Magic: Anti-Chaos

The second clash.

To be precise, for Ophelia, this was the third time facing this thing.

The sensation of her blade cleaving into the membrane was entirely different from the last. Previously, every strike felt like cutting into living flesh that would bite back—her battle qi would be poured in, thirty percent of it swallowed, and the remaining seventy percent left to tear against that corrosive power. Every swing had been a war of attrition, a gamble of her own life force against the entity.

This time, there was none of that.

The recoil traveled up her forearm, dissipating once it reached the spaulders. The runic inscriptions on the surface of the dragon scales lit up, absorbing the impact completely, leaving even her bones untrembled.

Ophelia delivered another slash.

Deeper.

The gash in the membrane was twice as large as before, yet her consumption of battle qi was less than half.

She didn't need to divert her focus to resist the erosion. The dark-green energy attempting to seep through the wound was repelled the instant it touched the armor plates. The dragon’s biological field wrapped around her, isolating her completely from the external pollution.

It was like an invisible cocoon.

No.

Ophelia sensed something strange as her third strike fell.

It wasn't just “isolation.”

The battle qi within her was accelerating. Not an acceleration she had actively triggered—it was being pulled and resonated by something, spontaneously increasing its circulation efficiency. The golden battle qi surged from her body nearly twenty percent faster than usual, and every strand that passed through the areas covered by the dragon scale armor was “filtered.”

Impurities were sieved out.

The purity of the battle qi outputted to her blade was a step higher than the limit she could normally achieve.

It was as if, through these dragon scales, her level of existence was also being elevated.

The corner of Ophelia’s mouth twitched.

The things he made were never as simple as they appeared.

The fourth strike.

She didn't hold back on this one. Golden battle qi poured out along the blade, and after being amplified by the runic circuits of the dragon scale armor, the arc of light trailed by the sword’s edge was longer than she was tall. The membrane was torn open in a vertical rift, exposing the dense cluster of anchor points within.

“I see it.”

Klein’s voice came from the dragon’s back. It wasn't loud, but it remained clear in this environment.

Ophelia didn't look back. She didn't need to.

If he said he saw it, he saw it. He would handle the rest.

The membrane began to heal—rapidly, the edges of the rift pulling back toward the center.

Ophelia rode the airflow created by the Silver Dragon’s dive, her figure rising high, sword tip pointing downward.

She gripped the hilt with her left hand.

Beneath the gauntlet, those black scales were quiet, showing no signs of movement. The silver runic inscriptions suppressed them like a cage, or a set of reins. It wasn't that they didn't want to move—Ophelia could feel something squirming beneath those scales, testing, pushing against the runic boundaries with extremely weak force. But they couldn't move. The silver suppression lines were as steady as a rock, leaving not even a sliver of a gap for them.

Stay obedient.

Ophelia took a deep breath.

Something inside her was waking up.

It wasn't battle qi. She was far too familiar with battle qi; since its awakening, she had understood the flow of every strand. This was different. This was something rising from the depths of her marrow, something more primitive, more instinctive—like an instinct that had been sleeping in her body all along, awakened by the runic frequency on the surface of the dragon scale armor.

The “field.”

She didn't know what else to call it, but the word surfaced naturally in her mind.

The runic inscriptions on the dragon scale armor all lit up, cold blue light tracing the complete outline of her body. That light wasn't just attached to the surface of the plates—it seeped beneath her skin, connecting with the power that had just awakened inside her.

The Silver Dragon let out a low hum behind her.

It was a response.

The response of a kin.

The massive silver creature slightly raised its head, the light in its vertical pupils flashing for a moment—it was looking at her. It wasn't looking at a human riding on its back, but at something... it recognized.

Ophelia gripped her sword tight.

I can do it.

The monster before her, which had swallowed half the sky—its membrane would regenerate, its volume was boundless, and its level was so high that conventional means could not reach it.

But so what.

She only needed an opening.

However, she felt—

With the next strike, she would cleave it apart!

Ophelia’s body plummeted from the highest point. The runic light of the silver armor grew brighter during the descent, golden battle qi and cold blue field intertwining, turning her entire person into a falling weapon.

It wasn't a person swinging a sword.

It was the sword itself falling.

A single slash.

The moment the sword light fell, the world went quiet.

