The frozen clearing in the Northern Frontierra was a theater of desperation. The combined party of Shiori’s Vanguard and Saintess Evelyn were reeling. Stripped of their Ultimate Skills and blind to their own combat statistics, they were fighting in the dark.
General Vane stood like a monolith amidst the swirling snow, his presence alone radiating a pressure that made the very air seem heavy. Kazura, their primary tank, was already struggling to stand, his ribs shattered by Vane’s casual punch.
"Do not let the hopelessness take you!" Shiori commanded, her voice cutting through the howl of the wind. She adjusted her grip on her katana, her eyes locked on Lady Sylas, the Lich. "We are not just numbers on a System screen. We are the ones who were summoned here to change this world. Fight like it!"
Evelyn, ignoring the danger, knelt beside Kazura, her hands glowing with a soft, flickering light. It wasn't her usual blinding holy radiance—that had been suppressed by Vane’s Holy Banishment—but a faint, flickering warmth born of her own sheer willpower. "Hold on, Kazura," she whispered, her brow beaded with sweat. "I am knitting the bone manually. Do not move."
"Don't worry about me, Saintess," Kazura gritted out, his face pale. "Just keep the others alive."
Meanwhile, Vane began his advance. He moved with the terrifying speed of a apex predator. Shota and Yoshi lunged, their movements sluggish in the cold, trying to harry the General with low-level wind slashes and spear-jabs. Vane didn't even bother to draw his great-sword; he caught Shota’s blade between two armored fingers and flicked him aside like a nuisance.
"Is this it?" Vane sneered, his dead, sunken eyes tracking their every desperate movement. "The legendary heroes of the prophecy? You fight like children playing with sticks."
Across the clearing, Shiori faced the Lich. Lady Sylas didn't need physical speed; she warped the space around her, appearing and disappearing in blinks of necrotic fog. Each time she reappeared, a bolt of emerald hellfire followed. Shiori danced through the flames, her movements precise and efficient, but the sheer lack of mana—the "blindness" of not seeing her own health bar—made every dodge a gamble.
Think, Shiori, think! she told herself. He's human. If he's human, he has limits. If he’s human, he has a heart, a nervous system, and a breaking point.
She observed Vane's footwork. Every time he pivoted to strike, he favored his right leg, his movement hitching for a fraction of a second. An old injury, perhaps from his life before he turned traitor. It was a microscopic detail, but in a battle of attrition, it was a lifeline.
"Yua! Mei!" Shiori shouted. "Focus your wind currents not on him, but on the snow beneath his feet! Create a suction vortex!"
The two girls understood instantly. They slammed their hands into the ground. The snow beneath Vane’s heavy armor began to churn, creating a localized instability. Vane stumbled—just for a split second—as his footing turned to slush.
"Now!"
Shota and Yoshi saw the opening. They didn't aim for his armor; they aimed for the joints. Their weapons rang out against his pauldrons, drawing sparks. It wasn't a killing blow, but it forced Vane to retreat, his arrogant smirk finally faltering.
The snow beneath Vane’s heavy iron boots violently shifted. Thanks to the localized wind vortex created by Yua and Mei, the solid ground turned into a treacherous, churning slush. For the first time since the ambush began, the towering General stumbled, his right knee buckling as his weight betrayed him.
Shota and Yoshi did not waste the microscopic opening. Their weapons struck like lightning against the joints of his heavy armor, forcing the massive traitor to take a defensive step backward.
Shiori’s plan had worked. She had found a physical limitation in an otherwise overwhelming opponent. But on a battlefield dictated by high-tier magic, a single second of divided attention was a fatal luxury.
In the brief moment Shiori’s dark eyes flicked toward Vane to confirm the success of her strategy, Lady Sylas made her move.
The Lich did not chant. She simply raised a skeletal finger, her empty eye sockets blazing with emerald hellfire. A concentrated, jagged bolt of necrotic energy—silent and deadly—streaked through the falling snow.
Shiori’s [Perception] skill screamed a warning, but her body, still slowed by the crushing debuff of the Abyssal Rite, could not react in time. She twisted her torso, trying to parry with her katana, but the dark magic bypassed her blade entirely.
