Chapter 81: The Requiem of Mirrors and the Black Ash Phoenix
The sun had sunk almost completely behind the peaks surrounding Skull Rock. The spiritual fire torches embedded in the walls of the main arena sprang to life, casting long, dancing shadows over the jade. The coliseum, battered by gravity, ice, blood, and magma, reeked of a mixture of molten minerals and ozone. However, for the Morningstar legion, the air had never been so intoxicating.
The Final Rank Tournament had exceeded all expectations, even those of the ones who had survived the Pagoda. The level of tactical annihilation and raw power demonstrated by the Sequences, regardless of their ranking number, had made it clear that this emerging empire had no weaknesses.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian remained seated, though his posture was rigid. The goblets of ice wine that the clan servants had left on his table remained untouched.
"Nine matches, Saira," said the Emperor of Star Ice, his voice low and loaded with a respect forged in fear. "Nine demonstrations that the conventional rules of cultivation do not apply on this mountain."
Saira Varian nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on Kael's burn marks and the frozen blood that still stained the slabs where Lirael had almost been erased.
"And one is missing, father. The final match to close this phase. If Sequence 2 and Sequence 1 have already fought... who is left that can hold the interest of this audience of psychopaths?"
"Sequence 3," Lord Varian replied, his memory recalling the report. "And number 8. Illusion against fire. A classic closer, although I suppose nothing here is classic."
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar gently stroked Celeste's back, who had begun to doze off under the warmth of his arm. The Patriarch directed his gaze toward the tunnels, his spatial tyranny enveloping the box.
"Lyra and Eris," Samael pronounced. There was no favoritism in his tone, only the assessment of a commander. "The mind that weaves physical lies against the flame that devours the truth."
Seraphina, leaning gracefully against him, nodded. Her silver-blue hair reflected the torchlight.
"Eris is the exact counterpart to Violeta, husband. If Violeta is the calculating cold of space, Eris is the explosive heart of battle. But Lyra... Lyra found something dark in the Pagoda."
Great Elder Lilith, immovable as an ancestral mountain, narrowed her dark red eyes.
"Eris loves to hit. But you cannot hit what does not exist. If the girl of fire does not keep a cool head, Lyra will drive her mad before slitting her throat."
The herald, his voice hoarse but still imbued with Qi, took a step forward and raised the bone horn toward the twilight sky.
BOOOOOMMM!
The echo of the horn seemed to hang suspended in the air, refusing to fade, as if the sound itself knew what was to come.
"The tenth and final match of this phase!" announced the herald, his voice spreading over the crowd. "The whispering nightmare against absolute destruction! Sequence 8, Lyra Morningstar, against Sequence 3, Eris Morningstar!"
The heavy doors at the south end opened without emitting a single creak.
The air began to turn gray. An ashen mist with violet streaks crawled heavily along the ground, spilling over the arena like thick water.
From amidst the fog emerged Lyra Morningstar.
She had semi-short deep dark blue hair, and her eyes glowed with an unnatural neon blue. With fair skin and an icy beauty, her face was a mask of emotional distance. Lyra seemed not to be there physically; every step she took produced a small visual shockwave in the fog, like a stone falling into a still lake. In her right hand, she held the Staff of Eternal Mist, a growth spiritual weapon topped with an orb that pulsed with dim light.
Lyra was enigmatic, but her loyalty to the clan was fierce. However, her way of protecting it was by plunging her enemies into a sensory terror from which they never awoke.
From the north, the doors were literally kicked open. The iron bent under the impact, and the doors crashed against the containment walls.
Eris Morningstar burst into the arena.
Sequence 3 was a whirlwind of arrogance and power. Her silvery-white hair ended in furious red tips. Her inverted heterochromia was the antithesis of Violeta's: one crimson red eye and the other neon violet splashed with red flecks. She wore red and white robes, and her expression was an open challenge to the entire world.
Unlike her ice twin, Eris was explosive, loud, and a lover of close-quarters chaos. In her right hand rested an immense Earth Grade black spear, her companion for the Sky-Piercing Phoenix technique.
