(Back in the Colosseum)

  The dust settled over the crater.

  Starlia and I lay completely motionless, our bodies buried under the rubble and heavy frost.

  The dead-eyed boy looked down at the wreckage. Slowly, a small, chilling smile crept onto his face.

  "It's not over yet, dear vassal," the boy said, his impossibly heavy voice cutting through the silence of the ruined arena. "Isn't it interesting that this lowly demon's a true demon."

  The ice-blue girl frowned, her arrogant sneer faltering into genuine confusion. "What do you mean, my lord?"

  The boy didn't answer. He just smiled again, his dull brown eyes locked onto the spot where I was buried.

  Deep beneath the ice and dirt, my biological systems were failing. My heart rate was dropping. My core was freezing.

  But my subconscious—that deep, primal, 800-year-old genetic blueprint—refused to accept bankruptcy. Believe in your own body, Jase had said.

  System reboot. Safety limiters disengaged.

  Suddenly, the earth beneath the Colosseum began to shake.

  A faint, vibrating hum filled the air, escalating into a deafening roar. A piercing blue aura erupted from the rubble. The girl gasped, stumbling backward in shock.

  Gravity ceased to exist for me. My body rose from the debris, floating effortlessly into the mid-air.

  I was completely enveloped in a violent, suffocating blue aura. My eyes snapped open, emitting a blinding blue light, thick smoke trailing from my irises. The sheer, absolute density of my mana output rejected my clothes entirely; my Azure Frost jacket and tunic burst into blue flames, burning away to reveal my bare upper half.

  And spreading across my skin, glowing with that same terrifying blue light, were intricate, jagged lines—the True Demon marks.

  "I can feel it," I whispered, my voice echoing with a strange, overlapping resonance. It wasn't just magic. It was cellular perfection. I raised my palm, pointing it directly at the terrified girl.

  "Transformation..."

  The air pressure plummeted.

  "...Blue Origin."

  The girl barely had time to register her own shock before I fired. I condensed my aura into a massive, dragon-like projectile of pure kinetic plasma and launched it. It crashed into her with the force of a meteor, shattering her ice barriers instantly and damaging her heavily.

  But I wasn't finished. Corporate restructuring is a hands-on process.

  Before her brain could even process the impact from the front, I bypassed spatial friction entirely, appearing directly behind her.

  I was in an absolute, unfiltered rage. I drove my fist into her spine, sending her flying upward. Then, I raised both of my hands toward the sky. I siphoned the ambient mana in the arena, compressing it into a massive, highly unstable energy ball, and threw it right at her mid-air trajectory.

  It hit her dead-on.

  I didn't let her fall. I closed the distance and unleashed a relentless, brutal barrage of physical punches, hitting her continuously. Every strike was backed by draconic gravity and blue flame.

  "Time to close the account," I snarled.

  I stopped my barrage, stepping back in the air, and brought my palms together. I forced a massive amount of the Blue Origin energy between my hands, condensing it into a hyper-dense singularity.

  "Aura..." I whispered, launching the glowing sphere straight at her. "...Sphere!"

  KRA-BOOOOOOM.

  The explosion was catastrophic. The blast completely swallowed the girl. She plummeted from the sky like a broken doll, hitting the arena floor severely injured and entirely out of the fight.

  I turned slowly in the air. The blue smoke still trailed from my eyes as I locked my gaze onto the dead-eyed boy.

  You're next. I prepared to launch myself, ready to deliver the exact same hostile takeover to his face.

  But before I could even move a muscle, the boy simply raised his hand. He wasn't panting. He wasn't scared.

  "Alright, enough entertainment," the boy said, his voice maddeningly calm. "It was amazing."

  (Wait, what?) My glowing eyes narrowed. (Entertainment? I just broke the sound barrier with your teammate's face!)

  "Now I shall go," the boy continued casually. "I have many important things to do." He looked right at me, offering that same, chilling smile. "I surrender."

