Chapter 91: The Throne of Fire and the Eye of the Void
The gray dust still hovered over the arena of Skull Rock. Varian Morningstar, with his arms shattered and his breathing broken, lay flat on his back, staring at the sky he had conquered. Twenty meters away, Cedric was an inert body, the mastermind shut down by the singularity of the void.
The silence in the coliseum was absolute, a mausoleum of vitrified stone and ash. The healers had barely taken a step toward the pit when the gravity in the arena collapsed.
It was not a combat technique. It was a simple exhale from the Patriarch.
From the main balcony, Samael Morningstar stood up. He didn't jump. He took a step into the empty space separating his box from the arena a hundred meters below. The air beneath his boots solidified into steps of pure darkness. Samael walked down through the sky, his black tunic billowing, his violet eyes sweeping over the destruction with a coldness that froze the blood of the five thousand disciples.
When his boots touched the pulverized jade of the central crater, the atmospheric pressure forced everyone present to hold their breath.
Samael raised his right hand. A pulse of invisible telekinetic energy plucked Kael Morningstar from the northern crater where he rested, dragging him through the air until dropping him gently ten meters away from the Patriarch. With another movement, he lifted Varian from the ground, holding him upright even though the sniper's legs threatened to give out.
Samael looked at both of them. Kael, the Sovereign, with massive burns and a useless right arm. Varian, the Hunter, with waterlogged lungs and hands reduced to raw flesh and embedded obsidian crystals.
"You have proven that Morningstar blood does not surrender to logic or to the heavens," Samael's voice was not a shout, but it resonated in the spiritual core of every living being on the mountain. "But the throne does not wait for kings to heal. The tournament does not stop today."
Samael opened his left palm. Six spheres of condensed light floated above it. Three red as boiling blood, and three golden with stellar flashes.
They were the pinnacle of the legion's alchemy, relics that even the oldest empires would hesitate to use lightly.
"[Blood Lotus Pill] to rebuild the flesh. [Stellar Marrow Pill] to fill the seas of Qi. And the [Primordial Refinement Pill] to push your channels beyond their biological limit. Swallow them."
Samael flicked his fingers, and the pills shot forward, flying directly into the open mouths of Kael and Varian.
The effect was not miraculous and peaceful; it was violent and agonizing.
Kael stifled a scream as his bones cracked. The lightning burn on his chest cracked and peeled off like a dry scab, revealing new, hard, perfect skin underneath. His right arm, previously charred and dead, convulsed as the tendons wove themselves back together at a terrifying speed. His magma aura, which had extinguished, erupted into a pillar of golden fire that reached twenty meters in height.
Ten meters away, Varian fell to his knees, but not out of weakness. The obsidian crystals embedded in his arms were expelled from his flesh like bullets. The wounds closed, the blood evaporated, and his retinas, damaged by the overexertion of the eagle vision, healed instantly, glowing with an emerald so pure it seemed to emit its own light. His lungs expanded, drawing in oxygen with the force of a contained hurricane.
Within ten seconds, the agony ceased.
Kael and Varian stood up. They were at one hundred percent capacity. Their Stage 4 Qi reserves were not just full; they were overflowing, optimized to the breaking point by Samael's alchemy. They felt no fatigue. They felt no pain. Only the roar of primordial energy demanding to be released.
Samael Morningstar observed them, nodding imperceptibly. He turned around and began to walk back up his stairs of void toward the balcony.
His voice descended one last time.
"The winner will face Violeta tomorrow for the throne of the Golden Generation. Kill each other."
The herald, terrified by the brutality of forcing two warriors to fight two mortal combat matches on the same day, raised his horn with trembling hands.
¡BUUUUUMMM!
"The battle for the pass to the absolute final!" he bellowed, his voice tearing. "The King of the Vanguard against the Hunter of the Void! Sequence 1, Kael Morningstar, against Sequence 21, Varian Morningstar!"
