Yuki felt the moment the Grandmaster got bored.

  It wasn’t the words, not at first, not even the sigh that slipped past his lips like someone closing a book halfway through a chapter that wasn’t challenging enough. It was the way the surrounding light tightened, the lazy little flares and idle ripples snapping inward as if someone had pulled a drawstring, the ambient glow condensing into something narrower.

  “Enough games.”

  The tone wasn’t loud, but it hit like a system notification that absolutely did not bode well.

  Yuki’s stomach dropped. She’d felt his power before, during the testing jabs and petty lecture-attacks, had seen him swat aside Tramar’s best efforts and unweave her spells mid-cast, but that had been him playing, him being smug and slightly entertained. This felt different. The air itself went heavier, like light had mass suddenly and all of it was piling onto the center of the clearing.

  Oh no, she thought numbly. Oh no oh no oh no. He was holding back before.

  His gaze slid past Yuki and Tramar and went straight to Phèdre.

  “The healer,” he said, as if he were pointing out a faulty hinge. “Remove the healer, and the rest falls apart.”

  For half a second nobody moved.

  Then Phèdre’s eyes widened. Because he was right, and they all knew it, and that was the problem. Tramar could throw fire until his mana hit zero, Yuki could contort light until her brain melted, but without the steady glow at their backs, without the quiet golden pulses that pushed health bars back up from red, they were just two squishy players in front of a boss.

  “Merveilleux, how accurate that is,” Phèdre muttered, shifting instantly into her raid-glide, ducking behind a tree, then the next, never still long enough for the Grandmaster to line up anything easy.

  Yuki’s panic crystallized into motion. She thrust both hands out, mana rushing into form the way it always did when everything inside her screamed protect, protect, protect. The maximum, three mirrors bloomed into existence in a staggered wall; angled plates of light, overlapping slightly like improvised shields.

  “I won’t let you—” she shouted.

  The Grandmaster didn’t even stop walking.

  “Child,” he said, almost bored. “You cannot stop this.”

  The construct forming above his hand wasn’t like the elegant little lances he’d thrown earlier, those precise scalpel shots meant to poke at them and make a point. This was bigger, thicker, the color shifting toward pure, brutal light, no nuance, no artistry, just condensed intent turned into a weapon.

  It lengthened into a spear, a lance of blinding radiance, the tip so bright Yuki had to squint even with her own light magic fluttering defensively around her retinas. The air screamed faintly as it formed, like reality wasn’t thrilled about being asked to hold that much power in one shape.

  He didn’t gesture dramatically. He didn’t shout the spell name.

  He just flicked his hand.

  The spear ripped forward.

  Yuki’s mirrors shattered in a single, vicious line, each one exploding into useless motes as the lance threaded through them like they were made of paper. The speed wasn’t fair; her eyes could barely keep up, her brain lagging a half-second behind the motion, like a poor connection trying to render a high-end spell effect.

  It was aimed straight at Phèdre’s heart.

  Phèdre moved, her positioning was almost perfect, a sideways slip behind thicker cover, timing calculated to the half-moment, everything textbook-level good… but the magic didn’t care about her textbook.

  It was faster.

  Yuki’s heart lurched. It’s going to hit—

  Tramar saw it.

  Or maybe he didn’t see all of it, maybe he just saw the line, the wrongness, the way the Grandmaster’s gaze had pinned Phèdre like a target, maybe his brain didn’t have time for visuals at all and only heard the silent alarm going off somewhere between friend and threat.

  Whatever it was, he moved.

  He didn’t shout her name. He didn’t explain. He just threw himself at her, tackling her sideways in a full-body collision that would’ve been hilarious in any other context, both of them going down in a tangle of limbs and cloak.

  The spear hit where Phèdre’s heart would have been.

  Tramar’s shoulder was there instead.

  The sound was awful.

  Tramar hissed, and his body snapped backward with the force, momentum twisted by the tackle so he half-rolled, half-collapsed, knees slamming into the moss.

  His health bar plummeted, a sickening chunk cut out of the red.

