[A/N: Forgot about the sword. >>>>>]
The warmth from the world disappeared in an instant, as if someone had reached into the atmosphere and ripped the heat out by its roots. The world began to freeze—absolute zero was unleashed upon the land, the temperature plummeting so rapidly and so completely that the air itself began to crystallize.
Moisture froze mid-air, forming glittering sheets of ice that hung suspended in the atmosphere like frozen curtains. The ground below turned white as frost spread across every surface in every direction, racing outward from Reinhard's position at a speed that nothing could outrun.
Reinhard grinned as he felt the full weight of the power gathering in his blade—he could the the certainty that he could unleash a strike at his absolute full power, holding nothing back. But the god of lightning, seeing that grin spread across Reinhard's face, felt his expression drop in horror. He could sense it—his own mana was being absorbed by Reinhard. It was being sucked toward the sword, pulled from his body against his will, drawn in to further strengthen the already impossibly overpowered strike that was about to be unleashed upon him. He was being used as fuel for his own destruction.
Reinhard cut forward in a single, clean motion. All light in the world disappeared. Every source of illumination, from the sun above to the faintest glow of ambient mana, was swallowed whole, plunging the entire world into an absolute darkness that lasted for a single, terrifying heartbeat. In that void, there was only one light remaining—a dark red sword slash, burning with the aura of primordial chaos, cutting through the air in a perfect arc.
The slash swallowed the god of lightning entirely, engulfing his avatar and erasing it from existence. There was no resistance, no final defense, no last-second technique that could save him. The divine avatar simply ceased to be, unmade by a force that treated godhood as an irrelevance.
All defenses, before that sword slash, were proven meaningless—every barrier, every ward, every protection the god of lightning had erected in the fraction of a second he had to react was treated as though it didn't exist. And due to Reinhard's perfect control over his blade, the sword slash didn't damage anything else. Not a single blade of grass, not a single stone, not a single living creature beyond its intended target was harmed.
The slash simply disappeared after its job was done, fading into nothing as though it had never existed. But the sheer force displaced by the attack cleared out every cloud from the sky—not just above the battlefield, but for as far as one could see in every direction, and far beyond that. Not even a single wisp of cloud could be found anywhere across the heavens. It became a perfectly clean blue sky, stretching from horizon to horizon without interruption, scoured bare by the aftershock of a single swing.
Reinhard sheathed his sword with a quiet click, the blade sliding back into its scabbard as warmth and light returned to the world simultaneously, flooding back into the atmosphere as if a dam had been released. This was the first time he had ever absorbed so much mana at once.
Normally, he actively suppressed his unique physique that absorbed mana at all times, keeping its range and intensity contained to avoid draining the area around him dry. He hadn't expected that he could absorb so much mana so quickly that the sheer absence of energy in the environment would bring forth absolute zero—that the simple act of pulling all ambient mana from the world would strip the heat from reality itself. That was nice to know.
"It's like I can breathe," Reinhard said with a light smile, rolling his shoulders as if a weight he hadn't even realized he'd been carrying had just been lifted. It was nice, being able to swing his sword with his full might for the first time.
The sensation was liberating in a way he hadn't anticipated—it made him realize that before this moment, his every movement had been limited, constrained, like trying to run through waist-deep water. And now, for just that one swing, his movement had been allowed to move freely, without restriction, without suppression, without anything holding him back. He wanted to feel that again.
"You're no mortal." The god of war said through gritted teeth, his body battered and his pride in ruins as he stared up at the being hovering in the sky above him.
"I'm Reinhard Pendragon. I'm mortal." Reinhard said calmly, walking through the air toward the god of war with an unhurried stride. The god of war's face dropped for a moment, the implications of those three bloodlines combined hitting him with a weight that went beyond mere surprise. But the shock lasted only an instant before it was replaced by something else entirely—resolve, or perhaps desperation. The god of war suddenly moved, accelerating to speeds beyond that of light, his body vanishing from where he lay and reappearing in Reinhard's path in the same heartbeat.
Reinhard was about to move in response when his face suddenly shook with pain. His whole body was screaming at him, as if he had done the world's most hellish workout. He reacted quickly despite the shock, bringing up his guard and blocking the god of war's spear before it could reach its true target. But he was a heartbeat too slow in his positioning, and the spear pierced clean through his shoulder instead.
Reinhard had managed to shift his body at the last possible moment, twisting just enough to ensure that his shoulder took the hit instead of his heart, which had been the spear's original destination. A few inches to the right, and the battle would have ended very differently.
This marked Reinhard's second time being injured in this world. The first had been by Thorin, the eighth-circle mage whose fireball had burned his skin. And the second was now, by the god of war himself.
The god of war roared as he dared not waste this chance—this might be the only opening he would ever get against someone like Reinhard. He unleashed everything he had left, every reserve of divine power stored within his avatar, and sent the spear rocketing downward with Reinhard still impaled on it, driving him toward the ground at devastating speed.
Simultaneously, he held his hands toward the sky above, and a massive golden magic circle materialized in the heavens, its intricate patterns blazing with holy light. From the magic circle, a sword as massive as a mountain appeared—a blade so enormous that its shadow darkened the land below like an eclipse. The colossal weapon fell to the ground at a speed faster than light, aimed directly at the point where Reinhard would impact.
"This is my chance, you mortal, think your body can handle such a high level of swordsmanship?" The god of war roared, and as he spoke, he summoned a beautiful red bow. He aimed at the point Reinhard was, and fired an arrow made out of divine energy,
The arrow shot fast, before it fragmented into billions of individual arrows that spread across the sky in a blanket of golden light so dense that it blotted out the sun entirely. But he didn't stop there. He landed on the ground beside Reinhard's impact crater, summoned a massive shield into his hands, and slammed it into the earth with enough force to crack the bedrock beneath.
