Shatter. Heal. Shatter. Heal.
The seventeenth time.
Cecilia’s right fist exploded entirely from the wrist. Bone fragments flew out, striking Leovet’s robe before bouncing off and falling to the ground.
A sickly green light flickered. Tender pink granulation tissue sprouted from the severed wrist. Bones restructured. Tendons tightened. Skin sealed shut.
One and a half seconds.
A complete right fist reappeared.
She could no longer feel the pain.
It wasn't endurance. It was numbness after her threshold had been pushed to the limit. Every sound of bone shattering reached her ears, sounding no different from the whistling wind.
Leovet stood three meters away. The entire left sleeve of his robe had been burned away. Two tears had been ripped into his trouser legs by the elemental aftershocks.
Other than that...
Not a single hair was out of place.
Cecilia’s feet slid back two steps over the rubble. Her chest heaved at an extremely high frequency. It wasn't a matter of physical stamina—the mana provided by the World Tree Heart was nearly infinite.
It was her mind that was collapsing.
The combat experience, magic combinations, and timing judgments accumulated over hundreds of loops had all been poured onto this man.
It was useless.
He stepped aside to let the five-element annihilation pass. He flicked away the three-attribute fusion barrage with two fingers. He didn't even look at the dual polarity contradiction curse of Holy Light and Shadow, simply crushing the casting node with a single step.
Cecilia retreated ten meters in a burst of speed. Her feet crushed two stone slabs as she came to a halt.
She withdrew all her flashy composite magic.
Four of the five elemental lights went out.
Only Earth remained.
Thick, heavy earth-element mana from deep within the ground surged from the soles of her naked feet, covering her entire body.
Stone armor began to climb up from her ankles. Calves. Thighs. Waist and abdomen. Chest. Arms. Finally, her neck and face.
Within three seconds, Cecilia was encased in a layer of dense rock armor nearly half a meter thick.
The surface of the rock armor shimmered with dark gold patterns. Her earth element affinity had been pushed to its limit by the Blood Dance Tattoo.
She stopped attacking.
She crossed her arms, protecting her chest, and lowered her center of gravity.
She waited.
She waited for the moment Leovet showed an opening. Then she would teleport. And run.
It was the only way to survive.
Leovet stopped walking and tilted his head. He tucked his left hand back into his pocket.
He looked at Cecilia, who was hunkered down in her rock armor.
“Hiding in a shell?”
He pulled his right hand out from the inside of his robe. He wasn't holding bread.
He held two fingers up in front of him—index and middle fingers pressed together, pointing toward the sky.
“It’s about time to wrap this up.”
The wind stopped.
It didn't weaken; it vanished.
The air flow within a fifty-meter radius dropped to zero at the same moment. Fallen leaves hung in mid-air. Rubble and dust froze in their flying trajectories. Even the dust motes stopped drifting.
And then...
The wind returned.
Centered on Leovet, it returned on an indescribable scale.
“Wind Domain.”
The words left his mouth as casually as calling attendance in class.
“Absolute Sovereignty.”
White light exploded.
Cecilia’s visual signals were completely overwhelmed within zero point zero one seconds. Nothing remained on her retinas but a pure, searing white.
Absolute silence fell over her ears.
It wasn't just quiet. Sound had been physically stripped away. Every frequency and vibration within the domain was suppressed to absolute zero.
Her body left the ground.
A sensation of weightlessness came from beneath her feet. The weight of the rock armor meant nothing at this moment. She was lifted by an invisible force, suspended in mid-air.
The rotation began.
Cecilia felt the air around her moving at high speed. It wasn't wind, but a perfect spherical structure rotating around her. The speed increased faster and faster. Air was flung toward the walls of the sphere by centrifugal force. The air pressure at the center began to plummet.
A sense of suffocation rose from the bottom of her throat.
She opened her mouth, but could inhale nothing.
Her lungs contracted violently in the vacuum. Her ribs were pressed inward by the atmospheric pressure difference. The air leaking from the gaps in her rock armor was sucked dry within zero point three seconds.
Mana. Use mana.
Her consciousness frantically drove the elements within her body. Earth. Water. Wind. Fire. Lightning.
All were silent.
It wasn't that they were depleted; the reserves were still there. The World Tree Heart was still frantically supplying her. But her mana could not resonate with the external elements at all.
