Clip-Clop. Clip-Clop.
The sound carried strangely through the open sky, out of place amid the low hum of shattered light and drifting corruption, a heavy, rhythmic thumping, almost mundane in a battlefield built entirely of things that shouldn't exist.
Three Shadow Horning Bulls ran through the air together, hooves striking against nothing at all, black flanks steaming faintly with the corruption that gave them shape. They moved as a unit, thundering forward in a loose triangle, drawn along by a small cluster of pink stars drifting just ahead of them. Leaderless, directionless, the cluster looked like nothing more than idle light left hanging in their path.
The bulls didn't hesitate. They chased it anyway, instinct outweighing whatever passed for caution in a creature built from corrupted will.
The cluster waited until the last possible moment before splitting. Three stars peeled away at once, arcing toward a different bull each, slipping neatly between horn and hide before the creatures could so much as flinch. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The bulls kept running, oblivious, still chasing a formation that was no longer where they thought it was.
Two of the stars disintegrated on schedule, and two bulls buckled under sudden pressure before exploding into black light.
The third bull twisted at the last instant, some flicker of instinct saving it from the star lodged near its shoulder. It shook the light loose before it could detonate and turned hard, charging straight for the cluster's source instead. Eric felt the shift a half second before the bull did, and a fresh star had to be thrown into its path from farther away than he liked, costing him more strain than the first two combined. The bull went down all the same, but the ache that followed in his chest lingered longer than it should have.
...
Chirp-chirp. Hiss-hiss.
The sounds rippled through the dark as a wall of Shadow Bone Lizards clung to the air, stalking among the stars. Their eyes glowed red, and their obsidian-black bones burned with dark flames that seemed to swallow the darkness around them.
They followed their leader, weaving and twisting their slippery bodies to dodge the pink stars' attacks while tearing through as many of them as they could. But for every star they destroyed, another rose to take its place. The will understood that Eric could keep replacing them, but not forever. Maintaining the technique already cost him dearly, and every new star added to that burden.
Worse, the stars were adapting. What began as a faint tremor before impact had turned into evasive movement, then self-destruction on contact, and now coordinated group attacks. The lead lizard noticed the pattern first. It broke formation and began hunting down the youngest, least-adapted stars before they could learn from the others, snapping the swarm's collective memory apart star by star.
It was working, until a fresh pink star sacrificed itself and the resulting shockwave crushed a Nova-level Shadow Bone Lizard where it hung. Eric barely registered the kill. His focus had narrowed entirely onto the lead lizard, and the effort of tracking something that intelligent while still directing every other star on the field was starting to show. A thin line of blood traced down from his nose, unnoticed.
The fight might have dragged on much longer, but Eric finally stepped in. The white and pink stars on the western edge of his Abyssal Eyes shifted, drawing the lizards inward and locking them into a five-pointed star formation, the white stars anchoring its points. The formation pulled the lizards apart from every direction at once.
The Shadow Bone Lizards hissed as their bodies began to tear. The Lysi Nova-level lizard lunged to break the formation before it could close, nearly succeeding, one point of the star flickering under the strain before Eric forced it back into place through sheer will. A second formation intercepted the lizard mid-strike, teleporting it away and burying it under a barrage of attacks. It let out one last hiss and died a second time, and for good.
...
Clicking sounds filled the air as five silver-furred mantises let out silver slashes, their thick silver and white fur rippling with each strike. It was an innate ability, one bred into every fiber of their bodies.
They moved with grace and elegance, abyss-black veins fluttering beneath their fur, adding another layer of ineffable beauty to creatures that were now raging with no sensibility left in them.
One mantis, slightly larger than the rest, held the center of their circle and called the shifts, a faint click of its mandibles cueing the others to rotate position before they struck. The group answered instantly, cycling around the stars and hitting from a new angle each time.
Eric struggled against them at first, not for lack of strength but because the formation gave them no fixed pattern to exploit. He stayed patient, pressing against their will while watching the circle for a weakness.
He found it in the lead mantis itself. Its clicks always came a beat before the others moved, and once Eric caught the rhythm, he timed a formation to strike the instant it signaled the next rotation. Four of the mantises were caught clean, teleported away by clusters of golden stars and finished before they could land.
The fifth broke rhythm entirely, abandoning the pattern the moment it sensed the others falling, and lunged straight for Eric's stars instead of waiting its turn. There was no click to read this time, no beat to anticipate. Eric had to abandon the formation mid-construction and improvise on the spot, throwing together a cruder trap from whatever stars were still in range. It worked, but only just, and the strain of building something on instinct instead of design left his hands trembling faintly by the time the mantis finally stopped moving.
