🔥[𝙈𝘼𝙎𝙎 𝙍𝙀𝙇𝙀𝘼𝙎𝙀! 𝟮𝟬 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙩𝙤𝙙𝙖𝙮!]🔥
𝙒𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 #𝟭 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙬𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜! 𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚, 𝙑𝙊𝙏𝙀 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙍𝙀𝙑𝙄𝙀𝙒! 𝙇𝙚𝙩'𝙨 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙒𝙚𝙗𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙣! ⚔️
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The corrupted guard did not stand; he uncoiled. His joints popped with the sharp, dry sound of breaking wood, and the shadow-tentacles protruding from his spine lashed out, anchoring themselves into the cracks of the stone floor. He was no longer a Tier 3 human; he was a biological vessel overflowing with the Black King's "Incision" energy. The air around him distorted, vibrating with a low-frequency hum that made Leonardo's teeth ache. To a Tier 1, the mere presence of a Tier 3 was an invisible weight, but this corruption amplified that pressure into something suffocating.
Leonardo's perception slowed as he entered the deepest layer of the Void State. In this cold, colorless world, the guard's movements were telegraphed by the displacement of the air. Leonardo didn't lunge forward; he drifted. He moved laterally, his boots barely touching the moss, becoming a blur of gray that the guard's violet, slit-pupiled eyes struggled to track. He knew he couldn't take a direct hit. A single strike from a Tier 3 would shatter his ribs and end the fight before it began.
"Seraphina! High!" Leonardo shouted, his voice cutting through the heavy atmosphere.
He didn't wait for her response. He closed the distance in a low crouch, the Void Stitcher held in a reverse grip. As one of the guard's shadow-tentacles whipped toward his head, Leonardo leaned back at an impossible angle, the serrated edge of the appendage whistling inches above his nose. He spun on his heel, using the momentum to drive the black blade into the guard's thigh.
The dagger didn't just cut; it drank. The silver runes on the hilt flared a dark purple as they siphoned the corrupted mana directly from the guard's nervous system. The man let out a strangled, wet roar, his leg buckling as the muscle withered under the touch of the Void. It was a shallow victory—the wound began to knit itself back together with violet threads almost instantly. The Tier 3 vitality was too immense to be quelled by a single Tier 1 strike.
Above, the air ignited.
Seraphina had abandoned her suppression entirely. She stood in the center of the garden, her wings fully extended, radiating a light so pure it scorched the shadows clinging to the ceiling. She was a Tier 1, but her "Sacred" nature gave her an explosive output that rivaled higher levels in raw intensity, even if she lacked the stamina to maintain it. She raised her hands, and a spear of solid, crystalline light materialized between her palms.
"Step back, Leonardo!" she cried.
Leonardo kicked off the guard's chest, using the momentum to flip backward into the darkness of the pillars. A split second later, the spear of light descended. It struck the guard's shoulder, not with a standard explosion, but with a searing, prismatic heat that turned the corrupted shadow-tentacles into white ash. The impact forced the guard to his knees, the stone floor spider-webbing beneath his weight.
But a Tier 3 veteran, even one hollowed out by corruption, was built of sterner stuff. The guard screamed—a sound that was half-human and half-static—and swiped blindly with his remaining healthy arm. His fingers elongated into jagged claws, trailing streaks of violet filth. The strike was desperate and fast, aimed directly at Seraphina's exposed throat as she landed.
Leonardo reappeared from the side like a ghost. He didn't use a blade this time. He slammed his palm against the guard's forearm, channeling the Void's Absence. The kinetic energy of the guard's strike was simply... deleted. The arm stopped dead in mid-air, the momentum vanishing into the vacuum Leonardo had created. His own arm felt as though the bones were about to snap from the sheer resistance of the guard's Tier 3 physical strength, but he held the line.
"Again!" Leonardo hissed, his left eye bleeding a thin trail of violet light as the strain of maintaining the Void reached its limit.
Seraphina didn't hesitate. She flapped her wings once, launching herself back into the air. The downdraft of her mana sent the Ghost Lilies flattening against the ground. She descended like a falling star, her hands glowing with the intensity of a miniature sun, prepared to deliver a finishing blow to the creature that dared to defile their sanctuary.
As Seraphina descended, her palms radiating the brilliant, searing heat of the Sacred Realm, the corrupted guard did not flinch. Instead, a jagged, unnatural grin split his face, revealing teeth that had turned into blackened needles. He slammed his remaining healthy hand into the stone floor, not to brace himself, but to trigger a dormant ritual. He was a Tier 3 veteran, and even through the haze of madness, his combat instincts remained lethal. He knew that a direct confrontation with Seraphina's light would be his end, so he changed the nature of the battlefield.
"The King... feeds on the bright ones," the guard hissed, his voice a distorted rasp that seemed to vibrate from his very chest.
From the cracks in the floor, the violet "Incision" energy that had been seeping into the conduits suddenly reversed its flow. It didn't strike outward like a physical wave; it imploded. A localized gravity well of pure corruption erupted directly beneath Seraphina's feet while she was still mid-air. The atmosphere turned into a thick, oily sludge that clung to her wings, dragging her down with a violent, bone-wrenching force.
Seraphina let out a cry of pain as her light was forcibly stifled by the weight of the dark mana. The violet corruption crawled up her legs like frozen vines, turning her silver hair into a dull, leaden gray. This was the "Soul-Canker"—a specialized trap designed by the Black King's forces to ground celestial beings by overloading their mana circuits with negative frequency. For a Tier 1 like Seraphina, the sheer volume of Tier 3 corruption was like being submerged in liquid lead.