The arena was a lunar landscape. Overlapping craters, ash, and vitrified stone. Varian did not have his obsidian bow, but with his core at one hundred percent, he no longer needed a physical weapon. He extended his left arm and channeled a vortex of wind Qi and absolute void. The air howled, compressing in his hand to form an immense compound bow of pure cyan light and distorted shadows. [Void Storm Bow], a purely spiritual construct.
Kael Morningstar, his golden eyes shining with divine intensity, unsheathed the Whisper of the North. The steel instantly ignited in hyper-dense magma, white-hot from the astronomical temperature.
"You have nowhere to run, Varian. There are no trees. There are no labyrinths," Kael sentenced, his voice rumbling like subterranean thunder.
Varian did not answer. His right eye lit up in electric yellow. [Eagle Vision]. He saw the immense furnace of energy that was Kael, a miniature sun standing in the middle of the coliseum.
¡DOOONG!
The gong had barely begun to vibrate when Varian drew the energy string and fired a volley.
Not one. Not two. Fifty [Radiant Void Arrows] in the span of two seconds. The sound of the shots was like the tearing of silk multiplied a hundredfold. The arrows of light did not travel in a straight line; they formed a parabola, surrounding Kael from all angles, seeking to pierce his vital organs simultaneously.
Kael did not move.
He injected his magma Qi into the ground through his boots.
[Sovereign Shield Eruption].
A ring of liquid lava erupted from the rock around Kael, rising into a perfect ten-meter-high cylinder. The fifty void arrows crashed against the wall of molten stone. The void drilled into the lava, but the extreme density and viscosity of Kael's magma absorbed the kinetic force, liquefying the wind energy of the arrows before they could pierce all the way through.
Straight through the descending cylinder of lava, Kael launched himself forward.
He left a crater at his starting point and crossed forty meters in an instant. He used no feints. He used pure brute force, wielding the sword with two hands, tracing a descending arc designed to cleave Varian in half.
Varian retreated using a [Directional Impulse] of wind on his chest, gliding backward inches above the ground like a wraith.
The Whisper of the North smashed into the stone where Varian had just been standing.
The thermal explosion was colossal. A twenty-meter-long fissure opened in the ground, spewing fire and debris. The shockwave caught up to Varian, but the sniper used the wind to envelop his body, nullifying the impact of the extreme heat.
Without losing his balance as he slid backward, Varian fired three more arrows.
This time, he aimed at Kael's legs.
Kael, with his sword lodged in the ground, used his bare fist. His hand wrapped in magma and he delivered a right hook into the air, creating a hyperbaric shockwave that deflected the void arrows, causing them to shatter against the stadium walls.
Reactive defense won't work, Varian calculated, halting his slide at the edge of the northern crater. He is too fast to be a heavy warrior. His magma acts as a kinetic thruster.
Varian leaped onto a ten-meter-tall stalagmite of vitrified stone left over from the fight with Cedric. He landed on the tip as lightly as a feather. From that height, he drew the void bow.
Kael ripped his sword from the ground and looked up at him.
"Come down from there, hunter."
Kael channeled the soundless sword art.
[Phantom Gale Slash].
In the blink of an eye, Kael vanished. There was no sound of a jump. There was no flash of fire.
But Varian was not blind. His Eagle Vision didn't need light; it read airflows and temperature. He saw the anomaly: a bubble of thermal vacuum moving at supersonic speed through the air, aimed directly at his throat.
Varian didn't try to dodge visually. He let himself fall backward off the stalagmite a millisecond before Kael's blade materialized.
Kael's silent slash cleaved the ten-meter stone stalagmite into two perfect halves.
As he plummeted, Varian fired an arrow directly at Kael's soundless bubble.
Kael, in mid-air, twisted his body and blocked the projectile with the flat of his blade. The void explosion pushed Kael upward, breaking the inertia of his attack.
