Abaddon roared—and the sound didn't travel through air. It traveled through bone.

  Hundreds—thousands—of hands surged out through the dimensional fissure like a tide with nowhere left to go but forward, all of them converging on Rein in an effort to shatter his concentration at the precise moment when he had committed everything to the golden Demon King Hands.

  Yet those hooked claws slammed instead into invisible walls and were flung back, because six impossibly thin azure square plates were orbiting him in a complex pattern: Carbyne Shield V.2, an improved version designed to withstand both physical impact and mana pressure far better than the first.

  The plates rotated and switched positions at blinding speed under LIZ's exacting calculations, sealing every angle of attack with flawless precision.

  [LIZ: Confirmed… dimensional gate opening reduced to 25%. Seal progress proceeding according to plan.]

  "Can you… push it faster!"

  Rein clenched his teeth so hard the muscles along his jaw stood out in sharp lines, cold sweat pouring down his body until the black coat clung to him; it felt as if he were bracing a stone gate weighing hundreds of tons with his bare shoulders, while the monstrous resistance from the demon dimension fed straight back through the mana links into his flesh until he could taste blood at the back of his throat.

  [LIZ: Hmph… I'm already going all out here, and these black hands just keep popping up like termites.]

  With a trembling hand Rein snatched up the last mana potion Ingrid had given him, tore the stopper out with his teeth, and swallowed it in one bitter rush; the astringent taste kicked through his starved circuits, shoving the dwindling flow of mana back upward for a moment, and he exhaled a harsh breath.

  "My mana's almost gone, LIZ…"

  [LIZ: Just a little longer… once it drops another 10%, the gate will be completely shut!]

  "No!"

  Abaddon's voice hit the stone like a physical thing.

  In that instant an immeasurable mass of demonic hands erupted from the crack, a black tsunami so vast it swallowed the remaining light whole, filling every square inch of the underground hall in a heartbeat before hurtling toward Rein from all directions at once.

  [LIZ: This is bad! The computational load is too high, Rein!]

  "LIZ! I'll take the shields myself!" he shouted. "Put all your power into the Hands—close that gate!"

  The words had barely left him before Rein swept both arms through the air in rapid, precise movements, fingers crossing and folding as if solving a Rubik's Cube at impossible speed, while mana threads from his fingertips snapped into the six shield-plates in a single breath.

  "Assemble—Geometric Armor!"

  The six Carbyne Shields that had been dancing separately shot together in perfect synchronization, locking edge to edge and corner to corner until they formed a flawless cubic shell around him, just before the black wave crashed down.

  The impact thundered through the chamber. The cube lurched and rocked, impact after impact, yet Rein's face inside remained calm, his eyes fixed on the geometry—his geometry, built by his own hand. Hundreds upon hundreds of hands clawed and tore at the Geometric Armor in a frenzy, their talons scraping across the smooth Carbyne surfaces with a shriek like metal dragged over glass, but no matter how many there were, they could not even score a scratch across the cube.

  [LIZ: Hold on, Rein. The gate is closing… success rate 95%… less than five percent remaining.]

  The blue system text flashed at the edge of his vision, urging him to wrench out the very last of his mana, but just as victory seemed almost within reach, Abaddon's cold voice cut through the chaos.

  "…Drag him in."

  That short command overturned the entire battle in a heartbeat.

  The thousands of hands that had been trying to tear the cube apart suddenly changed form, melting into black threads so thin and numerous they resembled millions of strands of human hair bound together, and those demonic filaments lashed themselves around the Geometric Armor from every angle before pulling it bodily toward the heart of the Pandemonium Gate.

  Rein felt the violent tug at once, the entire cube skidding across the stone floor beneath him.

  Damn it. It's not trying to break the shield—it's trying to drag me into hell with it.

  A cold numbness raced up his spine.

  The cubic shell shook so hard Rein nearly lost his footing. It was being dragged toward the dimensional maw inch by inch, the stone floor shrieking beneath it as the cube scraped forward, while the black hair-like strands tightened around Carbyne until the structure groaned under the strain. The pull was steady, relentless, as though he were locked in a tug-of-war against the Abyss itself.