  A clean ninety percent gone in a blink.

  The spear evaporated, its job done, leaving a smoking hole in his shoulder and a sick glow lingering along the edges of the wound.

  Phèdre hit the ground, rolled, and was back on her feet in a heartbeat, hair a mess, eyes wide and blazing. “NON—Tramar—” Her voice came out somewhere between a snarl and a gasp. “You IDIOT—”

  She dropped to her knees beside him, hands already glowing, the golden light rushing to life around her fingers without any of the usual measured, elegant buildup.

  I should have seen it, Yuki thought, watching her, chest tight. I should have predicted the target, I should have angled better, I should have been faster—

  She’s thinking the same, another part of her supplied. She’s blaming herself for the hit she didn’t take.

  Phèdre pressed her hands to Tramar’s chest, glow flaring bright enough to tint his already pale face in warm gold. His health bar jerked upward, climbing back into safer territory, but before Yuki could exhale in relief, it started dropping again.

  Not as fast as the initial blow, not a cliff, but a steady, merciless drainage, tick by visible tick.

  A status icon blinked into existence next to it.

  [Attention! Light Corruption: HP draining 10/second]

  “Merde. It’s chewing through him,” she snapped, eyes flashing. “The spell, il ronge encore, it’s still eating inside.”

  She poured more mana into him. The glow intensified, the healing numbers visibly higher, directly fighting the steady -10 ticks. Tramar’s health bounced like a badly tuned graph; up, down, up, down, never stabilizing, never breaking free from that corrosive drag.

  Yuki’s pulse hammered.

  The Grandmaster stood a few paces away, not pressing the attack, not following up, just… watching. As if this were a lab result and he wanted to see how far they’d go to skew the variables.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Fascinating,” he remarked, almost conversational. “The light outpaces your healing. What will you do?”

  Phèdre did not look at him. “I make it stop,” she spat. “évidemment.” Sweat beaded at her temple, her mana bar already sliding downward faster than Yuki liked.

  “Phèdre, your pool—” Yuki started.

  “I know,” Phèdre bit out. “Couvre-nous. Now.”

  That, at least, Yuki could do.

  She threw herself in front of them, hands slamming into motion, mirrors blooming one after another. She angled them high, low, overlapping, tried to layer all three of them with illusion skill, anything to draw the Grandmaster’s focus, anything to make him look at her instead of the bleeding fire mage and the healer trying to plug a hole with her bare hands.

  “Look at me!” she shouted. “Fight me!”

  She cracked a whip of light at his eyes, sent a blinding flash straight into his face, added a scattering of false Yuki silhouette. Her mana burned, but she didn’t care. She just needed to buy seconds.

  He looked at her shields.

  At her illusion.

  At the way she stood between him and her friends.

  He flicked his fingers.

  Her whole mirror formation detonated as if someone had hit “delete” on her code. The flash fizzled into nothing halfway through forming. Her double-image blew apart like dust.

  He barely even shifted his weight.

  “But futile,” he said like a teacher marking her exam with a big red X.

  Behind her, Tramar sucked air between his teeth, eyes squeezed shut, sweat mixing with blood on his collar. “Phèdre…” he managed, voice rough and thready. “Stop… you need to fight—”

  “Non,” Phèdre snapped, voice shaking now with strain and something hotter underneath. “I can stabilize you. I just need—”

  Her words cut off as she poured even more magic into him. Yuki could see the mana bar dropping like a waterfall now, each pulse of healing more demanding than the last, but Tramar’s HP wouldn’t cooperate; it kept see-sawing between maybe-okay and absolutely-not-okay.

  Yuki’s throat burned.

  She turned halfway, still facing the Grandmaster but calling over her shoulder. “Phèdre! You need to let Tramar go, he’ll respawn! Let’s fight with me—I can’t hold him if—”

  “JE SAIS CE QUE JE DOIS FAIRE!” Phèdre screamed.

  The sound hit Yuki like a slap.

