Chapter 65: Lightning and Roots: The Path of Confrontation (Part 4)
The Ancestral Coliseum still exhaled the scorching heat of the solar pillar Lys had invoked. The center of the arena, now turned into a vitrified jade mirror, reflected the relentless desert light. The healers had removed the priestess of light and the heavy water colossus, leaving behind a silence pregnant with anticipation.
The positions of the Middle Layer were filling up with monsters. Draven had claimed Sequence 16 in an assault of brute force and pure ice on the adjacent platform, and now, the raspy-voiced herald raised his arms again, looking for the next candidates for the slaughter.
"Fire and water have passed judgment!" bellowed the herald. "Let those who walk in the gloom step forward! Sequence 17 awaits its master!"
The grates of the east tunnel opened without the slightest creak, as if the gears themselves had been silenced.
From the darkness of the vault, Joren Morningstar emerged into the sunlight. He was a tall man, one meter eighty of pure athletic build, lean and sculpted for speed and efficiency. His light brown hair and brown eyes did not possess the exoticism of the Vanguard; his face was a mask of absolute neutrality. Joren did not walk with Rowan's arrogance or Maren's bloodlust. He glided over the jade. He was the embodiment of the classic assassin: silent, professional, devoid of emotion or bravado. His mere presence in the arena seemed to absorb the sound around him.
In each hand, he held a curved dagger of matte black steel, forged to reflect not a single particle of light.
From the west tunnel, the response was a contrast so violent that it drew gasps from the lower stands.
Lirael Morningstar stepped onto the arena. Her height of one meter seventy-five centimeters, added to her long legs and graceful posture, gave her an immensely seductive figure. Her hair was a deep orange that fell like a cascade of autumn fire down her back, and her amber eyes shone with predatory cunning. Lirael walked swaying her hips, every movement calculated to draw the male gaze, every smile designed to lower her prey's defenses. She was the black widow wrapped in silk. She enjoyed the terror in the eyes of those who believed they were going to be embraced, only to feel the edge of steel at their throat when they were most spellbound.
Lirael stopped fifteen meters from Joren. She tilted her head, her orange hair waving softly, and offered him a smile loaded with lethal promises.
"You are a very quiet man, Joren," whispered Lirael. Her voice wasn't a shout, but she subtly amplified it with Qi, making it resonate like a purr directly into the assassin's ears. "Quiet men always hide the sweetest secrets. Why don't you come a little closer? I promise my light won't burn you... it will only embrace you."
Joren didn't blink. He didn't smile. His brown eyes scanned the distance, wind speed, ground temperature, and angle of the sun. He didn't see a beautiful woman; he saw a sack of organs, nerves, and blind spots.
In the Vanguard's box, Lyra leaned forward, resting her chin on her intertwined hands. Sequence 7, mistress of illusions, observed Lirael with the critical eye of a master.
"She's using light micro-refractions on her lips and hips to hypnotize him," Lyra evaluated, her voice devoid of inflection. "It's a cheap trick, but effective against weak minds."
Kael, beside her, snorted with a half-smile.
"Joren doesn't have a mind. He's a knife. And knives don't fall in love."
DOOONG!
The instant the gong sounded, Lirael made her first move, hoping her charm had bought even half a second of hesitation.
Joren didn't give her a tenth of one. He activated the [Shadow of the Hundred Steps].
The assassin's body blurred, fading into a translucent mist like a heat mirage over asphalt. Low-frequency air currents nullified his weight and the sound of his boots. In a blink, Joren was no longer where the gong had sounded. He left behind a wind silhouette that mimicked his running posture for half a second before dissolving into a soft breeze.
Lirael widened her amber eyes. There was no sound. There were no footsteps. The silence was absolute.
"How boring you are..." the woman hissed. Her eyes flashed with a pearly white glare. If he didn't want to see her beauty in the light, she would make him die in his own darkness.
Lirael spread her arms and released a massive pulse of lunar Qi. [Midnight Mirage].
The transformation was a spectacle of overwhelming and terrifying beauty. In a fifteen-meter radius around Lirael, the burning midday sun disappeared. The area was dyed a deep cobalt blue, plunging the battlefield into a "false night." Small spheres of light floated in the darkness like silver fireflies, distracting vision and altering the perception of distance and depth.
In the center of that artificial night, Lirael became a specter of pure silver. She shone with a nocturnal coolness, her figure moving three times faster within her own domain.
But Lirael didn't stop there. Knowing that an invisible assassin was hunting her, she danced in the center of the blue night. [Dance of the Broken Mirrors].
