On the other side of Seiron, terror and madness were spreading like plague. Sylvester, into whose heart doubt had begun seeping, and whose mind had begun to be gnawed by insanity after the incident of the door burned with the ancient crest, did not content himself with executing his guards. He issued a hysterical order to deploy the elite of the elite from the Shadow Organization.
These killers were not mere soldiers, they were human weapons. Specialized units honed in the arts of tracking, advanced concealment, and silent assassination that left no trace. Their mission was to comb the palace's surroundings, alley by alley, rooftop by rooftop, searching for any intruder, any foreign mana signature, or even a local cat behaving suspiciously.
On one of the very high, steeply slanting rooftops, looking directly down onto a narrow dark alley like an abyss, leading to the secret rear gate of the ducal palace, Lumia sat with a calm wholly incompatible with the tension enveloping the city. She sat on the edge of the wet terracotta tiles, her slender legs dangling in the cold air above the void, her loose black cloak fluttering in total silence with the gusts of wind.
She was watching what was happening below. Her blue eyes saw the world in a way that ordinary mages cannot comprehend. She does not see bodies or weapons, she sees fundamentals: she sees mana flow, the lines of gravity, and the spatial distortions produced by bodies in motion.
"Five targets. Very advanced level compared to the palace guards. They use Shadow-and-Wind class concealment magic. The rate of their mana flow is interestingly disciplined," Lumia analyzed the situation in a whisper so soft only she could hear it, like an entomologist observing armed ants in a glass box.
In the dark alley below, Zaylan, the commander of the Shadow Organization's third and most bloodthirsty unit, was moving with excessive confidence and incredible lightness. He was a professional and sadistic killer who carried in his record dozens of assassinations of prominent political figures.
He always boasted that his victims never saw his face except as they breathed their last, their eyes overflowing with tears. He wore a black leather suit that absorbed light, and carried two curved daggers coated with an antidote-less poison.
But today, despite his long experience, Zaylan felt something utterly wrong. Something that disturbed his killer's instinct. The insects in the alley suddenly ceased chirping, as though nature itself had suppressed its breath from terror.
The surrounding air was no longer merely cold, it had become heavy, viscous, and draining of vitality. And a primal, primitive instinct of grave danger, resembling the approach of an unconquerable predator, made every hair on his neck stand completely on end.
Zaylan signaled his four men to stop immediately using a rapid hand gesture. "There is something here..." he whispered in a barely audible voice, and drew his daggers slowly.
Before he could finish his sentence, Lumia descended before them directly.
She did not fall from the high rooftop like a stone or like a person subject to the laws of gravity. She descended with a surrealist slowness, like a bird's feather drifting down in calm, producing no friction with the air, and no sound whatsoever from the contact of her small feet with the wet stone floor. Not even a whisper.
She simply stood there, a small girl, with an angelic pale face and a black cloak, staring at them with empty coldness.
The five killers jolted into a state of maximum alert, their bodies taut as bowstrings, their poisoned daggers gleaming with the glint of death in the thick darkness, encircling her in a professional semicircular formation.
"A girl?" sneered one of the killers, the most massively built among them, trying to dispel the tension that her sudden appearance had imposed. "Did you get lost from your mother's arms, little one? This is no place for playing."
Lumia did not answer with a single word. She did not even blink. Instead, in an extremely slow and fluid motion, she raised her slender right hand and opened her small white palm toward them.
And suddenly, sound disappeared from existence.
This was no ordinary silence resulting from the absence of noise. It was not mere quiet. It was a physical annihilation of the property of sound in that specific space. Lumia had withdrawn the medium carrying sound waves from the air.
The massive killer who had just sneered at her tried to laugh a rough laugh to intimidate her, opened his mouth with force and his throat vibrated, but nothing emerged. No laugh, no hum, not even the sound of his panting.
His eyes widened in shock. Another killer tried to scream at the top of his voice, warning the others of a magical trap, and the veins of his neck bulged from the effort, but the words died in his throat as though he had swallowed a piece of void.
They could not hear the sound of their own footsteps, nor the friction of their clothing, nor even the rapid beats of their hearts hammering in their chests like mad drums.
Lumia had created an Absolute Sound Void Zone with a radius of ten meters. In Lumia's world, the physical laws of matter are not cosmic constants, they are merely "suggestions" she can annul whenever she wishes.
