The rain had finally begun to slacken over Oakhaven Valley, reducing from a deafening torrent to a heavy, cold drizzle that clung to the stagnant air.
"Medics! Over here! We have a collapse on the lower ridge!"
"Clear the central pathway! Move the third squad stretchers to the rear bastions!"
The battlefield was a chaotic hive of desperation and blood. Armored knights, their plate mail dented and smeared with dark crimson and golden ichor, hoisted their fallen comrades onto makeshift wooden stretchers. Mages with glowing blue mana stones held high struggled through the thick, waterlogged clay, frantically directing the flow of casualties toward the primary medical pavilions erected behind the secondary stone barricade.
Among the chaos, four heavily armored vanguard knights were carefully hauling a motionless body up the muddy incline.
Shin'ya lay completely limply across their arms, his head tilted back, his dark hair drenched and plastered across a pale, deathly face. His midnight-black shirt was shredded at the shoulder and torn open at the chest, revealing bruised, blackened skin beneath blood-soaked silk. His right leg, wrapped tightly in a hasty tourniquet, dripped thick crimson onto the boots of the soldier carrying his legs. Slung tightly to his waist, caked in dried mud and monstrous fluids, was the parasitic dark blade Ketsugai.
"Gently! Watch his right leg!" the lead knight barked, his voice hoarse from shouting. "If his pulse drops any lower, the backline clerics won't have enough lingering lifeforce to catch him!"
Suddenly, a frantic, mud-splattered figure broke through the crowd of soldiers.
Seraphina stumbled through the crimson slush, her wet notebook clutched like a lifeline against her chest, her leather boots sliding dangerously on the slick slope. Her face was deathly pale, her eyes wide with a frantic, stuttering panic that went far beyond the horror of the war.
"Wait! Stop! Listen to me!" Sera gasped, breathlessly catching up to the four knights. She grabbed the lead soldier's forearm, her fingers trembling violently. "You can't let him stay unconscious! You have to wake him up! Please, you have to wake Sir Arata up before forty minutes pass! If forty minutes hit, he—!"
The lead knight stopped for a fraction of a second, staring at her in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. He looked down at the blood-drenched, pale boy in his arms—whose chest was barely rising with microscopic, shallow gasps—and then looked back at Sera as if she had lost her mind.
Is this girl completely insane? the soldier thought, his jaw tightening in irritation. Wake up a child whose right calf was pierced through by an abyssal bone, whose muscles are completely torn, and who just solo-cleared the throat of a Calamity Gate?! Waking him up right now would trigger fatal shock in three seconds!
"Step aside, girl!" the knight growled, shoving past her as he picked up the pace toward the medical pavilion. "If we don't get him on a healing circle in two minutes, there won't be a Arata left to wake up! Get out of the way!"
"No, you don't understand!" Sera screamed after them, her voice cracking over the noise of the army. "Forty minutes! Do not let him sleep past forty minutes!"
Her desperate cries were quickly swallowed by the roars of commanders ordering perimeter sweeps and the groans of dying men.
Inside the grand medical tent, the air was heavy with the suffocating scent of burning sage, iron, and high-concentration restorative mana. Dozens of iron cots lined the canvas walls, occupied by screaming vanguard veterans and silent, dying knights.
The moment the four soldiers burst through the flap carrying Shin'ya, the Head Cleric—an elderly man with robes stained dark red at the sleeves—looked up from a wounded lieutenant. The moment his eyes landed on the dark, blood-drenched silk and the shattered physique of the young Shadow Master, his eyes widened.
"Clear the central sanctum circle!" the Head Cleric bellowed instantly, dropping his tools. "Drop all secondary triage! Focus all High Clerics on the boy!"
Four senior mages immediately abandoned their stations, surrounding the central stone pedestal as Shin'ya was gently laid down upon the carved arcane runes. The moment his cold, motionless body touched the stone, the mages slammed their hands onto the outer ring, pouring dense, emerald-green recovery magic directly into his body.
