave 3 — Cleared]

---

Three colors lit the runes. Amber. Black. Deep violet.

Five Terra Goliath Beetles burst upward through the platform floor, enormous, their hexagonal carapace plates layered like fortress walls. Five Nether Clawed Rats dropped from the walls, long and fast, their extended black claws dripping dark condensate that hissed against stone. Five Ashveil Phantoms drifted from the crater shadows, vaguely humanoid and formless, trailing cold that lowered the visible air temperature around them.

Fifteen constructs. Rudrean looked at all of them and felt something settle behind his eyes.

He moved first.

Heavenfall Wind gathered in his legs and launched him into the beetles. He landed on the first one’s back, drove one palm flat against the carapace, and pushed Phoenix Flame downward in a single focused column that drilled through every plate simultaneously rather than burning between them.

The beetle dissolved from the inside outward in under a second.

He was airborne before it finished.

The second beetle received a Heavenfall Wind sphere to the front, dense and elongated, released at contact range. The carapace folded inward catastrophically. Phoenix Flame found the gaps before they could close.

Gone.

He dealt with the remaining three beetles the same way. Landing once on each. One palm. One focused column. Three seconds total.

The rats converged while he moved between beetles. Fast, low, coordinated.

He stopped and let them come.

Phoenix Flame spread across both forearms, and he met the first rat with an open-handed strike to its skull, the flame conducting inward through the point of contact and unraveling the lattice from the inside out. The second received an elbow. The third and fourth he caught simultaneously by their extended forelegs, swung them into each other, and pressed both palms to the collision point.

One pulse. Both gone.

The fifth rat hesitated.

He flicked one finger. A Phoenix Flame needle, thin as wire, crossed the distance.

The rat dissolved mid-step.

The five phantoms drifted inward, cold radiating off them in pressing waves. He breathed out and let Phoenix Flame rise from his entire body at once, not projected as an attack but held as a steady radiating field.

The nearest phantom unraveled where the heat reached its edges. Then the next. He walked forward, and the remaining three thinned and dispersed around him like smoke pulled apart by wind, pale eyes dimming one by one.

The last one drove itself at his chest in a final desperate lunge.

Phoenix Flame met it two inches from his skin.

The phantom dissolved against the warmth without ceremony.

[Wave 4 — Cleared]

’What the hell...’ Wuzai’s eyes narrowed. ’He isn’t using the spells he had shown so far, but he is improving his combat senses at a terrifying pace.’

’What’s going on with him?’

"Woohoo, that’s my darling." Aelira grinned. "You are already at 3rd rank."

Rudrean looked at the leaderboard above.

Rank 3: Rudrean — Wave 4 cleared in 16 seconds.

The other two above had cleared Wave 5, but it took them over a minute.

[Wave 5 starts]

The runes went dark.

Then came back in a color he had not seen yet.

Crimson.

Twenty constructs materialized at once.

Ten Ironscale Basilisks emerged from the crater walls, their bodies long and heavily armored, their scales dense interlocking plates of lattice compressed to extraordinary rigidity. Each one was twelve meters from snout to tail. Their eyes pulsed with a dull red light. From their mouths gathered dense, concentrated beams of petrification energy, slow-forming but enormous, aimed at the platform from every angle.

Ten Voidwing Mantas rose from beneath the crater floor, their flat bodies wide as ceilings, trailing long barbed tails that crackled with arcs of dark energy. They moved silently. No wingbeats. Just displacement, drifting upward and fanning outward to cover the aerial space entirely.

Rudrean looked at all of them.

Then looked at his hands.

He understood something new.

He had been thinking about Phoenix Flame and Heavenfall Wind as two separate things he combined. But they were not separate. They were two expressions of the same intention. Weight and heat. Presence and conclusion.

He stopped separating them in his mind.

What happened next came from that single shift.

Heavenfall Wind gathered across his entire body simultaneously, not in his palms or his feet, but everywhere at once, a total field of controllable weight radiating outward from his skin. Phoenix Flame rose inside it, threading through the compressed air, heating it, charging it.

The field became visible. A deep red-orange shimmer pressed outward from him in every direction, the air around him warping slightly from the combined heat and pressure.

The first basilisk fired.

A wide beam of petrification energy crossed the crater toward him.

He raised one hand, and the field on that side compressed into a single point, dense enough to catch the beam and redirect it. The beam bent and struck the crater wall. Stone turned grey and rigid where it hit.

He was already moving.

Heavenfall Wind turned him weightless, and Phoenix Flame in his legs discharged downward in two narrow columns, not as heat but as propulsion, controlled combustion driving him upward faster than the mantas expected. He was among them before their barbed tails had finished tracking.

He pressed one palm flat against the first manta’s body.

The field collapsed inward through the contact point. Heat and weight combined, focused into a single penetrating force that passed through the manta’s entire lattice structure in one continuous motion.

The manta dissolved from the point of contact outward in a perfect expanding ring.

He moved to the next without stopping.

Same motion. Same result.

Third. Fourth. Fifth.

He flowed between them, each touch precise, each dissolve clean and immediate, and the aerial space above the crater cleared methodically.

Below, the basilisks had repositioned, forming a ring around the platform, all ten beams now angled upward toward him simultaneously.

Ten beams fired at once.

He gathered the field inward, pulling it completely against his skin, and dropped.

The beams crossed the space above him and struck each other at their convergence point. The resulting collision was violent. Petrification energy detonated against itself, shockwaves radiating outward.

He fell through it untouched.

The field expanded again the moment he was clear.

He hit the ground in the center of the basilisk ring and let the field release outward in a single total pulse. Heavenfall Wind and Phoenix Flame surged simultaneously in every direction, a perfect expanding ring of heat and crushing pressure originating from his body.

The ring passed through all ten basilisks at once.

Ten dissolves. Simultaneous. Silent.

Lattice dust settled across the cracked platform in a thin, even layer.

Rudrean stood at the center of it.

He looked down at his hands again and noticed the faint red-orange shimmer still resting on his skin, a residual warmth from what he had just created.

He did not have a name for it yet.

But it was his.

[Wave 5 — Cleared]

[Isalyn: Amazing! You literally came up with your own intent that formed into this magical art of Phoenix Flame and Heavenfall Wind!]

Rudrean’s eyes were filled with thrill. ’It’s so strong!’

[Congratulations. You have cleared all waves.]

[Wave 5 cleared in 12 seconds. Rank 1st in the Foundation Stage Monster-Combat Leaderboard.]

"Holy shit," Aelira muttered, her eyes shining.