While Sylvester was crawling backward in terror, completely surrounded between Dex's flames advancing relentlessly and the edge of the abyss behind him, a suspicious and sudden movement occurred in the deep lateral shadows of the balcony.
A group of what remained of Sylvester's Personal Guard, along with an elite of Shadow Organization protectors who had been tasked with personal protection of the lord and who had hidden in the inner corridors when the real fighting began, suddenly decided to intervene.
It was a final, desperate, impulsive attempt to save their employer who paid their wages, or at the very least to create enough chaos to gain a few precious seconds to flee this hell.
"Protect Lord Sylvester! Form a human shield! Kill the rebel Dex at any cost!"
The guard commander screamed in a rough voice as he surged like a raging bull from the side entrance, drawing his broad sword, with ten men heavily armored and armed with long lances and poisoned arrows, launching a sudden flank assault toward Dex.
Dex was focusing his gaze with absolute and exclusive intensity on Sylvester, he did not blink, and did not even turn his head toward the threat approaching from the side.
He appeared to be paying them no attention whatsoever, or rather, as though he knew with certainty that his back was protected by an unconquerable force.
And indeed, before the guards could come within five meters of the fighting circle, Lumia moved.
She had been standing throughout this time on the edge of the opposite balcony railing, watching the entire scene with two gleaming, cold blue eyes: cold as the ice of virgin mountain peaks.
She had not participated in the direct fighting until now, content with guarding Dex's back. Now, her moment had come.
Lumia raised her slender hand, white as snow, toward the gray sky with slowness and stately grace. She closed her eyes for a single second, and murmured rapid, whispering words in a very ancient and forbidden language: a language not taught in the magical academies, and not found in books, a language known among the few remaining masters of secrets as "the Language of the Void."
[Void Magic: Spatial Isolation, The Silent Cage]
No explosion occurred, and the sky did not blaze. Instead, a wave of completely transparent energy descended in a terrifying silence from above. It was an energy resembling liquid, rippling glass.
This was not ordinary mana energy depending on the natural elements, it was literally a distortion and a rewriting of the very fabric of reality and spacetime itself.
This invisible energy formed a perfect, massive semi-circular dome, enveloping the entire balcony area where Dex and Sylvester stood, isolating it completely from its surroundings.
The surging guards collided with the wall of the transparent dome.
BAM! BAM! KRAAAACK!
They struck with tremendous force as though colliding with a wall of impenetrable magical steel, despite the wall appearing to the naked eye as ordinary air. The guard commander bounced back, breaking his nose immediately from the force of the collision.
The knights attempted to strike the invisible wall with heavy swords and lances, but the swords rebounded with doubled force to break their arms.
The mages accompanying them attempted to launch their most powerful fireballs and lightning bolts, but every spell, with all its fury, dissolved and was absorbed the moment it touched the wall's surface, as though a drop of water had fallen into an ocean of nothingness.
"What is this cursed magic?!" screamed one of the mages in terror, watching his most powerful incantation vanish without trace. "It absorbs mana completely! This is no ordinary protection magic, we cannot penetrate it, not even scratch it!"
In the opposite corner of the balcony, Supreme Imperial Inspector Croft and his assistant stood. Lumia had taken care, with a terrifying tactical intelligence, to leave them outside the dome at a safe distance, to avoid an unwanted diplomatic friction with the Empire at this early stage.
For the first time since the beginning of these dramatic events, signs of genuine shock, deep astonishment, indeed, awe, appeared on Croft's face: always cold and controlled.
He raised his hand slowly, straightened his spectacles, and looked with intense concentration and narrowed eyes at the transparent wall separating the balcony, then transferred his gaze to the mysterious girl with silken black hair standing calmly as though she had done nothing of particular note.
"Void magic..." Croft whispered in an astounded voice, his tone trembling slightly from the weight of the discovery.
"This is impossible, this legendary element vanished entirely from the continent since the age of the first mages. There are no records or books explaining it. This girl, who in hell is she? And how did the Williams family obtain a destructive beast such as this?"
In that precise moment, Croft understood with complete clarity that the political and military scales had not merely shifted locally, this was no longer merely a rebellion or a family dispute over succession. This was the birth of a new and terrifying great power that could threaten the balance of the entire Empire.
Inside the dome, the situation was entirely different, and verging on madness.
"This zone is now outside the boundaries of recognized time and space," Lumia's whispering, delicate, and terrifying voice arrived directly inside the minds of Sylvester and Dex alone, bypassing the physical sense of hearing. "No one enters, and no one leaves, until the reckoning is complete."
Sylvester felt doubled terror seep into his very bones. He suddenly realized that all external sound had vanished completely.
The thunderous roars of the masses, the sharp ringing of swords in the square, the screams of the guards attempting to save him, the sound of the winds, everything had gone completely silent. The absolute silence of the void. Only he, and Dex, and the hissing sound of the burning phoenix flames advancing toward him.
Sylvester found himself trapped in a cosmic glass cage, imprisoned with an enraged predator. He began striking the transparent wall with his bare fists until they bled, screaming at the guards outside to rescue him, waving his hands, screaming in supplication to Inspector Croft to intervene with the Emperor's authority, but no one could hear him.
He could see the guards screaming and striking the wall, but could not hear them. They were looking at him like a terrified ornamental fish opening its mouth in a water tank, from which no sound emerged.
Sylvester turned slowly in despair to see Dex advancing toward him with great deliberateness, the fire sword in his hand. The blue flames began to spread and cover the entire floor inside the dome. The luxurious red carpet imported from the East transformed into white ash within counted seconds.
The precious marble statues began to blacken, and boil, and crack from the immense heat trapped inside the dome.
"There is no escape, Sylvester," said Dex, his voice reverberating with a strange metallic, very deep echo inside the isolated dome, as though the gods themselves were pronouncing their verdict. "Lumia has closed the door, and I hold the only key to open it, and the only key, is your life."