  He snapped his fingers. Space warped around him and the unconscious girl, and in a blink, they completely vanished from the arena.

  I hovered there in the air, absolutely dumbstruck.

  "I surrender?" I muttered out loud, thoroughly confused. "You can't just... opt out of a boss fight! This isn't a board meeting! Get back here!"

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  But they were gone.

  And without a target to focus my rage on, the adrenaline completely flatlined.

  Error. Core depleted. Initiating emergency shutdown.

  The blue flames extinguished instantly. The True Demon marks faded from my skin. My eyes rolled back into my head as the sheer, agonizing toll of the transformation hit my nervous system all at once.

  Gravity remembered I existed.

  I started falling from the sky like a rock.

  Through my fading consciousness, I heard the frantic, booming shout of a man. I managed to crack an eye open just a fraction, seeing Akira Crimson sprinting across the ruined arena floor, desperately rushing toward me to catch my falling body.

  Akira Crimson had sprinted across the ruined arena and caught me right before I became a permanent fixture of the Colosseum floor. My Blue Origin state completely deactivated, my core shutting down to prevent total biological failure. And miraculously, as the blue flames died out, my clothes—my Azure Frost jacket and tunic—were somehow back to normal.

  (Don't ask me to explain the physics of magically auto-repairing fabric. Let's just assume the boutique owner wove some highly efficient restoration runes into the lining and move on. I was too exhausted to question a free wardrobe replacement.)

  Nearby, Serelya rushed in, lifting the unconscious Starlia into her arms. Moving with synchronized military efficiency, both my father and my mother carried us out of the crater and straight into the Academy's medical area.

  They laid Starlia and me down to rest on the crisp white cots. I was hovering somewhere between consciousness and a severe mana-induced coma, but my auditory processing was still functional.

  I heard Akira and Serelya start talking.

  "So..." Akira started, his voice rumbling awkwardly in the quiet ward. "How are you?"

  (Really, Dad? Your son just went nuclear, your supposedly long-lost wife is standing in front of you holding a comatose Princess, and you open the board meeting with 'How are you?' Corporate communication skills: absolutely zero.)

  Serelya, clearly possessing zero patience for small talk, instantly cut to the point.

  "Why was he alone in the forest?" she demanded, her voice tight with rising, unfiltered anger. "And at the mere age of six?"

  Akira sighed, the sound heavy with years of regret. He didn't try to dodge the question. He sat there and told her the whole story—the lack of a core, the family pressure, the banishment.

  "That old geezer," Serelya hissed in a hushed voice, dripping with a terrifying, deep-seated grudge.

  (I mentally nodded from my cot. Truly, wrinkled raisin of a grandfather, I fully support the hostility.)

  Taking a breath to calm herself, Serelya suddenly shifted the topic. She asked about the boy—the brown-haired, dead-eyed anomaly from the arena.

  Akira's tone grew gravely serious. "According to the Death Incarnate and me," he stated, "he is a really small fragment of the Demon King, Leonis Death."

  Serelya's expression instantly changed. The anger vanished, replaced by genuine, palpable worry.

  "Will he be okay?" she asked, her voice tight. She wasn't talking about the Demon King; she was talking about me. She was asking if her son was going to survive being in the crosshairs of a literal apocalypse.

  Akira nodded firmly. "Jase will protect him."

  Hearing the absolute certainty in his voice regarding the 800-year-old Saint, Serelya let out a long breath. She was visibly relieved.

  Later That Night

  Night had officially covered the skies.

  I woke up, my eyes blinking open to the dim lighting. My brain booted up, running a quick situational analysis of my surroundings, and I quickly figured out I was still in the medical ward. My physical injuries had knit themselves back together, though my mana reserves were still critically low.

  I closed my eyes, ready to demand at least eight solid hours of REM sleep from the universe.

  Ragna.

  I froze. After a moment, I heard it again—a voice coming from outside, clearly calling my name.

