Chapter 65
A deep silence fell over the broken arena.
The noise from the other battles became a distant, muffled sound.
Inside the first barrier, the air grew thick and heavy.
The last few Elites, maybe five or six, froze in their smaller fights.
Their weapons lowered as a basic instinct told them to run.
They were small fish who suddenly found themselves in water with two crashing giants.
Austin's burning eyes, with three black-leaf pupils spinning in red, were locked on Lucas's calm, blue eyes.
No words were spoken.
Here, words were useless.
Their plans were shown in a tightened grip, a shift in stance, and the gathering of mana that made the air buzz.
[Mana Spell: Flash Step]
The air around Lucas shivered, then fractured.
With a sound like a shattering crystal, he vanished not as a blur, but as a pulse of condensed cerulean light.
His katana, the Frost-Tracer, became an extension of the spell—a sliver of impossible cold and razor-sharp intent, propelled by magic that warped space itself for a single, devastating step.
[Fire Spell: Quick Step]
Austin's departure was an act of violent combustion.
The ground beneath his boots blackened and cracked as he erupted forward, not in a run but in a controlled detonation.
He became a living comet, trailing searing orange and crimson embers.
His short sword, Emberclaw, glowed white-hot, heat haze warping the air around its edge as it carved a path through sheer explosive force.
Their convergence was not a meeting, but a cataclysm.
Two streaks of opposing annihilation—one a cutting line of arctic blue, the other a roaring torrent of solar orange—collided at the center of the training ground.
TING!
The first impact was a single, deafening chime that vibrated in the bones of every onlooker.
Then, the world dissolved into chaos.
They were no longer men, but principles of motion given form, ricocheting off walls, earth, and each other at velocities that shredded the air.
Moving at over seventy meters per second, they became afterimages and sonic booms.
Every clash was a localized earthquake.
TING-TING-TING-TING!
The sound was a staccato hailstorm of ringing metal, each note lagging behind the reality of the blow that created it.
With every parry and slash, concentric shockwaves exploded outward, visible as shimmering rings of distorted air.
They kicked up torrents of dust and gravel, flattened grass in perfect circles, and sent vibrations through the ground that rattled the teeth of distant observers.
To the stunned crowd, the duel was a terrifying, beautiful abstraction.
There were no discernible fighters—only the violent ballet of two opposing auras.
A flash of glacial blue would cut a wide arc, only to be met and dissolved by a whirling corona of furnace-orange.
A crescent of orange flame would erupt, only to be split down its heart by a piercing line of azure light.
The courtyard became a canvas of their passing: frozen scorch marks and smoldering frost patterns crisscrossing in a frantic, ephemeral tapestry.
The relentless percussion of their weapons—TING! TING-TING-TING!—was the only constant, a metallic heartbeat to the spectacle of two forces trying to erase each other from existence.
[Fire spell: Great Fire Balls]
Austin's feet left scorched earth as he launched himself skyward, the air whistling past him.
Below, the arc of Lucas's strike cleaved through empty space.
From his elevated perch, Austin retaliated.
His palms flared, not with simple flames, but with spheres of churning, sun-bright infernos.
One after another, like falling stars in reverse, a barrage of these Great Fire Balls screamed toward Lucas, each trailing a wake of distorting heat and leaving the smell of ozone in their path.
[Mana spell: Slashers]
Lucas didn't flinch. With a sharp, downward sweep of his blade, he didn't cast a shield, but a symphony of silent destruction.
From his sword erupted dozens of crescent moons, not of metal, but of solidified, shimmering mana—his Slashers.
They hummed through the air with surgical precision, each one intercepting a fireball in a flash of violent contradiction: the roaring chaos of fire meeting the silent, cutting order of mana.
The air erupted in a staccato series of firework-like detonations—crack-boom-fizz—as each projectile mutually annihilated the other in a shower of dying embers and dissipating light.
Through the dissipating curtain of ash and energy, Austin was already landing, skidding back, his focus inward, preparing his next assault.
[Fire spell: Scorching Annihilation Wave]
The air grew deathly still, then superheated.
Austin's short sword became a conduit for a calamity.
He didn't swing it; he unleashed it.
A Scorching Annihilation Wave erupted—a horizontal tsunami of blue-white fire that roared forward.
This was not mere flame; it was concentrated annihilation, a wall of heat so intense it turned the stone beneath it to instant, bubbling glass.
