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The Augria Sand Dunes were the world's final breath, a place where life itself seemed to have given up. Dunes of sand, a pale and sickly yellow like old bones under a cruel sun, rolled on endlessly. The star in the sky did not warm; it only punished. The air did not shimmer with heat but with the density of stagnant and corrupted mana, an invisible poison that drove away any sane creature. Legends were the only harvest in this sterile place; legends about the Witch of Envy, sealed beneath the sand, waiting. Today, the legend refused to wait any longer.
The arrival of Reinhard van Astrea was a silent refutation of all the desolation. He did not walk on the sand; the sand seemed to pull away from his immaculate boots. The caustic sun dared not touch his skin, its glare appearing to bend around him. His vibrant red hair was the only truly living color for miles, a flame of life that the desert's death could not extinguish. His blue eyes, serene as a summer sky, observed the landscape not with hostility, but with the pity of a god looking upon a flawed creation. He was the will of Od Laguna made manifest, the personification of order in a domain of chaos. The world loved him, and that love was an armor stronger than any steel. He was there because the world's antithesis had awakened.
Her manifestation was a violation. Reality did not tear; it unraveled, like a rotted cloth yielding to touch. A point on the horizon, previously occupied by a dune, became a patch of nothingness. Color bled from that area, followed by sound, heat, and the very notion of space. The patch grew, a wound opening on the face of the world, and from it, a figure emerged.
She was a young woman of such overwhelming beauty that it became painful to behold. Silver hair that seemed to have stolen the moonlight, eyes of deep amethyst that held the sorrow of ages. Her dress, woven from shadows and despair, billowed even in the absence of wind. It was Satella. And with her came the cold. Not a natural cold, but a thermal vacuum, a hungry presence that sucked the energy from everything around it. The sand around her feet darkened, freezing not into ice, but into a state of pure stagnation.
Her eyes did not focus on Reinhard. They looked through him, at a memory, at a desire so intense it became a force of nature in itself. "I love you," she whispered, and the voice, though soft, carried the weight of a mountain. The air bent. The dunes trembled. It was not for Reinhard. He was just an obstacle.
Reinhard's hand went to his hip, to the hilt of the only sword he carried: the Dragon Sword Reid. Its sheath, known as the Dragon's Claw, bore the marks of deep grooves, as if an ancient power had clawed it. Against an enemy of this magnitude, only the strongest sword in the world would suffice. With a fluid motion that was in itself a form of martial art, he drew it. The blade, forged from the finest steel and bathed in the blood of a thousand dragons, shone with a light of its own, a latent power that seemed to drink the corrupted mana around it and turn it to nothing. It was no ordinary weapon; it was one of the Ten Swords of Power, a legend in his hands.
"I love you, I love you, I love you..." Satella's whisper continued, each repetition a little more desperate, a little more unstable.
Then, hell answered.
The shadow beneath her did not spread; it erupted. Like a geyser of pure night, a pillar of darkness struck the pale sky, and from it unfolded the Unseen Hands. Not dozens, not hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. A black, pulsating forest of shadowy appendages, each as thick as a tree, each moving with a speed that broke the sound barrier, leaving a trail of vacuum in the air. They converged on Reinhard, a tsunami of annihilation.
For any other living being, the universe would have ended in that instant. For Reinhard, it was the beginning of a deadly waltz.
His body moved before his mind could command. The Divine Protection of Foreknowledge turned the torrent of attacks into a map of future intentions, lines of light tracing the path of each hand in his mind. The Divine Protection of Evasion calculated the path of least resistance, a millimeter-wide path through the apocalypse. His sword became an extension of his will, a silver blur that did not block, but deflected.
The air cracked and groaned around him. A hand descended like a meteor; he spun, the tip of his sword touching the shadow's "wrist" with surgical precision, redirecting its colossal trajectory. The hand plunged into the sand meters away, the force of the impact creating a shockwave that threw up a wall of yellow dust. Before the dust could settle, three more hands emerged from the cloud, trying to impale him from different angles. He took a single step back, a minimal but perfectly timed movement, allowing the three shadowy tips to meet at the exact point where he had been, colliding with each other with a dull thud that made the ground tremble.
