"YOU DARE!"
The words slammed into the elder's consciousness. The killing blade unravelled as a willforce rose from behind Hestia, extending beyond every limit his Chime-stage perception could measure.
He saw the rule stage man behind the woman slowly float forward. With each inch he closed, something vast and incomprehensible bore down upon the elder's consciousness, and he felt like he would die at any moment now.
The moment the Rule Stage man came much closer, the elder understood what the supposedly Rule Stage cultivator truly was: an Anchor sovereign. His first instinct was survival.
His Astral Core surged as he attempted to release his domain. At the same time, he drew his willforce back from the ruined technique and turned toward the dark-gold vessel waiting beyond Nerath's atmosphere, intending to escape into the protection of its formations before the unknown sovereign could act.
But he completed neither movement. Adrian's willforce pressed deeper into his consciousness, and the domain that had begun unfolding around his body shuddered before even its first boundary could stabilize.
The Anchor did not merely possess more willforce than a cultivator at the Chime. His consciousness had become so dense that its presence disrupted the elder's ability to impose his intent upon reality. Every rule he attempted to move demanded more mana, more willforce, and a degree of concentration Adrian's pressure no longer allowed him to gather.
Adrian added a deliberate grip of pure intent to the pressure, the same defining control that allowed an Anchor to move physical matter without mana, closed around the ebon elder's body and drove him downward. He crashed through the shattered roof of the governing hall and struck the broken floor upon both knees, sending cracks through the stone around him. His hands caught the ground before his face could follow, but no amount of strength allowed him to rise beneath the will holding him there.
Several paces away, the Solvaren Clan Leader stared at the kneeling Ebon Meridian elder while pain continued spreading from the palm strike that had hurled him into the hall moments earlier. The truth behind the two travelers' identities was no longer difficult to understand.
The woman had stood against a Chime-stage willforce technique, awakened her own Chime beneath it, and was now stabilizing her newly condensed consciousness. The man who had appeared to be her Rule Stage companion had forced an Ebon Meridian enforcement elder onto his knees without releasing a domain or any kind of visible power. He understood that both cultivation levels had been disguises from the beginning…
Until this moment, the Clan Leader had still believed the disaster could be contained. Narev could be surrendered alive, the records inside the governing hall could prove that the council had opposed his actions, and the clan might yet establish that Deyran's assassination had been the crime of one grieving elder rather than the beginning of a wider rebellion. That possibility vanished the moment Adrian's pressure descended. Narev's individual revolt had somehow become a confrontation between Ebon Meridian and an unknown Anchor sovereign.
Even if every surviving record proved that the council had never supported Narev, the scale of what had begun upon Nerath might make their innocence irrelevant.
The Clan Leader opened his mouth, intending to plead with the disguised sovereign before anything worse occurred. He did not know what words could possibly change the situation, but if speaking offered even the smallest possibility of protecting the millions of Solvaren living upon Nerath, he needed to try.
Before a single word emerged, Adrian appeared in front of the kneeling elder without any spatial fluctuation announcing his movement.
A restrained surge of pure mana reinforced Adrian's body as he drove his fist upward into the elder's jaw.
BOOM!
The impact lifted the elder from the broken floor and launched him through the open roof. His body crossed the inner district too quickly for the surrounding cultivators to follow, tore a narrow path through the atmospheric formation, and continued climbing as the clouds above Avaris split apart from the force carried behind him. The shockwave spread across the governing district a moment later, shaking damaged furnace towers and scattering loose fragments from the hall, but the direction of the blow had carried its true destruction away from the city.
Adrian did not immediately follow. He turned toward Hestia, whose body remained suspended above the shattered hall with her eyes closed. The thin line of blood beneath her nose had not spread farther, and the newly formed golden dot within her consciousness continued drawing her amplified willforce into a stable center. She had already crossed the threshold through her own resolve, and the remaining stabilization belonged to her consciousness alone. Adrian's role was to ensure that no one interrupted it.
Adrian raised one hand toward her. His refined Willforce Wall had been built to protect his own consciousness, and the structure itself was already familiar to him in every detail. For the first time, he reshaped its flat layers into a closed sphere and placed that defense around Hestia. The adjustment changed only the wall's geometry rather than the principle governing it, allowing his established mastery to enclose another consciousness without interfering with anything occurring inside.
The invisible sphere settled around Hestia, prepared to seize anything that approached her with dangerous force and heavy enough to break the concentration of any Rule Stage cultivator attempting to complete a hostile spell. A narrow current of Adrian's willforce continued feeding the sphere as he moved away. The surrounding elders saw nothing appear around Hestia, but every one of them felt that any attack directed toward the woman within those invisible boundaries would collapse before reaching her.
Only after confirming that the structure had stabilized did Adrian turn upward. Pure mana gathered around his body, and his figure accelerated through the path the enforcement elder had torn into the clouds.
...
The first imperial vessels positioned within Nerath's orbital lanes detected the enforcement elder's body seconds before he emerged from the atmosphere. Warning formations spread across their command decks as his life-signature crossed into orbital space at a velocity none of their systems had expected. Several crews began bringing their arrays toward him, only for every targeting formation to shift again when another figure erupted from the planet beneath him.
Adrian overtook the elder before the man could arrest his ascent. He caught him by one shoulder, stopped his upward momentum with a single movement, and struck him in the chest before the surrounding vessels finished identifying the second arrival. The elder shot away from Nerath along a completely different trajectory, crossing the boundary of the nearest regulated lane and continuing toward the outer system.
The Keldovan vessels began withdrawing from Adrian's path almost immediately. Their commanders knew the strength of the enforcement elder, and they required no further evidence to understand how completely the sovereign pursuing him stood above that strength.
