Chapter 78: The Shattered Reflection and the Empress of the Void
The arena of Skull Rock crackled beneath the sun. The jade slabs, witnesses to the previous spiritual ballistics and destructive force, now reflected a deceptive calm. The stands seethed, the roar of the Morningstar legion demanding more blood, more displays of power. They had seen one of the Top 10 masters fall to an archer of absolute precision. The certainty of the ranks began to blur in the minds of the spectators, but the true terror of the hierarchy was about to descend upon the coliseum.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian remained impassive, but the imperceptible drumming of his fingers on the ice railing betrayed him.
"The archer was a tactical anomaly," said Lord Varian, his voice low and icy. "But now, the arena calls the true leaders of this pack."
Saira Varian, his daughter, swallowed hard. The arrogance she had shown at the beginning of the tournament had been completely eradicated.
"Sequence 2. The second in command of all this madness."
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar lifted little Celeste, settling her in one of his arms while she played with the edge of his dark tunic. The Patriarch did not look away from the arena doors.
"Illusory light cannot deceive space," declared Samael, his deep voice resonating with the certainty of one who knows the weapons he has forged. "A huntress who relies on visual lies will face someone who masters reality itself."
Great Elder Lilith, with her timeless majesty, observed the entrances with her dark red eyes.
"Lirael isn't just lies, Patriarch. She knows she cannot win with brute force. She will look for the blind spot. But Violeta... Violeta has no patience for games."
The herald, whose own Qi was at its limit from the tension of narrating such massacres, raised the bone horn.
BOOOOOMMM!
"Seventh match!" bellowed the herald. "The deception of silver against the frost of the abyss! Sequence 18, Lirael Morningstar, against Sequence 2, Violeta Morningstar!"
The south doors opened in total silence.
Lirael Morningstar walked in with a feline elegance. Tall, long-legged, and with an immensely seductive figure, her presence was a magnet for the gazes of the disciples in the stands. Her long, deep orange hair waved gently behind her back, and her amber eyes shone with a promise of warmth and desire. She wore tight robes that accentuated her silhouette, and in her right hand, she held a thin, curved sword, similar to a saber.
Lirael did not radiate bloodlust. She radiated a dangerous magnetism. She was manipulative and icy beneath her mask of seduction. On the battlefield, she used her beauty and the moonlight to attract her enemies like moths, lowering their defenses before decapitating them while they were still enthralled.
From the north door, the air froze. It was no metaphor. The warm desert wind crashed against an invisible wall of zero degrees and plummeted to the ground as frost.
Violeta Morningstar entered the arena.
The Winter Princess was the antithesis of Lirael's warm seduction. Her hair was an absolute silvery white, and her face, although delicately beautiful, was a mask of cold, aristocratic indifference. She possessed heterochromia: one eye was an intense neon violet and the other a diamond blue that seemed to reflect the clear sky. She wore light blue and silver robes that crunched slightly from the constant frost covering them. In her right hand rested a fine-hilted rapier.
Violeta didn't walk; she glided with a serene bearing. She was second in command, only below the monster with the golden sword. Cold, calculating, and without an ounce of mercy for her enemies.
Lirael stopped thirty meters away, resting her weight on one leg and smiling with her red lips.
"Violeta, darling. Always so tense. You should relax a little. Stress will ruin that pale skin of yours."
Violeta did not smile. Her violet eye and blue eye fixed on Lirael as if looking at an annoying insect.
"And you should stop talking, Lirael. Moonlight provides no warmth. It is only a false reflection of a dead sun. I will end this quickly, before you dirty me with your cheap tricks."
Lirael let out a crystalline laugh, a melody that made more than one guard in the lower ranks sigh.
"Oh, my little tsundere princess. We'll see if you're still so haughty when you can't find my neck."
DOOONG!
The gong resonated, but Lirael was the first to disappear.
Literally, she disappeared. Lirael's aura shifted to a pearly white with cyan flashes, emitting a sensation of nocturnal coolness. In a blink, Sequence 18's seductive figure multiplied.
