Mason’s fist met Rhea’s light-reinforced palm. The impact sent a crack racing through the plaza floor, splitting the stone in a jagged line that ran ten meters in each direction.

PAM.

Rhea twisted her wrist, redirecting Mason’s force, and drove her knee toward his ribs. Mason caught the knee with his free hand, golden veins pulsing along his forearm as his War God bloodline reinforced his grip. He squeezed.

CRACK.

Rhea’s eyes widened. Her kneecap had cracked under the pressure. She ripped her leg free, stumbling backward, and Mason didn’t let her reset.

He pressed forward, each step heavy enough to leave footprints in solid stone. Solar energy radiated from his body in waves, heating the air around him until it shimmered like a desert mirage. His cellular reconstruction was already working on the cuts across his arms, knitting tissue faster than a normal cultivator could manage.

Rhea recovered faster than he expected. She raised both hands, and light condensed into a dozen floating orbs that circled her like satellites.

"Light Barrage."

The orbs fired simultaneously, streaks of concentrated light that crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second. Mason didn’t dodge. He raised his arms and let them hit.

PAM. PAM. PAM. PAM. PAM.

Each impact left a burn on his forearms, but the War God bloodline absorbed the kinetic shock while his Solar energy mitigated the thermal damage. He grunted through the pain and kept walking forward.

"Is that all?" Mason said.

Rhea’s expression tightened. She fired again. Same result. Burns that healed within seconds and a War God who wouldn’t stop advancing.

She changed tactics. The remaining orbs collapsed into two concentrated beams that she swept across the ground like scythes. Mason jumped, clearing the beams by a hair, and landed a straight punch directly in Rhea’s guard.

BOOM.

Her light barrier cracked but held. The force pushed her back five meters, feet dragging across stone. Mason pursued. Another punch. Another crack in the barrier. Another five meters.

PAM. PAM. PAM.

He was beating her defense down one blow at a time, each impact weakening the structural integrity of her light constructs. Rhea realized it before he did. Her barriers were strong against single devastating attacks. They were designed to block techniques, not sustained physical pressure from someone whose power grew with each exchange.

The War God bloodline didn’t just heal. It adapted. Every hit Mason took, every wound he sustained, his body learned from it and reinforced the affected area. By the third minute of their exchange, his arms were virtually immune to her light burns.

Rhea made her mistake. She tried to create distance, leaping backward while firing a concentrated light spear. Mason batted it aside with his forearm, the Solar energy around his hand dispersing the construct on contact, and closed the gap before she could set up another barrier.

His hand caught her throat.

GCK.

He lifted her off the ground with one arm. Rhea clawed at his wrist, light energy flaring from her hands, burning his skin. Mason didn’t flinch. The burns healed as fast as they formed.

"You’re strong," he said, his voice flat. "But your power doesn’t grow in a fight. Mine does."

He slammed her into the ground.

BOOM.

The plaza cratered. Rhea’s light barrier shattered completely on impact. She lay in the depression, gasping, light flickering weakly around her broken body.

Mason released her throat and stepped back. He was breathing hard. Blood ran from a gash on his forehead where a light shard had caught him early in the fight. Three of his ribs were cracked from a kick he’d failed to fully block. Burns covered both forearms, still healing but painful.

[1,700 → 3,250 PTS]

Rhea’s bracelet flared red.

[ELIMINATED]

Her unconscious body vanished, transferred to the stadium.

Mason sat down on a chunk of broken stone and pressed his hand against his cracked ribs, wincing. His body went to work immediately, golden light pulsing beneath the skin as cellular reconstruction accelerated.

"That was annoying," he muttered.

Three kilometers north, in what had once been a public square dominated by a shattered fountain and dead trees, Yenna Frostveil stood alone.

Two figures emerged from the shadows of the surrounding buildings. The first was a tall man with pale skin and dark circles under his eyes, his black uniform marked with the sigil of Neon Abyss Academy.

Ryan Durant. Early Mana Heart Rank 4. Captain of the Neon Abyss team. Ranked fourth individually.

The second was smaller, wiry, with a hood pulled low over his face. Peak Mana Heart Rank 2. His name didn’t matter to Yenna because she didn’t recognize him, and she wasn’t in the habit of learning the names of people who were about to try to kill her.

Yenna’s frown deepened.

"Two on one," she said flatly. "How cowardly."

Ryan smiled.

"Nothing cowardly about efficient resource allocation," he said, his voice smooth and reasonable in a way that made the hair on Yenna’s arms stand up. "You’re the second strongest fighter in Heaven’s Gate. Taking you out two on one is just good strategy. Don’t take it personal love."

The wiry student said nothing. Shadows pooled at his feet, writhing like living things, and his form flickered at the edges as though reality itself was uncertain about where he ended and the darkness began.

