"Everyone, fall back! Now!"
Garrick's voice boomed across the ruined farmland, laced with a heavy infusion of wind mana that forced the words into the ears of every exhausted soldier. He didn't look back at the guards, nor at Clei. They were battered, drained, and in the face of a Rank 4 Alpha, they would only be burdens.
But as he stepped forward, his eyes briefly locked onto Clei's masked face. The Village Head gave a single, sharp nod. It was a silent acknowledgment of the boy's desperate, explosive strike that had bought them these precious seconds.
Then, Garrick turned his attention to the charging behemoth.
The Ironclad Mammoth didn't flinch at his arrival. Driven by a mindless, corrupted rage, it lowered its massive tusks and accelerated, the earth trembling beneath its metal-plated feet.
Garrick didn't retreat. Wind mana erupted from his colossal, steel-plated gauntlets in a shrieking vortex. He met the house-sized beast head-on. His right fist, wrapped in a compressed spiral of razor-sharp air, slammed into the mammoth's metallic jaw with the force of a cannon blast.
BOOM!
The impact sent a violent shockwave rippling across the farmland, flattening the remaining crops. The mammoth's head snapped sideways, its massive body skidding through the mud. But it didn't fall. The dark, pulsing veins across its hide flared violently, and it swung one of its tusks in a blind, sweeping arc.
Garrick ducked beneath the lethal swing, his Aura Body carrying him with inhuman speed. He was a Peak C-rank Aether-Knight. Every fiber of his muscle, every plate of his bone, was reinforced with dense wind mana. His entire body had become a living weapon.
"Hold still, you overgrown mutt!" Garrick roared, launching a flurry of devastating strikes against the beast's ribs. Each blow released a shockwave of compressed wind that dented the mammoth's metallic hide. But the metal groaned, warped, and reformed almost instantly, fueled by the dark energy coursing through its veins.
A quarter mile away, Clei leaned heavily against a splintered fence post, his chest heaving. He had already retreated, his arms trembling from the recoil of the detonated mana core. He watched the battle with wide, unblinking eyes.
So this is what an Aura Body looks like, Clei thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. Every strike carries enough force to shatter a boulder, and he's barely breathing hard.
Behind him, Captain Ludwig and the surviving guards stared in absolute awe.
"By the Radiant God..." Ludwig whispered, his hands gripping his mace tightly. "To think the Village Head was holding back all these years. We're saved."
Elycia stood a few paces away, her emerald eyes shining with a mixture of relief and fierce pride. She had seen her father train a thousand times, but seeing him fight a monster of this scale without a single scratch was breathtaking.
Near the village border, Toshi and Verdehile watched in equal awe, their exhaustion momentarily forgotten. A few yards behind them, Teacher Teresa sat cross-legged in the dirt, her eyes closed, her breathing slow and rhythmic as she desperately meditated to replenish her drained mana reserves.
Suddenly, a second figure arrived from the direction of the village.
He was moving at a dead sprint, yet his posture was perfectly composed. The golden light radiating from his body was anything but subtle. It was the Deacon of Althea, Deacon Vance, another Peak C-rank powerhouse in the village.
Unlike Garrick's explosive, physical presence, the Deacon's aura was calm, heavy, and overwhelming. As he crossed the threshold of the farmland, a Holy Domain—roughly twenty meters in radius—expanded outward from his body. Inside it, the air smelled of ozone and warm sunlight. The ambient mana itself seemed to bow to his will.
As the golden Domain washed over Clei, a strange sensation prickled his skin. It was warm, almost comforting, but there was an underlying sharpness to it, like staring directly into the sun. Beneath his thick, fire-resistant glove, Clei's left hand twitched; he looked at it for a moment before turning his attention back to the battlefield.
Deacon Vance stopped, his eyes locking onto the mammoth. His expression darkened.
"This corruption... I recognize it," Vance said. His voice was quiet, but it carried across the battlefield with unnatural clarity. "I was just a young priest during the Umbral Blight. I saw this exact darkness consume entire villages."
He raised his hands, and a beam of golden light shot from his palms, striking the mammoth's flank. The beast shrieked—not in physical pain, but in something much deeper. The black veins on its hide writhed and recoiled where the Holy Magic touched them, sizzling like water on hot iron.
Garrick capitalized on the opening, driving both fists into the beast's chest. "This would be a hell of a lot easier if that old geezer from the Guild was here!" he shouted between strikes, frowning deeply. "Where is he?"
Garrick gritted his teeth, his wind aura flaring erratically around his gauntlets. The mana radiating from the mammoth felt wrong... It reminded him of the Phantoms he had fought when he was twenty years old, back when the Umbral Blight first exploded.
"On a long-term quest," Deacon Vance replied calmly, maintaining his beam of light. "But some of my priests are on their way. We just have to hold the line."
The mammoth thrashed wildly. Its physical strength was monstrous—each swing of its tusks carved deep trenches into the earth, and its metal-plated body deflected Garrick's wind strikes with deafening clangs.
Watching from the sidelines, Clei's mind raced. He fully ascertained that the beast was Blighted, but there were glaring differences compared to the books in his father's spatial ring.
This is completely different from what the books described, Clei realized, his brow furrowing beneath his mask.
