The enhancent from this technique alone was thrice what it had been before his race change and affinity advancent. Raijin’s Descent at this level of mana quality wasn’t the sa technique he’d used in the forest or during his early fights. It was sothing categorically different—a god’s mantle worn on a body built to carry it.
Frostmail Guard.
Ice crystallized across his form in a shimring chainmail lattice that moved like living armor without restricting a single degree of his mobility. Where lightning arced across the surface of the ice, the two elents created sothing that shouldn’t exist—crackling frozen lightning that sparked and hissed along every surface, beautiful and absolutely lethal.
HISSSSS... CRACKLE... ZZZZAP... HISSSS...
The earth beneath his feet cracked audibly, a ter-wide depression forming in the scorched ground under the sheer gravitational weight of his combined aura pressing downward without him trying. Nearby undead—dozens of them at the fringes of his range—simply collapsed, unable to sustain themselves in the field of pressure radiating from his position.
Now.
Void Movent.
The thousand ters ceased to exist.
Space didn’t bend—it was simply overruled. The distance between his position on the ground and the sky directly beside the cloaked figure was treated as a suggestion that Leon had chosen to ignore, and reality had no aningful objection to offer.
He erged from the fold already mid-swing.
His blinding multi-elental sword was already in motion, already tracing the arc that would end at the figure’s neck, carrying the full combined weight of transcendent Mana Body Enhancent, transcendent Raijin’s Descent, and every elent fused into that blade—compressed into a single strike delivered from a perfect blind spot that the figure had no reason to expect because nothing capable of this should have been able to close that distance in that tifra.
The entire sequence—the departure shockwave, the thousand-ter observation, the three transcendent buffs stacked in sequence, the spatial fold across the battlefield, the ergence mid-strike—had consud one millisecond.
To the cloaked figure, to the Red Dragon, to Archon Vyra below, to every Archon-rank monster pressing the assault—Leon had not existed, and then he was already there with his sword already moving at the figure’s neck.
CRAAAAAAACK!
The figure’s staff ca up in a block that was barely—barely sufficient, bringing its staff in front, but one of its runes was cracked by this attack.
The impact landed like a divine verdict regardless. Even intercepted, even partially redirected by the block, the force transferred with catastrophic totality. The cloaked figure was launched backward through the sky—not stumbling, not pushed—launched, rocketing through the air for dozens of ters before its own power arrested the montum with visible effort.
WHOOOOOOSH! THUMMM!
The pressure wave from the clash radiated outward in a visible ring, a circular shockwave of displaced air that scattered nearby Archon-rank monsters like leaves stripped from a branch in a sudden gale.
Far below, Archon Vyra saw him.
The relief that crossed her face was imdiate, visible, and profound—the kind of relief that cos from carrying sothing terrible alone for too long and suddenly feeling part of that weight lifted without warning.
Her shoulders dropped slightly. Her breathing changed. Her eyes, which had been carrying the flat determination of soone who had stopped counting the cost, filled with sothing close to desperate gratitude mixed with disbelief.
He ca back. He actually ca back.
Every Pyran who had died while she fought alone had registered as a personal failure. She was their Archon—their protector in the most fundantal and sacred sense—, and she had watched them fall despite everything she could do, her power insufficient against the sheer coordinated scale of what had been deployed against them.
Leon’s clone had bought thousands of her people enough ti to escape before its destruction, a sacrifice she’d witnessed and understood wasn’t free. And now, only minutes after that clone had been destroyed, he had returned.
But the presence radiating off him now was nothing—absolutely nothing—like what the clone had projected.
This oppression... this threat...
Even she felt it. An instinctive pressure against her senses that said: different. Dangerous in a way the previous version hadn’t been. Whatever had happened inside that tower had changed him at a level she couldn’t fully quantify.
We have a chance now, she thought, the first genuine tactical hope she’d felt since the assault began. Not to kill it—I don’t believe that. But to repel it. To push it back far enough that my people can breathe.
The Red Dragon had recognized him, too.
It had watched the silver-white-haired figure die at this enemy’s hands, that death carved into its ancient mory with the permanence that only genuine humiliation and rage can achieve. His reappearance confused it for exactly one mont—and then the strength radiating off the returned figure dissolved every question instantly.
RRRROOOOAAARRR!
Sothing ancient and vicious ignited behind the dragon’s eyes. Every wound it had accumulated beca irrelevant. Every instinct toward self-preservation that had been quietly moderating its combat intensity was overridden completely. Its gaze locked onto the cloaked figure with absolute, consuming fixation—deep revenge finally given an outlet—and it began fighting with a ferocity it had been holding in reserve, wounds be damned, consequences be damned.
Leon had co to rest thirty ters from the cloaked figure in open sky, both of them suspended above the battlefield below.
In the fraction of a second while the figure recovered and reoriented, Leon checked its status with his perception.
What ca back gave him a single beat of genuine pause.
Level 110 — Ethereal Realm.
One level beneath Ethereal Lord.
Significant. But not what actually stopped him.
Beside the figure’s na, set apart in brackets, was a single word that changed every calculation simultaneously.
Incarnation.
This isn’t its real body.
The implications arranged themselves in rapid succession. An incarnation at this power level—sustaining an army of this scale, coordinating this assault, holding Archon Vyra and a full-strength ancient dragon simultaneously in check—ant the main body existed sowhere beyond this, at a level that sent a figure capable of all of this as a fragnt expendable enough to deploy.
How strong is the real one?
The figure’s remaining stats were obscured—question marks where numbers should be, the sa phenonon he’d encountered before. Three cultivation levels above his own, and the full picture beca unreadable. Not unusual. Just a gap wide enough that the system declined to pretend otherwise.
The cloaked figure had arrested its backward montum and was suspended in the sky, looking down at its own hand.
Trembling.
Its hand was visibly, undeniably trembling from a single blocked strike—a response that told Leon exactly how much force had actually transferred through that staff. The figure stared at the tremor for a long mont with the expression of sothing recalibrating every assumption it had arrived with.
Then its gaze lifted.
It found Leon across the distance between them, and it stayed there.
The silver-white hair caught the light of the fires below. The transcendent lightning still cascaded across his body in arcs of purple-gold. The blinding fused-elent sword held loosely at his side, still radiating heat and pressure and light that distorted the air around it. The cold, completely unimpressed expression of soone who had arrived to finish sothing rather than contest it.
Sothing in the figure’s posture had shifted in a way that went beyond the physical.
It had co here expecting resolution. A manageable obstacle, already neutralized once in a form it now understood had been sothing lesser—a clone, a proxy, not the real thing.
What it was looking at now across thirty ters of burning sky was demonstrably not that.
The figure’s laugh had stopped.
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