  One more moment and we'll be across.

  "Shotgun!"

  Three layered spell-rings sprang into being on the face of the cube, and a continuous burst of blue pellet-like mana rounds exploded outward—yet the result was not what he had hoped for.

  A curtain of black strands descended across their path, intercepting the pellets in dense, writhing layers; the shotgun barrage blasted them into ash where it struck, but in the very next instant fresh strands regrew to replace what had been lost, as if the Abyss simply grew more.

  Rein kept firing anyway, mana ripping out of him until pain spread through his chest, but the black wall ahead only thickened, swallowing every attack.

  "Seriously?" he spat, sweat pouring down his face.

  Though the gate still remained only five percent from closing, the two immense golden LIZ Hands had stalled. They quivered under the burden, straining with all their might, yet they could no longer drive the ancient doors even a single centimeter farther.

  [LIZ: Warning! It's not arm-wrestling anymore—Abaddon has switched to using "gravity" from the far dimension to hold the gate in place! Right now the Hands are basically trying to push an entire mountain. If we don't find another answer, we're screwed!]

  The Geometric Armor scraped forward again—and the violet light of the threshold fell across the cube's surface like a stain.

  At that range the pull from the Pandemonium Gate intensified exponentially, beginning to affect the structure of the six Carbyne shields themselves; the plates emitted a high metallic whine as the unnatural gravitational field started to twist them, and the once-stable blue light across their surfaces flickered in rapid pulses.

  Rein stared into the deepening dark beyond the widening gap, while the chill of the Abyss began to leak through—and it didn't feel like cold. It felt like absence.

  "LIZ… borrow mana from the Mana Realm."

  [LIZ: Warning! You're already running Mana Vision: Full Burst Mode. If you pull in more power now, the backlash will trigger the Curse of Dragon's Speech. Your body won't survive the load!]

  The Geometric Armor jolted again under another savage yank from the abyssal force, and the distance between him and the lethal threshold shrank to only a few feet.

  "I don't have enough mana left to load CUBE again— so borrow it from the Mana Realm," Rein said, forcing the words out against the pressure crushing the air.

  [LIZ: This is too dangerous! You're about to load a second CUBE when your mana is almost completely dry… that's outright suicide!]

  "That's why I need yours. Do it, LIZ."

  [LIZ: …Understood. Then just don't black out before we're done!]

  In the next instant Rein felt as though a dam inside his body had burst apart, and a colossal torrent of mana surged through his veins—too much, too fast, like a circuit built for candlelight suddenly asked to carry lightning.

  The symptoms of Mana Overheat spread across his chest at once, so intense that his skin flushed a violent red and faint steam began to rise from his body.

  The cube scraped violently along the floor, leaving a long furrow behind it. Only three more feet remained before he would be dragged bodily into the demon realm.

  Then the interior of the Carbyne cube blazed white. Rein dismissed every layer of protection in a single heartbeat, and at once millions of black strands lashed toward his exposed body—but before even one could touch so much as a hair on him, searing cerulean fire erupted outward and incinerated everything around him into dust, while heat ripples twisted the air until the world looked like a fever dream.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  "Ignis Drive… activate!"

  The moment the command left his lips, the final red CUBE unleashed its power. A vast inferno burst outward, reducing thousands of black filaments to nothing in a fraction of a second. A concentrated lance of fire tore through the darkness, blasting apart the demonic mass in its path, and countless grotesque hands that had tried to obstruct him were burned away in an instant.

  An explosion thundered through the entire underground hall.

  Rein, transformed into a blazing arrow of fire, slammed straight into the heart-container set at the center of the gate. The pulsing lump of the Puppet Master's flesh, which had been beating steadily only moments before, disintegrated into ash under the overwhelming heat, while the Pandemonium Key itself melted down into little more than a drop of molten metal.

  And the moment that central mechanism was destroyed, the opposing force from the Abyss collapsed with it. The ancient gears and hidden metalworks inside the gate began to shriek and grind as they lost equilibrium all at once.

