But once it cleared, Azula walked out of it untouched.
The flesh flayed from his arm was already crawling back over the bone, knitting itself whole as if the wound had never existed.
This was the undying effect of the crown rank.
Caelus could see why with his sight. Deep inside Azula’s chest, beyond flesh and bone, sat a small radiant object. A crown.
One Crown ant the other party was Crown I.
Every crown rank possessed one. So long as the crown stayed intact, the body it lived in could not truly die. Damage it, and the crown simply rewound the damage. This was why it was said only a crown could kill another crown, because only a crown could reach past the body and strike the core directly. For everyone else, attacking a crown rank was like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket.
Their HP was based on the HP of the crown itself, and only another crown’s power could destroy it.
Azula rushed in. A halberd appeared in his grip, blood power oozing off him in a red haze.
His circulation overheated inside him, his own blood boiling to drive his speed and strength higher. It was a self-buff that traded his blood reserves for an acceleration in power.
He shot forward faster than before. The Chaos Perception Dragon moved to et him.
Boom!
Claws and halberd clashed, the air between them shattering. If not for Lyra’s barrier, the city would have been wiped off the map.
Azula unleashed everything. He flicked his fingers, and the spilled blood across the field hardened into high-velocity spears that scread toward the dragon’s hide. When the claws ca for him, his body dissolved into a spray of crimson mist, reforming ters away and leaving a corrosive cloud behind. He flooded the ground with a surging tide of blood tall enough to drown and crush, dragging at the beast’s footing.
Hardened blood-spears.
A blood-mist blink.
A drowning tide.
He cycled through all of it.
But none of it was enough. The dragon matched his every move, and against the transformation, Azula’s mountain-leveling ceiling simply was not a high enough wall.
What unsettled him was not that he was being matched in power. It was that the dragon kept tearing pieces off him and looking at his regeneration like it was a problem to be solved, rather than a wall to fear.
Because Caelus had already worked out the answer.
He did not need to destroy the body. He needed to destroy the crown.
So he stopped fighting the man and started hunting the core inside him.
The dragon’s jaws opened, and Volcra erupted, ignoring all defenses as it shot straight toward Azula, targeting his crown.
Crk.
For the first ti in centuries, the crown fractured. It was a hairline crack, but the Volcra did manage to wound it.
Azula felt it. He felt his own crown crack, and the fear finally curdled into sothing he had not felt in a very long ti.
Desperation.
"You can touch it?!" His voice ca out hoarse. "Impossible. Only a crown can wound another crown. You do not even have one!"
Caelus didn’t care about his words, he pressed the attack.
A storm of light shot toward the man as he unleashed Ferra.
The crown cracked further. It was still healing between hits with Azula’s vampiric abilities, but slower now. He was damaging it faster than it could nd.
Azula’s eyes went bloodshot. He was being cornered. Him. A crown rank who had ruled from his castle longer than this central plains had existed.
"You have forced my hand, Caelus Kross."
"Blood-Sovereign’s Ascension."
The words appeared behind him in the language of the Origin Domain, and an oppressive power blood outward as Azula unleashed his Arcana Scroll.1
A shroud of living blood unfurled from his body and lifted into the air, orbiting him as a vast suspended sea of crimson.
Among the crowd, the Player Association’s head, their pillar, Magnus Roan, spoke with a troubled look.
"There is no winning this now under normal circumstances. An arcana scroll is the ultimate trump card. Once released, it lets the caster skip an entire rank for a short window usually. That is long enough to land a killing blow before it crashes into cooldown. Forming one takes an incredible amount of Arcana Focus Point, but he ca here with it already charged."
But the rank jump ntioned by Magnus was only a part of it.
The shroud did three things.
First, every blow Azula took would be siphoned into the crimson sea, which converted a portion straight back into healing. The more he was struck, the thicker the shroud grew. Below a certain threshold, he was simply unkillable.
Second, the shroud fed on death. For as long as it held, Azula’s own combat score climbed with every life ended around him. A crowded field would only make him stronger mid-cast.
And third, if he was sohow brought to zero despite all of it, the shroud would shatter and drag him back, resurrecting him at half strength on the ashes of every life it had consud.
Damage into healing. Stronger with every life taken. A free resurrection.
That was his Arcana, sumd up shortly.
And Azula intended to feed it.
He turned, and without a flicker of hesitation, gestured at his own descending horde of vampires.