Cough! cough!
Young Eric spat a mouthful of blood onto the dirt and stared at what was left of the formation in front of him. The array had folded in on itself and burst outward, scattering scorched paper and bent charm-wire across the yard. Wrong charm, wrong circuit. He could already see it.
"What did I do wrong this time?" He dragged his finger along the blackened lines, tracing the feedback back to where it started, ignoring the sting in his own knuckles.
Eight hours. He had been at this for eight hours, and he had barely finished half.
He sat back on his heels and let out a short, tired laugh. "It held longer than yesterday, at least."
Footsteps crunched behind him. Max stopped dead in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, and took in the scene: the blood pooling near Eric's knee, the ruined diagram, the thin curl of smoke still rising off the burnt grass.
"Eric." Max's voice cracked halfway through the name. "Oh, my god. You are going to cough out your entire stomach before you turn seventeen."
"The outer field held longer than yesterday." Eric wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, leaving a fresh smear across his skin, and did not look particularly bothered by any of it. "I'm making progress."
"That is not the comfort you think it is." Max crossed the yard in three strides and dropped down across from him, eyes scanning the wreckage of the drawing. He couldn't read the notation, not really, but even he could see how dense the lines were, how deliberately layered. "What is this thing even supposed to be? It doesn't look like your usual doodles."
Eric's gaze didn't move from the paper. For a second, he looked younger than usual, not softer, just more exposed in his focus, the way a person looks when they've forgotten someone else is in the room.
"Because it isn't a doodle." His voice dropped, almost private. "I got the idea for a battlefield technique a few days ago. The idea itself is beautiful. It's the construction that's trying to kill me."
Max's mouth fell open. "A battlefield technique?" He nearly choked on the words. "Those are Walker-tier. Strong, experienced Walker-tier. You know that, right?"
"I know exactly what tier it is," Eric said it like a fact he'd already made peace with.
"Then what, you just decided the rules don't apply to you?" Max threw both hands up. "Eric, I have never once doubted you, but you are sixteen. You've been doing this for three years. The tutors at the organization said battlefield formations take decades to design. Decades. Not a summer."
"I know what they said." Eric finally looked up, and there was no defiance in his face, only exhaustion stretched thin over something harder underneath. "But so what? I'm not trying to prove anyone wrong. I saw the shape of it in my head, and I haven't been able to put it down since. It already exists. I just have to get it onto the ground before it kills me first."
Max's eyes dropped to Eric's split knuckles, then to the blood drying at the corner of his mouth, then back up. "Looks like it's already trying."
"It's not done trying." Eric picked his stick back up and began redrawing the ruined circuit from memory, slower this time, pausing at each junction like he was checking it against something only he could see.
"Okay." Max exhaled and dragged a hand through his hair. "Fine. What is it, then? The technique."
That got Eric to pause. A small, genuine smile flickered across his face, there and gone. "I'm glad you asked." He tapped a blackened node near the center. "It's not one technique sitting in one place. I've built it as small anchors spread across a wide field. If one anchor fails, the others keep the whole thing alive. If the core holds, I can rebuild everything else around it." He dragged his finger along an unburned line, following it outward. "It lets me control an entire space. A structure that keeps standing even after parts of it are already dead."
Max stared at the diagram as if it had personally offended him. "And that is worth coughing up blood for?"
Eric looked up. No drama in it, just that same quiet, unnervingly calm certainty. "Yes."
He leaned back against the pillar behind him, breathing carefully around the ache in his ribs. "Formations don't care that I'm sixteen. They don't care if I'm tired, or talented, or having a bad day. If the structure is wrong, it collapses. If the load-bearing points are wrong, it collapses. If I lie to myself about what I actually understand, it collapses." He touched the blood at his mouth almost absently. "I like that. It's honest."
Max went quiet for a moment, just watching him. "You're talking about this like the blood is part of the lesson."
"It is." Eric's voice didn't waver. "Every time something blows up in my face, I know exactly where my understanding stops. Most training lets you fake it. This doesn't." He looked back down at the wreckage, and something close to fondness passed over his expression despite the pain still written across it. "A field that repairs itself. Anchors that share the load instead of failing alone. A technique that survives even when a piece of it dies. If I can actually build that, it won't just be powerful. It'll be honest. And it'll let me protect the people I care about a lot better than I can right now."
