Chapter 84: The Torn Veil and the Zero Blood
The arena of Skull Rock exhaled the vapor of past matches, but the atmosphere was about to freeze to its foundations. Five thousand disciples crowded the stands, a tide of dark robes and eyes injected with fanaticism. New members had been born, others had returned to the bosom of the clan after years of bloody missions, but they all shared the same unquenchable thirst. They didn't want to see mystical exhibitions from a distance; they wanted to hear the crunch of bones and smell boiling blood on the jade.
The herald, his voice on the verge of breaking from the tension in the atmosphere, raised the immense horn. The sound tore through the desert wind.
"The second match of the quarterfinals!" the shout echoed off the stone. "The Empress of the Void against the First Disciple! Sequence 2, Violeta Morningstar, against Sequence 6, Elara Morningstar!"
The north and south doors burst open simultaneously.
Violeta advanced with the coldness of an eternal winter. Her silvery-white hair flowed behind her, and her neon violet eye shone in perfect, lethal synchronization with her diamond blue eye. Her exceedingly fine-bladed rapier, devoid of useless adornments, rested in her right hand.
From the opposite side, Elara glided into the arena. Her black hair with liquid silver tips seemed to float in an invisible current. There was no trace of the playful girl who ran through the fortress corridors. Her silver-gray eyes were empty of all human emotion, replaced by a sadistic and calculating abyss. In her hands, the Mist Fangs daggers spun with a lethal gleam.
They stopped ten meters apart. There were no words. There were no taunts. The killing intent between the two was so dense that the oxygen in the center of the arena liquefied, forming drops of frost that fell upon the slabs.
DOOONG!
The gong had barely begun to vibrate when Elara disappeared.
It wasn't a fog trick. It was pure muscular explosion. Sequence 6 closed the distance in a fraction of a second, launching a brutal thrust with her right dagger straight at Violeta's throat.
Violeta didn't retreat. With an imperceptible flick of her wrist, she raised her rapier and deflected the dagger.
CLANG!
The clash of steel against steel sent sparks flying that froze in mid-air. The force of the impact pushed Elara a step back, but the assassin used the inertia to spin on her own axis, launching a low spinning kick aimed at shattering Violeta's knee.
Violeta jumped, barely inches over Elara's leg, and in mid-air, launched a descending thrust toward her opponent's collarbone. Elara rolled across the jade, hearing the rapier pierce the stone where her neck had been a millisecond before.
Elara pushed off with her hands, launching herself back into the assault. The arena became a whirlwind of metal. The two women exchanged dozens of blows in barely three seconds. Elara's daggers sought out femoral arteries, ribs, and the neck in rapid, curved, savage cuts. Violeta responded with the precision of a surgeon: sharp parries, millimeter-perfect deflections, and straight thrusts that forced Elara to contort into impossible angles to avoid being skewered.
The sound of clashing metal echoed in the coliseum, accompanied by the savage cheers of the five thousand disciples, who beat the seats with their fists, demanding blood.
Violeta found a gap in the assassin's guard. Her rapier slipped past the daggers' defense and grazed Elara's left shoulder. The fabric tore, and a thin red line welled up from the pale skin.
Elara hissed, but didn't back down. Instead, she ignored the cut and closed the distance even further, stepping inside the guard of Violeta's rapier, a range where the long weapon lost its advantage. With a guttural grunt, Elara delivered a devastating elbow strike straight to Violeta's sternum.
The crunch of bone echoed above the screams of the crowd.
Violeta spat blood, her lungs knocked out of air for an instant, but her military training overcame the pain. As she was pushed backward by the blow, Violeta unleashed a knee strike straight into Elara's face.
The impact smashed Elara's lip and fractured her nose. The assassin stumbled backward, red blood staining her pale chin, but an unhinged, purely sadistic smile crossed her bloodied face.
"That's how I like it!" spat Elara, tasting the iron in her mouth.
Without missing a beat, Elara exhaled.
[Shroud of Vitreous Fragments].
From her battered lungs erupted a dense, freezing mist. It wasn't meant to cover the entire arena; she concentrated it in a five-meter radius around herself. The air filled with diamond dust, micro-crystals of frost that cut like invisible razors. Violeta, still catching her breath from the cracked rib, found herself enveloped in the slicing fog.
Every time Violeta tried to move, the tiny crystals in the air scratched her cheeks and the backs of her hands, opening dozens of micro-cuts that burned from the extreme cold. Visibility was reduced to zero.
Stealth is her domain, thought Violeta, her heterochromatic eyes shining in the darkness of the fog. But you cannot hide from what has no shape.