He danced. Every step was perfect. Every sword strike, a whisper of steel that guided destruction away from him. The air around him hissed with the displacement of thousands of attacks, the sound of a hurricane contained in a single point. He was the calm in the eye of the storm, an island of order untouched by absolute chaos. For minutes that dragged on like hours, he simply existed, untouchable, while the world around him was pulverized to dust. The sand around him was carved out, forming an irregular crater tens of meters deep, all from the impact of attacks that missed their target by millimeters.
But Reinhard, or the world's consciousness guiding him, understood. This was unsustainable. The hands were infinite, manifestations of a Witch's will. Draining her energy was like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Defense, however perfect, was a form of slow defeat. He needed to attack.
Satella's tactic shifted, as if sensing his change in intent. The hands stopped attacking directly. Instead, they plunged into the sand, all at once. The desert fell silent for a heartbeat. a silence pregnant with terror.
Reinhard felt it through his Divine Protections. The world's mana, the very lifeblood of the earth beneath his feet, was being drained, corrupted, and turned into a weapon.
The ground trembled. Then, the horizon rose.
A wave of sand, hundreds of meters high, black as pitch and glowing with a sickly purple light, surged towards him. It wasn't just sand; it was the Authority of Envy given form, each grain a vessel of power that disintegrated reality before it. Behind the first wave, two more rose, turning the desert into a stormy ocean of annihilation. The sun was completely swallowed. The world became a shore waiting to be drowned.
"Astrea Style," Reinhard's voice rang out, calm and clear, a beacon of certainty in the growing darkness.
He did not retreat. He advanced. Leaping towards the colossal wave, he swung his sword in a horizontal arc. A wave of pure blue energy, the manifestation of his perfect swordsmanship, erupted from the blade. The attack did not push the wave back; it negated it. Where the blue energy passed, the Witch's corruption was undone. The black sand turned yellow again, the dark power evaporated, and it fell back to the ground, inert. He had carved a tunnel through the tsunami.
But the other waves were already crashing down on him. From within the sandy walls, shadowy tendrils and faces formed, trying to grab him as he passed. The Divine Protection of the Spirit King activated, and micro-spirits of fire, water, and wind formed a shimmering shield around him, vaporizing the sandy claws before they could touch him.
He burst through the other side of the first wave, only to be met by the second, which was curling over to crush him. This time, he pointed his sword at the ground. A blast of power propelled him high into the air, above the wave's crest. For a moment, he hung suspended in the air, the Sword Saint against a sky of darkness and a sea of black sand.
Below him, Satella watched. And for the first time, a clear emotion crossed her beautiful, sad face. Annoyance. A deep, absolute annoyance, not of a warrior facing an equal, but of someone whose sacred moment was being interrupted by a noisy insect.
Her patience had run out. Brute force tactics had failed. It was time for a more... intimate approach. She raised a hand.
The air around Reinhard thickened, grew heavy, as if space itself were solidifying. Then, gravity multiplied a thousandfold. He was ripped from the air with the force of a comet, plummeting towards the sand. His Divine Protections reacted instantly. The Divine Protection against Ground Magic negated the spell's origin, while the Divine Protection of Lightness reduced his effective weight. Even so, the force was so primordial that he hit the ground with an impact that created a fifty-meter crater, though he landed on his feet, unscathed, at its center. The sand around him had been compressed into glass by the impact.
Satella gave him no respite. As he stood at the bottom of the crater, shadow poured over the edges like a waterfall of oil. It did not solidify into Unseen Hands, but into something sharper, more lethal. Thousands of spears, needles, and swords, all made of solidified darkness, rained down upon him. Each projectile hissed with the power to pierce a mountain.
The Divine Protection of Projectile Deflection kicked in. An invisible field of force warped the air around Reinhard, causing the vast majority of the shadow weapons to swerve by inches, embedding themselves in the ground around him and turning the crater into a forest of black thorns. For the few that passed through this defense, the Divine Protection of the Light Shield generated instantaneous, localized barriers of golden energy, each appearing for a microsecond to block a blade before vanishing. The sound was of a million crystals shattering at once, a deafening noise that echoed through the desert.
Reinhard remained motionless, his expression serene. He did not need to move. The world moved him. The world protected him.
