"You're alive… How? That shouldn't be possible."
Vermilion stared incredulously, the being looked a little annoyed.
The puppet glanced at the sky for a moment then back at Vermilion and sighed. It seemed that this wasn't the first time he was asked this question, nevertheless he still answered.
"I'm alive because of your students careless mana siphoning. Hopefully that'll teach you to be cautious of taking mana from people, let alone from that wretch…"
He spat the words out as he mentioned Cassius. Just saying Cassius' name left a bad taste in his mouth.
Isle tilted his head to the side, he was gonna ask more about Cassius before a familiar voice explained.
'It's a simple mana trick. He put a small ball of pure mana into the puppet then wrapped it with his own mana, forcefully suppressing the ball until his mana ran out. In which case he'd lose control of the puppet and it would become a living being.'
Caeruleus explained to him with a sigh.
Isle had also sighed, wondering if the elusive Caeruleus would ever stop being so damn condescending.
Vermilion had been observing the puppet from the moment it came to life.
His superior eyes as a dragon allowed him to find out the nature of the puppet with just a glance.
So far Vermillion could only sense pure hatred from the puppet, it was a stark contrast from Cassius' odd happiness.
If he had any doubts that the puppet wasn't still being controlled by Cassius then they were completely gone now.
Appearance-wise the puppet hadn't changed a whole lot.
The cracks that'd formed as a result of the fight earlier had been repaired as if they were never there, making the puppet look perfect like before.
"If you're not Cassius, then who are you?"
Isle looked to the puppet hoping for an answer.
Vermilion squinted for a moment before going back to normal. It seemed he'd already known who this was.
Surprisingly enough the puppet gave a genuine answer.
"I am Sandrone. Just Sandrone, not of the foul wretch's family, but of my self."
He frowned as he looked at the two. he was growing visibly more annoyed by the second. His fists clenched.
Vermilion opened his mouth as he was about to ask something, despite seeing this, Sandrone glared at Isle before approaching him.
Vermilion closed his mouth then sighed before he outstretched his wing to block Isle.
"Back up."
At this point even Vermilion was growing tired of the crazy fights that were taking place in this realm. Mostly because he had to protect Isle at the same time, forcing him to hold back. He would've been vivid if he could fight freely.
'Wasn't this meant to be a prison?'
Isle was starting to get curious about the nature of this realm.
He had already known that it was a prison, but it didn't seem to be a very good one.
That's what he had thought before he realized it likely wasn't like this a lot.
There were a lot of roses and petals now, but when he had appeared here there weren't many apart from the ones he had woken up on, and the few that'd been on the glass shards.
He learned that roses only sprouted here when the floor was fed blood, therefore his arrival had to have been planned or predicted by Cassius or there wouldn't have been any flowers there.
the timeline of events occurring seemed to start only after he arrived, further backing his theory.
He'd started to think that this entire trial was thought out and planned by Cassius.
But how could Cassius have planted the flowers here without being here to do so?
'The chains!'
The answer to Isle's question was likely the chains that Cassius controlled.
He could easily get some of his own blood on a chain and send it up here to smear it on the ground without Vermilion noticing.
Isle was sure that he was dragged here on the way to Shattered Memories.
'By what though? The roses?'
This begged the question as to the qualities of the roses. He assumed they had something to do with teleportation, but he wouldn't be able to confirm until this fight was over.
"Move outta my way…"
Sandrone waved his hand lightly, a gale formed and knocked Vermilion away.
He closed his hand, Vermilion was entrapped in a ball of Cassius' feathers.
The ball shook for a while before it eventually stopped.
Now that Vermilion was trapped, Isle's frown only grew.
With how easily Sandrone had dealt with the dragon, Isle knew that he likely wouldn't be able to win in a fight against him without losing something.
He didn't have any of his own mana but he still had some of Cassius' mana from earlier.
Though he had a strange feeling that something was wrong with it, so he wasn't planning on using any of it.
He kept it locked away in his mana core making sure it wouldn't flow around freely through his body.
Sandrone sauntered towards Isle.
Isle stood there with his dagger in hand, his grip on it tightened by the second.
"He's in there isn't he?"
Sandrone said as he looked at Isle.
