Ethan’s chest jolted hard.
He could feel it clearly—the thunder wasn’t rejecting him. If anything, it was answering the Heavenly Demon Lightning inside him.
The resonance was impossible to put into words. Like two rivers that had been split apart, now finding each other again under the pull of fate.
"Nysera!" His voice was low and firm, cutting through the roar of the storm and landing cleanly in her awareness. "Kill them."
The answer was even more violent thunder.
Nysera didn’t speak. She only lifted her fingers a fraction.
The air froze solid.
The next instant, countless white lightning bolts dropped from deep within the clouds at the sa ti. Like divine punishnt, they poured down and swallowed Nexaris’s formations whole.
And at that exact mont, Ethan stopped holding anything back.
Heavenly Demon Lightning erupted from his body and threaded into Nysera’s descending thunder, weaving together at speed. Two powers that should’ve been separate didn’t clash at all. The mont they touched, they rged—smooth and natural, like they’d always belonged to the sa source.
The air began to tremble.
Space began to warp.
It felt like the world was witnessing sothing that wasn’t supposed to exist—two separate individuals, commanding the sa primal force, resonating with perfect harmony.
Rak’tharion’s expression finally cracked for real.
He could feel his energy being suppressed. The core inside him shuddered, unstable. The blood-red light from his scepter went chaotic, and even the space around him started collapsing inward.
White lightning hamred his body again and again. Every contact carved a new fissure across his armor. Those cracks spread fast, webbing over him from shoulder to heel.
His breathing turned ragged.
For the first ti—
He felt fear.
"You... what are you?" His voice had lost its earlier arrogance, stripped down to naked shock and unease. "Why can your power... fuse?"
Ethan didn’t answer.
He only raised his arm slowly, his gaze cold and level.
Then his body began to change.
His outline blurred. Countless tiny black particles surfaced across his skin, breaking apart and re-forming in a constant cycle, shifting his body into sothing between solid matter and pure energy. Heavenly Demon Lightning flowed between those particles, and his very existence started converting—climbing toward a higher tier.
Nysera moved too.
Her body turned into a streak of pure white thunder, and she appeared beside Ethan in a blink.
No touch.
No words.
But their power, in that mont, fused completely.
An indescribable energy storm erupted around them. White lightning stopped being a simple attack and beca a full domain—a complete field that sealed Rak’tharion inside it.
Rak’tharion tried to break free.
He whipped his scepter, blood-red energy exploding out in a frenzy, trying to rip open the thunder domain encasing him.
But the instant his attacks touched the white lightning, they collapsed—disintegrating like they’d been swallowed by sothing on a higher level entirely.
Cracks raced across his body.
His armor broke down.
His flesh separated.
His energy core was laid bare.
"No—!"
The roar didn’t even have ti to fully leave his throat before white lightning erased him.
His body ca apart into countless fragnts. Those pieces didn’t even get the chance to fall—before they were annihilated inside the thunder, reduced to nothing.
The world fell silent again.
Ethan drifted down again, stopping in midair. White lightning still flowed around him in slow streams, like loyal guards on patrol.
He flexed his fingers, feeling a stability—and strength—he’d never had before. That sense of having everything in his grasp made his gaze sink deeper, sharper.
He lifted his head and looked toward the remaining Nexaris soldiers still floating in the air at a distance.
They’d stopped attacking.
Fear spread through them like a plague.
Rak’tharion had been the symbol of their power—the ruler none of them could even imagine shaking.
And now they’d watched that "unshakable" existence get wiped out right in front of them.
Ethan’s voice carried across the open air.
"Now I’ll give you a chance to live."
His tone was calm, but the pressure behind it was impossible to resist.
"Hand over your energy cores."
"Then kneel."
"Submit."
The air fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
Finally, one soldier slowly loosened his grip on his weapon.
It dropped from his hand, the impact ringing out clean and sharp.
Then he knelt.
After him, a second.
A third.
More and more sank to their knees in midair, bodies trembling, energy fluctuations chaotic, their eyes filled with nothing but fear and despair.
"We’re willing to submit..." one of them whispered, voice cracked with desperation and pleading. "Please—remove the control runes inside us."
"Those runes control our energy cores," another said, almost breaking as he spoke. "If you can remove them, we’ll swear loyalty to you forever."
All around, pleas rose and overlapped, turning the air heavy and ssy with panic.
The Nexaris warriors who’d been trying to kill him just monts ago now knelt with their heads lowered, breathing like even that might offend him.
The energy inside them surged and stuttered, unstable as fla on the edge of going wild. Their eyes held no hostility anymore—only naked fear, and a greedy, aching hope.
Ethan didn’t answer right away.
He frowned slightly, sweeping his gaze over them one by one.
He could tell their terror wasn’t an act. It was instinctive despair—not fear of losing a fight, but fear of sothing deeper. Sothing that owned them.
He moved forward.
The air parted around him on its own. White lightning flowed at his side like breathing, making him look less like a man walking through the world and more like he was fused with the world’s energy itself.
He stopped in front of one kneeling Nexaris soldier. The man was shaking, too afraid to even lift his head.
Ethan raised a finger and lightly tapped the soldier’s forehead.
In that instant, his awareness extended through the contact point—like invisible tendrils slipping in—diving into the soldier’s energy structure. He spotted the problem almost imdiately.
Deep in the man’s chest, an energy core spun slowly. And on its surface, a rune had been etched—so complex it made Ethan’s scalp tighten.
The rune wriggled faintly like sothing alive, giving off a dark red glow. Each pulse released a tiny but dangerous ripple of power.
Ethan’s pupils tightened.
That wasn’t a normal rune.
It was a control device.
More precisely—
A self-destruct device.
The rune was continuously compressing the power inside the energy core, pushing it closer and closer to a critical threshold.
If it triggered, the energy core would instantly go out of control and erase the host—along with everything around him—in one violent blast.
The soldier clearly knew it too. His breathing sped up, like he was one breath away from collapsing.
Ethan didn’t pull back.
If anything, his eyes went calr.
Runes.
This was exactly the field he’d been studying lately.
He slowly released a thread of Heavenly Demon Lightning.
The white lightning didn’t strike the rune head-on. It touched the rune’s edge like a thin stream, almost gentle.
It flowed along the rune’s surface, like it was reading the lines—studying the structure, analyzing the way it operated.
The rune reacted instantly.
The dark red light flickered violently, trying to resist the foreign power. But Heavenly Demon Lightning wasn’t normal energy. It carried a higher, primal attribute—and the mont it made contact, it began to erode the rune’s structure.
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