The air in the Cathedral plaza didn't just turn cold; it died.
The moment Leonardo's humanity snapped, a phenomenon occurred that the ancient scrolls of Albion called Metaphysical Displacement. The sound of the wind, the crackle of the lingering fires, and even the rhythmic breathing of the survivors were abruptly cut off, replaced by a low-frequency hum that vibrated not in the ears, but in the very marrow of the bone.
Leonardo stood at the center of this vacuum. His body, once lean, was now being rewritten. The silver scars—the marks of the Soul-Seed—didn't just glow; they tore open. From these fissures, a substance that looked like liquid obsidian began to weep, coating his skin in a layer of "Non-Existence." His eyes, formerly a clouded grey, had become twin pits of absolute darkness, reflecting no light, no emotion, and no mercy.
"What... what is this pressure?" Kiran gasped, his knees hitting the cobblestones. He felt as if an invisible mountain had been placed upon his shoulders. Even as a Tier 1 squire, his instincts were screaming that he was no longer in the presence of a human. He was in the presence of an End.
Melinoe, the Daughter of the Black King, felt the shift more acutely than anyone. Her indigo aura, a Tier 3 power that had easily suppressed the entire district, was being physically pushed back. The shadows she commanded—shadows born from the royal lineage of the Abyss—were shivering. They were being attracted to Leonardo, not as allies, but as prey.
"So," Melinoe whispered, her voice trembling with a mixture of predatory excitement and a deep-seated, ancestral dread. "The Hollow Star finally collapses. You aren't just using the Void anymore, are you, Little Crow? You've opened the door."
Leonardo didn't respond with words. He didn't even breathe. He took a single step forward.
The impact of his foot hitting the ground sent a ripple through the fabric of space. The cobblestones beneath his boot didn't crack; they dissolved into a fine, grey ash that was instantly sucked into the black mist surrounding his ankles. This was the Field of Desolation—a localized zone where the laws of conservation of mass were suspended.
"Jax... get the Saint... away..." Leonardo's voice came not from his throat, but from the air itself, distorted and layered with the whispers of the souls. It was the last vestige of his will, a final command issued before the Void took full control of his motor functions.
Melinoe didn't wait for him to reach her. She realized that the "game" had ended. She crossed her arms, and the indigo energy around her condensed into a jagged, three-meter-long crystalline scythe. The blade was etched with runes of Soul-Binding, a weapon designed to reap the essence of High-Tier beings.
She swung the scythe in a horizontal arc meant to decapitate Leonardo and seal his soul in a single stroke. The blade hummed with the weight of a thousand Tier 3 curses. But as the crystalline edge reached Leonardo's neck, he didn't dodge. He didn't parry.
He simply raised two fingers.
The sound of the impact was like a glass mountain shattering. Leonardo's fingers, coated in the black weeping, caught the edge of the royal Abyssal blade. Where they touched, the indestructible indigo crystal began to turn grey. Cracks spread across the weapon instantly, not from physical force, but from ontological decay.
"Impossible," Melinoe hissed, her eyes wide. "This is royal steel! It is forged from the heart of the—"
"It is... nothing," the voice of the Void replied.
With a flick of his fingers, Leonardo didn't just break the blade; he unstiched it. The scythe exploded into a cloud of violet dust, and the resulting backpressure sent Melinoe skidding back fifty meters, her boots carving deep trenches in the plaza's stone.
The true battle for Oakhaven's soul had just begun.
Melinoe recovered from the impact with an inhuman grace, her feet sliding across the stone floor as she stabilized her center of gravity. The fact that her royal scythe had been disintegrated by a mere two fingers from a Level 1 "Inept" did not shake her; on the contrary, it ignited a flame of purple fury in her eyes.
"You dare touch the heritage of the Black King with those filthy hands?" Melinoe hissed. She spread her arms, and the air around her began to liquefy into shadows. "If you wish to consume, then I will give you something that even the Void cannot digest!"
