The sky roared.
Scales clashed against scales in the churn below, and beneath it ran the constant whistle of blades cutting through open air — dozens of them, each carving a thin scream before vanishing into the next. The once-silent layer had become a battlefield of ceaseless noise. The wind carried ash now, and something older beneath it, like rot dressed up as smoke.
Eric and the Will floated opposite each other, suspended in that narrow stretch of space where neither side had yet committed to the killing blow.
He'd already closed his major wounds — the ones that would have ended him in minutes rather than hours. The lighter injuries remained: thin red lines, shallow burns along his arms and collarbone. There simply hadn't been time. Every second spent healing was a second the Will used to adapt, and adaptation, he'd learned, was more dangerous than any single strike.
Corruption had crept further. It stained parts of his hair a deep, absorbing black, spreading outward like ink through wet paper, and dark veins branched along his arms now too, as if something beneath his skin were answering the black liquid drifting around him. His right eye had recovered — the pink light in it steady again — but the bangs that fell over it had gone fully black, and stayed that way.
He exhaled slowly. Even that felt heavier than it should have.
Below him, the swarm hadn't stopped moving. Shadow Beasts surged through the lower layers, their forms flickering at the edges like something not fully committed to existing. Dark-Embracing Swordmasters moved among them, black blades swallowing light instead of catching it. Behind both came the rest — hundreds of corrupted figures, smaller, faster, less coordinated but no less relentless, twisting mid-flight as they launched themselves upward toward the one thing worth killing.
Eric watched them come and felt, for a moment, almost nothing. He'd been in pressuring situations before. This was just one of them, at a larger scale.
Then the sky tore open.
A spatial rift split the air in front of the charging mass — silent, absolute, a wound where there should have been sky. It closed almost instantly and reopened behind him. The attacks meant for his front now poured in from his back, closing the gap in a single heartbeat.
Eric almost answered with Repulsion Charge, Aura already gathering low in his chest.
Then a premonition cut through his thoughts, sharp and absolute. He abandoned the technique without hesitation, triggering Meditation Aura instead. His form blurred and reformed several meters away a fraction of a second before the space he'd occupied became violence.
In the same motion, he fired a dense pink star into the space he'd left. The explosion tore through the incoming beasts, clearing a wide arc of sky — and revealing what had been hiding behind them.
A thick, vertical wall of black liquid hung in the air, dense and utterly still. It didn't ripple. It didn't react. It simply waited, patient in a way nothing born of instinct ever was.
Eric's eyes narrowed.
"It's adapting," he muttered, more to himself than to anything listening. He'd suspected as much for several exchanges now — the Will was no mindless enemy throwing itself forward on instinct. It learned. Every attack he used became a lesson it absorbed and turned against him next time.
He rolled his shoulders, ignoring the fresh flare of pain along his corrupted arm.
"Then I'll have to do the same."
The moment the black wall was fully revealed, the remaining beasts surged from every direction at once, as if the Will had been waiting for him to finish speaking.
Shadow Beasts flickered through short-range spatial rifts, appearing above, below, and behind him in a coordinated pincer that left no clean angle of retreat. Dark-Embracing Swordmasters followed a half-beat behind, black blades already mid-swing, trailing arcs of corrupted energy. The denser mass of lesser figures poured in right after, less precise but overwhelming in sheer number.
Eric didn't retreat. He adjusted.
His instinct had always been to charge head-on with Repulsion Charge — but that pattern was already being read. Instead, he twisted mid-air and released a burst of Gravitation Aura beneath his feet, reversing his momentum in an instant. The sudden shift threw off the first wave of swordmasters entirely, their blades cutting through space where his torso had been a heartbeat earlier.
A Shadow Beast lunged from his blind spot. Rather than blocking, Eric let it come close, then compressed a tiny singularity of Gravity Press against its chest. The beast folded inward with a sickening crack before the ruined mass was flung into the path of the others, disrupting their formation and buying him a breath of space.
More kept coming. They always did.
His breathing stayed steady, but his mind raced. The Will was adapting — so he'd adapt faster. He began varying his responses deliberately: a short-range Infinite Repulsion to force beasts into each other, then letting a few attacks graze him, using their momentum to redirect his own techniques at sharper angles. His movements grew less predictable with every exchange.
