I Evolve 10,000 Times Faster

Time stopped the moment Holden’s brain registered what was about to happen. His processor calculated the trajectory, timing, and distance, then returned a single, absolute result.

Aldous was going to die.

The pillar of dark energy was six inches from the Headmaster’s chest and moving at missile speed. Aldous’s body was turning, his Rank 4 energy surging into a defensive formation, but the turn was only halfway complete. His left side was exposed, and his guard was open. He needed another 0.3 seconds to finish the movement.

He had 0.1 seconds.

Holden’s Gale-Step activated. The world froze around him as he moved toward Aldous, already calculating the intercept trajectory. His 10,000x processor ran the numbers again, searching for a way through the distance.

He couldn’t reach Aldous in time. Not even at Gale-Step speed. The pillar was too fast, and the distance was too great.

He couldn’t save him.

But someone else was closer.

Vespera moved.

She had been standing three feet behind Aldous, slightly to his right. It was the position she had maintained throughout the fight, covering his blind spot the same way she had done for twenty years.

She didn’t freeze time, and she didn’t have a 10,000x processor. She had Rank 4 speed and twenty years of instinct built on loving someone more than she loved herself.

She hit Aldous with both hands. It wasn’t a gentle push. It was a full-body shove that lifted the Headmaster off the ground and threw him six feet to the right.

BOOM!

Aldous hit the ash, rolled, and tumbled across the ground. He came up sputtering, confused, his Rank 4 defenses flaring in response to an attack that had never reached him.

Because it wasn’t aimed at him anymore.

The pillar of dark energy struck Vespera.

BOOM!

The shockwave ripped outward from the impact in a perfect sphere, flattening the ash field across a fifty-foot radius. Balthazar was thrown backward as his earth walls shattered around him. His gauntlets sparked, and he hit the ground twenty feet away before skidding through the ash.

Holden, still moving through Gale-Step, caught the edge of the shockwave. His Phantom-Weave Armor screamed as its kinetic dispersal passive overloaded. The Blood-Amber Ring pulsed frantically, sealing a dozen cuts that opened across his face and arms at once.

The second Harbinger, already crippled, was caught in the blast. Its remaining wing disintegrated, and its bone armor shattered. Its body broke apart, fragments of corrupted bone dissolving into the shockwave until nothing remained.

A sharp, scraping sound cut through the blast.

The first Harbinger, the one that had fired the Death Curse, was consumed as well. The self-detonation had emptied its entire energy reserve. With nothing left to sustain it, the creature’s body crumbled and dissolved.

Both Harbingers were gone. Two Rank 4 elite defenders had been erased by their own weapon.

The wasteland had gone silent. The purple sky pressed down over the flat, cratered ash field, which was now marked by the scars of a Rank 4 detonation.

At the center of the crater, Vespera lay on her back.

Holden’s 10,000x processor cataloged her condition in a microsecond. Her combat uniform was gone, erased by the Death Curse. Only the underlayer remained, and it was already dissolving. Her body was exposed to the Miasma, which was doing what it did to everything it touched.

It was consuming her.

The corruption had begun at the point of impact, directly in her chest. A hole six inches across had opened there, but it wasn’t bleeding because there was nothing left to bleed. Her tissue wasn’t damaged. It was being unmade. Grey ash spread outward from the wound in slow, branching patterns, like frost moving across a window.

Her skin was dissolving. Her muscles were dissolving. Her bones were dissolving.

The ash climbed toward her neck and began moving toward her face.

"No!"

The scream tore across the wasteland.

Aldous was running toward her. His grey robe was torn, and his face had become a mask of pure horror.

He dropped to his knees beside her. His hands hovered over the spreading ash, trembling as he struggled to find somewhere to touch, somewhere he could help. His Rank 4 energy surged into her body, trying to reinforce her and hold back the dissolution.

It didn’t work.

The Death Curse wasn’t ordinary damage. It was erasure. It ignored Rank 4 reinforcement and continued unmaking her. No amount of energy could rebuild something that was being removed from existence.

"Vespera." His voice broke. "No. No, please. Stay with me."

He grabbed her hand. The ash had reached her shoulders, but her fingers were still solid and warm. He held them as if they were the only things keeping the world from ending.

"Aldous!" Balthazar shouted from across the crater. The general was back on his feet, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, his cracked gauntlets hanging at his sides. "We need to move. That detonation will have attracted every creature in the Epicenter. We need to—"

"Shut up!"

Aldous’s scream echoed across the wasteland. It was the first time Holden had ever heard the Headmaster raise his voice.

Holden ran to them and dropped to his knees on Vespera’s other side. His 10,000x processor flooded his mind with data: the dissolution rate, the spread pattern, the tissue degradation timeline. The numbers were absolute. Final. There was no way to stop it.

She had less than two minutes.

The ash had reached Vespera’s collarbones. Her breathing was shallow, each breath a wet, rattling sound that told Holden the corruption had reached her lungs.

"Vespera." Aldous’s voice had fallen to a broken whisper. "Please. Don’t leave me."

