Mercyros turned his golden, glowing head slowly toward Ayame. The deity recognized the young woman as the last remaining active threat on the battlefield. Mercyros raised his dark hand and pointed his palm directly at her.
Arthur dangled securely from the blood thread. He looked up at Ayame suspended above him, and then he looked across the void at the supreme Monolith preparing to erase her from existence. Arthur felt the cold, heavy reality of their situation settle into his bones.
He decided at that exact moment that it was finally time to stop hiding.
Arthur had recently suffered an incredibly embarrassing, deeply humbling defeat at the hands of an enlightened person conjured from a dimensional rift. That specific failure burned brightly within his chest. It tasted like ash and broken pride. He had promised himself he would never allow his comrades to suffer because he chose to limit his own destructive potential.
As a former paladin, Arthur possessed a terrifying martial pedigree. He was not just a common swordsman. He was an unawakened paladin who possessed enough raw combat output to easily rival most fully awakened and fully enlightened beings. His baseline credence was built upon decades of brutal, unwavering discipline. He achieved his immense power not through divine gifts, but through absolute physical mastery and an unbreakable human will.
He absolutely could not suffer such a total defeat again.
He knew the exact scale of the sheer power he was currently facing. He understood the mathematical impossibility of fighting a supreme deity governing its own domain. Yet, Arthur flatly refused to back down. He rejected the concept of surrender. He knew he had to deliberately over-resonate with his own internal thread. He had to break his own spiritual limiters, or else there was simply no feasible way to win this conflict with just the three of them remaining on the battlefield.
That specific realization sparked a sudden, chilling thought in the back of his tactical mind.
'Lucid,' Arthur thought, his grip tightening on his heavy weapon.
If Lucid had truly been thrown inside the dark gate, then perhaps there really was no hope for any of them. Without Lucid's unpredictable anomaly of a soul, their combined combat effectiveness was severely crippled.
Arthur shook his head, banishing the pessimistic calculation. He focused entirely on the heavy blood thread connecting him to Ayame. He pulled himself upward with raw upper body strength. His blue energy blade began to hum with a terrifying, high-pitched frequency.
The metal cracked and glowed as he forced massive amounts of ambient fate essence into his own being.
He felt his veins burn with the dangerous heat of over-resonance. He was a former paladin of the scattered realms, and he fully intended to make the almighty Monolith bleed for every single inch of this broken domain.
Depsite their legacy.
Arthur placed the thick metal hilt of his heavy energy blade directly between his teeth. He clamped his jaw down hard against the steel. He reached out with both bare hands and gripped the thick, crystallized blood thread pouring down from the elevated platform. The crimson rope felt unnaturally hot against his palms.
He scaled the vertical line with rapid, desperate movements. He ignored the burning ache in his shoulders and the terrifying drop below his boots. With a swift, calculated contraction of his muscles, he leapt forward.
He launched his heavy armored body upward into the open air above the shattered foundation. He prepared a completely different magical attack. He knew standard physical strikes were entirely useless against a supreme domain ruler.
He focused his eyes on the target directly ahead. Mercyros hovered in the center of the ruined vault. The deity possessed smooth, tanned skin that seemed entirely untouched by the surrounding devastation. Deep, intricate runes were etched across the divine flesh. The symbols glowed with a blinding, golden ethereal light.
The intensity of the divine illumination suddenly doubled, casting harsh shadows across the broken masonry. Arthur tracked the movement and noticed a secondary figure positioned directly behind the Monolith.
A human woman hovered silently in the air, completely suspended by an unseen gravitational field. She wore a dark coat and possessed long dark hair. Arthur processed this new visual information instantly.
He wondered if this specific captive was the exact person Valen desperately wanted to locate. He questioned if she served as the primary source of this massive dimensional anomaly.
A sudden flash of intrusive light flared directly in front of Arthur. His vision distorted briefly. He saw the hallucination of a person kneeling on the empty air, begging for mercy with outstretched hands.
Arthur did not recognize the specific features of the pleading figure, but he immediately identified the pathetic posture of the destroyed cultist they had encountered earlier. He dismissed the mental intrusion with brutal efficiency.
He could not afford a single distraction. He channeled every ounce of his remaining physical stamina and raw magical output into his current trajectory.
He aimed to steer the incoming divine retaliation away from his injured allies.