Pink sparks of Quirk Detonation began appearing at irregular intervals — smaller than before, scattered, timed to break rhythm rather than deal damage.
Corruption still burned along his arms and the side of his face, a slow, gnawing heat. His body screamed with accumulated damage. Yet his eyes stayed sharp, gold and unwavering, tracking the swarm with a clarity his battered body no longer matched.
The swarm pressed harder, sensing weakness, trying to close every gap he'd carved open.
Eric's lips curved into a thin, cold smile — more exhaustion than amusement — before it twitched, breaking as a bead of sweat traced down his cheek.
He understood what this was. These beasts weren't the real threat. They never had been. They were fodder, meant only to bleed his Aura dry so that when the real attack came, he'd have nothing left to answer it with.
Knowing that didn't make them any less dangerous.
He triggered Infinite Repulsion, gravity twisting outward in a wide, controlled dome, carving a clean bubble of space the swarm couldn't immediately breach.
Something shifted directly in front of him.
A Dwelling Shadow Beast revealed itself, form unfolding out of a space that had looked empty a half-second earlier.
"Dimensional Phantom."
Eric recognized it the instant it appeared — not by sight alone, but by the wrongness of its presence, existing slightly outside the swarm's rhythm. He didn't hesitate. He flooded his body with Meditation Aura and teleported clean out of the horde, reappearing several dozen meters away, high enough that the worst of the swarm fell briefly behind him.
One glance back. Then he launched forward again, already gathering Aura for whatever came next.
His premonition flared without warning.
Eric twisted just in time to see the Will break free from the mass below, shedding beasts and swordmasters as it surged forward, black corruption spilling from its form with every step, like something finally let off a leash.
"Finally decided to attack?" he muttered, and beneath the exhaustion there was something almost like relief. At least this — one direct threat — was simpler than a hundred small ones.
The closer the Will came, the denser the corruption grew, pressing in like a rising tide. Eric's pink hair darkened strand by strand, pain stabbing through his skull like heated needles. He gritted his teeth and repeatedly activated Repulsion Charge, launching himself backward in short, violent bursts, each one buying a sliver of distance the Will immediately closed again.
The Will answered with Abyssal Charge. Black liquid erupted around its body, rapidly forming the silhouette of a massive dragon — wings, coiled length, a head opening in a roar that carried no sound, only pressure. It pursued him without pause, a predator that had decided the chase was over.
Eric suddenly dove downward, dropping hard toward the churn of the swarm below. The Will's dragon bent mid-flight to follow — only for the dive to prove a feint. In the same breath, he triggered Meditation Aura and vanished, the pursuit snapping shut on empty air.
He reappeared on a stretch of open ground far below, in the central land, where the fighting hadn't yet reached.
He landed hard, knees buckling briefly under the impact, and was already moving before he'd fully steadied himself. Broken charms scattered from his hands as he dropped to one knee, fingers moving with practiced, desperate speed as he began laying down a hasty formation across the bare earth.
"Trying to build a formation? Hmph." The Will's voice carried down from above, edged with something between amusement and contempt. It refused to give him time.
A massive wave of corruption surged across the plain and slammed toward him. Eric answered with Infinite Repulsion, a wide gravitational shockwave exploding outward. For a moment it held—
—then the corruption compressed.
The black wave collapsed into a single, razor-thin line of liquid and punched straight through his defense.
Eric's premonition screamed. He threw himself aside at the last possible instant, the black line grazing past his body close enough to burn the air. His eyes widened in genuine shock.
Eric used Repulsion Charge and charged away as he continued to drop broken charms.
He closed his eyes for a moment and looked inside his Domain of Emotions; the Emotional Spirit was constantly inscribing symbols around the entire four-edged star formation. It took two dozen starfield charms and put them on the northern edge.
The entire formation raged with pink sparks as it happened.
Eric, in the outside world, spat out a mouthful of blood as it happened; his Domain of Emotions was still damaged even after being healed.
