CHAPTER 68: The Flaw of the Machine
Master Grey's right eye widened to an unnatural degree, the exposed sclera mapping a sudden, frantic web of veins. The absolute shock of hearing a commoner effortlessly identify the highly classified relic she had agonizingly grafted into her own skull paralyzed her for a fraction of a second. Before she could even part her blood-flecked lips to speak, or even begin to contemplate how a boy from the lower rings could possess such archaic knowledge, Caspian decided he had reached his final limit.
The time for words had been thoroughly exhausted.
With a silent, terrifying burst of speed, Caspian vanished from his position, closing the distance between them in a flash step that left a faint, cracking ring of frost where his boots had broken the stone. Relying entirely on the mechanical perfection of the artifact, Master Grey's left eye flared with an intense, noxious green light. The triangular iris spun wildly, setting her body on high alert. Recognizing his low stance, the eye calculated a linear trajectory identical to his previous strike. Believing it was another simple, straightforward thrust, Master Grey confidently prepared to shift her weight to the side and dodge.
However, nothing in her decades of combat experience could have prepared her for what happened next.
"**Ice Blade: 6th Form,**" Caspian's whisper was a cold breath against the air. "**Improved.**"
"**Ice Thrust Barrage!**"
His right arm dissolved into a continuous, blue blur. The translucent crystalline sword did not move in a single line; it became a storm of frantic, overlapping stabs. He propelled the blade forward and pulled it back with such a violently rapid frequency that his entire hand and weapon became utterly invisible to the naked eye.
The courtyard filled with the frantic, overlapping *thwip-thwip-thwip* of air being punctured.
Driven by the frantic instructions of the Engram's Eye, Master Grey's body moved in a desperate, broken rhythm. She side-stepped to the left, twisted her hips to the right, and contorted her torso to avoid the incoming points of light. She was dodging every single stab, but unlike before, the seamless elegance of her evasion was completely gone. She was under an overwhelming, crushing amount of pressure. Caspian was steadily increasing the velocity of his thrusts, his strikes moving faster than her muscle fibers could naturally interpret the eye's predictive imagery.
The sapphire blade emitted a biting, hyper-localized blizzard. The sheer proximity of the icy aura sent primal shivers of intense cold and genuine fright directly down Master Grey's spine. Leaning her body violently to the right, the tip of the ice sword narrowly missed her chest, tearing through the fabric of her cloak and leaving a layer of hard frost on the fabric beneath.
Realizing she was losing her footing, she gathered her mana and leaped backward, desperate to put distance between herself and the relentless boy. Her hands glowed with an unstable purple hue as she prepared to unleash a wide-area defensive spell.
But she had miscalculated the boy's reach.
In the blink of an eye, the blue blade abandoned the thrusting pattern entirely, transitioning seamlessly into a savage, horizontal swing aimed directly at her exposed neck. Grey frantically bent her spine backward, dropping her head toward the stone. The blade grazed past, shearing off a thick lock of her purple-hair, the severed strands instantly freezing into brittle needles before scattering across the floor.
*"What?! How?!"* her mind screamed in a panic she hadn't felt in years. *"I just placed distance between us! How did he manage to catch up to my momentum so effortlessly?"*
Caspian didn't give her the time to solve the riddle. He pulled the blade back into his center gravity, the crystalline steel glowing with a deep, pressurized sapphire luminescence. He clenched the hilt with such immense force that his knuckles turned a bloodless white, the veins along his forearms popping beneath his skin.
"**Ice Magic: Level 1.**"
"**Frost Force Thrust!**"
He drove the sword forward. Seeing the familiar posture, Master Grey instinctively threw herself backward once again to escape the blade's physical range, assuming it was another standard, short-range stab.
But the physical blade was never the true purpose of the spell.
The moment his arm locked straight, Caspian released a massive, blurry shockwave of concussive, frozen mana directly from the tip of the sword. The blast traveled at an invisible velocity, striking Master Grey squarely in the chest before her brain could even process the trap. The force of the magical impact sent her flying through the air, her body tumbling across the courtyard before crashing heavily against the hard earth.
Master Grey rose to her feet with agonizing slowness. Her knees wobbled, her body staggering from left to right as a profound, deep-seated chill began to paralyze her nervous system. She exhaled heavily, a thick, white fog escaping her lips as her lips turned a faint shade of blue.
"H... H... How...?" she wheezed, her left eye spinning erratically as if trying to reboot its internal matrix.
Caspian, who had maintained a heavy, unreadable silence throughout the frenzy, finally lowered his blade slightly. He met her frantic gaze with his own dull, emotionless eyes.
"The Engram's Eye," Caspian began, his voice flat and educational, as if he were lecturing a student rather than breaking an assassin.
Master Grey raised her head, her single human eye locking onto him with a mixture of hatred and fear.
"A powerful, forbidden artifact forged during the Warring Era of Sorcery," Caspian continued, taking a slow step forward. "Capable of giving its host enhanced sight, hyper-perception, and an absolute three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision that eliminates any natural blind spot. During that era, people foolishly believed it possessed the mystical ability to see the literal future of an opponent's attack, granting the user a god-like advantage. But that was all a lie born of ignorance."