Varian landed softly, using the wind as a cushion, and gave no quarter.
He ran in circles around the perimeter of the stadium, maintaining a distance of eighty meters. His fingers moved so fast over the energy string that only a cyan blur was visible. Hundreds of void bursts drilled into the arena, forcing Kael to constantly block, dodge, and melt them.
The arena became a hellscape of light explosions and magma eruptions. Kael cleaved the air, sending crescents of fire toward Varian, but the sniper was a master of evasion. Through his Eagle Vision, Varian saw Kael's attacks before the sword finished its arc, adjusting his position with micro-detonations of air at his ankles.
I can't touch him at a distance, Kael growled mentally, deflecting another arrow aimed to pierce his shoulder. His vision predicts the contraction of my muscles. He evades before I even attack.
Kael halted his pursuit in the center of the arena.
If he couldn't reach the hunter, he would take away his hunting ground.
The Sovereign drove the Whisper of the North up to its hilt into the gray stone. He closed his golden eyes and began to pump all of his immense refined Qi into the subterranean depths.
[Sovereign Domain: Caldera of Annihilation].
Skull Rock groaned deeply. The tectonic faults of the mountain were forced open by Kael's sheer will.
The jade and gray stone around Kael's sword began to turn red. Within ten seconds, a circle of solid rock a hundred meters in diameter transformed into a bubbling lake of white and yellow magma. The temperature in the coliseum spiked to thousands of degrees. The thermal currents became so violent that small hurricanes of fire began to form spontaneously in the air.
Varian, running along the perimeter, felt the ground beneath his boots grow soft and scorching. He had to jump immediately before the magma swallowed his feet.
There was no solid ground. The entire arena was an ocean of lethal lava.
Kael stood in the center, the only solid point, the lava parting around his boots as if it were alive and revered him.
Varian, in the air, generated a wind vortex beneath his feet. He took advantage of the immense thermal updrafts the magma lake was creating. The extreme heat formed air currents so powerful that Varian could use them to levitate permanently.
The sniper began to fly in circles forty meters in the air, riding the hurricanes of fire.
Kael looked up at him from below, ripping his sword from the center of the lake.
"You're a skilled bird, Varian. But the sky burns too!"
Kael thrust his free hand upward.
From the immense magma lake, columns of boiling lava erupted toward the sky. They were geysers of molten stone trying to swat Varian out of mid-air. Hundreds of magma tentacles rose like devouring serpents, seeking to entangle the sniper's legs.
Varian performed extreme evasive maneuvers. He spun, nose-dived, and climbed again, using void explosions to deflect the fastest magma tentacles. The heat was cooking his skin, and the black smoke from the lava obscured his normal vision, but his Eagle Vision pierced the smoke, showing him the infrared map of death.
The temperature is destabilizing my wind constructs, Varian analyzed. If I keep evading, the oxygen will be completely consumed, and I will asphyxiate or fall. Solution: Annihilation of the thermal source.
Varian stopped in mid-air, right in the eye of the thermal hurricane, the most unstable position.
He aimed his cyan light bow toward the center of the lake, toward Kael.
But this time, he didn't nock a normal void arrow.
Varian injected the deep vibration of his soul into the arrow, the same one he had used against Elowen, but this time, he infused the area-saturation technique into it.
[Predator's Mark: Rain of Dead Stars].
Varian released the string.
An immense dark arrow, surrounded by a cyan halo, descended toward Kael.
Kael smiled arrogantly, raising his magma-wrapped free hand to incinerate the projectile.
"A direct shot won't—"
Before Kael could touch it, the dark arrow burst twenty meters above his head.
There was no explosion. The arrow fragmented into a thousand small cyan lights that fell like ash upon Kael and the magma lake.
Kael frowned. The lights caused no damage. They simply stuck to his aura and the surrounding lava.
The instant the lights touched their target, Varian's Eagle Vision connected with every single one of them.