"Finally!" roared Eris, striking the butt of her spear against the jade, creating orange sparks. "I thought I was going to grow old waiting in that tunnel! Come on, Lyra! Stop hiding behind the smoke and come take a hit!"
Lyra stopped thirty meters away. She didn't smile. Her neon blue eyes locked onto Eris.
"The smoke is only the beginning, Eris," Lyra whispered. And although she spoke softly, her voice echoed throughout the arena as if she were whispering directly into the ear of every spectator. "I wonder how many times I will have to kill you in your own mind before your fire truly goes out."
DOOONG!
The gong resonated, and Lyra attacked first.
Not with offensive magic, but with the nullification of reality. She struck the base of her staff against the ground and activated the [Requiem of the Shadowy Mirage].
The ash-gray mist that had entered with her expanded at breakneck speed, swallowing half of the arena. The light from the torches turned dim and greenish. Eris, who was already charging forward, found herself submerged in an ocean of thick fog.
But the fog wasn't just visual; it was a conductor.
Immediately, Lyra unleashed the [Phantom Echoes].
Eris heard the whistle of an arrow grazing her left ear. Instinctively, the fire warrior spun her spear to block the air. There was nothing. A second later, she heard heavy footsteps running behind her. She spun and launched a thrust into the void.
Eris's brain was being bombarded by false auditory and visual reflexes. The high-frequency hum of the technique began to cause her slight nausea.
"Coward!" shouted Eris, her patience running out in less than three seconds. Her instinct told her to destroy everything.
She channeled fire Qi into her spear and jumped, preparing to use the Descent of the Igneous Phoenix to burn away all the fog.
But before she could initiate the assault technique, a voice echoed within the mist.
It was Violeta's voice.
"Eris, to your left! Look out!" shouted the voice of the ice twin, laced with unusual urgency.
Eris's heart skipped a beat. She knew Violeta was in the tunnels, but her protective instinct toward her sister overrode her reasoning for a fraction of a second. Eris interrupted the charge of her technique and spun sharply to the left, looking for the imaginary danger threatening her sister.
It was the [Whisper of the Traitor]. Lyra had captured Violeta's tone during the previous matches.
And Lyra was exactly to Eris's right.
Taking advantage of the millisecond of vulnerability and Eris's open guard, Lyra did not launch an illusory attack. Thanks to the Staff of Eternal Mist, her illusions had achieved physical resonance.
She activated the [Dance of the Nameless Mist].
Lyra's body multiplied into four gray mist clones that surrounded Eris. The clones, propelled by high-frequency sound vibrations, acquired temporary physical density.
The four clones struck simultaneously with solidified mist staffs.
Whack! Smack! Crack!
The impacts were real. Eris took hits to the kidneys, ribs, and shoulder, with enough force to make her stumble and spit blood. The illusions dissolved into metallic gray smoke immediately after striking, with the sound of broken bells, only for the real Lyra to appear in front of her and deliver a blow to the stomach that knocked the wind out of her.
Eris fell to her knees in the middle of the fog.
The echo of Violeta's false voice still resonated in her head.
In the VIP box, Saira Varian watched in horror as the loud warrior fell prey to the trap.
"She's driving her crazy," whispered Saira. "The illusions are real. The voice is her sister's. That fog girl is not an illusionist; she is a mental torturer."
Lyra backed away a few steps, staying hidden in the rolling mist.
"You are too emotional, Eris," Lyra's voice echoed from everywhere. "Your fire is great, but your mind is fragile. A spark in the wrong direction and you manage to burn yourself. Yield before I start showing you your dead parents."
In the center of the fog, Eris, with her head down and her spear resting on the ground, let out a sound. It wasn't a groan of pain. It wasn't a cry of surrender.
It was a laugh.
An unhinged laugh, low at first, which grew in volume until it became an explosive, maniacal cackle that vibrated the fog particles around her.
Eris lifted her face. Her crimson red eye and violet eye shone with a martial madness that eclipsed any psychological terror. Blood stained her lips, but her smile was pure destruction.
