Chapter 1249: The Trap Was Already Inside
Seraphine chose that moment to condense a second weapon—another long sword.
Death power boiled along the edge, so heavy it pressed the surrounding light downward. She gripped the hilt with both hands, eyes locked ahead, ready to layer a second strike onto the energy sphere.
Maelor saw the angel silhouette redirect its spear. He froze for a beat—then threw his head back and burst out laughing.
A target that big... and they still missed him?
"You seriously whiffed that?"
He watched the golden spear veer off his line, and his laughter got even nastier.
"I can’t even look at this!"
Maelor didn’t take the energy sphere seriously.
To him, it was just fire, lightning, and wind—stuffed together by force. One clean slash and he’d split it apart, along with the little pests hiding behind it.
"You—die!"
The dragon-horn sword chopped down.
A teal sword wave peeled off the edge and cut straight for the incoming energy sphere. Maelor had absolute confidence in that strike. He didn’t prepare a backup plan, and he didn’t leave himself a retreat path.
His sword pressure hit the sphere head-on.
The impact point dented inward—then exploded with blue-white brilliance. Infernal flames were blasted aside, and white lightning detonated off the sphere’s surface in all directions.
For an instant, it looked like the sphere was about to be cleaved apart.
But right as the blast began—
—the golden spear from the sky came down.
The spearhead punched through the outer flames and drove straight into the sphere’s center. Holy power surged down the shaft and flooded inside, mixing with the existing blue-white energy.
The entire sphere swelled again.
Maelor’s sword pressure didn’t destroy it.
It got swallowed.
Queen Seraphine immediately dismissed her twin blades.
A single death blade condensed in her hands.
The moment the dark edge fully formed, the angel silhouette vanished. The golden radiance blanketing the domain retreated with it, replaced by a dim, spreading aura that leaked from Seraphine’s death blade instead.
The gray space was stained in the color of death.
Seraphine tightened her grip and slashed forward.
The death blade struck the energy sphere along the path the golden spear had carved. It didn’t split the sphere— it fed the entire weight of death power into it.
Then Aishana’s sword came down right after.
White lightning from Ethan continued to pour in from all sides.
Hit after hit didn’t break the sphere. Every force was devoured and forced inward. Infernal flame, lightning, wind, holy power, death—everything crashed together inside, then got compressed until it had nowhere left to go.
With the group’s relentless barrage—and Ethan continuously replenishing power—the energy sphere finally stopped expanding.
It had taken in everything it could take.
The surface calmed.
No flames leaked out. No lightning lashed free. All the power recoiled inward, leaving only slow-rotating blue-white patterns along the outer shell.
It was primed.
Like fireworks that had finished every step of preparation and were only waiting for the final spark.
Maelor’s sword wave hadn’t even traveled a few hundred feet before the sphere’s pull caught it.
The teal wind blades slowed. Then they began to break down from the edges. Strands of wind energy peeled off their path and curved into the sphere.
A few breaths later, the massive sword pressure was gone—cleanly absorbed.
Not even residue remained.
The smile vanished from Maelor’s face.
For the first time, he actually felt the sphere’s stored power—and realized it was far beyond what he’d estimated.
Not ten percent more.
Not a few times more.
It was so much larger than anything he could release right now that he couldn’t even measure the gap.
Danger.
That was the only judgment left in Maelor’s head.
Thirty years on one bank, thirty years on the other.
If he kept forcing a head-on clash now, it wouldn’t be "brave."
It would be suicide.
He abandoned the attack instantly and spun to flee.
The others had been waiting for exactly that.
One restraint after another rose from different platforms. Bands of light snapped around Maelor’s arms and legs. Energy barriers raced along the edges of the space, sealing shut.
Layered barriers linked together, steadily choking off every direction he could move.
Maelor’s body suddenly swelled.
His human outline was swallowed by teal scales. Limbs lengthened. Dragon wings unfolded one after another from his back. In a blink, he became the same teal dragon phantom that had appeared behind him earlier—an enormous body spanning multiple platforms.
All eight wings beat at once.
A hurricane erupted beneath them and crashed into the barriers everyone had erected. The outermost restraints shook violently, cracks spiderwebbing across their surfaces.
Maelor tried to rip every barrier apart with sheer wind force, then punch through and escape the domain.
But a golden barrier blocked his path.
Deep gold light rose in front of him, expanding up, down, left, and right. His gale slammed into it, and the surface only rippled in wide rings—no break. No crack.
More golden formations flared into existence.
They spread across the domain, so dense there were almost no gaps. And inside every formation was a pressure similar to the one coming from that energy sphere behind them.
Maelor’s movements slowed.
Even in full dragon form—with scales and a massive body multiplying his defense—he still didn’t dare brush those formations lightly.
He beat eight wings and lurched toward a corner, searching frantically for the thinnest point between the golden barriers.
In the sky, Seraphine looked at Ethan, gratitude clear in her eyes.
Not every golden formation was a real attack waiting to erupt.
The simulated pressure was terrifying, but it didn’t carry the same lethal bite. If Maelor had been bold enough—if he could crush his fear and keep his line—he could’ve forced his way through and escaped.
But Maelor didn’t see it.
Or maybe he did, and he was just too scared of dying.
The moment a formation leaked even a trace of aura like that energy sphere, he flinched and veered away—too afraid to test truth and illusion with his own body.
At the same time, Ethan—still in particle form—had already reached the space above the slowly advancing energy sphere.
The sphere wasn’t directly chasing Maelor.
It moved on a special, stable track, not very fast. As long as it didn’t truly enter the target’s body, the power inside wouldn’t detonate.
Ethan observed for a moment, originally planning to feed in more energy.
But the instant his awareness touched the sphere’s interior, he scrapped the idea.
At its current level, the sphere’s power might already be beyond what the domain itself could withstand.
If he pushed it further, the blast might not only kill Maelor—it could shatter the surrounding barriers and splash back onto Ethan and every ally here.
No.
Ethan pulled back the lightning he’d been about to release.
He glanced at Maelor, panicking in the corner, then guided the black particles away from above the sphere and silently slipped through the golden barrier.
His particle body didn’t disturb the wind.
Maelor kept checking formation after formation, completely unaware Ethan was already inside the sealed zone.
A smaller energy sphere followed the black particles as they moved.
When Ethan drew close to the teal dragon’s massive body, both the particles and the small sphere passed through the wind layer between the dragon’s scales—
—and entered Maelor’s body.