Kael was now tagged by a thousand Predator's Marks.
Varian, in the sky, drew the bow to its structural limit. His bandages soaked in fresh blood once again. His entire body tensed like the mechanism of a divine siege crossbow.
[Convergent Judgment Bombardment].
Varian fired straight up.
Hundreds of immense pure void projectiles soared toward the stadium's vault, forming a dark cloud of unstable energy. At the apex of their flight, the magnetic pull of the thousand marks on Kael activated simultaneously.
The hundreds of void arrows stopped in mid-air, spun one hundred and eighty degrees, and plummeted.
They didn't rain down at random. Each of them altered its trajectory, creating impossible curves, dodging the lava geysers, bypassing the natural defenses of the lake of fire. Every single arrow converged on a single geometric point: the body of Kael Morningstar in the center of the lava lake.
It was a spherical cage of ballistic annihilation falling at supersonic speed from every angle of the sky. There was nowhere to jump. There was no wall to block.
Kael watched the swarm of death converging upon him.
Any other warrior would have tried to flee, covering their body in shields to mitigate the damage.
But Kael was the Sovereign.
And a Sovereign does not flee or hide behind a shield. He imposes his law.
Kael drove the Whisper of the North into the solid ground supporting him. He extended both hands, palms up. His magma aura, the entire lake of fire, the yellow and red of the boiling lava... it all stopped.
Kael retracted all the magma back into his own body.
The immense hundred-meter-diameter lake cooled and solidified in a fraction of a second, turning into cold, black obsidian. All that thermal energy, all the tectonic force of the underground, was sucked up and condensed into Kael's Stage 4 core.
His body ceased to look human. He was an avatar of incandescent gold and white light.
When the cage of hundreds of void arrows collapsed upon him from the sky, Kael unleashed the release of that infinite pressure in a single movement of his will, infusing it into his sword.
He unsheathed the Whisper of the North toward the sky.
[Sovereign's Slash: Dome of the Ascendant Monarch].
It wasn't a thin slash. It was an explosion of pure will materialized into an expanding dome of golden light. The slash ignored the notion of "direction"; it was an omnidirectional cut that expanded from the center of his sword into the heavens.
Kael's golden wave and Varian's void cage collided ten meters above the arena.
Sound was instantly abolished.
The conceptual clash between the void that devours all and the will that obeys nothing fractured the air itself.
Varian's hundreds of arrows pierced the golden light, trying to disintegrate Kael's will, but the Sovereign's will could not be severed. The golden slash forced its existence through the nothingness.
The sky above Skull Rock erupted in a kaleidoscope of absolute gold and cyan light. The repulsion force generated by the clash unleashed a hurricane that made the stands' security shields groan and turn red. The coliseum vibrated as if a barometric pressure bomb had detonated inside it.
Kael's golden dome shattered the void swarm. The shockwave continued its ascent, sweeping away the clouds, the ash, and the smoke, opening the sky to a raw, unforgiving sunlight.
Varian, suspended forty meters in the air, was struck by the backlash of the golden shockwave. The wind supporting him was purged. His void bow construct disintegrated in his hands.
The sniper went into freefall.
His body was exhausted; his muscles screamed in agony. The impact against the solidified obsidian forty meters below would break every bone in his body.
But Varian didn't close his eyes. He kept his Eagle Vision active as he fell.
He saw Kael below. The Sovereign had consumed all his thermal energy to perform the Monarch's Dome. His golden aura flickered, weak. He was breathing heavily, leaning on his sword, his defense completely down for the fraction of a second of spiritual reload.
Varian had no bow. He had no arrows. But he still had void, and he was falling at twenty meters per second directly toward Kael.
Varian brought both hands together in front of his chest. All the kinetic energy of his freefall, plus the last remnant of his Stage 4 Qi, concentrated at the joined tips of his index and middle fingers.
He wasn't going to fire a projectile. He would become the projectile himself.
