Bam! Bam!
Adrian's body jerked with every impact that shook the ground. Pain flared through his ribs and skull in dull, nauseating waves, radiating outward until he could no longer tell where one ache ended and the next began. He had already pushed past his limit long before this; the technique he forced out earlier had scraped his Aura reserves almost clean, leaving behind a hollow, scraped-out feeling that sat behind his ribs like something had been carved out of him and never replaced. Now he could only lie there, half-curled in the dirt, while Seraphiel fought above him at a speed his eyes could no longer follow.
He tried to lift his head once, just to see, and the effort alone made the world tilt sideways. He gave up and let it rest against the cold ground instead, cheek pressed into broken earth, watching the fight above him through a blur of dust and flickering gold.
Golden sabers flashed and vanished. The Pseudo-Hypernova Beast answered with crushing force, each collision sending shockwaves that rolled through the ground and up into Adrian's bones, making his teeth ache and his already battered ribs scream in protest. Every impact felt closer than the last, though he knew, distantly, that Seraphiel was holding the line, keeping the worst of it away from him. That knowledge didn't make the fear any smaller. It only meant the fear had somewhere safe to sit while it grew.
He had done what he could. He had bought Eric the opening that had helped him survive this far, had spent everything he had left to buy that single moment, and there was nothing left in him to spend now. The rest was no longer in his hands, and some small, tired part of him almost welcomed that. He was so tired of holding on to things.
His fingers curled weakly against the dirt, and he became aware, in a distant sort of way, of the sound of his own breathing, ragged and shallow, each pull of air scraping against something raw in his chest. Somewhere above him, Seraphiel let out a sharp cry as it took a glancing blow meant for something worse, and Adrian flinched at the sound without meaning to, guilt cutting through the exhaustion for just a moment before the exhaustion swallowed it whole again.
He closed his eyes.
"Let it end..." he murmured, the words barely more than breath.
He wasn't even sure who he was saying it to. Not to Seraphiel, who couldn't hear him over the roar of its own fight. Not to Eric, somewhere far above in a battle Adrian could no longer track. Maybe just to the dark itself, in the hope that something out there was listening and might finally agree.
Then light pressed against his eyelids.
Adrian forced them open again, squinting hard against a brightness that felt wrong for a battlefield this deep in shadow. The black sky above the central land was no longer empty. Pink, white, and gold stars were blooming across it in every direction, hundreds of them, silent and sharp, turning the darkness into a vast, cold field of light. The sudden illumination cut through the battlefield like a blade, and for one disoriented moment Adrian wondered if he had already died, if this was simply what came after.
But the pain in his ribs was still there. The pain, at least, was real.
The effect on the battlefield was immediate.
A pair of Shadow Beasts mid-pounce faltered as the light stabbed into their senses, their forms flickering, claws frozen an inch from flesh they had already claimed as theirs. One Dark-Embracing Swordmaster raised its blade to strike, only to hesitate when a golden star drifted too close, the unexpected radiance breaking its rhythm and buying the soldier beneath it one more breath of life. Further away, two corrupted lesser dragons locked in a vicious aerial clash broke apart entirely, roaring in confusion as white stars slid between them, forcing them to wheel away from each other with nothing resolved.
Even the Pseudo-Hypernova Beast paused for half a breath, its featureless head turning upward toward the new constellations, some instinct older than its corruption recognizing the light for what it was before its mind caught up.
Adrian's heart lurched watching it hesitate. Not relief, not yet. Just the thin, dangerous hope that came from watching a monster blink.
Seraphiel did not waste the moment. Golden light flared around its armor as it drove the beast back another several meters, wings beating hard enough that the wind of it reached Adrian even from the ground, tearing at his hair and stinging the raw scrapes along his arms.
The Pseudo-Hypernova Beast didn't stay staggered for long. It surged forward again, chasing, and the instant it closed the distance, a circle of white stars swept in around it, folding into a four-edged formation that pressed down on the creature with sudden, crushing force. The beast let out a sound that was less a roar than a scream, something raw and furious tearing loose from a throat that had never once had to make that sound before.
Adrian's breath caught. He had never heard it cry out like that. Not once, in all the hours of this fight.
The beast attacked the stars with everything it had, tearing through the formation in seconds, black claws raking light apart into scattered, dying sparks. But before it could turn and press its advantage, more white stars slid in to replace them, surrounding it again, and Adrian understood, watching it happen a second time and then a third, that this wasn't a single trick the beast could simply outlast. It was a pattern. A trap that kept resetting itself faster than the beast could tear free.