Leonardo saw the trap a fraction of a second before it peaked. His Void State allowed him to see the lines of force converging, but he lacked the power required to dispel such a concentrated mass of filth. He had only one option, and it was a suicidal one.
"Seraphina! Close your eyes!"
Leonardo lunged, not at the guard, but at the center of the violet vortex. He threw his body over Seraphina, pinning her to the mossy ground to shield her from the primary eruption. As the burst of corruption exploded upward, Leonardo opened his left eye wide and forced his Vazio into an unstable, outward expansion. He didn't try to block the corruption; he tried to consume it.
The impact felt like being struck by a runaway mana-carriage. Leonardo's vision splintered into a thousand shards of purple glass. His nervous system screamed as the "Incision" energy flooded into him, looking for a soul to rot. But there was no "soul" in the traditional sense for the corruption to grab onto within Leonardo's hollow core. He was an abyss—a vessel that simply kept swallowing, regardless of the toxicity of the contents.
The violet vines that had been strangling Seraphina's light were pulled into Leonardo's chest instead. He became a living lightning rod for the filth. His skin turned a pale, sickly translucent color, and his internal "Inept" circuits groaned and sparked under the immense pressure of the Tier 3 corruption. It was a physical agony that defied description, the feeling of one's veins being filled with boiling tar.
"Leonardo... stop!" Seraphina gasped, her wings fluttering weakly beneath his weight. She could feel the darkness radiating off him, a cold so absolute it threatened to extinguish her own heart. "It will destroy you! You can't take that much!"
Leonardo didn't answer. He couldn't. His teeth were clenched so hard they felt like they would shatter into porcelain dust. He could feel the Black King's "Echo" laughing in the back of his mind—a cold, distant vibration that mocked the futility of a Tier 1 vessel trying to contain the ocean. But Leonardo held the connection with a grim, silent tenacity, grounding the corruption through his own body and refusing to let a single drop of the poison touch the girl beneath him.
The guard laughed, a wet, bubbling sound that echoed off the damp stone walls. He raised a jagged shard of stone, his shadow-tentacles regrowing and weaving together to reinforce his arm. He stood over them, prepared to finish them both while they were pinned by the crushing weight of the dark ritual.
The corrupted guard loomed over them, the jagged stone shard in his hand pulsing with a sick, rhythmic violet light. He was a Tier 3 executioner standing over two Tier 1 children, and the air between them was thick with the scent of ozone and char. Leonardo felt the "Incision" energy churning inside him—a cold, oily parasite looking for a heart to stop. But his Vazio wasn't a heart; it was a vacuum. Instead of dying, Leonardo forced the stolen corruption into his right arm, the veins bulging and turning a bruised black-purple as the energy sought an exit.
With a guttural roar that tore through his throat, Leonardo grabbed the hilt of the Void Stitcher.
The dagger didn't just accept the energy; it hungered for it. The silver runes on the black blade turned a violent, screaming violet, mirroring the corruption Leonardo had just siphoned from Seraphina's wings. Leonardo shoved Seraphina aside with his left hand and launched himself upward from his knees. His movement was no longer fluid or graceful; it was jagged, explosive, and desperate—powered by the very poison meant to kill him.
"Eat this," Leonardo hissed, his voice cracking under the strain of the Void.
He drove the Void Stitcher upward in a vertical arc. The blade met the guard's stone shard, and for a microsecond, the two opposing forces of corruption clashed, creating a static discharge that turned the moss beneath them to ash. Then, the dagger won. It sheared through the stone as if it were soft wax and buried itself deep into the guard's sternum.
The effect was instantaneous. The "Incision" energy that Leonardo had absorbed acted as a bridge, allowing the Void Stitcher to reach directly into the guard's core. The man's eyes widened, the violet slits in his pupils shattering into dull gray. He didn't bleed; he began to unravel.
The shadow-tentacles on his back dissolved into a foul-smelling mist, and the blackened veins on his face receded as the borrowed power was violently reclaimed. Leonardo twisted the blade, and a shockwave of "Nothingness" rippled through the guard's body. Every ounce of mana—both the man's original Tier 3 strength and the Black King's gift—was sucked into the dagger's hilt.
The guard collapsed, his body hitting the stone floor with a hollow thud. The corruption was completely purged, but his life force was extinguished; a Tier 1 vessel simply could not survive the total vacuum Leonardo had created within his chest.
Leonardo stumbled back, the Void Stitcher falling from his numb fingers. He collapsed onto his side, his skin still pale and his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The black-purple veins in his arm were receding, but the effort had left his internal circuits feeling like they had been scrubbed with glass. He had survived a Tier 3 encounter, but the cost was a spiritual exhaustion that threatened to pull him into a coma.
Seraphina was on her knees beside him in an instant. Her wings, though still dim and gray from the Soul-Canker, unfurled to shield him from the cold draft of the shaft. She reached out, her hands glowing with a soft, hesitant gold.
"Leonardo? Can you hear me?" Her voice was thick with panic, her flickering weakly as she tried to stabilize him. "Why did you do that? You could have been erased! You're only a Level 1!"
Leonardo coughed, a small spray of dark fluid hitting the moss. He looked up at her, his left eye still flickering with a dying violet spark. "Rule... rule two," he wheezed, a faint, pained smirk on his lips. "Don't... don't let the bad guys finish their speeches."
Seraphina didn't laugh. She placed her glowing palms against his chest, and for the first time, Leonardo felt the pure, unfiltered warmth of a "Sacred" healing. It didn't fight his Vazio; it simply filled the cracks he had opened, anchoring his soul before the darkness could carry it away.