The will immediately realized that Eric was preparing a technique, even though no aura had leaked out of Eric while his preparation - a great achievement for any Walker not from the Concealment pathway; it wasn't the only way to know if a walker was preparing one.
The will pointed at the broken charms Eric had thrown on the ground and destroyed them, foiling Eric's plan to build a formation. It had grown wary of Eric building any formation like before.
It wasn't going to repeat the same mistake.
Now that it also knew that Eric was preparing a technique, it wasn't going to probe around idly. It snapped its fingers as it used Myriad Darkness again. Normally, Myriad Darkness has a cooldown, but it had used the remaining black blood to activate it again, ignoring the cooldown.
Eric didn't look up. He couldn't afford to.
The charms kept moving between his fingers, each one settling into place with a precision that felt almost obscene given the chaos closing in around him. Two more edges of the formation flared to life, pink light bleeding faintly into the packed earth.
The Shadow Beasts hit the outer edge of his awareness a heartbeat before they hit him.
He threw up a half-formed burst of Gravitation Aura, not enough to stop them, only enough to steer the worst of the impact wide. One beast clipped his shoulder anyway, claws raking through cloth and skin. He didn't flinch. Didn't stop moving his hands.
Northern edge. Then eastern.
Another beast came in low, and this time he didn't have the margin to redirect it — he took the hit head-on, a blunt weight slamming into his ribs hard enough to steal the air from his lungs. He staggered a step, caught himself, kept placing charms.
Blood welled at the corner of his mouth again.
The swordmasters arrived next, blades cutting diagonal lines through the space he needed to move through. He twisted between two strikes, close enough that one blade opened a shallow line across his forearm, and used the same motion to plant a charm without breaking stride.
"If I stop, it's over. If I stop, all of this was for nothing. Eric thought as he clenched his teeth.
His premonition screamed twice in the span of three seconds — once for a beast dropping from directly above, once for a blade aimed low at his legs. He couldn't dodge both. He chose the legs, letting the beast's full weight crash down across his back instead, driving him hard into the dirt.
He didn't go down.
He planted his palm flat against the ground, forced himself back up through sheer refusal, and kept his other hand moving — charm after charm after charm, even as his vision blurred at the edges.
Inside his Domain of Emotions, the Emotional Spirit worked faster than it ever had, symbols bleeding pink light across the failing structure, trying to hold the formation together against a body that was rapidly running out of ways to protect it.
Eric spat blood onto the dirt between his knees and kept going.
"Almost."
But almost was still as far away as light in this dark layer — a horizon that kept retreating no matter how many charms his hands set down.
Another blade found him. He felt it before he registered the pain, a line of cold fire opening across his back, and his knees buckled for real this time. The formation blurred in front of him, pink light swimming at the edges of his vision.
He wasn't going to make it alone. He knew that now, with the same flat certainty he knew his own name.
Eric drove his palm into the dirt, forced his spine straight, and reached — not outward, not for another technique, but inward, through Meditation Aura, past exhaustion and blood loss and the screaming weight of his own body, toward the two presences he'd been holding in reserve since the fight began.
"I need you. Both of you. Now."
His voice, when it came, was rough and stripped of anything but need.
"Seraphiel. Dragon. Now."
Even though Seraphiel and the Angelic Dragon were busy in their own fights, they had not stopped observing Eric's fight with the Will.
...
Somewhere far beyond the central land in the sky.
The Angelic Dragon felt it first — a pull at the edge of its awareness, faint but unmistakable, carrying the particular shape of Eric's voice inside it. It didn't hesitate. It searched the space around itself for an opening, found one in a gap between two lumbering shapes of black and gold, and took it.
Light poured out of it in answer. A single, concentrated beam of gold, cutting through the dark with the force of something that had been coiled and waiting far too long. It moved fast, faster than anything born of shadow had any right to track, aimed with absolute certainty toward the layer where Eric knelt, bleeding, refusing to stop.
But the two Hypernova dragons saw it coming.
They understood, in the way old and patient predators always seemed to understand, exactly where that light was going and exactly what it meant if it arrived. There was no hesitation on their end either. One peeled off immediately, diving to intercept the beam head-on, black scales catching no light at all as it closed the distance. The other turned toward the Angelic Dragon itself, jaws already parting in a silent, corrupted roar.