"Who?"
Isle raised an eyebrow in genuine confusion.
"Caeruleus."
He stopped for a moment before reappearing in front of Isle with his hand out towards Isle's eye.
"How would he eve—"
Isle curiosity was stomped on when Sandrone forcefully gouged out his eye mid question.
He would've fought back but it all happened so fast, one moment Sandrone was fields away and in the next he was within arms reach.
Blood poured down the right side of his face.
He screamed in pain, pressing his palm to the socket in which his eye used to rest.
He felt an overwhelming sense of agony, breathes came out heavily as he trembled uncontrollably.
Sandrone held Isle's eyeball in between his index finger and his thumb, he looked into its deep cerulean iris.
When he didn't see Caeruleus in the bloodied eyeball he lobbed it back at Isle.
"Take it back, I've no use for it. I know Caeruleus is watching anyways. It's grown tiring being imprisoned with that wretch, I'll kill all of you then leave. 3 birds with one stone."
He spoke with no pause, It'd seemed that he was serious about this plan. As if he'd wholeheartedly believed that it would be that easy.
He walked towards the now standing Isle. Isle slanted towards the right.
A few moments beforehand it looked like Isle was having a breakdown, but now he looked almost unbothered.
He held a large, ornate crimson lance in one hand and an engraved cutlass in the other.
Unlike the cerulean weapons that were generated while under Caeruleus' contract. These weapons didn't have even a hint of blue, they were purely a deep crimson except for a few traces here and there.
The rare traces on the cutlass and lance were pitch black.
Isle's face was bloodied by his previously eyeless socket, his hands tensed around the handles impatiently.
In anger, Isle had used some of Cassius' mana. He had a new right eye but he couldn't see much of anything with it.
It's iris was pitch black in contrast with his cerulean left eye.
The only things Isle could see with this new eye were Sandrone's mana routes and mana core.
Sandrone's eyes widened.
It was odd that he could see them but it was odder that Sandrone had mana routes in the first place.
Mana routes simply put, are invisible veins in the body that allow the manipulation of mana flow.
Mana routes had to be formed naturally which usually takes awhile, for example Isle took 15 days to fully form his.
Technically speaking the process could be sped up, but not nearly fast enough for Sandrone to have already make them.
There's another method that could explain Sandrones mana routes but it'd take a ridiculous amount of mana.
It's possible to create your mana routes instantly by shooting an incredible amount of mana through your entire body in an instant.
Simply put, the mana core is the organ that lets you completely control mana flow and absorb mana.
The higher your core stage, the more precision in which you could control your mana and absorb mana.
Sandrone's rank was abnormally high for someone who was apparently just created.
He had an awoken mana core. It shouldn't have been possible that he could have a mana core of that ranking yet, but after seeing his mana routes it wasn't really that surprising to Isle.
Raising the rank of your mana core normally took time, you needed to saturate your mana core then it would naturally evolve to the next rank.
Some people have more unique mana cores than others, typically these special cores tended to have no particular correlation to the owner.
Isle knew that they existed but he hadn't expected that Sandrone of all people would have one.
He didn't know the nature of said mana core but it hadn't changed anything for him.
He was gonna kill Sandrone regardless of the numerous disadvantages.
Isle's hand twitched again.
His muscles flexed before he thrusted his lance towards Sandrone.
Sandrone would've tried to block the lance with his arms but he could tell he'd be impaled if he tried to, so he chose to dodge instead. He obviously couldn't dodge towards the lance, so he chose to dodge to the right, minimizing the damage to any major body parts.
He could've dodged to the left, but he would've likely been sandwiched by the cutlass and the lance, so he chose to dodge right and lose the wing that hadn't been destroyed in Cassius' earlier fight.
As Isle's lance punctured the wing, he swung it to the left, ripping the wing off of Sandrone's shoulder, blood had bursted out before it became a steady stream running down his back.
Sandrone grimaced and groaned.
Although he was in pain, he didn't show any other reactions apart from lightly pressing on the hole where the roots of his wing used to be for a moment.
Isle couldn't help but smile. For some reason Sandrone feeling even the slightest bit of pain had filled Isle with an inexplicable feeling of ecstasy.