"F. U. C. K. Y. O. U. C. R. A. Z. Y. B. I. T. C. H."
Zara whispered each letter with deliberate relish, her voice a lody of venom and mockery, her lips curling into a devilish smile. The words hung in the void like a curse, echoing faintly, dripping with the weight of rembered humiliation.
Razeal’s jaw tightened, but he did not look away. The silence that followed stretched, thick and oppressive. Her eyes bore into him, testing or maybe waiting for the crack in his composure.
The silence might have crushed a weaker man. But Razeal refused to let it linger. He spoke quickly, his voice sharp, before she could twist the silence into another aning.
"Tell ," he said, steady but urgent. "What would it take... for you to forget that?" His silver gaze narrowed. "And maybe teach how to attach cut-off parts of Obsidian Agony back together."
For a heartbeat, there was nothing. Then, slowly, Zara tilted her head, one hand rising to her chin.
"Hmmm..." she humd softly, rubbing her chin with deliberate grace. Her gaze never left his, sharp as daggers, yet strangely thoughtful. She looked at him as if appraising sothing under glass, sothing alive and writhing but fragile.
"That’s all you want?" Her voice was calm, almost casual, though an undertone of mockery lingered. "Nothing else?"
Razeal blinked. He had braced himself for fury, for an attack, for even mockery. But instead she responded with... composure. Almost mild curiosity. It threw him off balance more than a he thought it would actually.
Razeal hesitated for a fraction of a second, then forced himself to answer without embellishnt. "Yes. That would be all."
He wasn’t fool enough to reach for more. Greed would only destroy whatever chance he had.
Her lips curved faintly, not quite a smile. "Ohhh..." she whispered, as though sothing amused her. "No greed for power anymore? That’s... different from that you."
Her eyes glinted, dark and sharp. "I expected you to co crawling, begging for more power, like the desperate little fool you were days ago. That hunger... that reckless craving.. you carried it like a beggar hungry for all his life. And now, instead of power, you ask only for enough to nd yourself. To stitch your broken bones."
She raised the severed arm she still held, obsidian bone glinting faintly in the void’s starlight. "So you ca back just for this?"
Her words cut deep even nonsensical. Razeal frowned, eyes wondering as if confused a little, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t think he had changed or even believe he was any different before. And yet... her words gnawed at him.
Without warning, Zara extended her free hand, palm open. Her voice dropped to a whisper, soft but commanding.
"Give the cut-off part of your arm."
There was no question in her tone. Even casual about it.
Razeal didn’t hesitate. Shadows rippled beneath his feet, rising like liquid smoke. They ford a black tendril that coiled upward, presenting the severed piece of his arm into his left hand. Blood still dripped from the fingertips, each drop sizzling faintly as it hit the ground.
He glanced once at it, then tossed it toward Zara with a swift motion.
She caught it effortlessly, her movents fluid, almost lazy. Now she held both halves.. one in each hand. She studied them briefly, then shifted her gaze back to him.
Her brow rose slightly as she saw him use his new skills.
She tilted the arm, blood sliding across her pale fingers. "Seems like your hunger for skills faded once you gained a few of them."
Her words faded as her focus shifted fully to the task. She pressed the two halves of the arm together in her palms.
And then the void stirred.
Dark mana swirled around her hands, invisible at first but then visible to Razeal’s sharpened senses wisps of black, cold and alive, threading through the air. The obsidian bones quivered under her grip. For a mont, they looked almost alive, like liquid tal, shifting and moving at her will.
Then they began to knit.
The broken edges slid together seamlessly, not forced but pulled by sothing deeper, sothing commanding. They reford as though they had never been cut, the fracture line vanishing, the obsidian gleaming smooth and whole.
In seconds, the bones were perfect again. Untouched. Indestructible.
The flesh remained torn, blood still trailing down, but the skeleton.. the foundation was flawless. She gave the rejoined limb a sharp shake. It held firm.
Razeal’s eyes never left her hands. His gaze sharpened, desperate, trying to catch every movent, every flicker, every secret of what she had done. He wanted to morize the process, to tear the knowledge from sight alone.