The Angelic Dragon met the second dragon first.
It roared — a sound that carried actual weight, actual pressure, rolling out across the space between them — and swung its tail in a wide, brutal arc, catching the charging dragon across its flank hard enough to send black scales scattering like broken glass. The impact bought it a fraction of a second, no more, and it used every bit of it, twisting its enormous body and launching itself toward the dragon still racing to intercept the light.
It didn't make it in time.
The first dragon reached the beam a half-second before the Angelic Dragon could reach either of them, and rather than simply block it, the creature unleashed something it had clearly been holding in reserve — a technique built in silence, prepared the way the Will itself prepared things, without warning, without any sign of Aura leaking free to give it away. Black corruption folded around the golden light from every direction at once, compressing, smothering, until the light guttered and died entirely, swallowed whole.
The Angelic Dragon felt it happen. Felt the beam vanish, felt the connection it had reached toward Eric snap and go dark.
Something in it broke.
Veins bulged along its massive body, thick and pulsing beneath scales that had gone taut with sudden, overwhelming pressure. It let out the holy Aura of the Goodness Pathway as something caught the corners of its eyes, filling the entire layer.
It didn't roar again. It simply didn't need to. Divine sword lights erupted around it instead, dozens of them tearing into existence in the same instant, each one blazing gold and merciless — and the Angelic Dragon threw itself forward into both corrupted dragons at once, no longer holding anything back.
...
Rumble! Rumble!
Massive tremors spread across the central land as Seraphiel, shielding Adrian, clashed with the Pseudo-Hypernova Beast. Corruption crept across its golden armor with every exchange, but it kept moving, shifting position rapidly, dodging strike after strike aimed to end the fight in one blow.
It touched down in a stretch of forest already flattened by earlier fighting. The Beast charged the instant it landed — but Seraphiel laughed, and golden divine sabers bloomed around it, tearing into the black armor and carving cracks across its surface. The Beast staggered, its charge broken. Enough for distance. Enough for a breath.
Adrian had already activated Luck Among Chaos, forcing his own fraying luck into something stable enough to hold, and was pushing toward a second technique on top of it — reaching for more than his body wanted to give.
That was when Seraphiel felt it: Eric's message, cutting through the noise even as corrupted beasts closed in from every side. Its eyes flicked toward the layer where the signal had come from. Its right hand clenched, white claws forming, condensing into a single ball of light that it hurled into the horde. The light scattered the beasts apart, then converged again as it broke free of the mass, racing toward the same point the Angelic Dragon's beam had been aimed at.
The Pseudo-Hypernova Beast moved to intercept.
It closed the distance with shocking speed, faster than anything that size should move, cutting straight for the light.
"Damn it!" Seraphiel couldn't match it — not in time, not from this angle.
Adrian's eyes snapped open. Black tears streaked down his face, and for one terrible instant his heart simply stopped beating in his chest. 98 percent of his Aura was used as he forced out a black ball of condensed Aura that burst apart mid-air, blooming into dark fog. It wouldn't stop a Pseudo-Hypernova Beast — nothing he had left could do that — but it didn't need to. It only needed a moment, and the Beast's attention flickered, just enough.
"Good work, Adrian." Seraphiel's voice carried real warmth even through the chaos. Golden light wrapped around the boy where he knelt, shielding him, and in the same breath Seraphiel surged forward, divine sabers erupting outward to clear the last of the distance — letting the white light through.
Adrian didn't answer. His breathing had gone shallow and uneven, blood mixing with the black tears still falling, his small frame trembling under the weight of a technique built for someone twice his strength. He'd given everything he had to make sure that light reached its target — and he didn't have much left to give back.
...
Inside Eric's Domain of Emotions, the western edge neared completion, charm after charm settling into place under the Emotional Spirit's tireless hand.
Then a gush of black slashes tore through the air behind him.
His condition had deteriorated past anything sustainable. Under this much pressure, this much accumulated damage, he could barely summon the concentration Repulsion Charge demanded — and he needed it now, immediately, or the slashes would open him from spine to skull.
