Just then—
A laugh ca from inside the dust and smoke.
A laugh that sounded like a god mocking a mortal’s knife.
"Do you think my own teeth can bite ," the Covenant-Breaker called. His voice was thick with scorn. "I am Collapse. I am the closing of structure. I cannot be unmade by the shape of my own power."
The smoke thinned.
He stood there.
Wounded.
But the wounds were shallow, and already knitting. The staff glowed with a sickly light, feeding him recovery through corruption.
Lucien raised his brows.
"Of course," he said quietly. "You are that stubborn."
Lucien shifted tactics and summoned his other book. His Book answered.
The Covenant-Breaker’s gaze flicked to Lucien’s hand.
To the Monsterdex.
Recognition sharpened into sothing hungry.
His lips pulled back.
"I see," he said softly. "You are the new bearer of the codices."
His eyes turned colder than before.
"Then you must die here," he whispered as if reciting a prophecy.
Lucien’s instincts scread.
Warning.
Sothing had changed in the goblin’s stance. Sothing desperate. Sothing prepared.
Lucien snapped his hand open.
The Monsterdex flared.
And the world flooded.
Slis poured out in waves.
Dozens.
Then more.
Colored bodies moved like liquid soldiers. Elental slis ford lines. Solar slis pulsed with light. Shadow slis spilled darkness. Void slis warped space with blunt force. Temporal slis caused movent to stagger and stutter.
No Laws. No Edicts.
Just bodies that refused to die properly.
The allies froze for half a breath at the sudden tide.
Lucien spoke without turning.
"Back out," he ordered. "Now."
They obeyed.
Because Lucien’s tone was not strategy anymore.
It was instinct speaking through calculation.
Danger.
The Covenant-Breaker stared at the slis, and for the first ti he looked almost... amused.
"Slis," he whispered.
Then his eyes sharpened.
"And humans."
The taste of old war filled his expression.
"Again," his voice was like a curse dragging itself forward through ti.
He moved.
Suddenly reckless. Suddenly decisive. Like a creature that had decided survival no longer mattered as long as it could drag soone else into the grave.
The staff glowed chaotically.
Spells flung outward, one after another... aid to annihilate.
They struck the slis.
And failed.
Because the slis’ bodies had changed.
Their Symbiotic Fusion with the Abyssal One had turned them into sothing that did not respond normally to magic.
The spells dissolved on contact, absorbed and neutralized by abyssal resilience as if thrown into a sea.
Of course, this was only possible under the suppression where all beings had been dragged down to the Mortal Realm.
Still, this was unprecedented.
The Covenant-Breaker’s eyes widened.
His grin faltered.
Lucien did not hesitate.
He moved with the slis now.
Sli Beast Mode.
His form flowed into a flexible, shifting shape.
Sli rge.
He rged with slis mid-motion, borrowing their mass, their elasticity, and their absurd refusal to die.
For a mont, Lucien looked like a living tide wearing a man’s will.
The Covenant-Breaker snarled.
"You must die," he hissed.
Then he did it.
He stopped trying to win.
He chose to ruin.
He turned his staff and imploded chaos toward Lucien.
An eruption of unpredictability so complete that even Perfect Calculation could not see through it.
The chaos hit Lucien like an ocean breaking.
The slis that had rged with him were peeled away. Lucien stood exposed in Sli Beast Mode.
And in that sa instant, the Covenant-Breaker lunged...
...into him.
He clung to Lucien’s sli-form like a corpse refusing to fall. His staff pressed close and... corruption flared.
"This will cost millennia," the goblin emperor rasped. His voice was now twisted with madness. "But you must die."
Lucien’s instincts surged.
Disgust hit first.
Then a darker sensation rose.
Recognition.
Sothing in the goblin’s posture felt like an old ritual.
A prepared self-destruction.
Lucien’s mind turned sharply.
Through his connection with Astraea, she imdiately sensed that sothing was wrong.
Lucien then asked her to pull everyone back at once including the slis. She acted at once.
And just then...
Lucien’s mouth opened on its own.
And without aning to and without choosing it, the words slipped out like a reflex from another life.
"Scam the System."
The Covenant-Breaker exploded.
Not with fire.
With ruin.
