The pseudo-Hypernova Beast descended like a war god, arriving to end a war that had already been decided.
Eric's body was a ledger of failure written in pain. Bones half-crushed to powder beneath skin that no longer fully obeyed him. His heart stuttering, stopping, lurching back to life every few seconds like something forgetting how to work. Shadow beasts pressed in from every direction, and beneath all of it, a black tide of corruption was climbing steadily up his arms, eating toward his shoulders.
He had nothing left to fight with.
He had Adrian.
That was the only variable that mattered.
There was no time to think — and thinking, right now, would have only gotten them both killed. Eric's body moved on instinct alone, the same instinct that had kept him alive through every disaster before this one. He pulled Adrian tight against his side, wrapped beneath his arm, and in the same motion poured what remained of his Aura outward — not around himself, but around the boy.
He left his own back open.
The Beast's fist came down.
For one suspended fraction of a second, Eric saw it coming — saw the sheer mass of it blotting out what little light remained, felt the air itself buckle ahead of the blow like water before a falling stone — and he didn't move.
Then the punch connected.
The world went white, then red, then nothing at all for a beat too long to be safe.
His left shoulder didn't just break. It gave away — bone splintering into something closer to sand, the sound of it lost beneath his own scream, which came out as nothing more than a wet, strangled gasp because his lungs had forgotten how to work properly. Pain detonated through every nerve he had, so total and so absolute that for one terrible heartbeat his vision narrowed to a single white point and he understood, with perfect clarity, that he was about to lose consciousness.
He did not allow it.
He clenched what remained of his right arm around Adrian and moved.
The impact that should have killed him became momentum instead — Eric twisted with the force of the punch rather than against it, turning a killing blow into a launch, his body screaming as he shot forward like something fired from a weapon rather than something running.
He tore through the horde in a straight, brutal line. Shadow beasts didn't get out of the way — they ceased to be obstacles, shattering apart against his charge one after another, their corrupted bodies bursting like things made of wet paper. Blood — his, theirs, he could no longer tell — painted across his vision in long red streaks until the world itself seemed to be bleeding.
He didn't let go of Adrian.
Whatever else broke, whatever else gave way, his arm did not loosen.
Inside his skull, something was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the physical pain. Every coherent thought that tried to form dissolved before it finished — fragmenting into static, into nothing, the corruption finally reaching high enough to touch the part of him that still knew how to think. The black veins that had claimed his shoulder now crept across his right cheek, thin dark lines spreading like cracks in glass.
His body was failing. He could feel it failing, distantly, the way you feel a storm approaching before the rain actually starts.
He kept flying anyway.
The black ocean fell away behind them in a single dizzying drop — and then there was land. Eric didn't slow down to meet it gently. He hit the tree line like a falling star given a body, tearing a long, smoking scar through the forest canopy, snapping ancient trunks like kindling, the ground itself cracking open in his wake as momentum refused to forgive him for what he'd just survived.
Eric and Adrian finally came down at the edge of a black mountain.
Eric let go of him immediately, his legs barely holding as he forced himself upright. His vision had gone red at the edges. His lungs felt wrong — heavy, drowning — and every breath came up thick with blood. He didn't need to check to know what that meant. Something inside his chest had given way.
He gritted his teeth and stood anyway, swaying the moment his feet found ground.
A boulder broke loose from the cliff above and fell toward them. Adrian screamed. Eric's hand shot up and caught it on instinct, his Gravitation Aura shoving it aside before it could land.
His left hand had bent into a weird angle.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Healing Aura Technique - Gravitational Reconstruction.
His left arm was twisted and put back into place, but it couldn't stop the pain.
But at this point, he had already gone numb to the pain.
Then his premonition tore through him again — above, above, above — and his body simply didn't have the strength left to obey it. So he did the only thing he still could.
He kicked Adrian away from himself with everything he had left.
"FLY AWAY!!!"