The dark-gold Ebon Meridian vessel did not retreat as quickly. Its command deck entered a controlled emergency as defensive formations rose, weapon arrays remained cautiously unfired, and every record of the encounter was duplicated for transmission. The disciples aboard understood that none of them could intervene in the battle, but they had been trained to believe that no individual offense committed within Ebon Meridian's territory would remain beyond the reach of the sect behind them.
"Transmit the complete record to the sect," the senior disciple commanding the vessel ordered. His attention remained fixed upon the projection of Adrian overtaking the enforcement elder again. "Highest emergency classification. Report that the unknown woman who awakened the Chime is accompanied by a concealed Anchor sovereign, and that our enforcement elder is under direct attack."
The enforcement elder's life-signature remained active, but each new impact drove it farther from Nerath and caused the unstable domain gathering around him to collapse before it could fully expand.
During the brief intervals between Adrian's strikes, the elder continued pouring mana into his Astral Core and forcing fragments of his domain into existence despite the pressure crushing his concentration. He also formed more willforce blades within the Metaphysical Plane and drove them toward Adrian's consciousness with every portion of control he could recover. Each blade fully entered Adrian's Will and broke apart against a density the Chime-stage technique could not penetrate, leaving his consciousness completely undisturbed.
Adrian answered with another fist. He struck the elder away from a transport station, overtook him beyond the lane boundary, and drove him toward a route leading into the uninhabited outer region of the system. Nothing he revealed carried a concept the witnesses could identify. They saw only an unknown sovereign physically beating an Astral elder across distances normally crossed by regulated vessels.
Traffic formations reacted throughout the system. Commercial ships received emergency redirections, inhabited stations closed their local approaches, and the anchors defining several regulated lanes shifted away from the path of the battle. The routes nearest the outer region were emptied completely as Adrian drove the elder toward a dark, uninhabited moon orbiting one of the system's distant worlds.
The enforcement elder saw the moon approaching and understood what Adrian intended. He burned through a vast quantity of mana and willforce, forcing portions of his domain outward even while Adrian's consciousness multiplied the cost of every rule he attempted to control. The Anchor's pressure could make reality-manipulation ruinously difficult, but it could not prevent a determined Astral cultivator from forcing incomplete structures into existence if he remained willing to exhaust himself for them.
Dark-gold radiance spread unevenly around the elder and reached toward the approaching moon. It never joined into a stable domain or established a coherent field of authority. Nearly all the power he forced through the ragged boundary was consumed preserving his body and attempting to bend his trajectory away from the surface, but Adrian appeared above him before that movement could begin.
An immense current of pure mana flooded Adrian's body as he drove one fist into the elder's back.
BOOM!
The elder struck the moon hard enough to collapse the surface beneath him. A basin thousands of kilometers across sank toward the interior, cracks raced through half the celestial body, and vast shelves of lifeless stone sheared away into orbit. Dust and molten fragments erupted beyond its weak gravity in a widening cloud, while the elder's concentration broke beneath the collision and several unfinished sections of his domain dissolved with it.
Before the elder could rebuild those structures, Adrian descended through the debris and caught him beneath the collapsed surface. He drove him through a drifting shelf of stone, followed as it split behind them, and struck him again toward the exposed mantle.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Every impact forced the elder to spend more mana holding his body together and more willforce recreating the incomplete domain that kept failing whenever his concentration broke.
The elder formed one final cluster of willforce blades and released them at the distance separating their bodies. They struck Adrian's Will together and shattered without penetrating it. Adrian's hand closed around the elder's robe before he could gather anything else, and another surge of mana drove both of them through the moon's remaining core.
The last fragments of the elder's domain vanished at the same moment the celestial body failed around them. The damage running through its interior reached the ruptures already covering the far side, and the surviving mass separated into enormous pieces that continued drifting apart beneath their inherited momentum. The enforcement elder's life-signature disappeared within the destruction, extinguished so completely that every vessel still recording the battle received the confirmation at the same instant.
For several seconds, the outer system contained only the expanding field of debris and the system-wide alarms redirecting every regulated lane away from it. As the fragments continued separating, Adrian emerged from between them and turned back toward Nerath.
By the time he approached the planet again, the imperial vessels had drawn farther from his path and formed a defensive arc beyond the nearest stations. The Ebon Meridian vessel remained ahead of them. Its formations were fully active, but its weapons had not been fired, and no one aboard volunteered to test whether the power that had destroyed their enforcement elder and broken a moon would stop at the vessel's defensive boundary.
A holographic projection opened before Adrian while he was still beyond Nerath's atmosphere. "Unknown Anchor sovereign, halt your advance," the Ebon commander said, forcing his voice to remain formal. "You have killed an elder of the Ebon Meridian Sect within territory under our protection. Identify yourself and remain where you are until the sect's authorities arrive. Any further aggression will be treated as a declaration of war against Ebon Meridian."
Adrian regarded the gathered vessels. He could crush the Ebon Meridian ship and everyone aboard it before the commander completed another sentence. He could also descend to Hestia, take her away from Nerath, and leave the sect searching for two identities that had never truly existed. Instead, he stopped between the Ebon vessel and the planet.
The anger that had risen when the elder tried to kill Hestia remained genuine, but it no longer prevented Adrian from recognizing what her breakthrough and his retaliation had created. Ebon Meridian's attention was now fixed upon Nerath, and if he simply disappeared, every consequence produced by their intervention could fall upon the Solvaren Clan after they were gone. Yet as Adrian looked beyond the vessel toward the forces gathering around the planet, he also recognized the opportunity hidden within the confrontation.
Every important Ebon Meridian elder he killed here was one fewer elder available to threaten Andromeda.