He glanced at Max, and for a moment his eyes carried an odd, bright intensity that made Max sit up a little straighter.
Max studied him for a long beat, arms braced on his knees, worry and something like reluctant respect warring on his face. "You're going to keep going right now, aren't you? Tonight. Bleeding and everything."
Eric was already reaching for a fresh sheet of paper. "I'll keep going until I get it right." He smoothed the paper flat against the dirt. "Or until I die trying."
...
Eric slowly opened his eyes. Dark clouds and thousands of white, gold, and pink stars filled his vision, reflected in the depths of his Abyssal Eyes, which still tracked the position of every star scattered across the battlefield.
He looked down at his bloodied arms, veins of corrupted black twitching beneath the skin. The pain was immense, the pressure worse, but underneath it something else stirred, quiet and unexpected. The memories had resurfaced on their own, unbidden, and for a moment he simply let them.
He thought of scorched paper and bent charm-wire. Of eight hours spent hunched in the dirt, chasing a shape that kept blowing up in his face. Of Max crouched across from him, exasperated and worried in equal measure, asking why any of it was worth the blood.
"Max," he murmured, the name barely more than breath. "I got it right in the end."
A small smile touched his blood-smeared lips, real and unguarded in a way his face rarely allowed anymore. His corrupted black hair drifted in the still, dead wind, and for one suspended second the battlefield seemed to fall away entirely, leaving only that old ache of nostalgia, warm even here, even now.
It didn't last.
Something at the edge of his awareness snagged, faint at first, easy to mistake for a trick of the corrupted light. Then it sharpened, and the warmth in his chest curdled into something colder as recognition took hold.
His eyes widened. Fear Crawlers.
The realization hit him like a held breath finally released, memory and battlefield colliding at once. He knew that signature. He had felt it before, years ago, in a place he'd tried hard not to think about.
Without turning, he pointed behind him and killed the Shadow Fear Crawlers still hiding in the dark, the strike final before the thought had even fully formed.
The massacre continued as Eric kept the pressure on the will. Every beast he killed eased the weight bearing down on him, but the cost of doing it was steep all the same.
It was, however, a sacrifice he was willing to make.
The Will continued defending itself while it studied the white stars scattered around the battlefield.
These stars were not uniform in size. That detail struck the Will first among everything else it noticed, since most of the stars sat at a medium size; a smaller number were noticeably tinier, and only a handful of almost stationary white stars stood far larger than the rest, each one surrounded by the smaller stars in a pattern that felt deliberate rather than random.
Could these be-
Before it could finish that thought, Eric detonated a pink star through a gap he had found in its defensive formation, the blast tearing straight into the Will and forcing it to flicker into an incorporeal state before it managed to stabilize again.
It looked up, brows tightening as it caught sight of Eric in the distance, still moving constantly, never staying in one place long enough to be pinned down. The Will pointed at him and released a wave of corruption that surged forward and flooded through hundreds of stars at once. Eric answered by snapping his fingers, and three large white stars shifted into position alongside a cluster of pink ones, a formation forming almost instantly, pink light flaring outward and swallowing the wave of corruption whole before compressing it down into a single tight ball.
The Will had been relying on that wave of corruption for a long time now, and the technique had already been steadily weakened by the surrounding environment even before Eric countered it completely.
Realizing this, the Will shifted tactics without hesitation, seizing control of the Shadow Beasts and driving them to surround and attack Eric all at once.
Eric summoned a cluster of golden stars and teleported away, but the instant he reappeared, he found himself staring straight into a group of vibrating pink stars.
"Shit," he muttered, already trying to fly clear of them, but a swarm of Void Shadow Creatures materialized around him and boxed him in for exactly one second, just long enough for the corrupted stars to detonate and slam into him.
Eric spat out a mouthful of blood as he tore free of the horde. He glanced down and saw that much of the blood had already turned black.
The corruption has reached my internal body. This particular strain the Will wielded was built to devastate the body from the inside, and he had known from the start that it was only ever a matter of time before it found a way in.
A black spark flickered across his right eye, and his Abyssal eyes darkened further, blurring his vision just slightly. Slight or not, he could not afford to lose even a second dealing with it.
Having successfully forced Eric back, the Will turned its attention toward the white stars again, ready to resume its study, when a pink bubble suddenly appeared close beside it. It recognized the shape immediately as one of Eric's trapping techniques and tried to dodge clear, but a cluster of white stars cut off its escape and struck it hard, damaging it a second time.
