Chapter 405
"Hymns of praise, gather. Acknowledge the Heroism of Humanity—not as the past, but as form."
Shuuh!!
"I am the symbol that learns. I am the faith that adapts. With a single step, I arrive."
Baaaam!!!
"Bow to the one who adapts."
Then, a transformation that went far beyond ordinary defense or counterattack began to occur within Xavier.
He did not attempt to break Ilux's logic with greater force, nor cleanse the distortion with his golden light.
Instead, he did something far more terrifying and philosophical: he adapted existentially.
In essence, he did not reject the twisted reality Ilux had imposed.
He instead changed the very way he himself existed so that it aligned with—and then mastered—the logic that had been forced upon him.
It was a surrender that became the highest form of conquest.
The process of adaptation unfolded according to principles that defied common sense.
When Ilux attacked Xavier's perception and the way he understood the world, Xavier immediately replaced the manner in which he existed.
He stopped "understanding" and began "becoming" according to the new parameters.
When Ilux locked the concept of space around him, making direction and distance meaningless, Xavier stopped depending on space altogether.
His existence no longer required coordinates.
He simply existed at the point where his will declared him to be.
When Ilux attacked the law of cause and effect that should have bound him, Xavier responded by becoming a "result" that appeared without needing a "cause" traceable by Ilux's logic.
And most terrifying of all, when Ilux attempted to bind his glorious history by distorting it, Xavier did not try to defend his old narrative.
Instead, he brutally mutilated that very history, cutting away the parts that Ilux had degraded, and instantly replacing them with a "new history" born directly from his current will—an alternative past no less solid and fully supportive of his position.
After that horrifying existential transformation was complete, Xavier's counterattack came.
Yet the attack was not spectacular at all.
There were no elemental explosions, no giant sigils, no complex perceptual distortions.
There was only one simple motion, almost flat in its simplicity.
Xavier raised his right arm and pointed upward with his index finger.
The movement was ordinary, like someone pointing toward the moon.
Yet with that motion, the entire golden stage and symphony of praise behind him seemed to concentrate all their momentum into that single point.
A pure existential pressure—not force or energy, but a final statement about reality—launched calmly yet irresistibly forward.
Ilux, who was still locked in the mindset of attacking and manipulating, was completely unprepared for this kind of response.
He had no time to adapt, to analyze, or to create contingencies.
'As long as I can still outwit meaning, as long as logic can still be twisted, this battle is not over.'
Defeat was not an option that crossed Ilux's mind at this point.
Even when struck by an existential pressure that shook the foundation of his understanding, his fighting instinct as a trained student of the Star Academy burned even brighter.
He refused to submit to Xavier's pure will.
Instead, his quick mind devised an unexpected response—an attempt to outmaneuver the golden aura and the stage of worship that seemed inseparable from the legend himself.
His logic was simple.
If he could not attack the concept of Xavier directly, perhaps he could damage its medium—or at least test its resilience with something extremely physical, extremely violent, and extremely unphilosophical.
With his concentration peaking, Ilux ignored the disorienting sensation of the previous attack.
His outstretched arms suddenly changed.
Not through painful biological metamorphosis, but through the Perception Alteration he channeled into his own body.
Steel, gears, and long cold barrels shimmered—and in an instant became real.
Both of Ilux's arms transformed into two massive tank cannons, their muzzles pointing directly at Xavier's golden-shrouded figure.
The process was fast, mechanical, and filled with industrial aesthetics that contrasted sharply with the natural majesty of the legend.
Yet the shells loaded into those cannons were not conventional ammunition.
Within the vacuum created by his perception, Ilux prepared a single projectile that represented the extreme fusion of the five elements.
Fire was compressed into a plasma core of insane density.
Water was condensed into a stabilizing and cooling layer of extreme velocity.
Earth was enriched into the projectile's structure with unnatural mass.
Air was compacted into a propellant of overwhelming pressure.
And a thin touch of the cosmic element wrapped around it, ensuring the projectile ignored minor dimensional resistance.
Above all of it, Ilux wrapped the entire projectile in his strongest layer of Perception Alteration, programming it with a single command.
To be acknowledged and accepted by reality as "an object that must destroy Xavier's golden aura and stage"—a direct hack upon the law of perceptual causality.
With a violent jolt that shook the air and the surrounding reality, the two tank cannons fired simultaneously.
A single shell—or rather, a final manifestation of all Ilux's elemental and perceptual power—shot forward.
Its trajectory was not linear.
It moved through the still-ambiguous space, carrying its own paradox.
The most brutal physical weapon driven by the most abstract perceptual logic.
It flew not merely toward Xavier's body, but toward the golden aura and the stage of worship surrounding him, seeking to destroy not the hero himself, but the stage that made him a hero.
"Reversed."
Yet the reality on that battlefield refused to follow Ilux's logic and anticipation.
Xavier, the subject of all those attacks, did not move at all.
He remained still like a statue carved from absolute calm, his right index finger still pointing straight toward the night sky.
That position was not a defensive pose.
It was an axis—a fixed point amid the swirling chaos spinning around him.
The golden aura and the symphony of praise only grew more stable, denser, as if crystallizing into a new natural law within that small region.
Then something completely beyond Ilux's calculations occurred.
The tank-element-perception missile he had created, carrying all his destructive power and tactical cunning, suddenly underwent a perfect and horrifying inversion mid-flight.
As though touching an invisible mirror-field that reflected not only matter but also the intention and logic behind it, the projectile reversed direction by one hundred and eighty degrees.
Its momentum did not diminish in the slightest.
If anything, it accelerated further, as though pushed by the will of the golden stage itself.
Its new target was no longer Xavier, but its creator.
Ilux.
And even stranger, Ilux's body reacted before the missile even struck him.
An invisible pressure—heavy and absolute—suddenly pressed upon his shoulders and mind.
His knees buckled upon the cold open ground, not because of physical impact, but due to an existential compulsion born from the logical consequence of his own attack.
His position changed from attacker to one who bowed, as if acknowledging an authority far greater than himself.
That act of prostration occurred at the exact same moment, in perfect harmony, with the instant his returning missile struck.
"What… what just happened…? Why… did my attack turn back…?"
"It is quite simple. The five elements and the power of Perception Alteration originate from my own nature.
It is impossible for something that flows from a person's nature to be used to kill that very person.
So when you attacked me with it, reality merely reflected it back to the proper source: yourself."
To be continued…