Chapter 54: Fire and Abyss
The smoking crater in the center of the black jade arena looked like the open wound of a dying world. The impact of Eris Morningstar's landing had shattered the immemorial slabs, melting the stone into a bubbling sludge of orange and black. In the heart of that inferno of impossible temperature, Sequence 3 stood with the relaxed posture of a predator that had just found its favorite prey. Her spear, forged in dark spiritual metal, rested on her shoulders, while the fire of destruction licked her skin without causing the slightest harm.
Five meters away, on the edge of the melted rock, Nylas maintained his inscrutable posture. The thick black smoke forming the Claw of the Devouring Abyss on his right arm hissed upon contacting the extreme heat radiating from the clan's princess. His empty eyes, bottomless dark pits, did not reflect the flames threatening to devour him. For a young man who had walked through the forbidden lands of the outer desert, the fire of a spoiled heiress was merely a tactical inconvenience.
The entire coliseum, with its five thousand souls, was plunged into a sepulchral silence, paralyzed by the thermal and gravitational tension crushing the oxygen in the air. Even the elders who had exiled him years ago held their breath, terrified by the imminent collision of two walking catastrophes.
Samael Morningstar, from his obsidian throne high above, did not raise his hand or give a speech. He simply gave a slight nod. The gigantic bronze gong chimed on its own, a dull, deep sound that served as the trigger for the detonation.
Eris didn't waste a fraction of a millisecond. She wasn't a courteous duelist; she was the embodiment of total offense.
With a sharp, savage scream that echoed throughout the stadium, the blood-red-haired girl channeled her Qi into the soles of her boots and propelled herself forward. The molten stone erupted beneath her feet, launching her like a ballistic missile straight for Nylas's throat. Her spear was engulfed in a torrent of black and crimson fire.
Nylas did not retreat. He knew perfectly well that, in a duel against the fire element, yielding ground meant allowing combustion to consume oxygen and vital space. Instead, the exile measured the distance with chilling precision. Four meters. Three meters.
When Eris crossed the invisible line of his gravity domain, Nylas activated Mercury Heaviness.
The Vanguard and the strategists in the boxes watched as Eris's perfect inertia suffered an unnatural distortion. It wasn't a wall stopping her, but a brutal shift in the physical laws of the arena beneath her feet. Gravity suddenly multiplied in a localized manner. Eris felt her limbs, which a millisecond earlier were light and swift, suddenly weigh tons. It was as if the air had transformed into a pool of dense, crushing mud. Her frontal charge was interrupted so abruptly that the momentum nearly fractured her knees, forcing her to hunch over and plant the tip of her spear against the cracked jade floor to keep from falling flat on her face.
The surprise factor of Mercury Heaviness would have meant instant decapitation for any ordinary veteran.
Nylas seized the instant of vulnerability. He raised his right arm, the immense demonic claw expanding, and launched an Underworld Swipe directly toward Sequence 3's exposed neck, seeking to inject his freezing, corrupting poison into her bloodstream.
But Nylas had underestimated the martial insanity of the fire heiress.
Eris didn't try to fight the gravity using muscular strength. The moment she felt the crushing weight, her lips curled into a psychopathic smile. Ignoring the pressure threatening to tear her ligaments, she channeled an obscene amount of Qi directly into the base of her spear, which was resting against the ground, and detonated it.
The point-blank explosion not only shattered the jade stone, but the thermodynamic thrust nullified the anchoring gravity by brute force. Eris was launched upward and backward, evading Nylas's demonic swipe by mere millimeters. The black flames grazed the exile's claw, hissing violently.
In the air, ten meters high and outside Nylas's passive gravitational control range, Eris spun around. The thermal distortion around her body began to vibrate. It was the Phoenix Song, the passive of her spear art that evaporated any moisture or weak projectile attempting to approach her.
"Don't think you can keep me on the ground, scum!" roared Eris from the heavens.
Sequence 3 aimed her spear downward, straight at Nylas's taciturn figure. She initiated the Descent of the Igneous Phoenix.
Eris plummeted. The friction of her body tearing through the air, combined with her aggressive Fire Qi, created a terrifying visual manifestation. The crimson and black flames took the shape of a gigantic bird of prey completely enveloping her. The heat was so obscene that light itself seemed to bend around her, creating mirages in the air. It was an attack designed to melt siege armor and incinerate the meridians of entire armies.