The Will's form flickered again before settling, and it responded by sending another wave of Shadow Beasts surging toward Eric.
Eric paused for a moment, eyes scanning the battlefield around him, before wrapping himself in a tight layer of pink and white stars and launching forward with a technique that resembled a Repulsion Charge, except instead of driving straight ahead, he curved his path into a wide, deliberate arc.
The Will tracked the curve and answered with a dense spear of compressed corruption, aiming to cut across Eric's path rather than chase him. Eric snapped two golden stars into place mid-flight, blinked through the spear's trajectory, and reappeared above the Will's left side. A thin ring of pink stars dropped around the Will's upper body like a noose.
The Will shattered the ring with a burst of black force, but the delay was enough. Eric's white stars rearranged behind it and fired a lattice of compressed gravity through its back. The impact forced the Will several meters downward, black particles shearing off its form.
It recovered faster than before. Shadow Beasts did not merely swarm this time — they linked, forming a brief chain of bodies that snapped shut around Eric's escape line. He cut through the first two with a close-range gravity shear, then took a hit from the third across the ribs. More black blood hit the air.
Eric's breathing roughened. He flicked a damaged pink star into the chain and detonated it early, breaking the formation of beasts and buying a narrow gap. Through that gap, he sent three white stars in a triangular lock, not at the Will's body, but at the space it was about to occupy.
The Will stepped into the lock by habit and paid for it. The triangle collapsed inward and crushed part of its outer layer before it tore free, its form distorting hard enough that its next command to the beasts came half a second late.
That half-second was enough for Eric to reset his arc, pull the remaining golden stars into a short-range scatter, and force the battlefield back into motion. Neither of them had landed a finishing blow. Both had been marked.
The Will's next wave of corruption rose more slowly than the first one. Eric's starfield answered with fewer stars than before.
They were both spending pieces they would not easily replace.
However, the fight did not pause so much as it began to thin out into something quieter and more calculated.
Between one exchange and the next, the Will managed to force open a narrow window, though not by overpowering Eric outright. Instead, it fed him a false opening, sending a cluster of Shadow Beasts breaking pattern and fleeing in three directions at once, clearly inviting pursuit.
Eric did not take that bait with his own body. He sent two golden stars chasing after the larger group while keeping himself angled squarely toward the Will.
That single choice cost him a second, and the Will made certain to use it fully.
In that second, it stopped attacking entirely and simply looked as it moved around.
The white stars, it realized, were not scattered at random. They held a deliberate spacing, with small ones clinging near larger ones in patterns that repeated across the field, forming triangles, short chains, and nested arcs. When the Will lashed out and crushed a minor white star, the stars beside it shivered, their light stuttering along the edges like a plucked wire. When it destroyed a larger one instead, the ripple that followed was far worse, jolting the neighboring stars out of alignment and causing the local pattern to lose coherence for a brief moment before Eric's control dragged everything back into place.
The Will's eyes narrowed as the picture came together.
Size mattered, and so did proximity. The white stars were clearly not just positional tools scattered for convenience. They functioned as load-bearing points within a living structure, and breaking a small one only made the field flinch, while breaking a large one forced the entire field to spend real effort repairing itself.
The Will tested this understanding immediately.
A precise spike of corruption punched straight through a medium-sized white star positioned on Eric's left flank, and the resulting ripple spread cleanly into the two smaller stars linked to it.
Eric's next teleport landed half a meter off his intended line because of it, and the Will was already waiting there when he arrived. Black force clipped his shoulder and spun him through the air, more black blood trailing from his mouth as he fought to correct himself mid-flight.
Eric understood exactly what that probe had been testing for, and he answered by changing density rather than number, pulling three large white stars into a tight, overlapping knot while letting the outer field thin out around them. The Will's next strike landed against that knot and stalled there, the ripple this time contained entirely inside the denser cluster rather than spreading outward. Eric used that stalled second to seed pink stars along the Will's recovery path and detonate them in sequence, not for the damage they caused but simply to break its rhythm.
The Will adapted once more. It stopped trying to erase the white stars wholesale and began selecting them by the role each one played, targeting one large anchor positioned near Eric's escape line, then a small relay bridging two pink clusters. Each destruction produced a slightly different ripple, and each ripple bought the Will a fraction more lag in Eric's responses, fractions that were quickly becoming usable in their own right.