Each cycle bought Seraphiel more space, more time, more openings, and it didn't let a single one go to waste, driving in low and fast, barraging the beast with strike after strike until hairline cracks began spreading white and jagged across its black armor, small at first, then wider, then impossible to ignore.
Adrian stared at the sky through half-lidded eyes, chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged pulls that seemed to catch on something every time he tried to breathe deeper. The stars kept appearing, quiet and relentless, as if someone far above this battlefield had simply decided the night was wrong and had begun, patiently and without asking permission, to rewrite it.
He didn't understand what he was watching. He didn't need to. He only needed to feel the shift in the air, subtle but unmistakable, the first change in pressure over the battlefield in what had felt like hours of nothing but losing ground.
For the first time since this fight began, Adrian let himself believe, just barely, that it might not end the way he had already made peace with.
...
Everywhere the Hypernovas weren't locked in their own war of scale and fang, the lower beasts fought as if their lives depended on it, because they did. Slashing, roaring, the dull concussive booms of small explosions rolled out from a dozen different corners of the battlefield at once, overlapping into a single, constant undertone beneath the larger clash above, a noise so continuous it had stopped registering as separate sounds and had become simply the shape of the battlefield itself.
The Ancient Angelic Dragon watched it all.
Its gaze moved slowly across the layer, taking in each pocket of fighting in turn, calm in a way that belied how closely it was truly watching. The lower Angelic Dragons pressed hard on every front, holding their ground but only barely, worn thin by a swarm that never seemed to run out of bodies to throw forward. It saw one of its own falter under a joined assault of three Shadow Beasts, saw the desperate half-second before another dragon arrived to cover the gap, saw the exhaustion written into every wingbeat across the field. None of it escaped its notice. None of it went unfelt.
"The Darkness Pathway Aura marks have grown too dense inside this layer," it thought, the realization taking hold with quiet, mounting urgency, spreading through its chest like something icy finding its way into water. "I have to do something. Now."
It cared for every one of its troops, down to the last, and it knew their worth in this fight, not as numbers, not as tools, but as lives it had chosen to carry into this war. Each one it had watched grow, had trained, had sent into battle knowing full well what the cost might be, and it wasn't about to watch that trust get ground down into nothing without answering. The thought alone was enough to make something ancient and patient inside it finally begin to stir.
An Abyss-Inhabiting Wyrm lunged for it from the side, fast enough that a lesser opponent might not have seen it coming at all. The Ancient Angelic Dragon dodged, calm despite the speed of the attack, its body shifting with a fluid, almost lazy economy of motion, and in the same breath it found the opening it needed. It didn't hesitate.
Roar!!!
Its chest expanded first, drawing in a breath so vast it seemed to pull at the very air across the layer, and beneath its scales something answered that breath, surging upward from somewhere deep inside it. White veins bulged along its skin and scales, each one lit from within by a slow, golden current, as if light itself had learned to flow like blood through a body built to carry it. The glow spread outward from its chest to its limbs, to the ridges along its spine, to the very tips of its horns, until the Dragon itself seemed less like a creature and more like something being lit from within by a fire that had been banked for far too long and was only now allowed to burn.
The air around it grew heavy first, pressing down before a single sound had even left its throat, thick with Divine Aura so dense it felt almost solid, something the lower beasts nearby could feel crawling against their skin like static before a storm. Then its jaws opened wide, wider than should have been possible, and the sound that tore free from its throat wasn't merely loud. It broke the space around it, the very air shuddering and folding beneath the force of it, rippling outward in a way that felt less like noise and more like law, an edict given voice.
The roar carried across the entire dark layer, unbroken and absolute, reaching every ear that could hear it, corrupted or otherwise, as if the layer itself had no choice but to carry it to its farthest edge.
Every Shadow Beast and corrupted creature that caught the sound felt something seize in its chest, an icy grip closing around something vital and squeezing. Their bodies locked in place, frozen mid-motion, mid-strike, mid-flight, muscles refusing every command sent to them, and then the force came, pressing down on their shoulders like the full mass of a mountain descending there all at once, rendering limb and claw equally useless beneath it. Some of them buckled where they stood. Others simply hung frozen in the air, wings locked, eyes wide with something that might have been the closest thing their corrupted minds could manage to fear.
