The clearing, which only moments before appeared as a bucolic idyll, was ripped apart by a roar that did not belong to this world. The "Void Reflections" weren't the only threat Hayjin's residual mana had attracted. From the depths of the dense forest, where light dared not penetrate, emerged a creature that seemed the very incarnation of mineral resistance: a Crystal Gabbro-Bear.
It was a monumental beast, as tall as three men, with fur as dark and bristly as basalt needles. But the most terrifying feature was the crystalline growths covering its back and shoulders: translucent prisms of pulsing purple that seemed to vibrate in sync with the environmental mana. Every step it took made the ground tremble, leaving deep furrows in the fertile earth.
Rhaegalur, with the calm of one who has seen kingdoms fall, took a step back, crossing his muscular arms. "Here is your entrance exam, Hayjin. It's not a fixed target. It's not a shadow of smoke. It is solid matter, enhanced by a crystalline structure that deflects energy. If you want to make it to the Academy, you'll have to take it down."
Hayjin felt cold sweat bead on his forehead. His heart hammered against his ribs like a jackhammer. "Alright... alright. It's just a mass of flesh and muscle that's very, very angry," he whispered to himself, trying to cling to his rationality as the bear charged.
The boy lunged sideways, narrowly avoiding a swipe that uprooted a small bush of magical berries. mid-air, he extended his arm. "Venturi Bullet: Maximum Pressure!"
The ultrasonic whistle tore through the air. The shot, a blade of compressed air capable of piercing Ironwood, hit the animal's chest dead-on. But instead of penetrating, the blow produced a metallic sound, a sharp clink. The bullet slid off the surface of the crystal-hardened fur, deflecting upward and losing all its kinetic energy.
The bear didn't even slow down. With a grunt, it struck the ground with its front paw, creating a shockwave that slammed Hayjin to the dirt.
"Think, Hayjin! Analyze!" Rhaegalur shouted from a distance, his voice steady. "If the linear trajectory fails, it's because the impact plane is inclined. Your logic is defeating you!"
Hayjin scrambled up, wiping blood from his lip. His physicist's brain began to work at insane speed. "The crystals act like reactive armor. If I hit perpendicularly, the angle of incidence reflects the energy. I have to find a breaking point."
The beast wasted no time and charged again.
The roar of the impact was enough to displace the air in the entire clearing. Hayjin didn't even have time to process the failure of his first shot: the Gabbro-Bear, a mountain of muscle and dark mineral, had moved with a speed that defied the laws of biology. A massive paw, encrusted with purple quartz crystals, hit him full in the chest.
The boy felt his ribs creak. The pain wasn't immediate; first came a vacuum of air, then a blinding white heat. He was thrown backward ten meters, scything through the tall grass and stopping only against the knotty root of an oak tree.
"Damn..." Hayjin coughed, spitting a glob of blood. His vision wavered. He tasted the metallic flavor of defeat in his mouth.
Rhaegalur, motionless as an Egyptian statue at the edge of the clearing, made no move to help. "Analyze its structure well, Hayjin. If you focus only on the pain, you're already dead. What happened to your trajectory?"
"The angle..." Hayjin panted, struggling to stand as the bear charged again, making the earth shake. "Its fur... it's polarized. It deflects shockwaves like a prism does with light."
Hayjin realized he had to change his approach. If he couldn't pierce the armor, he had to make it vibrate until it shattered. He took his stance, legs shaking, and instead of a single bullet, he began to emit a series of rapid-fire air pulses, like a magical jackhammer.
He tried to hit the beast's eyes, but the creature was surprisingly agile. It covered its snout with its armored paws, using the crystals as mobile shields. Hayjin tried a variation: not a single bullet, but a burst of smaller pulses to try and destabilize the beast's balance.
"Frequency variation!" Hayjin yelled, emitting three small puffs of air in rapid succession. They hit the joints of the bear's legs. The beast staggered, but the crystals on its back began to glow with a sinister light. Suddenly, the kinetic energy from Hayjin's attacks seemed to be absorbed and re-emitted as a purple electrical discharge that forced the boy into a desperate leap backward.
The crystals on its back began to emit a low hum. The energy from Hayjin's vibrations wasn't destroying the mineral; it was being stored. An instant later, the bear slammed the ground with its front paws and released that energy in a kinetic shockwave that unearthed sods of dirt as large as shields.
Hayjin tried to protect himself with his arms, but the wave overwhelmed him. He was lifted off the ground and slammed back down. A shard of stone opened a deep gash on his thigh. Blood began to soak his tunic.
"Your enemy is a kind of living energy-absorber, human," Rhaegalur commented, his calm voice cutting through the noise of battle. "The harder you hit it with pure energy, the more you charge its next strike. You're practically digging your own grave."
"Energy absorption..." Hayjin murmured, horrified. "The crystals transform mechanical pressure into magical energy. The harder I hit it, the more it charges up. It's a positive feedback loop!"
Hayjin realized that brute force was useless. He had to act like an engineer sabotaging a machine from the inside. He looked around. The clearing was full of tall grass and wild flowers rich in sticky pollen.
"Rhaegalur! Is its respiratory system protected by the crystals?" he shouted while dodging another bite.
"No living being can protect its lungs without suffocating," Rhaegalur replied with a half-smile. "But how do you plan to get there? It is a wall, and you are a feather in comparison."
The pain in his leg was excruciating, but Hayjin's mind, fueled by adrenaline, was entering that state of "analytical trance" that had made him a genius in his world. If I can't use energy, I'll use matter.
Hayjin didn't answer. He began to run in a circle around the bear, using his mana not to attack, but to create small ground-level air vortices. They weren't bullets; they were vacuums. Pollen, dry earth, and small rock fragments were sucked up into a dense, murky cloud.
