Andrel’s world was a flow, it always had been.

  As a child, he had learned to read runes by copying scribbles on the ground with stolen charcoal. Not because anyone taught him—no one taught anything to a Zero—but because he needed to know. And because seeing the lines dance in the air was the only thing that made sense amidst hunger, filth, and abandonment. When he learned to utter a word and see a stone levitate, he cried for three days. Because, for the first time, something obeyed.

  But Ilian Meret was the opposite of all of that.

  There, before him, hovering like a serene specter between pages spinning like swords, the noble of the Glass Circle represented the perfection of the system in its purest form: structured magic, consolidated order, logic that asked for no permission—only obeyed formulas.

  Andrel was dying, his runes couldn’t hold.

  Each attempt at conjuration was undone before it even began. The words stumbled in his throat, the syllables burned like dry thorns.

  Ilian walked toward him, the grimoire floating with cruel elegance, its pages open to verses of disintegration.

  “You’ve gone too far with too little, Andrel,” he said, his voice low, almost compassionate. “But all makeshift things give way. All improvised bridges break.”

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  Andrel fell to his knees, coughing up blood.

  “And every structure... one day is buried,” he murmured.

  Ilian raised his hand. A rune of denial formed in the air, elegant and deadly.

  “You have no more words.”

  “Then…” Andrel smiled, spitting out a tooth, “I’ll use yours.”

  And in that instant, he tore the side of his own grimoire, revealing a hidden fragment—a page not made of ordinary paper, but of dracolite scale, an ancient, forbidden material immune to conventional rune reading.

  Ilian hesitated. It was the only mistake.

  Andrel pressed his bleeding palm against the page and whispered a forbidden phrase.

  “Retroverto Ex Lex.”

  The rune activated—and for an instant, the air around them stopped making sense.

  The ground wavered.

  Time fluctuated.

  And the structure Ilian had so rigidly dominated was suddenly deprogrammed, disassembled not with force, but with pure disorder.

  “This is impossible,” Ilian murmured, the pages of the grimoire spinning uncontrollably. “This is... unacceptable!”

  With a gesture, Andrel threw the page like a blade of wind.

  It cut through the floating circles, tore through the enchanted verses, and struck the grimoire, which exploded into flames. The pages disintegrated in the air, turning to dust of memory. Ilian screamed.

  “My grimoire... my legacy...”

  Andrel advanced, slow but steady. With one hand, he invoked an ancient seal. Simple. A single word.

  “Breath.”

  And the wind obeyed. The wind lifted dust. Lifted dead leaves. Lifted Ilian Meret and threw him against the very conjuration structure, which was already unstable.

  The impact was enough. The runes on the ground shattered, and Ilian, the man of formulas, was left with only flesh.

  Andrel approached with a dagger in hand. He looked into his eyes—and saw fear. The noble trembled, gasping for breath. Andrel drove the dagger in with force, and Ilian Meret fell without glory.