Chapter : 877
From the silent, motionless form of Ifrit, a new, and completely unexpected, kind of light began to glow. It was not the deep, crimson light of fire. It was a brilliant, almost blinding, azure light, the color of a storm-swept sky. The light grew in intensity, and from the broken, demonic form of the fire spirit, a new, ethereal, and impossibly beautiful figure began to rise.
It was a woman, or the form of a woman, woven from pure, solidified lightning and starlight. Her silver hair, crackling with static energy, flowed around her as if she were underwater. Her golden eyes, the same molten gold as the Fire Knight’s, held a look of profound, ancient, and serene power. She was Fang Fairy, the goddess of the storm, and she had just been revealed to the world in all of her Transcendent, divine glory.
The crowd, whose minds were already a shattered ruin, could only let out a collective, groaning gasp. The challenger had not just one, but two divine, magnificent, and terrifyingly powerful spirits. The paradox, the contradiction, the sheer, impossible reality of the man, had just deepened to an infinite, incomprehensible degree.
Fang Fairy floated in the air for a moment, a silent, beautiful, and awe-inspiring vision. She looked at the Fire Knight, and a silent, perfect communication passed between them. She then turned her gaze to the empty center of the arena, and she raised her slender, graceful hands.
A low, humming, and deeply resonant sound began to fill the arena, the sound of a rising thunderstorm. The sky above the coliseum, which had been a brilliant, cloudless blue, began to darken with a sudden, unnatural speed. Great, swirling clouds of a deep, bruised purple and angry gray boiled into existence from nowhere, blotting out the sun. The world was plunged into a sudden, premature twilight.
And then, the lightning began. Not a single, jagged bolt, but a thousand of them. A silent, beautiful, and terrifying web of pure, azure and silver energy began to crackle and dance within the clouds, a celestial, divine, and utterly silent storm.
The Fire Knight raised his own, massive greatsword of solar fire, its brilliant, white-hot light a stark, defiant sun in the new, man-made darkness. He was no longer just a warrior; he was a conductor, and he was about to command a symphony of pure, elemental destruction.
He looked at the empty spot where the Jahl had died, where its essence had dissolved back into the world. He was about to give it a proper, and truly magnificent, funeral pyre. He plunged his greatsword of solar fire deep into the white-crystal floor of the arena.
And then, he unleashed his final, and most glorious, technique.
“Mountain of Fire,” his dual-resonant voice said, the words not a shout, but a quiet, calm, and utterly absolute command to reality itself.
And from the point where his sword had pierced the crystal, the world erupted.
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It was not an explosion. It was a birth. A violent, beautiful, and world-altering act of pure, elemental creation.
From the heart of the arena, from the single, small point where the Fire Knight’s solar blade had touched the crystal floor, a mountain began to grow. It was not a mountain of common rock and earth. It was a mountain of pure, roaring, and incandescent fire.
A great, circular fissure opened in the crystal, and from it, a geyser of liquid, white-hot magma shot a hundred feet into the air. The magma did not splatter and cool. It flowed, it coalesced, it began to build upon itself, layer by searing layer, with an impossible, architectural precision.
The Fire Knight stood at the very center of this rising, volcanic apocalypse, his form a calm, still point in the heart of the inferno he was commanding. The mountain of fire grew around him, a roaring, swirling vortex of molten rock and solar flame that seemed to be scraped from the very surface of a sun.
It grew with a terrifying, exponential speed. Fifty feet. A hundred. Two hundred. It rose higher and higher, a roaring, incandescent spire that threatened to pierce the very heavens. The heat it radiated was a physical, palpable force, a solid wall of energy that washed over the stands, making the very stone of the coliseum glow with a dull, cherry-red light. The spectators were not burned; they were protected by the arena’s ancient, powerful wards, which were now straining and groaning under the sheer, impossible, and sustained thermal load, their magical energy glowing with a frantic, desperate light.
Chapter : 878
High above, in the storm-wracked, man-made sky, Fang Fairy, the goddess of the storm, began her own part of the symphony. The thousand silent, crackling bolts of lightning that had been weaving through the clouds now began to descend. They did not strike the mountain of fire. They struck the air around it, weaving a vast, intricate, and impossibly complex cage of pure, azure lightning, a beautiful, divine prison to contain the raw, chaotic power that was being unleashed within it.
The two forces, the pure, creative fire of Iffrit and the pure, disciplinary lightning of Fang Fairy, worked in perfect, breathtaking harmony. They were two gods, a creator and a warden, a builder and a guardian, and they were performing a miracle of such profound, cosmic scale that it was a thing of pure, terrifying, and almost religious beauty.
The mountain of fire reached its final, magnificent height, a three-hundred-foot-tall, perfectly conical volcano that now dominated the city’s skyline, a new, and very temporary, addition to the kingdom’s geography. And then, as its peak solidified, the Fire Knight, who had been at its heart, simply… rose.
