The blade connected.
General Vance's massive iron greatsword, glowing with blinding golden kinetic force, was stopped dead against Arthur's bare, red-crackling palm.
The concrete beneath them had already turned to dust. The shockwave had shattered every window within a mile.
A single drop of blood slid down Arthur's pale forearm.
The [Mantle of the Fallen Lord] had flickered, exposing his fragile human silhouette for a fraction of a second.
"You bleed," Vance stated coldly, the immense pressure of his greatsword not yielding a single millimeter. "Good."
Arthur didn't flinch. He stared up at the Level 50 General, his pitch-black eyes burning with an icy, terrifying calm.
"You survived," Arthur whispered back over the roaring collision of their auras.
A cold, abyssal smile touched his lips.
"...Adapt."
The deadlock held for exactly two seconds.
A normal fighter would have tried to push back. They would have drawn more mana, tried to summon a shield, or desperately attempted to dodge out from under the crushing weight of the Level 50 Warlord.
Arthur did none of those things.
He didn't push. He didn't pull.
He let the hit land.
But not on his current reality.
Arthur's pitch-black eyes flared with the absolute, crushing weight of the [Calamity Seed].
He didn't use mana to strengthen his arm. He poured his monstrous Mental Energy directly into the microscopic space between his palm and Vance's blade.
CRACK.
It wasn't a physical sound. It was the sound of spatial logic snapping.
Vance's eyes narrowed as his greatsword suddenly lurched forward.
The resistance vanished.
The heavy iron blade slammed cleanly through Arthur's shoulder, biting deep into his collarbone.
But there was no blood.
There was no sickening crunch of bone.
Vance frowned, his veteran instincts screaming that something was fundamentally wrong. The blade had passed through Arthur's flesh, but the kinetic feedback felt as if he had just cleaved through thick water.
Arthur stepped backward, sliding smoothly out from under the embedded blade.
The greatsword remained in Vance's hands, untouched by blood.
Arthur stood three meters away. His coat was intact. His shoulder was perfectly fine.
"You moved the world," Vance rumbled, his deep voice carrying no surprise, only cold, tactical realization. "Not yourself."
Arthur tilted his head slightly.
"A sword can only cut what is there, General," Arthur replied quietly.
He hadn't dodged. He hadn't become intangible.
The blade had passed through him... yet not through him.
But the universe demanded balance. A Level 50 strike could not simply be ignored. The kinetic energy had to go somewhere. The impact didn't vanish.
It lingered.
Two seconds later.
CRUNCH.
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.
Then, reality corrected itself.
Arthur's left shoulder violently exploded in a spray of blood and shattered bone.
He didn't just break. He caught up with the past.
He staggered backward, gasping as the delayed execution finally aligned with his physical form. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, the bone completely pulverized.
Arthur coughed up a mouthful of blood, falling to one knee.
He didn't scream. He just stared at the blood pooling on the asphalt, his dark eyes analyzing the damage.
"Delaying the execution," Vance said, slowly resting the heavy iron blade over his broad shoulder. "A clever trick. But a debt unpaid is still a debt."
Vance took a heavy step forward.
"And I always collect."
Vance didn't rush in to finish the job immediately. He had recognized the terrifying nature of the anomaly he was fighting.
Arthur couldn't block him. But Arthur could control when he was hit.
"You manipulate the space around you to avoid the absolute," Vance analyzed calmly, his golden aura flaring brighter, pushing back the toxic green fog of the Domain. "But you are still bound to a physical vessel."
Vance raised his greatsword.
He didn't aim at Arthur.
He aimed at the ground beneath his own feet.
"Then I won't strike you," Vance declared, his voice echoing like thunder. "I will strike the space that allows you to exist."
BOOM!
Vance slammed his greatsword directly into the bedrock of Sector 2.
He didn't use a spell. He used pure, unadulterated kinetic force, amplified by fifty levels of combat experience.
The earth didn't just shake. It rippled.
A massive, localized earthquake tore through the plaza. The asphalt buckled and folded like ocean waves.
But the ground didn't settle immediately.
The world itself... lagged.
The concrete fragments hung suspended in the air for a fraction of a second too long. The gravity in the plaza violently fluctuated, glitching out of sync.
Vance was aggressively shattering the structural integrity of the battlefield itself, rendering the spatial coordinates completely unstable.
Arthur, kneeling on the ground with a shattered shoulder, was violently thrown into the air as the concrete beneath him exploded upward.
He's erasing the grid, Arthur realized, his mind working at lightspeed through the blinding pain as the world stuttered around him. The reality here is broken. I have nowhere to anchor the delay.
Vance didn't wait for Arthur to land.
The General leaped into the air, moving with terrifying, explosive speed through the lagging debris. He appeared directly above the airborne Arthur, his greatsword raised for a lethal, downward cleave.
Arthur couldn't dodge. The air around him was distorted by Vance's crushing aura. He couldn't delay the damage; the chaotic spatial shockwave from the ground strike made it impossible to pinpoint his own coordinates.
Death was a fraction of a second away.
Arthur didn't panic.
He looked up at the descending blade, his pitch-black eyes perfectly calm.
His left arm was destroyed. His body was failing.
But his right hand was free.
Arthur didn't look at the General.
He looked past him. At the massive, beating [Graveborn Mana Heart] rooted in the Core Tower behind Vance.
"System," Arthur whispered, his voice dropping into something inhuman, a terrifying, blood-red light igniting in his palm.
"Extract."
The massive Heart pulsed violently.
It didn't send a monster. It didn't send a spell.
It sent pure, unrefined, highly toxic Domain-Mana, shooting through the air like a localized lightning bolt, directly into Arthur's outstretched hand.
Arthur didn't absorb it. He couldn't. His Soul Capacity was at 99%.
Instead, he weaponized the risk.
He formed the raw, toxic mana into a jagged, unstable spear of pure corruption and hurled it point-blank at Vance's descending chest.
The General had a choice.
Follow through with the execution and take a fatal dose of Domain-Mana directly to the heart.
Or defend.
Vance's eyes narrowed.
He twisted his massive body mid-air, bringing the flat of his heavy iron greatsword down to intercept the toxic spear.
CLANG!
The impact was deafening. The toxic mana exploded against the iron blade, hissing and aggressively eating into the metal. The sheer kinetic force of the collision threw both men backward through the lagging, unstable air.
Vance landed heavily on his feet, sliding back ten meters, his boots carving deep trenches into the ruined concrete. He looked down at his greatsword. The indestructible iron was pitted and smoking, scarred by the concentrated corruption.
Arthur crashed into the rubble, rolling painfully before forcing himself up to his knees. His breath was ragged. His left arm was a mangled mess. He was bleeding heavily from his nose and mouth.
But he was alive.
Arthur wiped the blood from his chin with his good hand.
He looked at the Level 50 Warlord.
He looked at the smoking scar on the General's unbreakable sword.
"A debt unpaid is still a debt," Arthur echoed softly, a cold, predatory smile spreading across his pale, bloodstained face.
Arthur slowly stood up, the [Mantle of the Fallen Lord] billowing around his broken frame like the wings of a wounded, defiant demon.
"Then let's see which one of us runs out of reality first."