This wind sphere had severed her connection to the world.
Her internal circulation remained. The sickly green healing light within her body was still repairing the cellular damage caused by oxygen deprivation, but the speed of repair could not keep up with the speed of suffocation. The oxygen supply to her brain dropped below the critical threshold within ten seconds.
The edges of her vision began to blacken.
It wasn't a normal reaction to oxygen deprivation. It was her consciousness peeling away, layer by layer.
The outermost layer of tactical thinking collapsed first. Then her spatial perception. Then her concept of time. Finally, only the most basic instinct remained.
Fear.
Pure fear of death surging from the depths of her genes.
She was going to die.
She was really going to die this time.
The sense of security built by the infinite loops shattered completely at this moment. Restarting required consciousness. Without consciousness, there was no restart.
Leovet could kill her.
Truly. Permanently. Kill her.
Her lips moved wordlessly. Her oxygen-deprived brain squeezed out one last set of syllables.
There was no sound.
Only the shape of her lips.
“Bro... ther...”
Her consciousness disconnected.
Her body went completely limp inside the wind sphere. Her naked limbs hung down, and her golden hair floated haphazardly in the vacuum. The dark red glow of the Blood Dance Tattoo flickered twice on her skin before going out.
Leovet withdrew his two fingers.
The wind sphere dissipated at the same instant.
Losing its support, Cecilia’s body plummeted from a height of fifteen meters.
Leovet did not let her hit the ground. A supporting force rose from beneath, and wind elements formed a soft air cushion under her, reducing her fall speed to zero.
She hung half a meter above the ground, her limbs dangling powerlessly. her chest heaved weakly. She was still breathing.
Leovet looked down at the unconscious Cecilia, rubbing his chin with his right hand.
“The Soloer...”
He chewed on the name twice, tasting it.
He looked up, scanning the sky.
The withered World Tree branches had stopped growing.
More than just stopping, those dense, grayish-white branches extending downward from the rift in the sky were shriveling, cracking, and shattering at a visible rate.
Fragments fell from high altitude, striking the ruins of Moon Phase City and crumbling into powder.
In the streets of Moon Phase City...
The withered husks that were still frantically charging the defensive lines all stopped.
Their movements froze in various postures of charging, biting, and climbing. The black fruits embedded in their chests lost their luster simultaneously, cracking from within and crumbling into dust.
One by one, the withered husks collapsed.
The moment they hit the ground, their wooden fiber bodies rapidly weathered, turning into piles of harmless rotted wood scraps that were blown away by the wind.
The withered husk tide across the entire Moon Phase City ended completely within thirty seconds.
Antinoia stood on the ruins of the North District wall. The blades of the golem legion hung in mid-air, their targets gone.
She pushed up the glasses on the bridge of her nose. Her lenses reflected the collapsing remains of the World Tree in the distant sky.
“Is it over?”
Footsteps came from the passage leading from the secret chamber to the surface. They were hurried and chaotic.
Bell was carrying Tia.
The left side of Tia’s body was not yet fully repaired. The filaments drawn by the liquid Mithril at the break barely maintained her basic form. The etheric conduction lines in her right eye glowed with a faint light.
Leon followed to Bell’s right. His left arm hung at a twisted angle, and the wound where the broken bone had pierced the skin was crudely wrapped with a few strips of scrap cloth. The cloth was already soaked through with blood.
Lilian was on the left. Her Crown of Thorns was crooked on her head, and half its petals had withered. Her right hand still gripped that Mithril dagger, and the skin on her knuckles had split in three places.
The three of them walked up to Leovet together.
Bell gently placed Tia on a relatively flat stone slab. His fingers paused for two seconds when they touched Tia’s damaged panel, his thumb sliding lightly over the etheric lines on her cheek.
It was very gentle.
He stood up and turned to Leovet.
“Cecilia—” The metallic taste of blood from his earlier roaring still lingered in his throat. He swallowed. “Is she dead?”
Leovet looked down at Cecilia floating on the wind cushion, then back up at Bell.
“Haven't decided yet.”
He spoke casually, as if choosing what to eat for lunch.
