I drew my blades.
The aura that escaped from my body was so violent that the generals had to step back several paces. They raised their arms in front of their faces to protect themselves.
I leaped.
My body beca nothing more than a streak of gray light crossing the battlefield. I was not using magic, I only had my Arts, those techniques I had developed over decades of hand-to-hand combat.
The lower-ranked monsters were nothing more than insignificant obstacles. With each step, I pivoted on myself. With each rotation of my blades, dozens of heads flew. Severed limbs fell to the ground. The demonic blood, black and viscous, rained on my armor without ever dulling my montum. It slid on the tal like water on stone, leaving behind shiny trails that evaporated imdiately.
I moved with a speed that defied human perception.
My shoulders transmitted the force to my arms, and my wrists adjusted the angle of my blades to the milliter. It was a perfect chanism, learned through hundreds of years of war.
The ten Archdemons noticed my advance.
They regrouped, their ebony lances charged with corrupted mana pointed toward . The runes engraved on those lances glowed with a sickly mauve light. The leader of these creatures, an entity with scaly skin like that of a reptile and eyes injected with liquid sulfur, let out a roar. The foundations of the earth trembled, and cracks appeared on the ground around him.
" You’re the human causing all this shit?" he growled in a guttural language.
" You’ll end up like the others," he continued while brandishing his lance. " Your heart will serve as a feast for my master."
I stopped ten ters from them. My two swords hung along my body, motionless, and yet the aura continued to radiate around . My silver hair floated in the wind of death, and my eyes of sidereal gray fixed on his. My gaze was of a terrifying serenity.
" I hope that next ti, the demon princes will have the audacity to co themselves instead of sending their dogs," I replied calmly.
I crossed my blades in front of . The white blade t the black blade, and from their contact was born a blinding spark. They ford a cross of light and shadow. My aura suddenly contracted, sucked toward my body as if an invisible hand was compressing it, then it expanded with such density that the ground beneath my feet collapsed. A perfect crater ford around , at least three ters in diater, and rocks flew into splinters.
The world seed to freeze. And in an instant, I disappeared.
I was not running. I was not flying. I was not teleporting either, at least not in the sense that mages understood it. I rged with space itself. My body beca an abstraction of reality because of the massive concentration of Aura. The Archdemons did not have ti to raise their defenses. Their eyes dilated, their jaws opened, but no sound ca from their throats.
A series of shrill whistles, similar to harp strings breaking under extre tension, tore through the atmosphere.
The movent was invisible to the naked eye. Only its consequences were perceptible. Arcs of white light and slashes of pure darkness streaked across the sky, crossing with perfect geotry. At each intersection, a part of reality seed to be erased. The air tore, the ground split, and the bodies of the demons opened like overripe fruits.
It was a level that Klein had never hoped was possible to reach with the Sundering Eclipse.
The first Archdemon was sliced vertically, from head to pelvis. His lance fell to the ground in two pieces even before his body collapsed. The second saw his arms and wings detach in an explosion of black blood. His limbs landed several ters away from him, and he collapsed onto his knees while letting out a scream of pain that remained stuck in his throat.
I reappeared behind the leader.
My white blade was driven into his sternum, right between two plates of his natural horn. My black blade erged from his spine, after having pierced his heart, his lungs and his stomach. The colossus remained standing for a fraction of a second, his sulfur-injected eyes widening in astonishnt. Foamy blood, mixed with pieces of charred flesh, ca out of his maw and flowed along his chin.
" How..." he murmured.
His voice was nothing more than a breath. The power that had animated him monts earlier had evaporated.
" Such strength... in a mortal..."
I tilted my head toward his ear. My warm breath struck his scaly skin, and I knew he felt his death approaching.
" I told you," I murmured. " Here I am the predator."
I withdrew my blades with a brutal twist.
The resulting shockwave pulverized the remains of his body into a fine mist of flesh. There was no corpse, no remains to trample. Just a reddish cloud that dissipated in the wind of ashes, as if he had never existed.
The other Archdemons, terrified by this demonstration of power, deployed their mbranous wings and beat the air frantically, but the New Moon had not yet finished its cycle.
Residual aura blades, echoes of my previous strikes, continued to hit. These blades had no physical consistency, but they sliced through flesh as if they were made of hardened steel. The air itself had transford into thousands of razors obeying my will.
One of the Archdemons took flight, but an aura blade severed both his legs at the knees. He crashed to the ground screaming, and another blade pierced his skull from side to side.
Another tried to protect himself with his arms, but the residual blades disarticulated them as one would debone a chicken. A third tried to deploy a magical shield, but the aura blades bypassed his protection through impossible angles and pierced him from twenty sides at once.
In a few seconds, the ten entities that could have razed an entire kingdom were nothing more than formless heaps of at and broken bones scattered on the black rock.
I wiped my blades with a gesture, letting the demonic blood slide between my fingers before letting it fall to the ground. The gravitational pressure of my technique evaporated, and the air around beca breathable again. The silence that followed was deafening, disturbed only by the crackling of the magical flas that went out one by one on the battlefield.
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