They burst apart where they hovered, hundreds of them, their lives crushed out and dragged screaming into the crimson sea.
"He killed his own people..." Leonard’s voice cracked from where he stood.
Then Azula turned to Lyra’s golden barrier and the people sheltering behind it. He drove the halberd forward, and the barrier that had held against a collapsing sun shattered like glass.
Lyra was taken aback by this; she imdiately began to move to nd the barrier.
However, several lives winked out before she could re-anchor it, every one of them pulled into the shroud. With each death, Azula climbed higher, the crimson sea thickening until he was less a man and more a thing wearing a crown of boiling blood.
However, Caelus was unfazed.
He struck again, and this ti his wounds did nothing. Every cut sealed the instant it was made, the shroud drinking the damage and handing it back as life.
It was over.
Or it should have been.
Allstar on the ground grinned seeing this, his heart racing with excitent.
Caelus simply looked calmly at the man drowning in stolen blood.
Then, he uttered, "Temporal Regression."
The world violently glitched.
Reality skipped backward like a needle dragged across a record, and it rewound to the precise mont before the arcana scroll was ever cast.
The crimson sea unraveled. The shroud peeled off Azula and vanished. The combat score that had soared toward Crown II dropped back down.
Every vampire and innocent the shroud had devoured returned.
However, no one except Azula retained mories of this.
Azula staggered. He looked down at his own hands, then at the scroll’s focus reading floating in his vision.
"My focus... it is back at one hundred percent." His voice shook for the first ti. "The ascension is gone. It is as if I never cast it at all. How? HOW is that possible?!"
The arcana had not been blocked. It had not been countered. It had been unmade, rewound to before it ever left his hands, his greatest trump card erased from the tiline.
Allstar, watching from the side, let out a delighted laugh. "There it is! It’s that power! I knew you had it in you!"
But Caelus was not finished, because Temporal Regression had only solved half the problem.
The arcana was gone. But underneath it, Azula was still a crown rank. The undying crown still sat in his chest, still regenerating him, still impossible for a non-crown to destroy.
Reversing the arcana brought Azula back to baseline. Killing him ant taking the crown itself.
So, in the window his rewind had bought, Caelus stared at the man.
His vision turned; he saw the crown more clearly.
Then, he spoke. "Origin Sever."
This was the power he realized, the potential he always had but failed to recognize.
The ability to sever the concepts binding sothing.
Origin Sever did not deal damage. It severed a property from its right to exist. A fla from its right to burn. A barrier from its right to hold. And now, a crown from its right to heal.
The sa power that once the Ender of Origin used to breach the barrier of ti.
There was no ear-deafening sound, just a small sound of scissors cutting through paper.
Snip.
Azula felt it instantly. He felt the crown in his chest, the thing that had made him untouchable for centuries, go silent. The wounds the dragon had carved into him, the ones that should have already healed, stayed open and began to bleed freely.
Not just that, Caelus also took his healing factor of a vampire.
For the first ti in his immortal vampire life, Azula was simply a thing that could die.
"How...?" Azula stared at Caelus in disbelief. "Such power. How can soone possess such power?"
"How can there be no consequences?"
"No consequences?" Caelus chuckled coldly. "Everything has a cause and effect. tapping into this power also has its negatives that perhaps I will not be able to handle my form after this is all over."
"But for the person I love, I will go even to the deepest hell to save them."
"This is the difference between you and , Azula." Caelus’s form began flickering. "A being worse than a robot. That is what you are."
It was clear that he did not have much ti left in this form.
It was the power granted to him by the last bits of golden energy that was hidden deeply within him after realizing his own potential and awakening Origin Sever and Ti reversal.
It allowed him to evolve beyond the Chaos Dragon body temporarily and grant him the authority as a full ender, and this was just a half-complete dragon transformation.
But... it was enough to defeat this monster in front of him.
"I will not kill you, Azula," Caelus spoke at last.
"I will rip out your powers. I will use my remaining strength to permanently cut off your path to ever becoming a player, reducing you to nothing but a normal person."
He activated Origin Sever again, permanently cutting off Azula’s connection to mana and the Origin Network.
This was the last bit of authority he could use.
For Azula, death was just sothing he would not bat an eye at.
But suffering through the life of an ordinary person, that was a bigger punishnt than death.
Just then, Caelus frowned. He felt a strange connection forming.
In case you forgot. Rachel used this during her introduction Chapter.
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