Eric's counter came colder than anything before it. He began sacrificing stars on purpose, letting a large white star flare too brightly and practically inviting its own destruction. When the Will took the bait, the expected ripple fired straight into a prepared pink lattice that converted the disturbance into a gravity shear aimed directly back at the Will's center. The trade landed cleanly. The Will's form buckled as its outer layer cracked, while Eric's left arm went completely numb as internal corruption climbed higher through his body.
They separated then, by mutual necessity more than choice.
Shadow Beasts filled the gap between them almost instinctively, and Eric cut straight through them using a curved Repulsion Charge wrapped in what remained of his pink and white sheath, no longer bothering to look efficient and instead focused entirely on keeping the white star network from being read too cleanly. The Will, for the first time in several exchanges, did not immediately press its advantage. It watched instead, studying the way the surviving white stars reordered themselves after each loss, noting which sizes Eric chose to restore first and which patterns he simply abandoned.
The battlefield had turned, by then, into something closer to a conversation carried out entirely in structure.
Eric was still faster at building, though the Will was steadily growing better at understanding exactly what those structures were meant to protect.
Another small white star died under a casual black needle, and though the resulting ripple was minor, Eric's eye twitched all the same. He replaced the star at once, but the replacement settled slightly farther from its paired star than it had sat before.
The Will noticed that too.
"These stars are condensed charms and symbols! They move in proximity, while the large ones are the cores or main anchors. This is also why they have the same effect. Such talent." The Will finally came to an understanding as it praised Eric inwardly for being able to condense even charms and symbols into physical four-edged stars.
Eric lifted his eyes once toward the broken black moon hanging above the central land.
He snapped his fingers.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Offensive Aura Technique - Asteroid Fall.
What answered was not light but weight instead. Fractured pieces of the black moon tore free from their suspended ruin and began to fall, not as scattered debris but as directed asteroids, each one locked onto a descending path by thin pink guidance lines only Eric could see. The first wave came down in silence. The second arrived with a low, building roar as air and corrupted space alike resisted the descent.
Shadow Beasts looked up too late.
The first asteroid smashed straight through a dense knot of them and kept going, carving a burning trench across the dark soil. Two more followed on angled trajectories, forcing the Will to split its attention between Eric and the sky above. It sent corruption upward in a wide net, shattering one descending mass into black glass rain, only for the fragments to be caught by Eric's remaining white stars and redirected into a second wave of impacts.
Eric did not watch the destruction unfold from safety. He moved.
A golden star flared beneath his foot, and he kicked off it laterally, his body twisting horizontally as a corruption spear punched clean through the space he had just occupied. He landed on the cracked spine of a fallen beast, ran three steps along its length, then vaulted clear as another asteroid struck behind him and sent a shockwave rolling outward. The blast threw him higher instead of down, and he used that forced ascent, snapping a pink star into place midair and slingshotting himself around a rising column of black force.
The Will tried to pin him against the falling sky.
Chains of Void Shadow Creatures erupted from the ground, rising into a cage around him. Eric dropped through the first gap, fingers brushing corrupted cloud, then sprang, stepped up a collapsing beast carcass, and onto a drifting white star no larger than a shield. He rode its motion for half a second, kicked clear, and twisted between two descending moon fragments that missed him by no more than a body length each, cratering the battlefield in tandem where he had just been standing.
Black blood still ran freely from his mouth. His right arm answered slower than his left now, the corruption climbing further than he wanted to admit. He moved anyway.
An asteroid broke apart above the Will under a concentrated burst of corruption. Eric was already inside the falling debris field by then, using the largest shard as brief cover before launching off it with a compressed Repulsion Charge that curved instead of running straight, a line written through open air rather than ground. He tagged a golden star, vanished, reappeared low, swept beneath a horizontal corruption slash, then ran up the slanted face of a freshly made crater wall as though it were nothing more than a staircase.
The Will adapted, collapsing several Shadow Beasts into a single dense spear form and hurling it along Eric's predicted exit path.
Eric planted a white star on the crater's lip, vaulted over the spear as it passed beneath him, and in the same motion redirected two small asteroids into its flank. The impact tore the construct apart. He landed rolling, came up running, and snapped his fingers again.
More pieces of the black moon answered the call.
They fell in staggered intervals now, no longer a single barrage but something closer to a rhythm. The Will destroyed the largest fragments as they came. Eric used the destruction itself, turning shockwaves into footholds, treating the expanding force the way a runner treats uneven terrain. He kicked off a pink star, spun around a black lance, slid beneath a collapsing beast, then sprang onto the side of a descending asteroid and ran along its burning surface for three impossible steps before leaping clear just as it struck the ground.