As the shield hit the ground, thousands of copies of the god of war materialized behind him, each one springing into existence from the point of impact and spreading outward in a wave of divine replication. They all moved in perfect coordination, forming a massive circle around the battlefield, and in the center of their formation, they collectively generated a magic circle of staggering complexity and power.
From that magic circle, a spear appeared—not just any spear, but the spear that belonged to the god of wisdom himself. It was a weapon of conceptual authority, a spear that would rewrite cause and effect upon being thrown, altering the very fabric of reality to ensure that it would always hit its target, no matter what.
Dodging was meaningless against it. Blocking was irrelevant. The spear didn't need to reach its target through conventional means—it simply rewrote the universe so that the outcome where it struck had always been the only possible outcome from the moment it left the thrower's hand.
It was launched toward Reinhard, streaking across the distance in a blur of golden light. And with that final attack committed, the god of war's clones disappeared in unison, their existence spent, and the original fell to the ground, breathing heavily while looking ahead at the point of convergence where every attack was about to land. He was sure this should kill Reinhard.
There was no conceivable way he could face all of these attacks by himself simultaneously—the mountain-sized sword, the arrow that fragmented into a sea of arrows, and the spear that rewrote causality. It was overkill by any reasonable definition, and that was precisely the point.
All of the attacks landed at the same time—the billions of arrows, the causality-rewriting spear, and the mountain-sized sword. They all hit their mark in perfect synchronization, converging on Reinhard's position in a single, cataclysmic instant. The explosion that followed caused an earthquake so massive that the entire human domain shook from border to border. The tremor wasn't localized—it spread across the whole of the continent and beyond, reaching into territories that had nothing to do with this battle.
Around the human domain, buildings began shaking violently before crumbling and falling apart, their foundations giving way under the force of the tremors. Structures collapsed on the people inside and around them, killing them where they stood or slept or worked. Ancient trees that had stood for centuries toppled over, their root systems torn from the earth.
Mountains broke apart, their peaks splitting and sliding downward in massive avalanches of stone and debris. The ground itself split open in jagged crevasses, swallowing everything nearby—homes, roads, livestock, entire sections of villages disappearing into the earth's depths without warning.
Near bodies of water, the oceans and lakes surged and moved in devastating waves, swallowing coastal villages and port cities alike. Some bodies of water disappeared entirely, their basins cracking open and draining into the newly formed fissures below, and the list of devastation went on and on across the land.
It was like it was the end of the world. This was the power of a god unleashed without restraint, the full destructive capability of a divine being who had decided that nothing in the blast zone deserved to survive.
And at the center of all of it, at the exact point where every attack had converged in that singular moment of annihilation… Reinhard could be seen walking out of the explosion, his steps calm and unhurried, while removing the spear from his shoulder with a casual pull. He tossed the weapon aside, and it clattered to the ground, its divine light already fading.
That was the only injury he had suffered from the entire onslaught—the spear wound to his shoulder that the god of war had inflicted before the bombardment even began. Everything else, the arrows, the causality spear, the explosion, the combined force of a thousand divine clones—none of it had left so much as a scratch on him.
"You saw the future, and from the start to now, you were aiming for the one opening that would be formed when I used my full power attack," Reinhard said calmly, looking at the god of war, who was on his knees on the ground, his body spent and his face frozen in horror at seeing that his attacks had not injured Reinhard in the slightest.
The god of war's eyes glowed as he activated his ability to see the past, rewinding the events to understand what had happened in the moments he couldn't perceive in real time. He wasn't the god of time—that domain belonged to another—but gods could still peer into the past and future to some degree, although not with the same clarity or depth as those whose domain fell under temporal authority. There, in the rewound sequence of events, he saw what had truly happened and understood at last why his final gambit had failed so completely.
As Reinhard had been injured by the god of war's spear—the moment that divine weapon pierced through his shoulder—it triggered his body's adaptation to activate at its highest possible speed, the injury serving as exactly the kind of stimulus his adaptation had been waiting for. This whole time, Reinhard had been suppressing his adaptation, but with him being injured, he could no longer suppress it. So, while he adapted to the spear injury, his passive adaptation kicked in to deal with the debuff.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. When Reinhard hit the ground at the center of the bombardment, he had already adapted to the debuff he had been enduring throughout the entire battle. The magic circle's suppression, which had been crippling him to a fraction of his true power, simply stopped working on him. His body had analyzed its structure, understood its mechanism, and rendered itself immune. And the moment the debuff fell away, the world itself reacted—instantly, frantically, desperately.
It was like the world was throwing blessings at Reinhard as fast as it could generate them, stacking protection after protection onto its most beloved child to ensure he wasn't hurt in the slightest by what was coming. The world wasn't just helping—it was panicking, pouring every resource it had into shielding the one existence it valued above all others. These were the blessings he received in that critical moment:
[A/N: This is the first time Reinhard bled. Throin didn't make him bleed; Throin only burnt him.
This is the first time MC blocked, but he acted too slowly and didn't trigger his ability.
MC's body isn't strong enough for him to use the full weight of his swordsmanship. In the same way a sword is destroyed when it is used, his body would be destroyed. But he would adapt to this.
The god of war didn't see everything in how MC adapted. To him and the gods' eye, as soon as Reinhard was injured, the world rushed forward to protect him, bypassing the debuff. So they would be under the belief that the world personally acted to save Reinhard. But Reinhard's secret would be exposed. For one, blessings in his hands are far too strong, and the world spoils him.]