"I want to see how your armor reacts to sand in the pistons," Hayjin snarled.
The bear, confused by the fog of debris, began to roar and strike blindly. Hayjin took advantage of the chaos. Instead of firing the air at the bear, he used it to create a zone of extreme low pressure around the creature's head.
"Oxygen displacement principle!" Hayjin thought fiercely.
The bear threw its mouth open to gasp for air, inhaling large quantities of sticky pollen and dust that Hayjin was channeling with surgical precision into its nostrils. The beast began to cough violently; its movements grew clumsy, its coordination vanished.
With a gesture of his hands, he guided the fine dust directly into the bear's leg joints and under the crystalline plates of its neck. The silica dust, moved by high-speed wind, began to act as an abrasive. The bear let out a roar of annoyance, feeling the friction burn between its skin and the crystals. Its movements became slower, grinding.
"Good, Hayjin. You found its biological weak point," Rhaegalur commented, stepping a few paces closer. "But its armor is still intact. If you don't take it down now, it will recover, and its rage will be ten times greater."
But the creature was intelligent. Realizing the mist was the source of its problem, it opened its jaws wide and released a mana-enhanced roar. The sonic wave swept away the dust and sand in an instant, clearing the air. Before Hayjin could react, the bear pounced.
A glancing blow hit Hayjin's shoulder, tearing the flesh and sending him tumbling into the mud. The boy screamed. He was on the ground, covered in dust and blood, with his right shoulder nearly useless. The bear towered over him, ready to crush him.
"Is it over?" Rhaegalur asked, and for the first time, there was a note of challenge in his voice. "Will you give up so soon?"
"Never..." Hayjin whispered. His eyes desperately searched for a variable. He saw the crystals on the bear's back: they were incandescent purple, charged to the limit with all the energy absorbed from previous hits. And he saw, a few meters away, the pool of water created by the morning rain, gathered in a hollow in the ground.
The plan formed in a millisecond.
Hayjin knew he had only one chance. He remembered his lessons on materials: thermal shock.
The crystals on the bear's back were hot, charged with the energy from previous attacks.
Hayjin ran toward a small stream at the edge of the clearing. Using the water magic Wren had taught him—that "water bubble" that once made him feel like a failure—he created a mass of freezing liquid. But this time, he didn't throw it carelessly.
He used his wind blast to wrap the water bubble in a high-pressure shell, keeping it at a temperature near zero through rapid gas expansion.
The bear raised its paws for the finishing blow. Hayjin, using his left arm, summoned an air vortex not toward the enemy, but toward the pool of water. He sucked up the freezing liquid and nebulized it instantly. But he didn't stop there. He used the principle of gas expansion: he forced the air around the droplets to expand so quickly that it dropped the temperature of the water mist below freezing.
At the same moment, with a final superhuman effort, he used wind mana to create a concave air mirror above himself, concentrating the little sunlight filtering through the branches directly onto the bear's purple crystals.
The heat of the concentrated light and the monster's internal energy brought the crystals to a critical temperature. Then, Hayjin released the freezing mist.
"Now die..."
Hayjin hurled the compressed, frozen water bomb directly onto the incandescent crystals on the bear's back.
The contact was cataclysmic.
TSSSSS!
The extreme temperature difference between the mana-charged crystal (hot) and the frozen water (cold) caused instantaneous molecular contraction. The crystalline structure, known for its rigidity, could not withstand the stress.
The thermal shock was instantaneous and violent. The crystalline structure, pushed to the point of maximum thermal tension and then hit by a sub-zero mist jet, underwent a catastrophic molecular contraction. The crystals didn't just break; they exploded outward like fragmentation grenades.
A sound like a thousand shattering mirrors echoed through the clearing. The bear's crystals exploded into a thousand shards, stripping the beast of its energy source and its protection. The Gabbro-Bear, stunned by the systemic shock and deprived of its armor, collapsed heavily onto the grass, unable to get back up.
It let out a harrowing wail as its own armor turned against it, tearing its skin and extinguishing its power source. The beast collapsed inches from Hayjin, kicking up one last cloud of dust.
Hayjin fell to his knees, his lungs burning and his mana reduced to a flicker. Silence returned to the clearing, broken only by the heavy breathing of the defeated bear and the rustle of wind through the branches.
Hayjin remained motionless, his breath a wet rattle. Every inch of his body screamed. He felt the heat of his own blood dripping onto the soil of Alius. And yet, amidst the wreckage of that battle, he felt a clarity he had never experienced in thirty years of life on Earth.
Rhaegalur walked over slowly, looking at the remains of the pulverized crystals. "You used the environment as a weapon. You turned its strength into its weakness. And you used a 'weak' spell like water to deliver the final blow."
The shadows of the forest parted as he passed. He stopped in front of the wounded boy and, instead of offering his hand, crossed his arms, looking at the downed bear.
The giant leaned over Hayjin, offering his hand to help him up. "You didn't just defeat a monster, Hayjin. You proved that the mind can bend matter even when matter is ten times stronger. This is what separates a mage from a true master."
Hayjin grabbed Rhaegalur's hand, struggling to his feet. He looked at the fallen beast and then at his hands. He no longer felt just the fear of a child; he felt the cold, lucid awareness of a man who had just rewritten the laws of survival on Alius.
Rhaegalur nodded solemnly. "Let's go home. Elara has prepared dinner, and I believe tonight you've earned the right to eat like a king... or like a God."
Hayjin leaned his head against the giant's armored chest, losing consciousness as Elara ran from the cabin with bandages and ointments. He had won. Not like a hero of legends, but like a survivor who had bent the universe to his will.