The crater glowed faintly beneath her, seething with residual energy. Lowe's steps echoed faintly over the ruined stones, steady despite the blood running down his arm. He didn't stagger. Didn't slow.
Minus raised her staff again, twirling it once before jamming its base into the ground.
The air shifted.
A high-pitched whine built around them, subtle at first—like pressure bending space. The light dimmed, shadows bending toward a point between her hands as she lifted her staff. Her eyes narrowed.
"This one," she said, "you won't walk away from."
She whispered the spell in a dead language. A void bloomed between her palms.
Not mere darkness—absence. A swirling black spiral that twisted the air, pulling everything around it toward its core. Screams of pressure echoed in its wake as stones lifted from the ground, dragged toward the artificial singularity.
Lowe didn't retreat.
He charged.
She smiled, cold and terrible, and snapped her fingers.
The black hole expanded—not wildly, but with calculated precision, a concentrated point of annihilation. It didn't explode. It consumed. Trees, debris, the very color in the world around it—all pulled into the humming, crushing gravity.
Lowe skidded to a stop, body pressed low to the ground, resisting the pull. His blade stabbed into the stone, anchoring him. But the drag was relentless.
Minus stepped toward him, wind tearing around her. "You don't understand it, do you?" she called out. "Magic isn't something you can beat with brute force."
She raised her hand again. Runes flickered around her fingers—ancient, binding.
"Let's see what you are without your strength."
Chains of luminous mana burst from the void, serpentine and swift. They wrapped around Lowe before he could move—writhing cords of light that tightened as they touched flesh, leeching color from his skin. He grimaced, breath hitching.
"I call it Mana Drain." Her voice was soft, almost sweet. "It'll pull the life out of you, bit by bit. Until there's nothing left but a husk."
Lowe's knees hit the ground.
The chains pulsed.
His sword fell from his hand with a clatter.
For a moment, she thought it was over.
And then—his eyes rose to meet hers.
Still burning.
Still defiant.
"You talk too much," he said.
And then, the chains shuddered.
Minus blinked. The bindings—meant to suppress mana, to suffocate it—were trembling. Not from resistance.
From rejection.
Lowe wasn't fighting with magic.
He was forcing it out of his body.
His muscles trembled, veins bulging as if his body were denying the very concept of mana flowing within him. The chains cracked—not from overuse, but from incompatibility.
"No," Minus said, stepping forward. "That's not possible. That spell is unbreakable. Not for a normal mage—"
"I'm not a mage," Lowe growled.
And then—
Snap.
The chains broke.
Not all at once, but in violent, splintering bursts of white energy. The draining stopped. The singularity behind her wavered. She barely had time to react.
He was already in front of her.
His fist slammed into her stomach like a cannon. The force ripped the air apart between them. Her breath caught in her throat, her staff flying from her hand as she rocketed backward, skidding through rubble and wreckage, stone cracking under her weight.
Silence.
Her body shuddered, head bowed.
Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.
He stood over her again—bleeding, breathing heavily—but unshaken. That same cold fire in his eyes.
Minus coughed, steadying herself on her palm. "You're not just some hunter," she muttered. "You're a curse."
Lowe said nothing.
The storm above them began to thin.
The wind quieted.
And for the first time since the fight began—Minus felt the tide turning.
He wasn't stronger than her.
But his hate?
His sheer, blistering hatred for everything she was?
It might just be enough.