Arthur achieved temporary airborne suspension at the apex of his jump. Mercyros pointed a dark finger forward.
A massive beam of condensed, pure golden energy erupted from the deity. The attack carried a level of destructive density unlike anything Arthur had ever witnessed. It was absolute, unfiltered cosmic authority weaponized into light.
Arthur immediately summoned a rare vestige he had acquired during a highly dangerous, forced expedition into a Zeta-level dimensional rift. A perfect clone of himself manifested directly in front of his floating body. The faint, silver duplicate wore identical plate armor and radiated a distinct ethereal glow. A vestige required absolutely zero Fate Essence consumption to maintain its physical presence.
This specific tactical advantage meant Arthur could focus his entire internal reservoir of energy directly into his weapon without splitting his concentration.
"Tempest Reckoning," Arthur yelled around the hilt of his sword. He grabbed the weapon from his teeth and swung the heavy blade downward with devastating vertical force.
The ethereal blue edge of his sword collided directly with the condensed golden energy beam.
The sheer kinetic friction of the two opposing forces shrieked across the silent domain. Arthur pushed past his physical limits and successfully cut the divine energy completely in half. The bisected beam detonated safely on either side of his silver vestige.
The resulting shockwave bypassed his magical defenses entirely. The physical pressure crushed his right arm.
Dark red blood gushed violently from his bicep, spilling heavily through the small openings between his padded clothing and his steel armor plates.
Arthur understood the terrifying mathematics of the battlefield.
An attack generated by a true Archon-level entity could very well pulverize an entire continent if the deity simply wished it to happen. If a legendary, fully enlightened combatant like Lyssandra attempted to parry that exact beam, even they would suffer grave injuries and severe permanent consequences.
Arthur was merely awakened knight. He hung completely suspended in the air, his body locked rigidly in the downward stance of his massive swing. His subsequent descent toward the ruined floor happened in agonizingly slow motion.
Valen remained completely unconscious on the stone floor below.
The wealthy executive was gone entirely cold, his body failing under the metaphysical debt he had incurred. Ayame was still frozen securely in her temporal prison. Arthur felt a grim sense of satisfaction settle into his chest.
He had managed to deflect one of the most devastating attacks in existence, and he was still breathing. His eyes flared with a sudden, desperate realization. He threw his secondary, conjured blade across the chamber. He filled the flying weapon with the absolute last remnants of his Fate Essence.
The spinning blade somehow made a solid dent against the invisible stasis field trapping Ayame. The temporal cage cracked.
Ayame capitalized on the opening immediately. She started to expand her physical mass slightly, utilizing the subtle vulnerability in the magic. She cracked the space around her entirely and dropped a thin, trailing thread of fresh blood directly downward.
Arthur reached out and latched his bloody hand onto the crimson thread. He utilized the momentum of his fall to swing himself violently upward, launching his body toward the exact coordinates where Mercyros had initiated the attack.
Arthur felt his mind growing incredibly hazy. His eyes were heavily reddened, and his peripheral vision blurred into a gray fog. He slipped seamlessly into a pure fighter's stance.
When a veteran combatant experiences multiple near-fatal encounters in rapid succession, a total mental collapse often triggers a singular, hyper-focused survival trance. Arthur surrendered completely to this fierce psychological state. His fear vanished, replaced by cold, mechanical intent.
He swung his blue energy sword in a wide, horizontal arc.
The heavy blade struck the invisible barrier surrounding Mercyros and shattered the divine shield into a thousand harmless sparks.
Arthur fully expected to cleave the Monolith in two. His eyes lit up with sudden alarm as the heavy blade cut through completely empty air. Mercyros simply was not there.
The deity had completely bypassed the physical laws of the domain and teleported directly to the side of the shattered platform.
'Since when could the bastard teleport,' Arthur thought. Panic bled through his carefully maintained combat trance.
He recognized his own absolute failure. His muscles screamed in agony. His lungs burned for oxygen.
He had nothing left to offer the battlefield. 'I need to hold out,' Arthur commanded himself. 'I must survive until he comes back.' He anchored his final shred of hope on Lucid somehow returning from the dark depths to balance the impossible scales.
Arthur turned his armored body backward to track the displaced deity.
He lifted his heavy sword over his head to prepare a defensive guard. His physical movements were agonizingly sluggish.
Time itself seemed to distort and stretch over the course of his simple rotation.