Morgana moved through the forest like something that had decided the trees were an inconvenience rather than an obstacle.

Her figure blurred between the trunks, covering ground at a speed that left the undergrowth swaying in her wake long after she had already passed through it.

Her sky-blue hair had come partially loose from its bun and streamed behind her. Her amethyst eyes were fixed forward, cold and completely focused.

She had already sent word to the other instructors.

Pull every student out of the forest. All of them, from every direction, as fast as possible.

She hadn’t explained in detail. There wasn’t time for detail. The urgency in her message had been enough.

Now she was running toward the last known position of the vanished signals.

She kept her expression controlled, the way she always did. But underneath it, the worry was real and her heart was shaking slightly.

Damien’s signal was among the missing.

Her disciple. Her responsibility in a way that went beyond the standard instructor relationship.

She had taken him on personally, trained him directly, invested in his development with genuine intent. If something had happened to him.

And Noah as well.

She hadn’t expected to feel anything particular about that.

He was a student. Capable and unusual in ways she was still working out. Yet she had felt it when his signal disappeared.

A tightening somewhere between and professional that she was currently not examining.

He was the only student who openly asked for training and spar with her.

She pushed more mana into her legs and went faster.

The trees thinned slightly ahead where the terrain changed around a cluster of old rock formations.

And Morgana vaulted a fallen trunk without breaking stride, her coat snapping behind her from the speed.

She was close.

Then something dropped from the canopy above and landed in the path directly in front of her.

She stopped.

Not slowly. Instantly, the way only someone with complete control of their own momentum could stop. One moment moving, the next completely still, three meters from the figure that had landed in her way.

He straightened from the landing crouch and looked at her.

Dark hair cut to the jaw. Dark blue eyes with vertical pupils that caught the filtered forest light in a way that human eyes didn’t.

The cloak he was wearing settled around him as he rose, and the ease with which he had dropped from that height and simply stood up said everything about what he was.

Demon. And not a weak one.

"Morgana Celestine," he said pleasantly, like they were being introduced at a social gathering. "My name is Buel. "

He inclined his head in a greeting that was almost courteous.

Morgana looked at him.

"Demon...tell me...the students," she said, her voice even and very cold. "You’re responsible for their disappearance, aren’t you?."

Buer smiled. It reached his eyes that made it worse rather than better.

"I took a few of them, yes." He tilted his head slightly.

"It isn’t as serious as you’re making it. They’re not dead... well. Most of them aren’t." He let that sit for exactly the right amount of time to be unpleasant.

"My suggestion would be to turn around and go back to the students you still have. The ones who are safe. Cut your losses, as they say. We are just taking few."

The mana that came off Morgana’s body wasn’t a gradual build.

It detonated outward from her all at once. A single pressure wave of dense, dark energy that rolled through the surrounding forest in every direction simultaneously.

The trees nearest to her groaned from it. Undergrowth flattened outward in a ring.

Birds that had been sitting in branches fifty meters away launched themselves into the sky in a panicked mass.

The air around her darkened at the edges, her mana carrying the particular quality of her affinity.

Not the clean sharp darkness of absence but something deeper and more dangerous, the kind of dark that had destruction and weight in it.

Her amethyst eyes had shifted to a deep, deep purple.

Bael looked at the display with genuine interest rather than fear, which told her something important about him.

"No wish to stand down," he said. "Understood then... you people really love to work hard..coukd have save lot of effort if you had just back away."

He reached beneath his cloak and drew two swords simultaneously.

One in each hand, long and well-maintained, the blades carried by someone who used them constantly rather than occasionally.

The moment they cleared their sheaths, the dark blue energy started. It didn’t gather like mana did– it rose from him like heat, coating both blades in a layer.

That was simultaneously sharp and heavy, the edges of the aura crackling faintly where it compressed most densely.

Morgana’s eyes narrowed by a fraction.

It was Aura.

Not many fighters used it. The discipline required to compress mana into a sustained external coating of that density was considerable.

It demanded either a specific talent for it or years of focused practice, usually both.

One saw it in dedicated weapon practitioners, pure martial artists, people who had chosen one path and walked it until the path ran out.

Buer held both blades with the relaxed grip of someone who had been doing this for a very long time.

She reached into her storage ring.

The spear that came out was black. Not dark grey, not charcoal, but a true unreflective black that seemed to pull the light around it. Slightly inward rather than bounce it back.

It was long and well-balanced in her grip, and the moment her hand closed around the shaft. The darkness mana she was already releasing began to orient toward it naturally, like it recognized the weapon.

Buer looked at the spear and something in his expression became more serious.

"Astral core....that means an S rank," he said quietly. More to himself than to her. He could guess her power just by feeling her mana.

Morgana didn’t respond to that.

She raised her free hand and the air in front of her changed.

Magic circles appeared. Not one, not two, but a cascade of them materializing in overlapping layers across the space between her and Bael.

Each one was different, rotating at its own speed, the inscriptions on their surfaces dense with the particular complexity.

That came from someone who had been casting for so long that what others needed to construct. One step at a time she could place simultaneously without visible effort.

Multi-cast.

Six circles. All darkness affinity. All charged and waiting.

The forest around them had gone very quiet. Even the wind seemed to have decided to stay out of this particular stretch of trees.

Buer looked at the circles, then at Morgana, then shifted his stance. Feet wider, both blades coming up, the aura on them intensifying until the dark blue coating crackled audibly.

Morgana’s expression didn’t change.

Her grip on the black spear tightened once.

"Where are my students?"

Buer smiled again, though it was a different smile than before. This one had respect underneath it, which was the most honest thing he had shown her so far.

"Somewhere you won’t reach in time," he said.

The aura on his blades flared.

Morgana moved first.