Chapter 190: When Steel Met Blood and Spell Met Shadow

Steel flashed.

The demon jerked backward as Garrick’s blade opened a wound across its forearm. Black blood spilled onto the stones, sizzling where it touched the mana coating the sword.

The creature stared at the cut for a moment, then smiled.

"So the academy still has a few real ones."

Garrick said nothing. He adjusted his stance and kept his sword between them.

The wound was already closing.

Not quickly enough to make the injury meaningless, but quickly enough that a prolonged fight would favor the demon.

Dark mana surged through its arms. Black markings spread across its shoulders and chest like cracks through stone. Its skin hardened into a dark, metallic shell, and the claws on its fingers sharpened into jagged blades.

The demon flexed its reinforced arms and lunged.

**CLANG!**

The impact drove Garrick backward several steps. His boots scraped against the stone, and the arm holding his sword trembled from the force.

The demon followed with another strike. Garrick blocked, turned the blade, and redirected the claws away from his throat. One still caught his shoulder, tearing through fabric and drawing blood.

He retreated before the next blow could land.

The demon’s smile widened.

"Losing confidence already?"

Garrick pressed his injured shoulder back into place.

"No. Just deciding where to cut."

The demon attacked again.

This time Garrick did not meet the force head-on. He shifted aside, allowed the claws to pass, and struck the demon’s knee, then immediately rose toward its elbow. The blade bit into the hardened flesh—not deeply, but enough.

The demon snarled and swung its other arm. Garrick ducked beneath it, moving with the economy of someone who had spent decades fighting stronger opponents.

He struck the same knee again.

The demon staggered.

It slammed both fists into the ground.

**BOOM!**

Stone erupted around Garrick. He leaped backward, but fragments tore across his cheek and forearm. Before he could fully recover, the demon closed the distance and drove a reinforced fist into his abdomen.

Pain ripped through him. He crashed against a broken pillar, his sword nearly slipping from his grasp.

The demon approached, dark mana radiating from its body.

"You found a few weak points. Congratulations."

It raised its claws.

"But you’re too slow to use them."

Garrick forced himself upright. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and his shoulder throbbed with every movement. His gaze remained steady.

He had already seen enough.

The demon’s body was heavily reinforced, but the protection was not uniform. The joints remained slightly less dense than the rest of its frame. Every time it committed to a heavy strike, the reinforcement shifted, leaving brief openings.

He waited.

The demon charged.

At the final instant, Garrick stepped forward instead of retreating. The claws swept past his shoulder. He turned his body, letting the attack miss by a narrow margin, and drove his sword into the damaged joint of the creature’s knee, committing his mana to the strike.

The blade penetrated.

The demon’s leg buckled.

Before it could recover, Garrick twisted the sword free and struck the opposite elbow, disrupting the arm it needed to defend itself. The creature roared. Garrick did not give it time to adapt. His next cut scraped across its throat, meeting resistance from the hardened protection around its neck.

The demon reached for him with its remaining functional arm.

Garrick released one hand from his sword and drove a concentrated burst of Battle Energy into its chest. The impact forced it backward. Its protection flickered for a fraction of a second as the bloodline struggled to maintain reinforcement across its damaged body.

That was enough.

Garrick stepped in and delivered a final, precise cut.

The demon’s head separated from its neck. Its body remained upright for an instant before collapsing heavily onto the courtyard stones.

Garrick stood over it, breathing hard. Then he lowered his sword.

He turned toward the evacuation route without another word.

There were still students to protect.

And the battle was not over.

---

Elsewhere, Alaric Thornwood faced a different kind of threat.

The mage demon stood in the middle of a shattered classroom, surrounded by fragments of desks and broken windows. Dark magical circles revolved around its body, each one layered over the next. The air was heavy with concentrated mana.

Alaric stopped at the doorway.

The demon was not simply preparing a powerful spell. It was drawing the surrounding mana into a complex formation that already extended into the corridor beyond. If the spell completed, the entire passage would become a killing zone.

"You arrived just in time," the demon said. "I was starting to think the academy had no one worth the effort."

Alaric adjusted his glasses.

"You talk a great deal for someone standing in a room full of broken furniture."

Dark mana surged. The magical circles accelerated. The pressure in the room increased sharply as loose mana streamed toward the demon. Its spell structures grew denser with every second.

Alaric began forming a spell of his own.

The moment his mana gathered, it thinned.

The structure weakened before it could fully take shape.

Alaric’s eyes narrowed slightly.

The demon was not merely casting. It was consuming the free mana in the air before it could stabilize into a completed spell. The denser the surrounding energy became, the more the demon seemed to draw from it.

A wave of dark energy surged across the room, slamming into the doorway and cracking the frame. Alaric raised his hand at once.

"Seventh Circle Spell: Veil of Bound Echoes."

Thin lines of pale light spread across the walls, ceiling, and floor, dividing the space into dozens of interlocking sections. The formation did not attack immediately. Instead, each section reinforced the others, creating a self-supporting structure.

The demon pulled at the loose mana. Several lines flickered—then the lattice stabilized.

It could consume free mana. It could not easily devour a fully established formation whose components continuously supported one another.

Alaric moved two fingers.

The formation tightened. Several of the demon’s magical circles distorted as the surrounding mana pathways were redirected. The layers began interfering with one another.

The demon poured more energy into the circles. For a moment the structure held.

Then the strain became visible.

The circles trembled. Their edges warped.

Alaric closed his hand.

The formation contracted violently. The demon’s magical circles shattered one after another with sharp, overlapping cracks. The backlash tore through the classroom, blasting fragments of stone and wood across the floor. A jagged piece of debris sliced across the demon’s cheek as it staggered, its control over the surrounding mana faltering.

Alaric had already prepared the next spell.

"Seventh Circle Spell: Piercing Starfall."

A narrow spear of concentrated mana formed before his hand and shot forward with lethal precision. The air around it distorted from the density of the energy.

The demon tried to raise a barrier, but its unstable mana flow left a gap near the center. The spear punched through and tore into the core of concentrated mana in its chest.

The demon’s eyes widened. A choked sound escaped its throat as the dark markings across its skin flickered and faded. Its body convulsed once, then collapsed to its knees before toppling forward onto the broken floorboards.

Alaric maintained the spell until he was certain the demon could no longer fight. Only then did he release the remaining mana.

Silence settled over the ruined classroom.

Alaric lowered his hand and exhaled slowly. The concentration required to counter the absorption effect had drained a considerable portion of his reserves.

A distant impact shook the building.

He adjusted his glasses, stepped over the broken debris, and walked toward the corridor without looking back.