An electrified sword, its crimson glow searing with deadly intent, descended mercilessly toward Trisha's vulnerable neck. Death hung in the air, a chilling inevitability. 

 

But fate was a capricious mistress.

Before Khan's blade could fulfill its murderous purpose, a small, unassuming purple crystal hurtled through the air and struck his outstretched arm. In an instant, the hand that held the sword separated from his body and tumbled to the ground, leaving only a shallow scratch on Trisha's neck.

Stunned and bewildered, Khan stood frozen in disbelief. How could a mere crystal sever his hand so cleanly, he who wielded the power of a tenth-circle mage? The pain, delayed but fierce, flooded his senses as he clutched the bloodied stump where his hand had been.

 

Khan tried to turn around to understand what was the cause of this attack but another small purple crystal, swift and unerring, grazed his shoulder. The result was immediate—a gaping hole where Khan's left shoulder should have been. His blood sprayed out in a crimson arc, staining the twilight sky.

 

Instinctively, Khan pushed Trisha aside, his focus shifting to the unexpected new adversary. His military training took over; his teeth clenched in pain, he used his electric magic to cauterize his wounds, staunching the blood flow.

 

But the assault did not cease. A third crystal, propelled with deadly accuracy, collided with Khan's abdomen. Though he managed to sidestep the full brunt of the attack, it still left a grievous injury—a hole in his abdomen. Khan could feel the blood trickling from the wound, a stark reminder of his vulnerability. 

 

Khan wanted to stop and rest but the crystals still floated around him trying to attack from all directions. Khan, seeing the damage the crystals could cause was forced to treat them like the danger they were and elegantly began to dodge the remainder of the crystals. 

 

Khan's mind raced as he grappled with confusion. How could these unassuming crystals wreak such havoc upon a tenth-circle mage like himself?

 

'These are the weapons of a tenth-circle mage?' he pondered as he skillfully evaded the remaining crystals.

 

A few seconds later, realizing that he was losing blood at an alarming rate, Khan made a calculated decision. He ceased dodging the crystals and instead unleashed his lightning magic upon them. With deft precision, he destroyed all but one—the last crystal entrapped within a cage of red lightning.

 

It didn’t take much for him to sense where the crystals originated from.  Far in the distance was a little boy leaning on a black wolf with a sadistic grin on his face. 

 

Khan was puzzled. This was the same child he had witnessed when he first arrived, presumably crushed by the falling debris. Why was he now aiding the Blackdeath? 

 

'Curiouser and curiouser,' Khan mused as he approached the lad and continued to examine the lone crystal.

 

'This crystal… It appears to be an ordinary light crystal, albeit modified’ Khan thought as he continued to walk while thinking and simultaneously seering another wound shut. 

 

‘I can’t tell what it is exactly but a lot of something seems to be missing from this crystal.’

The Colonel couldn’t put his finger on exactly what he was dealing with.

 

With the speed of a tenth circle mage plus  his red electric wings, it didn’t take much for Khan to reach closer to where Alric was. 

 

‘Only a sixth circle mage’ Khan thought as he inspected the boy leaning on the wolf. Although a sixth circle mage at such a tender age would be considered among the more talented, Khan was thinking more on the fact that a sixth circle had actually managed to deal such heavy wounds onto him. 

 

Normally, his presence alone would be more than enough to instantly kill ants like these but due to the after effects of the blackdeath ailment plus his overexertion, his mana levels were severely depleted. 

 

"Young lad," Khan began, intrigued by the weapon he had encountered, "what is this device you have deployed, and how does it function?"

 

Before everything else, Khan was a mage, and as such he was genuinely intrigued by this item. 

 

Alric responded with a defiant smile, struggling to hold his ground against the overwhelming aura of the tenth-circle mage.

 

"Have you ever heard the phrase, 'nature abhors a vacuum'?" Alric inquired, his gaze filled with contempt as he regarded Khan.

 

Khan nodded, not understanding where the young lad was going.  

 

“Then what would happen if a vacuum of a fundamental law existed and was removed?” Alric asked with a slight grin on his face filled with madness. 

 

“What would happen if the weakest of the forces went missing from the balance of the universe? 

How would the universe correct this balance?”

 

Khan rubbed his chin trying to understand but in the end it felt like the child was speaking gibberish. 

 

In reality though, Alirc had done something very simple. It wasn’t a matter of increasing or decreasing the weight of an object. Instead he had converted the magic pathways inside the crystals to absorb gravity instead of emitting it. 

 

But it was in such a small location that the very atoms that things were made of were affected. 

Within the universe, four forces held it together. In a universe governed by four fundamental forces, Alric had long theorized that there were only two at play.

 

In his previous life, he had tried to prove that weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force and gravitational force were all different sides of the same coin, just acting on particles on different scales. 

But he was laughed at by the scientific community, even called a mad coot. His ideas had been met with ridicule, dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. However, in this world, gravity was not only observable but also malleable.

 

Alric had ingeniously manipulated the crystals to absorb the entirety of gravity within a confined space. With the fundamental force that held the universe together inexplicably absent, particles essential to maintaining the structural integrity of cells and matter simply drifted off into the abyss of space.

 

These crystals weren’t ‘attacking’ anything, they were essentially forcing atoms to wander off into the abyss of space. 

 

But Khan’s knowledge of fundamental forces was far too primitive to understand such a complex concept. Instead he raised his only remaining hand readying to deal with another nuisance. 

 

Electric energy gathered in his palm. 

 

"Be gone, insect!" Khan bellowed as he unleashed his lethal attack.

"Gravity Flash!" Alric countered with a spell of his own.

In an instant, Khan was propelled backward, landing flat on his back. His eyes, wide with disbelief, beheld a world upended.

Khan felt the balance of power had shifted, and reality itself was unraveling.