She activated her Mid Earth Grade technique: the [Mirage of the Silver Moon].
It wasn't a cheap illusion; they were refraction doubles made of solidified photons. Ten exact replicas of Lirael surrounded Violeta in a thirty-meter circle. Each reflection seemed made of luminous mercury, emitting fake body heat and Qi fluctuations that completely deceived spiritual senses.
At the same time, Lirael unleashed her [Midnight Mirage].
A pulse of moonlight swept the arena. Violeta, in the center of the coliseum, felt the day fade away. The area within a ten-meter radius around her was dyed a deep cobalt blue, creating a zone of "false night". Small spheres of light, like lunar fireflies, floated around her, distracting her vision and altering her depth perception.
Within this false night, Lirael's ten reflections began to move, dancing at three times their normal speed, turning into glowing silhouettes and specters of pure silver.
"Where am I, little princess?" whispered Lirael's ten voices in unison, the sound bouncing from all angles.
Violeta, enveloped in the illusory darkness, closed her eyes for a moment. Her face showed no frustration. Only tedium.
Light refraction deceives the eyes. Fake Qi deceives the spiritual sense, Violeta analyzed with mathematical coldness. But light has no mass. And what has no mass occupies no true space.
Instead of launching desperate attacks against the illusions, Violeta raised her left hand, palm open, and exhaled a dense, cold mist.
She activated her defense: the [Aurora of the Last Snow].
A veil of shining ice particles, similar to diamond dust, sprouted from her body and began to float around her like a curtain of polar lights in a three-meter radius.
Two of Lirael's silver silhouettes lunged at Violeta, launching simultaneous thrusts.
Violeta did not move.
When the lunar light weapons of the illusions touched the aurora curtain, the photonic refraction effect collapsed. Violeta's diamond dust barrier scattered the light particles. The two illusory Liraels burst into a thousand fragments of light crystal that fell slowly like silver snow, emitting a melodic sound similar to breaking bells.
They were fakes.
But Lirael wasn't naive. She knew Violeta would nullify the copies. The illusions were only the distraction for the true assassination strike.
While the crystal bells rang and Violeta was surrounded by the burst of light, the real Lirael appeared directly in the Winter Princess's blind spot, descending from above with her saber wrapped in a blinding bluish-white light.
She had activated her most lethal offensive technique: the [Lunar Shadow Cut].
Lirael launched the real slash toward Violeta's neck. But the true trap wasn't the steel. Beneath the physical blade, the moonlight projected a second dark slash, a "shadow" of inverse black light. If Violeta blocked the steel, the black shadow would pass through her guard and inflict an incurable frigid burn on her throat.
"Die!" hissed Lirael, losing her seductive mask for an instant, revealing the ruthless assassin.
Violeta didn't flinch. Her heterochromatic eyes snapped open, shining with a terrifying spatial intensity.
She didn't try to block with her rapier. She didn't try to dodge backward.
In the fraction of a second before the steel and the lunar shadow touched her neck, Violeta altered the rules of geometry.
[Step Between Worlds].
Violeta's body didn't become invisible. Her image shifted abruptly out of phase, as if reality had disconnected. Three or four "echoes" of her body overlapped, vibrating at an extremely high speed. She had desynchronized from physical reality, shifting her mass into a shallow parallel dimension.
Lirael's saber and the lethal Lunar Shadow Cut passed cleanly through Violeta's neck.
There was no sound of flesh cutting. The impact area on Violeta's neck glowed with a spectral blue. The black light slash flowed through her as if hitting television static.
Lirael landed in front of her, her amber eyes wide open in absolute shock. Her perfect attack had passed through the air.
What... she's intangible? thought Lirael, panic clawing at her killer instincts.
Violeta could only maintain intangibility for one second in the Origin Realm. It was enough.
The echoes of her body merged back together with a sharp crack, like two rocks colliding, returning to physical density.
