Chapter 118: Life & Death
The fight ground on past the ten-minute mark, and every one of them was bleeding for it.
The Grave Knight pressed relentlessly, Sepulcher’s Reckoning cracking the air with every swing, and Aidan met blow after blow on a guard that had started shaking somewhere around the fifteenth exchange.
The Bonewrought Archer never stopped firing, spectral volleys thinning Finn’s reserves in steady, punishing increments. Anrita traded lightning with the Cursebound Wraith in a duel that had already cost her one badly burned arm, and she fought on anyway, jaw locked, refusing to yield ground.
Jovan’s barrier failed entirely under the Deathrider’s third charge, black-gold light shattering outward in a spray of dying sparks, and only a desperate roll saved him from the horse’s full weight.
He came up fighting anyway, misfortune weaving into a tighter, smaller ward around himself alone, and threw everything he had left into harrying the Deathrider’s flank, buying Aidan half-second openings wherever he could carve them out.
"We’re losing ground," Anrita called out, voice tight with something close to genuine alarm. "All four. Simultaneously. This isn’t a fair fight."
"Never said it was." Aidan drove Halcyon’s fire through another exchange, forcing the Grave Knight back a full step. "Keep pushing."
They pushed. It cost them.
The Cursebound Wraith caught Anrita with a full cascade she couldn’t fully dodge, corrupted magic sinking into her side and dropping her to one knee, sparks spitting from the wound instead of blood.
Finn took a direct hit meant to finish him, only barely surviving by throwing every scale’s worth of remaining light into a desperate, last-second shield.
Aidan felt the battle tilting, and felt something old and patient stir low in his chest in answer.
Then the Grave Knight’s blade found the crack already spreading across his breastplate, and drove home.
[Armor durability: 0%.]
The Ebon Sovereign’s Mantle shattered.
It didn’t crumble slowly. It simply gave out all at once, five hundred years of accumulated resilience spent in a single defining moment, plating cracking apart and scattering into drifting motes around him.
And in the same instant, as if the timing had been planned from the very first strike of the fight, the Deathrider’s lance and the Bonewrought Archer’s fully charged volley arrived together, converging on the exact space where Aidan’s now-unarmored chest stood exposed.
There wasn’t time to dodge. There wasn’t time for anything.
Arthur moved anyway.
Gear Morph tore itself apart in a flood of crimson-gold light, the armor unraveling off Aidan’s body in a single violent motion as the dragon reformed bodily between him and the incoming strike, wings spreading wide enough to eclipse the attack entirely.
The lance and the volley struck together, and struck Arthur instead.
The impact was catastrophic. Arthur’s body absorbed the full, combined weight of two Conceptual Techniques meant for something already critically weakened, and even his freshly Divine-rank frame had no answer for that much force delivered at once.
His roar cut off mid-breath. His wings folded. He hit the cursed ground in a broken, unmoving heap, and the light that always lived somewhere behind his eyes simply wasn’t there anymore.
[Arthur: Deceased.]
The graveyard went silent.
Jovan went still where he stood, black-gold power guttering low around him, something in his ancient composure genuinely shaken for the first time all fight.
He was nearly about to lose his control over the Colored King Black, and that spurred in this place, where the restrictions of the lower realm were lifted, he would instantly kill every single being in this space.
That was over overpowered Colored King Black was compared to everyone here.
[Warning, Player Aidan. It is advisable to put the Colored King Black Vessel into the Summoning Space.]
But Aidan wasn’t hearing any of that. He stood over his fallen summon, unarmored, exposed, and utterly still. Something inside him that had held for a billion years finally let go of its leash, deliberate rather than desperate.
The pressure that rolled off him in that next instant made all four undead guardians hesitate for the first time in the entire fight.
’Ninety-three point seven percent, was it.’ His voice, when it came, arrived flat and quiet and infinitely more dangerous than any shout could have managed. ’Let’s see what happens when I actually spend some of it.’
’Control. Be in Control of My Will.’
[Relentless Force generating. Source: suppressed anger reserve.]
