Chapter 199
Skin and bone seemed to be swallowed by living metal creeping outward from within.
From the tips of his shoulders, new structures took shape.
Long, solid barrels, metallic alloys radiating the aura of primordial elements.
White ice—clear and razor-sharp like diamond shards at the heart of a mountain—froze around them, releasing a cold mist that crystallized the dust in the air.
Beside it, black fire roared, not with light, but with a darkness that devoured all surrounding color, a blazing void.
Golden wind spiraled like a miniature vortex, whistling with the murmurs of a long-forgotten language, carving patterns of light into the air.
Volcanic obsidian material, pitch-black and gleaming, pulsed with geothermal rhythm as though it possessed a heart of its own.
And at the peak of each cannon barrel, glowing with terrifying intensity, surged streams of crimson energy not born of this world—the remnants of a dead pulsar's fury, now awakened and harnessed into a threatening form.
Without hesitation, without a pause for reflection, the body now armed with elemental power moved.
Ilux ran.
His stride was not the unsteady run of a human, but a mechanical forward drive filled with purpose, like a projectile already fired from its barrel.
His feet slammed against floors strewn with rubble, crushing shards and dust without care.
His direction was clear.
The massive library doors, now visible as a blurred frame of light at the end of the corridor of destruction.
He shot out of the ruined chamber, carrying with him a silent storm swirling around his arms, a fast-moving silhouette amid the fragments of shattered reality and the new threat he had anchored to his own body.
'Was this explosion actually an attack meant for me?'
The chaos surrounding his body was nothing more than a blurred backdrop, a mural of destruction painted in dust and fractures.
His mind, though still heavy as if submerged in murky water, refused to drown in confusion alone.
A conviction began to crystallize within him, hard and cold like the icy core of the cannon fused to his arms.
The devastating blast that tore the space apart—powerful enough to shake even the intermediate elemental defenses now merged with his blood and bones—could not have emerged from nothing.
Every explosion has a source, every quake an epicenter.
And his most primal instinct, sharper than his still-blurred vision, screamed that none of this was coincidence.
The image of Aldraya, the sixteen-year-old teacher with a voice that should have been emotionless like a machine, now became a ghost haunting every breath he took.
The memory of that faint voice, once merely an intrusive whisper at the edge of awareness, had evolved into a deafening scream ripping through his mental space.
Strangely, its intensity peaked at his most vulnerable moment: when he was called to stand before the class, inside that silent library.
It had not been an ordinary summons.
It felt like bait, a marker, or perhaps a summoning ritual disguised within routine academic procedure.
The echoing voice of Aldraya was no longer a mere auditory disturbance.
It had become a trap frequency, a melody of suffering that lured something far darker into emergence.
Ilux felt a horrifying connection between that voice and the explosion that followed.
How could a young teacher, with a face seemingly devoid of emotional depth, trigger a catastrophe of this magnitude?
The question spun endlessly, yet the answer remained sealed behind a fog thicker than the dust filling the room.
Perhaps Aldraya was not herself.
Perhaps that voice was merely an intermediary, a channel for another force targeting him.
Or perhaps—most terrifying of all—this was part of a much larger game, in which the library, the class presentation, and even the explosion itself were nothing more than opening moves on an unseen chessboard.
His conviction hardened like forged metal.
He had to get out of here.
Not merely to escape the ruins, but to move toward the faint source of truth beyond them.
Every step cutting through the dust cloud was a refusal to accept the fate of a victim.
The twin cannon-arms hissing with elemental power were no longer merely weapons.
They were tangible proof that he had been dragged into a battle beyond ordinary human comprehension.
The explosion was a declaration of war, and Aldraya's voice was its opening trumpet.
Now, as he burst through the shattered library doors into the unknown state of the outer corridor, Ilux knew one thing.
This was only the beginning.
And he would find the answer—or destroy it along with the source of that voice.
'Utter chaos.'
With strides still fast and purposeful, Ilux continued forward, leaving behind destruction as a silent witness to the immense force that had just swept through.
Though his focus lay on escape and the search for answers, the image of the surrounding devastation etched itself deeply into his mind with near-cinematic detail, as though every fracture were a phrase in a poem of grief imposed by the universe itself.
Bookshelves that once stood proudly like arrogant guardians of knowledge now lay toppled in chaotic formations.
Some leaned crookedly, knocked from their perfect verticality, while others had completely collapsed, crashing to the floor with the rustling echoes that still lingered in memory.
Stranger still were shelves resting against one another, mutually supporting each other in their fall, forming fragile triangular angles and unnatural arches.
They became a line of ruins resembling a massive domino arrangement that failed to complete its motion, frozen in half-fallen poses as if holding their breath, awaiting the final push to collapse entirely.
Books—the souls trapped within leather and paper—were scattered without order.
They lay strewn across the floor in chaotic piles, some wide open with folded pages, others tightly shut yet trampled underfoot.
Dust and thick plumes of black smoke coated many of them, forming a dark layer over covers that had once been colorful.
Yet none bore signs of burning or scorch marks.
The magical protections installed by the guardians of the Star Academy's library had succeeded in shielding the contents from fire, though they failed to preserve the physical structure that housed them.
Books continued to fall as shelves still swayed gently or suddenly collapsed with louder bursts of dust, adding to the already thickening haze in the air, making every corner of the room feel like the interior of a moving dark fog.
Ilux sharpened his vision, forcing eyes newly clouded by haze to pierce through the drifting dust.
Yet even as his lenses captured faint shapes of ruin, the air itself remained an enemy.
Its heat no longer struck as a shockwave, but as a suffocating blanket, like breathing inside a furnace long extinguished yet still holding residual warmth.
Fine particles of splintered wood, shattered plaster, and crushed concrete ceiling danced endlessly in the air, entering his nose and mouth with every forced breath.
The more he tried to resist it, the heavier his chest became, as though his lungs were filling with a thick fluid made of dust and despair.
Above it all, the remaining hanging lamps drooped mournfully.
Some still flickered, casting pale, unstable light that created swaying shadows among the ruins.
Others had shattered, their glass scattered across the floor, yet their exposed sockets occasionally spat brief sparks of electricity, bursting into bluish-white flashes that momentarily illuminated patches of the area with sharp, ghostly light before sinking back into darkness.
To be continued…