On the other side of the field, the Angelic Dragons felt it too, not as pressure, but as strength flooding into limbs that had been running on fumes only moments before. Their roars rose in answer, one after another, morale surging through their ranks in a single unified wave that swept across the battlefield like fire catching dry grass, and slowly, steadily, the balance of the battlefield began to tip in their favor, the tide turning in a way that felt, for the first time, undeniable.
Rank 3 Goodness Pathway Supporting Technique. Roar of the Imperator.
The Wyrms looked at each other as they took in the declining situation, and there was no mistaking it now: they were losing, and losing fast, the ground shifting beneath them in a way that felt less like a swing in momentum and more like a verdict being read aloud. Until this moment, the Ancient Angelic Dragon had held back, studying the field, carefully maintaining the position of its subordinates without fully committing itself, patient in a way that had almost lulled them into believing it would remain patient forever. But the instant it decided to grow serious, a single technique had been enough to turn the entire battlefield against them, and the ease of it, the sheer effortlessness, was its own kind of warning.
They exchanged one last glance and nodded, some fragment of a plan passing wordlessly between them, born more of desperation than confidence. But there was no time left to act on it. Before either of them could move, the Ancient Angelic Dragon unleashed a staggering surge of Divine Aura, vast and absolute, the force of it alone enough to make the very air feel unbearable, thick enough to fight for breath against. The ground beneath it seemed to strain under the pull of that presence, and every lesser creature caught nearby dropped low instinctively, some primal part of them recognizing a power too far above their own to challenge.
A blinding column of white light tore free from its horn, climbing skyward before folding back down over its body as armor sealed itself into place, plate by plate, each one closing with a sound like a verdict being carved into stone. And then, with the full force of that light and that pressure gathered behind it, the Ancient Angelic Dragon shot forward, closing the distance in an instant, bearing down on the two Wyrms with nothing left standing in its way and no room left for them to run.
...
"Hmm."
The Will lifted its gaze to the newborn stars, studying them for a long moment with something close to curiosity. Not alarm. Not urgency. Just the slow, measuring look of something that had seen many surprises over a very long existence and simply wanted to catalog one more before deciding whether it deserved to be taken seriously.
Then it looked back at Eric.
"Just when I think you have nothing left, you surprise me again."
Black liquid rose from its form in thin, precise threads, calm, almost lazy in how they extended outward across the space between them. Dozens of pink stars and several white ones were coated in an instant, swallowed whole before they could even react. They swelled, cracked, and burst into dull dust that the wind carried away without a sound, no flash, no violence, just quiet erasure, as if they had never mattered enough to fight for their own destruction.
Eric felt each loss as a faint pull inside his Domain of Emotions, a small tug somewhere behind his ribs, dozens of tiny threads snapping all at once. He raised his right hand without flinching. Fresh stars slid free from the formation and drifted into the gaps the fallen ones had left, their light steady and pale, unbothered by what had come before them, as though the field itself refused to acknowledge the loss.
"I could say the same for you," Eric said, and slowly opened his eyes.
His abyssal eyes were still active, but they were no longer the same eyes they had been at the start of this fight. The four downward black arrows that had ringed his iris were gone now, and what remained instead were hundreds of small pink, white, and golden stars, mirroring the position of every star scattered across the layer, letting him feel and rearrange them at will, the way a conductor might feel the shape of an orchestra without needing to look at a single instrument.
The Will tilted its head slightly, the motion almost thoughtful, almost gentle.
"A Battlefield technique at your age is already rare. To maintain it under this much pressure..." It paused, as if genuinely turning the question over in whatever passed for its mind. "How many years has it even been since you awakened? What Realm of Understanding allows you to hold this many techniques at once?"
Its voice lowered, taking on something quieter, almost contemplative, almost fond.
"You set traps. You plan. You do not lose hope even when the situation is endless. You keep a determined face and continue walking." It nodded once, slow and deliberate, the way one might nod at a memory rather than a person standing in front of it. "Commendable. You remind me of my main body. If only you had accepted the Inheritance."
A beat of silence stretched between them, long enough that the stars overhead seemed to turn a full degree in the pause, the whole battlefield briefly holding its breath around the two of them.
"It is still not too late," the Will added. "It would be for your own good."
"Hmph." Eric gave a cold snort and said nothing more. There was nothing left to say to an offer he'd already refused more times than he could count.
His figure blurred and vanished between the stars before the Will could add anything else.
He had already understood the shape of what was happening. The conversation had been nothing but a stall, a patient, almost courteous kind of stall, but a stall all the same, and he wasn't going to let it run any longer than it already had. The Will was buying time to watch the stars, to learn their rhythm before committing to anything real, and every second spent talking was a second the Will used to study him for free. In a fight between two experts who both knew exactly what they were doing, even words became weapons, and silence, sometimes, became the sharper answer of the two.
