"What... what the hell are you saying?" Ash asked after taking a moment to take everything in. The world he had been living in for the past year now... the one he had made so many connections in and even started a kingdom...
And this woman was saying it wasn't real?
"Exactly what I mean. Everyone in this 'world' are indeed cultivators.... but you're living inside of a cultivated world... or artifact that comes from a deceased powerhouse..." Fay explained which caused Sia to chime in.
"Right... the power of this world is only the beginning of the long and endless path of power. Those in the SSS rank are more common than you believe... you won't gain true influence until the Calamity rank."
"Stop!" Ash said for a moment as he was now seated straight up.
"Why are you revealing all of this?"
"Because.... we are offering to bring you out... into the true world. All you need to do is agree to stop ruining our game." Sia said as she was honestly a bit worried that he would decline... That would leave them both in tricky positions....
Ash hearing this began to think...
'Well... that explains why I haven't learned of any other worlds... or higher realms... Also, I already have the Origin's essence of this place... even though it's a mystery.... I don't truly need to stay here.'
As he thought this he smiled once again.
"Fine I agree.... however, I would advise you to find a new champion. Kale needs to die... not for me per say, but for someone who will be of good use to me."
Sia thought for a moment before nodding. Honestly, she didn't need Kale himself... she just needed a pawn.
"Well... see you soon... I guess." Ash said as the two women blinked out of existence and time in the throne room began once more.
-----
BOOOOM!!!!!
The battlefield had already erupted into a space-shattering collision long before the dust from the first exchange had settled. Neither side had ever intended to hold back; the Velora Kingdom had come to carve a statement in blood and fire, and the Voss Kingdom had answered with the same language.
Yet the sheer number of S-ranks clashing overhead had turned every heart beneath them cold. The moment the fighting truly ignited, every Soul Brand on the field flared awake like dying stars refusing to go quietly.
SHK!
SHK!
Nia's sword sang its cruel hymn again.
Two more vicious cuts carved across Sylvara's torso, deep enough that bone flashed white beneath ribbons of golden-black flame. Blood sprayed in perfect arcs, only to burn mid-air and dissipate before it even fell through the skies.
"Oh, come on," Nia said with a lazy smirk, licking a stray ember from her lower lip. "Use more of those flames, would you?"
BANG!
She drove her heel into the underside of Sylvara's chin.
The kick detonated like a thunderclap, snapping Sylvara's head back and hurling her upward in a spiraling streak of fire and blood.
Sylvara caught herself high above the carnage, boots grinding against nothing, wiping a line of blood from her mouth. Her pupils burned molten gold as Nia blitzed upward again, sword already hungry for the next taste.
Sylvara's lips peeled into a feral grin.
|Infernal Flames (A)|
Nine tails of pure golden-black fire lashed outward in a single heartbeat the moment she willed her talent into action. Each tail moved like a living solar flare, whipping toward Nia from every conceivable angle.
They coiled, crushed, ignited.
The sky flashed white-hot.
And then the flames faltered.
They guttered, wavered, and, like tamed beasts, sloughed off Nia's body to coil protectively around her instead.
"Tsk," Nia sighed, almost disappointed, spinning the stolen fire idly around one finger. "If flames are the only thing, you can use… then you can just die now."
She raised her sword high into the violet heavens.
|Heavenfall Cinderblade (S) – 38 % MP|
Space cracked like porcelain beneath an invisible hammer.
A single, colossal sword of golden-black flame edged in blinding white, spanning fifty thousand kilometers from tip to guard, materialized overhead, hanging motionless for one heartbeat of perfect, apocalyptic silence.
Far below, the remaining fodders forgot how to breathe.
Then it fell.
BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!
The impact carved a canyon of straight through the battlefield. A shockwave of pure incandescent fury rolled outward, incinerating anything beneath S-rank into glittering ash.
Sylvara's hastily woven mana bubble burst like a soap bubble beneath a supernova. She was smashed downward, ploughing a kilometer-long trench of glowing slag, glass exploding into a glittering storm.