The spell slammed into her left arm.
The impact sounded like cracking ice. Shiori let out a sharp gasp as the necrotic mana tore through her defensive aura and bit deeply into her flesh. The fabric of her sleeve disintegrated, and a spurt of crimson blood sprayed across the pristine white snow, instantly freezing into dark crystals. A searing, numbing agony radiated from her bicep, threatening to paralyze her entirely.
"Shiori!" Saintess Evelyn cried out, her voice laced with panic, briefly looking away from healing Kazura.
"I'm fine!" Shiori lied through gritted teeth, clutching her bleeding arm. She forced herself to stand tall, refusing to show weakness to the undead creature mocking her. "Keep your focus on the Vanguard!"
But before Sylas could launch a follow-up attack, a new, terrifying sound vibrated through the frozen earth.
It was a rhythmic, heavy thudding. It sounded like a heartbeat, multiplied by thousands.
Through the dense, blinding curtain of the blizzard, a massive silhouette began to form on the horizon, approaching from the direction of the village they had just left. At first, a desperate spark of hope flared in the chests of the Vanguard students. Reinforcements? Had the local village militia rallied to aid the "Heroes from the Capital"?
The hope died a gruesome death as the silhouettes breached the tree line.
It was an army. Hundreds of heavily armored demons, grotesque imps, and rotting undead soldiers marched in perfect, terrifying lockstep. Their weapons gleamed with dark enchantments, and their eyes burned with an unnatural, collective hunger.
And standing at the very front of the vanguard, leading the demonic march, was a face Shiori recognized. It was the middle-aged man with the thick brown hair—the exact same villager who had so gratefully pointed them toward the Adventurers Guild, weeping about how his village was dying.
Except now, his human skin was peeling away, revealing the twisted, horned visage of a high-tier Doppelganger demon.
A cold bucket of realization washed over Shiori's mind. The pieces of the puzzle aggressively snapped together.
The map, Shiori thought, her breath hitching. When I studied the cartography of the Northern Frontierra back in the Kingdom's library... there was no settlement registered in this pass. The terrain was marked as a Class-A Danger Zone. I thought the map was just outdated.
It wasn't outdated. There was never a village.
The heavy wooden cabins, the smoke from the chimneys, the tired receptionist at the Guild—it was all an elaborate, massive-scale illusion and a psychological trap. They hadn't stumbled upon a settlement in need; they had walked directly into the open maw of the demon fortress, lured in by their own heroic complex and naivety.
General Vane, who had finally regained his footing and swatted Shota away, turned his scarred face toward the arriving army. He did not look pleased.
"Who gave the order to march?" Vane bellowed, his unnaturally loud voice echoing over the howling wind. He glared at the Doppelganger leading the troops. "I explicitly told the garrison to hold position! Sylas and I are more than enough to handle a few unbaked children. You are interfering with my hunt!"
It was a blatant display of arrogance and poor chain of command. And for Shiori, it was the exact distraction she desperately needed.
"Cover your eyes!" Shiori screamed to her classmates.
Ignoring the agonizing pain in her left arm, Shiori dug into her waning mana pool. She didn't aim for a lethal strike; she aimed for utility. Chanting at breakneck speed, she thrust her right hand toward the Lich.
"From the lightless depths, rise and obscure—Abyssal Ash!"
A dense, explosive cloud of pitch-black, magical dust erupted directly in Lady Sylas's face. The necrotic particles clung to the Lich’s emerald eyes, momentarily blinding her magical sight and cutting off her mana sensory network.
"Insolent brat!" Sylas shrieked, blindly firing streams of blue fire that missed Shiori entirely.
Shiori didn't even watch the spell land. She had already pivoted on her heel, her golden eyes locking onto the distracted General Vane.
She abandoned incantations entirely. Using the high-speed processing of a top-tier student, she activated a mid-tier offensive spell—[Void Barrage]—but forced the System to duplicate the magical arrays exponentially.
Twenty black, jagged lances of compressed dark mana materialized in the air around her. Because she skipped the chant, the power of each individual lance was halved, but the sheer quantity was overwhelming.
With a vicious slash of her katana, Shiori unleashed them all at once.