Lirael, desperate, tried to back away using her false night speed, but Violeta had already raised her rapier.
The Winter Princess's weapon didn't shine with frost. It emitted an aura of cold so extreme that it didn't disperse, concentrated entirely on the blade's edge.
[Frigid Blood Seal].
Violeta launched a brutal and precise thrust, not toward Lirael's heart, but superficially tearing the right arm of the seductive assassin.
The rapier barely cut the fabric of Lirael's tunic and grazed the skin of her bicep. It wasn't a deep wound. No red blood was spilled.
But the effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
Lirael let out a scream that tore her throat. At the point of contact, the veins in her right arm turned a bright electric blue through her pale skin. The extreme cold traveled inward, not as a sharp pain, but as a fulminating cryogenic necrosis. The blood flow in her arm froze in a millisecond. Her veins turned black and rigid like dry branches.
A horrifying sound of breaking glass echoed beneath Lirael's flesh. Her entire right arm died. It fell heavy and flaccid at her side, completely paralyzed and cold as a corpse in the permafrost. The silver saber slipped from her dead fingers and hit the jade floor with a dull thud.
Lirael stumbled backward, holding her dead arm with her left hand, hyperventilating. The Midnight Mirage collapsed immediately from the loss of concentration. The arena was once again bathed in the afternoon sun.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian leaned forward, his cold eyes fixed on Violeta's weapon.
"Dimensional intangibility as an absolute defense... and a zero-degree seal as an offensive. That girl doesn't fight; she executes. She nullified the assassin's arm with a mere graze."
Saira Varian nodded, pale. "She is a monster, father. A monster of ice and space."
In the arena, Lirael, despite the agonizing pain of the cryogenic necrosis in her arm, wasn't going to give up so easily. Her survival instinct replaced her seduction.
If Violeta could become intangible in short spaces, Lirael had to keep her away and confused.
Lirael expanded all the Moonlight Qi she had left in her core.
[Dance of the Broken Mirrors].
The air around Lirael shattered. Dozens of silver glass fragments, sheets of solid light suspended in the air, began to orbit her at high speed. They reflected the arena in a distorted way, like a maddened kaleidoscope. Lirael moved among them, and her image seemed to teleport from one mirror to another, leaving a trail of broken glass in the air, making it physically impossible to locate her.
"Catch me if you can, monster!" shouted Lirael from all directions, her voice bouncing off the photon mirrors.
Violeta lowered her rapier. Her neon violet eye and diamond blue eye did not look for Lirael's reflection.
The Winter Princess exhaled a cold sigh.
"Your parlor tricks bore me, Lirael," declared Violeta, her voice resonating with an icy authority that froze the air around her. "You think because light bounces off your little mirrors you're safe. But you forget something fundamental."
Violeta raised her free hand and tapped the blade of her rapier with two fingers.
"Space does not reflect. Space breaks."
Violeta activated her area attack technique: the [Reality Fragmentation].
She didn't attack Lirael's light mirrors. She attacked the spatial coordinates of the arena itself.
The air around Violeta physically shattered with a thunderous sound, as if someone had struck the sky with a hammer of the gods. Floating ice polygons, large as tombstones, materialized in a twenty-meter radius.
But they weren't simply ice. They were fractures in the geometry of the dimension.
The entire area where Lirael was executing her Dance of the Broken Mirrors was caught in the fragmentation. Lirael's light mirrors, created from photons, could not withstand the space in which they existed being literally torn apart. The solid light mirrors burst into glowing dust, unable to reflect a fractured reality.
Lirael was violently thrown from her optical hiding place. She fell heavily onto the jade slabs, her illusion destroyed by pure spatial violence. The extreme cold emanating from the cracks in reality around her drained her vital energy at an alarming rate.
Sequence 18 looked up, terrified, gasping for air, her black, dead arm hanging uselessly at her side.
Violeta was twenty meters away.
