I still can't believe it, I actually killed a high orc.
When we first stepped foot into the dungeon, I was a nervous wreck. My hands trembled every time I cast a spell, and my heart wouldn't stop hammering in my chest. I forced myself to hide it, bury the fear so no one would see. But once the first spell landed, once I saw blood spill and heard the screams it changed.
At first, it was survival. Then, slowly, it became rhythmical. Cast, kill, move. The goblins fell one after another, their bodies crumbling, and with each death, something inside me loosened. I wasn't afraid anymore. I was exhilarated.
The adrenaline surged through me, hotter than fire, sharper than lightning. Every time a goblin's body hit the ground, every time their blood splattered warm against my skin, Cecilia's words echoed in my mind: 'Your first kill is something you'll never forget.'
And she was right.
And then the high orc appeared, and I didn't hesitate. My fear was gone, replaced by something fierce, something intoxicating. Its roar shook the cavern, but all I felt was anticipation. My spells tore it apart, and as the orc's body collapsed in a rain of gore, I stood there drenched in its blood as it painted my skin, soaking into my clothes. When it finally collapsed with a thunderous crash, silence fell around me.
I stood there, gasping for breath, my body trembling not from fear, but from the rush, The ecstasy of it. It was terrifying and yet I loved it.
I finally understood what Cecilia meant.
Killing wasn't just survival. It was a joy.
I can't wait to tell Cecilia about this. Meanwhile, Cecilia at the academy:
Now that everyone had gone, I stretched my arms and muttered, "Guess it's time for me to get moving too. Too many experiments waiting, and far too little time."
I glanced around the quiet academy halls, weighing the options. "But where?" I murmured. "If I start here, half the academy might be in ruins by nightfall and Damian would definitely throw a fit."
A chuckle brushed against my thoughts. "Then why not head to the Forest of Abyss?" Nox suggested, "Plenty of space, no prying eyes, and no property to worry about. You can let loose without restraint."
I paused, genuinely considering it. "...That's actually a good idea." My lips tugged into a faint smile. "I must say, I'm impressed. Usually, you're the first one to tell me to ignore the consequences and just blow everything up."
"True," Nox admitted, his tone quieter than usual. "But things are going to be different now. It'll be better for us to go there from now on."
Something about his voice made me tilt my head. A subtle weight. A shadow hiding behind his words.
"Why the sudden change?" I asked softly.
A beat of silence. And nothing else.
I could have pressed further, but I didn't.
"Alright," I said, "The Forest of Abyss it is."
This forest has always calmed me. A place where silence ran deeper than any prayer, where even the air seemed to bow to those who wielded power. It was the perfect ground for testing the forbidden.
I was itching to go ever since I stumbled upon this spell. My mana responded instinctively, eager, hungry. I centered it at a single point within me, the world around sharpening into a crystalline stillness.
My voice rang out, cold and unwavering.
"Notum in ignotum convertere."
The trees groaned, bending away as if they sensed the weight of the command. Shadows stretched unnaturally long.
"Omnia in oblivionem convertere."
The air curdled, mana pooling so thick it felt suffocating. The forest seemed to recoil.
Then, with eyes devoid of warmth, I whispered the final word like a sentence passed down:
"BEELZEBUB."
Everything stilled. Even time seemed to pause. Then—obliteration.
The mountain before me did not crumble, did not fall. It simply ceased to exist. A void opened in its place, No rubble. No smoke. Just nothingness.
So this was the true depth of the grimoire. Power vast enough to swallow an academy, a city, entire kingdoms without leaving so much as a trace.
I lowered my hand, steady, expression unreadable. My breath never faltered. My heart never raced. Cold, merciless calm lingered in my eyes.
This was not power. This was dominion. Utter dominion.
And it was mine to command.
"All mine."
The words slipped out first as a whisper, then broke into laughter sharp, ragged, unhinged. I laughed like a maniac drunk on blood, head tilted back, the sound cutting through the dead silence of the forest like broken glass.
The void where the mountain had been still hung there, trembling on the edges of reality. Watching it, I felt my lips curl wider, felt the tremor of delight race down my spine. The taste of power was intoxicating, bitter and sweet all at once, like wine poured straight into an open wound.
The forest recoiled from me. The shadows stretched back, shivering as though they knew something worse than death had just stepped into their world.
My grin didn't fade. It grew sharper, colder.
It wasn't the grimoire that held dominion nor the spell. It was me. The realization left a thrill in my veins, so strong it bordered on madness.
I let the laughter spill again, darker this time, low and jagged, echoing through the abyss until it almost sounded like something inhuman was laughing with me.
"All mine. Every last drop of it. Power, ruin, mine to command, mine to shape, mine to break."
And in that moment, I knew: there was no going back.
"Alright, you little maniac, time to come back." Nox's hands clamped down on my shoulders, shaking me until the last shreds of that laughter bled out of me. "After all these years, you still let your dark side slip."
He pointed behind him. "Look, even Lux is terrified."