He ascended through the heart of his own creation, the molten rock and roaring flame parting before him as if he were its rightful king. He rose to the very peak of the fiery mountain and stood there, a solitary, four-meter-tall figure of shadow and light, his greatsword of solar fire held at his side. He was a god, standing on the pinnacle of his own, freshly made world.
And then, he gave his final command.
The mountain of fire, which had been a thing of raw, upward, creative energy, now turned its power inward. It began to compress, to collapse upon itself, the roaring, expansive flames now becoming a dense, implosive, and infinitely hotter core.
The light it emitted became so intense, so absolute, that it was no longer possible to look at. The entire world, for a single, breathtaking moment, became pure, undiluted, and silent white.
And then, with a final, soft, and almost gentle whoosh, it was gone.
The mountain of fire, the lightning cage, the storm-wracked sky—all of it vanished in an instant, as if it had never been.
The sun, which had been blotted out, returned, its normal, gentle light now seeming weak and pathetic in comparison. The arena floor, which had been a field of pristine, white crystal, was now a vast, circular expanse of smooth, black, and perfectly polished obsidian glass, still shimmering with a faint, residual heat haze.
And in the very center of that new, black, glassy plain, where the Jahl had died, and where a mountain had been born and had died in the space of a minute, there was a single, small, and deceptively simple object. It was a pile of fine, white, and almost luminescent ash, no larger than a common burial urn.
It was all that was left. All that remained of the ancient, powerful, and once-unbeatable Demon of Jahl. It had been fought, it had been unmade, and now, its very essence had been purified, refined, and reduced to its most fundamental, and most peaceful, state.
The Fire Knight, the being of shadow and solar fire, was also gone. In his place, standing beside the small pile of white ash, was a simple, unassuming man in a tattered, scorched, and blood-soaked healer’s robe. His hair was a simple, dark brown. His eyes were a gentle, compassionate brown. He was leaning heavily on his simple, unadorned practice sword, his chest heaving, his body trembling with a profound, and seemingly very human, exhaustion.
He had done it. He had not just defeated the monster. He had given it a funeral. A glorious, magnificent, and world-altering funeral.
The silence in the arena, the silence of a world that had just been completely, utterly, and beautifully broken, continued. No one moved. No one spoke. No one even seemed to breathe. They could only stare, their minds a blank, white canvas of pure, unadulterated, and holy terror. The Challenger had won.
Chapter : 879
Lloyd stood beside the small pile of pristine white ash, his breathing even, his posture steady. He looked at the purified remnants of the Jahl with the cool, detached satisfaction of a surgeon who had just completed a long and complex operation. The crowd saw an ending, a victory. But his [All-Seeing Eye], and the cold, hard data from the System, had shown him the truth they could not perceive. The final, spectacular act had not been for show; it had been a necessity. The destruction of the Jahl's spiritual form had left behind a tiny, invisible, and infinitely more dangerous parting gift: an Abyssal Seed of pure, concentrated malice that would have poisoned the very earth beneath the arena for centuries. The Mountain of Fire had not been an attack. It had been a cleansing. A necessary, brutal, and ultimately successful act of surgery on the soul of the land itself. He had not just slain the monster; he had cured its final, lingering disease.
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From the shattered ruin of the challenger’s waiting area, the broken, bandaged form of Gias the Valorous was being helped to his feet by two grim-faced companions. His body was a wreck, but his warrior’s spirit, his pride, was a thing of stubborn, unkillable resilience. He had been defeated, yes. But he had been defeated by a strong demon. He could accept that. What he could not, and would not, accept was the idea that this… this fraud… had succeeded where he had failed.
His pain-filled, hazy eyes fixed on the colossal, silent, and now rapidly fading form of the Fire Knight, and his mind, the mind of a professional warrior, a man who understood the slow, grinding, and decades-long process of cultivating power, latched onto the one, single, glaring impossibility of the entire, insane spectacle.
The power. The sheer, overwhelming, and utterly mature scale of the power.
He was the first to find his voice, and it was a raw, ragged, and furiously incredulous roar that shattered the arena’s sacred silence.
“IMPOSSIBLE!”
The word was a physical blow, a stone thrown into the still, shocked surface of the crowd’s consciousness. Every head, every eye, turned to him.
“He is a fraud!” Gias bellowed, his voice cracking with a mixture of pain and righteous, professional outrage. He pointed a trembling, bandaged finger at the figure on the arena floor. “That… that is not the power of a young man! That is the power of a grandmaster, of an archmage! The kind of control, the kind of raw, elemental dominance he just displayed… it takes a lifetime to achieve! Decades of training, of meditation, of a hundred hard-won battles! No one, I repeat, no one under the age of twenty-five can wield that kind of power! It is a fundamental law of spiritual mechanics!”
He was right, of course. In their world, the cultivation of spiritual power was a slow, arduous process. The human body and spirit were like a vessel that had to be slowly, carefully, and painstakingly enlarged and reinforced over many years to contain a greater and greater amount of power. A young man’s vessel was simply too small, too fragile, to hold the kind of cosmic ocean of energy they had just witnessed. To do so would be to shatter oneself from the inside out.