Satella's expression tightened. The annoyance was hardening into something colder. If mass brute force didn't work, she would use absolute precision. She extended her delicate fingers and whispered a single word, one that would make any mage's blood run cold. "Al Minya."
This was not the common Minya magic, which created simple stakes of mana. This was its ultimate form, a barrage of pure crystalline annihilation. The air in front of her shattered, and from it erupted hundreds of purple crystals, each a meter long and sharp as obsidian. They didn't just fly; they hunted, leaving trails of violet light in the air as they converged on Reinhard from every conceivable angle, twisting and changing trajectory mid-flight to find an opening.
The true horror of Al Minya, however, was not in the piercing. It was what came after. One of the crystals, deflected by one of Reinhard's Divine Protections, struck the glass wall of the crater. There was no explosion. Instead, the point of impact spread into a web of purple veins. In the blink of an eye, a ten-meter section of the glass wall transformed into a giant amethyst crystal. And then, with a sharp crack that split the air, the crystal disintegrated into a billion shimmering fragments, which in turn dissolved into dust. The magic didn't just destroy; it crystallized its target and then shattered it from the very fabric of reality.
Against Reinhard, the barrage was useless. The Divine Protection of Projectile Deflection worked frantically, but the crystals' homing nature was too advanced. A few got through. The instant a crystal entered his personal space, the Divine Protection of Spirit Affinity summoned minor spirits to sacrifice themselves, colliding with the projectiles and dissolving into light. For the single crystal that slipped past even this defense, the Divine Protection of First Attack activated in a peculiar way: before the crystal could hit him, an invisible wave of his own energy met it in the air, neutralizing the crystal's magic and causing it to fall to the ground like a harmless piece of glass.
Seeing that physical and magical attacks were useless, Satella changed tactics again, attacking what not even steel could defend against: the mind.
Whispers snaked into his consciousness, not through his ears, but directly into his soul. They were voices of doubt. The memory of his grandmother, Thearesia, falling in battle. The weight of the Astrea name. The loneliness of being the strongest. The futility of protecting a world that would continue to spawn monsters. They were needles of despair meant to pierce his resolve.
But Reinhard's soul was a fortress guarded by Od Laguna. The Divine Protection of a Clear Mind wrapped his consciousness in a shroud of tranquility. The poisonous whispers were not blocked; they were simply observed, cataloged as a "threat," and dismissed without causing a single ripple in his conviction. To Reinhard, the psychic attack was as disturbing as the buzz of a mosquito.
The annoyance on Satella's face gave way to a cold, silent fury. This man, this champion of the world, was an aberration. His very existence was an insult. His perfection was an obstacle to hers.
The veil of shadows around her thickened. The pressure in the air increased a thousandfold. The atmospheric mana began to crystallize, forming black snowflakes that hung in the air, absorbing all light and energy. The desert was plunged into an absolute, cold, and starless night. This was not the absence of light; it was the presence of darkness as a dominant concept.
And then, the true Authority hit him.
It was not a physical force. It was a conceptual weight. The weight of her envy. The desire for nothing else to exist. The yearning to erase an entire universe so that only she and her beloved could occupy the void. It was the pressure of 400 years of solitude, obsession, and unrestrained power, focused on a single point: him.
The ground under Reinhard did not turn to glass; it shattered into fractal patterns of pure hopelessness. The Dragon Sword in his hand remained impassive, its conceptual nature immune to the pressure, but the same did not apply to its wielder. His Divine Protections, his divine armor, groaned under the strain. The Divine Protection of Supreme Magic Resistance kept him from being crushed, but the force was so overwhelming that he was forced to one knee. Blood trickled from his nose, from his ears. His bones, protected by Od Laguna, threatened to shatter.
The Sword Saint, the invincible hero, the beloved of the world, was kneeling.
He felt the weight not just on his body, but on his very existence. It was as if the universe were whispering to him that his presence was unwanted, that his strength was a lie, that his very life was an obstacle to a greater, more terrible love. Every fiber of his being screamed for him to yield, to disappear and allow the Witch's will to be done. This was the essence of the Authority of Envy: to make the world itself envy his non-existence.