The Will's expression turned distant at once, whatever warmth had touched its voice draining away as if it had never existed in the first place. Black liquid surged around it, gathering, coiling, twisting itself into the shape of a long, serpentine dragon that seemed to swallow the darkness around it rather than simply occupy it. Waves of black light swept outward across the layer, its primary method of reading the battlefield now that Seraphiel had rendered its Devil's Eyes unreliable and left it half-blind in a fight it could not afford to be half-blind in.
The pink and white stars shifted at once, breaking the black light apart before it could resolve into anything useful, scattering it the way wind scatters smoke. The Will's gaze sharpened, tracking the disruption. It pointed toward the nearest cluster to destroy it, then, mid-motion, twisted sharply and struck instead at a group of gold stars drifting together in silence at the field's edge, faster than the redirection should have allowed.
It had noticed the pattern.
"The gold stars are compressed Meditation Aura," it concluded, almost to itself, satisfaction threading quietly through the words. "They allow him to teleport."
A low chuckle answered from somewhere else entirely, nowhere near where the Will had struck. Several pink stars vanished. Heavy gravitational force slammed down on the Will from the left, sudden and crushing, hard enough to buckle the black serpentine coils for half a second, and it turned just in time to see Eric already waiting near another cluster of gold stars, arms folded, expression unreadable.
"So the earlier group was only a distraction..."
The Will had taken more damage than it wanted to admit, even to itself. Too many of its thoughts had been burned away across the exchanges of this long, grinding fight, worn down thread by thread until the whole of it felt thinner than it had at the start. It was no longer as sharp as it had been in the opening moments, a fraction slower now, a fraction less certain of its own next move.
That did not make it harmless. Not by any measure, and Eric knew better than to treat it as though it did.
Eric's eyes widened, and he charged away without waiting to see what came next, instinct moving him before conscious thought could catch up.
The pink stars nearest to him darkened all at once, a black stain spreading through them like ink through water. Corruption sparked along his left leg, forming a thin black chain that linked him to one of the tainted stars before he could pull free of it. The others detonated in sequence, one after another, and the blast drove the corruption deeper into him with every concussion. His hair blackened further at the roots. His left eye blurred, dark color creeping back across it like something reclaiming ground it had once owned, and he vomited a mouthful of blood mid-flight, the taste of iron flooding his mouth.
His body was already failing him, piece by piece, and he could feel it happening in real time.
But the Will was in no better state, and some distant part of him took what comfort it could from that.
Both of them were running on damage and residual strength now, spending reserves neither of them had left to spare, each exchange drawing down a well that was already close to dry.
Eric swept his hand forward. More pink stars vanished and crashed toward the Will in sharp gravitational bursts, one after another in rapid succession. The Will dodged, weaving through the field with tight, economical movements that wasted nothing, while Eric used the gold stars to blink across the battlefield, constantly reshaping the arrangement of the remaining lights, never letting the pattern hold still long enough to be read and countered.
The Will understood the danger clearly enough. If the stalemate dragged on, it would remain suppressed, worn down piece by piece until there was nothing left of it to negotiate with, no leverage left to spend. It raised its right hand, slow and final, the gesture almost ceremonial. The horde of Shadow Beasts poured back into the sky at once, answering the call without hesitation.
Inside his Domain of Emotions, Eric watched his Aura drain at a brutal, unforgiving rate, the reserves ticking downward faster than he liked to see. Stellar Starfield was powerful, more powerful than almost anything else in his arsenal, but the cost was enormous, unrelenting, and it never once let him forget it. Even with the Aura stones he had left, he couldn't maintain this indefinitely. Nothing that strong ever came free, and he'd known that going in.
He'd never planned to kill the Will here. He knew his own limits too well for that kind of ambition, and pretending otherwise would only get him killed instead.
His objective had been clear from the very beginning: wear it down. Nothing more, nothing less than that.
"I have to hurry."
The thought cut through his mind, sharp and clarifying, as he beat his wings and accelerated hard, the wind tearing past him. Below and around him, the Will directed its Shadow Beasts with sharp, practiced precision, splitting them into distinct groups and sending each cluster toward a different set of stars, probing for weakness wherever it could find one. A smaller formation stayed close around the Will itself, screening it from any direct approach.
Eric refused to give it the space it wanted.