"Royal Abyssal Art: Hundred Needles of the Sunless Sea!"
Instantly, the vacuum around Melinoe transformed into an arsenal. Hundreds of needles made of abyssal glass—each containing a Tier 3 curse capable of paralyzing the circulatory system of a war ogre—materialized in the air. With a mental command, they fired. They did not fly in a straight line; they curved through space, attacking Leonardo from every angle simultaneously, like a swarm of obsidian wasps.
Leonardo did not move. He did not even look at the projectiles.
As the needles entered the three-meter radius of his Field of Desolation, reality began to treat them as calculation errors. They didn't stop; they lost their definition. Where once there was solid glass and potent curses, there was now only grey static. The needles simply vanished before touching his skin, being converted into raw energy that fed the black scars on his chest.
Leonardo raised his right hand. The gesture was slow, almost lazy, but the pressure he exerted on space was absolute.
"Void-Stitch: Spatial Tether."
Melinoe felt as if invisible hooks had been driven into her lungs and limbs. The space between her and Leonardo was suddenly "stitched" together. No matter how hard she tried to retreat, every step backward brought her physically closer to him. It was a distortion of the plaza's topography.
"What... what kind of authority is this?!" Melinoe screamed, feeling her aura being pulled out of her pores. "You have no core! You have no mana! How are you bending dimensions?!"
Leonardo's voice came out as a chorus of overlapping voices, dry and lifeless. "...I am removing the distance."
In a blur of movement that Jax and the others could barely follow, Leonardo appeared before Melinoe. He did not use a weapon. He simply delivered a direct punch. The impact did not just hit the princess's physical body; it struck her very existence.
Melinoe crossed her arms in a desperate defense, evoking a shield of compressed abyssal energy. Leonardo's punch collided with the shield, and the world seemed to lose color for a millisecond. The Tier 3 barrier shattered like common glass. Leonardo's fist continued, striking Melinoe's sternum.
The sound was that of a structural collapse. Melinoe was launched across the plaza, crashing through three stone walls of the Cathedral's east wing before being buried under tons of sacred rubble.
The silence that followed was heavy, laden with the smell of ozone and ash. Leonardo remained standing, but his right arm was now covered in black veins that pulsed as if something was trying to claw its way out from under his skin. The "Hollow Star" was burning brighter, and with every beat of his heart, the city of Oakhaven seemed to shrink a little more.
The Cathedral's east wing didn't just collapse; it seemed to be digested by the shadow. For a moment, there was a deathly stillness, and then, a geyser of indigo fire erupted from the rubble, melting the ancient stone into glass.
From the center of the inferno, Melinoe rose. Her physical form was no longer that of a teenage girl. Her skin had turned the color of a bruised twilight, and two extra pairs of spectral arms, made of solidified Abyssal energy, sprouted from her back. Her eyes were now burning suns of violet light, and a crown of jagged obsidian hovered above her head.
Melinoe's voice now carried the weight of a thousand weeping souls. This was her True Real Form: Abyssal of Ruin. "I was sent to gather a seed, but I will be content with ashes. Do you wish to see the Abyss? I will drown you in its deepest abyss!"
She clapped all six of her hands together. The ground for a hundred meters around Leonardo transformed into a literal ocean of black, viscous ink. This wasn't just shadows; it was Primordial Ichor, a substance that drained the 'concept of existence' from anything it touched.
"Royal Art: Abyssal Grave."
The gravity within the plaza increased by a factor of a hundred. Jax and the squires were pinned to the earth, their bones groaning. Leonardo, however, didn't sink. He stood atop the liquid darkness, his black scars pulsing with a rhythmic, mechanical hum.
Leonardo's voice, the chorus of souls, echoed through the void. "The weight... is irrelevant."
He reached into his own chest, his fingers disappearing into the black sludge weeping. When he pulled his hand out, he wasn't holding a weapon. He was holding a flickering, grey orb—the compressed essence of one of the souls he had consumed in the Albion.
"Void-Style: Soul-Dissolution."