"Drive me crazy?" asked Eris, her voice raspy. "Lyra, you idiot. I was born broken. And I don't need my eyes or my ears to kill you!"
Eris stopped trying to dispel the fog with ordinary fire. She injected the purest and most dangerous essence of her Stage 4 directly into the ground and into her black spear.
She activated the [Flame of Ruin].
The change in the arena was instantaneous and catastrophic.
From Eris's feet, a flare of absolute black fire erupted upwards, absorbing all the ambient light in a five-meter radius. In the exact center of the black flame, a white core shone with violent intensity.
There was no radiant heat. There was an existential cold, a force of accelerated decomposition.
Lyra's ash-gray mist, which was infused with Qi, came into contact with the black fire. Instead of evaporating from heat, the fog began to "rot." Eris's Entropic Combustion didn't use oxygen; it used Lyra's Qi as fuel. The illusion burned away, turning into gray ash that rained down on the arena. The fog dissipated at an alarming rate, revealing Lyra's true position.
Sequence 8, for the first time, showed astonishment. Her technique was being devoured.
"There you are!" roared Eris.
The fire warrior didn't run; she leaped into the open sky, rising twenty meters thanks to the immense kinetic force of her legs and the thermal propulsion of her black flames. In the air, Eris inverted her posture, aiming the Earth Grade spear directly at Lyra.
The air warped around her. The black aura and the white core formed the immense silhouette of a bird of prey plummeting.
[Descent of the Igneous Phoenix] combined with the Flame of Ruin.
Lyra knew she couldn't block that physically. The impact force would crush her, and the black flame would decompose her body into burnt paper.
Quickly, Lyra concentrated her Qi in a final defensive effort to nullify the attack. She unleashed the [Dream Devourer].
The remaining fog condensed and rose, taking the shape of gigantic, shadowy figures that emitted a sonic wail designed to cause nausea and immediate spiritual paralysis. The shadows interposed themselves between the black fire Phoenix and Lyra.
The Igneous Phoenix crashed into the nightmare illusion.
The clash was not loud; it was a deep, corrosive hiss.
Eris, enveloped in the Flame of Ruin, activated the [Devouring Ruin]. The black fire didn't stop at the illusory energy of the ghosts. It began to devour it, using it as fuel to make its flame even larger. The mist monsters shrieked as molecular ruin undid them.
Eris broke through the barrier of illusory nightmares like a dark comet, and her spear impacted the jade floor exactly where Lyra was standing.
KABOOM!
The explosion wasn't of orange fire. A dome of dark energy and white fire laid waste to the center of the arena. The jade turned to fine gray dust in a fifteen-meter radius. The disintegration shockwave was so powerful that the energy shields of the stands flickered dangerously, creaking under the entropic corrosion.
The dust and black flames hid the center of the crater.
On the main balcony, Seraphina held her breath, her imperial posture tensing. Samael, with his violet eyes, penetrated the smoke effortlessly.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian had covered his face with his thick ice-bear fur cloak to avoid the corrosive ash.
"It is destruction incarnate!" shouted Varian to make himself heard over the noise of the hollow wind. "Her fire ignores magical defense! She has disintegrated the girl of illusions!"
The smoke began to dissipate slowly, carried away by the night breeze.
In the center of a ten-meter-diameter crater of pure gray ash, Eris Morningstar stood. Her black spear was driven deep into the melted stone. The flames of ruin on her body were slowly dying out, and Eris's hands showed the dangerous gray spots of ash, the aftermath of abusing her power of decomposition. She breathed heavily, her heterochromatic eyes searching for her opponent's corpse.
But beneath the blade of her spear, there was no disintegrated body. There was a cloak of fading mist.
A muffled cry echoed from the eastern edge of the crater.
Eris spun sharply.
Fifteen meters away, at the edge of the blast, was Lyra.
She hadn't been disintegrated, but the price she had paid to survive was horrendous.
In the last millisecond before the Phoenix of Ruin crushed her, Lyra had used the extension of her evolutionary skill, the [Mask of Shadowy Mist], but in a purely defensive manner. She had enveloped her own body in a hyper-dense clone and forced a sonic position swap in mid-air.
