Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Midair, Ethan frowned.

The white lightning in his hand was still condensing, arcs crawling from his palm up his forearm, leaving strips of jumping white light across his skin.

If those Stellar Core fragments had stopped on their own, that meant they’d just handed him time to invade them.

Let him steal?

Yeah. Then he wasn’t going to be polite about it.

Ethan stared without blinking at the energy currents inside the shards, then turned his head toward Seraphina.

Seraphina understood immediately.

The golden swords orbiting her flipped one by one, redirecting their tips upward. Ethan lifted his hand and split the lightning in his palm into dozens of streams, feeding one into each blade.

White light washed over the golden steel.

Holy power and lightning braided along the edges. The glow at each tip compressed tighter and tighter, until it sharpened into a platinum-white point—thin enough to pierce a Stellar Core.

Seraphina raised her hand and pointed toward the dome.

Every sword launched at once.

They punched through the golden barrier. The moment they cleared the shield’s range, their speed spiked. The swarm of blades tore through the deep blue pressure, stabbing along different paths toward the hovering Stellar Core fragments.

In the darkness outside the cage, Vhalrath felt the familiar attack and let out a low chuckle.

"Again?"

Its enormous pupil surfaced from the deep black, watching the rising golden swords with obvious amusement.

"Do you have any idea how those swords disappeared earlier?"

Vhalrath’s voice slipped through the bars, dripping with undisguised mockery.

"Fearless. Because you don’t know any better."

The golden swords made contact with the Stellar Cores.

The lead blade’s tip struck the deep blue shell. That sharp gold light only sank in a paper-thin layer before the blade couldn’t withstand the squeeze of the two forces and snapped in the middle.

Then the second.

The third.

Broken blades fell from the air, turning into shattered golden motes that scattered around the shield. The rest of the formation couldn’t pierce through either, breaking one after another inside the deep blue glow.

But the swords had already done their job.

The instant blade met Stellar Core, the white lightning hidden inside slipped through the tiny cracks and burrowed into the interior.

Each lightning strand left only a thread-thin copy of itself behind.

Those copies didn’t damage the Stellar Core’s structure. They clung to the internal energy flow instead, searching for the source that held all that power together. White light darted through the deep blue, sharing feedback—each thread reporting what it sensed from its own angle.

The Stellar Core fragments started falling again.

All the deep blue shards accelerated at once, smashing down toward the golden shield.

Everyone was already braced for impact.

Hands shot out to grab several of Ataneya’s fox tails. The soft, massive tails threaded through the crowd and got used like shock-absorbing ropes.

Ataneya glanced down.

Dozens of hands were gripping her tails at once. The fur and flesh quickly reddened under the strain. Some people practically plastered their whole bodies against them, terrified they’d get launched the second the hit landed.

Ataneya shut her eyes, helpless.

They were her partners.

They were just trying to survive this disaster. What bad intentions could they possibly have?

All she could do was press her tails down harder, wrapping the tips around the nearby ground to give everyone something solid to anchor against.

Ethan’s power had already invaded most of the Stellar Cores.

As the white lightning mapped the internal paths, many shards began to drift off course. They broke away from their locked trajectory toward the crowd and slid aside, following Ethan’s will.

But some still slipped through.

Those shards weren’t controlled, and they kept coming straight for the shield.

The first deep blue fragment hit.

The pale-gold barrier caved into a massive dent. Ripples exploded outward from the impact point in stacked layers, like storm waves rolling across the surface.

The second slammed down right after.

The entire shield shook violently. The pressure drove everyone downward. Ataneya’s tails went taut as bowstrings—most of the people gripping them were yanked off the ground.

Vhalrath lived up to its name.

Disaster came with it.

When Vhalrath decided to hand out a "reward," it meant ruins were about to be born again.

Seraphina raised one hand, five fingers aimed at the golden barrier above.

Deep-gold power surged along her arm into the shield, patching the damage the fragments had carved out. Andona stepped forward too, golden-yellow light flaring beneath her imposing mask.

Power poured out of her.

Ten pairs of wings drove Light Force into the barrier. One by one, the golden cracks sealed shut. The sagging shield forced itself back upward.

Ethan had finished the most important part—control.

He pressed a white energy sphere into his own chest.

The moment it touched, it broke apart, and white lightning flowed through his body from the inside out. In the next breath, his outline started dissolving from the edges, his whole body breaking into black grains that streamed away into the distance.

The Stellar Core fragments he’d taken over shifted with him.

Deep blue shards lined up obediently behind the swarm of black particles, following the path Ethan carved as he left.

He left everyone under the shield to handle the remaining hits, and dragged the majority of the Stellar Cores away with him.

And right then, Kaelira and Catheryn disappeared too.

Purple-red flame and deep black aura wrapped their bodies. They faded at the same time, slipping into some hidden layer of space.

Ethan spotted them ahead almost immediately.

Kaelira and Catheryn were reduced to energy outlines there, moving along a concealed route as they pushed forward.

Watching those two sneak around, Ethan felt a headache coming on. He shut his eyes for a second.

They really wanted to show off that badly?

He didn’t change direction. He only let a thin sliver of his own power leak out.

White arcs lit inside the stream of black particles, and the controlled Stellar Cores behind him revealed their deep blue glow in response.

Kaelira and Catheryn snapped their heads around at once.

There was no way they could miss him.

Especially not when they saw that whole swarm of Stellar Cores tailing Ethan like a pack.

Whatever greeting they’d had ready got stuck in their throats.

Kaelira lifted a hand, her smile going stiff.

"Uh... hi, Ethan!"

Ethan stopped.

The black grains gathered in front of them and re-formed into his body.

Kaelira and Catheryn also shifted back from energy into flesh. They stood side by side, wearing the rarest expression on both their faces—awkward, like two kids who’d snuck off to cause trouble and were waiting to get scolded.

Ethan didn’t say a word.

He just raised his hand and pointed behind himself.

One Stellar Core after another was racing down the spatial channel toward them, deep blue light washing their faces in a cold, ugly tint.

"I’m moving."

Ethan turned and kept going.

"If you want to keep up, then keep up."

Kaelira and Catheryn exchanged a look. The embarrassment vanished instantly, replaced by excitement.

They pulled their power together again.

Kaelira supplied the purple-red flame. Catheryn wrapped it from the outside in darkness. A new sphere formed between them, its presence compressed to almost nothing even as the force inside it kept slamming and churning.

Those energy spheres acted like their own little "underlings," too.

So the three of them—each leading their own Stellar Cores and homemade energy orbs—left the original battlefield behind.

Back under the golden shield, everyone watched three signatures vanish one after another, and the looks on their faces turned complicated.

Picking a fight without bringing them?

What was that supposed to mean?

Ethan couldn’t do much about it, either.

He had a whole swarm of Stellar Cores on his tail. If even one slipped his control and smashed into the shield where everyone was—yeah. He wasn’t taking responsibility for that.