The blast tore through suppression like a fist through glass. The formation shattered. The ground cracked open. The atmosphere itself lurched, as if reality had taken a step backward to recover from the insult.
Their Laws returned.
Power returned.
But the shockwave was overwhelming, tearing through space itself and reaching even the distant refuge where Astraea and the others had fled.
Astraea moved instantly, shielding the others with storm-wind and hardened pressure.
The slis too ford barriers. Their bodies stacked. Light and shadow and elental force interlocked into a living bulwark.
Their abyssal nature drank a portion of the blast.
But everyone’s eyes were on the sa point.
Lucien.
Point blank.
Astraea called his na through the pact like thunder in a skull.
Even the slis cried out in his mind with alarm.
When the dust thinned, Lucien was still there.
His sli-form was torn apart, but it was already crawling back together. Pieces reconnected like a wounded ocean refusing to stop being wet.
For one second, he had been immune.
Scam the System had worked.
But the remaining impact after that one second had still hit like a continent.
Lucien’s body trembled.
Then steadied.
His eyes opened.
Across the ruined ground, the Covenant-Breaker lay broken but alive. His chest was heaving.
And... His eyes were wide with disbelief so profound it looked stupid.
"How," he choked.
Lucien’s sli-body continued to recover. Threads knitted, mass reford.
He rose slowly. Like a man getting up from a chair.
"Is that it?" Lucien asked.
The words hit harder than any punch.
Even the allies froze as if offended on the goblin’s behalf.
Lucien stepped forward with intent sharp enough to cut.
He was going to finish it.
Then the Covenant-Breaker laughed.
A guttural sound, ugly and ancient, full of old secrets and worse resignation.
"So fate is imminent after all," the goblin rasped. "I see it now. No one escapes the cycle."
His gaze drifted upward as if watching sothing that was not there.
"The seals wane," he whispered. "And the cycle begins anew. Now I know what it ans."
Lucien paused. His eyes narrowed.
"I will return," the Covenant-Breaker said.
Lucien’s head tilted slightly.
"You will not have the chance."
Astraea spat a curse that sounded like a storm swallowing a mountain.
"Rot-spawn," she hissed. "I will scatter you across centuries."
The goblin emperor’s laughter returned, crueler.
"Foolish insects," he said. "Do you think I tore my own body apart rely to kill you?"
His eyes glittered.
"This is not my true flesh. I have prepared more vessels than your imagination can hold. Dozens. Hundreds. My real body waits for the day the world forgets to fear."
The words landed like a blade between ribs.
Even Lucien felt it.
A tightening.
A promise of a future catastrophe.
The Covenant-Breaker’s staff pulsed weakly.
His body began to blur at the edges, as if reality had decided he was no longer fully present.
Lucien’s hand tightened around Morphis.
His madness sharpened into sothing colder.
Astraea’s aura rose like thunder about to break.
The allies moved forward instinctively.
The slis surged.
But the Covenant-Breaker smiled through blood and ruin, and his eyes held the smug certainty of sothing that had lost a battle but intended to win the war.
"Rember my na," he whispered.
Before it could finish, Lucien delivered the final blow.
The Covenant-Breaker’s body convulsed once, then collapsed inward as if the world itself had withdrawn permission for it to exist. The lingering miasma thinned and was dragged screaming back into nothingness.
Then... the field shuddered once more.
And the world held its breath.
Because the hardest fight they had ever endured had not ended in triumph.
It had ended in a warning.
...
And when everything finally looked safe, that was when Lucien felt victory co to collect its debt.
His vision blurred.
The Sli Beast Mode collapsed without warning. The mass peeled away as if it had exhausted every last fragnt of will. His human form reerged beneath it. Torn, bloodied, and barely holding together.
His knees buckled.
Lucien exhaled a long breath.
As he fell, his gaze caught one last sight upon the ruined ground.
The cube drop.
It stood out, refracting light in colors he had never seen before. It shimred with layered spectra with colors that bent into one another without boundary.
A rainbow.
The system responded.
[Rarity: Divine]
Lucien’s lips curved faintly.
"I guess," he murmured, "you lose so... you win so."
His eyes closed.
He collapsed forward as hands rushed to catch him. Voices called his na while the battlefield finally fell silent.
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