Bond Master

The Proving Grounds (2)

[Initializing Shared Active Skill: Bone-Plate Rend — Linear Form.]

Four jagged, razor-sharp spikes of calcified grey bone energy erupted from his iron knuckles, slicing through the air with a pneumatic hiss. The linear kinetic piercing force tore through the grass, instantly perforating the first Earth-Mouse before it could even cancel its casting rune to retreat underground. The kinetic shock wave expanded inside the narrow burrow hole, collapsing the tunnel walls and crushing a second rodent hiding directly behind the first.

Ren lunged forward, his movements precise and unhurried. He reached down into the ruined dirt, grabbed the two blood-slicked rodent carcasses, and immediately routed them through his spiritual brand. With a faint flash of crimson light, the physical bodies vanished from his hands, appearing instantly inside his internal Confinement Vault. Down on the central stone dais, the Shackle-Hound pup let out a joyous psychic howl, its razor-sharp baby teeth instantly snapping through the armored hides of the vermin, greedily absorbing their raw environmental Mana to fuel its embryonic growth matrix.

Ren kept moving, maintaining a steady, rhythmic jog toward the distant white towers. Every time a cluster of Earth mice surfaced to launch a barrage, Ren utilized his superior spatial awareness to swat away the lethal trajectories while executing compact, high-speed jabs that left a trail of obliterated burrows in his wake. Within ten minutes, the local collective intelligence of the pack recognized the arrival of an apex predator; the shifting thermal webs beneath the grass began to warp, the Earth-Mice actively steering their tunnels away from Ren’s path and redirecting their aggression toward the wider, unprotected mass of initiates stumbling through the field behind him.

"Hey! Wait up! You in the iron gloves—stop moving so fast!"

A sharp, breathless female voice cut through the rhythmic thuds of his boots. Ren paused, casting his expanded peripheral gaze backward without rotating his spine. A young girl with a mane of disheveled dark hair and an ornate, silver-tipped ash wand gripped tightly in her hand was scrambling through the brush, trying desperately to keep pace with his clean perimeter line. Her high-district silk uniform coat was already covered in mud, and a minor graze along her left cheek was weeping a tiny bead of crimson where a stone projectile had clipped her.

"Those gauntlets are an absolute cheat code in an open skirmish like that," she panted, stumbling to a halt a meter away from him, her chest heaving as she used her wand like a walking stick. "The rest of us are getting absolutely pulverized out there, and you’re just walking through them like you’re taking a stroll through a city park."

Ren looked down at her silver-plated casting implement, his eyes tracing the faint, residual sparks of violet lightning crackling around the tip. "You're a registered Mage class. An elemental practitioner. If the vermin throw rocks at your perimeter, why aren't you clearing the path with your own runes?"

The girl let out a bitter, exhausted scoff, wiping a smudge of dirt from her forehead. "Are you completely oblivious to metabolic casting costs, or did you just skip the enlistment lectures entirely? Channeling an active lightning rune requires my brain to calculate complex spatial trajectories while my cellular mitochondria burn raw glucose at ten times the normal human rate. Magic isn't some free parlor trick. I can only manifest two, maybe three active arcs before my blood sugar flatlines and I pass out cold in the middle of a dirty field. If I faint out here, the seniors watching through the surveillance drones will let these rodents pelt me until my face looks like a gravel road."

Ren nodded slowly, his foundry-trained mind instantly translating her complaint into mechanical terms. Her magic was a high-voltage industrial capacitor—immensely destructive, but saddled with a miserable battery capacity and a catastrophic thermal overheat limit. She was built for a controlled vanguard line, not a prolonged war of attrition across an open field.

"Fine," Ren said, turning back toward the academy gates and resuming his steady, calculated jog. "If you want to keep your skin intact, drop into my shadow. Position yourself exactly half a meter behind my right shoulder blade. And unfasten the primary buckles of your uniform coat."

The girl blinked in absolute confusion, her wand trembling slightly. "What? Why on earth would I undo my coat in the middle of a live engagement?"

"Because you're thinking like an aristocrat instead of a scavenger," Ren snapped, his voice cool and matter-of-fact as he swatted away another stray stone with his knuckles. "These Earth-Mice are a low-intelligence strain. Their optical biology is calibrated to track high-contrast movement, bright colors, and exposed skin profiles. If you drape that dark, heavy coat directly over your head and mask your human silhouette, their primitive brains won't register you as a distinct target. They'll focus their proximity sensors entirely on the heavy rhythmic vibrations of my iron gauntlets and the kinetic mass of my boots. I’ll clear the path and absorb the incoming trajectories. You just focus on keeping your feet moving and conserving your cellular glucose. Do we have a deal, or would you prefer to test your lightning arcs against the next twenty burrows?"

The dark-haired girl stared at him for a fraction of a second, her jaw tightening as she recognized the absolute, pragmatic logic of his foundry-style survival strategy. Without another word of complaint, she reached up, snapped her uniform buttons loose, and draped the thick fabric over her head, vanishing completely into the protective wake of his shadow.

The Bond Master turned back to the battlefield, his calcified bone-spikes humming with renewed power through the dark grass. The gates were still half a kilometer away, the hound inside his soul was still hungry, and he had just secured his first tactical asset.

The response to his intrusion was instantaneous. The earth beneath his boots trembled as three Earth-Mice popped their armored, chisel-toothed heads out of hidden burrow holes less than five meters away. Their small, amber eyes locked onto Ren, and their forepaws glowed with a faint yellow mana as they rapidly compressed the surrounding soil into polished, marble-sized stone projectiles.

Thwack! Thwack!

Two hardened stones whistled through the air, targeting his chest. Ren didn't dodge. Relying on his [Ironclad Senses] to map the exact trajectory of the projectiles, he simply raised his left iron gauntlet, swatting the stones away with a sharp, metallic clink that left nothing but a streak of grey dust on his armor plates.

Simultaneously, he dropped his weight, drove his right foot into the dirt to build explosive forward momentum, and launched a savage, linear jab toward the closest burrow.