Chapter 86: The Decree of Heaven and the Shattered Colossus
The smell of burnt metal and flesh rotted by entropy still hung over Skull Rock, a grim reminder of the annihilation Eris and Cedric had unleashed. However, the array forgers didn't have time to rebuild the entire arena; they limited themselves to sealing the deepest fissures of the central crater and stabilizing the containment walls. The battlefield was now a rugged, broken, and treacherous terrain, covered in jade dust and gray ash.
In the VIP box, Lord Magnar Varian watched the sky. The midday sun had begun to pale, hidden behind a sudden layer of dense, leaden clouds swirling over the fortress. The air, which moments before was suffocating from the heat of the previous battle, had grown heavy, laden with static that made the hair on their arms stand up.
"The weather is changing again," Saira Varian murmured, rubbing her forearms over her silver armor. "It's her. The girl who crushed the speedster. Sequence 5."
Magnar nodded, his gray eyes evaluating the storm clouds.
"Weather Control attribute combined with Thunder. A bloodline that in the past would have been considered sacred. In our empire, those who can dictate the weather are guarded in ivory towers and used only to destroy entire enemy fleets. Here... they throw her into a gladiator pit against her own brothers."
Saira looked toward the destroyed arena. "And her opponent? The ice colossus. I saw him in the preliminaries. He is a biological tank, but he lacks Violeta's finesse. He is pure brute force."
"Do not underestimate brute force when it carries the weight of a mountain, Saira," the Chained Wolf corrected. "A lightning bolt can split a tree, but a glacier drags everything in its path. This will be a clash of absolutes."
On the main balcony, the core of the tyranny observed in silence.
Samael Morningstar stroked Celeste's head. The girl, with her silver-blue hair and bicolored eyes—one frigid and the other dark violet—raised her tiny hand toward the storm clouds, laughing as she felt the static on her diminutive fingers. Samael's presence anchored the storm, preventing the lightning from striking their own box.
Seraphina, at his side, rested a hand elegantly on the back of the throne.
"Xylia demands absolute control, husband," Seraphina commented, her voice flowing with the serenity of the Supreme Yin. "Her trauma molded her to trust nothing she cannot subjugate to her will. But Draven... Draven is indomitable force. It is the perfect test to see if the Empress of Thunder can subjugate an army that feels no pain."
Great Elder Lilith smiled slightly, the majesty of her bearing standing out against the fading light of the impending storm.
"The colossus has thick skin and bones of dense ice. Xylia will have to use more than sparks to make him kneel. This fight will not be quick."
Down on the announcement platform, the herald felt his clothes sticking to his skin due to the electrically charged humidity. He raised the bone horn, and the sound reverberated like the echo of distant thunder.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The fourth clash of the quarterfinals!" bellowed the herald, his amplified voice competing with the thunder beginning to rumble in the low clouds. "The imperial authority of the sky against the immovable glacier! Sequence 11, Draven Morningstar, against Sequence 5, Xylia Morningstar!"
The five thousand disciples in the stands howled, stomping their feet on the slabs, oblivious to the cold drizzle that was beginning to fall upon them.
The heavy north doors opened with an agonizing screech. The steel nearly bent outward as two hands the size of shields forced the metal doors apart.
Draven Morningstar burst into the arena.
The "Ice Colossus" was a mountain of muscle wrapped in scars and frost. Standing over two meters tall with a monstrous shoulder width, Draven didn't walk; he caused small earthquakes with every step. He didn't wear heavy armor; his own skin, tanned in extreme cold, was covered in a layer of dense, bluish ice that acted as a biological cuirass. He carried no weapons. His fists were siege rams. His gaze was pure brutal determination, the hunger of a polar bear that has locked onto its prey.
From the south, the doors opened without a crash, but the impact on the atmosphere was a thousand times greater.
Xylia Morningstar stepped in beneath the mantle of the storm.
Her long silver hair absorbed the scarce ambient light, and her electric purple eyes flashed in the gloom. She wore dark blue, almost purple robes, and a simple jade diadem rested on her forehead. Her fair, luminous skin contrasted with the darkness of the sky she herself was molding.
There were no loud taunts from her. The instant she stepped onto the arena, her Origin Realm passive, the [Morale Domain], expanded. Thunder Pressure fell over the stadium. The lower-ranking disciples in the front rows felt their hair stand on end and a taste of oxidized copper filled their mouths, forcing them to instinctively step back, oppressed by the pure authority of an Empress of the storm.
Draven, however, did not back down. He clenched his fists, shattering the frost on his knuckles, and snorted, exhaling a cloud of dense vapor.
