The echo of the four Transcendents' transformations still resonated in the enormous throne room. Shade observed them carefully, assessing each threat with the cold precision that years of life-or-death battles had granted him.
The giant was the most visible, his head brushing the vaulted ceiling, forced to maintain an uncomfortably hunched posture. His arms were columns of petrified muscle, each one capable of bringing down walls with a single blow. Definitely the most problematic in terms of raw power.
The dragonfly, on the other hand, represented a different kind of threat. Its carapace gleamed with a metallic sheen, and its multiple wings vibrated at a frequency that distorted the surrounding air. Shade had seen similar creatures before—they were always fast, lethal, and difficult to reach. The air cannons it had fired possessed a precision and power he could not underestimate.
The lizard, with its sharp claws and that serpentine tail ending in a lethal point, was unpredictable. He had avoided its first attack by instinct rather than technique, and that bothered him. He preferred to face enemies whose movements he could anticipate.
Finally, the twenty-meter ape, the first to attack. Powerful, yes, but also clumsy. In an enclosed space like the throne room, its size was more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Shade had already proven that when he used the giant's arm to knock it down.
'Well?' Uriel asked in his mind, with a hint of amusement. 'Do we continue with hand-to-hand combat, or have you run out of ideas?'
Shade smiled to himself. The answer was obvious. It always had been.
His specialty, the one he had shared with Uriel since his earliest days as a Sleeper, had never been the sword, no matter how skilled he was with it. Nor was it strategy, though he knew how to plan. No, his true talent, the one that had kept them alive through countless nightmares, was much simpler and much more satisfying.
Making things explode.
Of course, he couldn't use a Supreme soul fragment. That would be madness, even for him. A single one of those fragments, detonated without control, would erase the entire castle, a large part of the city, and every living being within a radius of several kilometers. Thousands of innocents would die, and Shade, despite everything he had done, was not a mass murderer. At least not of innocents.
But Transcendent fragments... those were another story.
He was glad for his own foresight. For months, he had stored thousands of Transcendent-rank soul fragments in the shadows of his dark storage, torn from fallen enemies, extracted from corrupted beasts.
He had saved them "just in case," as he always did with anything he considered useful. His companions often mocked his tendency to hoard apparently useless objects, but in moments like this, that mania became a brilliant strategy.
Shade invoked his dark storage. A small, vulgar-looking sack, black as a starless night, appeared between his fingers. It weighed more than it seemed, much more.
The lizard moved first. Perhaps it had smelled the danger, or perhaps its animal instinct simply told it not to allow Shade to do what he was planning. Its claws tore through the air as it lunged to attack, the serpentine tail hissing behind it like a living whip.
Shade ran straight toward it.
The lizard opened its maw, an abyss of serrated teeth ready to crush him. Shade slid under the attack at the last moment, his body nearly brushing the beast's forked tongue. He rolled over one shoulder and came out the other side, just as the dragonfly fired.
The air cannon was almost invisible, just a distortion in the light that announced death. Shade had no time to dodge normally, but he didn't need it either.
His armor twisted, obeying [Shape Shift], and a chain tipped with a black spike sprouted from his arm. He drove it into the lizard's scaly skin and pulled himself to the side, using the beast itself as an anchor to change his trajectory.
The air cannon whistled past, centimeters from his face.
Shade dispelled the chain and landed in a crouch. Above him, the gorilla's shadow grew dangerously. He looked up just in time to see a fist the size of a carriage descending toward him.
He jumped.
Not backward, not sideways. He jumped directly onto the fist, landing on the ape's hairy wrist, and began running up its arm. His boots pounded against the leather-tough skin, climbing at full speed toward the beast's shoulder. The gorilla roared in frustration and raised its other arm to crush him like an insect.
Shade smiled. The plates on his back bristled, melting and reshaping into a massive black spike pointing upward. The gorilla, in its blind fury, brought its hand down directly onto it.
The howl of pain was deafening.
The ape's hand withdrew quickly, streams of black blood falling onto the stone floor. Shade took the moment to propel himself upward, and as he flew, his armor changed again. Two black wings sprouted from his shoulder blades, membranes of solid darkness that caught the air and lifted him toward the ceiling.
