The clock was ticking.

Tightly gripping the girl by her shoulders, Jin looked her in the eyes and made sure trust was a gamble worth taking. He would do anything to save his brother. Jin wasn't good at being a hero, quite the opposite. Most of the time the right thing to do didn't seem at all natural to his train of thought. But he knew that a better course of action wouldn't sprinkle in the little time they had.

He shook his head, shrugging the fear of failure away as best as he could. Something he was certain about however, was that he could not count on Eliza's quiver or Viktoria's wits. Them or the High Elders, who surely would've been able to defuse the situation were nowhere to be seen.

“So how do I free the crowd from the illusion?”

The question made the woman turn around with a raised voice.

“You have to break the gemstone that is holding the elemental energy that is anchored in—It has to be inscribed around the arena somewhere. Just look around.”

Jin desperately searched the surroundings of the arena, the area being a semicircular room virtually identical to the location the Sages had gathered the day before in the top floor. Aside from the items scattered near the center of the arena, a bookcase caught Jin's eye. The type of furniture that often housed spell books, martial art guides and poems. Truly, in all they were dozens of books piled up and not even with an entire year to spare he'd be able to go through the contents of each. Quickly tapping each bookcase in a lurching motion, nervously unfolding pages until he tapped one twice. Its strangeness caught his attention instantly.

The weight contrast was the first giveaway.

As soon as he opened it, his fingers felt a crystallized surface that made his fingers jump in surprise, as if he'd received a shock due to its unique texture. In fright, an object jumped from the middle of the pages. On the floor a gem with blank engravings fell at his feet.

Jin quickly slashed vertically at the gemstone. Black light mixed with purple exploded in all directions along with the crystal fragments, as if the elemental energy itself had suddenly been freed to wander back to where it came from.

Turning his gaze toward the arena, he noticed that Vendrick was on his feet again, carrying himself with a different posture, but noble nonetheless. Jin couldn’t see anything around his brother but a faint, very soft trace of energy in his stance. So soft it was like it was pulsing like ripples coming out, like smoke around blazing flames. And Vendrick was the bonfire, projecting his nucleus to such an extent it was visible even for those with no deep knowledge of the elemental arts.

In a sudden movement, the attacks launched by Vendrick now took on an entirely different character—the hue had also changed. His eyes were shrouded in sparks, the only change Jin could claim with certainty, considering his virtually non-existent connection and experience to elemental affinities and how they worked.

『"Fulgur — Shockwave"』

Unarmed, Vendrick punched the wind, and in a blink the wave of lightning swept through the area. As if his fists had released thunder from the clouds above. The blow landed on both Disciples, throwing them and making their bodies tremble as they went until Vendrick's fist clenched in fury. At almost the same moment, Verpast and Wollman fell incapacitated to the ground.

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

Jin looked around in awe. Staggering back a step, he eagerly awaited the audience's reaction toward the outcome on the field. Their eyes, however, to Jin were almost impossible to read, as if they'd been staring into an abyss of emptiness for several seconds. After a moment of silence, hands began to move, and that was when palms began to fill the stage; shouts of celebration and support for Vendrick echoed in the arena.

Shaking his head, Jin tried to catch sight of that brown figure again. That color was difficult to identify due to the shade being used by great numbers of Disciples attending the commotion, however the suspect's abnormal height highlighted him to Jin's fortune like a firefly in the Hollow Forest.

"There!"

“Excuse me, excuse me, sorry… My bad! Just let me go through, sorry!”

Rubbing through the crowd with the target locked in his eyes, he chased the silhouette without even blinking. His eyes were completely focused on the man in brown as he passed several confused Disciples on the way.

Slightly climbing the stairs he had used to enter the room a moment ago, he had difficulty moving in such a tight space. Trying to move as fast as he could, when he got close to the balcony from which he had just entered the room he noticed that the brown figure had stepped through the door on the right.

Jin would have been much faster and quicker in chasing the silhouette if he could make use of elemental energy like the Disciples, but officially he wasn't even an Elemental Warrior to begin with. He needed to proceed with extra caution between the crowd as to not offend the people he passed. Each of those unaware individuals were cloaked to carry the Disciple Insignia in their backs because they earned it.

If he had to guess, any of them could best him with his eyes closed. However, there was no doubt in the back of his mind that this attitude would have dire consequences no matter how he went about it. Most importantly, it became clear to him that such excessive caution cost him essential time to pursue the figure. With that absurd height, Jin needed to compensate by speeding up his pace but as soon as he noticed, he had lost sight of the suspect. And when his eyes failed him, he cried out appealing to anyone in range.

“The door, someone stop that man!”

Following the door shortly after, he ran down the hall trying to open as many doors as possible. The hall was huge, but this time he didn't have many individuals to disturb the pace at which he moved.

A girl sitting on the floor between two of the closed doors was reading a book, her moment of respite suddenly interrupted by the rush of a rude stranger. A newcomer, nonetheless. Between long breaths with unrestrained rhythm, he got up on his own knees and tried to get information on through the chaos.

"Very tall lad, brown cloak?"

Jin nodded.

"That way."

And it was then that he spotted, among dozens of doors in that direction, one stood out. Near the end of the corridor he was in, one of the doors laid open. A strong current of icy wind hit his face, which was already dripping with sweat. A gaping window with a figure looking back. Less than a meter away, a mere glimpse of the figure was all Jin could see before he jumped down from the second floor and continued running as if the height he leaped from wasn't even a concern. So fast that by the time Jin had reached the window, he could barely tell which direction the bastard had made a run for.

And that's when he saw it, and the surprise couldn't have been more sudden. The shock as if a stab had pierced his lungs, such moments of surprise so harsh they shoved his thoughts from automatically breathing. Marks on the windowsill. Running his finger around them, Jin noticed that the nails had an animal-like appearance, so that a simple touch marked it and scratched the wall like claws.

Looking down, just under the window were fragments of what appeared to be a piece of fingernail. Cautiously picking her up off the ground with his hands so as not to cut himself, he determined.

"Not so much of a good escape now huh?"

Whatever Jin was holding on his hands, it was five times the size of a regular nail. It was sharp and curvy, the end of it seemed likely to graze anything that touched with the minimal amount of effort.

Whoever this belonged to certainly was no human.