Chapter 65: Lightning and Roots: The Path of Confrontation (Part 3)
The blood of the wind and thunder prodigies had already been absorbed by the arena's purifying runes, but the tension in the Ancestral Coliseum was far from dissipating. The battles for the Middle Layer were proving to be carnages where human limits were broken by sheer will. No one in the stands of the outer layer dared to murmur. The seats were being paid for with flayed flesh, broken bones, and burned meridians.
The desert sun had reached its zenith. The light beat down on the black jade, heating the stone until it became untouchable for any common mortal. It was the perfect stage for the next execution.
The herald stepped forward, his voice tearing through the hot air.
"Seats 12 and 13 have been claimed in the crossfire of the sky! Now, the tournament demands a new sacrifice! Sequence 14 calls its heirs! Let the light and the liquid abyss clash!"
The immense grates of the south tunnel rose slowly, and from the gloom emerged a figure that seemed not to belong in a bloodstained coliseum.
Lys Morningstar advanced into the light. She was an angelic vision that contrasted violently with the brutality of the mountain. Her hair, a dazzling gold, fell in perfect waves to her knees, shining under the zenith sun as if woven with threads of pure light. With serene features, immaculate skin, and a stylized figure, she walked with the solemn devotion of a priestess. Her hazel eyes looked neither at the stands nor at her opponent; they were raised with absolute reverence toward the imperial box, toward the figure of Samael Morningstar.
To Lys, the Patriarch was not just a military leader; he was a living god. Her sense of justice was extreme, and in her mind, purifying the clan's enemies with fire and light was the highest act of devotion she could offer.
From the north tunnel, the sound of wet boots stepping on stone resonated with a strange echo.
Elian Morningstar entered the arena. He did not have Draven's imposing presence or Maren's explosive energy. Of average height, his posture was unusually relaxed, almost languid, as if his bones were flexible. His silver-blue hair was constantly wet, plastered to his face by a film of perpetual moisture. His eyes were deep and strange, reflecting the world not as human pupils, but as spheres of liquid metal.
Elian represented an almost forgotten minor branch, but his passivity was a trap. He was the epitome of water: he seemed harmless, yielding to pressure, until you realized you were a thousand meters deep and your lungs had filled with an ocean you couldn't breathe.
The young man of heavy water stopped twenty meters from the girl of light. He didn't raise his fists. He simply let his arms fall to his sides.
"It's too hot today, Lys," Elian murmured, his voice soft, dragging his words like a slow current. "Surrender. I don't want to have to crush something so pretty. Your light will go out if I sink you deep enough."
Lys lowered her gaze from the Patriarch's box and locked her hazel eyes on Elian. There was no mockery on her face, only the relentless pity of an inquisitor.
"Stagnant water accumulates rot, Elian. Your toxicity offends the purity of this coliseum. I'll do you a favor... I'll evaporate you before you even realize it."
In the Vanguard's box, the monsters of the Elite settled in to watch. There were no criticisms or disdain this time. They had learned to respect the lethality of the base.
Kael rested his chin on his hand, staring at Elian.
"That boy... doesn't emanate normal water Qi. It's too dense. Light doesn't pass through his aura; it distorts around him."
Eris smiled, recognizing a silent assassin when she saw one.
"It's heavy water. Spiritual mercury. Lys thinks she's fighting a puddle, but she's about to hit a wall of toxic lead. This will be beautiful."
DOOONG!
The gong marked the sentence.
Lys did not wait. She knew her power lay in distance and overwhelming the senses. She snapped the fingers of her right hand with a sharp, elegant motion.
[Purifying Flash].
A sphere of incandescent white light erupted from her body. The entire world seemed to lose its color, swallowed by absolute whiteness. Within a ten-meter radius, the solid light traveled at the speed of thought, seeking Elian's eyes to fry his retinas and stun his nervous system. Threads of sacred light crackled in the air, burning the ambient moisture with a furious hiss.
Elian didn't close his eyes. He didn't even raise his hands to cover his face.
The young man simply sighed. A thick, chrome-silver liquid instantly sprouted from the pores of his skin, enveloping his body in a fraction of a second.
[Devouring Mercury Mantle].
Lys's purifying light impacted Elian, but there was no blindness. The mercury mantle acted as a perfect, spherical mirror. The white flash bounced off the liquid metallic surface, refracting toward the sky and the coliseum walls. The silver liquid, reflecting the deformed arena on its surface, emitted a toxic purple vapor as it absorbed the residual heat of the attack, but Elian remained untouched inside.
"Broken mirrors, Lys," Elian whispered.
Lys frowned. Her light had been physically blocked. Without hesitation, she brought both palms together in front of her chest. The air around her turned golden and vibrant, and the dust on the stage began to glow, sucked into the space between her hands. A sharp, crystalline chiming filled the air.