Bell’s right hand trembled slightly. That hand had been dripping blood ten minutes ago. The wound had been crudely bandaged, and the bloodstains seeping through the bandage had turned a dark brown.
He spoke.
“Don't kill her.”
Leovet’s movements paused for a beat.
He turned to face Bell, looking him up and down twice.
He pulled his left hand out of his pocket and crossed his arms.
“Interesting.”
He paused for a second.
“You know better than I do what this brat did to you.”
Bell didn't respond.
“Forcibly plundering. Controlling the World Tree. Using Dracula as a pawn. She almost destroyed the entire city.”
Leovet rattled off the points one by one.
Leovet stared at him.
“I was actually hesitating.”
“This brat has a lot of information. Keeping her alive for interrogation is a reasonable option.”
He took a step forward.
“But now you’re pleading for her.”
Another step.
“That makes me very uncomfortable.”
“So I’ve decided.”
“She must die.”
Bell’s right hand suddenly gripped the hem of his clothes, the fabric wrinkling between his fingers.
His mind was racing at high speed.
The value of the information. She knew about Salomos. She knew all the details of the restart. This information was the key chip in the fight against the unknown.
If Leovet killed her now, that information would disappear with her.
“She has information we need,” Bell said, pulling the conversation back onto a rational track. “About the restart, about Salomos, about—”
“That’s my prey.”
Leovet interrupted him.
“You think I don't know the priorities?”
“Of course I know a live witness is more useful than a dead one. But she’s a monster. You tell me, how do I lock her up?”
“What cage? What seal? Next time, I might not be able to catch her by surprise.”
The ground beneath their feet suddenly shook.
It wasn't an aftershock.
It was a heavy, continuous vibration from deep within the ley lines.
Leovet’s words cut off halfway. A tiny, abnormal feedback came from beneath his feet. A massive energy was awakening within the earth.
Lilian’s dagger dropped.
It wasn't that her grip loosened. It was that the hand holding the dagger had suddenly lost all blood source mana feedback.
The sickly green light of the inheritance stone pillar—
It went out.
In its place was a frequency that had never appeared in this world before.
Black.
Pure.
Absolute black.
The ground of the Night Rose Palace exploded beneath everyone’s feet.
Stone bricks, soil, and foundation fragments flew into the sky. A pillar of pitch-black energy erupted from the rift, over twenty meters in diameter. It pierced through the remaining dome of the Night Rose Palace and stabbed into the sky above Moon Phase City.
A dragon’s roar echoed from within the energy pillar.
It wasn't a roar, but a resonance.
It was so low it fell below the minimum threshold of human hearing, yet every person present felt it. Because that roar did not travel through the air—it ground directly across their souls.
Leon’s knees buckled. Cold sweat seeped from his forehead. His broken left arm shook violently and uncontrollably.
This pressure...
It was completely different from the suppression Cecilia had created with stacked mana.
It was a denial from a higher dimension, a rejection of life itself.
The energy pillar dissipated.
A giant dragon coiled atop the ruins of the Night Rose Palace.
Its entire body was pitch black. Its scales had no luster, reflecting or refracting nothing, absorbing all light that fell upon them. Two hideous horns curved out from the sides of its head, pointing straight at the firmament.
Crimson vertical pupils. The pupils were a razor-thin slit, flanked by deep red irises. There was no emotion, no spark of intelligence. Only nothingness.
Its bone wings unfurled, their span covering most of the remaining area of the Night Rose Palace. There were no patterns of blood vessels on the wing membranes; they were translucent, dull gray films.
Black mist swirled around its body. Wherever the mist touched the ground, the color of the stone bricks faded, the texture vanished, and the material structure was stripped away layer by layer.
It wasn't destruction.
It was erasure.
Bell stood at the edge of the ruins, looking up.
Those crimson vertical pupils were lowered, looking down at him.
It was completely different from Dracula’s sickly green light. This thing’s existence itself was a “denial.” Denying order. Denying vitality. Denying the rationality of all existence.
The name Cecilia had spoken...
Every word squeezed from the depths of his throat carried a chill that surged up from his tailbone.
“That guy Dracula...”
The dragon’s crimson vertical pupils lingered on him for two seconds. The slit of the pupils widened by a single millimeter.
“That is... The Denier of the World.”
The dragon opened its mouth.
Rate on N.U.
