Chapter 65: Lightning and Roots: The Path of Confrontation (Part 2)
The inert and paralyzed body of the giant Draven was still being dragged toward the dark tunnels of the infirmary when the coliseum's war drums echoed once again. The blood from the previous battle, stained with corrosive poison, was quickly purged by the disciples of the water branch, leaving the black jade of the central crater clean and shining under the relentless desert sun.
In the upper boxes, the Morningstar Vanguard watched with the cold indifference of immortals. Tamsin had proven that lethality didn't require explosions, but the mountain demanded variety in its spectacle. It demanded that the jade splinter once more.
The herald, standing on the north wall, raised both arms. His voice echoed above the natural whistling of the wind.
"Seat 11 has been claimed in silence, but Sequence 12 demands an uproar! The heavens clash on the earth! Let the aspirants step forward!"
The heavy iron grates of the east and west tunnels rose with a deafening metallic screech.
From the east side walked a figure that seemed to absorb the light around him. Rowan Morningstar. Of average height and an athletic build sculpted through martial discipline, his light blue hair fluttered softly, even when there was no breeze in the arena. His silver eyes, cold and focused, didn't look at the crowd; they were locked onto the center of the floor.
In his hands, spinning with a deadly fluidity, he held twin Chakrams, forged from light spiritual steel. Rowan carried an invisible weight on his shoulders: he was the most outstanding disciple after Jian. After seeing Jian's collapse and defeat for Seat 10, Rowan had silently sworn that the path of the wind would not be humiliated again. He despised slow, heavy "meat sacks." To him, combat was an art of rapid dissection.
But from the west tunnel emerged someone who considered Rowan's speed a mere yawn.
Maren Morningstar stepped into the light almost jogging, incapable of standing still. Standing a meter ninety tall with a lean, fibrous musculature, he looked like a high-tension wire about to snap. His electric blue hair was completely unkempt, and his vibrant purple eyes darted frantically in all directions, processing the world at a sickening pace.
Maren was loud, charismatic, and absolutely neurotic. His brain's hyper-speed didn't allow him to tolerate silence; to him, stillness was torture.
"Finally, finally, finally!" Maren exclaimed, rubbing his hands together at a speed that generated visible sparks, walking toward the center of the floor with short, bouncy steps. "I thought that poison woman and the stupid big guy would never finish. How slow! How boring! My dead grandmother moves faster in her coffin!"
Rowan stopped twenty meters from him, his silver gaze hardening. The chakrams in his hands stopped spinning.
"You talk too much," decreed the wind user, his voice low and cutting.
"And you don't talk enough, friend of the breezes," Maren retorted, tilting his head with an unhinged smile, while small cyan electric arcs began to jump between his fingers. "You're just like the Jian kid, aren't you? The one who cuts the air? I'll do you a favor. Try to keep up with my pace. If you touch me even once, I promise not to fry your nervous system until you're left drooling. Deal?"
In the Elite's balcony, Kael leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
"This duel will be a headache for weak eyes," commented the Vanguard swordsman, his golden pupils dilating to follow the flow of Qi. "Rowan channels the wind as an extension of his nervous system, but Maren... that kid is unstable."
Xylia, sitting to one side, crossed her arms with an expression of absolute disdain. The storm clouds seemed to resonate with her irritation.
"Maren is an insult to the lightning lineage," spat Sequence 5, her gray eyes shining with hostile sparks. "He doesn't rule thunder as a divine punishment. He uses it as a drug. He burns his own nerves to overstimulate his body. He is a speed addict, not a monarch of the storm."
"Addict or not, if he's fast, his rival's neck will bleed just the same," Eris replied, flashing a fierce smile, eager to see the bloodshed. "Let's see who cuts first."
DOOONG!
The gong resonated.
