The glass-smooth crater left by the Emperor's divine decree was still steaming, a frozen moment of celestial judgment. But the peace was a lie. The Royal Knights scrambled across the vitrified earth, their boots slipping on the polished surface as they reached the prone, unconscious form of Menardius Zephyrin St. Cloud.
High above, Dartivus Vaderius stood atop a jagged spire of floating obsidian. He didn't blink when the signatures of Kaelthorn and Graven vanished from his senses. He didn't mourn. He simply narrowed his eyes, his dark aura flaring like a dying sun.
"Two pawns lost," Vaderius rumbled, his voice a tectonic grind. "But the King has spent his soul to take them. A foolish trade."
In a flicker of gravitational distortion, Vaderius vanished. He reappeared a millisecond later, a black streak of annihilation aimed directly at the medics surrounding the fallen Emperor. He was the "Mad Monster" of the Pact, a creature of absolute mass, and he intended to crush the head of the Gonaya kingdom while it slept.
But he never reached the crater.
A blur of crimson and gold intercepted him mid-flight. Redhardt Von Molinhurst didn't just block him; he moved with such unnatural fluidity that he seemed to exist in the spaces between seconds.
CRACK.
Redhardt's palm met Vaderius's chest. The sound wasn't an explosion, but a heavy, resonant thud.
"Hey," Redhardt grinned, his eyes wide with a manic, battle-hungry light. "I am your enemy. Weren't you taught not to turn your back against the ones who want to kill you?"
Before Vaderius could react, Redhardt engaged his Adaptive Motion. He didn't just push; he redirected the entire kinetic energy of Vaderius's flight, doubled it with his own momentum, and delivered a smackdown that warped the air.
The impact sent Vaderius hurtling miles away, skipping across the plains like a stone on water. Redhardt followed him in a sonic-boom-inducing leap, deliberately moving the fight away from the 20-meter rescue radius. He knew that the collision of their powers would liquefy the organs of any normal human nearby.
THE KINETIC RESERVOIR
They landed in the heart of a fresh Maiju wave—thousands of insectoid horrors scuttling toward Ukyo. Vaderius slammed through a hill, rising from the rubble with his obsidian armor pulsing a violent violet.
"You've moved the execution to a graveyard," Vaderius hissed. "Do you think these beasts will save you?"
"Save me?" Redhardt threw his head back and laughed—a boisterous, echoing "WAHAHAHA!" that shook the nearby trees. "You've got it backward! These ugly bastards are just my batteries!"
The Maiju swarm, sensing Redhardt's heat, lunged. Hundreds of them piled onto him, a "gank" of black meat, claws, and jagged mandibles. They buried him under a mountain of chitinous bodies.
Vaderius watched, his gravity-well preparing to collapse the entire pile. But then, he felt it. The pile wasn't crushing Redhardt. It was... vibrating.
Inside the mass of monsters, Redhardt's FlowState was at peak efficiency. Every strike, every bite, and every ounce of pressure from the Maiju was being absorbed by his Momentum Redirection. He wasn't resisting; he was becoming the sea.
"Shinji!" Redhardt's voice boomed from the bottom of the pile, muffled but filled with a terrifying joy. "I know you can't hear me, but you'd be proud! You didn't know, did you? I've been getting stronger too! I'm not the shield anymore—I'm the whole damn ocean!"
With a roar, he triggered Crash Release.
The kinetic energy of five hundred Maiju, stored in his body, exploded outward. It wasn't a blast of fire, but a shockwave of pure force that pulverized the "gank" into a red mist. Redhardt stood in the center of the carnage, his aura shifting like water, sometimes heavy as a storm, sometimes vanishing like mist.
THE VOID-WHIRLPOOL
Vaderius lunged, his fists wreathed in Obsidian Gravity. "Playtime is over, Molinhurst!"
The Mad Monster delivered a barrage of strikes that could have leveled mountains. But Redhardt didn't block. He flowed. Using Adaptive Motion, he slipped past Vaderius's fists as if the world itself could not pin him down. He moved unnaturally, his body bending around the gravitational pulls.
"You're like a mountain, Vaderius," Redhardt mocked, his voice calm as he dodged a strike that shattered the earth behind him. "Firm, stubborn, and destined to be eroded. I'm the tide. And the tide always, eventually, wins."
Vaderius growled, his aura expanding. "Then I will freeze the sea!"
Vaderius collapsed the gravity in a 100-meter radius, trying to pin Redhardt to the bedrock. Redhardt's knees buckled for a split second, but then his eyes turned a piercing, translucent gold.
The Awakening: Absolute Zero-Point Flux.
The friction of the world ceased to apply to him. Redhardt began to vibrate at an extreme frequency, appearing in multiple places at once. He didn't fight the gravity; he created a Void-Whirlpool. The crushing pressure of Vaderius's arcane was caught in Redhardt's orbit, stripped of its lethality, and added to his own spiraling momentum.
Vaderius's eyes widened. "What... what is this?"
"This," Redhardt said, his voice now sounding like the deep, resonant hum of the ocean floor, "is the end of YOUR LIFE!!."
THE FINISHER: MAELSTROM'S MERCY
Redhardt didn't run; he slid through the air like a hot blade through wax.
The Great Inhale. He began to rotate his Formless Presence. A massive, invisible vortex formed, pulling in all sound and light. The battlefield went dead silent. Even the dying Maiju stopped screaming.
The Eye of the Storm. Redhardt struck. To Vaderius, it looked like a single movement, but in reality, Redhardt delivered thousands of strikes in a single second. Each hit didn't bruise; it deposited a small pocket of Crash Release energy deep into Vaderius's obsidian-reinforced cells.
Redhardt reappeared ten feet behind the villain, exhaling a single, calm breath.
"The Stillness of the Deep," Redhardt whispered.
The Collapse. He snapped his fingers.
The deposited energy didn't explode outward. It detonated inward. Vaderius let out a silent gasp as his own internal gravity turned against him. It was an implosion that mimicked the pressure of the Marianas Trench.
Vaderius's obsidian armor remained perfectly intact on the outside, but inside, his muscles, bones, and mana-pathways were liquefied. The "Mad Monster" fell to his knees, blood leaking from his visor, his system in total failure.
Redhardt stood over him, perfectly dry, perfectly calm. He looked toward the horizon, where the smoke of Ukyo rose.
"I'm coming for you next, Shinji," he grinned, the boisterous laugh returning to his lips. "Don't you dare finish this war without me!"
[TO BE CONTINUED]