"Even your absolute mastery of aura cannot do anything against the will of heaven. You are nothing but a mortal who has forgotten his place."
Sulyvhan raised his head, his silver hair soiled with ash and blood. His gaze fixed on Loriel, who continued to observe him from the skies, impassive. It was at that mont that sothing broke definitively inside him. It was not his body, nor even his will... it was the ultimate bond that still connected him to humanity and to hope.
A cold anger, of an unimaginable density, began to boil at the center of his being.
"You speak of my place..." he murmured, his voice having beco a hiss that made the traitors shiver. "But you ignore that the predator is the most dangerous when it is cornered."
The golden runes on the ground began to turn to charcoal black. The air around Alexander beca so cold that frost instantly covered the bodies of the generals. Pendragon’s gravity was simply canceled, replaced by an inverse pressure that pushed the seven n back several ters.
"What is he doing?" stamred Kaelen, his voice betraying a sudden panic.
"He... he is exceeding the limits!" cried Kaelen while raising his shield of flas.
Sulyvhan stood up slowly. Each movent of his limbs caused a cracking in space itself. His eyes no longer possessed irises, only a void of liquid silver. He crossed his two swords in front of his face, the blades vibrating at a frequency that tore the eardrums.
’Sulyvhan... Alexander Sulyvhan... the first and the last...’ he said to himself internally. ’If the angels want my fall, I will take them with into the darkness.’
The aura that escaped from him resembled nothing known. It was not mana, nor even ordinary aura.
< Genesis: Lunar Eclipse >
In an instant, the ravine was plunged into total darkness, an absence of light so absolute that it seed to have physical mass. The cries of the generals were muffled, replaced by the terrifying sound of a reality that was fragnting.
Inside this domain, Sulyvhan was no longer a man. He was the void.
He moved. His speed was no longer quantifiable.
He appeared in front of Kaelen. The general did not even have ti to raise his arcane axe. Sulyvhan’s movent was of an atrocious simplicity. The ebony blade sank into his plexus, while the alabaster blade sliced his throat. Kaelen’s blood did not spurt out; it was instantly absorbed by the void of the eclipse.
"The first traitor... the first to feed the oblivion," murmured Alexander.
He threw the desiccated corpse to the side and turned toward Draken. The tactician tried to manipulate ti to escape, but in the domain of < Genesis >, ti itself belonged to Sulyvhan.
Alexander seized Draken by the face, his fingers sinking into his eye sockets with a sickening sucking sound. The aura of the eclipse gnawed at the flesh and spirit of the general in one second, leaving only a pile of gray dust that flew away in the black wind.
Pendragon, terrified, unleashed all his gravity to try to crush the singularity, but Sulyvhan walked toward him as if it were nothing. The arcane flas that surrounded him extinguished at his approach, deprived of their essence by the cold of the black moon.
"Your Seraph Michael... he is not here to save you, is he?" asked Alexander while decapitating Pendragon with a circular gesture so fast that the general’s head remained suspended in the air for a mont before being pulverized by the shockwave.
But before he could continue everything he had killed rose again...
Standing, he felt a searing pain tear his skin, right between his shoulder blades. It was a pain of his soul itself that was branded with a red-hot iron... Under his tattered combat tunic, a tattoo appeared on his back, a blood moon totally occulting a dying sun.
It was the Seal of the Eclipse, the mark of absolute infamy, the sign of the one who is cursed by the angels and banished from hell, condemned to wander in the eternal void.
Above him, the sky of Tenebris reacted violently to this transformation... A colossal moon, of a scarlet red, appeared through the ashes, eclipsing the dull glow of this world.
Sulyvhan raised his head, his silver eyes shining with a pure fury, stripped of all humanity. He looked at the thousands of angels floating in the air, their spears of light pointed toward him, and he let out a roar of rage that made the walls of the ravine tremble... His aura, usually gray and contained, underwent a brutal tamorphosis.
It did not rely radiate; it materialized physically, fragnting into thousands of translucent energy blades that began to swirl around him in a hiss of death.
"You want my blood?" shouted Sulyvhan, his voice amplified by the power of the eclipse. "Then co take it in the void to which you have condemned to dwell!"
With a simple gesture of his arms, he released this storm of spiritual steel... The thousands of aura swords shot in all directions with a speed that defied divine perception.
The blades sliced celestial flesh, tearing the immaculate wings in explosions of feathers and golden blood. The heads of the angels were cleanly severed, their bodies evaporating before even touching the ground while the aura swords continued their mad course, massacring the winged legions by the hundreds...
The cries of pain from the divine entities echoed in the ravine, but Sulyvhan felt no pity. He saw their entrails emptying and their limbs being torn off in a deluge of gore.
Yet, in the middle of this carnage, his eyes fixed on Loriel. She was still floating high up, her silver armor reflecting the light of the blood moon...
At that precise instant, Alexander understood the truth he had refused to see. It was not only the generals who had sold him for a title and arcane mana; it was her. The archangel he had loved for fifty years, the one with whom he had shared the warmth of his tent in the darkest nights, had led him here to be slaughtered like a beast.
"Loriel..." he murmured, the na like a poison on his tongue. "So that’s it... the aning of your caresses? Every kiss was one more step toward this scaffold?"
The archangel did not answer imdiately. She rely tightened her grip on her ice sword, but her steel-gray eyes, usually so cold, wavered for a mont.
She observed the massacre of her peers before resting her gaze on the fallen sovereign... Her generous chest rose rapidly under her divine breastplate, and her wide hips swayed imperceptibly as she stabilized her position in the air.
"The balance of the world demands this sacrifice, Alexander," she finally said, her voice of a cruel clarity. "You have beco too great for this earth. If you remain, n will never know the peace of submission. They will follow your example and try to defy the Heavens."
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