The Winter Princess raised her rapier. Her murderous intent spiked. She wasn't going to let the seductive assassin surrender. Lirael had called her a tsundere and belittled her. Violeta, proud and vengeful, wanted to leave a clear message for the rest of the legion and for the outsiders in the box.
Violeta did not walk. She initiated the final execution.
She concentrated all her Stage 4 Qi into the tip of her rapier. A dense vapor escaped her lips and froze instantly. Violeta's weapon seemed to disappear, leaving only the hilt wrapped in a vortex of absolute black snow.
She was going to use the lethal [Execution: End of the Spatial Line].
In the VIP box, Lord Varian leaped to his feet, his Emperor's eyes recognizing the pattern of annihilation.
"She's going to erase the space between them!" exclaimed Lord Varian, unable to hide his astonishment. "A spatial collapse technique in the Origin Realm! That girl is going to pulverize her without even crossing the arena!"
Violeta aimed the black snow-crowned hilt at the chest of the paralyzed and terrified Lirael.
"End of the line," whispered Violeta.
She delivered the thrust into the air.
In the instant of execution, the world in the arena lost its color for a second, turning black and white. A line of fractal frost, a beam of dark spatial distortion, instantly linked Violeta's hilt with Lirael's chest. There was no physical travel path. The cut simply "existed" simultaneously at both points. Violeta had erased the line of space separating them.
The impact wasn't an explosion. It was a silent implosion.
Lirael, the beautiful huntress of the moonlight, felt the cold of absolute zero invade her central nervous system. In the center of her chest, space itself collapsed inward. However, before the void consumed her heart, the arena's own emergency protection runes—activated by Samael's will on the balcony—glowed an intense red, forcing the expulsion of the spatial energy before total disintegration.
Still, the damage was catastrophic. Lirael couldn't scream. Her vocal cords were frozen in stasis. A circumference of abyss-black frost was marked on her chest, and her body fell backward onto the jade, wrapped in a mist of diamond dust that began to crystallize her skin.
The silence in the arena was sepulchral. The pure terror of seeing one of the legion's masters nearly erased from existence in a millisecond froze the blood of the ten thousand spectators.
Twenty meters away, Violeta lowered her hilt. Her right arm was covered in a thick obsidian-colored frost, the physical toll of executing a technique so close to the domain of saints. Her eyes, now a solid white with no pupils, emitted a fine cold vapor. She stood upright, unyielding, a winter goddess who had just claimed her victory.
In the VIP box, Saira Varian took a step back, hitting the ice wall.
"That technique..." whispered the foreign princess, trembling. "She almost erased her from reality. How can someone of her level control such a level of collapse?"
Lord Varian remained standing, his knuckles white as he gripped the railing.
"She didn't kill her because the Patriarch intervened in the arena's arrays in time. But the message is clear: Violeta Morningstar can decide who lives and who ceases to exist with a simple wave of her hand. The future of this clan is an impending cataclysm."
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar nodded slowly, holding Celeste in his arm. Violeta had executed his will. She had purged illusory weakness with the authority of the void, leaving her opponent on the edge of nothingness, but sparing her life so she could learn from her defeat.
The herald, stuttering and with a pale face, raised the bone horn while a team of twelve elite healers, led by Elowen's senior disciples, rushed into the arena. They used sacred heat seals and spatial restoration elixirs to stabilize Lirael's chest before the void wound expanded.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The... the winner of the seventh match!" bellowed the herald. "Sequence 2, Violeta Morningstar! The Empress of the Void advances in the Final Rank Tournament!"
As the slow, reverential chants began to rise from the stands, Violeta turned and walked back toward the northern tunnels, dragging her frost-darkened arm. She didn't look back to see them carry away Lirael's wounded body. For her, the match had ended the moment she decided space must break.
The tournament had crossed the point of no return. Mercy did not exist in Violeta's execution, only the cold hierarchy of Skull Rock. And as the medical team fought to save the seductive assassin of the moonlight, the next contenders in the tunnels felt a new chill: the fear of being the next "zero coordinate" on the Winter Princess's board.