The weight of the ancient leather-bound tome had finally become too much for Jay's weary mind.
For hours, he had been submerged in the dense geometrical prose of Thaumaturgy Magic and Formation, trying to reconcile the fluid nature of his spatial magic with the rigid structures required for advanced geometric seals.
He started focusing on researching 'vessel' for The Anthem of Life in the forms of runes.
The flickering candlelight in Glenda's basement library cast long, dancing shadows across the pages until the words began to swim and the stone walls seemed to breathe with a rhythm that was not their own.
Sleep did not come as a gentle descent. Instead, it was a sudden pull as if the floor had vanished beneath him and he was falling upward into a sky that had never known the sun.
Then it was all darkness, until Jay opened his eyes in a foreign land.
It was a singular haunting rise in the land, a hill that protruded from the earth like a jagged bone through skin. It was a wound that refused to close, a place where the world felt thin and raw.
Although his internal clock told him it should be midday, the sky above the hill was a bruised and swollen purple, heavy with clouds that smothered the light. The horizon was a suffocating twilight, casting a pallid glow over the dry and cracked earth.
A wind swept across the barren ground, carrying with it a heavy cargo of dust and ash. As it brushed past Jay's face, he caught the unmistakable scent of copper. It was the smell of a slaughterhouse or a battlefield, a metallic tang that made his chest tighten and his breath hitch in his throat before he fully understood the source.
As he moved closer, drawn by an invisible thread of destiny, the shapes atop the hill began to sharpen against the darkening sky.
Three crosses stood stark against the horizon.
They were crude silhouettes, rough-hewn timber that looked as though it had been dragged from the darkest corners of the world.
With every step Jay took toward the base of the hill, the air grew heavier. It was as if the atmosphere itself had become a physical weight, a pressure that resisted his approach and demanded a price for every foot of ground gained.
He heard the murmurs of a crowd next. The sounds were fractured, a cacophony of voices layered with a terrifying spectrum of human emotion. He heard the sharp jagged edges of mockery.
He heard the low guttural moans of grief. But beneath the noise, there was something far more chilling. He heard indifference. The sound of people walking away, of soldiers gambling, of the world continuing to turn while its heart was being pierced.
Then, as suddenly as a candle being snuffed out-
-the voices vanished.
Jay blinked and the crowd was gone. The dust-choked path was empty. The soldiers, the mourners, and the mockers had evaporated into the gray mist, leaving only a singular, terrifying focus.
He was alone at the foot of the hill, looking up at the man in the middle cross.
Jay felt a primal urge to see the face of the figure on the middle cross. He strained his hazel eyes, pushing his vision to its absolute limit, yet the space around the cross seemed to ripple and warp. It was a fata morgana, a mirage of illusion that deceived his senses.
Every time he thought he had caught the curve of a jaw or the line of a brow, the image shifted.
He could not see the man, but he could see the flame.
It was not a fire of heat or light. It was a column of obsidian energy, a Black Flame that seemed to consume the very shadows around it.
It flickered with a slow, rhythmic intensity, rising from the wood of the cross as if the timber itself were being offered as fuel. This was the source of the scent Jay had noticed earlier. This was the Incinerate Anthem in its most primal, terrifying form.
Its true form.
The True Cross.
And then, there was the blood.
It was vivid, a jarring contrast to the black flames and the gray sky. It stained the wood in long, uneven trails that looked like dark ink against the parched timber. It flowed where the iron met the flesh, drying into thick dark crusts that seemed to pulse with a life of their own.
No matter how much Jay tried to look away, his gaze was drawn back to that central figure. There was something unbearable and immense suspended there, a bridge of suffering between the broken earth and the silent heaven.
The ground beneath his boots began to tremble.
It was not the violent shaking of a common earthquake, but a deep, restrained fury. It felt as though the earth were a living creature holding back a scream of absolute agony. Stones beneath him cracked with the sound of breaking bone. Fine dust fell from split rocks, and somewhere nearby, Jay felt the undeniable sensation of a boundary tearing apart. It was the sound of a veil being ripped from top to bottom.
Jay stopped at the foot of the hill, his hands trembling at his sides.
The wind died instantly.
For a single heartbeat, the world fell into a silence so absolute that it felt louder than any scream. It was not an empty silence, but one that was full to the bursting point, as though all of creation had drawn in its breath at once and was waiting for a word that would change the course of history.
"This is not the right time yet that we meet."
The voice did not come from the cross, nor did it echo across the hill. It was a gentle sound, spoken directly into Jay's ear as if someone were standing right beside him in the darkness.
It was a voice that carried the weight of centuries, yet it was devoid of the cold authority Jay usually associated with the Church. It was warm, weary, and deeply personal.
Jay spun around, his hand instinctively reaching for a sword that was not there. "Wait! Who are you?"
He can't use his Sacred Gears nor his magic.
He looked toward the mirage on the central cross, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Are you the consciousness inside the Incinerate Anthem? Or... the spirit of the True Cross?"
The silence returned for a moment, heavy and contemplative. Then, the voice spoke again, sounding both closer and further away than before.
"If you want answers, meet me in Golgotha. I am not the flame, nor am I the wood. I am just a remnant of his will and his idea. His light. "
Jay reached out toward the flickering black flames, his fingers brushing against a heat that felt like a thousand suns and a winter's night combined.
"What light? All I see is fire and blood."
The figure on the cross seemed to shift and for a fraction of a second, Jay thought he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from within the obsidian fire.