Nylas watched the approaching meteor of fire. He could feel the heat scorching his skin despite the distance. Dodging was useless; the explosion radius of the Igneous Phoenix would cover half the arena, and if he tried to run, the thermal shockwave would catch him in the back and destroy his internal organs.
The exile gritted his teeth. If he couldn't dodge it, he would have to break the attack's inertia.
When the fiery Phoenix was fifteen meters from impact, Nylas simultaneously activated two of his most demanding techniques.
First, he dug his boots into the stone and used the Anchor of Stability. He multiplied the gravity on his own body by four. His feet sank fifteen centimeters into the solid black jade, anchoring him to the physical world with the density of a wrought-iron statue. It was a horrendous expenditure of Qi, but it guaranteed that no shockwave could move him from his spot.
Second, the very instant he anchored himself, Nylas raised his left hand—the one without the demonic claw—and launched a Kinetic Impulse directly at the falling meteor. It wasn't a beam of energy, but a massive, focused gravitational pull designed to destabilize the perfect trajectory of Eris's descent.
The invisible pull struck the fiery Phoenix mid-flight.
The sudden gravitational force pulled Eris off her perfect axis of descent. The flaming bird flickered and deviated slightly from its optimal course. The impact would no longer be directly on Nylas's head.
Eris's spear, wreathed in ruin fire, smashed into the jade a meter and a half away from the exile.
The deflagration was monumental. A dome of black and red flames expanded with a deafening roar. The stone instantly liquefied. The defensive formations protecting the spectator stands sizzled, pushed to their absolute limit to contain the thermal radiation threatening to incinerate the disciples in the front rows.
At the epicenter of the inferno, Nylas endured. His Anchor of Stability worked, preventing the shockwave from launching him into the walls, but the heat was stifling. His skin began to blister, and the oxygen vanished. With a guttural grunt, the exile raised his right arm, expanding the Shield of Shadowy Jaws. The demonic energy and the Abyss formed an opaque barrier that desperately devoured the flames trying to consume him.
But Eris wasn't finished. Protected by her own fire, she emerged from the primary explosion without skipping a beat. Taking advantage of Nylas being immobilized by his own gravitational anchor and occupied blocking the heat, Sequence 3 executed the Setting Sun Thrust.
Her arms became a blur. The dark metal spear stabbed the front of Nylas's demonic shield with sound-barrier-breaking speed. One, two, three thrusts.
Nylas felt the impact vibrate to his bones, but the spear failed to penetrate the density of his abyss. However, Eris wasn't trying to pierce the shield. Every time the tip of her spear touched the dark smoke barrier, it left behind a small, pulsating point of light—a hyper-dense concentration of pure caloric energy.
On the fourth impact, Eris jumped backward, out of range of Nylas's claw, and snapped the fingers of her free hand.
The three heat points anchored to the demonic energy shield detonated simultaneously.
The blast shattered the black smoke from the inside out. The shield of shadowy jaws was blown to pieces, dissipating into the scorching air, and the shockwave broke Nylas's Anchor of Stability. The exile was thrown three meters backward, rolling across the hot jade until he braked sharply by planting his claw into the ground.
In the boxes, the veterans murmured in awe. Sequence 3 was dominating the monster that had massacred ten men without flinching just minutes before. The heirs' fire seemed superior.
But on the Pillars' balcony, Cedric and Kael were not smiling.
"Nylas isn't attacking," murmured Cedric, his bicolored eyes analyzing the exile's Qi flow. "He's measuring Eris's combustion."
In the arena, Nylas slowly got to his feet. The clothes on his left shoulder were scorched and the skin reddened, but he showed no signs of pain. His dark eyes, cold and empty as bottomless pits, locked onto the girl wreathed in flames. He raised his right hand. The abyssal claw, which had been shattered by the explosions, reconstituted itself in less than a second, feeding on its bearer's pure rage.
A trail of thick, dark blood began to flow from Nylas's left nostril. Maintaining such abrupt gravitational alterations mere meters from his own body was pushing his blood vessels to the breaking point, but the exile didn't seem to care. He knew the heiress's brute force was exceptional, so he would stop trying to crush her and switch to corrupting her.
"Your fire is noisy," Nylas said, his low voice cutting through the coliseum's din. "Let's see how it burns when you have no air in your lungs."
Nylas opened his clawed hand and unleashed the Chains of Darkness.
Five long tendrils of demonic and abyssal energy shot from his fingers. They moved like black smoke vipers, dodging the areas of greatest ambient heat and seeking blind spots.