Multiple sheets of solid, suspended light condensed in the air, orbiting around Lirael like floating mirrors. The silver crystal fragments reflected the cobalt night and the fireflies in a distorted way, creating a maddening kaleidoscope. The air filled with a gleam of silver glitter. Lirael moved among the mirrors, appearing to teleport from one fragment to another, leaving a trail of "broken glass" floating in the air.
Anyone who tried to attack her blindly would end up stabbing a reflection, losing their balance, and exposing their throat to the lunar edge.
From outside the cobalt dome, the arena seemed to contain a piece of the night sky. It was an optical marvel.
But inside, Joren didn't look. Joren felt.
The assassin, floating silently in the shadows of the false night, was not fooled by the lights. He crossed his daggers in front of him and activated his core. [Fangs of the Reverse Breeze].
The blades of his black daggers lost their focus, as if they were underwater. The air around the steel began to vibrate at such an extreme frequency that it became invisible, leaving only a trail of thermal distortion. Joren wasn't pushing the wind; he was creating a vortex of negative pressure.
He initiated the [Dance of the Silent Wake].
Joren glided toward the network of mirrors. Every time he launched a slash at empty air, he left a suspended sheet of vacuum. By stepping on those same sheets, he received instantaneous speed boosts that made him zigzag through the cobalt night like an erratic ghost.
He wasn't attacking Lirael directly; he was destroying her network.
The sound was disturbing. There was no clash of metal, no explosions. Just a constant hiss, like air escaping through a millimeter-wide slit. Joren's daggers sucked in reality. When the black blade passed near a floating mirror of light, the vacuum violently pulled the solid photon toward the edge.
Crash! Ssshhh!
The mirrors of solid light were swallowed by the vortex of the daggers and shattered into stardust that disappeared into the void. Small translucent white conical whirlpools formed at the tips of Joren's weapons, devouring Lirael's technique mirror by mirror. Threads of pale green wind hung suspended for a second in the cobalt darkness before snapping with a click.
Lirael felt icy panic crawl up her spine. Her kaleidoscope was being dismantled in absolute silence by a predator who refused to look at her.
"Come out of there, coward!" she screamed, her seduction replaced by pure murderous fury.
Lirael concentrated her Qi and projected an exact reflection of herself two meters away. [Silver Moon Mirage].
The double seemed to be made of luminous mercury, vibrating slightly at its edges, but it emitted heat and fake Qi, a perfect trap. Lirael, wrapped in bent light, hid right behind the projection, wielding her short sword that now shone with an intense pearly white glow.
Joren, moving by inertia over his vacuum sheets, detected the heat signature. He emerged from the cobalt darkness like a detached shadow. He launched a cross slash straight at the neck of Lirael's figure.
The vacuum daggers struck the copy.
The reflection burst into a thousand fragments of crystal light that fell slowly like silver snow, blinding Joren's peripheral vision. It was the sound of glass bells echoing in the silence.
Lirael, from his blind spot, materialized her sadistic smile.
"Got you."
Her sword descended in a lethal diagonal slash. [Lunar Shadow Slash].
The physical weapon descended brightly, but the true trap lay beneath it. A "shadow" of black light, an arc of translucent darkness, traveled a fraction of a second behind the real steel, aiming directly to sever the assassin's collarbone and spiritual meridians.
Joren, blinded by the mirror explosion, couldn't see the shadow. But the vacuum of his daggers warned him of the pressure change. There was no time to dodge.
In a display of inhuman reflexes, Joren planted both feet on the ground, let go of his daggers (which remained floating in the vortex for a microsecond), and brought both hands together in front of his chest.
[Heart of the Unstoppable Hurricane].
A deafening burst broke the silence of the fight. Joren became the eye of a miniature tornado. Furious, dark winds rotated at supersonic speeds in a tight dome around his body. Emerald green static lightning jumped between the gusts due to molecular friction.
Lirael's physical sword struck the wind wall. Centrifugal force violently rejected the shining steel, throwing the woman's arm backward and tearing the sleeves of her silk tunic.
But the moon's illusion didn't obey the laws of pure physics.
The Lunar Shadow Slash, composed of inverted, immaterial photons, passed through the high-frequency wind barrier. The dark shadow cut through the storm and pierced Joren's left shoulder.
There was no sound of tearing flesh, only a frigid whisper.
Joren choked back a grunt. The wound didn't bleed red blood; the flesh on his shoulder glowed with a silver light from within, as if a cold star were trapped beneath his skin, freezing his tendons with a frigid burn that temporarily paralyzed his arm.
Lirael, smiling triumphantly upon seeing that her wound had penetrated the absolute defense, took a step back to prepare and decapitate him when the storm fell.