And for a mont, he thought he saw it.. the dark mana. The way it coiled around the obsidian. The way it bent the unbendable. He rembered trying once before, trying to infuse his own dark mana into Obsidian Agony. He had failed. The tal had rejected him, cut through his energy as though it were nothing. His mana had dissolved before they even touched it as they just cut it out right.
But her mana was different. It wasn’t fighting the bone. It was commanding it. Obeyed. As though the Obsidian itself recognized her voice, her will, and bent like a servant.
He nerrowed his eyes. His chest burned with frustration. He couldn’t learn anything. He couldn’t replicate it. All he could do was watch... Wasn’t he supposed to be dark genius? What is that she have and he doesn’t? Sa mana even now and still cant even see any secret behind what she did?
Zara. Of course noticed. She saw his eyes, the way they strained to drink in every detail as kf trying to learn from just her movents..
Her lips curled faintly, a smile that was more cutting than kind.
She didn’t comnted anything. She didn’t need to. The silence itself was enough her silence told him she knew what he wanted, knew he was failing to grasp it, and chose to let him stew in it.
Then
She walked to him slowly, each step deliberate, her presence sharp as a blade against the stillness of the air. Razeal did not move. He simply stood where he was, waiting. His shadow casting a long shadow across the fractured ground. He neither reached for her nor spoke just endured her approach with the calm of one who does fear that she might kill or torture him.
When she reached him, she leaned closer. Her hand held what had been severed from him: his arm. The cut was jagged, black tal and torn flesh fused together in grotesque finality. She lowered it toward his shoulder, aligning the twisted edge of bone and the broken shard of obsidian agony that jutted from his body.
The mont tal touched tal, the air trembled.
She pressed the severed piece into place, holding it with careful precision. At first it resisted, as though body and limb did not recognize each other trying to cut each other. Then, with a sound like cracking stone, the shattered shoulder accepted its lost half. Bone shivered. Flesh disappearing. The obsidian lines of agony pulsed once, then surged alive.
Razeal’s arm began to knit itself together.
Veins of darkness threaded through the fracture, crawling like living fire across his shoulder. Muscle also bound itself fiber by fiber, twisting into place as though invisible hands were weaving him anew. Flesh sealed over it, pulsing as it rged with the tallic bone. Even the smallest nerves found their counterparts, aligning with impossible accuracy.
It was not healing as normal it should be... it was reconstruction. His body had only been waiting for the structure to return. Now, with the missing piece restored, it seized the chance to regrow, to reclaim what had been torn away.
And he endured it all in silence.
She watched him closely, half-expecting a cry, a grunt, a flinch. The process was brutal afterall.. Obsidian Agony never spares anyone even if its him who was able to put it like a skeleton in his body.. since that was because of mutation, yet he stood unshaken. No flicker of pain crossed his features. His stillness little surprised her, though she did not let it show.
In a matter of monts, the arm was whole again.
His fingers twitched. Then his hand flexed fully, opening and closing as strength surged back into it. He clenched a fist, his knuckles cracking with the familiar sound of power returned. Smoke curled faintly from his skin, dissipating in the cold night air. The arm was flawless, as if it had never been severed.
Razeal looked down at it with quiet wonder, though confusion still lingered in his eyes.
"How?" His voice finally broke the silence. "How was one of the hardest tals cut through? I still don’t understand it."
It was a question that had plagued him since the battle. Once he had asked the system, but it had given him nothing much just vague bullshit. Now, with the one who had forged the very material standing before him, he asked again. And perhaps tonight, when she had just restored him so gently, she might finally answer... She looks in good mood.. weirdly enough to him.. As how kindly she was doing everything.
"What rank of enemy was it?" Zara’s reply was cool, deflecting.
Razeal answered quickly, almost instinctively. "SS-ranked spirit." Then he hesitated, rembering she might co from a world where the strength systems were asured differently. He opened his mouth to clarify.. yet she cut him off before he could.
"A wind spirit," she said. "Of SS-rank. Rare. Very rare."
Her dark eyes lifted to the night sky, where clouds drifted thinly across the stars. "At that level to cut this, it shoud be Saint Kings. Perhaps even the Great Saint powerhouse."
Razeal blinked, surprised. "Yes... she was sowhere in that range.." He said rembering -SS Rank was Saint.. Then SS Saint king And SS being Great Sage as hiw system had told him.