In the improvised sky of the throne room, Shade was an easy target.
The giant raised a hand the size of a table, ready to catch him like a fly. The dragonfly lined up another air cannon, calculating the trajectory. The lizard prepared to jump, its tail coiling like a living spring.
Shade did not flee. He flew downward.
The giant extended its fingers to close its fist around him, but Shade was too fast, too small, too slippery. He passed between two fingers like a shadow, and the dragonfly's air cannon, already fired, could not correct its trajectory in time.
It struck the giant's hand dead-on.
The colossal arm recoiled uncontrollably, crashing into the gorilla, which was still recovering from the pain in its hand. The ape, staggering, fell backward and crushed the lizard that had been preparing to jump. The three enormous bodies tangled into a confused heap of limbs, scales, and stony hide.
Shade observed the scene with a wide smile.
"That's the problem with being big," he said quietly, almost sympathetically. "In enclosed spaces, you only get in each other's way."
He landed softly on the cracked floor, a prudent distance from the pile of stunned beasts. The dragonfly, which had managed to avoid the collision, flew erratically above its fallen companions, trying to reorient itself.
Shade opened the black sack.
Dozens of soul fragments fell from inside like a cascade of dark stars. They glowed with a faint, sickly light, each one containing the concentrated essence of a Transcendent being. The fragments rolled across the floor, some stopping next to the fallen beasts, others scattered within a radius of several meters.
The Transcendents, those who could still think clearly, looked at him in confusion. What did he intend to do with those small, shiny stones?
Shade moved away quickly. He ran backward, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the pile of fragments. Twenty meters. Thirty. Fifty. One hundred.
He stopped.
With a smile that his enemies would never forget, a smile that combined the excitement of a child with the madness of a war veteran, Shade raised a hand.
"Art," he said, his voice resonating in the tense silence of the hall, "always springs from an explosion."
He imitated a random hand seal. One of those complicated gestures he had seen in some old anime, completely unnecessary but terribly dramatic.
"EXPLOSION!"
The soul fragments began to glow.
First came a blinding flash, as if a small sun had been born in the middle of the room. Then came the sound, not one but dozens of chained explosions, each fragment detonating a fraction of a second after the previous one. The shock waves overlapped, creating a chaos of pressure and temperature that distorted the air itself.
Shade stripped off his armor. The black plates flowed from his body, forming an enormous opaque cube that interposed itself between him and the explosions. It wasn't enough to completely block the impact, but it reduced the blast wave to something his reinforced body could withstand.
For almost a full minute, the only sound in the room was the roar of destruction.
When the last fragment went dark and the shock waves dissipated, Shade dropped the armor cube. The plates returned to his body, reforming into his usual combat armor.
The silence that followed was different from before. It was not a silence of tension, but of astonishment.
Shade observed the results with a satisfied smile.
The four Transcendents were unconscious. The giant had lost an arm, and much of his torso was covered in horrible burns, but his chest still rose and fell. The lizard had its tail destroyed and several fractured ribs, but it lived. The ape, the one that had taken the most direct impact, was completely charred, its fur reduced to ash, but it still breathed. The dragonfly, the fastest of the four, had tried to flee and for that reason had only lost half its wings and part of its carapace.
They were alive. All of them.
Shade laughed. A joyful, genuine laugh that sprang from the depths of his being. He turned to Cronos and Ananke, who watched from a distance with expressions ranging between astonishment and horror.
"Do you see?" he said, pointing to the smoking battlefield. "True art, the art that transcends any martial technique, any elaborate strategy..."
He paused dramatically.
"It's a great explosion. An explosion of inspiration."
He laughed again, this time louder, while behind him the four Transcendents moaned unconsciously on the floor. Above, on the throne, Daeron watched him with a new light in his eyes. Interest. Respect. And perhaps, just perhaps, a hint of fear.
Cronos shook his head, but couldn't stop a slight smile from curving his lips. "He's completely insane," he murmured.
"Completely," Ananke replied, her eyes still fixed on the smoking chaos. "But he's a very, very effective madman."