The air turned from stale heat to a suffocating, vaporizing scorch as the Leviathan broke the surface, its colossal, mountainous frame radiating an unholy, blistering temperature that warped the very light around it. Beneath this oppressive, searing weight, Luke's body underwent a profound, terrifying metamorphosis.
This was the activation of **Aethelgard's Mantle**—an exclusive, peerless skill wielded solely by those branded with the sacred Hero's Mark. It was not merely a combat transformation; it was a divine prerogative stolen from the heavens, granting him absolute command over natural mana. The surrounding environment no longer resisted him; instead, rivers of raw atmospheric mana bent to his whim, twisting around his skin in crackling, blinding arcs of white-hot brilliance, turning him into a vessel of pure, walking creation and destruction.
Yet, divinity carried a crippling tax on mortal flesh.
*Damn it... my meridians are already tearing,* Luke thought, his internal monologues sharp and racing as a wave of agonizing heat lanced through his core. *The sheer volume of ambient mana is too dense.I only have a few minutes—at most—before this power strips my soul bare and leaves me a charred corpse.*
Across from him, the Leviathan roared, a sound that shattered stone and boiled the surrounding sea water into violent geysers. Its strength was monstrous, its scales forged from abyssal iron, and erupting from its massive flanks were thick, thrashing tentacles covered in razor-sharp suction cups that lashed out like iron whips.
What followed was not merely a fight, but a cataclysmic, world-shattering exchange of pure violence.
The Leviathan lashed out first, hurling a multitude of colossal tentacles through the air with enough kinetic force to fracture the spatial boundary. The resulting shockwaves slammed into Luke like falling mountains, sending him skidding backward across the burning bedrock, carving deep trenches into the earth. Before he could even steady his balance, the beast lunged, its massive maw opening wide alongside its flailing tentacles to unleash a torrent of pressurized, scalding vapor that melted the surrounding rocks into glowing slag.
Luke gritted his teeth, blood sputtering from his lips. *Move! If I hesitate, I'm vaporized.*
Channeling the untamed fury of Aethelgard's Mantle, he vanished in a streak of white-hot lightning, reappearing directly above the beast's cranium. He drove his hands downward, summoning a spear of condensed, blazing fire mana and thrusting it deep into the creature's thick hide.
The Leviathan shrieked, an ear-splitting howl of agony that rattled the very heavens. It retaliated with berserk ferocity, whipping its heavy tentacles upward in an attempt to swat him out of the air like a fly, while slamming its head against the obsidian cliffside to dislodge him. The impact sent a concussive shockwave through Luke's arms, fracturing his bones, but he refused to let go. He carved another deep, bleeding gash across its flank with his bare hands, painting the churning waters and writhing tentacles with boiling black blood.
Blow for blow, the devastation escalated. The Leviathan's tentacles tore deep crimson grooves across Luke's chest, crushing the air from his lungs, while Luke retaliated by unleashing concentrated beams of solar-hot mana that bored agonizing craters into the monster's iron scales and severed a pair of its flailing appendages. The ground beneath them cracked, split, and collapsed under the sheer, unbridled weight of their clashing energies. Both combatants were bleeding, both suffering equal, horrific losses, locked in a brutal war of attrition where every second brought them closer to mutual annihilation.
*I have to end this now, before the mantle fades and my body shatters into dust,* Luke gasped, his vision swimming as the blistering heat threatened to cook his organs from the inside out.
Flashing forward with the frantic speed of a falling star, he recalled a memory burnt into his mind—a ghost of ancient knowledge witnessed within August's memory. A sequence of absolute destruction.
With frantic, precise precision, Luke began to carve. Utilizing the raw, concentrated fire mana at his fingertips, he forced a blazing, volatile fire rune directly onto the monster's flesh, repeating the intricate stroke twelve times across each of the leviathan's thrashing limbs and massive tentacles. The glowing seals burned deep into its flesh, instantly locking its colossal, writhing movement in place. The beast shrieked in sudden, desperate terror as its overwhelming mobility was brutally stripped away.
With his remaining strength and seconds ticking away, Luke leapt toward the towering beast's crest, his hands glowing blindingly bright as he carved the thirteenth and final rune dead center on the monster's head.
The moment the final stroke connected, the ambient air snapped shut into absolute, terrifying silence.
*Boom.*
A cataclysmic detonation ripped through the atmosphere. The Leviathan, along with its ruined tentacles and everything surrounding it within a mile radius, vanished into an obliterating flash of white fire. The night sky was instantly drowned in a blinding sea of light, and the monstrous shockwave caught Luke mid-air, hurling his battered, smoking body violently backward until he crash-landed hard onto the distant shores of a forgotten, jagged obsidian island.
Coughing up a mouthful of blood, his senses spinning, Luke dragged himself up on the strange ground. That was when the heavy, inexplicable chill hit him—a deep, creeping dread that had nothing to do with the fire, carrying the suffocating aura of an era long buried by time.
The vast, flat surface of the obsidian island wasn't natural stone. It was carved entirely with gargantuan, cryptic runes that pulsed with an ancient, eerie light, radiating a thick aura of historical weight and forgotten secrets, as if the island itself was a living, breathing entity hiding an epoch-old conspiracy.
Unconsciously, through a haze of encroaching darkness and fading divinity, Luke rolled over and placed his trembling hand flat against one of the massive runes.
The instant the Hero's Mark on his skin made direct contact with the ancient carving, the entire rune ignited with a blinding glare.
Before he could even draw a breath, the island shrieked with a mechanical groan of shifting stone, sinking rapidly back down into the churning depths of the dark sea—and with it, Luke vanished completely into the abyss, leaving behind an empty, silent ocean where nothing remained except the faint, lingering echo of a forgotten age.