"Your clouds weigh nothing, Xylia," Draven grunted, his deep voice resonating like the cracking of a glacier. "I'm going to beat you out of the sky."
Xylia looked at him with icy indifference. Her face, forged in past betrayal and emotional isolation, showed not an ounce of intimidation before the giant's mass.
"The sky doesn't descend to fight, Draven. The sky simply crushes those who stand too tall."
DOOONG!
The gong rang, and Draven wasted no time.
The colossus launched himself forward with terrifying speed for his size. Every footstep shattered the remaining jade slabs. He attempted no evasive maneuvers or subtle tactics. He went straight for Xylia, his right fist encased in a mace of solid ice the size of an anvil, ready to crush her in a single blow.
Xylia didn't move. She raised her index finger toward the charging giant and activated the [Spear of Divine Decree].
A linear beam of pure white color, so condensed it hummed with a deafening frequency, shot from the tip of her finger. It wasn't an expansive attack; it was pure piercing, designed to burn Qi and punch through physical shields.
The white beam struck squarely against Draven's immense chest.
CRACK!
The sound was like lightning striking a frozen tree. The white beam pierced the thick layer of bluish ice covering the colossus's torso, but, to Xylia's surprise, it did not pierce his flesh. Draven had condensed his muscles until they were hard as steel and had accumulated his frigid Qi beneath his skin. Xylia's beam burned the surface, leaving a black ozone mark, but Draven's immense biological resistance dissipated the lethal penetration.
Draven let out a roar of pain, but he didn't stop. The impact didn't even slow his inertia.
Seeing that the giant kept coming like a runaway train, Xylia showed no panic. In the last second before being crushed, she activated her defense: the [Magnetosphere Sanctuary].
A two-meter electromagnetic vibration dome formed around her.
When Draven's immense ice fist crashed against the shield, the colossus felt a massive magnetic repulsion force. The shield didn't try to stop the blow; it repelled the physical mass with the same magnetic polarity, trying to deflect the fist to the side.
But Draven wasn't using a metal weapon that could be easily deflected. He was using his own muscle mass driven by hundreds of kilos of inertia. With a guttural cry, Draven forced his arm through the repulsion. The veins in his neck threatened to burst from the effort of overcoming the electromagnetic barrier.
Xylia's shield creaked. The Empress of Thunder was forced to slide backward, giving ground to avoid being crushed, her shoes scraping against the arena's ash.
"You can't push a mountain!" Draven roared, raising both fists and slamming the arena floor with a [Seismic Frost Hammer].
The impact shattered the ten-meter radius around him. Jagged ice stalagmites erupted from the ground, seeking to skewer Xylia from below.
Xylia activated the [Veil of Static Polarity].
A thin layer of vibrating electricity surrounded her body millimeters from her skin. Using her veil's magnetism, she repelled the stone and ice rising toward her, gliding through the air, levitating half a meter off the ground to evade the frost spikes.
She landed fifteen meters away, her purple eyes fixed on the giant shaking the broken ice off his shoulders.
His muscle density nullifies linear piercing. If force doesn't penetrate, I'll have to collapse his nervous system from the surface, calculated Xylia, her analytical mind operating without emotional interference.
Xylia raised her right hand, aiming her open palm at Draven.
[Stigma of Judgment].
An invisible static pulse swept the coliseum. Draven felt a cold prick on his forehead, but paid it no mind. The colossus charged again, shattering his own ice spikes in his wake.
Xylia raised her other hand toward the black clouds covering Skull Rock.
[Rain of Thunder Needles].
It wasn't a single spark. From the leaden sky, dozens of pale yellow electric darts descended like a storm of light arrows. Thanks to the "polar charge" of the Stigma on Draven's forehead, all the thunder needles falling within a twenty-meter radius curved their trajectory in mid-air and honed in on the giant.
ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!
Thirty thunder needles struck simultaneously at Draven's shoulders, chest, and legs. They weren't mortal blows, but each impact injected a concentrated dose of direct paralysis into his nerves.
The colossus's body convulsed. Draven stopped dead in his tracks, his massive muscles suffering violent micro-spasms. Every fiber of his being screamed in pain from the electrocution. The rain of lightning continued to fall, magnetically drawn to his body, immobilizing him in the middle of the arena like a prisoner undergoing divine punishment.
Xylia lowered her arms, watching coldly as the giant trembled.
"The beast has been tamed," Xylia declared, her voice projecting through the static in the air. "Yield, Draven. Your muscles are your prison. The more you fight, the more your nerves will shrink until your heart forgets how to beat."