The word came out ruined, scraped raw from a throat that had been screaming silently for hours. Speaking at all cost him something he didn't have to spare.
Adrian's body trembled as he was thrown clear, tears streaming freely now, and for one terrible second, he looked back and saw it — a black shape falling out of the sky, slamming into Eric hard enough to crater the ground for what looked like millions of square kilometers in every direction.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Defensive Aura Technique — Infinite Repulsion!
Eric threw it up on reflex, but the technique had been bled dry across this entire chase — half its charms were already shattered, its strength a fraction of what it should have been against something at the Pseudo-Hypernova's level. It held for less than a second before it broke entirely, the last of its charms crumbling to nothing as Eric's body absorbed what the technique couldn't.
He coughed up blood in violent, wracking spasms, buried now beneath the weight of the creature pressing him into the earth.
He was dying.
He knew this with the same plain clarity he knew most things. There was no panic in the knowledge, only fact.
But knowing he was dying and being willing to die were not the same thing.
He drove his fist into the side of the beast's head with whatever strength remained in his arm. It staggered, cracks spreading through the ground beneath them both, and the corruption where his skin had touched its flesh surged up his arm like fire finding oil — but he didn't stop. He couldn't afford to.
His face had gone strangely calm. Expressionless, almost. But his eyes burned with something that refused every part of him that wanted to lie down.
He kept fighting.
And somewhere underneath all of it — in the part of his mind that had nothing left to spend on fear — old memories began surfacing on their own, unbidden, the way they sometimes do when a body decides it might be done.
...
He was three years old.
A man he barely knew was crouched in front of him, his voice trembling, trying to explain that his parents would not be coming home. A bus accident had happened. Words too large for a three-year-old to hold.
Eric had looked at him and said, with a calm that unsettled every adult in the room:
"It's okay. Everyone dies."
The relatives around him had gone still, staring at the small boy who should have been crying and wasn't.
Eric understood, even then, exactly what he was feeling. He had grieved his parents — quietly, in his own way, in the years that followed. But twenty-one years later, looking back from wherever this moment found him now, he felt something he never expected to feel about that day.
Gratitude.
Because that loss — that single, unbearable loss — had eventually led him to Max.
And meeting Max had been worth everything that came before it.
...
A faint, distant smile touched the corner of Eric's mouth as he slammed the beast's skull into the ground and raised his other fist.
He brought it down.
The earth screamed. Mountains folded in on themselves. Forests tore free of their roots and scattered across a landscape that no longer resembled anything natural.
Far above, Adrian flew as fast as the borrowed wings would carry him, tears blurring everything in front of him, but he didn't stop. He didn't have the luxury of stopping. Every second mattered now in a way it had never mattered before in his short life.
Just as the last of his hope began slipping away — just as some small, terrified part of him started accepting that Eric might not survive this —
Golden light tore through the darkness.
The Hypernova Angel Spirit descended in a blaze of radiance, throwing itself directly into the Will.
Rank 3 Goodness Pathway Offensive Aura Technique — Divine Sabers.
Three blades of solid golden light materialized around the Will and slashed inward simultaneously.
The Will didn't flinch. It watched them come with the same cold, patient stillness it had shown for the entire fight.
Rank 3 Darkness Pathway Defensive Aura Technique — Abyssal Baptism.
A thick wash of black liquid surged up around it, swallowing the sabers' momentum whole, corrupting the golden light into something dimmer, duller, before drawing it back into itself entirely.
The Will's form flickered — less solid now than it had been. The truth of the situation settled clearly: the Angel Spirit was no true combatant, built for support and concealment rather than war, while the Will, despite being only a fragment, still carried vast reserves of its original Hypernova's power and ancient cunning. But that same fragment-state made its current form fragile — easily damaged, if anyone could land a hit clean enough to matter.
For the moment, the two of them were roughly equal. A stalemate neither could break alone.
The Will made its decision instantly.
