The twenty-minute countdown on Markus's interface dissolved to zero. Inside the dim, velvet warmth of Nagini's shadow mattress, the girls began to stir. Rosanne was the first to open her eyes, her gaze instantly snapping into focus as the lingering fog of the rejuvenation elixirs cleared. She pushed herself up, her cracked armor clicking against the stone, her hand instinctively reaching for her blade.
"Markus—the anomalies..." she rasped, her voice still rough from exhaustion. Beside her, Jessica and Mika were forcing themselves into sitting positions, their faces pale but their vital baselines finally holding steady.
"The core threat of this portal is erased," Markus said, his voice flat and absolute as he stood over them, looking down with cold, clinical appraisal. "You girls have survived, but your mana pathways are micro-fractured. If you channel so much as a spark of elemental energy within the next two hours, the feedback will permanently degrade your mana pathways."
"We can still draw aggro," Jessica gritted her teeth, trying to stand, but her knees trembled violently under the residual weight of the stasis fatigue. "There are still two Purple Gates active on the northern shelf. We aren't leaving you to clear a multi-gate convergence alone."
Markus didn't argue. He simply raised his left hand, his silver-blue eyes flashing with an unyielding, sovereign authority. With a precise flick of his fingers, he tore a localized fracture into the air behind them, exposing a humming, sub-spatial transit rift. Through the tear, the familiar, pristine white stone architecture of their rented estate in the Dominion's upper district was clearly visible.
"You are not combat capable for the remainder of the mission," Markus stated, his tone brooking no compromise. "An architect does not deploy compromised pillars to support a falling ceiling. Go back to the estate, finish your recovery, and monitor the global news. Nagini, escort them into the warded perimeter."
Protests died in Rosanne's throat as she met his icy, unyielding gaze. She knew that look—it was the absolute will of her older brother.
Nodding grimly, she anchored herself to Jessica and Mika. Nagini's shadow fluidly rose like a gentle wave, sweeping the four team members backward through the spatial rift before snapping the tear shut behind them.
The outer Dominion garrison soldiers, who had been tensely preparing a desperate backup deployment, gaped in stunned silence as the massive violet gateway behind Markus structurally buckled, shriveling into a harmless, microscopic spark before vanishing entirely.
"Sir!" the local detachment commander stammered, rushing forward. "Where is the vanguard? The remaining two Purple Gates in Sectors 5 and 6 are experiencing synchronized spikes! We have heavy transports prepped to move your team—"
"The team has been extracted," Markus interrupted, walking past the commander without halting his stride. "Cancel the heavy transports. They will only slow down the transit velocity."
"But... you're going alone? To a dual-gate convergence?"
Markus didn't bother responding. He locked his focus onto the distant, pulsing violet signatures bleeding into the northern sky. With his mana reservoir sitting at a pristine, saturated thirty percent, he no longer needed to accommodate the kinetic limitations of a squad.
He uncoupled himself from the constraints of the physical terrain.
What followed over the next forty-five minutes was not a series of desperate battles, but a systematic, high-speed structural demolition. Without the need to protect his team members, Markus utilized the absolute limits of his spatial mastery.
Arriving via a three-fold spatial leap, Markus encountered an army of crystalline, heavy-armored iron golems marching from the rift.
He didn't draw a weapon. Extending his palms, he applied a localized gravitational collapse vector directly to the portal's mouth.
The spatial pressure multiplied exponentially, crushing the golems into compressed, hyper-dense metal cubes before they could fully cross the threshold. The gate inverted and snapped shut in less than fifteen minutes.
The final gate attempted an atmospheric flash-freeze, spewing sub-zero elemental drakes into the mining valleys.
Markus materialized directly in the eye of the storm. Channeling a massive, precise chunk of his core, he executed a high-order concept.
He forcefully bound the internal spatial dimensions of the dungeon to the surface area of its own event horizon, causing the pocket dimension to swallow itself. The drakes vanished back into the collapsing rift, and the final purple scar on the Dominion's territory tore itself out of existence.
As the final elemental blizzard cleared from the mountain shelf, leaving behind nothing but quiet, pristine snow, the shadows beneath Markus's boots pooled together with fluid, lazy grace. Nagini slid out from the dark, her form whole and vibrant once more, her dual crimson eyes gleaming with absolute, liquid adoration as she coiled around his silhouette.
The howling wind of the upper northern shelf finally tapered into a heavy, absolute silence. The violent violet and crimson scars that had choked the atmosphere were entirely gone, leaving behind a vast, unblemished expanse of pristine, untrodden snow.
Markus did not immediately open the sub-spatial path back to the estate. Instead, he walked to the absolute edge of the jagged obsidian precipice, his heavy traveling coat cutting a stark, dark silhouette against the blinding white wilderness.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, his silver-blue eyes weren't scanning the environment for structural flaws, mana vectors, or rift decay rates. He simply turned off the clinical filters of his interface and looked. The crisp, clean geometry of the frozen landscape stretched out for hundreds of miles, a silent kingdom of jagged peaks and deep, shadow-filled valleys unmarred by the system's invasive architecture. It was a rare, fragile pocket of natural beauty, untouched by the smoke of the foundries or the blood of the front lines.
Leaning against a frost-rimed boulder, a quiet, uncharacteristic thought crossed his mind. What did this world look like before the ink of the void split across its fabric?
Before the mana apocalypse structurally rewrote the earth's blueprint, these mountains were just rock and ice. They didn't host volatile mana veins; they didn't breed mutated elemental tyrants. There was a quiet, unforced equilibrium to the old world—a baseline architecture that required no external stabilizers or sovereign wills to exist. It was a design that existed simply to be, balanced entirely on the elegant simplicity of natural physics.