The Will's form flickered under the weight of repeated impacts and near misses, its outline losing definition for half a second before it forced itself back into shape. Eric's starfield had thinned considerably by now, far sparser than when the fight began, yet every star he had left was still being pressed into service as a platform, a pivot point, or a brake.
They were still countering each other, exchange for exchange, but the sky itself had become one of Eric's lanes now, and both of them were beginning to feel exactly how long this fight had already run.
Looking around the battlefield, the Will realized that the number of Shadow Beasts and corrupted creatures still under its command had continued shrinking the longer this dragged on, each one consumed faster than it could be replaced.
Eric, for his part, turned his attention briefly inward toward his Domain of Emotions, a thick bead of sweat sliding down his chin as he took stock of exactly how much of his Aura and his Aura stones this single fight had already cost him. The number was not one he liked looking at.
For one long moment, the Will and Eric's gazes met across the battlefield, pink and abyssal black staring into each other, both of them worn thinner than either wanted to show, and a quiet, mutual understanding settled between them without either needing to speak it aloud.
Eric gathered a cluster of golden stars around himself and teleported away, the motion carrying none of the sharp precision it had held at the start of the fight, only the practiced ease of a body running on discipline rather than strength.
He reappeared high in the sky above the center of the central land and raised one hand, waving it once. Immediately, tremors rippled outward across the entire layer, and even that small gesture seemed to cost him something now.
...
Seraphiel and Adrian, still fighting on the ground, remained locked in battle against the pseudo Hypernova Beast. Adrian's condition had improved somewhat, though he was still holding on more by will than by strength.
Rank 3 Goodness Pathway Healing Aura Technique - Blessing of the Kind.
Seraphiel had woven a passive healing technique over Adrian, a steady flow that constantly mended him beneath a layer of golden light, enough to keep him from collapsing outright even as the fight raged on around them both.
Seraphiel kept its eyes moving even as it dodged another dark slash from the Dark-Embracing Swordmasters closing in around it. It had already killed a great number of them, and yet for every one that fell, more seemed to rise in their place.
It had tried, more than once, to end this cleanly and finish the fight for good, but the pseudo Hypernova Beast never once gave it the room to try.
The Beast tore free from a black rift and charged straight for Seraphiel, and it was a terrifying thing to behold in that moment, its abyssal black armor rippling like liquid shadow across a body built for nothing but violence.
Seraphiel swept its wings wide and dropped low as the Beast slammed into the ground where it had just been standing, black dust erupting into the air on impact. Seraphiel rose back through that dust a moment later, its body wrapped in cracked golden armor, and released a volley of Divine Sabers straight toward the Beast.
The Beast roared, low and guttural, and charged again without hesitation. It jumped, slid across the scorched earth, and rolled cleanly through the path of the Divine Sabers, dodging every single one. It had begun learning the rhythm of Seraphiel's attacks by then, no longer relying on raw instinct alone but reading the pattern itself and moving to break it.
It ran on all fours like something purely animal, then launched itself straight at Seraphiel in a single powerful leap, causing massive cracks on the ground to appear.
Seraphiel answered with a sweep of wind torn from its wings, slamming the Beast back down into the ground hard enough to crack its armor along one shoulder. The Beast rolled its eyes toward a tree standing nearby and charged for it instead, closing one clawed hand around the thick trunk and using it to spin itself once before launching forward again, this time not toward Seraphiel directly but toward one of the Dark-Embracing Swordmasters standing near the tree line.
It let out another roar, and the Swordmasters answered by unleashing a coordinated pattern of dark, corrupted slashes that forced Seraphiel to a dead stop mid-retreat. The Beast used that exact opening to vault clean over the shoulders of two waiting Swordmasters, its black liquid armor flowing forward beneath it like a living path, and stepped down onto that surface before charging on all four limbs straight toward Seraphiel once more.
Seraphiel fired another volley of Divine Sabers, and the Beast twisted through the air to dodge them, dark matter shifting and pooling beneath it mid-leap to form a landing surface exactly where it needed one, and it touched down on that surface without losing a fraction of its momentum.
"It keeps getting more troublesome." Seraphiel could feel it clearly now, the way the Beast kept improving while its own options kept narrowing with every exchange. It had already been fighting for a long stretch of time by that point, absorbing damage it could not fully shed, and had even begun burning into its own lifespan simply to keep pace.
