Chapter 207: Downfall
Kai swung down to end Damas and take him out of the battle for good.
For plotting to kill and eat a kid, death will be his punishment.
But something else came faster than the swing of his arm.
A vertical energy slash cut through the air and struck Kai on the side of his body, forcing him to pivot sideways. Pain lanced through his mind as his sword-arm was severed from his body with a perfect, clean-cut.
It flew into the air like it was nothing.
Kai looked to the far side and saw Asher standing in the distance with his sword unsheathed.
The leader of the squad had been watching the battle progress with growing interest. And seeing one of them was about to be cleaved into two—he decided to intervene, stopping Kai’s blade before it could deliver the finishing blow.
Relief washed over Damas as the scimitar only scratched his shoulder.
He knew it was Asher who helped him. A silent word of thanks flickered through his burning mind before he drove his boot into Kai’s chest hard, kicking him back while, at the same time, wrenching his arm free of the dark tendrils that had pierced it.
But the damage was done—his fingers were numb, and his sword clattered to the ground.
Annoyance flared, but there was no time to retrieve the sword.
Damas forced his body into overdrive and moved, vanishing from Kai’s immediate sight.
Kai snapped his gaze up, scanning—and found nothing. Damas was gone.
Then, before thought could catch up, an elbow smashed savagely into his temple.
Bam—!
The elbow accidentally or deliberately found the right nerve, causing Kai’s left eye to explode in its socket. A burst of blood—and vitreous fluid that turned half his world into a red smear. Veins ruptured across the sclera, webbing outward in an instant, and the skin around the eye swelled with dark, angry vessels.
One breath, he couldn’t find Damas; the next, everything on one side was foggy red.
His body registered the trauma in a white flash of agony before the force flung him sideways, ragdolling him across the cloudy ground. Kai stopped about fifteen yards away, lying on the ground in pain.
Damas staggered back as whisperers began to invade his mind.
Slowly, he reached his hand to the cut on his shoulder and smacked his lips in displeasure.
He realized that Kai’s scimitar isn’t normal.
And that blade was probably the reason Makos was struggling to recover from one thrust.
Just then—Makos landed right beside him with a heavy thud. His chest was still smeared with blood, but the fighting fire already returned to his eyes. "How are we losing to this kid? We’ve the number, and we still lost?"
"We underestimated him," Damas spat blood to the side. "And things spiralled."
In a battle, momentum is everything.
Once Kai began to show his aggression and it worked, the two unconsciously remained really vigilant. Their subconscious mind respected Kai for his lethality, and that made a momentum that gave Kai more leeway in attacking.
And with his wide arsenal of Imprints, he could capitalize on that.
But momentum could shift in battle.
As long as Kai was struck once, the momentum he built would disappear, and a new one would form.
Regardless, the initial momentum had already done its work. The damage was so severe that it had forced them to face Kai one at a time—Kai had rendered the fact that this battle was one against two meaningless.
"He’s down an arm now. Time to bring a world of pain down on him for his futile resistance." Makos paused with heavy restraint. "Shame that we can’t kill him."
"I wouldn’t say that too quickly." Damas pointed at Kai ahead. "He’s not done yet."
Across the cloudy expanse, Kai pushed himself up with a single hand—and rose with an ease that surprised even him. He settled onto his knees, then froze. Where his severed arm should have been, a massive, dark tentacle now writhed, as if it had always belonged there.
One that was entirely made of darkness.
Kaelmorath... So, this is your strongest Ending Fragment.
Just earlier, Kai had already felt the completed ending fragments doing its miracle.
Each strike from Makos and Damas was unleashed with incredible force.
Enduring those relentless attacks from these seniors was more than proof enough that meeting Kaelmorath was crucial for his survival. The completed Retribution Ending Fragment that he had attained through intense body forgot had fulfilled its purpose.
But there was more.
From every wound he suffered, seething darkness now bled in place of blood.
Kai didn’t need to control it.
It happened automatically.
Every time he suffered a cut, the blood that bled out turned into dark energy.
And this dark energy that looked like dark smoke that came out of every open wound remained in gas form and dormant throughout, but it shifted when something hostile drew near. Almost in an instant, the smoke could harden into a tendril and strike.
As more blood poured out from him, the tendril would grow bigger and more powerful.
Kai could feel that keeping it there was taxing on his stamina, but he could manage.
Underneath these tendrils, the wound was clotted over so that no blood came out.
It was the Night Mutation from the Reckless Ruin Ending Fragment.
