Both teams exploded into motion simultaneously.

Romen’s voice cut through first, sharp and commanding. "Formation Delta. Pin him down and don’t let him breathe."

Reina followed half a second later. "Surround. Nobody commit solo."

Eight people moved with the kind of coordination that only came from serious training. Attacks launched from five different angles at once, a mix of lightning, crystalline projectiles, condensed mana blades, and pressure waves that overlapped each other’s blind spots deliberately.

It was genuinely good.

Rudrean smiled.

Heavenfall Wind discharged through his legs, and he simply wasn’t there anymore, rising straight up as every attack passed through the space he had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. From above, he looked down at the formation calmly.

"That was well timed," he said pleasantly. "Truly. All eight of you at once. Very coordinated."

"He dodged all of it?" one of Romen’s cousins said under his breath.

"Don’t talk. Move!" Romen barked.

The formation shifted immediately, several members launching into the air to close the vertical gap while the others maintained ground pressure. Reina pointed two fingers upward and a spiraling cage of mana threads shot toward Rudrean from below, designed to restrict movement rather than damage.

Rudrean tilted his head slightly and watched it come.

"Ah, a binding attempt. Smart."

He drifted sideways by exactly enough, the cage closing on empty air.

"Unfortunately."

He pulled his right hand back and let a projectile form, Heavenfall Wind and Phoenix Flame compressing together at his fingertips in a rotating core, the heat stabilizing the density of the wind and the wind sharpening the flame into something that belonged to neither element separately. Deep crimson at the center, bleeding out to cold glowing cyan at the edges, turning slowly, humming at a low, sustained pitch.

He threw it without particular urgency.

It crossed the distance in a fraction of a second and struck the nearest airborne member of Romen’s team squarely in the chest. The Magic Suit didn’t crack gradually. It simply stopped existing at the point of contact and the rest came apart immediately after.

The member vanished with a startled shout cut short.

"Nine left," Rudrean said, mostly to himself.

"He’s throwing projectiles now!" someone in Reina’s team shouted. "Shields up! Don’t let him pick us off!"

Reina was already adjusting. "Jointed barrier, now. Merge your output with mine."

Three of her members locked their mana signatures together and a layered barrier expanded outward, covering the formation from above. It was dense and well constructed, the kind of defense that would give most Foundation stage opponents serious trouble.

Rudrean descended toward it slowly, hands behind his back, the Combat Art ribbons coiling at his wrists.

"Oh, that’s quite solid," he said, looking at the barrier with what appeared to be genuine appreciation. "You built that fast."

"Shut your mouth and fight properly!" the boy who had thrown the blood spears earlier shouted from behind the barrier.

"I am fighting properly," Rudrean said, sounding mildly confused by the accusation. "This is just how I fight."

He pressed one palm flat against the surface of the barrier.

Heavenfall Wind flooded outward from his hand, not as a strike but as weight. Pure, concentrated, suffocating weight pushing against every point of the barrier simultaneously. The members maintaining it felt it immediately, their mana output straining against a pressure that didn’t push in one direction but pressed in from everywhere at once.

"Hold it!" Reina said through her teeth.

"I am holding!" someone answered, voice strained.

"It’s too heavy," another said. "What is he doing, it feels like a mountain."

"Hold!"

Rudrean watched a crack form along the upper left seam of the barrier and tilted his head.

"There it is," he said quietly.

He shaped a second projectile in his free hand, smaller this time, tighter, compressed to roughly the size of a fist, with the rotation wound much faster than the first one. He pressed it directly against the crack.

It detonated inward.

The barrier shattered.

Someone in Reina’s team stumbled backward from the feedback. Romen seized the moment and launched himself forward personally, lightning wreathing both arms, committing fully for the first time.

"Enough of this!" he said. "I’ll handle him myself."

He was fast. Genuinely fast, with real power behind the movement.

Rudrean stood still and watched him come.

Romen’s lightning fist arrived.

It connected.

Rudrean absorbed the full output of Romen’s Arcane Path through his chest, felt the two thousand lightning resistance of Voidante’s Drive take the hit, and remained exactly where he was standing.

Romen’s eyes went wide.

"That..." he started.

"That was your strongest attack, wasn’t it," Rudrean said. Not a question. He sounded genuinely sympathetic about it. "You should step back. You’ll hurt yourself before you hurt me."

Romen’s jaw tightened. "Don’t patronize me."

"I’m not patronizing you." Rudrean raised one hand and a compact spread of three projectiles formed between his fingers, each one rotating independently. "I’m giving you honest advice."

He released them simultaneously into the three strongest defensive nodes of the now fractured formation.

All three detonated at the same moment.

The formation came apart completely.

What followed stopped being a battle and became something closer to a lesson that nobody had asked for. Rudrean moved through the scattered members with the same unhurried composure, appearing beside each one just long enough to strike and cancel their Magic Suit before moving to the next.

"You’re too exposed on the left."

Strike. Gone.

"Your footing was off there."

Strike. Gone.

"Oh, careful with that angle."

Strike. Gone.

One of Reina’s members tried to flee outright, breaking from the group and sprinting laterally through the scorched terrain.

Rudrean appeared in front of him.

The member skidded to a halt and stared.

"Where are you going?" Rudrean asked, genuinely curious.

The member opened his mouth, closed it, and then his Magic Suit shattered as Rudrean tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

Gone.

Romen made one final attempt, pulling a crystalline mana stone from his ring and shattering it to fuel a last burst of lightning output, raw and unstructured and desperate.

Rudrean walked through it.

"That really isn’t going to work," he said patiently, arriving in front of Romen and looking at him with an expression of complete calm. "You knew that before you tried it."

Romen stared at him for a long moment, his breathing hard, his mana pool spent.

Eyes filled with rage and humiliation. "Bastard."

Rudrean smiled.

He pressed two fingers to Romen’s Magic Suit.

Gone.

One left.

Reina stood alone in the scorched terrain, three reinforcement layers still intact over her Magic Suit, mana fully extended. Her team was gone. Romen’s was gone. She looked at Rudrean with an expression that had moved clean past fear into something quieter and more honest.

"I want to ask you something," she said.

"Go ahead," Rudrean said.

"Lyra Ravengold is on your team."

"She is."

Reina was quiet for a moment. "Is she alright? She went through a lot."

Rudrean looked at her. He studied her face for a second and found nothing calculated in it. Just the question.

"She’s getting there," he said.

Reina nodded once. Then her eyes steadied. "Alright. Don’t hold back."

"I haven’t been," Rudrean said pleasantly.

He pressed two fingers forward.

Wind and flame, compressed to a point, three reinforcement layers folding in sequence like pages turning.

Her Magic Suit went with them.

She vanished.

The second zone settled into quiet. The ambient mana of the scorched terrain resumed its natural pulse, undisturbed, as if nothing had happened here worth noting.

Rudrean deactivated the Combat Art and let the ribbons fade from his arms. The halo dissolved above his head. The patterns beneath his skin dimmed back to their resting glow.

He checked his timer internally.

Thirty-one seconds used.

He turned and flew back toward the group.

Aelira was leaning against a boulder with her arms crossed and one brow raised in the expression that meant she was impressed and had decided not to make it obvious.

"How’d it go?" she asked.

"Easy." Rudrean leisurely answered. "Now we have no rivals in this secret realm. Let’s get all that this place can offer."