Even so, he raised his head, his blue eyes meeting hers in the darkness. "Witch of Envy," he said, his voice strained but unshakable. "For the sake of the world I have sworn to protect... I deem you an enemy worthy of being struck down."
His declaration was not a challenge. It was a trigger. A prerequisite. The Dragon Sword in his hand, until then a blade of contained power, awakened to its master's call against a worthy foe.
If Satella's manifestation was a violation, the sword's awakening was a correction. A golden light, warm and absolute, exploded not from the blade, but from Reinhard himself, who now acted as a conduit for its conceptual power. The light banished the artificial night, evaporating it like mist under a noon sun. The crushing pressure vanished, replaced by the comforting, all-powerful presence of the sword. The desert itself seemed to sigh in relief. The corrupted sand was purified, the stagnant mana was swept away, and for an instant, the Augria Sand Dunes became the purest place in the world, all under the influence of that single blade.
The blade, pulsing with the power of a thousand dragons, seemed to have a will of its own. Its existence was older and more fundamental than the desert itself, a weapon forged not just to fight, but to dictate the end of fights. It did not reflect light; it commanded it. Its conceptual function, awakened by the worthiness of the enemy, was to impose an "end" on that which should have none.
Satella's existential condition, an absolute invulnerability that made her body immune to injury, decay, and any mental or spiritual attacks, wavered before that power. The sword yearned to impose an "end" on something that should have none.
"This ends here," Reinhard declared, his voice now resonating with the power of the sword itself.
He rose. The movement was not fast, but space bent to accommodate it. Time seemed to slow in anticipation. He raised the Dragon Sword, and the air around the blade unraveled, revealing glimpses of the void between stars. He cut.
There was no sound. No explosion of light. Just a cut of perfect silence. A line of "non-existence" that stretched across the desert. The cut did not destroy what it touched; it undid it. The laws of physics, mana, matter itself were temporarily suspended and rewritten as "null" along its path.
The cut hit Satella.
Or rather, it hit the space she occupied. The blade, carrying the concept of an "end," met Satella's existential condition, the concept of being "unchangeable." The result was a paradox that tore the very fabric of reality at that point. The shroud of shadows that enveloped her was disintegrated, not by a blow, but by being caught in the clash of two absolutes. The sand beneath her, for hundreds of meters in every direction, was not cut, but simply ceased to exist, creating a perfectly spherical crater of pure void.
Satella herself remained at the center of it all, untouched. Not a single strand of her silver hair had been severed. The sword, a weapon capable of killing the immortal, had found the one thing that could not be killed. The concept of an "end" was rejected by a being whose existence did not permit one.
She did not stumble. Her feet remained firm on nothingness. But for the first time, her amethyst eyes focused on Reinhard with something beyond annoyance. It was a cold acknowledgment. The power of that sword, though unable to harm her, was an undeniable truth in the world. A truth that prevented her from moving forward.
Reinhard stepped forward, the Dragon Sword raised for a second strike. Victory seemed a distant concept now. If his best attack, the will of the world made manifest to impose an end, could not touch her, what could? The logic of the battle was unraveling. For the first time in his life of perfection, he felt the cold sting of uncertainty. All his Divine Protections gave him the answer to victory, but against her, they all whispered the same impossible answer: "there is no path."
But he saw the expression in her eyes change. The cold acknowledgment disappeared, swallowed by a wave of sorrow so colossal, so ancient, that it made the power of the Dragon Sword seem momentarily trivial. And beneath the sorrow, a cold, hard, and absolute determination formed. A determination born not from a desire to win, but from a love so possessive that it saw reality itself as a barrier to be demolished.
"You..." she whispered, and for the first time, her voice was focused, directed at him. "...will not stand between us."
She raised her hand, not to attack, but like a conductor about to command the final silence. And then, she spoke the name of the magic that would distort the world.
"Al Shamac."
It was not a shout. It was a declaration. The ultimate Yin magic, capable of isolating an area from the normal flow of time and space. But this was not the magic that scholars knew, nor the version that the great Yin Spirit, Beatrice, could conjure in her prime. That would be like comparing a candle to a supernova. Satella's Al Shamac did not create a simple door to an isolated dimension; it tore a nation-sized chunk from the very tapestry of reality, intending to cast it away forever. The magnitude of the spell was so vast, so absolute, that the very concept of "space" around them began to dissolve.