  (Great. Just fantastic. I survive a hostile takeover by a True Phoenix and a Demon King fragment, and now the universe wants me to go on a midnight stroll. My biological battery is at two percent. Can the plot please wait until morning?)

  Apparently not.

  I pushed the blankets off and quietly left the ward. As I slipped into the hallway, I saw Akira and Serelya slumped in chairs nearby, completely fast asleep. I didn't wake them. Whatever was calling me, my instincts said this was a solo meeting.

  I could still hear the voice, pulling at my consciousness. I followed it, walking through the quiet, moonlit paths of the Academy until I reached the exact spot where the voice originated.

  The Colosseum. The arena where I had given my very first test.

  I stepped out onto the empty sands. The massive stadium was eerily silent without the thousands of screaming teenagers. And there, standing in the dead center of the stage, was the Shivalinga.

  The ancient Sanskrit scriptures carved into the stone were glowing, radiating a brilliant, holy gold light into the dark night.

  I walked close to it. Out of deeply ingrained respect from my past life, I bowed. I straightened up and looked around the empty stands, scanning for whoever had summoned me, but I found absolutely no one.

  Then, the voice echoed in my head again. It told me to touch the Shivalinga.

  I didn't hesitate. I reached out and placed my palm flat against the cool, glowing stone.

  Instantly, a blindingly bright light erupted from the monument, completely swallowing the area and completely covering me—

  Ragna: Hey, Writer. Should I tell them the next line?

  Writer: Why not? Go on.

  Ragna: Mhmn... (Clears throat). I said, "Ooh, I'm blinded by the light, and I can't see it until I reach a beach."

  (Stop staring at me. Yes, I know I butchered the lyrics to a 21st-century pop song while touching a holy artifact in a magical Colosseum. But honestly? Getting flash-banged by divine golden light at 2 AM really limits your vocabulary.)

  "I'm really sorry, sir, The Weeknd. On the behalf of my misbehaved character, I would like to present my deepest apologies."

  I ignored the Writer's pathetic groveling to the pop-music deities and took a dramatic, sweeping bow toward an invisible audience.

  "Thank you, thank you," I said, mentally tipping an imaginary hat.

  The Writer let out a heavy, static sigh in my mind, followed by the sound of slow, sarcastic applause. "Enough," the voice muttered. "Now can we please get back to the plot?"

  (Fine. Killjoy.)

  The blinding, holy golden light of the Shivalinga finally began to recede. I braced my core, expecting to be teleported to a celestial void, a fiery battlefield of ash, or maybe some ancient, cosmic boardroom where deities hand out mythical quests.

  Instead, I felt the unmistakable crunch of coarse grains beneath my boots.

  I opened my eyes and found myself standing right in the middle of a sun-drenched beach.

  Wait. What?

  I blinked, my glowing blue eyes struggling to adjust to the glaring, tropical sunlight. It wasn't a dark illusion or a grim trial. There were actual people in front of me, splashing in the crystal-clear ocean waves, running around, and genuinely having a fun time. Down the shoreline, a massive, obscenely expensive-looking resort loomed over the white sand.

  Error 404: Spiritual Realm Not Found. Did the holy relic of the Destroyer just send me on an all-inclusive tropical vacation package?

  My corporate instincts immediately kicked in. You never get a free vacation without a hidden agenda or a highly demanding client. I narrowed my eyes and scanned the shoreline for the VIP.

  It didn't take long to spot him.

  Laying back on a woven mat right on the sand was a man who looked completely, utterly unbothered by the fact that the universe was currently facing a demon apocalypse. He was dressed in a loud, vibrant Hawaiian shirt and a pair of casual shorts.

  His face was completely hidden by a wide-brimmed sun hat and a pair of dark sunglasses. And to complete the absolute picture of lethargy, he was casually sipping from a glass of ice-cold lemonade.

  I stood there in my heavily enchanted Azure Frost jacket, vibrating with leftover magical tension, staring at a guy who looked like he was about to complain to the resort staff about the lack of tiny umbrellas in his drink.