They were eyes that had seen the beginning and the end, eyes that held a sorrow so deep it made the lake at Balaton look like a shallow puddle.
"This world is yours." the voice said softly.
"You see blood because anguish dwells within you," He continued. "You see fire because you seek to burn"
"Then why," Jay pressed, "did you give this power to me in the first place?"
Silence followed.
"At the time," the voice answered at last, neither warm nor cold, "you needed it."
Jay clenched his teeth. "To kill them?"
The flames rippled, casting long distorted shadows across the hill.
"I didn't give you fire to ask every question," the voice said.
Jay's chest tightened. "Then tell me. What is it really for if not for revenge? Why do you even let me live but not everyone that i loved."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"You live because you survived. It all yours." the voice said simply.
The fire dimmed, retreating inward.
"Walk your path," the voice whispered. "When your flame can warm as easily as it burns, then we shall meet again."
Jay's eyes snapped open.
He gasped, his lungs burning as if he had actually been inhaling the ash and dust of that desolate hill. He was back in the library, the cold stone floor a harsh reality against the shifting landscape of his dream.
The heavy book of Thaumaturgy was still clutched in his hand, its edges digging into his skin.
A sharp stabbing pain blossomed behind his eyes, a migraine that felt like a hot needle being driven into his temple. He groaned and dropping the book and clutching his head as he tried to stabilize his breathing.
The memory of the dream remained vividly etched into his mind. It was not like the fragmented, fading images of a normal nightmare.
He could even still smell the copper. He could still feel the phantom heat of the black flames on his skin.
"What was that dream..." he whispered into the empty room, his voice shaking.
***
Three months had passed since the vision of the blackened hill and the silent, bleeding cross. That haunting dream had never returned, yet its memory remained a cold weight in the back of Jay's mind, a constant reminder that his power was not merely a tool but a legacy of something ancient.
During those ninety days, the basement in Verona had become his entire universe. The scent of old parchment, the hum of mana, and the sharp, biting tongue of Glenda were the only things that defined his existence.
The world outside, however, had not remained still.
Two months ago, news had filtered through the hidden networks of the supernatural world regarding a catastrophe in Japan.
It was being called the Heavenly Aloha Incident. Rumors spoke of a mysterious agency, a shadow organization with resources that rivaled the great powers, which had orchestrated the abduction of over two hundred students.
The scale of the kidnapping was unprecedented. It was a slap in the face to the traditional authorities of the Far East. Jay had listened as Glenda muttered about the shifting tides of power. The Grigori, the organization of Fallen Angels led by Azazel, were already mobilizing their elite.
More importantly for Jay, the Magicians Guild known as Grauzauberer was also sending their specialists to assist in the recovery as per Grigori requests.
Lavinia Reni would be among them. The time for preparation was over.
Meanwhile, in the training hall. Jay would be attending his final lesson.
The air in the training hall was thick with the scent of ozone and the heavy humidity of condensed mana.
This basement, magically expanded by Glenda to the size of a professional football stadium was a masterpiece of spatial architecture. It was a vast, cold expanse of reinforced stone and runic dampening fields, designed to withstand the fury of Ultimate-class combatants.
Glenda stood at the far end of the hall, her robes fluttering in the artificial wind generated by her own presence. She looked tired, but her eyes burned with the pride of a master who was about to test her greatest disciple even if she hates to admit it.
Jay stood opposite her, his breathing steady, his mind a calm lake of crystalline logic.
He did not plan to use the Incinerate Anthem today. He did not need the instant, overwhelming power his sacred gears for this.
He wanted to prove that his own progress, his own mastery of the arcane and mystic of magic was enough to stand against one of the world's greatest magicians.
It was not a simple sprint. It was a sequence of high-speed spatial displacements. He moved through the hall like a glitch in reality, appearing twenty feet forward, then ten feet to the left, then directly above Glenda's head.
Voidwalker, a spell that created by seamless integration of Teleportation and Domain of His Own. He minimized the mana cost by narrowing the focus of his spatial folds, turning the teleportation from a heavy spell into a light effortless stride. It is far better than the last time he used it in Hungary.
"Stop trying to get close, you little brat!" Glenda shouted, her voice echoing off the distant walls.
She snapped her fingers, and ten magic circles of a brilliant cerulean blue erupted around her. From each circle, a spear of high-pressure water shot toward Jay with the speed of a rifle bullet.
Jay didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. He tilted his head a fraction of an inch to let one spear graze his clothes, then teleported through the gap between two others.
He was using his Domain to read the trajectory of her spells before they even left the circles. To Jay, the room was a grid of vectors and mana signatures. He wasn't just dodging, he was navigating the only safe path through a storm of water spears.
"A magician who fights at close range is a magician who wants to die!" Glenda continued to curse him, but her hands were moving in a blurred dance of gestures.
She realized that Jay was closing the distance too fast. She couldn't track him with standard elemental projectiles anymore. She needed to reset the board. She slammed her wand to the ground and the floor beneath Jay's feet turned into a literal whirlpool.
"Water Magic: Tides of dragons, rise and consume!"
Five massive dragon heads, constructed from magically densified water erupted from the ground. They roared with a sound like crashing waves, their liquid bodies shimmering with a lethal blue light.
They rushed toward Jay from five different angles, their jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.
This was an Area of Effect spell designed to overwhelm even the most agile teleporter. There was no gap to flicker through, no shadow to hide in.
Glenda smiled.
' How about that! '
The training hall turned blue.