"Hakcuhh!"

The sneeze echoed off the iron walls and came back to him multiplied, bouncing between the two massive storage tanks that flanked him on either side like rusted sentinels.

Revan pressed himself deeper into the narrow gap between them, his body curled into a ball with his knees drawn to his chest and his arms wrapped around his shins, shivering so hard that his teeth rattled against each other in a rhythm he couldn’t control.

"What the hell is this place," he muttered through chattering teeth, his breath fogging in the stale, chemical-tinged air. "Everything is sealed tighter than a Vespera family secret."

He had spent the last hour meticulously scouting the facility.

For sixty minutes, he became a shadow, drifting through corridors, testing locks, and peering through every narrow crack. Every movement was a masterclass in stealth, fueled by fifteen years of expertise that The Silent Sin had etched into his very bones.

It should have been easy.

Sneaking through an abandoned building was practically a vacation compared to infiltrating a guarded estate or trailing a target through a crowded market. Revan had walked into this exploration fully confident that if there was anything worth finding in this facility, he would find it within the first twenty minutes.

But such was the price he had to pay for his own arrogance.

The security was unlike anything he’d encountered.

Every door, every hatch, every access point in the entire facility was sealed with layered magical wards so dense and so intricately woven that Revan could feel the residual pressure of them through his skin even in his current mana-depleted state.

"For God’s sake, isn’t this supposed to be a Dead Zone?" he hissed, pressing his palm flat against the nearest tank in frustration. "The whole point of this wasteland is that magic doesn’t WORK here. So who in their right mind sealed an entire facility with high-tier enchantments in a place where mana is supposed to be crushed flat?"

The complaint had barely left his lips before the obvious answer caught up with him.

He went quiet, his brow furrowing as the gears in his head clicked into a new configuration.

"Wait. Hold on."

He stared at the corrugated ceiling above him, his eyes tracing the lattice of rusted beams while his mind rewound through the events of the past several hours.

"Come to think of it... in my final battle, I can use Aura Manifestation , can’t I?"

Revan immediately began tapping the side of his head with his palm, struggling to dig through the information he had retrieved from the gauntlet.

It was a painstaking process; because the data had been dumped into his mind in a single, high-speed burst, the information now lay fragmented and scattered across his brain.

The only way to make this easier was to channel his Aura into his brain, just as he had done before. But that would be suicide.

His mana was functioning solely as his life force now, and there was so little of it left. In truth, he was already on the brink of death.

"Eumm... hnnngh..."

A low, strained groan escaped his lips. His fingers twitched against his temple.

After what felt like an eternity of navigating through the mental fog, he finally grasped the thread.

The scattered fragments slowly merged together, gradually forming a clear picture.

"Are you kidding me? Of course I knew that the Dead Zone suppresses mana instead of destroying it. Do you think I’m an idiot? Why the hell did I exhaust myself piecing information like this together while I’m literally freezing to death here?" Revan sneered, a look of derision crossing his face.

He lashed out, striking the iron at his side, until a sudden realization flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning.

"EH? Wait, wait, wait..." He was stunned for a moment, until finally, a wide grin spread across his face.

"I am actually a genius! Hahahaha! You really are a genius, Revan!"

He had been looking at it all wrong.

"The Dead Zone... it suppresses ambient mana, kills passive regeneration, and crushes anything trying to draw energy from the environment. But internal reserves? Mana that’s already tucked away inside a body, sealed in an artifact, or locked behind a ward? That still functions!"

The suppression field is a wall that keeps mana OUT, not a vacuum that destroys what’s already IN.

Revan’s mind raced, connecting the dots at terminal velocity.

He let out a sharp, mocking laugh at his own previous confusion.

"That’s why my Shadow Storage went dormant the moment we crossed the perimeter. It’s a spatial artifact; it needs a constant bridge between this dimension and the pocket space. Maintaining that bridge requires a steady draw of ambient mana. No ambient mana, no bridge, no storage. It’s like a cloud-based app with no Wi-Fi."

"But hold on," he muttered, sitting up straighter. "If internal mana still works inside a Dead Zone, then why couldn’t Sylvia cast a single spell during the train attack? She had mana. Her reserves were MASSIVE. So what the hell was the problem?"

He scratched the side of his jaw, frowning.

"Ah. Right. Casting isn’t the same as having. Having mana is like having flour in a bag. Casting a spell is like baking bread — you need to take the flour OUT, mix it, shape it, and put it through a process. The Dead Zone crushes that process. The moment Sylvia tried to push her mana outward and shape it into a construct, the suppression field smashed it flat before it could take form."