In the VIP box, Saira Varian looked impressed by the display of crowd control.
"She has completely immobilized him. That magnetic mark ensures not a single attack misses, and the electrical overload renders brute force useless. It is the end of heavy infantry."
But Lord Magnar Varian did not take his eyes off the giant trembling under the rain of lightning. His scars itched. He knew that kind of body. He knew that stubbornness.
"A berserker is not tamed, Saira. If you corner him with pain, you only force him to shut off his pain receptors. Look at his eyes."
Under the cascade of electric needles, Draven was not looking at the ground in defeat. His eyes, reddened from ruptured blood vessels due to blood pressure, were locked onto Xylia with a primordial hatred.
Draven let out a roar that didn't sound human. It was the roar of a snow bear caught in a steel trap, willing to tear off its own limb to kill the hunter.
Ignoring the spasms that threatened to tear his tendons, Draven concentrated all his Stage 4 Qi into his frigid core. He knew electricity traveled through his nerves. So, with a suicidal resolve, he decided to freeze his own nerves.
An aura of absolute white frost erupted from within Draven. The ice didn't form on the outside; it formed beneath his skin. With an agonizing effort, Draven lowered the temperature of his own blood and muscle tissue until it bordered on total freezing, completely anesthetizing his body.
The electrical paralysis lost its effect, because Draven's nerves were already dead from the cold.
The thunder needles continued to strike and burn his outer flesh, but Draven no longer felt the spasms. His body was now a war machine without a pain switch.
The colossus took a heavy step. Then another.
The Rain of Thunder Needles fell relentlessly upon him, enveloping him in a halo of yellow light and black smoke from burnt flesh, but Draven quickened his pace.
Xylia's expression broke for a fraction of a second. Logic dictated that a body under that electrical tension couldn't move. But the giant in front of her was rewriting biology with sheer obstinacy.
Draven crossed the fifteen meters in three colossal strides.
Xylia quickly activated her [Suppression Pulse], a low-intensity, high-frequency omnidirectional wave designed to force enemies to their knees from stabbing pain in their nerve fibers.
The wave struck Draven at point-blank range.
Draven didn't even blink. His nervous system was so frozen that the Suppression Pulse felt like a warm breeze hitting a glacier.
With a brutal and savage movement, Draven opened his immense arms and lunged at Xylia. The Empress's Magnetosphere Sanctuary tried to repel him, but Draven didn't throw a punch this time; he enveloped her in a crushing bear hug, using his chest and both arms to enclose the magnetic field.
The electromagnetic repulsion fought against Draven's immense mass. The colossus's muscles creaked, and his bones protested under the opposing force, but he wasn't going to let go. He began to squeeze, crushing the electromagnetic shield millimeter by millimeter. Xylia's bubble groaned under the tectonic pressure.
Inside the sphere, Xylia looked up at the giant's bloody and frozen face, who glared down at her from mere inches away through the barrier of light.
"I told you your clouds weighed nothing," Draven grunted, frozen blood sliding from his mouth as the barrier began to crack.
Xylia, cornered in absolute close combat, felt the claustrophobia of the impending prison. The trauma of betrayal and loss of control threatened to cloud her mind. If that hug broke the shield, her ribs would turn to dust.
The Empress of Thunder gritted her teeth, her purple eyes glowing with frigid fury.
If you want to get so close, die in the process.
Xylia dropped the electromagnetic shield by her own choice.
The sudden lack of resistance caused Draven to fall forward, his embrace closing around Xylia. But in that fraction of a second of total exposure, Xylia had channeled all her core's power into her two bare hands.
[Electric Edge Thrust].
Unlike her ranged attacks, this technique condensed lightning at her fingertips, creating ultra-thin beams of blue light that completely bypassed physical armor, piercing directly into internal organs.
The instant Draven's hug closed, Xylia drove both extended arms into the giant's abdomen, right beneath his ribs.
The beams of blue light penetrated the steel-hard flesh and the internal layer of ice. There was no explosion. There was a blinding flash inside Draven's body. The internal damage was massive. The ultra-concentrated lightning instantly paralyzed his abdominal organs, burning his Qi from the core outward.
Draven let out a scream that made the arena tremble, a roar of pure internal agony. The pain of having his organs cooked was too much even for his ice anesthesia. His arms loosened, unable to maintain the crushing force.
Xylia didn't stop there. Her need for absolute dominance took over.
While her fingers were still buried in Draven's abdomen, injecting pure electricity into his guts, Xylia used her [Mandate of Heavenly Thunder].
She raised her gaze to the leaden clouds she herself had summoned, which had turned into a spinning vortex right above their heads.