He cut across the nearest group at once, closing the distance before the Will could finish arranging its pieces on the board. Pink stars vanished in short, violent bursts, crushing beasts mid-flight and scattering the rest into disarray, wings and claws tumbling through the dark. The pressure bought him a moment, just a moment, but the cost came immediately after, his Aura reserves dropping harder with every detonation he triggered, the well running shallower with each one.
He understood the plan well enough. The Will was bleeding him dry on purpose, forcing him to spend power just to protect the starfield it had already learned to fear. It was an open scheme, almost insultingly direct in its simplicity, with no subtlety to it at all. And yet refusing to answer would be worse. If the Will regained room to act freely, even for a moment, the whole battlefield would begin to unravel around him.
So Eric kept moving. Kept intercepting. Kept paying the price, one detonation at a time, because the alternative was worse than the cost.
Meanwhile, cutting through the swarm with precise, economical strikes, he gave the Will something it had lacked for most of this fight: a brief window. Room to think.
Black liquid coiled tightly around the Will's form as it observed the battlefield with distant, measured focus, cataloging everything it could in the time it had bought itself.
"The pink stars are extensions of his Gravitation Aura. That much is clear. He uses them to strike and pressure from a distance. The golden ones are compressed Meditation Aura, anchors for teleportation."
It changed direction sharply, using the bodies of nearby beasts as living shields, absorbing the residual gravitational force that still clipped it from time to time, tearing shallow wounds across its form with each near miss. Nothing fatal. Not yet, though the accumulation was starting to matter.
Its gaze settled on the white stars, lingering there longer than it had on the others.
"But these..."
The connection to the Pseudo-Hypernova Beast had grown thin, unreliable, most of that shared perception severed by injury somewhere else on the battlefield. The Will could no longer borrow its eyes across the layer. It had only its own senses left to work with now, and that alone felt like a loss worth noting, one more thing stripped away from it in a fight that kept stripping things away.
It lashed out with a thread of black liquid, aiming to destroy a cluster of white stars in one clean motion.
The stars shifted.
Not far. Not dramatically. Just enough to slide out of the direct path of the attack, an almost casual evasion, untroubled and steady.
The Will's eyes narrowed. It attacked again, faster this time, a wider sweep meant to leave no room for correction, no gap for the stars to slip through.
Once more, the white stars adjusted. Their movement stayed slight, almost reluctant, but unmistakably deliberate. They were no longer static points of light scattered across the sky, waiting passively to be found and destroyed. They were responding.
A long silence stretched through the Will's mind, heavier than anything that had come before it in this entire fight.
"...They adapt."
The realization sank in slowly, taking hold with quiet finality. Not panic. Recognition. These stars weren't a fixed formation to be memorized and countered once and left behind. The longer the fight continued, the more accurately they would read its patterns and answer them in kind, learning faster than it could unlearn. Every exchange was a lesson, and the battlefield itself was learning how to suppress it, one small adjustment at a time, patient in a way that felt almost worse than aggression would have.
"I have to unravel this field," it said under its breath, voice low and flat, "before it finishes learning me."
Far across the dark sky, Eric watched through a small lattice of white stars hovering near the Will like a silent, patient eye, close enough to catch every flicker of its expression.
So he had already noticed. Faster than expected, Eric thought, and felt something tighten briefly in his chest at the timing of it.
He felt no real alarm at the realization, though. Discovery had always been inevitable; there was no version of this fight where the Will stayed blind forever, not against something this old and this careful. What mattered now was the timing, and for the moment, it still favored him.
The Will would be forced onto the offensive.
Eric had taken the initiative, and for the first time since this fight began, he intended to keep hold of it for as long as he possibly could.
Both of their gazes turned sharp in the same instant, as if some unspoken line between them had finally been crossed, some quiet phase of the fight ending all at once.
The Will moved first. It looked back toward where Eric hovered among the stars and pointed, calm but absolute, a gesture that carried no doubt in it whatsoever. The small lattice of white stars floating near it, Eric's borrowed eyes on the battlefield, shattered on command, winking out one after another in quick succession. His window into the Will's side of the fight closed as quickly as it had opened, leaving him blind again just when he'd started to see.
"Tch." Eric clicked his tongue, more irritation than surprise, the loss stinging less than it might have an hour ago.
There was no time to mourn a severed connection, not here, not now. He turned his attention back to the swarm still pressing in from every side and began manipulating the remaining stars, cutting the horde of beasts down cluster by cluster, one detonation at a time, refusing to give the Will a single inch of the ground he'd already paid so much to take.