Eris tried to block them by spinning her spear into a circular shield of fire, but the tendrils weren't solid matter. Two of the chains of darkness wrapped around Sequence 3's legs, and a third managed to dig directly into her armor's shoulder plate, penetrating the physical protection and sinking its immaterial anchor into the young woman's flesh.
Eris let out a choked groan and fell to one knee.
The chains acted instantly. They didn't seek to cut her; they sought to drain her. Eris felt a freezing burn, a cold rot invading her nervous system, spreading from her shoulder toward her chest. The demonic energy injected through the shadows began to aggressively slow her Qi circulation, numbing her muscles and swallowing her life force to send it back to Nylas's claw through the dark cords.
The flames enveloping Eris began to flicker and lose their intensity, threatening to extinguish beneath the weight of the abyssal poison.
Nylas slowly clenched his fist, increasing the drainage flow. The smoke from his claw took on a sickly red glow as it fed on the essence of a main lineage.
"It's over, princess," declared the exile, his voice vibrating with deep contempt. "Everything you love will rot in the same darkness I was thrown into."
Silence fell over the stands once more. The coliseum watched as the indomitable Sequence 3 was consumed by the underworld's cold touch. Aylin, at the entrance to the medical pavilion, felt a shiver seeing the technique that emulated the terror she herself had felt hours earlier under Saira Varian's breeze.
But Eris Morningstar was no wind assassin, nor an acoustic illusionist. She was the living embodiment of Ruin.
Beneath the paralysis and the freezing pain of the demonic energy rotting her meridians, Eris lowered her head. Her body trembled, but the sound that escaped her lips was neither a plea nor a cry of pain. It was a laugh.
A low, harsh, deeply unhinged laugh that echoed through the arena, causing Nylas's blood to run cold for a fraction of a second.
"It's over?" Eris whispered, slowly raising her face.
Her eyes no longer had the white of the sclera; they were completely submerged in a fiery golden and black glow. The veins in her neck and face throbbed unnaturally.
"You just made the worst mistake of your damn life, parasite!"
Eris didn't try to cut the chains of darkness with her spear. Instead, she activated the true lethal nature of her lineage: Devouring Ruin.
Instead of rejecting the demonic energy invading her meridians and freezing her blood, Eris trapped it inside her own body. She embraced the poison. Using the core of her martial art, she began to transform Nylas's lethal, corrupt Qi into raw fuel for her own fire.
Nylas's eyes widened in disbelief. He felt a violent yank on the end of his own chains. The life force he was draining suddenly stopped. Instead, a horrific, destructive heat began to travel in reverse—from Eris's body, through the shadow chains, straight into the exile's claw.
Eris was setting her own blood on fire from the inside to use the demonic energy as kindling. The pain of incinerating the poison within her own energy channels would have knocked an ordinary cultivator unconscious, but for the Morningstars' pyromaniac psychopath, that pain was the perfect catalyst.
Eris's pillar of fire erupted with twice the intensity as before. The flames ceased to be crimson and turned a dense, suffocating black. The chains of darkness binding her were instantly incinerated, turning to ash that fell onto the sand.
Nylas had to dispel his own demonic claw with a choked gasp and jump backward to prevent the ruin fire from climbing his dark cords and setting his own arm ablaze. The energy feedback scorched the edges of the miasma, causing him a stabbing pain.
The exile bled profusely from both nostrils, the stress of the constant use of his gravity techniques and the clash of energies pushing him to his absolute limit. He breathed with difficulty, his lungs burned by the superheated air Eris was generating in the center of the floor. He had underestimated the girl's destructive capacity. He wasn't fighting a spoiled princess; he was facing a force of nature that would rather burn alive than surrender.
Eris got to her feet, leaning heavily on her spear. Her skin was pale, her internal meridians were severely damaged from the suicidal use of Devouring Ruin on her own veins, and she spat a clot of black blood onto the molten jade. But her gaze was more lethal than ever.
The arena had reached a point of no return. Both combatants were one step away from physical collapse, and they knew the next attack would define who lived to claim the title.
Nylas wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his intact hand. He would not retreat. His black eyes locked onto Eris.
He raised his right arm, and the abyssal claw reconstituted itself for the final time—denser, darker, and more unstable than ever. The exile decided to risk it all. He concentrated the absolute limit of his passive gravity, a deadly x5 that made his own knees creak, and fused it with the demonic energy in his fist.
He was preparing a hyper-concentrated Explosion of Abyssal Wrath. If he detonated that brute force directly against Eris's body, not even the ruin fire could save her bones from turning to dust.