[Arrow of Inevitable Judgment: Zero Descent].
Varian's body was enveloped in a spinning cone of cyan light. The air around him collapsed into a void tunnel. Varian transformed into a needle of annihilation plummeting straight toward the exhausted Sovereign's head.
Kael looked up. The void cone was descending upon him.
Death was coming from above, and he lacked the physical strength to raise his sword in time.
In that moment of imminent annihilation, Kael's instinct rejected surrender. If he couldn't raise his sword, he would raise his soul.
Kael released the hilt. He clenched his fists and forced his damaged bones and meridians into one last, suicidal effort. He didn't try to block. He planted his feet firmly on the obsidian.
The instant Varian's void cone was a meter from piercing his skull, Kael punched both fists upward—not against the void, but against Varian's very body wrapped in the light.
Kael's bare hands crashed into the tip of the void drill.
Blood sprayed from Kael's hands instantly, his skin being shredded by the friction of the spinning void. But brute force, backed by the sheer density of his Stage 4 bones reinforced by the Primordial Pill, halted the sniper's inertia.
Kael felt as though his arms were about to snap in half. His muscles tore. But he managed to stall the cone of light.
With a roar that tore his own throat, Kael grabbed Varian by the shoulders of his torn tunic. He nullified the void technique with pure physical repulsion.
The kinetic force of a forty-meter fall couldn't simply disappear.
Kael used the remaining momentum, pivoted on his left foot, and, using Varian as a human battering ram, smashed the sniper into the immense, solidified obsidian wall of the lake with tectonic force.
¡CRAAACK!
The impact shattered the black obsidian wall into pieces.
Varian was embedded in the cold rock. The force of the crash broke his collarbone and several ribs. His ultimate technique dissipated in a harmless cyan sizzle.
Varian coughed up blood that stained the obsidian. His arms fell limply to his sides. His Eagle Vision deactivated, leaving his emerald eyes dilated and unfocused. He tried to raise an arm, but his entire body betrayed him. The exhaustion of the void and the trauma of the impact had shut down his motor system.
Kael Morningstar took a step back, his arms bleeding profusely, the muscles of his forearms visible through the skin shredded by the void drill. He dropped to one knee, breathing with a terrifying rasp.
He looked at the sniper embedded in the wall.
Varian, eyes half-closed, did not return the gaze. His head fell forward. Consciousness had abandoned him.
Kael braced himself on his bloodied fist. The obsidian beneath him was cold, but the blood from his wounds was boiling. Slowly, agonizingly, the King of the Vanguard stood up once again.
There were no shouts of victory from him. He only looked up at the balcony, toward the unfathomable void in Violeta Morningstar's eyes as she watched from the darkness of the tunnels. The message was clear. He had survived the abyss.
The arena erupted into a primordial clamor. The cheers were deafening. The battle between absolute artillery and indomitable force had obliterated every expectation of what the Origin Realm could achieve.
The herald, ecstatic, raised the bone horn, its sound soaring toward the finally clear sky.
¡BUUUUUMMM!
"The Sovereign remains standing!" the herald bellowed, his voice reaching the point of madness. "Will cleaves the void, and the sky bows! The King of the Vanguard, Sequence 1, Kael Morningstar, annihilates the Hunter's threat and claims his right to the Absolute Final!"
The healers descended into the obsidian crater. They peeled Varian's unconscious body from the rock and placed him on a stasis stretcher, while another team wrapped Kael's flayed arms in bandages soaked in ice lotus to stop the bleeding from his exposed tendons.
Kael did not look back as he walked toward the northern tunnels. The bloodiest semifinal of the tournament was over. Tomorrow, Skull Rock would be the stage for the final clash. The unyielding will of the golden light against the terrifying tyranny of the Empress of the Void. The throne of the Golden Generation demanded its final tribute, and the world was not ready for the tactical horror they were about to witness.