However, the Flame of Ruin had caught her in her escape attempt.
Lyra was on her knees, using her Staff of Eternal Mist as support. Her tunic was shredded on the left side. But the most terrifying thing was her left leg and hip.
The Ash Touch of Eris's technique had dealt a glancing blow. The flesh and fabric in that area were not bleeding; they had turned a suffocating shade of gray and were cracked like burnt paper. The decomposition damage was spreading millimeter by millimeter. If she didn't amputate that limb or spend all her Qi containing the necrosis, the ruin would consume her entire body.
Lyra looked up, her neon blue eyes trembling with pain and fatigue. The ringing sound in her ears was deafening.
Eris didn't hesitate. With a bloodthirsty smile, she yanked the spear from the ash and aimed at the kneeling illusionist.
"Your mind is very twisted, Lyra," Eris said, her voice echoing in the silence of the arena. "But flesh always burns. And now that you can't run, I'm going to reduce you to dust."
Eris raised the spear, preparing to perform the Setting Sun Thrust and detonate Lyra's body from the inside.
Lyra, her breathing ragged and her sanity sharpened by the proximity of absolute annihilation, raised her right hand.
"Enough..." whispered Sequence 8, her voice barely audible. She lowered her head, her pride broken by physical pain and overwhelming destructive pressure. "You have control... Eris. I yield."
Eris stopped the spear centimeters from Lyra's throat. For an instant, the warrior's crimson red eye flashed with the desire to finish the job, to let the Flame of Ruin purge the weakness. But she was Sequence 3, and although she was battle-crazed, she knew the boundary between a tactical massacre and betrayal to the clan.
Eris lowered the weapon and dispelled the last sparks of her dark fire. Her face became arrogant once again.
"At least you're smart enough to know when you're dead," Eris snapped at her. She turned toward the balcony, crossed her spear over her shoulders, and spat a little blood into the ash, laughing loudly at the crushing victory.
In the VIP box, Saira Varian slumped in her chair, terror paralyzing her limbs. The final battle of the round had made it clear that the clan's high commanders were not human; they were natural disasters encapsulated in mortal bodies.
"Fire that decomposes matter," whispered Saira. "Father, that loud warrior could incinerate our best ice arrays in a single blow."
Lord Varian remained rigid, his Emperor's eyes evaluating the ruins of the arena.
"Fire that decomposes, ice that shatters space, poison that freezes, soundless assassins, and absolute snipers," Lord Varian listed, his tone denoting a dark reverence. "We have witnessed the initial phase of a tournament that in my empire would have been the final war of a generation. And the duels of the summit still remain."
On the main balcony, Seraphina let out a light sigh of relief, watching the elite healers run toward Lyra to stop the advance of the ash with stasis elixirs and runic purification.
"Physical destruction severed the mental bonds," murmured Seraphina, her gaze full of pride. "Eris remains indomitable."
Samael Morningstar said nothing. The Patriarch caressed the face of his little Celeste and directed his violet gaze toward the arena, toward Rank 3 celebrating her victory. The message of his tyranny was clear: the sharpest pieces were ready.
The herald, coughing from the ash floating in the air, stepped forward to the edge of the lower stands.
BOOOOOMMM!
The final sound of the war horn for that phase echoed in the night that was beginning to fall over Skull Rock.
"The winner of the tenth match and the closing of the first round!" bellowed the herald, his voice reaching an almost fanatical pitch. "Sequence 3, the fire of destruction, Eris Morningstar, burns the lie and secures her place in the next phase of the Final Rank Tournament!"
The stands erupted into the loudest clamor of the day. They had witnessed the evolution of their own legion. They had seen blood, frozen amputations, fractured minds, and absolute power. The combatants of the Golden Generation had proven they were not afraid to devour each other to reach perfection.
As Eris walked haughtily toward the tunnels and the builders began the monumental task of rebuilding the pulverized jade arena overnight, the world waited. Tomorrow, the winners would clash against each other. Blood would continue to flow, and the Morningstar Empire would forge its crown on the anvil of the most exquisite pain.