Not metaphorically—it was quiet in a physical sense. Sound vanished. The wind stopped. Even the vibration of the Silver Dragon’s wing membranes skipped a beat. It was as if the air itself were terrified by the sharpness of this strike.

Then, the sea split.

Starting from the point where Ophelia’s sword edge touched, a straight rift extended to both sides. The seawater was cleaved into two walls, and what was revealed in the middle was not the seabed—it was the void. A pure, empty blackness.

The rift didn't stop at the sea. It continued upward, piercing through the body of the evil god.

That gargantuan mass, which defied cognitive definition, was sliced down the middle. The membranes, anchor points, and those flickering nodes on either side of the rift—all of them separated neatly along the cut. The cut was excessively smooth, with no signs of tearing or lingering struggle.

Clean and decisive.

The Silver Dragon’s body stiffened for a moment.

It had lived for untold years and had seen more battles than there were fish in this sea. But this strike—its wings instinctively tightened for a beat, like a primitive reaction of awe. A low vibration rumbled from its throat.

Klein did not take pride in the result. Instead, his gaze fell back onto the rift.

The rift was healing.

The speed was slower than last time—the area cleaved open was too large, and the evil god needed more time to reorganize its shattered structures. But it was indeed healing. Starting from the edges, the membrane regrew, the anchor points relit, and the severed connections were mended one by one.

It wasn't dead.

Something like this could not be killed with a single strike.

But one strike was enough.

Ophelia landed back on the dragon’s back, her single-knee-to-the-ground posture perfectly steady. Her breathing rate had increased, but it wasn't severe—the dragon scale armor had saved her at least forty percent of her physical exertion.

She stood up, glancing back at Klein.

The look was simple: Your turn.

Klein began his chant.

It wasn't the kind of high-pitched recitation heavy on ritual—his voice was low and extremely fast, with almost no gaps between syllables. The frequency of his tongue moving in his mouth far exceeded the limits of normal human language, with every consonant precisely hitting the nodes of mana resonance.

This was the moment he had been waiting for.

Ophelia’s strike had cleaved more than just the evil god’s body; it had broken its control over the surrounding sea. In those few seconds of an opening—when the evil god’s attention was entirely focused on its wound—the oceanic mana it had held firmly in its grasp began to loosen.

Klein’s mental energy dove through this crack.

Like a needle, it pierced into the giant’s wound.

The mana and elements of the entire sea began to stir. The water elements surging beneath the surface were the first to respond, followed by wind, lightning, and those free-floating mana particles that had been suppressed by the evil god for who knows how long. They were like prisoners who had been locked away for too long; once a gap appeared in the cell door, they surged out like mad.

Countless white waves exploded across the sea, not from the wind—but from the water elements cheering. Three bolts of dry thunder struck from the sky; there were no clouds, no rain, just the instinctive venting of lightning elements after breaking their bonds.

The Silver Dragon’s wings were pushed back half a beat by the turbulence. It let out a low, dissatisfied growl from its throat, flicking its tail to maintain balance.

Klein ignored it. His chant continued, the speed increasing until Ophelia, standing behind him, could no longer make out the specific words—she could only feel the air vibrating and the runic inscriptions on the dragon scale armor flickering in response to a certain frequency.

The sword-shaped fastener on her chest was also growing slightly warm.

The evil god noticed.

That formless existence suddenly accelerated its healing speed. The membranes on both sides of the rift grew frantically, and the frequency of the anchor points relighting tripled. It was racing against time.

It knew something was taking advantage of the opening.

Klein was also racing against time.

Sweat slid down his temple. The thin dragon scale wafer tucked inside his coat was pressed against his skin, its runic pulse perfectly synchronized with his heartbeat—it was something he had made for himself with only one function: to share some of the computational pressure when his mental energy was about to overload.

It was already working now.

His left hand drew the final anchoring symbol on his knee, while his right hand spread its fingers, aiming at the cross-section of the evil god that had been cleaved in two—

The chant stopped.

Silence lasted for about half a second.

Ophelia’s hand instinctively tightened around her sword hilt.

Then, runes flew out from his palm.

Not one or two. An entire page. A dense runic array detached from his palm, unfurling in the air into the shape of a scroll, flying toward the evil god’s wound with its own light source. The way those runes were arranged in the air—like a book being flipped open by the wind, every page filled with words, and every word glowing.