  Phèdre never yelled at her. Phèdre teased, scolded, soothed, muttered merde at malfunctioning systems… but she didn’t shout like that, not at Yuki, not with that knife-thin fear laced through every syllable.

  Yuki flinched, hands stuttering for a second before she forced another mirror into existence. Her chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with health values.

  Phèdre dragged in a breath, shoulders shaking, then forced her voice down to something almost controlled. “I will not lose him,” she said, each word trembling with restraint. “I can do this. Seule.”

  Her hands never stopped glowing.

  Yuki swallowed. Alone. That word lodged somewhere between her ribs and stayed there. She risked a glance toward the edge of the clearing, toward the Fox.

  It stood where it had been, golden light wrapped tight around itself. Its eyes watched Phèdre with a sorrow that made Yuki’s skin crawl.

  “Help her!” Yuki shouted. “Give her something like you gave Tramar! She’s—she’s spiralling—”

  The Fox held her gaze.

  Sad.

  Silent.

  No system notification. No golden threads of dawn wrapping Phèdre’s hands. No new skill popup.

  Nothing.

  “Phèdre hadn’t learned whatever the labyrinth wants her to learn.”

  Yuki’s heart slammed against her ribs.

  This wasn’t about raw output, or who could shove the most mana into a problem until it stopped screaming.

  Behind her, Phèdre’s mana dipped into the danger zone, the bar so low it made Yuki’s brain flash red warning triangles. Tramar’s health bounced again, hit a sliver above the critical line, then wobbled uncertainly as the [Light Corruption] icon kept ticking away like a metronome counting down to something she really, really didn’t want to see.

  Yuki turned back to the Grandmaster, breath coming too fast, fingers shaking. He watched them all with the same distant curiosity. “Interesting,” he said softly. “Let us see how long you cling to the illusion of control.”

  It’s just me now. Really, actually me.

  She didn’t hesitate, not because she was brave, but because hesitation meant watching one of them go to respawn in slow motion, so she surged forward with every mirror, barrier, and light-construct she could summon, layering them in angles she barely understood, trying to buy time, space, oxygen, anything that would keep the Grandmaster’s attention off the two people behind her who were fighting battles she could not help them with.

  Her mana burned hot and fast; every spell felt like throwing pieces of herself into a void she couldn’t fill.

  It didn’t matter.

  The Grandmaster advanced as if strolling through a morning garden. Yuki lashed a whip of light at him; it slid off his shielding like water refusing to cling. She detonated a blinding flash at his eyes; he blinked it away as though brushing dust from his sleeve. Illusions danced around him in desperate flares of motion; he ignored them utterly, stepping through them like someone walking through fog.

  “You work very hard,” he said, as he swept aside her entire formation with a single widening pulse of pale-gold magic. “But effort without understanding is merely noise.”

  The blast caught her dead-on.

  It wasn’t lethal, but it ripped the air from her lungs and lifted her body off the ground, flinging her backward so fast she barely had time to register the spin before she slammed into the moss and rolled, her sword skittering several feet out of reach. Her health bar plunged into red; her vision tunneled; the forest warped and spun.

  She crawled.

  Her body felt too small for the pain inside it, every breath a jagged scrape.

  She stretched her fingers toward the sword, too far, and tried again, dragging herself inch by inch through the dirt because stopping wasn’t an option, not when the Fox was watching in a silent stillness that felt like judgment and mourning combined.

  The Grandmaster exhaled a long, tired sigh. “This grows tedious.”

  He looked at them, Tramar slumped and barely conscious, Phèdre kneeling with trembling hands, Yuki bleeding and crawling, and something in his expression shifted from curiosity to conclusion.

  Then he turned toward the Fox.

  Yuki’s heart stuttered.

  No. No, no, no, he couldn’t—

  “Let us end this properly,” the Grandmaster said, raising his hand.

  The light forming in his palm wasn’t a spear this time; it was something heavier, something with the unmistakable finality of ending, the spell that wasn’t meant to teach or warn, but erase.

  The Fox stood at the edge of the clearing like a flickering sun about to be snuffed.

