Lyra trembled with rage, a fury like none she had ever known surging within her. But she didn’t know where it was coming from.
True, she was angry and felt humiliated—unable to move her body or command even the air around her. It was as if both her body and the wind bowed to a supreme master, utterly ignoring her like a whining child.
She flinched inwardly.
’A whining child? Where had that thought even come from?’
More terrifying than her rage or humiliation was the powerlessness—the fear. This man... this being... it felt as if she stood before a Saint... No, more than a Saint... way more than a Saint. No Saint had, and could ever reduced her to this pathetic state.
Still... even that didn’t explain the primal, unfiltered rage boiling inside her. It wasn’t born from humiliation or defeat. It was something deeper and older.
And her dynamis responded—roaring through her dynisis roots with helpless fury, that the pain she was enduring by actively utilizing her dynamis, multiplied instantaneously.
The man’s brow, seemingly noticing something, lifted slightly, and he chuckled softly before backing away.
Suddenly, the pressure lessened considerably. Air rushed into Lyra’s lungs in a violent gasp, and her aura burst outward uncontrollably, wind whipping chaotically in a five-foot radius around her.
Although the pressure had lessened and her dynamis whipped about chaotically, it was still entirely suppressed within a five-foot radius—unable to move even a nanometer beyond.
Inside what could only be described as a bubble of absolute pressure, the wind raged into gales and cyclones, but none of it could escape. The invisible prison held her with terrifying precision.
Her fury climbed to another level, and her dynamis lashed out even more violently. Blood began trickling down her lips as her body groaned and quaked under the strain.
Tears formed in her already fragile dynisis roots, spreading like cracks through glass, letting her volatile dynamis run rampant within her. It tore through her, damaging her from the inside.
Blood vessels burst, spilling into the torn dynisis roots. The wild currents of her dynamis clashed against the blood, fueling a catastrophic cycle of internal destruction.
And still, the man watched with the same quiet smile.
The twinkle in his eyes never dimmed, and the curve of his lips never shifted, not even by a fraction.
His expression was perfect... too perfect It was sickening.
Lyra didn’t know what was happening anymore. Her body had become a beast of its own, raging like a wind dragon she could no longer control. Pain wracked her mind, her body convulsed, and her breath came in short, shallow gasps.
Slowly, the whites of her amber eyes began to bleed red.
Her body started levitating, blood flowing from her eyes, rising until her head touched the top of the pressurized bubble, and was unable to go further.
Her aura raged harder, fighting to tear through the suffocating boundary. Fearing her dynamis would bring them to their ruin, she called upon her Will, trying to bend the world to her command, but unsurprisingly, nothing answered.
Lyra saw death. It was close now, only a breath away.
A single tear slipped from her eye as a strand of her lustrous caramel hair turned white. Then another. And another. Her already pallid complexion became dry and pale, wrinkled lines creeping up her arms.
Something... whatever was pushing her to rage before this man, was now feeding on her very Essence. Her vitality ebbed away with every passing second.
And then as if that was not enough, under his control the bubble began to compress.
As she felt pressure mounting, pushing against her raging aura with ease, her rage climbed to a fever pitch, and even her collected thoughts began to fray.
At this point, even Lyra was angry... infact, she was beyond angry. Beyond humiliated.
If something within her had hated him before for unknown reasons, now she hated him no less.
But a question echoed through the chaos of her thoughts: What was the point of fighting when it only led to self-destruction?
She didn’t fear death. But how could she die when she still didn’t know her son’s fate? How could she let herself die when she didn’t know if her son was dead or alive nor even where he was?
’Kal’, she thought. Tears of blood streaked down her cheeks. ’I’ve missed you.’.
Her body trembled, and her aura sharpened as if resonating with that thought.
But instead of calming, her dynamis pushed even further over the edge.
Slowly, incoherent scrambled voices began to creep into her mind. Well, not voices but a voice. It was her voice.
"Must... kill him..."
"M-must find K-Kall...en..."
"Kal... Protect Kal... Must protect Kallen..."
She found herself sinking deeper into them.
’That’s right... I must find my boy.’
As she made that proclamation, her aura pulsed. An explosion of insane power surged through her... her dynamis forming itself into a javelin of wind, lunging toward the roof of the bubble.
The wind in the bubble exploded, and even the sound barrier shattered from the force and speed of the gales within it.
Her insides churned and quaked from the recoil. However, she didn’t stop nor hesitate to think that it was pointless. The strike did not even slow down the still enclosing bubble of pressure.
The next strike came even fiercer than the first.
She coughed out a mouthful of blood.
This time, the blood came with pieces of her inner organs.
Meanwhile, in the world her hospital room and even within the rest of the hospital, there was peace.
As peaceful as it could be, with the trembling earth mimicking an impending earthquake, the howling wind wailing like a chorus of ghosts, the rumbling sky, and the roaring of volatile dynamis in places concentrated with dense dynamics.
Yet no one caught a whiff of what was happening inside the room.
While the world unknowingly held its breath for what would determine its future, the Matriarch of the Crimson Family was slowly bringing herself to destruction.