The Beast dodged again, and again, closing the distance with each pass until it finally reached Seraphiel and pounced. Seraphiel had already begun gathering his Aura Essence for a far stronger technique, ready to end the exchange decisively, when the ground beneath them all suddenly convulsed.
The tremor tore through the entire battlefield at once, the earth splitting and heaving in jagged lines that threw off every combatant's footing without warning, and in that single disrupted instant, Seraphiel found the opening it needed to break free without spending the technique at all. The Beast let out a furious roar as its pounce landed on nothing but shattered ground, robbed of its target in the one moment it could least afford to lose one.
Seraphiel looked down for a moment, its eyes widening at the sight.
"Just a Lysi Nova and yet so capable." It muttered before turning its head back as it continued flying away, still being chased by the beasts.
...
Following the tremor, every pink and white star Eric had scattered across the battlefield began converging at once, streaming toward the center where he had just teleported.
The Will turned its attention to the sight, watching thousands of stars gather into that single point. It lashed out, trying to destroy as many as it could reach before they finished converging, and found some measure of success at first. But the stars nearest the edges began dodging its attacks with an ease that had not been there before, as though something in them had already learned the shape of its basic strikes. The closer the stars drew to the center, the sharper that adaptation became, each one growing harder to touch than the last.
It took only a few failed strikes for the Will to understand its own mistake, and it stopped attacking entirely, watching the convergence continue unchallenged.
"He is building a mega formation." The Will needed only a glance to grasp the point, and it began dividing its army of Shadow and corrupted beasts to send them straight at the formation taking shape below. But even as it moved to act, still refusing to stay in one place for more than an instant, something else caught its attention.
The golden stars.
Unlike the white and pink ones, the golden stars were not gathering toward the center at all. They were shattering outward across the layer instead, scattering wide in a pattern that only made sense once the Will looked at the whole picture, a golden net slowly stretching itself across the entire battlefield.
"He is building a teleportation network." The realization landed hard, and with it came a fresh dilemma the Will had no easy way to resolve.
What to do.
If it threw its full attention at the central formation, the increasing rate at which the stars had been adapting made that option feel unwise, a fight it was not certain it could win cleanly. Yet leaving the formation untouched carried its own cost, since the longer it stood, the more it would harden into something close to a fortress, nearly impossible to breach, giving Eric a safe place to heal, refine his techniques, and command his stars without interruption.
On the other hand, focusing too heavily on the formation risked handing Eric exactly what he needed to expand his escape routes even further, and if he could build one network like this, nothing would stop him from building a second, or a third.
It needed a solution that answered both problems at once.
A small smirk crossed its face. "I will do both."
It shot itself directly at the golden stars being arranged into teleportation nodes, while at the same time sending nearly every Shadow and corrupted beast it commanded toward the central formation, packing them into a tight ring around it. It held them there, forbidden from attacking, watching instead.
Eric noticed the beasts gathering below, but he did not break away to engage them. His focus stayed locked on the formation itself.
He was building it in three layers, working outward from the innermost core. The adaptation the stars had shown earlier, the very thing that made the Will hesitate, had only ever been a performance, staged deliberately to buy him this exact window of time. Had the Will kept attacking through it instead of pulling back, it would have realized soon enough that the stars had already stopped adapting altogether.
It had been a gamble, and Eric had won it clean. The formation taking shape beneath his hands would be massive once finished, though completing it meant sacrificing the stars' ability to adapt for good, a cost he had already accepted the moment he committed to the plan.
He spat out another mouthful of blood, thicker and darker than the last. Looking down at it, he could see exactly how far the corruption had climbed since his last exchange with the Will, each injury pulling it deeper into him than the one before.
Eric's chest tightened as he watched the Will tear through his golden stars one by one, the very nodes he had scattered to build his teleportation network, and there was nothing he could do to stop it now. Strangely, he found himself almost relieved that the Will had chosen them as its target instead of the formation itself.
Across the battlefield, the Will's unease only deepened as it watched Eric assemble the formation piece by piece, waiting patiently for a single loophole to reveal itself.
None ever did.
The innermost layer neared completion just as the Will finished carving through a wide swath of golden stars. More kept arriving to replace them, though their numbers had thinned considerably by now, which made sense given how much of Eric's Aura and Aura stones this fight had already devoured while he focused everything on the formation.
"Now." The Will gave the command the instant the innermost layer locked into place, sending its entire horde of beasts surging toward it at once.