  [LIZ: Now!]

  The radiant golden Demon King Hands poured out the very last of their strength and drove the massive half-open doors toward each other. The dim purple light of the Abyss that had once flooded the underground hall was compressed into a narrow line, then swallowed entirely as the crack in reality began to close.

  "No… impossible! Vermin like you…!"

  Abaddon's roar shook the air like thunder fading into a distant storm.

  Suspended in midair amid the roiling flames that still clung to his body, Rein panted so hard his whole frame trembled, yet he still lifted two fingers to his brow and flicked them out in a lazy salute toward that enormous blood-red eye for one final farewell.

  "Goodbye, big-eye."

  "Rein Rhys… I will remember your name in the deepest pit of hell!"

  The iron doors slammed together with a crash that shook every stone in the hall down to its root, and the impact blasted hot wind and dust outward in a widening wave.

  Then darkness returned all at once, leaving behind only the smell of burning and a silence so deep it hurt.

  Rein dropped heavily to the ground. The flames that had engulfed him began to shrink and dissipate, vanishing together with the last remnants of his mana.

  "Made it…"

  A weak smile tugged at the corner of his mouth—then, in the next second, his body collapsed bonelessly to the floor.

  Pain beyond description assaulted his senses. The consequences LIZ had warned him about arrived with merciless precision. The muscles and blood vessels in both arms had torn under the burden of spells beyond his limit, and his skin split open in places until dark blood began to seep through.

  But that was not all.

  Without warning Rein vomited a heavy mouthful of blood across the stone floor, his face ghost-pale and drenched in black sweat.

  The Curse of Dragon's Speech was eating him alive from within.

  He lifted a sleeve to wipe the blood from his mouth, then looked unsteadily toward the giant gate, which had begun to tremble in a new and deeply wrong way.

  "What now…?" he muttered, tasting another surge of iron rising in his throat.

  The trembling stopped for a single moment. Then massive cracks spread across the entire face of the Pandemonium Gate, while the metal that had once seemed indestructible warped inward toward the center as though an immense pressure inside was crushing it from the core.

  [LIZ: Rein! Run! The gate has completely lost dimensional equilibrium! It's collapsing inward—dimensional implosion! In less than sixty seconds this entire place is going to erupt when all the accumulated mana is released at once!]

  Rein clenched his teeth and tried to drag his failing body away, but his legs might as well not have belonged to him anymore. He managed only a few miserable steps before pitching face-first onto the ground, leaving a trail of blood across the stone.

  The dark at the edge of his vision stopped waiting and moved in.

  [LIZ: Hey… stay with me, Rein! Don't you dare give up now! You can still move—move!]

  He gathered what little strength remained and rolled himself onto his back. His chest rose and fell in frantic, violent jerks—each breath a separate argument with his body. Pain raced through every nerve. By now it was not only his legs—both arms felt numb and leaden too. In that moment he was inventory: two arms that didn't respond, two legs that had quit, and a heartbeat that hadn't gotten the memo yet.

  "Sorry, LIZ… looks like the next time we meet, it'll be in the next world… assuming God's generous enough to give me another slot."

  Above his chest, a blood-red cross-shaped light shone through the fabric of the black coat, pulsing in time with his faltering heartbeat. Each pulse brought with it agony sharp enough to make it feel as though enormous iron tongs were slowly crushing his heart.

  Rein stared up at the trembling stone ceiling and almost laughed at himself in bitter disbelief.

  The first time he had died, it had been because a laboratory exploded. This time he was about to die because a dimensional gate exploded.

  And yet, just as his eyes were about to close, an orange blur dropped across his vision.

  "Who gave you permission to lie here and die like an idiot? I still haven't settled the score for all the times you used me!"

  "Huh…?"

  A faint sound escaped Rein's throat as his dimming eyes widened in surprise.

  The newcomer did not wait for an answer. She grabbed his limp arm without ceremony, swung him up across her back in one swift motion, and lifted him as though he weighed almost nothing at all.