It called the Pseudo-Hypernova Beast back — pulling it away from Eric, redirecting its full attention toward the Angel Spirit instead, determined to crush this new threat before it could reach the boy or interfere further.
The Beast paused before obeying.
It looked down at Eric one final time — at the man half-buried in his own blood, body broken in a dozen visible ways, and yet somehow, impossibly, still moving. Still fighting. Still refusing to simply stop, the way everything it had ever hunted eventually stopped.
Something old and unfamiliar stirred in whatever passed for the creature's heart.
Fear.
It looked away first, unable to hold Eric's gaze any longer, and sank into a pool of black liquid pooling behind it, retreating to join the Will's side instead.
Shadow beasts surged forward immediately to fill the gap it left behind, ambushing Eric the moment the Pseudo-Hypernova turned its back.
The Hypernova Angel Spirit unleashed a brilliant beam of white light toward Eric, but the Will and the Pseudo-Hypernova Beast struck at it in unison. Their combined assault tore through the healing radiance like wolves ripping into prey. Most of the light shattered mid-air, scattering into fading sparks, yet a fragile remnant still broke through and splashed across Eric's broken body.
The white liquid seeped into his wounds, slowing the black corruption's advance. The crawling darkness on his cheek and arms stopped spreading at a visible margin. More importantly, his presence dulled, becoming nearly invisible to the lesser shadow beasts.
For the first time since the chase began, Eric could breathe.
He didn't waste the gift. He took out several Aura stones from his Domain of Emotions, his shaking hands almost dropping them before popping them into his palm. He converted their energy into Gravitation Aura while channeling his barely recovered Meditation Aura to stabilize the worst of his injuries—shattered shoulder, punctured lung, fractured ribs. Every breath still tasted of blood; he had long gotten used to the taste of iron in his mouth, but the white liquid had bought him precious seconds.
He used every one of them.
Adrian slowly descended from the sky using his golden wings. Without a word, Eric ignited his Aura and launched into the air with him.
"Protect me," Eric rasped, voice hoarse and tired. He closed his eyes and activated Natural Draw, pulling ambient energy into his nearly depleted reserves.
His Aura slowly climbed out of the critical red zone… into yellow… then crept toward green. The crushing weight on his chest eased, if only slightly.
But his Meditation Aura couldn't be recovered in the same way. Aura stones and Natural Draw did not affect it. He would need time or proper meditation—luxuries he didn't have at this moment.
The Angel Spirit's concealment was already fading. Shadow beasts began turning in their direction, red eyes glowing with hunger as they charged through the air with murderous intent.
Eric glanced back. The Angel Spirit was being overwhelmed. The Pseudo-Hypernova Beast's raw power, combined with the Will's cunning traps, had pushed the radiant being into a corner.
"Stay here," Eric said, gently pushing Adrian behind him as he prepared to rejoin the fight.
Before he could move, the Will let out a cold, triumphant laugh that echoed across the battlefield.
"You all fell for it!"
Rank 3 Darkness Pathway Battlefield Aura Technique — Nine-Layered Abyss!
Nine thin layers of liquid darkness materialized above and below them, followed by walls of black light that slammed shut. Thick, oily darkness surged forward, coating the barriers and sealing the three of them inside an isolated domain.
Complete, suffocating blackness swallowed everything.
Countless pairs of crimson eyes ignited in the void—shadow beasts manifesting from the darkness itself, staring at Adrian with pure killing intent. The boy instinctively pressed closer to Eric, trembling.
Even the Angel Spirit's golden radiance was being devoured, dimming rapidly like a candle in a vacuum.
A heavy, primal fear settled over all three of them.
In that moment of utter hopelessness, Eric took one step forward. He looked at the Angel Spirit. Their eyes met.
A silent understanding passed between them.
Eric exhaled slowly, the calm of finality settling over his broken body.
It's time.
He had finally decided to use his most dangerous trump card.