Arthur materialized in the air, a kilometer above the Academy's central spire. He wasn't flying with Qi; he was simply standing on a fold in the dimension (D-2). Below him, thousands of terrified students and the bloodied Director Vance looked up. They didn't see a savior; they saw a silhouette that seemed to swallow the light around it.
"Too much noise," Arthur whispered.
He opened his arms wide. As the pillar of Solar Plasma—hot enough to vaporize a mountain—hit him, the expected explosion never came. Instead, Arthur's body became a Void Conduit. His skin flickered with jagged grey lightning as he absorbed the millions of degrees of heat directly into his D-Core.
The Solar energy didn't burn him. It was stripped of its properties, filtered through his Symbiotic Link with Seraphina, and compressed into a single, dense point of entropy at his fingertips.
"Arthur! Get out of there!" Vance roared from below, his voice cracking.
Arthur didn't even look down. His crimson eyes were locked onto the orbital coordinates Seraphina was feeding into his mind. "I don't like gifts I can't return," Arthur murmured.
He snapped his fingers.
"Void Breach: Vector Reversal."
A massive, circular rift of swirling grey mist opened directly in front of him. The absorbed Solar energy—now tainted with the erasing properties of the Void—erupted from Arthur's chest and surged back into the rift.
In high orbit, three of the Helios Corporation's 'God-Sun' satellites didn't just explode. They were erased. The reflected beam, empowered by the Void, traveled up the path of the original attack, hitting the satellites with ten times the original force. On the ground, the sky flashed a haunting, ghostly violet for a split second before the golden pressure vanished entirely.
Silence returned to Aetheria. The heat dissipated, replaced by a chilling, unnatural breeze. Arthur descended slowly, his feet touching the balcony next to the collapsed Director.
"The sun has set, Director," Arthur said, his voice as calm as if he had just finished a walk. "I suggest you call the Global Defense Front. Someone tried to delete your school."