  At that same instant, the ruined core of the Pandemonium Gate reached critical collapse. Compressed into a tiny sphere no larger than a ball, it imploded for a heartbeat and then erupted, unleashing millions upon millions of units of concentrated mana as catastrophic thermal force across every inch of the chamber.

  White fire rushed toward them and didn't care which direction they ran.

  But in the fraction of a second before death could reach them, both of them vanished from that spot, leaving behind only a blurred afterimage.

  Rein's vision was so damaged now that he could barely make out details, yet a speed so monstrous that it could outrun the blast radius in an instant belonged, within the Academy, to only one person he knew.

  "Sophia… why are you here…" he murmured weakly.

  "Did you forget already? We're in the same party."

  "Ah… right…"

  A tired, crooked smile formed on his lips.

  "You've got me running from another completely insane disaster again!" Sophia snapped, grumbling all the while as her feet hammered against the stone and carried them tearing through the tunnel.

  "The flames are… right behind us now… move it, you crawling turtle…" Rein whispered hotly into her ear, still somehow managing to sound infuriating even with his breath coming in ragged scraps.

  "Why don't you get down and run for yourself! I'm carrying you, you know—of course my speed's dropped!" the orange-haired girl shouted back, though her feet only accelerated harder until a faint sonic boom began to trail behind her.

  "My back's… starting to burn… save the complaining for outrunning the explosion…"

  He was not exaggerating. The colossal blast had hurled the infernal fire after them with terrifying speed. Sophia shot upward through the ruined spiral shaft, while orange-red flames chased only a few feet behind her heels, the heat so fierce it scorched the very air and stung the skin.

  Then, in a single instant, the two of them burst out of the mouth of that death-pit like a bullet launched by monstrous pressure. They hung weightless for a heartbeat above the shattered remains of the Whitmore Manor below, Sophia gasping in sharp, hurried breaths while Rein's came in broken fragments, and together they exhaled in the same moment, relieved simply to have escaped that underground darkness alive.

  That relief lasted less than a second.

  The moment their upward momentum peaked and gravity reclaimed them, a thunderous detonation followed from beneath. The earth below collapsed inward as if the world were swallowing itself, and orange fire surged up through the ruined shaft as if the underground had finally decided to exhale.

  "This is bad!" Sophia cried in alarm, trying to squeeze out enough mana to cast Haste and Vortex one more time, but the timing was already against her.

  Yet before the heat could sear their flesh, a dense black shadow rushed in and wrapped around them like spilled ink.

  Darkness Armor.

  The enormous blast of fire struck that globe of shadow, but the impact broke and scattered; the heat was sealed outside completely, and when the force of the explosion finally began to ebb, the darkness slowly unwound and streamed back toward its owner waiting below.

  "That was almost too late, Bella…" Sophia laughed dryly as her body drifted down to the ground in a controlled descent.

  "I was thinking the same thing," Isabella's voice came through the Mana Resonance Link in their minds.

  The glorious estate of the Whitmore family had become a gigantic sinkhole more than four hundred feet across, its depths choked with shattered brick and stone glowing red like coals in a furnace. Sulfur and smoke rolled through the air in suffocating waves.

  Hundreds of people in Academy uniforms had fallen into chaos—students and staff alike scrambling to cast water magic at the fireballs still raining from the sky like meteors, desperate to stop the blaze from spreading into the surrounding forest.

  Sophia lowered Rein carefully onto the grass. Ahead of them stood Isabella, Ingrid, and a team of healers who had already assembled, while not far away Victoria worked with the professors and Guardian Unit to establish a perimeter and keep the uninvolved away from the danger zone.

  Ingrid rushed in to support Rein, her hands already moving as healing magic took shape.

  "How bad is he?" Isabella asked, dropping to one knee beside him.

  "Bad… really bad," Ingrid answered through clenched teeth, forcing more mana into the spell. "I'll stabilize him first, but we need to move him to The Vault immediately!"

  And then Ingrid's expression changed at once to open panic.

  The healing spell she had poured into him was not entering his body at all. Not even a trace. The severe wounds on his arms and legs showed no sign of closing, as though some invisible wall were rejecting her mana outright.