According to his father's notes, when a high-rank Aetherborn—specifically a Rank 4 Alpha or above—was fully assimilated by an Umbral Phantom, it became a cold, tactical puppet. It retained its combat instincts and fought with calculated, unfeeling precision.
But this beast was swinging wildly, driven by blind, uncoordinated rage. It was fighting like a mindless, feral husk, not a true Hollowed Master. It wasn't being piloted by a higher intelligence.
It wasn't fully assimilated. It was just... corrupted.
"It fights like the mindless husks from twenty years ago, but there's something wrong with it!" Vance called out, his golden aura flaring. "Garrick, keep its attention! I need two minutes to prepare a purification spell to deal with that black mana! I don't think we have time to wait until my priests arrive."
Garrick nodded, understanding immediately. He sprung into action, weaving from side to side, taunting the beast to draw its aggro.
But the mammoth, as if sensing an existential threat from the Holy Magic, suddenly ignored Garrick. It pivoted on its massive hind legs, its tusks lowering directly toward the Deacon, interrupting his spellcasting.
"Garrick, stop it!" Vance shouted, his golden aura flickering.
Garrick was a step too late. He lunged forward, but the beast was already swinging its trunk to crush the priest.
Suddenly, a blast of crimson flames erupted from the flank, slamming into the Ironclad Mammoth's face. The beast roared, dropping its trunk and stumbling backward.
Teresa had arrived.
Her eyes were open, blazing with determination. She hadn't fully recovered, but she forced her Mana Core to spin, projecting her Crimson Domain. The air shimmered with intense heat, wrapping around the mammoth and sapping its strength.
Deacon Vance and Garrick locked eyes with the teacher. A silent, profound respect passed between the three C-rank powerhouses.
"Just hold it down for a minute!" Vance ordered, his hands glowing brighter.
With Garrick's relentless physical assaults and Teresa's suffocating heat Domain, the mammoth was pinned. But Clei noticed something terrifying: despite the barrage of attacks, the mammoth's regeneration was monstrous. The black mana surrounding its body actively absorbed the ambient mana in the air, knitting its metallic hide back together and healing the burns from Teresa's fire. Its mana reserves seemed endless.
"Now!" Vance roared.
The Deacon pressed both palms forward. His Domain contracted, focusing every ounce of its purifying energy into a single, blinding column of golden light that struck the mammoth directly between the eyes.
The magic didn't physically damage the beast. Instead, the Holy Light flooded its veins like liquid gold. It burned away the black corruption from the inside out, simultaneously accelerating the mammoth's natural healing to seal the deep dents and horrific burns covering its body.
The beast's roar was unlike anything Clei had ever heard. It wasn't the mindless shriek of a Hollowed. It was a scream of agony, as if something deep inside the beast was waking up from a nightmare. The black veins across its body ignited with golden fire, burning away layer by layer. The dark aura surrounding it dissolved like smoke in sunlight.
For five agonizing seconds, the battlefield was silent except for the mammoth's heavy breathing.
Then, the corruption shattered completely.
The mammoth collapsed to its front knees. Its eyes—previously empty voids of shattered glass—flooded with color. They were brown, deep, and filled with an ancient, weary intelligence. The beast looked down at its own body, at the pristine, unblemished metallic hide, and let out a low, mournful trumpet that echoed across the plains.
It had regained its clarity.
Without another glance at the humans who had nearly killed it, the mammoth turned and lumbered back toward the Great Forest, its massive frame disappearing into the tree line.
Silence descended over the farmland.
Deacon Vance fell to his knees, his golden aura vanishing completely. He was pale, sweat dripping from his brow.
Garrick let out a long, ragged exhale and sat down heavily on the broken, muddy grass. He wiped a mixture of sweat and dirt from his forehead. "It's finally over," he muttered, his voice thick with exhaustion.
A few yards away, Teresa leaned heavily on her staff, her elegant robes scorched and torn. She offered a weak, tired smile to the Village Head, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she finally let her Domain collapse.
A collective sigh of relief swept through the onlookers. Clei exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, his trembling legs finally giving out as he slid down the fence post into the dirt.
—
A quarter mile away, hidden in the dense canopy of the Great Forest, two figures watched the aftermath through the branches.
They wore identical dark robes, their faces obscured by featureless, porcelain masks. Neither moved as the golden light faded and the mammoth retreated.
"The Phantom Protocol was a success," the taller figure said, his voice a dry, emotionless rasp. "The beast fought to the death without a true Arbiter present. The corruption held."
"It held, but barely," the second figure agreed, adjusting the small, intricate glass artifact strapped to their wrist. Inside the artifact, a faint, crimson wisp of smoke swirled angrily. "The Holy Magic purged the Phantom in seconds. If a Deacon can undo our work this easily, the corruption is still too fragile."
The taller figure tilted his masked head. "Then we refine it. The artifact needs to bind the Phantom's soul tighter to the host's Mana Chamber. If we can perfect this, the Phantom won't just corrupt them... it will possess them. We could control a C-rank Master without them ever knowing."
"We will report our findings to the Elders," the second figure said, tapping the glass artifact. "The next test will not fail."
They turned and vanished into the shadows of the forest, leaving no trace behind.