Chapter 215
No longer spinning in place, but surging forward.
His body became a projectile steered by his own will.
His feet, wrapped in elemental energy, landed on the surface of a nearby intact meteor.
The contact was brief—less than a fraction of a second—just enough for his elemental platform to channel a devastating repulsive force, shattering the meteor beneath his feet into dust while Ilux himself was launched like an arrow toward the next one.
And so, he began to dance upon the apocalyptic sky.
His leaps formed a rhythm of destruction, poetic and terrifying at once.
Each foothold atop a meteor was both a small explosion and a great leap.
One meteor was destroyed to grant him momentum toward the next, which he shattered the instant he stepped upon it.
His right arm, an embodiment of hybrid artillery, continued to thunder, firing upon clusters of meteors ahead to clear a path.
His left arm, the blade, remained alert, cutting down threats that came too close with reflexive precision.
He became lightning moving through a rain of stone—a fast-moving point of energy that carved a trail of devastation across the anomalous sky of the domain.
"Stop all of this, now!"
Buuuuk!
'There is no recoil.
No pain returning to me, as if I were punching into a void forced into shape.'
After dancing across a sky saturated with destruction, the final destination of Ilux's every leap now fixed itself upon a single figure.
Aldraya Kansh Que.
That silhouette floated untouched at the center of the storm, surrounded by an aura of writhing, rotting flesh that perpetually metamorphosed in eternal suffering.
That was his target—the source of all this distortion, and the one he had once regarded as his teacher.
The final approach was anything but smooth.
Before reaching his objective, Ilux was intercepted by a formation of five colossal meteors, each of fantastic size, moving in a lethal pattern designed to block his advance.
With reflexes honed to the level of pure instinct, Ilux's body retreated for a split second, searching for an opening.
He found it in an almost impossible acrobatic maneuver.
His elemental foot clung firmly to the surface of one of the giant meteors.
Then, with a controlled burst of red pulsar energy, he twisted his entire body until he was inverted—head downward, feet anchored to the cosmic stone.
From that position, he launched himself like a catapult, threading through the narrow gaps left between the other four massive meteors, a phantom slipping free from a death trap.
He gathered the momentum of that launch and rotation, compressing it.
The five elements at his feet flared brilliantly, merging with the steel-like resolve in his heart.
His body itself became the final projectile.
He shot forward, leaving a trail of pure white light through the filthy air—a straight, undeniable line that pierced the remnants of the meteor rain and the domain's distortions, aimed directly at the heart of darkness, at Aldraya's chest wrapped in living flesh.
The collision occurred not as an ordinary physical impact, but as a silencing release of energy.
Ilux, the focal point of all his momentum and elements, crashed into Aldraya.
There was no active resistance from the teacher who had lost herself—only a passive presence, dense and corrupt.
The impact forced Aldraya out of her static hovering position, compelling her to move with the direction of Ilux's strike, sliding backward through the distorted air of the domain.
At the peak of that impact, before his momentum was spent, Ilux delivered a punch.
His left fist, still gripping the sword-katana blade yet clenched with elemental and technological power, drove into Aldraya's abdomen.
The blow sent out a visible shockwave, a ripple across the rotting flesh that encased her, launching Aldraya away at tremendous speed, like a falling star flung from its orbit.
Yet that fleeting victory felt hollow.
There was no groan of pain, no sign of returning awareness—Ilux's fist felt as though it had struck nothing more than a lifeless mound of clay.
Aldraya was hurled far away, but her suffering remained intact, untouched.
Then, before Aldraya's body vanished into the darkness, the writhing flesh covering her reacted.
It stretched rapidly in all directions, forming nets or tendrils that seized the very reality of the domain itself.
Aldraya's backward motion came to an abrupt halt, suspended in place like a spider at the center of its grotesque web.
She hovered once more, but now with a balance that was more threatening, more stable, and more alien than before.
'I cannot retreat. Not now, not after seeing you like this.'
Shooooh!
'If the world wishes to call this judgment, then I will stand as its denier.'
Tssiing!
'Time may stop. Causality may collapse. But my will does not.'
Foooooohhh!!
'I am not attacking my teacher. I am cutting the shackles that bind her.'
Retreat was no longer a word in Ilux's vocabulary.
Before him stood not an enemy, but a prison of the soul wrapped in rotting flesh, and his belief that Aldraya's true core was still trapped within it set his resolve ablaze like a red pulsar in his blood.
Mere physical destruction was not his goal.
He had to tear through those layers of darkness, force an intervention—a shock so violent that it might reach the consciousness of the teacher drowned in immeasurable suffering.
His left arm, long dormant, bearing the hybrid blade of katana and sword that radiated lethal silence, began to move.
He did not strike immediately.
First, he raised the blade high above his head, in a posture both sacred and threatening.
Ilux's entire body adjusted, bending slightly, his elemental feet gripping the wavering reality, balancing himself for a release of energy that would test the limits of the domain itself.
Then, in a motion too fast to be counted as ten separate actions, his left arm became a blur.
Ten cutting lines appeared in the air, each carving a fissure of white-blue light into the fabric of reality.
They were not ordinary physical slashes.
Each line was a conceptual cut—an attempt to sever Aldraya's bond with the suffering that enveloped her, to break the cycle of corrupted energy that endlessly circulated.
But Ilux knew that metaphysical slashes alone were not enough.
He required a force capable of shaking the very foundations of the entity before him.
Thus, before the traces of the first ten slashes could even fade, his right arm—the monolith of hybrid weaponry—was already in motion.
He aimed the colossal cannon-arm directly at Aldraya, who had been hurled back and was now held in place by her own web of flesh.
Within that arm, three weapon systems reached perfect synchronization.
And then, everything was released.
Not within normal time flow, but in a single moment that transcended causal sequence.
The world stopped breathing; cause and effect dissolved into fluidity.
In that "before-zero-second" instant, all of Ilux's attacks poured forth simultaneously.
Hundreds of fighter-jet missiles launched from the shoulder-mounted pods, each carrying a different concentrated payload of destruction, forming an intelligent rain of iron.
Billions of energy projectiles from the tank cannons—large and small—roared out in an unbroken torrent, forming a river of brass and light that slammed forward.
And from the ten laser points, not merely ten beams emerged, but a cascade—hundreds of thousands of multicolored lasers radiating across an unnatural spectrum, blazing like a lethal aurora storm, cutting and vaporizing everything they touched.
"Faith."
Fhuuuuh!
"What was that just now?
Everything vanished without leaving a trace? With just a single word… faith?"
Tssssh!
'There is no vibration.
No residual energy. No logic left behind.
My attack was not blocked.
Not deflected. Not destroyed.
In other words, it was erased.'
Huuuuuh!
To be continued…