That’s why warrior Aura still works in here, even externally. Aura is raw. Crude. You push it out, it goes out. The Dead Zone punishes you for it — costs triple what it would outside — but it can’t stop it entirely because there’s no complex structure to disrupt. It’s like throwing a rock through a rainstorm. The rain slows it down, but the rock still flies.

’So the real question is: where do wards fit? They’re magic. They’re clearly mage-crafted. But the Dead Zone hasn’t touched them. Why?’

The answer came to him with the quiet certainty of something that had been obvious all along.

"Think of a ward as a completed product. The mana was molded, formed, and then hard-coded into reality. Because it’s already finished, it’s static—it isn’t struggling to take shape. The Dead Zone is designed to disrupt active flows, but since a ward is a ’frozen’ spell, there’s no process for it to crush."

Which means these wards they were either cast before this Dead Zone even existed, or by someone powerful enough to carry their own mana supply into this field and cast from their internal reserves alone.

Whoever built this facility understood the Dead Zone’s suppression mechanics intimately enough to engineer around them.

They hadn’t fought the suppression field. They’d worked with it, treating it as a security feature rather than an obstacle, letting the Dead Zone itself serve as the outermost layer of protection while their wards handled everything inside. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

He exhaled a long, satisfied breath and let his eyes drift shut, hoping to give his overworked brain a few seconds of silence.

But the silence didn’t stay empty for long. Behind his closed eyelids, a face materialized uninvited.

"It was difficult to confess, but... in the end, I lost," Revan murmured to the empty air.

A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

It was true. His mana reserves had been pathetic from the start, thirty-one percent of a full pool, drained further by every exchange in the Dead Zone. Even with the gauntlet’s amplification and every trick he had up his sleeve.

If the knight had fought seriously from the beginning, it was a hundred percent certain that Revan would be dead.

"Even with a hundred years to train and this gauntlet permanently fused to my arm, I couldn’t beat that knight in a straight fight. That’s the truth. The only people who could face someone like him head-on are monsters like Sylvia, born with the kind of absurd, reality-breaking talent that the Generation of Miracles carries in their blood."

He opened his eyes and stared at the gauntlet on his left hand.

The knight had killed itself. At the end, when it poured everything into that last swing, it wasn’t trying to win. It was burning itself out on purpose, feeding centuries of accumulated existence into a single descending arc that was never meant to survive the collision.

And when the two blades met and the line split its body in half, the last of the knight’s Aura bled through the contact point and into Revan’s channels, a final, quiet transfusion that kept his heart beating through the seconds that followed.

That was the only reason he was still alive.

He was quiet for a while.

The facility hummed its deep, subliminal hum around him. Water dripped somewhere in the dark.

"I should have asked for his name sooner," he said softly.

A small, tired laugh escaped him, followed by a moment of silence.

"You know what, now that I think about it, your personality was all over the place. You’re like a woman," he said, breaking the silence he had created.

***

"Hakcuhh!"

Another sneeze ripped through him.

He clutched his sides, curled tighter, and let out a sound that was half groan, half laugh, entirely miserable.

"Ah, I don’t know what to do anymore. I genuinely have no idea."

His mind drifted back to his mission now.

’She should be fine. Dain is with her. Mirael too. Those two are reliable, competent, and actually care about keeping her alive.’

The thought should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t.

Because Dain and Mirael weren’t the only ones with Sylvia.

Revan’s expression shifted.

The tired, self-deprecating humor drained from his face and was replaced by something colder as two names surfaced in his mind.

Revan grabbed fistfuls of his own hair and pulled, scrubbing his scalp with a frustrated violence that sent dried mud and blood flaking onto the corrugated floor.

"AAAGHHH!"

The scream tore through the facility, ricocheting off rusted beams and steel tanks until it sounded like a chorus of the damned.

"I need to get out of here. I need to find them. I need to get back to her side before those two do something I can’t undo."

"Dammit, if anything happens to Sylvia, I’m dead. No — scratch that. I’d rather be dead than spend the rest of my life being hunted, only to be caught and tortured for eternity."

He uncurled his body and forced himself to stand.

His hand slipped into what was left of his trouser pocket and fished out a small object that had somehow survived the night intact.

He held it between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing the smooth surface in slow, absent circles the way a man rubs a worry stone when he’s already past the point of worrying.

"Do I have any other choice?"

He flipped the coin once. Caught it. Didn’t bother looking at which side landed up.

"Of course not."