The moment Ren's fingers brushed the shimmering surface of the barrier, a scream built in the back of his throat. Every nerve in his body felt like it was being stripped one by one.
The violet dome didn't feel like magic; it felt like something made out of frozen needles.
The Processors didn't even flinch at first. To them, he was a fly throwing itself against a windshield.
"Foolish boy," the lead Processor intoned, his silver mask reflecting the violent purple light. "The barrier is a Resonance Loop. An execution dome. Even a Sage couldn't touch it without—"
The Processor stopped.
The violet light wasn't burning Ren. It was flowing into him.
'It's too much,' Ren's mind shrieked. 'It's like drinking boiling oil.'
But the Fourth Stitch was humming, a deep, resonant vibration that pulsed through his arm and into his chest. His Void Core, usually a silent, empty room, had turned into a howling gale.
Ren didn't ground the energy. He couldn't "braid" it like he had on the bridge.
Instead he opened the floodgates.
"I told you," Ren whispered, though his voice was lost in the roar of the mana. "I'm a monster."
In his Mana-Sight, the world became a singular, terrifying image. The violet threads of the dome were being pulled toward his palm, spiraling inward like water down a drain. The invisibility stones the Processors were using shattered. One by one, the twelve men were revealed, their faces pale with a sudden, primitive fear.
"Stop him!" the lead Processor yelled, his voice losing its amplified calm. "He's... he's unravelling the dome! Kill the Null!"
Three Processors broke their formation, lashing out with whips made of solidified shadow.
Ren didn't even move. He didn't have to. The vacuum he had created was so powerful that the shadow-whips were caught in the slipstream. They didn't go to him at all, they were simply absorbed, the dark mana disappearing into his skin without a trace.
'Eat,' a voice whispered in the back of Ren's mind. It wasn't the man in the robes. It was his own core. 'Everything is threads. Everything is just... food.'
Inside the dome, the situation was a bloodbath.
Cian was pinned against a crystalline pillar, his silver armor cracked, blood leaking from a wound on his temple. The Chimera of Light was towering over him, its diamond head pulling back to deliver a killing blow of concentrated mana. Kael was struggling to keep a pack of smaller shadow-beasts that came from the Chimera, off Julian, who was desperately trying to make a vine shield that kept flickering out.
The dome itself was sucking out their mana and feeding it to the beast making them weak.
Cian looked through the violet haze and saw Ren.
He saw the boy he had called "Zero," the boy he had treated like a discarded rag, standing against twelve Processors.
Ren's hair was whipping around his face, and his eyes... they weren't brown anymore. They were two pits of moonlight-silver, glowing with an intensity that rivaled the Chimera.
"Ren!" Cian shouted, the name leaving his lips for the first time.
With a final, violent thrum, the violet dome shattered.
It didn't explode outward. It collapsed inward, all that concentrated execution-grade magic vanishing into Ren's palm in a single, deafening heartbeat.
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the noise.
Ren stood in the center of the clearing. His uniform was tattered, his skin was glowing with a faint, translucent light, and a single drop of silver-tinged blood ran from his nose and eyes.
The twelve Processors stood frozen. Their ritual was gone. Their mana-pools were dry. Ren had quite literally eaten their power.
"The Chimera," Kael's voice broke the silence.
The beast, deprived of the dome's energy that had been feeding it, let out a confused, distorted roar. It turned its diamond head away from Cian and toward Ren. It sensed the greatest concentration of mana in the forest.
It wasn't the Princes anymore. It was the boy at the edge of the clearing.
The Chimera leaped.
Ren didn't flinch. He felt the Fourth Stitch settle. He felt the Fifth Stitch begin to burn across his wrist. He looked at the beast—a creature of "Pure Mana"—and he didn't see a threat.
He saw a quilt. But he needed to make this one look like an accident. Because if he opened defeated a level seven beast and admitted to it, he might not live to see another day.
He reached out, his fingers splayed.
'Unravel,' he thought.
As the Chimera reached him, Ren's hand didn't strike bone or fur. It sank into the creature's chest like it was made of smoke. Ren's fingers caught the core of the beast's existence.
He pulled.
The Chimera didn't die. It undid.
The eagle wings turned into ribbons of light. The lion's body frayed into golden wool. The diamond head shattered into a thousand sparks. In less than three seconds, the "King-Beast" of the Obsidian Forest was nothing but a pile of glowing ash at Ren's feet.
Ren stood over the remains, his chest heaving. He turned his head slowly to look at the Processors.
The Processors didn't stay to fight. These were men who dealt in calculations and "Grade-One Threats." They knew when they were outmatched by something they couldn't name. They vanished into the fog, fleeing toward the Academy to report that the Purge had failed.
Inside the archway, the three Princes stood in stunned silence.
Julian was the first to move. He walked toward Ren, his emerald eyes wide, his silver knife forgotten in his hand. He looked at the spot where the Chimera had been, then at Ren's hand.
"That wasn't grounding," Julian whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of terror and awe. "You... you tore it apart. You treated a Level Seven Mana-Beast like it was made of old string."
'This is it. I can't admit to this.'
Cian approached next. He was limping, his golden ponytail disheveled. He stopped three feet away from Ren. He looked at the silver lead, which was still wrapped around Ren's hand.
The lead was smoking. The braided silk had been burned away, leaving only the silver wire, which was now glowing with a dull, permanent light.
Cian looked into Ren's silver-ringed eyes. The "dark greed" from before was gone, replaced by something much more dangerous: Fear.
"What did you do to it?" Cian asked, pointing to the beast's ash.
Ren didn't answer. The mana sight was starting to fade, replaced by a crushing, soul-deep exhaustion. The monster he had let out was retreating, leaving behind a boy who just wanted to go home and sleep for a century.
"I fulfilled my duty, Highness. I didn't kill beast, it unraveled before it got to me." Ren said, his voice cracking. He held out the silver lead toward Cian. "The beast is dead. The Processors are gone. Can we go back now?"
Cian didn't take the lead. He looked at Ren's hand—at the palm where the stitches were hidden by ash and blood.
"You're not a normal Null. You are really a super null." Cian whispered.
"I'm whatever you need me to be, sir," Ren said, his legs finally giving out. He felt like The whole world was on his shoulders. His chest felt like he was lying on glass.
As he fell, it wasn't Kael who caught him this time.
It was Cian.
The Prince caught him against his cracked silver breastplate, his arms wrapping around Ren with a grip that was less like a master and more like a man clinging to a life-raft in a storm.
"Don't die," Cian hissed into Ren's ear, his voice desperate. "Do you hear me, Zero? You don't get to leave. Not after that. You're mine. You're the only thing in this world that's mine."
Ren didn't hear him. He was already drifting into a blackness that felt, for the first time, like it was truly his own.
High above, in the shadows of the crystalline arch, the man in the robes watched.
"Five down," the ghost murmured, his voice like the rustle of dead leaves.
"And the Weaver has finally tasted blood."