I blinked, my gaze softening as I spotted the little spirit half-hidden, trembling in the crook of a tree root. My chest squeezed with guilt.
"I'm sorry, Lux… I completely forgot about you," I murmured, crouching down to scoop him up. His tiny body shivered against my palm, and he refused to meet my eyes.
"I thought Master was scary," he mumbled, voice muffled and small. "But you're even scarier than him."
A crooked smile tugged at my lips despite myself. "Awww… am I really?" My voice was teasing, but there was something sharper beneath it like even I wasn't sure if I was joking.
Lux only buried his face in my sleeve.
"Alright," I said," Should we move on to the next spell?"
Nox tilted his head, glancing back where a mountain used to be. "If you push again, you might destroy more than you can get away with. Covering up a crater or two is easy. But half a forest? Even you'd struggle with that."
"True," I admitted.
"Then…" I straightened, the grin sliding back onto my face, sharper now. "How about a spar instead? It's been too long. I'm afraid I'll start to rust."
Nox's eyes glinted, his shadow stretching taller, heavier, the promise of violence simmering around him like heat off black iron. "Now that I've got a proper body," he said, voice low and amused, "don't expect me to go easy."
I laughed, steady this time, excitement curling in my veins. "When have you ever gone easy on me?"
"Wait," I said, "If we go all out here, there won't be anything left of this forest."
"You're right." Then, with a snap of his fingers, the world fractured.
The trees around us splintered like glass, the ground crumbled beneath our feet, and the air itself folded inward. For a heartbeat, everything froze in a static hush then reality peeled away.
In the next blink, we were standing elsewhere.
A vast wasteland stretched beneath an endless, colourless sky. The land was cracked, lifeless, barren like the bones of a world long since devoured. Once, this place had been alive; I remembered the canopy of emerald leaves, the rivers that cut through glades where sunlight pooled like liquid gold. But our training had erased all of it. Years of unleashed spells and unrestrained battles had bled the land dry, until nothing remained but dust and silence.
"This place…"
The air here was thick with the scars of our magic, every breeze carrying echoes of past destruction. It was heavy. Yet it was Familiar.
I smiled faintly, cold as steel. "Perfect.
The forest was gone. The mountains are gone. The land itself was nothing but an endless wasteland of cracked stone and drifting ash.
But it wasn't enough.
Not for me.
Not for him.
Not for us.
Our next clash didn't just shake the world. It broke.
The instant my spell and Nox's shadows collided again, everything froze.
Not silence. Not stillness. Absolute absence.
The wind died. The earth stopped. Even time itself bent and shattered around us, fragments of moments floating like broken glass suspended in the void.
We weren't in the forest anymore. We weren't even in the world.
The battlefield twisted into something else a fractured dimension, a shattered mirror of reality. The sky above had cracked like porcelain, chunks of starless void drifting in slow motion. Below, the ground fell away into an endless abyss of screaming nothingness.
And in that ruined eternity
We laughed.
Mad. Joyous. Alive.
I surged forward, every step tearing rifts in the void beneath my feet. Mana coiled around me like a storm of living annihilation, my body blazing with an aura so dense it warped the fragments of frozen time that brushed against me.
"BLAZE—ANNIHILATION MODE."
The spell didn't just erupt. It rewrote the air itself. Reality peeled away like wet parchment, leaving behind a storm of devouring oblivion, a tide of black fire that sought to erase even the concept of existence.
Nox answered in kind. His shadows expanded until they weren't shadows anymore but a domain. "You really think your blaze can outshine my inferno."
"INFERNO." His voice rang like the tolling of a funeral bell. "Let's see if your flame can erase eternity itself!"
The clash came.
The void howled.
Dimensions folded, collapsed, and burst apart like bubbles. Each strike, each parry, each kick and claw and spell didn't just scar the world they shattered it into new pieces. We weren't fighting in one reality anymore but in a cascade of collapsing planes, a kaleidoscope of infinite worlds breaking and falling apart as our duel consumed them.
Past, present, and future blurred.
Time rewound, skipped, fractured.
One moment, I was driving my fist into Nox's chest, the next, he was behind me, but both were happening simultaneously, as if cause and effect had ceased to exist.
And still we laughed.
Because this was freedom.
This was home.
We weren't bound by rules. We weren't bound by the fragile cage of the mortal plane. Out here, in this dimensionless storm of ruin, there were only the two of us monsters testing the edges of infinity with grins carved into our faces.
"Cecilia!" Nox roared, voice shaking the broken skies.
"Nox!" I screamed back, my eyes blazing, my grin sharp and cold.
Our fists met one last time.
And the multiverse itself cracked
Collapsing into pure, blinding nothing.
And then—
Silence.
The collapse swallowed itself. The void folded in. The fractured skies stitched back together with a soundless tear, leaving only the endless hush of a world that shouldn't exist.
The battlefield was gone. The abyss was gone. Even the fragments of broken dimensions had burned themselves out.
Only we remained.