He paused, the ice on his blade shifting under the dim light. "The eye doesn't see the future. Instead, it observes the minute shifts in an opponent's physical posture, muscle tension, and initial mana pathways. It uses those metrics to calculate a highly accurate prediction of the coming attack, drawing a perfect mental image of that strike directly into the user's subconscious mind. It gives the perfect illusion of foresight."
Master Grey's breath hitched as he laid bare the deepest secrets of her treasure.
"Although it is an incredibly powerful relic, it carries a massive, fatal architectural flaw," Caspian explained calmly. "Its adaptability is remarkably poor. When fighting an enemy who suddenly changes their entire combat methodology—switching instantly from a physical blade stance to an entirely different vector of magic without changing their body's physical posture—the eye takes several vital seconds to recalibrate its predictive algorithms. The switch was simply too sudden and instant for your brain to process."
By masking the long-range magical shockwave behind the physical posture of a basic sword thrust, Caspian had completely fooled the artifact. The eye had told her body to dodge a blade that wasn't coming, leaving her entirely exposed to the concussive frost magic that had now restricted her physical movements.
Hearing his meticulous, cold breakdown of her ultimate weapon, Master Grey couldn't help but let out a bitter, self-deprecating laugh. She had nothing left to say to defend her pride. The commoner standing before her was far more endowed with forbidden knowledge, tactical genius, and raw, lethal capability than anyone in the Genix could have ever predicted. She had catastrophically underestimated her prey.
"Now, Professor Grey," Caspian said, his sapphire eyes glowing with finality as he raised his sword one last time. "This ends."
"Ends???" Master Grey snapped back into reality, her face contorting into a mask of pure, ugly desperation. The mention of an ending triggered something frantic within her. "There is no end to advancement! There is no end to our evolution! I will not be stopped not by you or anyone else!"
With a scream born of pure madness, Master Grey leapt high into the air. She thrust her bleeding hand toward the sky, her palm spread wide. Instantly, the air above her began to warp as a massive, roiling cloud of purple, clustered energy materialized. The miasma grew larger by the second, crackling with an unstable, corrosive frequency that threatened to dissolve the very stone beneath them.
"Try to cut through this!" she shrieked, her voice cracking under the strain.
"**Void Cataclysm: Abyssal Rain!**"
She hurled her hand downward. The massive, roiling haze of purple cluster mana launched forward, tearing through the air as it roared toward Caspian like a falling plague.
Caspian maintained his perfect calm and composure. He didn't move a single muscle. He didn't shift his stance, nor did he make any attempt to dodge the oncoming apocalypse. Just a single moment before the corrosive mass could collide with his face, he calmly spoke two words into the wind.
"**Anti-Magic: Erase.**"
An invisible, absolute ripple of nullification expanded from his center. The moment the massive, terrifying cluster of purple mana made contact with the boundary of his space, it didn't explode. It didn't scatter. It simply vanished. The dense, high-tier spell faded into absolute nothingness, dissolving into the air like salt in boiling water before a single particle could touch his uniform.
Master Grey's human eye went entirely wide with horror. A profound, paralyzing fear finally settled over her features, painting her pale skin with the sweat of a dying woman.
Without a second thought, Caspian lunged forward, his body cutting through the remaining mist, ready to truly end her life once and for all.
"Nooooooo!" Professor Grey screamed in absolute terror, watching the god of frost close the distance to her throat.
In a final, frantic bid for survival, she threw her hands out blindly. Dozens of round, condensed balls of purple mana manifested around her like a floating minefield. With a jagged wave of her arm, they all rained down on Caspian at once, forming a chaotic, blinding barrage of magical beams.
Caspian didn't slow down. He moved with fluid, lethal agility through the incoming storm, twirling his light blue blade to block, deflect, and parry every single beam heading directly for his vitals. He was closing the distance with every step, a force of nature that could not be deterred.
"No! No! No!" Grey shrieked, her mind entirely unraveled. "Stay back! Stay away from me!"
Out of pure, disorganized desperation, she fired a massive, stray cluster of beams in a completely wild, unguided arc. Caspian easily dodged the main cluster, preparing to deliver the final strike, but a sudden, sharp sound caught his attention.
One of the heavy, stray beams had completely missed him. It hadn't been aimed at him at all.
Caspian tracked the rogue projectile with his eyes. His heart instantly dropped into his stomach. The chaotic, high-density beam of purple mana was rocketing across the courtyard, heading directly toward the vulnerable, paralyzed forms of Lyra, Casel, and Elisa—who were still entirely pinned to the earth by the residual weight of the barrier, unable to move a single inch to protect themselves.
Caspian stopped dead in his tracks. His momentum hissed to a violent halt, his boots carving deep lines into the stone as he abandoned his attack on Master Grey entirely.
He spun around in a fraction of a second, dropping his weight into a deep, powerful throwing stance. Without a single heartbeat of hesitation, he whipped his arm forward, throwing his ice sword with everything he had.
The crystalline blue blade flew through the air like a streak of sapphire lightning. It intercepted the rogue mana beam mere inches before it could strike his friends, the absolute zero of the sword cutting cleanly through the core of the magic, neutralizing the explosion. The sword embedded itself deeply into the stone floor right in front of Lyra's face.