The barrage struck Vane right as he turned his head back to the fight. The dark lances hammered into his heavy iron armor with the force of cannonballs. While they didn't pierce his flesh, the concussive kinetic force was staggering. Vane roared in anger and pain, forced onto one knee as the rapid-fire explosions disrupted his breathing and shattered his concentration.
More importantly, it shattered the black miasma radiating from his gauntlets.
The oppressive, suffocating dome of the Abyssal Rite: Holy Banishment fractured like fragile glass and dissolved into the snowy air.
Instantly, the crushing weight vanished from the Vanguard's shoulders. The ambient mana of the world rushed back into their bodies. Their suppressed stats skyrocketed back to 100%. The greyed-out icons on their internal System interfaces flared with brilliant, blinding color.
Their Ultimate Skills were unlocked.
"Now!" Shiori commanded, her voice ringing with absolute authority. "Use your Ultimates against the Commanders! I will handle the swarm!"
Shiori didn't wait to see if they obeyed. She turned toward the marching demon army, her dark hair whipping wildly in the blizzard. She sheathed her katana, planting both feet firmly in the snow, and tapped into the deepest, darkest reserves of her magical core.
She felt her MP bar plummeting dangerously close to zero, but she didn't care.
"[Ultimate Skill: Event Horizon]!"
The air in front of the demon army violently warped. A pinpoint of absolute, suffocating darkness materialized, instantly expanding into a massive, swirling black hole of gravitational and magical force. The sound of the wind was entirely muted, swallowed by the sheer density of the sphere.
The demons didn't even have time to scream. Because the marching army consisted primarily of low-tier and mid-tier monsters—far below Rank A—they possessed no resistance to localized spatial distortion.
The front ranks were lifted off their feet and violently sucked into the void. Armor crumpled, weapons shattered, and bodies were reduced to atomic dust as they crossed the event horizon. In less than ten seconds, the proud, terrifying vanguard of the demon fortress was entirely absorbed and erased from the battlefield, leaving behind nothing but a perfectly smooth crater in the snow.
Behind her, the temperature plummeted to a level that made the blizzard feel like a warm summer day.
"[Ultimate Skill: Glacial Eternity]!" Shota roared.
Shota slammed his broadsword into the earth. A terrifying wave of absolute zero ice exploded outward, racing across the ground like a tidal wave of crystal. It slammed directly into the blinded Lady Sylas. The Lich shrieked as the holy-infused ice shattered her necrotic barriers, freezing her tattered robes and encasing her skeletal form in a massive, jagged glacier. The ice tore through her physical vessel, dealing catastrophic damage, though her phylactery kept her tethered to the world of the living.
Seeing his army annihilated in seconds and his co-commander frozen solid, Vane’s arrogance finally evaporated.
"Damn you!" Vane spat, clutching his dented chest plate.
Before Shota or Yoshi could follow up their attack, Vane activated a high-tier physical movement skill. The air cracked with a sonic boom, and the General vanished into the blizzard, retreating toward the mountains with impossible speed.
A moment later, a dark teleportation circle flared beneath the frozen block of ice containing Lady Sylas. With a sickening crunch, the Lich shattered the ice just enough to sink into the shadow, disappearing from the battlefield entirely to save her own life.
Silence fell over the clearing, save for the howling wind.
They had won. They had broken the trap.
Shiori stood frozen for a moment, staring at the empty crater where the demon army had been. A triumphant smile ghosted across her lips.
Then, her System chimed a hollow, warning tone.
[WARNING: Mana Depletion at 0%. Host entering critical stasis.]
Her vision instantly tunneled into darkness. Her legs gave out completely, and she tipped backward, falling toward the blood-stained snow.
"Lady Shiori!"
Saintess Evelyn moved with a burst of divine speed, sliding across the ice to catch the falling girl before she hit the ground. Yua, Mei, and Shota immediately rushed to their side, forming a protective perimeter around their unconscious leader.
"She used everything she had," Evelyn murmured softly, channeling a gentle, restorative holy light into Shiori’s chest to stabilize her vitals. She looked up at the exhausted, bruised Vanguard students. "She saved us all. Now, we must get her to safety before the storm buries us."
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