Though surprised she actually knew both ranking systems. It seed that in the world she ca from, the sa Power systems existed as well.
Zara rubbed her chin lightly, her elegant face sharpened by thought. The gesture was slow, deliberate, the kind of motion that carried both beauty and command.
"Well, that explains it," she said at last. "Wind is one of the sharpest of the elents. Of course it could cut through. Why complicate it further?" She shrugged as though dismissing the matter entirely, as if the severing of his arm were little more than an everyday occurrence.
To Razeal, it was not simple at all. But her voice carried such certainty that his protest faltered.
Her gaze turned back to him. "But before you can understand why it was cut, you should first know what this is. Why this tal is being called one of the hardest by ."
Hardest. The word lingered in the air like a challenge.
She tilted her head slightly, her dark eyes narrowing with faint amusent. "Tell , do you know what makes it so?"
He blinked, caught off guard by the sudden question. "Because... you made it?" The words ca out clumsy, almost apologetic. He didn’t even try to reason further. In truth, he knew he wouldn’t be able to guess. And this seems the perfect answer then saying No.
Her sigh was quiet but sharp, filled with disdain at his laziness.
"This tal," Zara said, her voice taking on weight, "I created after getting inspiration from my studies on neutron stars."
The words hung heavy in the void. Her eyes glead faintly, reflecting a pride that bordered on obsession. She wasn’t answering his question so much as reliving the thrill of creation, recounting the story to herself as much as to him.
"Do you know what neutron stars are?" she asked, her tone deceptively soft.
"Neutron stars? The stars that shrink... to smaller size?" Razeal answered after so seconds
Zara’s lips curved faintly, half amused, half approving. "Not completely right, but close enough." She inclined her head slightly. "At least you know sothing."
"So, in a neutron star," she began, almost like a teacher explaining a basic principle, "after a normal star has burned through all the fuel it ever had, all the fire that kept it alive dies out. And then... the collapse begins. Gravity takes over. That dying star shrinks so violently, so brutally, that the very atoms inside it are crushed. The space between them... what you think of as empty gets squeezed out of existence. Electrons and protons rge. All the gaps vanish."
Her eyes glimred faintly, like soone describing a mory too vast for anyone else to grasp.
"That," she said, "is how sothing millions of miles wide can collapse into an object barely twenty kiloters across. A star that once lit up worlds becos a corpse, denser than anything you can imagine. Heavier than any substance in creation. Its very surface becos the hardest thing you can touch. Inside, the density may vary, but on the surface? On the skin of a neutron star Yeah? It’s absolute. Harder than anything you have ever seen."
She let those words hang, the enormity of them pressing down like a mountain.
And then, with that sa unnerving calm, she said, "All I needed to do was copy that."
Razeal felt his lips twitch. Copy that?
Zara carried on, as though she had just ntioned copying a recipe. "I stripped away what I call the electron dust. Removed it. That way, the atoms could compress together without resistance as they were takinymost kf the soace. And then, I went further. I created my own atoms, a new kind entirely. I call them the lightest.. lighter than anything that has ever existed. Beyond imagination. By doing that, I broke the one thing that limits such materials. The weight. Gone."
Her tone never rose. No grand declarations, no dramatic pauses. Just a casual explanation, as if compressing the cosmos was as normal as mixing paint.
"With that, I was close to my goal. The perfect tal. The atoms compressed so tightly, so absolutely close, that it beca not only denser but sharper. The sharpest possible. Because the sharper a thing is, the closer its atoms are pressed. There is no limit to this compression. No ceiling. No barrier. All in all, that’s the concept."
Her eyes flicked toward him, calm and almost amused at his silence. "It’s simple for thisetal. The difficulty is only in the density. In plain words.. you could say the hardness is directly proportional to how much material you compress and how tightly you compress it."
Razeal’s lips twitched harder. His hands flexed at his sides. Inside, his thoughts churned like a storm. Simple? he thought. This crazy bitch just described collapsing stars and bending atomic laws, and she calls it simple?
But she wasn’t done.
"Your bones," Zara said, almost proudly, "are made up of an amount that could cover an entire kingdom of obsidian Agony. The square span of a whole kingdom, compressed into you. So if anyone wanted to cut through your bones, they would need the power to slice through a kingdom in a single strike."