Gold-crimson light bled up from somewhere beneath his skin, an ocean given the barest crack to breathe through, and the weight of it alone staggered the Cursebound Wraith a full step backward.
Aidan moved.
He didn’t bother with technique names this time. He didn’t need to. He simply closed the distance to the Grave Knight in a single stride that shouldn’t have been physically possible, caught the bone greatsword’s next swing in one bare hand, and crushed it to powder without slowing down.
The Grave Knight didn’t get a second attack. Aidan’s other hand drove through its chest plate and out the other side, and the ancient guardian folded into scattering ash before it finished registering what had killed it.
The Bonewrought Archer tried to retreat, loosing a full volley in a desperate covering pattern.
Every arrow simply stopped in midair around him, caught in a field of gold-crimson pressure that refused to let anything hostile move another inch, and Aidan crossed the frozen field of its own ammunition and ended the Archer with a single, contemptuous strike that didn’t bother slowing for the guardian’s raised bone bow.
The Cursebound Wraith tried to flee entirely, black tendrils folding it backward through cursed shadow.
Aidan caught it by the throat before the fold finished, hauled it back into solid ground, and simply squeezed until the corrupted magic holding its shape together gave out all at once.
The Deathrider came last, lance already lowered for one final desperate charge, horse and rider both radiating everything they had left.
Aidan didn’t dodge. He didn’t block. He walked directly into the charge, caught the lance’s tip an inch from his bare chest with two fingers, and stopped a Conceptual Technique-powered strike dead in the air like it weighed nothing at all.
"You had your fun," Aidan said, voice still flat, still terrifyingly calm. "My turn’s over quick."
The lance shattered. The horse shattered a half-second later. The rider never got the chance to shatter at all, gold-crimson force simply erasing it from existence in a single, absolute pulse.
Four guardians. Gone in under a minute.
The gold-crimson light bled back beneath Aidan’s skin as quickly as it had risen, the ocean settling back into its familiar, patient depths.
The moment it fully receded, he was moving again before his own knees finished processing how tired he was.
He dropped to Arthur’s side, hands already digging into his storage ring.
The Phoenix Feather came free, warm and glowing, and Aidan pressed it directly against Arthur’s still chest with hands that weren’t quite steady.
"Don’t you dare," he said, quiet and fierce. "Not like this. Not for me."
The feather dissolved into light, and the light poured into Arthur’s unmoving body, and for three unbearable seconds absolutely nothing happened at all.
Then Arthur’s chest rose in one enormous, gasping breath.
His eyes snapped open, gold and startled and very much alive, and he immediately tried to sit up too fast, wobbling.
"Ow," Arthur said, with tremendous feeling. "That was terrible. Ten out of ten, would not recommend dying."
Aidan laughed, and the laugh cracked halfway through into something rawer, and he wrapped both arms around the dragon’s neck without a shred of self-consciousness left in him.
"Don’t ever do that again," he said, muffled against scales. "I mean it."
[Arthur: No promises. You were about to get skewered, buddy.]
[Jovan: I would echo that sentiment, though with considerably less enthusiasm about the skewering part.]
Aidan finally looked up from the dragon’s neck, and the sight past him killed whatever relief had started settling into his chest.
The graveyard’s pressure hadn’t eased at all. Beyond the four scattered patches of ash where the first guardians had stood, row after row of tombstones stretched on toward the burning cup, still glowing that same sick, patient green.
He counted without meaning to. Eight more, at least, standing dark and waiting between here and the pedestal.
"That was one row," Anrita said quietly, cradling her burned arm, gaze fixed on the distance ahead. "Eight remain."
Aidan let out a slow breath, looked down at Arthur, freshly returned and still faintly unsteady on his feet, and then out at the long, glowing field still standing between them and whatever waited at the end of it.
"We should pause for a bit." Aidan stepped back.
’It’s been 24 hours since my last attempt. Let’s see if I can summon someone strong.’
[Player Aidan. Since you are in an Origin Tomb, the summon you meet next time might be beyond Divine-rank.]