[Bolt of Solar Glory].
A spear of white-gold light, so intense that its edges seemed to tremble and blur from the extreme heat, manifested in her palms. It wasn't fire; it was liquid crystal of compressed photons.
With an imperceptible "Swoosh!", Lys fired. The bolt did not trace a curve; it was an absolute and perfect straight line, leaving a trail of heat spots in the vacuum, aiming directly to pierce Elian's heart and cauterize the wound instantly.
Elian, demonstrating an unnatural fluidity, tilted his torso just a few centimeters. He didn't try to completely dodge a light-speed attack; instead, he redirected the impact. The golden bolt struck his shoulder covered by the Mercury Mantle.
The sound wasn't a magical explosion, but a dull, metallic "Clang!", like a spear striking a steel anvil wrapped in velvet. The bolt sank into the silver surface, releasing its 50,000-lumen pulse. The glare blinded several spectators in the lower stands, but the surface tension of the spiritual mercury was so absurd that it swallowed the physical light. The bolt vibrated and dissolved into golden sparks within Elian's liquid mass.
"Heavy..." Elian murmured, feeling the thermal burn through his liquid armor. "My turn."
Elian extended his right arm. The mercury covering his body flowed toward his hand, condensing into a long, thick whip of liquid metal.
[Mercury Whip].
With a lazy but devastating flick of his wrist, Elian unleashed the strike. A line of shining mercury crossed the air with a sinuous hiss. It left a trail of heavy drops that fell to the ground, cracking the stone like pure lead pellets.
The whip wasn't going to cut Lys; it was going to crush her ribcage.
Lys saw it coming. Knowing her light clothes wouldn't withstand the impact of a fluid mace, she planted her feet in the arena and expanded her light core.
[Dome of Dawn].
A hemisphere of solid light, honey-gold in color and covered in blinking hexagonal patterns, sprouted from the ground and enveloped her in a perfect bubble.
The Mercury Whip smashed against the dome. The impact generated an expansive shockwave. The struck area of the dome shone with the intensity of a miniature sun, dissipating the terrifying kinetic force of the mercury and repelling the whip with a burst of golden sparks. Lys felt the tremor in the soles of her feet; the density of Elian's attack was monstrous.
"Strong. Very strong," Cedric praised from the Vanguard's box, his bicolored eyes analyzing the physics of the blow. "That photon barrier is perfect against energy and speed, but Elian's mercury has brutal mass. He's hitting her with the weight of a glacier concentrated at the tip of a thread."
Elian retracted the whip, which emitted a viscous sound as it slid across the ground. He didn't bother hitting the golden dome again. Water doesn't break rocks with punches; it erodes them and sinks them.
"Do you like your cage of light?" Elian asked, his liquid metal eyes gleaming with aggressive passivity. "Let's see if it can breathe underwater."
The young man of heavy water struck the black jade with the palm of his hand.
[Thousand-Ton Prison].
The coliseum floor seemed to melt around Lys's dome. From the shattered jade emerged thick, chrome-silver tendrils, slithering like colossal metallic snakes. The mass of mercury advanced toward the golden barrier.
Lys tried to launch a Purifying Flash to evaporate the advance, but the moment the mercury touched the base of her dome, the girl of light felt like the entire world was falling on her. The weight of the liquid metal was astronomical. The ground beneath the Dome of Dawn began to crack and physically sink several centimeters into the stone, dragging Lys down.
Elian didn't stop. The mercury climbed the walls of the golden hemisphere, swallowing the light. The surface tension of the Heavy Water was like industrial glue, adhering to the photon barrier, suffocating the source. In a matter of seconds, the beautiful golden cage was completely covered by a thick, viscous mass of toxic silver.
From the outside, it looked like a deformed black mirror dome.
Inside, Lys experienced true terror. The sunlight had been completely blocked. The mercury was so dense that outside sound ceased to exist. But the worst part wasn't the darkness; it was the grayish, toxic vapor beginning to seep through the micro-fissures of her barrier. The hydrostatic pressure of the mercury pushed the dome inward, and the metal's poison was burning the oxygen.
Lys's knees trembled. Her "evaporative" Qi reserves were draining massively to maintain the dome under the weight of a thousand tons. If she gave out, the mercury would crush her bones and the poison would rot her blood.
She coughed, a trickle of blood staining her pale lips. In the darkness, she raised her trembling hands to her own chest. Golden stardust settled on her skin, closing the small capillary ruptures in her lungs caused by the pressure.
[Photonic Healing].
The harmonic hum of her own healing brought back her sanity. The divine light closed her internal wounds in seconds, but she knew she couldn't maintain a war of attrition against an ocean of crushing metal.