Violeta closed her eyes, ignoring the blood running down her cheeks. She activated the [Reality Fragmentation].
She didn't attack Elara. She struck the ground with the hilt of her rapier. The space within a ten-meter radius shattered like a gigantic mirror. Elara's mist, caught in the fractured coordinates, was torn into a thousand pieces of void. The illusion of safety shattered with a deafening crash.
Elara was violently expelled from her camouflage, falling onto the jade, but her killer instinct didn't allow her to stay on the ground. She sprang forward like a coil, throwing the Mist Fang from her left hand directly at Violeta's eye.
Violeta opened her eyes and activated her spatial mobility.
[Bridge Between Worlds].
Violeta's body compressed inward and vanished with a sonic snap. Elara's dagger cut through the vacuum. A millisecond later, a matte black streak crossed the arena and Violeta reappeared directly behind Elara's back, her rapier aimed at the assassin's spine.
Elara didn't have time to turn. She threw herself face-first against the jade floor. The rapier tore a gash across her back from shoulder blade to hip, a deep cut that gushed blood, staining her dark tunic.
The crowd erupted into a roar of ecstasy at the carnage. This was what they had come to see.
Elara screamed, not in pain, but in animalistic fury. From the ground, she swept her leg, striking Violeta's ankles and sending her crashing heavily to the floor beside her.
The combat devolved into a street brawl on the jade floor.
Violeta let go of the rapier, useless at such close range, and used her bare fists. She landed a brutal punch to Elara's jaw, bouncing the assassin's head off the stone. Elara responded by digging her fingers into the wound over Violeta's broken rib, tearing a scream of pain from the Winter Princess's lungs.
They rolled over the spilled blood. Elara managed to get on top of Violeta, raising her remaining dagger to plunge it into her opponent's heart.
"Die!" roared Elara, bringing the steel down at full speed.
Violeta didn't try to stop the dagger with her bare hands. She injected all her Qi into her right arm and used it as a meat shield.
Elara's dagger sank deep into Violeta's left forearm, piercing muscle and tendon until it scraped bone. Violeta muffled a scream, her teeth clenched so hard they nearly splintered, but she didn't let go of Elara's arm. She grabbed it with her right hand, anchoring the assassin to her own wounded body.
"Space always demands its toll," hissed Violeta, her eyes bloodshot.
Violeta's right hand, which now gripped Elara's forearm, glowed with an aura of black frost.
[Frigid Blood Seal].
Elara felt hell freeze over inside her veins. Absolute cold traveled instantly from Violeta's hand into her own arm. The blood didn't stop; it crystallized. The veins in Elara's right arm turned a bright electric blue and then black, rigid as dry branches. The necrosis advanced, devouring the tissue. The pain was so unimaginably sharp that Elara let go of her dagger's hilt, which remained buried in Violeta's arm.
With a violent shove of her legs, Violeta pushed the paralyzed Elara off her and staggered to her feet, the enemy dagger still protruding from her flesh, dripping hot blood that froze upon touching the stone.
Elara rolled across the jade, clutching her dead right arm, black from the cryogenic necrosis. The sadistic assassin was panting, the pain threatening to switch off her consciousness, but the adrenaline and the madness of the arena kept her afloat.
The five thousand disciples were on their feet, screaming at the top of their lungs, intoxicated by the barbarity.
In the VIP box, Magnar Varian watched without looking away for a single millimeter. He wasn't evaluating their magic; he was evaluating their tolerance for agony.
"They are willing to mutilate themselves to secure a position of advantage," Magnar analyzed with a hoarse voice, the military arrogance nodding to the sacrifice. "The ice girl let herself be impaled just to have her opponent within necrosis range."
On the main balcony, Samael Morningstar rested his chin on his fist, his violet gaze imperturbable, while Seraphina stroked Celeste's hair. The brutality of their girls was exactly what the world needed to see.
In the arena, Violeta grabbed the hilt of the dagger buried in her forearm. With a dry grunt that echoed in the coliseum, she yanked it out. A spurt of blood splashed the jade, but Violeta used her own element to freeze the wound instantly, cauterizing the torn muscle with red frost.
She drew her rapier back to her right hand using the magnetism of her Qi. She walked slowly toward Elara, dragging her feet slightly, her heterochromatic eye fixed on her wounded prey.
"It's over, Elara," Violeta said, her breath forming dense white clouds. "You don't have an arm. You're bleeding from your back. Yield."
Elara propped herself up on her knees. Her right arm hung useless and dark. Blood covered her pale face.
