"Yonas. Yonas. Wake up."
High above New York, inside the New York Sanctum, one sorcerer shook the shoulder of his partner, who had fallen asleep over a desk.
"...Clark?"
The drowsy sorcerer barely opened his eyes before trying to drift back to sleep.
"Five more minutes..."
"Oh, come on." Clark rolled his eyes. "We’re on watch tonight. If you’re caught sleeping again, we’ll both get chewed out tomorrow."
The Sanctum’s detection arrays never stopped operating.
Sorcerers, unfortunately, weren’t enchanted artifacts.
Someone had to monitor the wards through the night, ready to respond if anything unusual appeared. That responsibility rotated among the apprentices, and tonight it belonged to Yonas and Clark.
"Who’s going to know?" Yonas yawned as he reluctantly sat upright. "I was just resting my eyes."
"You do remember Master Olivan, don’t you?"
Clark sat perfectly straight.
"For all we know, he’s hidden surveillance spells in this room again."
The mention of Olivan immediately banished every trace of sleep.
He’d done exactly that before.
More than one apprentice had discovered, too late, that the master’s "unexpected inspections" were anything but unexpected.
Yonas instantly adopted the posture of a model student.
The act lasted all of ten seconds.
"I seriously don’t understand why this duty exists in the first place."
He stopped mid-complaint.
Both men looked toward the same point.
"...Did you feel that?"
Clark nodded immediately.
"An abnormal surge of magical energy."
He rose from his chair.
"We should investigate."
The Sanctum’s grand detection array amplified every resident sorcerer’s magical senses many times over.
Normally, the faint disturbance outside the city would’ve gone unnoticed.
With the array enhancing their perception...
Even that tiny ripple reached them.
Yonas groaned.
"We’re really going out there?"
"The fluctuation’s barely noticeable."
"It could just be a natural mana shift."
"Do we really need to investigate?"
Mana naturally flowed through invisible ley lines.
Where those currents converged, stable nexuses formed.
Occasionally, however, those currents fluctuated.
Just as rivers flooded or narrowed unexpectedly, magical currents sometimes produced brief disturbances that disappeared on their own.
Minor anomalies like this usually meant nothing.
Clark remained unconvinced.
"We’re checking."
He crossed his arms.
"Ever since that unidentified dark sorcerer appeared in the city, Master Olivan has become... extremely cautious."
"If we ignore this and it turns out to be real..."
"...we’ll never hear the end of it."
Yonas visibly deflated.
"Fine."
"But we’re in and out."
"No sightseeing."
Clark closed his eyes, following the disturbance through the detection array.
"...Found it."
He traced a glowing circle in the air.
A golden portal blossomed open.
Together, the two sorcerers stepped through.
Had they known what awaited them...
They would’ve awakened every sorcerer in the Sanctum.
Then written a letter to the Sorcerer Supreme saying:
If we don’t make it back... please avenge us.
Because the location they had chosen to investigate...
Was the site where Evenson had summoned the Eredar Twins.
His concealment wards hadn’t collapsed all at once.
Instead, they had gradually weakened.
Only now had tiny traces of the ritual begun leaking into the surrounding area.
To ordinary people...
Nothing.
To the Sanctum’s enhanced detection array...
Enough to attract attention.
Ironically, the magical signature was still so faint that Yonas and Clark mistook it for a harmless natural fluctuation.
It was the worst possible mistake.
The moment they emerged from the portal...
Both men froze.
Cold sweat ran down their backs.
"What..."
Clark’s voice barely emerged.
"...is this place?"
The air reeked of sulfur.
Faint screams drifted through the darkness, as though countless souls had been torn apart and wrung dry of every last shred of existence.
The ground was covered with unfamiliar ritual circles.
Their power had already faded.
Yet the twisted symbols remained.
To ordinary eyes, they were merely strange runes.
To trained sorcerers whose minds were highly sensitive to magic...
The symbols writhed like nests of venomous serpents.
Simply looking at them sent instinctive terror crawling across the spine.
This wasn’t a natural mana fluctuation.
This was the aftermath of an enormous forbidden ritual.
Performed by someone both immensely powerful...
And unimaginably evil.
Yonas and Clark reached exactly the same conclusion.
Run.
There was no point attempting a fight.
Anyone capable of creating a ritual like this would annihilate them.
Better to retreat.
Gather reinforcements.
Return with every sorcerer the Sanctum could spare.
They spun toward the still-open portal.
Just then...
The gateway violently distorted.
Before either could react, it collapsed into a stream of golden light and shot sideways.
Both men instinctively followed it.
Something enormous stood there.
Roughly the size of a calf.
Its hide was covered in crimson scales.
Its thick limbs ended in vicious claws.
Two massive white horns jutted from its shoulders.
Its fleshless, beak-like jaws overflowed with razor-sharp teeth.
Black spines lined its back.
Most horrifying of all...
Two upright tentacles rose from behind its shoulders, each ending in a blossom of fleshy petals like a carnivorous flower.
The creature had absorbed their portal.
Yonas stared in horror.
"What... is that?"
It looked less like any earthly beast...
And more like a nightmare clawed straight out of Hell.
Clark forced himself to stay calm.
"I’ll open another portal."
"We leave."
"Now."
If that monster was here...
Its master couldn’t be far away.
As it happened...
The master was still over an hour’s drive away.
Before Clark could cast another spell...
Laughter echoed through the darkness.
A towering figure charged out of the shadows.
"Hahaha!"
The massive demon covered the distance in an instant.
Clark had only enough time to raise a golden barrier.
A gigantic battle axe crashed down with overwhelming force.
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