Eris understood the monster's intention. There was no time to dodge, and the residual gravity was already beginning to slow her movements. There was no escape. The only answer to imminent annihilation was total annihilation.
Sequence 3 condensed every last drop of black and crimson fire from her core into the tip of her spiritual metal spear. The weapon ceased to look like a physical object and became a drill of dying starlight. It was a mass of thermal radiation and destructive Qi so unstable that the spear itself slowly began to melt under its own power.
The coliseum was plunged into a smothered void. The five thousand disciples couldn't make a sound, terrified by the two apocalyptic forces about to collide center stage. The stands' protective formations shrieked, on the verge of imminent collapse.
Nylas threw his fist loaded with the Explosion of Abyssal Wrath, a shockwave of crushing force and devouring darkness that distorted space itself in front of him.
Simultaneously, Eris propelled herself forward in a suicidal charge, throwing the entire weight of her spear, now a meteor of pure ruin, directly into the core of the exile's dark wave.
The Abyss and Destruction were a millimeter away from colliding.
The resulting shockwave from that unstable clash would not only kill both combatants, but it would shatter half the foundations of the Ancestral Coliseum and annihilate hundreds of disciples in the lower stands.
And then, space at the epicenter of the arena simply ceased to exist.
Between Nylas's wave of abyssal force and Eris's solar fire spear, a vertical, silent fissure opened in the fabric of reality. From that rift emerged the figure wrapped in the immense black cloak of the Void Sovereign.
Samael Morningstar didn't come down to the arena to give a motivational speech, nor to shake the combatants' hands. The Patriarch appeared exactly at ground zero of the collision.
With a blood-chilling absolute indifference, Samael raised both pale hands. With his right, he gripped the tip of Eris's incandescent spear, halting the kinetic charge and ruin energy as if he were catching a feather in the wind. His skin did not burn; the fire was simply swallowed by the Law of the Void before touching his flesh.
With his left hand, he caught Nylas's dark fist bearing the shockwave of Abyssal Wrath dead in its tracks. The destructive gravity and demonic energy crashed against the Patriarch's palm and were dragged into an immaterial, unfathomable well, vanishing without causing a single shockwave in the air.
The ultimate power of the two monsters was silenced in the blink of an eye, swallowed by the true abyss residing in the Empire's leader.
The coliseum abruptly caught its breath, sound and temperature slowly returning to normal as the techniques dissipated.
Samael lowered his hands, releasing Nylas's fist and the smoking shaft of Eris's spear.
Eris collapsed onto her knees immediately, coughing up black blood, her lungs burning and her meridians weeping from the abuse of the demonic poison still lingering in her system. A few meters away, Nylas also fell to his knees, blood flowing freely from his nose, ears, and lips, his physical body giving way to the brutal stress of the self-imposed gravitational pressure.
Both were wrecked, on the brink of death from exhaustion, but their gazes, when they met over Samael's imposing figure, remained laden with unyielding martial hatred and savage respect. Neither had taken a single step back. Neither had surrendered.
Samael looked at his kneeling sister, nodding slightly at the suicidal madness she had displayed. Then, he locked his unfathomable violet eyes on the young man with miasma hair and the lightning-bolt scar.
"Destruction does not yield, and the abyss does not forgive," declared the Patriarch, his voice echoing throughout the stadium, handing down a verdict no one would dare question. "The throne of Sequence 3 remains intact under the fire of Eris Morningstar."
A faint murmur of relief swept through the Pillars' box. Kael and Violeta let out a contained sigh.
Samael pointed to Nylas, whose chest rose and fell erratically.
"But the hunt demands a tribute, and the mistakes of the former elders are purged today. You have survived the forbidden lands and you have survived my family's Ruin," Samael proclaimed, his eyes gleaming with calculating tyranny. "You are not trash, Nylas. You are the fury of my legion. I grant you the ninth obsidian throne. From today, you are Sequence 9 of the Morningstar Empire."
The healers ran from the tunnels to the arena, rushing to treat the two monsters who had been on the verge of mutually destroying each other.
In the stands, the murmurs of reverential awe multiplied. The tournament had ceased to be a simple exhibition of talents. Saira Varian had brought the eternal winter from the North, and now, the underworld itself had claimed a seat on the highest dais of the Southern clan.
The board was almost complete, and the Morningstar Empire had just added to its arsenal a calamity that answered to no law, save its own abyss.
END OF CHAPTER 54