Chapter 508: You’re Annoying
The atmosphere on the Ashen Plain was no longer merely heavy. It was suffocating under Konstantine’s presence. Loriel, whose silver wings pulsed with a protective light, felt her celestial essence waver... She knew immediately upon seeing the newcomer that he was extremely powerful, with a strength that defied any logic known to the Seraphs.
"Pull back!" Loriel shouted to the seven generals, whose arrogance had just shattered against the gray shockwave emanating from the sorcerer.
She did not wait to see if they obeyed. With a gesture, she slashed her finger with the edge of her armor. A drop of Seraph blood, of pure gold, beaded before evaporating in a blinding flash. Under the effect of this sacrifice, the sky of Tenebris tore open, revealing a rift of unbearable white light... Angels armed with arcane mana lances poured out in successive waves, forming a wall of feathers and divine steel to protect the mortals.
Aeshma, the Demonic Princess, narrowed her eyes of nothingness. She hated the unexpected. Before she could make a move, a luminous beam of such density that it seemed almost solid burst from the celestial rift and struck Lucifer head-on.
The impact was seismic. Caught off guard, Lucifer was hurled across the plain, plowing the ground for hundreds of meters in a spray of black dust.
"Insolents..." growled Aeshma. Her voice, barely a whisper, froze the blood of the living still present on the field.
She did not retreat. She invoked her pearly flame, a demonic energy of milky white and iridescent hue, and burned her own blood to fuel a forbidden ritual. The effect was immediate: a scarlet mist spread across the battlefield, driving the monsters and lesser demons mad. The demonic mana was so dense that the ground trembled, with gaping fissures opening to release groans from the depths of the Abyss.
Konstantine frowned and brushed back a lock of blond hair with a sharp gesture. His decomposed the energy flows with laboratory precision. The Abyss was opening wider and wider, a dark frequency that threatened to devour reality itself.
"If this door opens completely, the experiment will be over before it has even begun," murmured Konstantine, his golden eye fixed on the horizon.
He was about to dash toward the center of the demonic rift when the space around him twisted abruptly. Reality fragmented into mirror shards. Without being able to resist, he was teleported face-to-face with four massive silhouettes bathed in an overwhelming aura of holiness.
He now stood away from the plain, in a zone of temporal stasis, facing three Seraphs: Michael of Judgment, Raphael of Healing, Gabriel of Time.
"The underling of the usurper," began Michael, whose golden armor emitted a solar heat. "Your existence is a mistake that we will rectify here and now."
Michael struck first. He brought down his sword of arcane flames, a Genesis-level attack meant to vaporize any living being. Konstantine did not move his torso.
"!"
A gray wave struck Michael’s blade. The impact created a sphere of void that absorbed the heat, but Raphael immediately reinforced his brother’s attack, injecting a continuous flow of regenerative mana that prevented the flame from extinguishing.
At the same moment, Gabriel raised his hand. "!"
Time froze around Konstantine’s legs, imprisoning them in a block of temporal crystal. Raphael, taking advantage of the immobilization, projected thousands of light feathers, each capable of slicing the soul.
Konstantine let out a mocking smile. His starry runes pulsed with ink-black on his skin.
"You are using laws that I dissected centuries ago," he declared in a monotone voice.
He activated his . His body mutated to match Gabriel’s time frequency, and with a simple ankle movement, he shattered the chronological crystal as if it were fragile glass. Then he extended both hands.
"!"
A blast of gray fire burst from his palms. Unlike Michael’s flames, this one did not burn: it erased. Raphael’s feathers disappeared on contact with the gray, wiped from existence. Raphael tried to close the torn space, but Konstantine’s void was a wound that divine healing could not mend.
Konstantine appeared before Michael in a translation so fast that the Seraph of Judgment had no time to raise his shield. He seized his wrist.
"Too slow for a seraph," commented the sorcerer.
He injected an impulse of mana from the 13th seat directly into Michael’s armor. The divine metal cracked, dissolving under the effect of molecular erasure. Michael let out a cry of pain: his arm was beginning to fragment into particles of dead light.
Raphael and Gabriel charged together, combining their auras to create an arcane energy vortex meant to seal the sorcerer.
"I don’t have time for your court games," cut Konstantine.
He used a technique to pull Gabriel directly into the path of his own brothers’ attack. The collision between the three Seraphs triggered a white mana explosion that made the entire stasis zone waver.
Konstantine was more powerful than these three sovereigns combined, because he did not fight with magic, but with the logic of the void. Yet his gaze remained fixed on the horizon, where the Tenebris plain continued to tremble under the opening of the Abyss. He felt Aeshma’s signature becoming unstable.
"I must get out of here," he thought.
With a fluid movement, he joined his hands to form the .
"!"
A shockwave of pure nothingness spread from him, shattering the barriers of the pocket dimension created by the Seraphs. Space tore violently.
Konstantine took advantage of the confusion to propel himself to the ground, his feet slicing through the pocket dimension like a blade slices through water. Michael, his right arm still fragmented into particles of dead light, gritted his teeth and summoned a second sword in his left hand.
"You will not leave this place," he spat.
He charged, shoulder forward, and struck with a low reverse blow aimed at Konstantine’s legs. The sorcerer pivoted on his forefoot, letting the arcane blade cut the air a few centimeters from his thigh, then closed his fist on Michael’s forearm at the moment he finished his gesture. He pulled, breaking the Seraph’s momentum, and drove an elbow into his ribs. The golden armor cracked under the impact, a fracture line running from the sternum to the shoulder blade.
"You’re annoying!"