He crushed the orb. The resulting energy didn't explode; it imploded, creating a vacuum that sucked the Primordial Ichor directly into a localized point of "Nothing." Leonardo then lunged, his body flickering in and out of reality as he bypassed the crushing gravity.
The two collided in mid-air. Melinoe's six arms moved in a blur, each hand manifesting a different weapon—spears of ice, blades of shadow, and whips of necrotic lightning. Leonardo met them all with his bare hands. Every time he touched her Abyssal weapons, they didn't just break; they were "Unstitched" back into raw, useless mana.
"Why won't you fall?!" Melinoe screamed, her face contorted in a mixture of rage and terror. She was a Tier 3 Royal, yet this Tier 1 anomaly was parrying her every strike with the casual indifference of a god.
He grabbed two of her spectral arms and, with a surge of Void energy, ripped them clean off. Instead of blood, indigo sparks showered the plaza. Melinoe shrieked, the sound tearing through the mental defenses of everyone listening.
Leonardo didn't stop. He placed his hand on her forehead, his black-veined fingers glowing with a terrifying, ashen light.
"Void-Stitch: Memory."
He began to force the collective trauma and the "Silence" of the souls directly into Melinoe's royal mind. Who had never known anything but power, was suddenly faced with the absolute freezing emptiness of the Void. Her violet suns flickered. Her crown began to crack.
The scream that tore from Melinoe's throat was not merely physical; it was the sound of a Royal Soul being forcefully synchronized with the "Absolute" of the Void. As Leonardo held her forehead, the grey, ashen light from his fingertips began to overwrite her memories, her pride, and her very sense of self. To the Her, it felt as if she were being pulled through a needle's eye into a dimension where even thoughts were heavy enough to crush stars.
"Get... out... of my head!" Melinoe shrieked, her four remaining spectral arms clawing desperately at Leonardo's chest.
She unleashed a frantic burst of Abyssal Eruption, a Tier 3 explosion of energy designed to repel any attacker. But the Void didn't repel. It opened. Leonardo's torso literally split into a jagged, black maw of smoke, swallowing the explosion whole. The energy that should have leveled the plaza was instead converted into more "Desolation," expanding the grey radius of his aura until it touched the very edges of Oakhaven's inner walls.
The environment began to undergo a terrifying metamorphosis. The stone buildings caught in the field didn't just crumble; they turned into a translucent, ghostly material before dissolving into nothingness. The air itself became a thick, viscous fog of "Void."
Leonardo's obsidian eyes flared with a cold, mechanical light. He leaned in, his voice now a singular, booming resonance of souls.
"Void-Stitch: The First Silence."
With a sickening crack, the obsidian crown hovering above Melinoe's head shattered. The shockwave of her broken divinity sent a ripple of "Null-Energy" through the ground, creating a crater so deep that the subterranean pipes of the city burst, spraying steam and oil into the freezing vacuum.
Melinoe fell. Her True Royal Form flickered like a dying candle, her skin reverting to its pale, original hue as her mana channels were forcefully sealed by Leonardo's grey threads. She hit the liquefied earth, her body trembling, her eyes wide with a trauma that no amount of Royal healing could erase. She was no longer a predator; she was a witness to something that should not exist.
Leonardo stood over her, his right hand still glowing with the ashen light of the Soul-Dissolution. He raised his arm, preparing to deliver a strike that would not just kill her, but erase her from the history. The souls were screaming for the kill, their collective hunger reaching a fever pitch.
But as he prepared to strike, the black "weeping" from his scars began to cover his own face, threatening to submerge his consciousness forever. The "First Desolation" had reached its peak. Leonardo was seconds away from becoming a permanent hole in reality—a monster that would continue to consume until nothing was left of World.
Far in the distance, a golden light flickered through the grey fog. Commander Vaelen had finally broken free from the spatial labyrinth, but even his legendary Solar Aura seemed like a tiny spark against the encroaching darkness of the Hollow Star.