The First Disciple let out a wet laugh. She coughed blood onto the jade and raised her single functional eye, the other swollen shut from the blows.
"I don't need arms to kill you, little princess."
Elara concentrated absolutely all her Stage 4 Qi, ignoring the physical damage, and opened her mouth. She didn't release fog to hide.
She applied the [White Breath Thrust], but not through a weapon. She exhaled the high-pressure gas directly from her battered lungs at Violeta, who was only three meters away.
The beam of bluish vapor closed the distance instantly.
Violeta, wounded and with diminished reflexes from blood loss, couldn't use her intangibility in time. The beam of freezing gas struck the Winter Princess squarely in the chest.
The gas penetrated through her shattered armor, seeping into her pores and seeking out her respiratory tract. Violeta fell to her knees, dropping the rapier. She felt her own lungs, accustomed to the cold, harden. Elara was forcing a massive internal crystallization, an [Internal Freezing] at point-blank range.
Violeta coughed, but no air came out, only an extremely thick white mist. The veins on her neck bulged, turning a dark blue. Respiratory paralysis threatened to stop her heart within the next ten seconds.
Elara, using her legs, dragged herself across the burning jade, approaching Violeta with the intention of suffocating her to death.
"Die," whispered the assassin, her lips stained red.
Violeta was losing her vision. Her nervous system was shutting down.
But the Princess of Space was not going to die in the arena.
With a final superhuman effort, Violeta raised her right hand—the only limb that still responded to her will—aiming directly at the torso of the crawling Elara.
Her heterochromatic eyes turned white, and she channeled all the destructive power of her spatial bloodline into a single hand motion, without a sword, without preparation.
[Zero Coordinate Slash].
Violeta didn't cut the air. She shattered the space right over Elara's left side.
A crack of black static, surrounded by snowflakes suspended in time, opened literally over the First Disciple's flesh.
Elara felt the universe bite her.
The assassin tried to contort with animalistic reflexes, but the spatial collapse was absolute. The crack tore through the left side of her abdomen. There was no blood; the void simply erased a portion of her flesh, leaving a perfect, concave wound sealed by black ice crystals.
Elara let out an agonizing shriek that curdled the blood of the stands, her body spinning violently from the spatial impact. She fell on her side, the damage to her organs and the loss of physical mass finally flipping the sadistic switch in her brain off.
The Internal Freezing technique suffocating Violeta dissipated as Elara lost consciousness.
Violeta fell face down on the jade, coughing violently, gasping the desert air as if it were the first breath of her life. Her chest heaved erratically. Her left arm was incapacitated by the dagger, her neck was bruised, and the internal frost still caused stabbing pain in every alveolus.
But she was alive. And she was conscious.
Slowly, with an iron will that made the thousands of disciples fall into a sepulchral silence, Violeta pushed herself up on her bloodied right hand and stood.
Her legs trembled. Her light blue and silver tunic was a rag stained with blood and grime. She dragged her feet across the fractured slabs until she reached Elara's unconscious and brutally mutilated body.
With the tip of her boot, Violeta nudged the assassin over to check that she was still breathing, albeit shallowly.
Violeta looked up toward her Patriarch's balcony, her violet eye and blue eye shining through the mask of blood and sweat covering her face. She had survived the assassin's abyss.
The entire arena erupted. The five thousand disciples didn't chant individual names; they screamed in a primordial frenzy, beating their shields, their weapons, and the jade itself with their feet. They had witnessed the pinnacle of slaughter, a combat where magic was abandoned for raw carnage and the will to survive.
In the VIP box, Magnar Varian nodded with the heaviness of a veteran.
"The true elite. They don't rely on Qi when things get dirty. They rely on nails, teeth, and hate. That is true military power, Saira."
Saira Varian couldn't take her eyes off the pool of blood the two women had left behind. Her breathing was ragged. The tactics and haughtiness of the imperial court were useless in a slaughterhouse like this.
The herald, his ears still ringing from the roar of the crowd, raised the horn, his hands trembling from pure adrenaline.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The end of the massacre!" bellowed the herald, his voice tearing. "Sequence 2, Violeta Morningstar, breaks the mist, shatters the flesh, and secures her place in the semifinal of the Final Rank Tournament!"
As Violeta stumbled toward the tunnels, shoving away the healers who tried to help her walk, Elara's bloodied and mutilated body was lifted with extreme caution to prevent the void on her side from expanding.
The sun continued its relentless march over Skull Rock. The slabs would be cleaned again. The blood would be scrubbed again. Because the Morningstar Empire didn't stop to mourn its wounded; it only prepared the arena for the next kings who were willing to kill themselves for the throne.