Yenna assessed them both. Ryan’s cultivation was higher than hers. Early Rank 4 against her Peak Rank 3. Normally that would be a significant gap. But she had Frost Intent, and Intent bridged gaps that raw cultivation couldn’t.

The shadow user was the problem. Not because he was strong, but because he was an unknown variable. Shadow abilities were versatile. Invisibility. Traps. Assault. She couldn’t predict what he would do because she had no data on him.

"Shall we?" Ryan extended one hand, palm up.

The ground around him shuddered.

Dark cracks split the stone of the plaza, and from those cracks, things climbed out.

Corpses.

Six of them. Men and women in various states of decay, some skeletal, some freshly dead, their eyes glowing with sickly green light. They moved with jerky, unnatural motions, joints bending in directions that living bodies weren’t meant to bend.

Necromancy.

Yenna’s expression didn’t change, but her frost mana surged outward, dropping the temperature around her by fifteen degrees in an instant. Condensation formed on every surface within twenty meters, a thin layer of ice crystallizing on the dead fountain and the surrounding rubble.

"Disgusting," she said.

The six corpses lunged.

Yenna drew her Tier 1 ice sword, the blade humming with cold that hurt to look at directly. She stepped forward and swung once.

SHLCK-SHLCK-SHLCK.

Three corpses bisected horizontally, upper bodies sliding off lower bodies before hitting the ground. The other three kept coming. One grabbed her sword arm with fingers that had long since lost their flesh. Yenna froze the arm solid and shattered it with a knee strike.

CRACK.

The fourth corpse lunged from behind. Ice spikes erupted from the ground beneath its feet, pinning it in place. The fifth and sixth came from opposite sides.

Yenna didn’t bother turning. A wave of cold exploded outward in every direction.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.

Every remaining corpse froze instantly, ice encasing them from head to toe, and then the ice contracted. The frozen bodies shattered into fragments of frozen meat and brittle bone that scattered across the plaza like gruesome confetti.

Ryan clapped slowly. "Beautiful. Truly beautiful ice control. But those were just distractions."

The shadows struck.

From every direction. Dark tendrils erupted from the ground, the walls, the air itself, converging on Yenna in a web of solidified darkness. She spun, ice sword carving through the tendrils, but for every one she cut, two more appeared.

The wiry student flickered into visibility directly behind her, a shadow blade forming in his hand, and stabbed toward her kidney.

Yenna’s ice armor materialized in time. The blade pierced the outer layer but stuck fast, frozen in the dense ice. She elbowed the student in the face without looking.

PAM.

His nose broke. He flickered back into shadow and retreated, reappearing twenty meters away, holding his bleeding face.

Ryan hadn’t moved. He was watching Yenna with those eyes, that terrible smile still in place, and he was chanting. The words weren’t in any language Yenna recognized.

The shattered corpse fragments on the ground began to move.

Schlick. Schlick. Schlick.

They pulled themselves back together. Bone fragments found bone fragments. Frozen meat thawed and reattached. The six corpses reformed, this time with ice coating their bodies like armor, and they rose again.

Yenna’s eyes narrowed.

"You can rebuild them," she said.

Ryan’s smile widened. "As many times as I need to. Necromancy isn’t about the bodies. It’s about the death energy embedded in the ground. Every place these corpses die, they leave a reservoir. I can rebuild them in seconds now. In minutes, I could have fifty."

The corpses attacked again. The shadow user attacked again. Ryan stood still and watched.

Yenna fought. Ice sword singing. Frost spikes erupting. Cold waves expanding. She destroyed the corpses a second time. Then a third. Each time they reformed faster. Each time the shadow user pressed harder, his tendrils more numerous, his strikes more precise.

Ten minutes passed. Yenna was breathing hard. Her mana reserves were dropping. Ryan hadn’t lifted a finger beyond the initial chant.

"You’re burning yourself out," Ryan observed. "Frost Intent is incredible. It lets you punch way above your rank. But it’s expensive. And I have all the time in the world."

The corpses reformed. The shadows gathered.

Yenna stopped moving. She stood in the center of the plaza, ice sword lowered, frost still radiating from her body but no longer attacking. The corpses circled. The shadow tendrils coiled. Ryan tilted his head.

"Give up?" he asked.

Yenna looked at him. Her blue eyes had gone pale, almost white, the color of glacial ice at its deepest.

"No," she said quietly. "I’m done playing with you."

She raised her ice sword above her head and drove it into the ground.

BOOM.

The temperature plummeted. The air itself froze, crystals forming in mid-breath, moisture solidifying into a fine ice mist that turned the plaza into a winter hellscape.

A dome of absolute cold expanded outward from Yenna’s position. Fifty meters. Seventy. One hundred. Buildings within the radius frosted over, their surfaces whitening, windows cracking from thermal stress. The ground became a sheet of ice so cold it burned to touch.