  Yuki tried to stand, but her legs buckled. She should have bought more potions from Scamantha. “Stop—” she rasped, even as she knew her voice wasn’t loud enough, wasn’t anything enough.

  Phèdre saw the incoming attack at the same moment.

  Her entire body went still.

  In a single instant, she assessed Tramar, assessed the Fox, assessed Yuki, and made a decision with a speed and certainty that felt almost violent.

  “PHèDRE, NO—!” Yuki screamed.

  She was already running, but not toward the Grandmaster.

  Toward the Fox.

  She reached it just as the Grandmaster unleashed the spell, her body sliding between the fox and the killing blow with the an elegance of someone who had spent her whole life putting her own safety second, sometimes last.

  The light struck her dead center.

  There was no scream.

  Only a soft, startled exhale as the impact lifted her slightly off her feet, the world pausing around her like even the forest wasn’t sure what had just happened. Her body hit the ground with an quiet finality.

  “Finish the quest for me,” she whispered, smiling as if she actually believed Yuki could.

  Her health bar didn’t drop in chunks. It didn’t wobble. It didn’t resist. It emptied in a single, brutal flicker.

  [HP: 0 / 320]

  Her body shattered into light, and her equipment rained onto the grass in a soft metallic scatter.

  For a moment, there was no sound at all.

  Then Tramar woke.

  He saw the empty space where she had been, he saw her staff among her clothes, he saw the Grandmaster turning back toward him with the cold efficiency of someone crossing names off a list.

  “You…” Tramar whispered. “You… BASTARD! STUPID ILLUSION! STUPID QUEST!” He rose and dawn-fire exploded from his hands. “Stupid fox reminding me the school…” The flames surged in a golden-white torrent, enough that Yuki shielded her eyes instinctively.

  The blast hit the Grandmaster’s shielding so hard the air cracked and for the first time, the Grandmaster staggered.

  [White Grandmaster — HP: 2041 / 2100]

  It wasn’t much damage, but it was damage.

  Tramar roared, firing again, pushing forward with a broken sort of determination, and for a heartbeat Yuki dared to hope, maybe grief was enough, maybe dawn-fire was enough, maybe—

  The Grandmaster’s expression sharpened.

  “Enough.”

  Light condensed in his hand, shaping into a blade so clean it looked like a single stroke of sunrise carved out of reality.

  Tramar tried to dodge.

  He wasn’t fast enough.

  The blade went through his chest as if it were nothing… no resistance, no sound except his breath catching once, before his body dissolved into falling equipment and fading light.

  [HP: 0 / 324]

  Yuki froze.

  The clearing felt impossibly large and impossibly silent, and she was suddenly, crushingly aware of the fact that she was the only one left standing… or rather kneeling, barely upright, trembling and bleeding and so very small in front of a figure who had wiped out two of her friends like they were warm-up exercises.

  “Child,” the Grandmaster said as he approached her. “This is over.”

  She stood anyway, grabbed the sword and hobbled toward him.

  She swung at him and he blocked it with one hand, not even changing expression. She swung again, and again, and each strike grew weaker until her fingers couldn’t hold the hilt and the sword fell from her grip.

  Her knees hit the dirt.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, voice shaking as the Grandmaster lifted his hand for the final blow. “This would be my trial. My greatest fear! Being left alone. It still came despite Phèdre trying to protect me from it. I can’t do this alone. I—”

  “You were never meant to be.”

  The voice wasn’t his. The Fox stepped forward, glowing brighter than it ever had, its light washing over her in warm waves. “And yet you fought. Never meant to fight alone. Never meant to carry everything.”

  Its body shimmered, unraveling into golden ribbons of dawnlight that reached for her like threads searching for a place to bind.

  “But you can carry this.”

  Yuki’s interface flared open.

  [Attention! The Sun Fox offers you its Bloodline.]

  [Warning: Accepting will permanently alter you.]

  [Accept: Yes / No]

  Her breath caught.

  She looked at the fox.

  Then at the Grandmaster.

  Then slammed YES.