Rowan didn't blink. The very instant the bronze vibrated, he activated [Breeze Stride]. The wind enveloped his legs, reducing air resistance to zero. His body seemed to lose all its weight. He didn't run; he glided across the battlefield like a specter, his figure becoming a blur.
He raised both arms and threw his Chakrams with brutal centrifugal force, activating the [Translucent Void Slash].
The weapons didn't just cut with their metal. Rowan's Qi enveloped the discs in ultra-high-speed rotating air currents. The chakrams emitted a deafening whistle, a sharp "Ssshiii!" akin to a whip tearing the sky. A translucent, emerald-green distortion expanded the weapons' edge fifty centimeters beyond their physical limit. They flew in curved trajectories, aiming directly to decapitate Maren from two opposite angles.
Maren didn't back down. His maniacal smile widened.
"Slow!" shouted the thunder user.
Maren channeled the rapid rotation of his electric Qi into his core. The air around him immediately became dense, vibrating with a frequency that made the closest spectators grind their teeth. Circular purple electric arcs spun horizontally around him, creating a cage of flashing light.
[Defensive Electromagnetic Field].
Rowan's two chakrams, traveling at the speed of sound, entered the radius of the invisible field.
The impact did not produce a clash of metal against metal, but a sharp screech of repelled polarities. The force of inverted magnetic attraction violently pushed the spiritual weapons away. The steel discs were deflected toward the sky at unnatural angles, surrounded by purple sparks, completely losing their inertia and falling uselessly dozens of meters away.
Rowan, who had continued advancing behind his weapons, stopped dead. His silver eyes widened in surprise. Metal was useless against Maren's rotational magnetism.
"My turn, little bird!" bellowed Maren.
Maren's eyes lost their pupils, turning into two beacons of pure, blinding white light. Small lightning bolts sprouted from his temples and the nape of his neck, connecting directly to his spine. He was injecting micro-discharges of lightning into his own brain, eliminating the biological delay of his nerves.
[Synaptic Overload].
For Maren, the world plunged into an agonizing slow motion. He watched as the dust kicked up by Rowan's boots floated lazily in the air. His own muscles moved with a robotic, unnatural, and perfect fluidity.
Maren's figure vanished, leaving behind an afterimage of light and a piercing sound of radio static. He appeared instantly to Rowan's left, his fists wrapped in a rhythmic flicker of blue and white light. [Constant Lightning Strike].
Rowan barely had time to react. Without his weapons, he relied on pure instinct.
Maren's fist smashed into Rowan's ribs. CRACK! Rowan was thrown two meters backward, but what hurt the most wasn't the physical blow. Small cyan sparks stuck to his skin, like electric fireflies, accumulating static charge directly in his meridians.
"That's one!" Maren laughed at a thousand miles an hour, his voice overlapping with itself due to the speed. He vanished again in a sonic boom.
Rowan landed with feline grace and immediately understood his enemy's lethality. The lightning wasn't burning him superficially; it was seeking his heart.
"Don't underestimate me," Rowan hissed, spitting a string of blood.
Rowan harmonized his weight with the air currents. His feet lifted a centimeter off the ground on a cushion of vacuum. [Invisible Breeze Steps].
The wind user blurred at the edges. There was no longer any sound in his movements. Tactical stealth kicked in. When Maren appeared in front of him again to connect the second blow, Rowan wasn't there. Maren punched empty air.
Appearing in Maren's blind spot behind his back, Rowan used his element's close-quarters combat. He thrust both palms forward, compressing the air between them until it became as hard as steel. [Pressure Palm].
The invisible wind mallet struck Maren between the shoulder blades. SMACK! Maren coughed up blood, being launched five meters forward. His electromagnetic field couldn't repel the wind, because there was no metal to reject. But the thunder madman didn't fall to the ground; in mid-air, he spun around and landed on his hands and feet like an electric spider, his white eyes distilling pure murderous euphoria.
"YES! THAT'S HOW YOU PLAY!" Maren shrieked.