It was more than only a weapon or a shield—It sealed his open wounds as it fought, stemming the blood loss so he wouldn’t weaken by degrees. And now, through the same dark energy—his severed arm had been reborn as a tentacle of pure shadow, moving at his will as naturally as flesh and bone ever had.
Kai lost the Blood-phantom Scimitar but gained another weapon.
All due to the Night Mutation.
However, what surprised him more than even the tentacle arm was his vision.
His left eye was impaired from the savage blow to the temple—and it also triggered the Night Mutation. Oddly enough, his vision did not return to normal. Instead, he saw only white with the outline of black.
Damas and Makos were still calculating their options.
Still wary of what he was going to do, he had time to catch his breath.
And in the meantime, he closed his right eye and let the world resolve through his newly built left eye. To his surprise, the blacks and whites sharpened. Everything was drawn in stark, unforgiving contrast.
But what seized his attention were the branching lines that came to be.
Glowing lines inside Damas and Makos.
A hidden map of something unknown lay bare beneath their skin.
Blood vessels? No, that’s not it.
Kai’s brows furrowed together, closely inspected the glowing lines inside the seniors.
Damas has red branching lines, while Makos has brown branching lines.
In hindsight, they looked like they were blood vessels, but they were not.
Not a part of the blood vessels, as they weren’t connected to the heart.
If not blood vessels, then Kai didn’t know what they were. Both Damas and Makos possessed three Divine Locks in them, and if they shared his ability to grow a new one, those branching lines should’ve been tethered thickly to their very first Divine Lock.
And that would mean growing Divine Locks is a mutation that some might possess.
But it wasn’t—the glowing lines in them don’t have that thicker connection.
Instead, the lines were growing from both activated Divine Locks—and it spread across their bodies like invasive roots of a fungus. That is one of the main reasons Kai thought these glowing lines were blood vessels earlier.
Then, if these lines aren’t blood vessels, what are they?
Hmm... Each one contained mana, almost like they were the Divine Locks’ extensions.
Kai then recalled something from earlier.
He had asked Rob the reason why the seniors, though having around his mana reserve and only a sub-rank higher than him, being Grade-3 Awakened Supernal, were far stronger than he was earlier.
Compared to Kai, without the use of the Ending Fragments, the seniors are far more powerful.
And that’s odd since he’s not that far behind.
Rob said that he would learn about the reason later.
But perhaps the reason for that elevated strength was these glowing lines.
Kai suspected that was the case, but it remained an assumption—he barely understood what this new eye was even meant to perceive. But no time for that. His thoughts scattered the exact second Damas and Makos finally moved.
Having had enough of this stare-down, they attacked in a united pair.
Damas closed the gap first. His anger from almost dying to a Lesser Anger was channeled into his sword as it came low and fast. A horizontal arc meant to cleave Kai in two at the waist.
Kai threw himself backward.
His spine bent at an impossible angle, head dropping nearly level with his hips—as the blade hissed past his face. He recovered almost instantly and launched himself toward Makos, fully ignoring Damas, who skidded behind.
But before he could reach the big senior, Damas was already behind him.
Faster than anticipated.
Kai twisted aside, but he was a fraction too late.
The blade was already arcing toward his waist, but all he heard was a clanging sound.
No pain.
The seething dark energy near the area solidified at the point of impact and parried the sword with a shriek of unnatural friction.
Damas clicked his tongue as his momentum carried past.
Kai’s head whipped around, searching for Makos.
And the answer came from above.
The massive minotaur-blood was already descending from above, bringing the axe down.
Kai avoided the head by a hair, and the impact detonated against the cloud-floor, blasting a crater through the miss—and unleashed a violent swirl of wind that tore at his balance. Even then, Kai fought the gale, lobbed over Makos, and shoved him away with his tentacle arm.
The dark limb pushed on Makos’ back to help Kai leap even further.
His winged boots flared to life, and he shot straight toward his fallen scimitar.
As he landed, his fingers closed around the hilt.
Pain seared through his palm, and he dropped the scimitar instantly with a painful hiss.
He looked at it and saw the handle was coated in a decayed green liquid. Poison. Seems like the seniors were not underestimating him at all now. But he had no time to curse as the seniors were already on him again.
Swoosh—!
The three collided in a storm of steel and shadow.
Blades whipped against dark tendrils.
Sword and axe hammered against the tentacle arm.
Kai defended desperately; the tendrils lashed out to meet each strike, while his tentacle arm attacked. But every move he made drained him. Every parry sapped his stamina. The Reckless Ruin Ending Fragment was bleeding his stamina dry.
Soon, exhaustion would claim him.
He could feel it coming.
At that moment, Kai realized something crucial. He’s going to lose.