When the firestorm finally dimmed, she rose.... charred, bleeding, half her armor burned away, yet the golden-black flames wreathing her now roared twice as hot, twice as vicious. Her Soul Brand blazed behind her eyes like twin dying suns.
Nia raised a single brow, unimpressed.
"Hotter flames?"
She chuckled, soft and fond and utterly merciless. "Whether they're hotter or not… flames are still flames."
|Sol Invictus Ascendancy (S)|
Her aura detonated outward in a perfect sphere of golden-black fire fifty thousand kilometers wide.
Every stray photon, every dying ember on the battlefield, every ray of violet light that dared brush her skin was devoured and reborn as fuel.
Cinderlight bled from her pores like liquid dawn made divine.
She smiled and his time using only her sword and nothing else.
She blitzed Sylvara.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Each impact detonated like a newborn star against Sylvara's crumbling guard.
-----
BANG!
SHK!
BANG!
Spear met sword in a storm of crimson sparks that fell like burning rain onto the grassy plains far below.
Rhea and Yonna danced a brutal waltz across the violet sky, neither giving an inch at first, blades and spearhead screaming every time they kissed. But the longer they fought, the clearer it became: Yonna was losing ground, millimeter by millimeter.
Not because she was weaker; she simply refused to trade raw power for power. She had studied Rhea (not just her but all of Kale's Harem) for months, memorized every twitch of that spear, every tell.... and with Rhea's soul brand she knew that her power could scale rapidly...
So, she fought slow, precise, surgical... every parry a hair's breadth from disaster, every counter a needle instead of a hammer.
BANG!
Rhea finally slipped through.
The spearhead punched clean through Yonna's guard and carved a diagonal gash from hip to ribs. Blood sprayed in a perfect crimson fan, glittering like rubies against the violet sky.
Fucking traitor!" Rhea roared, amber eyes blazing with betrayal and battle-mad joy. "How dare you turn your back on Kale!"
|Unending Momentum (A)|
Her aura detonated scarlet. Muscles swelled, runes flared, and she became a heat-seeking comet as her spear ignited the air behind her like a comet's tail.
Yonna's lips split into a bloody, knowing smile.
|Bloody Return|
A faint ripple of blood-red mist pulsed outward from her body, silent and invisible to almost everyone.
Rhea never saw it.
BOOOM!!!!
Her spear punched straight through Yonna's stomach leaving a gaping hole.... causing even her spine to be visible for a heartbeat, as blood exploded outward in a crimson halo.
Yet Yonna didn't scream.
She didn't fall.
She simply smiled wider.
"COUGH—!"
Rhea's eyes widened.
A wet, choking cough tore from her throat as identical agony bloomed in her own gut. She looked down... only to see a smaller hole, but perfect, mirror-image, already gushing. While Rhea stood frozen in shock, Yonna's wound sealed with a soft, wet sound, flesh knitting like time running backward.
Yonna raised her sword in a lazy horizontal arc.
SHHHHHK-BOOOOOM!!!!!
The swing exploded into a storm of blood-mist blades (hundreds, thousands) that swarmed Rhea like a school of razor piranhas.
They carved armor, carved flesh, carved pride, endless and intimate.
Rhea staggered in the heart of the crimson tempest, blood pouring from a dozen new mouths, yet her grin only widened.
"Haha… you're not bad after all… traitor."
----
Seyra's world had become a cage of black claws and cold eyes.
One hundred Vaeloria's surrounded her in a perfect sphere, each one indistinguishable from the last: ten celestial tails drifting like dark shadows, black hair spilling over shoulders that had never once bothered to move.
Every clone carried the exact same cold, predatory glint in those ancient eyes.
Every claw struck with the exact same killing grace.
SHK!
SHK!
SHK!
No matter where she teleported across the hundred-thousand-kilometer battlefield (void-step, shadow-slip, desperate flicker), another Vaeloria was already there waiting.
A claw raked across her ribs.
A tail whipped across her cheek, parting bronze skin like parchment.
