### Chapter 95: The Crimson Awakening
Lyra rose to her feet, the stone beneath her boots shattering under a sudden, staggering release of kinetic force. Her aura spread outward like a roaring wildfire, an unbelievable surge of raw, unrefined power detonating from her frame and whipping the air into violent, howling gushes of wind. The surrounding trees bent backward under the sheer atmospheric pressure, their leaves stripped instantly and scattered into the superheated gale.
Silas stood his ground, a wide, manic grin spreading across his face. For the first time since the bout began, the dull, emotionless mask he wore had entirely melted away. He stared at her with a look of pure, academic delight, watching the crimson light hum violently against her skin.
"The crimson apple doesn't fall far from the crimson tree," Silas murmured aloud, admiring the sheer density of her bloodlust and the terrifying spike in her power.
As one of the exceptionally few warriors to have ever encountered Alastair Rose and walked away alive, Silas recognized the exact texture of this magic. It was heavy, suffocating, and reeked of absolute violence.
" That menacing aura... it's just like her father," Silas noted inwardly, his pulse racing as the memories of the old war flickered behind his eyes.
Lyra's blood-red eyes, marked by the sharp black pupils floating in their centers, locked onto him. There was no hesitation, no tactical calculation, and no noble grace left in her posture—only the primal desire to tear down anything standing before her.
*FLASH!*
The ground where she stood exploded into fine powder as she executed a flash step. The distance between them vanished instantly. A sonic boom echoed through the garden as she materialized directly in Silas's personal space, her left fist—engulfed in that blinding, sinister red mana—driving straight toward his throat with lethal velocity.
Silas didn't panic. His instincts, honed by decades of life-and-death combat, took over immediately. He tilted his head back by a fraction of an inch, the superheated air of her fist grazing the bridge of his nose.
Lyra didn't reset her momentum; she unleashed a ferocious, relentless barrage of close-quarters strikes. She threw a heavy right hook, a rising knee, and a jagged backfist, each attack carrying enough concentrated force to pulverize through hard rocks. Yet, Silas swayed, weaved, and dodged smoothly, his footwork liquid and effortlessly precise. He slipped around her wild swings without a single inch of wasted movement, his eyes tracking every flicker of her dark aura.
Realizing her ground assault was being parried by his superior evasion, Lyra drove her foot into the earth and swept her arm upward, attempting to catch his jaw with a rising upper. Silas absorbed the kinetic shockwave on his forearm, using the upward momentum of her blast to leap high into the air, launching himself dozens of feet off the ground and into the air.
Lyra didn't let him escape.
With a guttural growl, a localized burst of crimson flame detonated beneath her boots, launching her into the sky after him like a guided missile. She closed the vertical distance in a heartbeat, intercepting him at the apex of his jump. Airborne and suspended in mid-flight, she renewed her relentless barrage, throwing a flurry of blazing punches and spinning kicks aimed at his vitals.
Even in mid-air, stripped of a solid foundation, Silas proved to be unnaturally flexible. He twisted his torso at impossible angles, deflecting her wrists with the back of his hands and ducking beneath her spinning heel kicks. To Lyra, it felt as though she were fighting a ghost; no matter how fast she struck or how wide her flames burned, her attacks met nothing but empty space.
Driven mad by her inability to touch him, the wild, out-of-control malice within her snapped.
Mid-air, Lyra forcibly checked her momentum, hovering for a fraction of a second as she thrust both palms straight forward toward Silas. The crimson veins around her eyes throbbed black.
"DIE!"
A staggering barrage of compressed, blood-red fireballs erupted from her palms in a continuous, deafening roar. Dozens of superheated plasma spheres rained down on Silas at point-blank range, turning the sky into a blinding furnace of crimson light.
Silas remained completely unfazed. As the torrent of fire roared toward him, he casually raised a single hand, his fingers spread wide. The air in front of his palm rippled, warping violently as a localized spatial vacuum expanded outward. The moment her fireballs made contact with the distortion, they didn't explode—they were instantly erased from existence, snuffed out like candles in a vacuum without leaving behind a single ember or trace of smoke.
Silas lowered his hand, his eyes scanning the empty air where the fire had been. "Is that all—?"
He didn't finish the thought.
Lyra hadn't stayed in front of him. Using the blinding glare of her own fireballs as a temporary blind spot, she had executed another mid-air flash step, reappearing directly behind his exposed back.
Silas's eyes widened slightly in genuine surprise. He had underestimated her speed
Lyra clasped both hands together above her head, her muscles bulging as she gathered every ounce of her dark, volatile mana into her fists. The crimson light flared into a towering, jagged blade of raw energy.
With a primal scream, she swung both hands down like an executioner's axe.
*BOOM!*
The hammer-fist struck Silas squarely between his shoulder blades. The sheer kinetic weight of the blow, combined with the explosive release of her malice, bypassed his passive spatial cushion. The impact created a deafening shockwave in the upper atmosphere, rippling through the clouds above the estate.
Silas was hurled downward like a falling meteor. He shot through the sky, crashing straight into the center of the garden with catastrophic force.
*CRASH!*
The earth groaned as the impact detonated a massive explosion of dirt, shattered stone, and uprooted trees. A towering plume of dust and dark smoke billowed into the air, completely obscuring the crater where the grand fountain once stood.
High above the wreckage, Lyra hovered in the sky, her chest heaving violently as she gasped for air. Her blood-red eyes glared down at the rising dust storm, her left fist still glowing with that sinister, unstable red light. The malice radiating from her body showed no signs of stopping, threatening to consume what little remained of her sanity.