Reinhard felt it first as a chill in his soul. The chorus of Divine Protections in his mind, the constant, warm, and reassuring presence of Od Laguna, began to stutter, to turn to static.
Divine Protection of Judgment... failing... Divine Protection of the Wind Arrow... connection... unstable...
Satella was no longer attacking him. She was attacking the stage. She was severing this portion of the desert from the tapestry of reality. She was not fighting him in his world; she was dragging him into hers.
He tried to take a step, but his feet sank into the sand as if it were pitch. He looked down. The sand was no longer yellow. It was gray, textureless, like the ashes of a dead fire. It was no longer the sand of his world. The sky above was no longer a sky, but a ceiling of purple static, crackling silently.
He raised the Dragon Sword to strike again, but the golden glow was visibly dimmer. The sword was the will of the world, but what happened when the world was no longer present to exert its will?
"What is this?" the question escaped his lips. It was the first time in his life that Reinhard van Astrea had felt confusion.
"This place no longer belongs to your world," Satella's voice echoed, not through the air, but from within his own mind, an intimate violation. "This place is mine. A garden I prepare for him. And weeds like you must be pulled."
A veil of darkness fell over the false horizon, sealing them in a bubble of fabricated reality. The sunlight vanished, replaced by a sickly purple glow that emanated from Satella. Reinhard stood on an island of dying existence, surrounded by the infinite ocean of the Witch's soul.
Then, he felt the last connection sever.
The sensation was of an infinite fall. The warmth, the love, the unconditional support of Od Laguna that had defined him since birth—vanished. The silence in his mind was absolute and deafening. For the first time, he was completely and utterly alone.
He tried to call upon a Divine Protection. Divine Protection of the Phoenix. Nothing. Sword Mastery. Silence. He tried to pull mana from the air to strengthen his body. There was no mana, only the suffocating authority of Satella.
The Divine Protection of the Sword Saint, the very key that allowed him to even draw the greatest of weapons from its sheath, was the last to fade, like a dying star. With it, the soul of the Dragon Sword was gone.
The blade in his hand became impossibly heavy. It was no longer a conceptual weapon, but a magnificently forged and completely inert piece of metal. A relic of a power that no longer recognized him, for he no longer held the credential to wield it. His divinity had been revoked.
The Sword Saint was dead. Not the man, but the concept. All that remained was Reinhard van Astrea. A man.
The shadows moved. Not with the furious speed of before, but with the slow, inexorable certainty of a glacier. They did not rush to kill him. They approached to erase him.
Reinhard lifted the heavy sword with his own muscles. His skill, forged through training and the blood of the Astreas, remained. His determination, his oath to protect, still burned in his heart. He was still the pinnacle of human potential.
But a human, however perfect, cannot fight the very fabric of his own existence.
The shadows touched him. There was no pain. Just a coldness that was not physical, but existential. A coldness that erased memory. He felt the concept of "red" disappear from his mind before his hair lost its color, becoming a lifeless gray. He felt the notion of "blue" drain from his soul before his eyes became a colorless void. The memory of his grandmother's face, the first Sword Saint, unraveled into mist. The feeling of loyalty to his kingdom, a cornerstone of his identity, dissolved into nothing. He tried to remember the face of Felt, the candidate he had sworn to serve, but all he found was a blur, a shape without a name.
The world to which the Divine Protection of the Phoenix would bring him back could no longer be reached. There was nowhere to return to. His greatest defense was useless because his "checkpoint" no longer existed.
His vision darkened. The last thing the consciousness of Reinhard van Astrea registered was Satella's face, her eyes no longer on him, but fixed on a distant future, a future where her obstacle had been removed, a future for her and her beloved alone.
In the real world, in the Augria Sand Dunes, a circle of land several kilometers in diameter simply... settled. The sand became smooth, devoid of any features, as if a divine eraser had passed over it. The air became deathly still, the corrupted mana completely absent, leaving a vacuum that nature abhorred.
The world had lost its strongest champion, its beloved son. And the greatest tragedy of all was that the world itself had no memory that he had ever been there. The battle never happened. The hero never existed. The Shadow had swallowed the Sun, and no one noticed when the light went out.