A palm struck her spine and sent her tumbling through empty sky, blood trailing behind her in glittering black droplets that reflected the violet heavens.
Ten minutes of being hunted.
Ten minutes of learning that space itself had turned against her.
Seyra hovered now, sword hanging loose at her side, chest heaving, body laced with cuts shallow and deep.
The plain far below reflected her broken silhouette a thousand times over. The real Vaeloria... the one who had never moved a single muscle, finally tilted her head, moon eyes narrowed with the idle curiosity of a cat watching a bird tire itself against a window.
'Hmm... Space talent layered with shadow… interesting,' she thought, tails swaying like living shadows.
Then she smiled, small and sharp, and willed every clone to strike at once.
Seyra's breath hitched.
She straightened, blood dripping from her chin, and bared teeth stained crimson.
"You… monster," she rasped. "How about you visit my garden?"
|Void Garden|
Her shadow exploded outward across the plain like spilled ink, swallowing every single clone in a tide of absolute black. For one heartbeat the battlefield went perfectly silent.
Then the darkness vomited them back.
Hundreds upon hundreds of perfect Seyra's erupted from the void, each one wielding the same bronze sword, each one wearing the same exhausted, furious snarl.
They spawned in a closing ring only meters from the real Vaeloria and attacked as one.
BOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!
Space shattered into jagged violet shards.
Vaeloria was flung backward like a leaf in a hurricane, silver-black blood trailing from her lips in a perfect crescent arc. She tumbled through the sky, tails flaring to slow her spin, and caught herself with lazy grace.
A single drop of blood clung to her lower lip.
She licked it away, cracked her neck once, and the temperature plummeted.
|Sovereign's Dreamweave (S)|
The violet sky bled away into absolute night. Two black moons ignited overhead, huge and hungry.
Behind her, a thousand silver foxes materialized from moonlight and nightmare fur like liquid starlight, tails ranging from five to eight, eyes cold as winter graves.
|Moon-Devouring Regeneration|
Dark Lunar light poured down in silver-black torrents.
Every cut, every bruise, every drop of spilled blood rewound itself in the space between heartbeats.
It happened in the time it took Seyra to blink once.
When her eyes opened again, a thousand foxes were already descending.
SHK!
SHK!
SHK!
SHK!
-----
Thalion hovered far behind the maelstrom, a lone figure of absolute stillness amid a sky that bled fire and moonlight. His eyes never stopped moving.... silver irises flicking across trajectories, shockwaves, blood droplets suspended mid-air, the exact angle at which a spear left a dying soldier's hand.
He was not here to fight.
He was here to read the future in the present's dying breath.
"In the first fifteen minutes," he murmured, voice soft as winter frost yet carried perfectly to every Veloran ear across the battlefield, "one million six hundred seventy thousand eight hundred ninety Voss lives have ended."
The numbers left his lips like a funeral bell.
Then his pupils contracted to pinpricks.
|Perfect Calculation|
Thousands upon thousands of timelines blossomed across his vision thirty minutes of carnage compressed into a single heartbeat.
He watched futures where the grassy plain cracked into continents, futures where the violet sky burned white, futures where a single crimson spear found a heart it should never have reached.
When the visions collapsed, only one truth remained.
"In five minutes," he said, voice still quiet, still terrible, "the Voss side receives an external surge of power."
The countdown began inside every Veloran mind.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
The violet sky tore open with a sound like heaven itself being ripped in half.
A voice rolled across the battlefield....
|Heavenly Conquest Edict|
HUMMMMMM!!!!!
The low, bone-deep resonance struck the plain like a physical wave.
Blood mist recoiled mid-air.
The plains beneath the remaining Voss troops boots vibrated as though the earth remembered it was once alive. Every warrior under the Voss banner felt mana pour into their veins (wounds knitting, mana surging, dying embers flaring back into suns).
The near dead opened their eyes.
The wounded straightened.
The tide that had been breaking against Velora's dawn suddenly remembered it was an ocean.....