“It is a trick!” Gias roared, his words now finding a purchase in the crowd’s confused, desperate minds. They had been looking for an explanation, any explanation, that could make sense of the impossible thing they had seen. And Gias, their fallen hero, had just given them one. “It is an illusion! An artifact! He is using some forbidden, ancient relic to channel a power that is not his own! It is a violation of the sacred rules of the Challenge! He is a cheat! A fraud!”
The accusation was a spark in a tinderbox of confusion and fear. The crowd, desperate for a logical, understandable narrative, seized upon it. A low, angry murmur began to ripple through the stands, a sound that quickly grew into a roar of a different kind. The awe was being replaced by a more familiar, and far more satisfying, emotion: a righteous, indignant fury.
They had been tricked. Hoodwinked. The miracle was a lie. The saint was a sinner.
The weary, one-eyed Royal Knight, who had been standing at the arena gate, his own mind a shattered ruin of disbelief, heard Gias’s words, and the cold, hard logic of them resonated with his own lifetime of experience. He, too, knew the laws of power. And he knew that what he had just witnessed was, by those laws, utterly, completely, and fundamentally impossible.
Chapter : 880
His duty, which had been momentarily obliterated by awe, now reasserted itself with a cold, iron-clad certainty. The rules of the Challenge were sacred. And the first, and most important, rule was that a challenger must fight with their own, innate power. The use of high-level, power-amplifying artifacts was strictly, and explicitly, forbidden.
His face, which had been a mask of stunned shock, now hardened into a grim, professional resolve. His hand dropped to the hilt of the massive, two-handed sword at his side. He was the guardian of this ring of judgment, and he had just witnessed a profound, and very public, violation of its laws.
He took a single, heavy, and decisive step onto the sand of the arena. He began to walk towards the small, unassuming figure in the healer’s robes, his every movement a statement of his purpose. The other Royal Guards, seeing their commander’s intent, followed suit, their own hands dropping to their swords, their faces grim and set. They began to spread out, forming a wide, semi-circular cordon, their movements the practiced, efficient ballet of a team of hunters closing in on their prey.
The hero had been declared a fraud. The crowd was baying for his blood. And the law, in the form of a dozen, heavily armed, and very determined Royal Knights, was coming to apprehend him. The greatest triumph of Lloyd’s life was, in a matter of seconds, about to become his most public, and most disastrous, defeat.
Lloyd stood his ground, the calm, still center of a rising, chaotic storm. He watched the approaching line of Royal Knights, their armor gleaming in the sun, their hands on their swords, their expressions a uniform mask of grim, professional duty. He heard the roar of the crowd, the fickle, hungry beast that had, in the space of a single hour, gone from mockery to worship and was now baying for his blood. And he saw the triumphant, vindicated sneer on the face of the broken champion, Gias, who was now the hero of a new, and far more satisfying, story: the story of the man who had exposed the great fraud.
The Major General’s mind, the cold, calculating engine that was always running beneath the surface, analyzed the new tactical situation with a dispassionate, almost bored, clarity. The gambit had been a success, perhaps too much of a success. The display of power had been so overwhelming, so far outside the established norms of their reality, that it had broken their suspension of disbelief. They could not accept the miracle, so they had defaulted to the only other possible explanation: a cheat.
It was a predictable, if inconvenient, development. He had, of course, anticipated this possibility. He had a dozen different contingency plans, a dozen different escape routes. He could, with a thought, unleash his spirits in their full, glorious, and undeniable Transcendent forms and simply slaughter his way out of the arena. He could use Fang Fairy’s conceptual speed to vanish, leaving them with nothing but a mystery and a pile of dead knights. He could use his Void power, the Black Ring Eyes, to simply turn off the minds of his accusers, leaving them as drooling, empty-eyed husks.
But all of those options were messy. They were loud. They would destroy the beautiful, perfect legend of the humble, saintly doctor he had worked so hard to build. He had not come this far, had not played this intricate, beautiful game with such flawless precision, only to end it with a crude, brutish display of overwhelming force. No. The performance had to continue. The story had to reach its proper, elegant conclusion.
He remained perfectly still, he is profoundly, deeply confused by the sudden, hostile turn of events. He was the innocent, the victim, the humble healer who had just performed a miracle and was now being accused of a crime he did not even understand.
The one-eyed Royal Knight, the commander of the unit, reached him first. He stopped a respectful, but also threatening, ten feet away, his hand still resting on the pommel of his greatsword. His one good eye was a cold, hard chip of granite, and it was filled with a look of profound, weary disappointment.
“Challenger,” the knight said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that carried across the now-hushed arena. The crowd had fallen silent again, eager to witness the final, dramatic confrontation. “By the authority of the Sultan, and by the sacred laws of the Jahl Challenge, I am placing you under arrest.”
