[Two Hours Later.]

​"Welcome back everyone, let’s continue the competition!" Davy stepped forward, his amplified voice cutting through the rising chatter, a professional smile plastered on his face:

​"The first on the list." He turned to the massive holographic screen, the names whirring rapidly as two names locked into place.

​"Ethan, from the sword academy, and Carl, from the dragon academy!! Please step on the stage!" He said, his words immediately stunning the Dragon team section into absolute silence.

​They collectively turned to Carl, who in turn, faced Mirabella without an ounce of hesitation. The atmospheric tension in the Dragon Academy’s staging area thickened instantly.

​"Damage his core." Mirabella said coldly, her words stunning Grace, Hitachi, and the rest. The sheer, unadulterated brutality of the command was chilling.

​"Yup." Carl nodded, and calmly walked forward, not even a bit surprised. His sister gave a order, and his loyalty to her was absolute; he plans to complete it flawlessly.

​"His core? If that happens, his spiritual sea will be a mess, and he might lose 200 levels." Hitachi said, staring at Mirabella.

​"He will survive because he’s above 200 levels, if it happens to someone who is weaker than that, they will die on the spot." Rose said, staring at Mirabella with a nervous side eye:

’What happened between her and this Ethan? She has never been this ruthless to anyone.’ She thought, deeply unsettled by her captain’s icy, unreadable demeanor.

’Did Senior Ethan anger Big Sister? And Carl... I hope he doesn’t go overboard.’ Grace thought, her small hands holding her chest. The gentle dark mage couldn’t reconcile the fiercely protective Mirabella she knew with this merciless commander.

​"Captain, what if his Captain interferes?" Austin whispered in a low voice, assessing the risk of the Sword Academy’s leader violently stepping in.

​"I plan to also damage her core." Mirabella answered flatly, her terrifyingly calm words stunning the entire vanguard group into absolute silence.

’These two are getting controlled... The ones controlling them will never let me get close, but if they become useless.’ Mirabella gave a small devilish smirk, her mind calculating the exact parameters of her grand strategy:

’I will have an opportunity to strike... Thanks to my mental Overlord, I can completely rewrite their brains, and use it to locate the one behind this... I don’t fucking care about Ethan. But Jessica is important to me.’ She clenched her fist:

’In my previous life, when we just entered Galaxy Fall, we encountered Jessica and her soldiers, they led us to the city... I will pay this debt.’ She turned her gaze to Ethan, her eyes hardening into absolute, dismissive apathy:

"As of him... He’s free to live as he wants.’

_

Davy stared at the two contestants standing before him, the shimmering barrier sealing them in.

​"Remember, there is a No-kill rule! Anything else count!" He said strictly, and violently ascended into the air, completely leaving the stage for the two.

​"Ethan... Do you remember me?" Carl asked, tilting his head to the side, genuinely searching the warrior’s face for any trace of the senior in school.

​"I said it once, and I will say it again, I don’t remember you!" Ethan snapped at him, his energy flaring erratically around his sword.

​"Okay, what about her?" Carl pointed his finger directly up at Mirabella.

​Ethan was momentarily stunned by the question, and turned his head to Mirabella. He stared at her for some seconds, his eyes completely blank and stripped of any emotional resonance, then turned back to Carl:

​"Why would I know her?" He asked.

__

​High up in the general audience section, Miranda and Angela looked at one another in profound confusion. They were all students from New York University, survivors of the initial planetary integration, and they all clearly remembered Mirabella. But Ethan didn’t.

​"I knew something is wrong with him." Miranda muttered in a low voice.

​"But, why didn’t he remember his ex-girlfriend? Did he lose his memories?" Angela, Mirabella’s ex-best friend asked, her voice trembling. The trauma of their past was still agonizingly fresh; Alice was killed by the Gatekeeper on earth, brutally leaving the two of them behind to navigate this terrifying new reality.

​"What should we do? Just go with this? Even the way he looks at us... It’s like we are strangers." Miranda muttered to herself, a chilling sense of isolation washing over her.

​Angela turned her head to look at Mirabella, her face filled with a deep, agonizing concern:

’I truly don’t know why she broke our friendship... I didn’t do anything, we grew up together, so why?’ She thought, her fist clenched tightly, entirely unaware of the betrayals Mirabella had endured to reach this point.

_

​Down on the battlefield, the last vestiges of their shared history were discarded.

​Carl exhaled softly: "I tried... It seems the friend we all remember is gone for good." He got in a brutal fighting stance as dense, highly compressed golden energy rose violently from his feet, entirely enveloping his body.

​"I won’t feel guilty of what will happen next." He added, his tone shifting permanently into the cold, clinical frequency of an executioner.

​"Friends?" Ethan blinked, staring at him in genuine surprise, then violently shook his head:

​"Stop trying to distract me!!" He yelled, and shot forward with lethal intent.

​"From this day onwards... I don’t know anyone named Ethan." Carl muttered, his eyes narrowing as all his vast energy rapidly gathered on one single palm.

​"I say stop talking!!!" Ethan leaped high into the air, rising his glowing sword over his head with both hands for a catastrophic downward cleave.

​"Get out of here!!" He screamed.

​WHOOSH!

Everyone only saw a blinding flash, and Carl instantaneously appeared mid-air directly before Ethan, whose sword was still raised high, and placed all his violently gathered energy point-blank directly on Ethan’s exposed abdomen:

​"You aren’t the Ethan I remembered."

​BOOOOOOOOM!!!

​A catastrophic golden explosion occurred, completely covering the two in a localized sphere of destructive shockwaves that violently rattled the arena’s foundational pillars.

​".....?!"

​The entire stadium watched in sheer, unadulterated horror as Ethan fell limply from the sky like a broken puppet, smashing heavily on the stone ground, while Carl landed gracefully on his feet, his golden aura casually dissipating into the wind.

​Davy instantly teleported and appeared before Ethan, waving away the smoke and moving his gaze over the young man’s battered, unresponsive form:

​"He isn’t dead, but his core is damaged. Not only that, his level had dropped, he is now Lv50." Davy said in profound disbelief, staring at the shattered spiritual sea. He looked up at Carl’s retreating back, a cold drop of sweat rolling down his spine. The violent drop from the high hundreds to a mere Level 50 was a fate far worse than death for anyone in Galaxy Fall.

​"Such ruthlessness, what power is in this kid?"