The arena turned into a spectacle that the eyes of common cultivators couldn't process. They were two colliding ghosts. One was a white and cyan flash that left a smell of ozone and static; the other was a translucent distortion that left trails of invisible blades and sharp whistles.
Rowan decided to overwhelm him. He raised his hands and unleashed the [Flurry of a Thousand Cuts].
Ten, fifteen, twenty wind projectiles per second shot from his fingers. The air filled with silver lines crossing space at erratic angles, screeching like a thousand scissors cutting silk in unison.
Maren, hyper-accelerated by the Synaptic Overload, moved through the net of invisible cuts with flexions impossible for a human body. However, the volume was too much. The wind blades tore his tunic, opening small cuts on his arms and cheeks. Maren's blood flew through the air, but before it touched the ground, the static from his body vaporized it.
The thunder user knew he couldn't dodge forever. He needed to connect.
"The dance is over!" Maren roared. His entire body became a blur of blinding cyan light. He turned into an absolute human projectile. [Speed Flash: Path of Thunder].
The sound of actual thunder made the arena rumble. Maren "stretched" across fifty meters of distance in a fraction of a second.
Rowan tried to summon an Evasive Tornado to suck in the impact, but Maren's speed surpassed the currents' summoning time.
Maren's electric fist broke the incipient wind barrier and buried itself in Rowan's stomach.
"TWO!" yelled Maren, with foam and blood appearing at the corners of his lips.
A new layer of electric fireflies adhered to Rowan's body. The wind user felt his heart skip a beat. His muscles began to suffer uncontrollable spasms. The Constant Lightning Strike had accumulated the critical charge. If Maren connected a third blow, the static would detonate in an electrical micro-explosion inside Rowan's veins, frying his vital organs and dealing instant death.
In the Elite's box, Kael narrowed his eyes.
"He's cornered. Lightning is faster at short distances. If Rowan doesn't break space, he's dead."
Rowan knew it. Cold panic invaded his mind, but his martial discipline took over. The invisible blade of the wind is sharpest when it is about to break.
Maren withdrew his fist and launched the third blow straight toward his rival's heart, a maniacal smile splitting his face.
But Rowan didn't dodge backward. The ground beneath his feet erupted in a ring of dust and wind. There was no fire, just an expansion of transparent air that cracked the earth. [Wandering Cyclone Step].
Instead of retreating, Rowan used centrifugal inertia to shoot diagonally forward and to Maren's right, passing millimeters from the murderous fist. Rowan's body visually stretched into a pale green line. A dry sonic "Boom!" announced his movement.
Maren missed the third blow, and the wake of vacuum Rowan left behind sucked in the thunder user's arm, violently throwing him off balance forward.
Rowan didn't stop there. He made two more directional jumps in the air, bouncing off the vacuum, until he appeared exactly behind the nape of Maren's neck.
[Gale Braking].
Rowan stopped dead without suffering damage from inertia, and all the air pressure built up in his hyper-speed burst outward. The vacuum blast hit Maren's back and neck squarely. The sonic stun was brutal; even with his electrically overloaded brain, the pressure impact gave him whiplash and clouded his vision for a crucial second.
It was the perfect execution window.
But Maren was a rabid animal. Refusing to lose, and knowing he was stunned, he forced the last spark of survival in his core.
"DEATH!" Maren roared, channeling all the electric plasma into his right hand. The blue and white energy formed a vibrating plasma blade. [Voltage Fangs]. He twisted his torso blindly, launching a savage slash toward where he felt Rowan's presence.
Rowan, at the same time, brought his bleeding hands together. The friction of the air at that speed had already burst the capillaries in his arms, and his blood stained the air. He concentrated all the wind into a single translucent blade in front of his palms. A point-blank [Translucent Void Slash].
There were no dodges. There were no retreats.
Rowan's Void Slash and Maren's Voltage Fangs collided directly in the center, crushing both their bodies in the process.
