Ethan froze for a split second.
His black-particle form had never failed him.
Stone Golems, chanoids, even abyss-enhanced monsters—if there was energy flowing through their structure, he could ride those pathways in, seep through the "veins," and collapse everything from the inside.
But this ti—
He'd been stopped cold.
The sensation was brutally clear, like slamming into a barrier you couldn't see but absolutely couldn't deny.
The mont his black particles touched Zerathrax's body, they were forcibly repelled. There wasn't even the smallest seam to slip through.
Ethan's breath hitched.
First ti ever.
He couldn't get inside an enemy.
But he didn't stop.
He snapped those scattered particles back to himself, reford his body, and started compressing power hard.
White lightning and Infernal Primordial Power pooled in his palm, shaping into a stable, heavy energy sphere.
This ti, he wasn't chasing raw destructive output.
He wrapped the energy core he'd just stolen into it as well, forcing two incompatible forces to clash and knot together inside, trying to create a burst with real penetration—sothing that could punch through whatever that rejection field was.
Right as the structure was about to lock into place—
Zerathrax moved.
No warning.
He opened his mouth.
The next instant, a beam of energy—compressed to the absolute limit—erupted out like a cannon.
This wasn't a normal attack.
It was a straight-through, space-piercing torrent of annihilation.
The air ripped apart in front of it. Space warped and collapsed like it was being scorched from the inside. Wherever the beam passed, leftover energy, broken spatial fragnts—even the light itself—seed to get swallowed whole.
Ethan's pupils snapped tight.
He realized it in the sa instant:
That hit—he couldn't dodge.
The force had already locked onto his position.
No matter how he moved, it would follow.
He was just about to brace and eat it head-on when—
A streak of white cut across.
Lily.
She appeared off to the side without any wasted motion, lifting a hand as white lightning condensed in her palm into an ultra-compressed layer of power—then slamd it directly into the beam.
BOOM—!
The mont they t, the world shook again.
The two forces tore at each other at the contact point, thunder and abyss energy tangling into a chaotic zone. Space was flattened, then ripped open, the surrounding cracks widening fast.
Ethan finally got a window.
He didn't waste it. He retreated at full speed, spreading his power again to stabilize himself midair. Then he recompressed everything he had left into an even larger energy sphere.
This ti, he didn't hesitate.
He threw it.
The sphere swelled as it flew. White lightning snapped wildly across its surface, while Infernal Primordial Power stacked layer after layer inside, forming a violently destructive structure.
But—
When it reached Zerathrax, it only stirred a faint ripple around his body.
No explosion.
No damage.
That much power couldn't even shake his defense.
Ethan's heart sank.
Zerathrax slowly lowered his hand, eyes settling on Ethan as a cold smile curled up from the corner of his mouth.
"You—"
His voice carried a contempt he didn't bother to hide.
"Don't even have the right to touch my power."
His aura climbed again.
Dark Abyss energy surged like a tide. Black-red light spilled out of him in waves, bending space itself slightly under the pressure.
"I'm the strongest existence in this world."
His voice echoed across the broken sky.
"I am this world."
In that mont, the pressure hit its peak.
Even soldiers out on the edge of the battlefield stopped moving, bodies trembling. That rank-difference oppression—pure, instinctive—made everyone want to back away.
Ethan's breathing turned sharp.
He knew it: if this kept going, the whole situation would collapse.
Lily could still barely keep him checked, but that edge was shrinking fast. Zerathrax wasn't weakening—he was adapting, stabilizing, getting used to whatever this new state was.
They had to—change the board.
Ethan closed his eyes.
In an instant, he forced all distractions down and gathered every last bit of his remaining power. He stopped chasing explosive output, letting the energy circulate slowly inside him, like he was assembling sothing precise.
Soon, a small-to-dium energy sphere ford in his palm.
It didn't look impressive.
It wasn't anywhere near as bright as his earlier attacks.
But beneath that calm surface was an eerie, wrong kind of vibration—energy that didn't belong to a single system. It wasn't fully thunder, and it wasn't fully abyss.
It felt like a "rift" suspended between the two.
Ethan opened his eyes.
No hesitation.
He threw the sphere.
Zerathrax didn't even bother giving it a real look.
He casually lifted a hand and ford a thin energy barrier off to his side, already preparing to keep pressuring Lily.
Then—
His expression changed.
The "ordinary" energy sphere didn't collide with the barrier at all.
It passed straight through.
Like the defense simply didn't exist.
By the ti Zerathrax reacted, the sphere had already sunk into his body.
"What—?"
His body jolted.
The next second, sothing went wrong inside him.
That energy spread fast, coursing through his limbs and internal pathways—but it didn't rge with his Dark Abyss power. Instead, it behaved like a foreign object, constantly ramming and disturbing his internal flow, even starting to tear at an energy structure that was already fragile.
Zerathrax retreated imdiately.
He forced distance between himself and Lily, drawing all his power inward as he tried to expel the invading energy.
But—
The mont he truly mobilized his power, the problem revealed itself completely.
His strength began to slip out of control.
That "heterogeneous energy" was like a wedge jamd into the operating structure of his body. Every ti his energy moved, it collided with the wedge—creating tiny, lethal tears.
Cracks started to appear in his flesh.
Energy channels buckled and broke.
"What… is this?!" Zerathrax's voice wavered for the first ti.
He'd never experienced anything like it.
He'd already lost his original energy core. Right now, he was relying entirely on Dark Abyss power to forcibly hold his body together.
If the link between that power and his physical form got severed—
There was only one outco.
Total disintegration.
And now, that disintegration had begun.
The mont Zerathrax's internal structure started collapsing, Ethan sensed it almost instantly.
This wasn't surface damage.
This was unraveling from the inside out.
The foreign energy Ethan had forced into him was spreading through his energy channels, clashing violently with Dark Abyss power—like countless hairline fractures detonating deep in the frawork all at once.
Ethan's eyes lit up.
When he'd scanned Zerathrax with the system earlier, he'd already felt sothing off about the way Zerathrax's energy was built.
It wasn't truly stable. It was a balance maintained by a kind of forced fusion—
And once that balance broke, it would collapse fast.
Now it was happening.
"Lily!" Ethan's voice cut across the torn sky. "He's off-balance—finish him!"
Lily's pupils tightened.
She'd felt the shift too, almost at the sa mont.
In the next instant, her power erupted completely.
The white lightning around her stopped being re coils. It poured out like a storm. Countless arcs exploded around her, then fused into a wide-reaching thunder domain that swallowed Zerathrax whole.
Lightning fell without pause.
Each strike tore open a fresh裂口 across Zerathrax's surface, and those cracks spread rapidly, weaving together until his body was covered in dense fault-lines.
The air rang with nonstop detonations.
It wasn't just energy impact anymore.
It sounded like a structure being peeled apart layer by layer.
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