The very air crackled and screamed as it was consumed.
Lucas, a blur of motion, knew evasion was impossible; the wave was too vast.
In a fraction of a second, he propelled himself backward with explosive force, his hands already weaving a counterspell mid-retreat.
[Mana spell: Harmonic Disruption]
Lucas's spell was not one of brute force, but of insidious precision.
Harmonic Disruption sent out invisible, razor-sharp threads of manipulated mana vibrations.
They sought not to block the annihilating wave, but to corrupt its core.
The leading edge of the blue-white tsunami wavered, its cohesive fury disrupted.
With a deafening SCREEECH, the spell misfired, violently twisting ninety degrees and roaring along the perimeter of the dome like a caged star.
Spectators who had believed themselves safe at the edges were caught in the cataclysmic redirect, their defensive spells shattering as they were violently hurled from the arena.
[Fire spell: Inferno Point]
As the chaos subsided, a new, silent threat emerged. Austin's sword glowed, not with encompassing flame, but with a terrible, focused intensity.
All the fury of a forge was compressed into its edge, the metal blazing a searing, painful white-hot—the Inferno Point.
Across from him, Lucas answered in kind, his own blade sheathed not in heat, but in a dense, vibrating cocoon of deep-blue mana that made the very light around it warp.
Without a word, they became shadows.
Their figures vanished, replaced by afterimages and the thunderous punctuation of their clash.
Boom, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! Explosions bloomed randomly across the scarred dome floor—the aftermath of near-misses and deflected strikes.
The sharp, clear Ting of swords kissing amidst the bass roars was a fleeting, metallic heartbeat.
In one such frozen moment, their blades locked, their eyes met over the crossed steel.
A wild, acknowledging grin spread across both their faces just as Austin's will triggered his next evolution.
[Fire spell: Phoenix Ascent]
With a sound like a roaring furnace, flaming wings of crimson and gold burst from Austin's back.
They didn't flap, but blazed, providing a terrifying, continuous jet-like thrust.
Combined with his Quick Step, his speed skyrocketed.
He became a streaking comet of fire, crossing distances in eyeblinks, his velocity hitting a blistering 80 meters per second.
The battle's tempo redlined.
Lucas's aura deepened, a visible pressure wave of power announcing.
His speed matched the comet, stride for stride.
Ting-ting-TING!
BOOOM!
Their duel was now a storm of sonic booms and shattering stone.
[Mana spell: Phantom]
After one particularly massive collision, a cloud of dust and debris mushroomed upward.
Lucas used the veil.
His Phantom spell bent both light and the ambient mana around him, not into true invisibility, but into a perfect, seamless camouflage.
He vanished—sight, sound, and magical presence utterly erased.
Austin's clover eyes, which could normally trace the flow of mana in a living being like glowing rivers, scanned frantically and saw nothing.
The absence was terrifying.
Then, pure instinct screamed.
From his right, a blade materialized from empty air, aimed at his temple.
There was no time to move.
[Fire spell: Nova Expansion]
Thought compressed into microseconds.
Austin's body became a star's core.
A Nova Expansion detonated outward from his very skin—a perfect, spherical cataclysm of heat and concussive force.
BOOOOMMM!
The remaining few in the dome were blasted cleanly out.
Lucas was only saved by a desperate, preemptive Flash Step that left a afterimage vaporized in his place.
Silence, heavy and charged, settled. In the center of the devastation, two figures stood wreathed in fading energy:
Lucas amidst shimmering air, and Austin at the heart of a settling firestorm.
No words were needed.
They vanished from their spots, only to simultaneously reappear at the exact center of the dome, spells already screaming from their weapons.
[Fire spell: Mountain-Cutting Flame Strike]
[Mana spell: Arc Cleave]
Austin' swing released a crescent of fire ten meters wide, a blade of pure incineration capable of shearing through stone fortresses.
Lucas met it with his Arc Cleave, a single, monstrous amplification of his Slasher—a crescent of condensed mana equal in every measure of length, intensity, and devastating power.
The collision was not an explosion, but a moment of annihilation.
BOOOOOOMMMMMMM
The sound was deep, final, and all-consuming.
A pillar of fire and shattered light erupted skyward, swallowing the center of the dome, as the two supreme attacks fought for dominion, neither giving an inch