The declaration hung in the salt-heavy air, cold and immovable. Cora stared at Jeather, her Chrono-Butterfly fluttering in erratic, shimmering loops around her fingers.
"You're insane," she whispered. "The High Circle doesn't fight fair. They don't send Rank 40s to settle scores. They send 'Adjusters.' They'll collapse the space around this cliff before you can even reach for a card."
Jeather didn't blink. He felt the internal hum of the [Iron Foundry] settling into his Beast Realm. The mana from Silas's defeated Behemoth was being recycled, fueled by the soot and heat of the new sector. It was a dark, industrial power, but right now, he needed every scrap of edge he could get.
"Let them come," Jeather said. "They've spent years treating beasts like hardware.
They've forgotten what happens when a beast actually fights for someone they trust."
The response was faster than even Cora expected.
The ocean waves fifty yards out didn't just stop—they vanished. A sphere of absolute silence expanded toward the shore, a void where sound and light seemed to be swallowed whole. From the center of the void, a figure descended. He didn't use a beast to fly; he stood on a platform of hovering, obsidian hexagonal tiles.
[System Warning: High-Level Mana Signature Detected.]
[Target: Adjuster Vane - Rank 12.]
[Danger Level: Fatal.]
Vane was a man of sharp angles, dressed in a high-collared black uniform that bore no academy insignia—only the Gear and Helix. Behind him, two beasts materialized from the void. They were Void-Stalkers, lanky, bipedal creatures with no faces, only shifting mists where their heads should be.
"Jeather Vale," Vane's voice sounded as if it were being played through a broken radio.
"The Aethelgard Initiative formally requests the return of Prototype 0-09. Your cooperation will result in a painless extraction of your system."
"The 'mutt' has a name," Jeather said, his hand sliding toward the silver-veined card at his waist. "And my system stays where it is."
"Correction," Vane sighed. "It belongs to the state."
Vane flicked a finger. The two Void-Stalkers vanished.
"Blink!" Jeather commanded, but he wasn't talking to the Rifthound.
[System Notification: Summoning Ice Abyss Weaver...]
[Field Effect: Abyssal Webbing Activated.]
The Weaver erupted from the sand, not as a combatant, but as a trap-setter. Thousands of strands of frozen silk, nearly invisible in the moonlight, had already been laid across the cliffside. As the Void-Stalkers reappeared to strike, they collided with the freezing silk.
The "void" mana they carried sizzled against the Weaver's deep-pressure ice.
"Saxum! Lava Form!"
From a fracture in the ground, a molten hand shot out and grabbed one of the Stalkers by its spindly leg. The Golem child emerged, his body glowing like a miniature sun, his stone skin dripping with liquid fire.
"SQUISH THE GHOSTS!" Saxum roared.
He slammed the Stalker into the cliff face, the heat of his body steam-blasting the wet rock. But the second Stalker slipped through the webbing, its misty claws aimed directly for Jeather's throat.
"Too slow," a voice echoed.
A wall of jagged, crystalline ice rose between Jeather and the Stalker. Velkaria manifested, her sovereign aura expanding to push back the void-silence. She didn't wait for a command. She raised her hand, and the very humidity of the ocean breeze turned into a thousand frozen needles.
[Skill: Thousand-Year Hailstorm]
The needles shredded the second Stalker's misty form, forcing it to retreat toward Vane's obsidian platform.
Vane looked down, his expression shifting from boredom to mild annoyance. "Platinum-tier pressure? No... these are Silver-tier beasts with Platinum-tier souls. Fascinating. The evolution resonance is higher than the charts predicted."
"I told you," Jeather said, stepping forward.
"You forgot how to count."
Vane's eyes glowed a toxic yellow. He tapped his gauntlet, and the obsidian tiles beneath him began to rotate. "If the hunters cannot catch the prey, we simply burn the forest."
A massive mana-cannon, similar to the one in the Behemoth's jaw but ten times larger, began to assemble itself out of thin air behind Vane. It was fueled by a pulsating, artificial heart—a 'Calamity Core.'
"Jeather, get down!" Cora screamed, her butterfly glowing bright enough to blind. "He's going to erase the coastline!"
Jeather didn't move. He felt a surge of heat from the [Abyssal Throne].
"Master," Astrael spoke, his voice calm and resonant. "The mask is no longer necessary. They know who we are. Let us show them who we have become."
Jeather smiled. It was a cold, jagged thing.
"Fine. Astrael—Full Release."
The green-black flames that had wreathed the Rifthound earlier exploded outward, but this time, they didn't come from the dog. They poured from Jeather's own shadow. Astrael stepped out, his nature-evolved demonic form reaching seven feet in height. His wings, looking like charred oak leaves, unfurled to cast a shadow over the entire cliff.
At the same time, the [Sunken Crater] rumbled. Two massive shadows loomed within the Beast Realm, waiting for the signal.
"You wanted the prototype?" Jeather asked, his eyes reflecting the violet spatial mana of the Rifthound, who now stood by his side, no longer hidden. "How about you take the whole family?"
Vane's mana-cannon fired. A beam of raw, corrosive void energy tore through the air, screaming with the sound of a thousand dying beasts.
"Basilisk—Petrifying Gaze!"
Jeather didn't summon the full body. He summoned the eyes.
Two massive, golden orbs materialized in the sky above Jeather. The moment the void beam hit the Basilisk's line of sight, the energy didn't explode—it turned to gray, lifeless stone. The beam crumbled mid-air, raining heavy rock into the ocean.
Vane's composure finally broke. "Platinum... a Platinum Basilisk? In a Rank 211's roster? Impossible!"
"And the Chimera says hello," Jeather added.
The three-headed terror manifested on the beach below, its lion head letting out a roar that shattered the glass in the distant academy windows. Its dragon head inhaled, and a torrent of multi-aspect fire surged upward, melting Vane's obsidian tiles into slag.
Vane plummeted toward the sand, his void-shroud torn to ribbons.
Cora grabbed Jeather's arm. "You've won the battle, but you just rang the dinner bell for every High Silver and Gold-rank Adjuster in the country! We have to move, now!"
Jeather watched as Vane disappeared into a spatial emergency-exit ripple. He knew Cora was right. He had exposed his hand. The Basilisk and Chimera were now on the radar of the world's most dangerous men.
"Otter!" Jeather called.
The Otter chirped, holding a small, silver compass it had 'found' in Vane's dropped luggage during the chaos.
"Good boy. Where to, Cora?"
Cora looked at the butterfly on her hand. "The Saltwind Tidal Trenches. There's a hidden path through the underwater archives. If we can reach the Saltwind Current, we can be fifty miles away by dawn."
Jeather looked back at the Academy one last time. The ranking obelisk was still glowing.
Rank 42.
"Keep the rank," Jeather muttered, turning toward the sea. "I'm going to find the men who built that lab. And I'm going to make sure they never seal another soul again."
[System Notification: Escape Phase Initiated.]
[New Environment Detected: The Deep Current.]
[Warning: The Aethelgard 'Hunt' has officially begun.]
As they dove into the dark waters, the Rifthound let out a low, satisfied growl. For the first time in its life, it wasn't a prototype. It was a brother.