Razeal felt his heart beat once, heavy. Then again, faster.
"It’s like this," Zara went on. "If you compressed an amount of Obsidian Agony equal to a planet, it would remain invincible until soone capable of cutting a planet in one strike appeared. Until then, it would be absolute. The hardest of all."
Her tone did not falter, her expression did not waver. To her, these were just facts.
"All in all," she said at last, "its hardness depends on whose hands it’s in and how much material is used. It’s light because I created a specific material that’s lighter than anything else. You could shape it into sothing the size of an empire-sized mountain, yet it would still weigh billions of tis less than a grain of sand." Zara explained this as if the theory was simple.
Even when describing her achievents like breaking the very limits of weight, or being able to remove the space between atoms she spoke as though these weren’t worth ntioning. And when she talked about compression, she made it clear that hardness doesn’t only co from density. She must have altered the structure too, turning tal into a new kind of tal altogether. Yet she brushed over it like it was a small detail. Still
Her voice carried faint excitent, barely noticeable beneath her composed mask. Excitent that leaked through despite her effort to sound indifferent.
Razeal listened, motionless, yet inside his mind was chaos. His lips twitched again, harder than before.
So this... this is what she calls her theory. This is what she ans when she says it’s simple.
He would never be able to look at his bones the sa way again. He had thought it was so arcane, complicated, incomprehensible sorcery. But no her explanation revealed sothing worse. It was logical. Straightforward, in its insane way. Just compress a mountain until it fits in your palm. Just remove space until atoms have nowhere to go. Just create new atoms if the old ones aren’t good enough.
Only an SSS-rank villain could think of sothing this fucking insane and then actually make it work.
His jaw clenched. His mind kept circling back to the sa thing. The real problem should have been the weight. That should have been impossible. The reason this shouldn’t exist. And she treated it like a side problem. A side problem.
The thought chilled him. If she can turn impossibilities into side notes, then what the fuck does that an for ? If my bones are like this... does that an my bones can keep upgrading endlessly? Like can get more harder if he put more material?
His thoughts scattered, then froze on another detail.
Wait... wait. Did she just an that little fairy could cut through an entire empire in one slash?
The thought slamd into him like a hamr. What the actual fuck?
His throat tightened.
Razeal knew she was SS-rank. He had accepted that. But this.. this was different. This was insanity in numbers and scales his mind struggled to accept.
Even though he kept his face carefully neutral, his chest rose a little faster. His pulse jumped. Inside, though, he was amazed, stunned, almost horrified.
And then, to make it worse, the system’s voice rang through his head.
[Really worth applauding. No one in my entire database has attempted such a feat. At first, I assud she had simply forged one of the hardest, sharpest, and most agonizing tals. But to learn that this was her true thod... removing atomic space, bending weight itself, compressing material on planetary scales.. truly worth applauding.]
The words echoed inside his skull, brimming with sothing rare for the system: genuine awe.
Razeal’s lips pressed into a thin line. He didn’t reply or comnted. It was already the second ti the system had praised her for this. Once for the result, and now again, even louder, for the explanation behind it.
He refused to admit it aloud. But in his chest, he knew.. it really was worth applauding.
Zara exhaled softly, almost like she was disappointed. "I wanted to create the perfect tal," she said, shaking her head. "But alas... this is not perfection. It’s incomplete.. This falure. This tal cannot be used anywhere other than inside you. It is not the flawless creation I dread of."
Her words landed with quiet weight.
Razeal’s lips twitched yet again, harder than before. Incomplete...
He rembered then. Yes. She had said before this wasn’t the perfect tal. This was only a step. A draft.
But his mind couldn’t stop wandering. If this incomplete thing already breaks reality... what the hell would her perfect tal look like? What would that even an for existence itself?
The thought left a shiver fo excitent running down his spine.
And yet, against his will, a smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. My bones. My own body. Made from sothing inspired by stars. From the corpses of suns.
It was crazy. But it was also... undeniably fucking cool.
For the first ti, he let himself feel it. That raw, dark pride. I’ve got bones born from inspiration.. of neutron stars. That’s not just monstrous. That’s legendary.
Maybe, just maybe... he could even brag about it.
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