He looked back. His vision filled with dark, imposing arcs of corrupted energy, closing fast. Half his hair had gone black by now, a tide he no longer had the strength to hold back. His body had given up asking for mercy long ago. However, his eyes still burned, stubborn and unbroken, refusing to accept what the rest of him already knew. His legs trembled with every movement, each step a fresh negotiation with pain that never stopped compounding.
The Will gave him nothing. Not even a single breath.
Bam! Bam!
Two gorilla-shaped corrupted beasts slammed down from above without warning, fists dropping like an executioner's blade. Eric barely twisted clear, the impact close enough to rattle his teeth.
There was no respite waiting on the other side of it. Three-Dimensional Phantoms bloomed into existence, left, right, above, closing him into a cage with no clean angle out. He triggered Repulsion Charge and forced his way past the one on his right, the maneuver costing him: his shoulder tore open under the strain, and his right arm went limp and useless at his side.
He barely managed Gravitational Reconstruction before three Silver-Winged Owls descended, blades of wind cutting at precise, calculated angles designed to leave no escape. Only his premonition saved him, screaming a half-second ahead of each strike, guiding a body that had nothing left to guide.
Huff… huff…
His breathing came ragged now, torn and shallow. He spat another mouthful of blood onto the dirt below.
The western edge lit fully.
"Only the southern edge is left," he thought — and in that instant, his entire body locked in place as if the air around had itself turned into ice.
The Will had appeared behind him.
Not corrupted beasts. Not swordmasters. Not fodder sent to wear him thin. The Will itself, coiled and towering like a dragon carved from living shadow, its presence alone pressing down on the air until breathing felt like a negotiation. It had finally decided the waiting was over. It had finally decided to end this personally.
Eric's heart dropped through every layer of the abyss at once.
Then — light.
A single beam of white cut across the darkness like the first crack of dawn breaking over a night that had refused to end, arriving in the exact instant despair had nowhere left to go.
"Concealment!" The Will's voice cracked with something close to fury, teeth bared, retreating a step it had not intended to give.
The white light poured over Eric and did not stop. His wounds sealed shut one after another, torn muscle knitting, broken skin smoothing over as if the last several hours had simply been unwritten. Two pairs of angelic white wings unfolded from his back, vast and radiant — and then folded inward, sinking into him, merging with his very body until they surfaced again as something new: cherry-blossom pink, delicate and burning all at once, wrapping him in an aura that no longer belonged to a boy fighting to survive, but to something closer to divine.
Eric looked to the left and saw the wings filling him with energy and support; this was one of the two pairs of Seraphiel's wings. Seraphiel had three pairs of wings originally, but it had given one pair to Adrian before, and now, Eric was given one too.
Eric no longer needed Gravitation Aura to fly. He simply flapped his wings, and the dark sky opened beneath him.
The Will followed.
He floated in silence, high above the ruined land, as the Will tore the clouds aside and rose to meet him. Eric lifted his gaze slowly. Broken pieces of moonlight fell across the Will's abyssal form, tracing its outline in cold silver — and its eyes, when they met his, held the same unmoved calm they always had.
Neither spoke for a long moment. The battlefield below had gone strangely distant, as if the whole world were holding its breath between them.
Then the Will broke the silence.
"How long are you going to hold back?"
In that same instant, deep within his Domain of Emotions, the southern edge of the formation finally sealed shut. The four-edged star flared, releasing a slow, steady wave of pink light through every part of him.
Eric closed his eyes. Breathed once, deeply, and opened them again.
"You're right," he said quietly. "I should go all out."
He raised his right arm. A huge amount of Gravitation and Meditation Aura was poured into the formation like a flood that pushed the structure to the edge of collapse. The small, transformer formation almost broke as cracks appeared on it. Aura stones burned away as they converted into raw, gathered power.
Light wrapped around him, then sank into his body, absorbed completely.
Immediately, the sky answered.
White, gold, and pink four-edged stars bloomed across the heavens in every direction, silent and vast, turning the dark sky into something closer to a field of newborn constellations.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Battlefield Aura Technique — Stellar Starfield.