Eric's body jolted as a heavy force slammed into his left flank, and he coughed out another mouthful of blood, his face draining paler by the second.
The horde tore into the formation, converging naturally on the innermost layer, and Eric scrambled to raise the skeleton of the second layer while throwing pink and white stars into the beasts' path to buy himself room. The Will refused to let them work, steering its creatures around every distraction with cold precision.
The beasts died in waves, but they kept coming regardless, and with every passing second the second layer grew harder to hold together, until even its half-formed skeleton finally gave way under the pressure.
Eric fought to keep the formation standing, but the relentless assault from the horde was more than he could match, and the strain was beginning to show in ways far more dangerous than exhaustion. Between the pressure of the fight and the damage already done to his World of Consciousness and Subconsciousness, a single fatal mistake slipped through his guard. Black sparks cracked violently across his body, and a loophole tore open along the right side of the innermost layer.
Eric's eyes went wide with panic, his body locking in place as he scrambled to salvage the breach and seal it shut, but when he finally looked up, all he found was the Will staring back at him.
The Will studied the broken layer for only a moment before it moved, black liquid pouring around its form and coiling into the shape of a dragon as it surged forward. It knew, somewhere beneath the hunger driving it forward, that this could easily be a trap. It no longer had the numbers left to spare on a cautious approach, and so it chose to strike Eric directly, gambling everything on this single opening.
It closed the distance in an instant, its dragon-formed strike aimed straight for Eric's chest, and just as it was about to land the killing blow, a small, knowing smile spread across Eric's face.
"You fell for it."
The Will's chest turned to lead, but its momentum never wavered. A cluster of golden stars flared to life directly above Eric, in a position the Will had never once thought to attack, and understanding crashed over it all at once. Every golden star it had destroyed across the battlefield had been nothing more than a distraction, a deliberate sacrifice laid down to hide the ones that mattered.
For one suspended moment, the sky cleared completely. No stars scattered across it, no clouds drifting past, nothing left in that vast darkness but the Will and Eric, facing each other at last with nothing standing between them.
The Will looked up.
Eric hung above it, bathed in the pale light of the black moon's largest remaining fragment, his blood-streaked face calm despite everything the fight had cost him, that same small smile still fixed in place as he gazed down without a trace of fear.
Neither of them moved.
The silence stretched longer than it should have, long enough that the Will felt it settle into its own form like a held breath it did not need to take. It had chased this boy across a battlefield of stars and shadow for what felt like hours, testing him, learning him, bleeding him one exchange at a time, and only now, staring up into that quiet, unafraid face, did it understand what it had actually been fighting.
Not a technique. Not a formation.
A boy who had decided, a very long time ago, that collapse was simply part of the lesson.
The Will's form flickered once, faint and involuntary, something almost like hesitation passing through it before it could stop the impulse. It had felt fear only rarely in its existence, and never from something this young, this broken, this small against the scale of what it truly was. And yet here, in this cleared and silent sky, it felt the shape of that fear anyway, cold and unfamiliar, curling somewhere beneath the corruption that made up its body.
Eric's smile did not waver.
He could feel his own body failing him in a dozen small ways at once, his right arm long since gone numb, his lungs dragging in air that tasted more of blood than breath, the corruption climbing steadily toward whatever remained of his center. He knew, with the same clear, honest certainty that had once kept him bent over scorched paper for eight hours at a time, that his body would not survive many more seconds of what came next.
He had made peace with that a long time ago too.
Below him, the Will finally moved, black liquid gathering along its form and hardening at the edges, readying itself for whatever Eric intended to unleash. It did not retreat. It did not hesitate a second time. Whatever fear had touched it a moment ago burned away beneath something older and hungrier, a refusal to be the one who broke first after coming this far.
The moment held, impossibly thin, both of them suspended in that empty sky with nothing left between them but the choice already made.
Then Eric raised his hand.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Offensive Aura Technique - Stellar Collapse!
Every pink and white star remaining on the battlefield surged inward at once, condensing into a single massive four-edged star that hung trembling in the air for one final heartbeat before its structure gave way entirely.
The explosion that followed swallowed the sky whole.
An instant before the blast could reach him, the Will lashed out with everything it had left and slammed Abyssal Seal into Eric's chest, locking down his Domain of Emotions and severing his immune system in one merciless stroke, determined to make certain that whatever survived this exchange would not walk away unmarked.
Then the light took both their visions, and the world turned completely white.