Chapter 218
In a flash, her body spun in place.
She rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees with unnatural fluidity, then returned to her original position.
The entire rotation was used as momentum.
Her right hand, raised higher than her fluttering black hair during the spin, followed the motion of her body.
From that forceful, will-driven rotation, a weapon was born.
Not from material substance, but from the manifested concepts of "entanglement" and "punishment."
A dark, intimidating crimson-black lasso appeared, extending from her grasp.
The instant the spin ended, the tip of the rotating lasso shot forward at a speed beyond sight.
She aimed with lethal accuracy, not at Ilux's body or weapon, but directly at his left cheek, as if to brand him, warn him, or impose a more personal and humiliating bond amid their exchange of cosmic power.
"Like forced praise turned into a current."
Confidence in his newly surging power, flowing like an unstoppable river, did not make Ilux careless or arrogant.
He understood that in a battle against an entity like Aldraya—one who had transcended conventional limits—victory could vanish in a single moment of negligence.
When the crimson-black lasso lashed out with ghostlike speed, slicing through air and malice alike, Ilux did not attempt to block or repel it head-on.
Instead, he chose to move.
His body, wrapped in bright yellowish aura, darted aside with agility so sharp and unpredictable that it left afterimages in the air.
He did this not once, but three times in succession, each evasion narrowly escaping the increasingly vicious lashes while searching for an opening.
During those three evasions, Ilux displayed acrobatic ability beyond human limits.
He hovered above the ground, creatively exploiting his elemental platform, until on the third evasion his position inverted completely.
His head faced downward, skimming close to the formless surface of the domain, while his legs pointed skyward in a perfect vertical line.
And in that inverted moment, during Aldraya's third lasso strike, Ilux's left hand moved like a striking serpent.
His fingers, wrapped in conceptual light, seized the lasso's tip mid-lash, halting its lethal momentum just before it could touch his skin.
The lasso, forged from dark will, trembled violently in his grip, as if enraged at being restrained.
Naturally, Ilux would not stop at defense alone.
Catching the enemy's lasso marked the beginning of his counterattack.
From his tightly clenched left palm flowed a new power he had never displayed before.
Not merely the five base elements, but a higher manifestation resonating with praise and reverence.
Lightning erupted, but this was no ordinary lightning.
Its color was a deep, somber blue, streaked with brilliant golden flashes radiating authority and majesty, like a crown adorning the lightning itself.
As it crawled along the crimson-black lasso, the accompanying sound was not thunder, but an echo resembling praise, cheers, and prayers offered by humanity to a Hero.
That sound empowered the lightning further, turning it into not only physical destruction, but an assault on will and status.
The noble yet punitive current surged at the speed of light along the lasso, burning and purifying every inch of the dark energy that formed it.
Its journey toward the source was inevitable.
In an instant, the blue-gold flash nearly reached the other end of the lasso—the right hand of Aldraya still gripping its base.
"Smaller than a fragment, unbearably light even in intent."
Faced with lightning charged with praise racing along the lasso, Aldraya chose neither to block nor deflect it.
Instead, she did something far more radical and terrifying.
With an absolute act of will, she erased the lasso from existence.
Not merely severing it or destroying its physical form, but erasing it completely from every layer of reality.
The lasso vanished from history, from the foundational concepts of "snare" and "punishment" that shaped it, even from the memory of the two opposing primordial pillars, Shi and Ramsh, the sources of all creation and contradiction—and of all things in this world.
Within that act of erasure lay an irony nearly immeasurable.
Shi and Ramsh, as the origins of all that arises through them, never placed their nature on equal footing with any creation.
They never existed on the same level—standing from the very beginning far above all results of creation.
Thus it is no surprise that the pair stand firmly, locking an absolute position impossible to challenge.
Love and hatred must each remain within their own measure—not seek to surpass it.
Everything created by Shi and Ramsh—including causality itself—can never stand as an equal, much less sit upon the same throne.
Worse still, any creation that attempts to comprehend the meaning of Shi and Ramsh's existence will destroy itself.
Without Shi and Ramsh acting as the cause.
Even so, their memory of Aldraya's lasso is utterly irrelevant—never appearing, never recorded—and ironically, Shi and Ramsh themselves might instead question what the observers are truly seeking to understand.
With the lasso's disappearance, Ilux's lightning racing along it vanished as well, erased alongside it before ever touching Aldraya's skin.
Without pause, the next attack was unleashed.
Aldraya raised her left hand forward, all fingers spread wide in a posture resembling both blessing and judgment.
From her palm, it was not a massive surge of energy that emerged, but something deceptively simple.
A speck of dust.
Yet this dust was no ordinary particle of earth.
It was a destructive atom, a singularity of annihilation packaged on a microscopic scale.
At the core of this lethal atom lay a fragment of the writhing, corrupted flesh cloaking Aldraya's body, imbuing pure destructive potential with suffering and distortion.
The dust was released not in a single direction, but in all directions across the domain except directly behind Aldraya's palm.
It spread rapidly, each particle carrying the promise of total obliteration upon contact—a destruction beginning at the atomic level and cascading through the very structure of reality.
Witnessing this new, unpredictable threat dispersing in every direction, Ilux moved on honed instinct.
His first step was retreat—a measured step backward to create distance.
But he quickly realized that passive distance would not suffice against an omnidirectional attack.
So he changed tactics.
Driven by the elemental platform beneath his feet, his body leapt sideways.
Midair, he began to spin—a fast, controlled rotation exploiting the leap's momentum.
After completing a full rotation, his position had shifted.
At the apex of that spin, while still airborne without footing, he launched a counterattack.
His legs, wrapped in yellowish aura and elemental power, extended into a deadly spinning kick.
The angle and trajectory of the strike were focused with absolute precision.
No longer merely to evade or defend, but to strike directly toward Aldraya's still-hovering body, exploiting the moment of surprise after the evasion and before the annihilating dust could reach him.
"There is something calling it home."
The spread of the annihilating atomic dust threatening all directions suddenly underwent an unexpected inversion.
To be continued…