Zaylan understood, with his terrifying expertise, that they were no longer hunters, they had fallen into a lethal trap set by a being that surpassed their comprehension. There was no time for panic. He signaled in the Organization's military sign language with a frantic and direct gesture: Kill her immediately! Synchronized attack!
The four killers lunged toward her in a fraction of a second, from every direction, like famished wolves. Their speed was staggering, augmented by Wind element magic that lightened their bodies and amplified the force of their charge. They intended to tear her apart before she could blink.
But Lumia did not retreat a single step, and showed no sign of panic whatsoever. She simply moved the fingers of her open hand lightly, as though playing a complex musical piece on the keys of an invisible piano in the air.
[Void Magic: Inverted Gravity, Neutron Star Collapse], she whispered in her mind.
And at the moment the killers leaped into the air, raising their daggers to deliver the killing blow from dead angles, the impossible happened. The killers who had been gliding with the lightness of feathers suddenly found themselves slamming into the rocky ground with a crushing, irresistible force, as though a mountain of pure iron had suddenly fallen vertically upon their shoulders.
Earth's gravitational force had multiplied twenty times in the vicinity of their bodies only, in a fraction of a second.
The scene was hideous and horrifying. Human bodies are not designed to endure this pressure. Their bodies were crushed against the stone floor with immense force, flattening their chests and tearing their muscles internally.
And because of the absolute absence of sound, the scene was surreal: the thunderous crash of their collision was not heard, their tearing screams of pain were not heard, the cracking of their ribs and spines ground to powder under the pressure was not heard.
They writhed on the ground like crushed worms, mouths open in silent and terrifying screams, blood oozing slowly from their eyes, ears, and noses under the weight of gravity.
Commander Zaylan remained standing alone, trembling violently, using every drop of mana in his body, every reinforcement enchantment he knew, and every last ounce of his survival instinct to resist the immense pressure trying to crush him. His knees bent, and the veins of his face nearly burst from the effort.
Zaylan looked at the small girl with a terror surpassing the limits of human comprehension. He grasped the horrifying truth: this is not human. Humans, however great their magical power, fight with emotion, they fight with anger, with fear, with enthusiasm, with the intoxication of victory, or even with sadistic pleasure like his own.
But this girl, she was fighting with an absolute cosmic coldness, a complete emotional void, as though she were not killing souls, but merely tidying her room, or removing annoying dust from a clean table. There was no hatred in her eyes, only sheer indifference.
Zaylan gathered what remained of his final reserves, burning his life energy (vital mana) in a desperate move. He drew his blackest and longest dagger, steeped in the Eternal Paralysis Venom extracted from the continent's rarest monsters, and lunged toward her in a final suicidal assault, exploiting what he imagined to be a minor gap in her magical defense.
Die, you demon! Zaylan screamed with every ounce of force he possessed, a scream from which no sound whatsoever emerged.
And when he arrived, at a staggering speed that nearly broke the sound barrier, when his poisoned dagger's blade was no more than a single inch from her pale neck, everything stopped.
Lumia did not dodge the strike. She did not use a magical shield. She simply looked directly into his terror-filled eyes, and time stopped in his perception.
His eyes met her cold blue ones, and he heard her voice reverberating directly inside his mind, bypassing the physical barrier of silence: "You call yourselves Shadow Killers and take shelter in darkness, but in the true world of void to which I belong, shadows do not exist. Because shadow needs light to create it, and I... I possess neither, and I recognize neither."
Lumia slowly closed her open palm.
The moment her fingers shut, Zaylan's body, still suspended in its attack posture, began to disintegrate and dissolve. There was no scattered blood, and there were no falling organs. The atomic bonds of his body were annulled.
His dark skin, his knotted muscles, his solid bones, and even his poisoned steel dagger all transformed into extremely fine silver molecules, then into silver mist that dispersed silently in the cold air, carried by the wind like incense smoke at a funeral, until nothing remained of the continent's most feared killer but emptiness where he had stood.
Lumia lowered her hand slowly. She released the Sound Void Zone. Sound returned to the alley. The four survivors lying crushed on the ground let out muffled, pained gasps, writhing in agony, unable to stand, unable to fight, incapable of reporting what they had witnessed even if they had wanted to.
She looked at them for a moment without interest, then turned her back on them and disappeared onto the rooftops, returning to Dex, the task completed with a professionalism and an absolute economy of effort that was the hallmark of a being who had once fought wars that erased continents, and for whom five professional killers were no more than a minor inconvenience that had delayed her morning by a few minutes.