  Rein's body began to convulse violently. He clutched at his chest, where a blood-red light was glowing through the fabric, and a sound of pure misery escaped his teeth.

  [LIZ: Warning! Interference detected from the Curse of Dragon's Speech. The curse is violently rejecting restorative mana… your body is reaching its limit.]

  The AI's warning flashed before him even though his eyes were shut, but the pain was so intense he could barely process it.

  "Don't die on us now, Rein! Our party doesn't get to end like this!" Sophia grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "We risked our lives together for all this—so you don't get to die alone."

  Tears welled in Ingrid's eyes as she called the nearby healers to join in, while she herself began casting Nullify Curse over his chest again and again.

  "It's a curse… something really severe. We have to slow it down first," Ingrid shouted over the chaos around them.

  "Rein! Stay with us—keep your eyes open!"

  "Yes… fight it," said Isabella, kneeling close to his ear and saying his name over and over, refusing to let his mind drift away.

  Amid the shouting and the still-raging flames, the season's next fall of snow began to drift down slowly from the sky. Clean white flakes settled across Rein's pale face.

  "Ah… so there's… snow here too…"

  His eyes closed. The smile stayed.

  And then everything sank once more into a silent, waiting dark.

  These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.

  Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.

  Magic & Spell Techniques

  Carbyne Shield V.2

  An upgraded defensive system built from six ultra-thin azure square plates orbiting the user in a dynamically calculated pattern. Compared to the first version, V.2 is specifically optimized for both physical impact resistance and mana-pressure resistance, allowing it to repel large numbers of Abyssal attacks at once.

  Geometric Armor

  A cube-shaped defensive construct formed by assembling the six Carbyne Shield V.2 plates into a flawless sealed structure. Unlike the orbiting shield mode, this is a full enclosure designed for maximum structural integrity under multidirectional assault. It is strong enough to endure thousands of abyssal filament impacts without being scratched.

  Ignis Drive [CUBE] — Breach Variant (Update)

  Previously used as a combat-drive system, Ignis Drive here is deployed as a final breach weapon. Rein becomes a blazing projectile and crashes directly into the heart-container at the center of the gate, using concentrated fire to destroy the mechanism rather than an enemy body.

  Darkness Armor — Blast Intercept Mode (Update)

  Isabella expands Darkness Armor into a large shadow globe around Sophia and Rein midair, sealing out the explosion and heat wave behind them. This is a broader-scale, reactive rescue application rather than standard personal defense.

  Mana Realm Borrowing

  An emergency technique in which Rein orders LIZ to pull additional mana from the Mana Realm into his body after his personal reserves are nearly exhausted. This is described as catastrophically dangerous because it overloads a body already operating under Mana Vision: Full Burst Mode.

  Secondary CUBE Load

  A suicidal-level escalation in which Rein attempts to activate another CUBE after his mana is nearly spent, using borrowed power from the Mana Realm to compensate. The chapter frames this as beyond safe spellcasting practice and well into self-destructive territory.

  Mana Overheat (Update)

  A critical overload state caused by forcing too much mana through the body too quickly. Symptoms include flushed skin, visible steam rising from the body, violent strain across the chest, and rapid onset of internal damage.

  Blood-Red Cross Light

  A red cross-shaped glow visible through Rein’s coat over his chest, pulsing with his heartbeat during the curse crisis. It acts as a visible marker of the Curse of Dragon’s Speech actively crushing or destabilizing his heart and internal system.

  Restorative Mana Rejection

  A severe condition caused by the Curse of Dragon’s Speech. Ingrid’s healing magic cannot enter Rein’s body at all, as if an invisible wall rejects outside restorative mana. This establishes the curse as not merely harmful, but actively hostile to healing intervention.

  Nullify Curse Emergency Loop

  Ingrid repeatedly casts Nullify Curse over Rein’s chest in an attempt to slow the curse’s progression. The wording and context suggest this is not a full cure, but an emergency suppression attempt under extreme time pressure.