The evil god’s membrane tried to close, but those runes were faster than its healing speed—they dove into the rift, adhered to the cross-section, and embedded themselves one by one into the structures currently being reorganized.

Wherever a rune settled, the evil god’s flesh underwent a change.

Those blurred membrane structures that defied cognitive capture began to become... clear. Areas where vision had previously failed to gain purchase now showed concrete textures. Shapes that the brain had refused to process now had boundaries.

It was as if someone had lit a lamp in a thick fog. The fog was still there, but you could begin to see what was hidden within it.

The evil god let out a sound.

It wasn't a roar or a scream—it was a vibration that covered everything from extremely low to extremely high frequencies simultaneously. That sound wasn't heard with the ears; it was heard with the bones, the organs, and the teeth. The Silver Dragon’s field rippled outward from the shock, Ophelia’s eardrums stung for a moment, and the taste of iron surged into her nose.

It was struggling.

An existence that resided outside the cognitive boundary was being forcibly dragged into the realm of cognition.

It was unwilling.

The corner of Klein’s mouth twitched.

You're unwilling? That’s exactly how it should be.

“Anti-Chaos,” he spoke, his voice not loud, but every word carried the final command of the spell. “Let all formless things—”

He pressed his hand down.

“—take shape.”

The runes all flared with light.

In that instant, an outline appeared on the evil god’s body.

For the first time.

Since it had descended upon this sea, for the first time—someone saw its shape.

What exactly was the evil god?

Klein stared at the cross-section illuminated by the runes, his brain working at high speed.

Was it the sirens he had seen in his dreams—those beautiful monsters that wove death with their songs? Was it the mermaids—the source of the compressed information from which Aphros was born? Was it a sea goat, a sea serpent, or... a dragon?

His gaze instinctively swept over the Silver Dragon beneath him. The Silver Dragon’s vertical pupils were also fixed ahead, its pupils narrowed into thin lines.

Or was it the things Ophelia had once faced on the West Coast—hideous tentacles and countless limbs reaching out from the deep sea?

The answer had been there all along.

It was all of them.

The light of the runes shone into the interior of the evil god’s cleaved body, revealing the structures that had previously refused to be captured by cognition, layer by layer. Klein saw scales—not just one kind of scale, but dozens, hundreds of kinds, varying in size and color. Some were fine as a snake's, some broad as a fish's, some thick as a tortoise shell, and some thin as a cicada's wing...

“Klein.”

Ophelia’s voice came from behind him. It wasn't loud, but it was clear.

Klein turned his head, meeting her gaze. Ophelia wasn't looking at the evil god; she was looking at him.

Klein blinked, refocusing.

As the last batch of runes embedded themselves into the evil god’s body, the gargantuan existence began to struggle violently.

The membrane structures that had been forcibly given shape were convulsing, the frequency of the anchor points relighting spiked to a frantic level, and the entire canopy of the Divine Kingdom shook along with it. On the sea—or rather, on that dark-green plane that could no longer be called a sea surface—circular ripples rose, spreading outward in rings, every ring emitting a piercing hiss as it passed through the Silver Dragon’s field.

The Silver Dragon backed up half a body length, instinctively pulling back to a safe distance. A low vibration rumbled in its throat, its wing membranes pulled taut.

Klein’s mental energy had already been withdrawn. What needed to be done was done; the rest was a chemical reaction—it didn't need his continued catalysis.

The evil god tried to shake off the runes in its struggle. Its flesh churned, and layers of membranes pushed outward, trying to squeeze out the “definitions” that had been nailed into it.

Unfortunately, those runes were like nails with roots; once driven in, they would not loosen. Every rune continued to work, continuously translating the “formless” into the “formed,” continuously stripping away its greatest advantage.

The struggle lasted for about ten seconds.

Then, it stopped.

“It is splitting,” Klein said aloud.

Ophelia raised her sword again, but Klein reached out and pressed her forearm. “Wait. Don't move.”

His palm was pressed against the surface of her armguard, the cold light of the runic inscriptions leaking through his fingers.

The evil god’s body began to actively separate along the cross-section Ophelia had cleaved. The structures on both sides contracted, reorganized, and condensed, evolving in two completely different directions.

It was no longer healing.

It chose to split.

Like a gecko driven into a corner, cutting off its own tail.