All the static in the coliseum, all the energy from the missed attacks, was sucked into the sky, condensing into a single point in the core of the storm.
"I am the decree. I am the judgment," Xylia pronounced, her voice devoid of emotion, sounding like the echo of gods. "And you are nothing more than a block of ice that dared to defy the storm."
The sky tore open.
A pillar of white lightning, as thick as a centennial oak, descended from the storm directly onto them.
Xylia, being the conductor of the Mandate, was immune to her own element. The pillar enveloped her, bathing her in divine light.
But Draven, physically connected to her, received the entirety of the divine punishment at point-blank range.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The white lightning crushed Draven against the molten jade. The sound was so brutal that thousands of spectators in the stands covered their ears, the light temporarily blinding them. The smell of ozone and burnt flesh saturated the air of Skull Rock. Draven's biological ice evaporated instantly into a cloud of boiling steam. His skin, invulnerable to cuts and blows, charred beneath the authority of heavenly thunder.
The pillar of light lasted barely two seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
When the light dissipated and the thunder stopped roaring, the silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the sound of cold raindrops that began to fall softly from the dissolving clouds.
In the center of the scorched crater, Xylia Morningstar stood intact. Her dark blue robes smoked slightly, and her silver hair was charged with static, floating around her expressionless face. Her electric purple eyes looked downward.
At her feet, Draven Morningstar, the immovable colossus, lay on his back. His massive body was covered in third-degree burns. The protective ice was completely gone. The smell of roasted meat was repulsive. Draven wasn't dead—the Stage 4 Qi of a physical warrior was absurdly resilient—but his chest barely moved. His eyes were closed, his nervous system completely fried, paralyzed, and unconscious. The mountain had been reduced to charred rubble.
The crowd was stunned. Xylia's display of destructive authority had been so overwhelming, so final, that the shouts of jubilation took several seconds to erupt. When they did, it was a clamor of pure fanaticism. They had seen an Empress dominate a beast.
In the VIP box, Lord Magnar Varian slumped heavily into his obsidian throne. Cold raindrops wet his face, but he didn't seem to notice.
"That girl..." whispered Saira Varian, her hands trembling imperceptibly. "She didn't use the lightning to wound him, father. She used it to execute him. Her control over electromagnetic condensation... if she launched that pillar against the walls of our capital, she would melt the iron gates and the ice in a blink."
Magnar Varian didn't take his eyes off Xylia, who was now walking slowly toward the south tunnels, leaving the healers to deal with the smoking colossus.
"She is authority personified," Magnar replied, his voice hoarse from the revelation of the scale of power he was witnessing. "She does not tolerate chaos. Rank 5 isn't a simple lightning user. She is an atmospheric dictator. And a dictator who doesn't flinch at electrocuting her own brothers from the inside... will show no mercy to an enemy army."
On the main balcony, Seraphina nodded, satisfied with the conflict's resolution.
"Xylia learned the lesson of close combat, husband. She broke her need to maintain distance when cornered, and responded with surgical brutality."
Samael Morningstar smiled slightly, a dark smile that rivaled the tyranny of the shadow dragon guarding him in the spiritual plane. He stroked Celeste's cheek, ignoring the rain that evaporated before touching his box.
"The legion is eliminating its own weaknesses. Each combat forges them harder, more lethal."
Samael directed his gaze toward the herald, who was still paralyzed at the edge of the stands, staring at the smoking crater.
The Patriarch projected his voice directly into the herald's mind, an order that brooked no delay. "Continue. There is still one match left in this round."
The herald jolted, swallowed hard, and raised the bone horn, his hands still shaking from the pillar of divine light.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The Empress hands down the sentence!" bellowed the herald, his voice recovering the legion's fanatical strength. "Sequence 5, Xylia Morningstar, breaks the colossus and rises to the semifinals!"
Cheers echoed through the fortress, a macabre celebration of the survival of the fittest.
"But the throne demands one final sacrifice to close the quarterfinals!" the herald continued, pointing toward the steel doors that had yet to open. "The fifth and final match of this phase is about to begin! The life that devours against the inescapable eye of death! Prepare for the final collision!"
Xylia's storm clouds began to clear completely, allowing the afternoon sun to once again bathe the bloodied and charred coliseum. Emergency repairs began immediately, but everyone knew that the next battle—the one pitting the botany of hell against the absolute sniper—would turn the rubble into a forest of nightmares. And Lord Magnar Varian, from his box, prepared to watch if the sniper he feared so much could survive an opponent who turned the very ground into a death trap.