A catastrophic explosion of blue plasma, white light, and translucent tornadoes erupted in the coliseum. The jade crater was swept once again, raising a cloud of dust and debris that completely hid the epicenter of the battle. The arena's containment barriers groaned under the impact of the shockwave.
The silence that followed was sepulchral. In the stands of the outer layer, the disciples held their breath, unable to process that two minor-rank cultivators could generate such sublime and desperate destruction.
Slowly, the dust dissipated, carried away by the desert breeze.
In the center of a new ten-meter-wide crater, the consequences of the Origin Realm were displayed in their rawest and most horrifying reality.
Rowan was on his knees, coughing up black blood. His clothes were charred. Both his arms, from the elbows to his fingertips, were covered in deep capillary cuts; the friction of the compressed wind had flayed his own flesh. His lungs were completely collapsed by the drop in pressure, forcing him to emit choked groans as he tried to take gulps of air that refused to enter.
Five meters away, Maren lay on his back, his state being equally pathetic and terrifying.
The lightning user's body was suffering violent convulsions and uncontrollable spasms. The overstimulation of the Synaptic Overload had taken its toll. His veins glowed beneath his skin with a sickly blue light, boiling his blood. Maren clutched his head with both cramped hands, screaming through clenched teeth from a migraine so destructive he felt his brain was being drilled by red-hot iron needles. His eyes were bloodshot, having burst from the pressure of the hyper-speed.
Neither of them could stand up. Their bodies had crossed the line of biological and spiritual collapse.
Rowan dug his bleeding fingers into the jade, trying to use the stone to lift his weight. His legs trembled, the broken muscles refusing to obey.
Maren rolled onto his stomach, digging his nails into the ground, grunting like a dying beast, trying to lift his head to launch even a spark-laced spit, but a spasm paralyzed his entire spine.
Both looked at each other across the distance, their eyes reflecting mutual hatred, respect, and agony. Both knew they had left their lives in that clash. They had touched the limit of the sky and had been crushed by it.
They collapsed simultaneously. Rowan fell on his side, losing consciousness, while Maren dropped his forehead against the ground, his convulsions subsiding until he was left in the immobility of systemic shock.
The referee, a master from the earth branch, cautiously approached the crater, evaluating the breathing and meridians of both combatants. He sighed, impressed, and raised both arms crossed toward the imperial balcony.
In the Elite's box, Xylia let out an ironic snort, though a minuscule spark of respect shone in her eyes.
"He fried his nerves. Just as I said. But I admit the idiot didn't hesitate when it came to burning himself alive."
Kael nodded slowly, his golden pupils acknowledging the weight of the combat.
"Rowan's braking in the blind spot was perfect. That is the art of the sword, even without steel. Jian must be proud."
Samael Morningstar leaned forward in his throne. The Void Sovereign observed the two broken bodies in the arena. There was no weakness in them, only the absolute price of ambition. And the Morningstar Empire rewarded those who were willing to die for its flag.
Samael's voice, amplified by the System, boomed across the mountain.
"A draw forged in the absolute destruction of their own limits!" the Patriarch decreed, his tone demanding the submission of everyone present. "Both have proven that their will is harder than the stone that supports them. The mountain's medicine will rebuild their broken bodies, because their utility is undeniable."
Samael raised his hand, dictating his unbreakable will.
"Rowan Morningstar and Maren Morningstar! Both have claimed their throne! Rowan, the wind grants you Sequence 12. Maren, your madness inherits Sequence 13. Take them away, heal them, and let the next on the list pray to have half the conviction these two idiots have just shown!"
The cheers that followed were not shouts of joy, but howls of bloodlust. The medical branches swooped down like crows into the crater to save the lives of the new legion captains.
The Middle Layer was cementing its legend with rivers of its own blood, and the morning sun still had many hours of massacre to illuminate.
END OF CHAPTER 65 (PART 2)