I stood there, chest heaving, steam curling off my skin as mana bled from every pore. My coat was shredded, my hands torn raw, but my grin remained carved in place. My body screamed, yet my heart felt light.
Across from me, Nox leaned against a jagged slab of floating stone, the last remnant of the shattered realm, his own body dripping with shadow, strands of it still writhing before dissipating into the air. His eyes met mine, glowing faintly, sharp as always.
And then he laughed.
A low chuckle at first. Then deeper. Wilder. Until the sound echoed through the nothingness like the voice of a god mocking creation.
I couldn't help it. I laughed too. Ragged, breathless.
We laughed together, two devils alone in the void, as if we had just finished sparring in a courtyard and not tearing through layers of existence.
Finally, the laughter ebbed into silence again.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. Just the faint hum of mana lingering in the empty air.
Lux floated back into view, eyes wide and trembling, clinging to the edges of the reformed world. He looked at us as though we weren't human anymore because maybe we weren't.
"Are you two… insane?" his voice quivered. "You nearly destroyed a dimension."
We just shrugged. "It wasn't our first time."
I chuckled darkly, wiping the blood from the corner of my mouth. "And it won't be the last."
We sat there, side by side, gazes cast into the returning silence of the forest as the fractured world healed itself. To anyone else, it would have been an apocalypse. To us—
Just another spar.
And in that quiet, a truth burned in my chest, warm and steady.
Nox wasn't just my shadow.
He wasn't just my partner.
He was my anchor. My family. The one I could tear down eternity with and still laugh at the end.
We went back after catching our breath. As much as I wanted to stay in that wasteland and tear reality apart a little longer, I couldn't. No matter how fun it was, reality was waiting. Vivian and the rest of the class would be returning soon, and I'd already been gone for an entire day.
A thought crept in as I walked the quiet halls of the academy. Vivian… she probably struggled. She must have been terrified, casting spells with shaking hands. I imagined her crying. The image stirred something uneasy in me.
How exactly does one… comfort someone? What should I do if she starts crying? Pat her head? Tell her she was strong? Would that even work?
I braced myself for the worst only for my worries to shatter in an instant.
"Cecilia! I'm back!" Vivian's voice rang out, bright and unshaken. She rushed toward me, smiling as if the dungeon had been a summer picnic. Before I could react, she wrapped her arms around me, pulling me into a warm, eager hug.
I stiffened out of habit, but didn't push her away. I'd allowed it once before, and now she did it at every chance she got. Strangely, though, I didn't dislike it. No, if anything, I found myself looking forward to it.
I glanced down at her, deadpan. "I thought you'd come back in tears. Yet here you are, overflowing with happiness." My lips quirked into the faintest smile. "Did you really enjoy it that much?"
Her eyes sparkled, and she squeezed me tighter. "I have so much to tell you but let me shower first. I'm covered in goblin guts."
She laughed as if it were nothing.
I stood there, silent, her warmth lingering on my skin. Somewhere deep inside, a strange, unfamiliar relief stirred.
Vivian hurried off to wash up, humming softly to herself. When she was gone, the classroom seemed to exhale all at once, a tense, collective breath that had been held since they stepped out of the dungeon.
Their faces were pale, some green with nausea, others hollow-eyed with exhaustion. But the worst of it wasn't from the dungeon, it was from her.
Whispers slithered through the air.
"She smiled when it happened…" one girl whispered, her voice trembling.
A boy's hands shook as he mimed the motion, his eyes wide. "That goblin, she sliced it apart with fire, but she didn't burn it clean. She… she left it screaming while its skin peeled off."
"She laughed when the high orc's head exploded!" another hissed, clutching his stomach as if the memory made him sick. "I swear she was covered in blood, and she looked… happy."
"Not happy." The first girl shivered. "Euphoric."
Their voices dropped lower still, but I caught every syllable.
"She's not like us. She's… something else. Something dangerous."
And then the door creaked.
Vivian stepped back into the room, hair still damp, face flushed from her bath. She smiled so brightly it was almost blinding. The whispers died instantly, cut off like blades to throats. Everyone looked away, refusing to meet her eyes.
She plopped down beside me, her grin wide and untainted. "Cecilia, you won't believe it! At first, I was terrified; I thought my knees would give out. But once I struck the first one down… it was exhilarating! Every spell flowed perfectly, and when I killed that high orc…" She pressed a hand to her chest, shivering with excitement. "…I felt so alive."
Her words dripped with the same thrill I once confessed to Nox long ago.
Around us, the others looked sick, their gazes darting anywhere but at her. One boy muttered under his breath, "Alive? That wasn't alive… that was a demon at play."
But Vivian didn't hear them. She only leaned closer to me, eyes sparkling. "It's all thanks to you."
I studied her face, that innocent joy. And behind it, the faintest shadow of something else.
My hand reached out on its own, brushing a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She blinked, startled, then smiled even brighter.
The class sat in silence, suffocated by the memory of her carnage. She sat beside me, glowing like sunlight.
And I sat in between smiling faintly, between those two realities, silently watching as the balance shifted.
To be continued.