"By the Gods..." one female cleric whispered, her hands shaking as the diagnostic spell flared to life above Shin'ya's chest. "His mana channels aren't just empty—they're completely shattered. His physical stamina is sitting at absolute zero. It's a miracle his heart is even beating."
"Stop talking and pour!" the Head Cleric roared, sweat pouring down his wrinkled face as he forced his own sacred mana into Shin'ya's torn shoulder. "Keep the recovery continuous! We have to seal the leg wound first!"
Simultaneously, inside the heavily fortified Command Pavilion at the top of Oakhaven Ridge, a very different atmosphere reigned.
The room was dimly lit by suspended crystal lanterns. A massive tactical map of Oakhaven Valley lay spread across a heavy oak table, weighted down by iron markers representing the destroyed breaches.
Seated around the table were the high commanders of the Imperial Vanguard, the Knight Commander from the Capital, and a tall, broad-shouldered man with a sharp, silver-streaked beard, wearing the ornate, wolf-embossed leather armor of the High Guild.
Guild Master Gideon.
Gideon leaned over the table, his heavy, scarred knuckles resting on the edge of the map, his eyes fixed on the red marker labeled Gateway 04.
"Let me hear it again," Gideon said, his voice deep, gravelly, and laced with an incredible, tense weight. "Report the frontline casualty report and the status of the fourth tear."
A high-ranking Imperial Scout bowed deeply before the table. "Report, Guild Master. Gateway 04 has been ninety-nine percent sealed by the Grand Incantation. The spatial rupture is completely neutralized. Total vanguard casualties are severe... but without the intervention of Sir Arata, the entire valley defense would have collapsed within the first twenty minutes."
The Capital Knight Commander—the man who had draped his silver-and-gold cloak over Shin'ya—stepped forward, his polished armor clanking in the quiet tent.
"I witnessed it myself," the Commander stated solemnly, crossing his arms over his chest. "When our airships broke through the storm cloud barrier, the boy was already standing amidst a mountain of S-Rank carcasses. When the gate anchored from the inside, he entered the pocket dimension alone. He did not hesitate. He manipulated a dark, fluid form of shadow magic with an efficiency I have never seen in all my forty years of service."
"Shadow Magic..." Gideon echoed softly, his eyes narrowing in deep, contemplative awe. "To refine shadow manipulation to such an absolute degree that it can sever S-Rank abyssal hide without firing a visible spell wave... The boy didn't just fight. He controlled the entire flow of the war from the shadows."
"He didn't just hold the line," an Imperial General added, leaning forward with a dark, serious expression. "He took the absolute brunt of a Calamity breach on his own shoulders to buy time for the Crown's deployment. In terms of martial merit, tactical execution, and raw lethality... he has outclassed every veteran captain present in Oakhaven."
Gideon slowly straightened his spine, staring at the ceiling of the tent as he weighed the immense political and military reality of what had just transpired.
"Three Sovereigns walk this continent," Gideon declared, his voice echoing with profound, solemn gravity through the tent. "Three legendary pillars who hold the balance of power for humanity in this generation. But after what occurred today... after a fourteen-year-old child single-handedly choked the throat of an S-Rank Gateway..."
Gideon slammed his fist onto the oak table, cracking the wood beneath his ring.
"We are looking at the fourth. The Imperial Senate will have no choice. When the Crown receives this battle log, Lord Arata will be officially recognized as the Fourth Sovereign of this generation... The Sovereign of Shadows."
A heavy, reverent silence settled over the commanders in the tent. The birth of a new Sovereign was an event that altered the world's power balance for centuries. And down in the mud, that title was currently bled for by a boy lying unconscious on a stone slab.
Back inside the medical pavilion, time was ticking away mercilessly.
Forty-five minutes had passed since Shin'ya was dragged out of the mud.
The four High Clerics were sweating profusely, their faces pale as their mana reserves drained to near-empty. Above Shin'ya's chest, the green diagnostic runes were flickered wildly.