She opened her eyes and looked at him. She saw the tears running down his face and the man she had married in secret twenty years ago, the man she had loved every day since.

She raised one trembling hand. The ash had reached her wrists, and her fingertips were fading, but she could still move. She could still touch him.

She wiped a tear from his cheek, leaving a grey smear across his skin.

"I love you," she whispered.

The words were small and quiet, the opposite of everything Vespera showed the world.

"I love you," she said again. "I’ve loved you since the day you told me my stances were sloppy and made me redo them three hundred times."

Aldous let out a broken, sobbing laugh. "Your stances were sloppy."

"They were perfect."

"They were acceptable."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about my combat form."

He pressed his forehead against hers. His tears fell onto her face, and she closed her eyes for a moment, simply feeling him and breathing him in.

Then she opened her eyes and looked past Aldous.

At Holden.

"Voss."

Her voice was stronger now. Not louder, but steadier. It was the voice of a commander giving a final order.

She coughed, and grey blood spilled from her lips. The ash had reached her jaw.

"Protect the academy," she said. "Not the building. The people. The students. The ones who can’t protect themselves."

Holden looked at her, at the woman who had been his mentor and commander. She had pushed him, tested him, promoted him, and trusted him with secrets she had never shared with anyone else.

"Yes, Instructor."

"And Voss."

"Yeah?"

"Never lose your humanity." She coughed again. The ash had reached her temples, and her hair was dissolving strand by strand, turning into grey powder that drifted upward in the still air. "Power without humanity is just destruction. I’ve seen it. I’ve fought it. Don’t become what we’re fighting."

She looked at him, at the boy who had started as a slum orphan and was becoming something that even Rank 4 masters feared.

Then she smiled.

It was the smile of a teacher who had watched her student surpass every expectation and was satisfied with what he had become.

"That’s my disciple," she said.

She closed her eyes.

The ash took the rest of her. Her face dissolved, followed by her hands. The last thing to disappear was her grip on Aldous’s fingers.

"Shhhhh."

She was gone.

Only a dark combat underlayer remained, already dissolving, along with a black-and-silver cloak bearing the Vanguard Academy insignia on its shoulder.

Aldous didn’t move.

He knelt in the ash, holding the empty cloak. His hands shook, and his entire body trembled. Tears covered his face, and he made no attempt to hide them.

The man who had always been the calmest, steadiest, most unshakable presence in the Academy was now kneeling in the dust, sobbing.

He pressed the cloak against his face and wept.

Holden stood up.

He didn’t speak or offer Aldous comfort. Not because he didn’t care, but because there was no comfort for this. No words could make it better. Nothing he said would bring Vespera back.

So he stood in the ash and let the silence remain.

The wind moved across the wasteland. The purple sky pressed down, and the ash field stretched in every direction.

Holden’s eyes changed.

The warmth left them all at once.

His eyes turned black. Not dark brown. Black. His pupils had widened until the iris was almost impossible to see.

He looked across the wasteland, at the endless field of death that had taken his mentor and the Abyssal corruption that was eating an entire continent.

Then he opened his System interface.

The Harbingers had been worth points. Two Rank 4, 1-Star bosses had died during the fight, and the System had tallied their rewards while Vespera was dying.

[Abyssal Harbinger (Rank 4, 1-Star) Defeated! x2!]

[Assist Kill: 50% KP Awarded!]

[+50,000 KP each!]

[2x KP Booster Active! KP Doubled!]

[+100,000 KP each!]

[Total: +200,000 KP!]

Two hundred thousand points.

The same number that had once been his goal, his obsession, and the force driving him forward since the System awakened.

He stared at it, but it had never felt so meaningless.

And so necessary.

The System was all he had. He hadn’t been fast enough or strong enough. Vespera had died because she was faster than him. She had reached Aldous before he could, and she had sacrificed herself because he hadn’t been strong enough to stop the Death Curse.

If he had been Rank 4, he could have blocked it. If he had been Rank 4, 5-Star, he could have intercepted the pillar. If he had been Rank 4, 9-Star, he could have killed the Harbinger before it fired.

He wasn’t strong enough.

Yet.

He looked across the wasteland, at the endless ash-covered hellscape beneath the purple sky.

The Epicenter was full of monsters. Rank 4 Harbingers. Rank 3 corrupted beasts. Millions of points walking through the darkness, waiting to be harvested.

He would walk into the Abyss and find every creature, every boss, and every corrupted entity that existed. He would kill them all. Not for the Kingdom. Not for the Academy. Not for revenge.

For the points.

Because the points were the path to power, and power was the only thing that could ensure nobody else he loved would ever die in front of him again.

He would slaughter every Abyssal creature in existence. He would farm them until his KP balance reached ten million. Whatever it took, he would buy Rank 4. He would buy Rank 5. He would buy every star, every tier, and every level of power the System offered.

And then he would tear the Abyss apart.

The wind howled through the wasteland. The purple sky bled.

Behind him, Aldous wept.

In front of him, the Abyss waited.