But Joren didn't drop the hurricane. He inverted it.
The frigid pain in his shoulder didn't slow him down; it ignited his engine of annihilation. With his healthy right hand, Joren retrieved one of his daggers mid-air and gripped it in reverse. He undid the hurricane dome, but he didn't let the air disperse. He compressed the rotating mass of wind directly beneath Lirael's boots.
[Ascending Gale Burst].
The jade floor beneath Lirael erupted in a geyser of cyan-white wind. The air became so dense it seemed liquid for a fraction of a second. The dull roar of an air cannon ruptured the eardrums of the closest spectators.
Lirael was launched three meters upward, her balance shattered, her legs floating uselessly in the void, exposed like a rag doll in the middle of the storm.
Joren, blood flowing from the fingertips of his right hand due to the negative pressure he had maintained, didn't waste the second. He bent his knees, concentrating all the Qi of his core into the matte blade of his single dagger, emptying his own lungs of air until he felt his chest would collapse.
The assassin jumped, intercepting Lirael's floating body in mid-air.
[Celestial Dawn Slash].
Joren executed a pure horizontal slash.
There was no pushing wind. There were no explosions. It was the art of separating reality itself. An extremely thin, horizontal line of sky-blue light crossed the entirety of the Midnight Mirage's cobalt dome.
The blade of the dagger tore through the air, the illusion, and physical space. The false blue night was cut in half by the sheet of vacuum. The silver lights and lunar shadows were violently sucked into the blue fissure, revealing the midday sun again in a fraction of a second.
The blade of the black dagger stopped.
Silence fell over the arena once more. Sound returned a second later: a sharp whistle followed by a sonic boom as natural air filled the massive vacuum created by the cut.
Lirael fell to her knees on the black jade. Her Midnight Mirage had been completely annihilated. She panted, her amber eyes wide open, paralyzed by the most absolute terror.
Joren, standing behind her, held the matte black steel dagger. The cold, sucking edge was resting exactly one millimeter from the orange-haired woman's carotid artery. A pearly drop of blood appeared on the thin line that the vacuum pressure had already opened on Lirael's neck.
The soundless assassin hadn't said a single word throughout the entire fight. And he didn't do so now. His brown eyes, slightly reddened from the rupture of ocular capillaries due to using the hurricane shield, looked at her through the reflection of her own sword, which lay on the ground.
Lirael swallowed hard, feeling the blade brush her skin with every beat of her heart. The terror she so loved to see in others now flooded her own veins. She raised her hands, releasing the air in a defeated exhale.
"I surrender," she whispered, her voice trembling for the first time in her life.
Joren withdrew the dagger with a flawless flick of his wrist. He sheathed both weapons silently and took a step back, bringing his right hand to his left shoulder, where the silver light of the frigid wound still flickered cruelly beneath his clothes.
In the upper boxes, the Morningstar Elite did not applaud, but the looks of absolute respect were unanimous.
"A perfect vacuum," murmured Cedric, evaluating the air dispersion. "He didn't waste energy on killing; he used it all to break Lirael's area control and gain the position. He is a machine."
Samael Morningstar, wrapped in his mantle of tyranny and power, leaned over the balcony. His voice descended upon the bloodied arena, cutting the silence like the mandate of an ancient god.
"The soundless wind claims its prey!" the Patriarch decreed, his violet gaze fixed on the upright figure of the assassin. "Joren Morningstar. You have shattered illusion with the truth of the void. Sequence 17 belongs to you!"
Joren, true to his nature, bowed in a mute, ninety-degree bow toward the imperial balcony and began walking toward the healers' tunnel, without looking back.
Samael then shifted his eyes to Lirael, who still remained on her knees, trembling from the brush of death, but whose illusory skill had transformed the arena into a theater of psychological lethality that even the elders would struggle to navigate.
"And you, widow of the moonlight," Samael continued, his tone severe yet calculating. "You have proven that beauty in this empire is a deadly trap capable of assassinating squads in the dark. Your deception deserves a throne in the gloom. Rise, Lirael! The fear you instill has earned you Sequence 18!"
Lirael raised her face, her amber eyes recovering a glimpse of predatory pride, and bowed her head to the Sovereign before retreating, aware that her refraction magic would now serve the most ruthless generals in the world.
The herald stepped forward, his voice worn but tireless, announcing to the mountain that the carnage was reaching its epilogue. The positions were closing, the army was taking its final shape, and only the last rungs remained to complete the base of the obsidian pyramid.
END OF CHAPTER 65 (PART 4)