"The sun does not hide before the abyss," Lys whispered, her hazel eyes shining with religious fanaticism. "It evaporates it."
From the box, Xylia observed the immense dome of silver mercury.
"He's going to crush her. Elian is a siege monster disguised as fluidity. He has drowned her light."
"He didn't drown it. He just condensed it," Violeta corrected, her sharp blue eyes detecting the extreme thermal fluctuation in the center of the floor. "He's going to get burned."
Beneath the suffocating dome, Lys made the riskiest decision of her life. She brought her hands together in prayer, raised her face toward the invisible ceiling, and closed her eyes. She abruptly withdrew all her Qi from the Dome of Dawn.
The golden barrier disappeared.
The thousand tons of toxic mercury collapsed on her from all directions in a silver tsunami, ready to shred her delicate body. She had less than a millisecond before the pressure turned her to mush.
Lys raised her hand to the sky.
[Judgment of the Sun].
There was no warning. The clouds floating lazily over the coliseum parted in a perfect circle. A pillar of pure light, vertical and five meters in diameter, plummeted from the heavens. It wasn't a flash; it was massive damage by absolute heat.
The solar beam descended at the speed of light, ignoring distance, and impacted directly on the mass of mercury that was millimeters from crushing Lys.
The thermal effect was catastrophic. The pillar of light melted reality itself. The extreme heat impacted against the mercury water. The immense silver tsunami didn't have time to crush her; the hyper-dense liquid boiled instantly, producing a deafening chemical shriek.
An explosion of toxic, superheated, and blinding vapor swept through the crater. The mercury evaporated in a cross of golden energy that incinerated the poison, turning the jade floor into a liquid crystal mirror from the thousands of degrees of temperature.
The pillar of divine light enveloped the center of the arena in white flames that left no ash.
Elian, connected to his mercury, felt the wave of thermal recoil. The water covering his body began to boil, burning his own skin. He lost control of his flows. The searing impact of the residual light threw him violently through the air, his clothes smoking and his skin reddened from third-degree burns. The young man of water crashed against the lower walls of the coliseum, leaving a dark stain on the stone before falling inert to the ground.
The pillar of light slowly faded, leaving behind a column of white, purified smoke ascending to the heavens.
At the epicenter of the crater, now vitrified and smoking, stood Lys Morningstar.
Her angelic appearance had suffered a devastating toll. She was in a state of extreme luminous exhaustion. Her skin, usually immaculate, was of an almost translucent, ghostly pallor. Her beautiful hazel eyes had completely lost their gleam, turning opaque. Her golden hair hung limply. She could barely stand on her own legs, swaying and panting, but her right hand still pointed toward the heavens in a sign of absolute victory.
The referee, shielding his eyes from the residual heat radiating from the jade turned to glass, ran toward Elian. The heavy water user was unconscious, his body bruised from the impact and his skin burned by his own boiled element, but alive. His passive resistance had prevented the blow from being fatal.
The herald raised his voice, overcoming the hiss of the burning jade.
"Purity triumphs over depth! By absolute evaporation, Lys Morningstar claims the throne!"
In the boxes, Kael nodded slowly, impressed by the escalation of violence.
"That boy, Elian. He has enough density to immobilize entire armies. But Lys bet her life on a single thermal shot and won. That is the will this mountain requires."
Samael Morningstar, from his obsidian throne, looked at the fragile but undefeated priestess of light in the center of the crater, and then shifted his gaze toward the bruised and unconscious body of her opponent.
"Sequence 14 has been purified!" decreed the Void Sovereign, his voice resonating in everyone's souls. "Lys. You have earned your seat."
The Patriarch paused briefly. He raised a hand, stopping the water branch medics dead in their tracks as they were about to carry Elian away on a stretcher.
"And as for you, Elian..." Samael's voice descended like the weight of a mountain over the silenced coliseum. "You have lost the thermal clash, but you have proven to possess the density of a toxic ocean and the tenacity of a siege wall. This mountain does not waste talents that have the potential to drown entire armies. Your effort will not be rewarded with oblivion! I grant you Sequence 15!"
The audience in the stands held their breath, marveling at their tyrant's ruthless but just pragmatism. He had rewarded absolute lethality.
"Take them to the healing pits before they fade completely!" Samael finally ordered, waving his hand with imperial authority. "And bring the next ones! The arena is still hot, and the blood must continue to flow!"
As the medics hurriedly descended to assist the two new legion captains, the murmur of reverential terror in the stands increased. The Middle Layer was proving to be a crucible of potential monsters. The generals were in the box, yes, but the commanders in the arena were forging swords and tidal waves that would one day drown the heavens themselves.
END OF CHAPTER 65 (PART 3)