"His shoulder fibers are eighty percent knit," the female cleric gasped, wiping blood and sweat from her brow. "The bone shaft in his right calf has been extracted, and the major arterial bleeding is stopped... but his body is refusing the deep cellular recovery! It's like his soul is completely disconnected from his physical frame!"
"Keep pushing!" the Head Cleric screamed, his hands glowing with a desperate, blinding emerald light. "We are at ninety percent! Just ten more minutes and his vitals will stabilize!"
Fifty-five minutes.
The clock approached the one-hour mark since Shin'ya's eyes had fluttered shut in the crimson mud.
Suddenly, the ambient green light of the medical tent began to warp.
A strange, soft, luminous white light began to emanate directly from Shin'ya's skin. It wasn't the emerald green of healing magic, nor was it the pitch-black shadow of the Ketsugai. It was a pristine, unnatural, flickering light that pulsed like static electricity across his clothes, his bandaged leg, and the dark dagger strapped to his waist.
The Head Cleric froze, his hands hovering an inch above Shin'ya's chest. "What... what is this magic? Is his body reacting to the spell?!"
"No!" another mage shrieked, backing away in terror as the white light grew blindingly bright, enveloping Shin'ya's entire form in a geometric, flickering outline. "It's not mana! The spatial coordinates around the stone slab are dissolving!"
"What the heck is happening right now?!"
FLASH.
In a split second—without a sound, without a shockwave, without a single trace of residual energy—the blinding white light collapsed into a single, razor-thin point.
And then, it vanished.
The medical tent fell deathly silent.
The four clerics stood frozen around the central stone pedestal, their hands outstretched, their mouths agape.
The slab was completely empty.
Shin'ya was gone. His blood-stained clothes were gone. The parasitic Ketsugai dagger was gone. There was nothing left on the cold stone except the wet, fading smear of his crimson blood.
"HE'S GONE!" the female cleric screamed, completely breaking down in terror. "THE PATIENT IS GONE!"
Panicked footfalls echoed outside as the healers threw open the canvas flaps, running frantically up the muddy hill toward the Command Pavilion.
"COMMANDER! GUILD MASTER! SIR ARATA HAS VANISHED!"
Inside the Command Pavilion, the sudden, frantic intrusion made every general draw their sidearms. Gideon turned violently, his eyes locking onto the breathless, terrified cleric standing at the entrance.
"What do you mean 'vanished'?!" Gideon roared, stepping forward. "He was ninety percent healed! Did an enemy assassin breach the medical tent?!"
Down in the muddy square, Seraphina–who had been sitting numbly on a wooden crate holding her wet notebook–heard the shouting. She snapped her head up, her eyes widening in pure, horrified realization as she looked at the heavy pocket watch hanging from an officer's belt nearby.
One hour... Sera thought, her heart dropping into a cold, bottomless pit of sheer panic. It's been a full hour...
"Wait..." Sera whimpered, pushing herself off the crate and sprinting toward the gathering crowd of commanders. "Wait! No! This can't be! Don't tell me..."
She burst into the center of the command group, her chest heaving as she looked up at Gideon and the Capital Commander.
"He didn't get killed! He didn't get assassinated!" Sera yelled frantically, her tears finally overflowing. "I tried to tell you! If Sir Arata sleeps for more than forty minutes, his body forcibly disconnects! He disappears!"
Gideon blinked, his massive brows furrowing in total confusion. "Disconnects?! What are you talking about, girl?! Disappears to where?!"
"I don't know!" Sera sobbed, wringing her wet notebook in her hands. "A random location! A safe domain! A spatial pocket! I don't know where he goes, but he isn't in Oakhaven anymore! We have to mobilize every scout squad immediately! Send out the search parties across the entire region!"
Gideon stared at her, then looked out over the dark, rain-soaked peaks of Oakhaven Valley. The fourth Sovereign of humanity—the newly dubbed Sovereign of Shadows—had just vanished into thin air from the center of a heavily guarded military camp, leaving the entire High Command in absolute, bewildered chaos.