Chapter 1188: Nirvana in Armor
That one sentence froze Ethan’s gaze into something outright cold.
These people had just crawled into this world. They didn’t even know the situation yet—and they were already trying to seize his territory by force. Maybe some ordinary faction would’ve been intimidated by their momentum.
But Emerald Castle wasn’t a place anyone got to step on.
THUD!
Ethan didn’t waste another word.
He raised both hands, and his aura snapped inward, condensing fast in front of his chest. Transparent lightning, golden runes, and Infernal Primordial Power interwove and compressed, forming a massive energy sphere. Arcs danced across its surface. The power inside kept compacting until the air around it buckled into rippling rings.
Then he hurled it straight at the man in front.
ROOOOM!
The sphere tore through the sky with a heavy roll of thunder, crashing down on him like a falling star.
The man only sneered.
He lifted a finger and tapped lightly at the air.
A violent force spread from his fingertip—an invisible, heavy net that poured toward Ethan like a tide. It didn’t smash into the energy sphere head-on. Instead it slipped around the frontal impact and wrapped Ethan from every side.
In an instant, Ethan felt pressure bite into his bones.
That strange, overbearing force clung to him like it had teeth—like countless tiny gears burrowing into the gaps of flesh, trying to twist his skeleton apart and crush his meridians. Transparent lightning exploded across his skin on instinct, trying to shock it loose.
But the moment that force touched the transparent lightning—
Something changed.
Ethan’s transparent lightning had been evolving already.
It held a huge amount of The Infernal Abyss energy, mixed with traces of all kinds of elemental auras. Now this unfamiliar power flowed into it—and instead of being rejected, it was swallowed whole.
The lightning darkened.
Within that formerly clear current, a thread of something indescribable appeared—an authority that didn’t feel like "more power" so much as a higher-ranked presence being awakened. The lightning gained a kind of imperial pressure from the inside out.
Ethan’s aura surged, turning feral.
An endless flood of lightning erupted from his body, blasting out along his limbs and from his back. The weird binding force around him detonated into fragments. And those fragments didn’t scatter.
They were dragged right into the transparent lightning—fed into its evolution like fuel.
The man’s expression twisted.
Ethan was already gone—turning into a streak of light as he shot forward.
He tore through the broken energy and went straight for the leader. The pressure rolling off him grew heavier with every meter. Transparent lightning carved a long, savage trail through the air, and wherever it passed, space itself split into fine, webbed cracks.
The man’s eyes widened.
He hadn’t expected Ethan to break free that fast—let alone absorb part of his power in the process. Caught off-balance, he could only throw up his palm and forcibly gather everything he had into a single point.
The blue gemstone blazed bright enough to sting the eyes.
A huge phantom form condensed in front of him, arms crossed, carrying a crushing weight as it met Ethan head-on.
Their powers collided in midair.
The result was immediate.
Ethan’s transparent lightning ripped through the phantom like paper, cleaving from its head down into its chest. Golden runes followed a heartbeat later, shattering the energy structure the man had just built. The leader tried to retreat—
Too late.
Ethan was already in his face. He slammed his palm down and drove the man from the sky like a hammer.
BOOM!
The leader hit the ground and was pinned there.
The earth caved in, forming a massive crater as cracks raced outward. His damaged Powered Combat Armor shrieked with piercing alarms. The blue gemstone in the abdomen stuttered and flashed, struggling to stabilize him—and failing.
"That’s impossible!"
There was no arrogance left on his face now. Only hysteria and fear.
"Who the hell are you? Why do you have The Infernal Abyss’s power?!"
He jerked his gaze down toward his abdomen, voice warping as panic crept in.
"And why is my power—how is it getting into you?!"
His aura was draining fast.
The blue energy core in his abdomen suddenly tore free from the Powered Combat Armor, turning into a beam of light that shot toward Ethan. Ethan’s transparent lightning snapped around it like a coil and began swallowing its energy, bit by bit, into his own body.
Watching his strength bleed away, the man finally broke.
Teeth clenched, he raised a hand and hammered a series of quick presses on the Powered Combat Armor.
A burst of crackling, unnatural sounds erupted from inside the suit.
The next second, his Powered Combat Armor detonated.
Armor fragments blasted outward in all directions. And his body was forcibly flung aside by a brutal surge of power, slipping out from under Ethan’s suppression.
At the same time, an eerie ripple rolled through heaven and earth.
The scattered armor shards—and energy surging from the void itself—began streaming back toward the man’s abdomen. Blue light rewove itself around him: first covering his chest, then spreading into his limbs, until a brand-new set of Powered Combat Armor formed right over his body.
The man staggered upright again.
Fresh armor sealed over him. And at his abdomen, that blue core flared once more—glowing, steady, and bright.
Ethan’s eyes widened.
When he’d driven the leader into the ground, the man’s aura had clearly dropped to rock bottom. The blue energy core in his abdomen had even torn free from his Powered Combat Armor—basically the same as having his main power source ripped out.
And yet now... all he’d done was shatter his original suit, get thrown clear by that bizarre rebound force, and he’d already condensed an entirely new set of Powered Combat Armor.
The fresh armor sealed over him. Blue light spilled from the abdomen core and crawled out toward his limbs, stitching everything together. Hairline cracks on the surface snapped shut one after another. Even the damaged energy patterns—those veins that had looked dull and broken from his desperate escape—flared back to life within just a few breaths.
Worse...
The aura pouring off him was several times stronger than before.
Ethan’s heart sank.
Right then, the system prompt chimed.
A stream of scan results flooded his vision—breakdowns of the man’s energy structure. That blue radiance wasn’t the power of some ordinary energy core at all. It was a pure strain of The Infernal Abyss energy—just an extremely rare kind that normally didn’t show much overt aggression.
Nirvana energy.
In a normal state, it barely showed any bite. But the moment its host teetered on the edge of death, it would erupt with an insane life-reversal force. It didn’t just rebuild the body—it remade it. And when the host returned, their strength surged by multiple times.
The moment Ethan understood, his whole body went stiff.
He’d seen plenty of brutal powers. He’d seen all kinds of Infernal Abyss energy forms. But something this close to outright rebirth...
This was the first time it had ever appeared in front of him.
In other words, the bastard in front of him—Azrakar—had the ability to keep coming back.
Azrakar rose back into the sky.
He rolled his neck once, and the new Powered Combat Armor answered with a low, heavy hum. The blue core in his abdomen burned bright enough to hurt to look at. Rings of The Infernal Abyss aura spread out from it, pressing so hard the surrounding sky crackled with sharp popping bursts.
Ethan’s breathing sped up.
He hadn’t expected a hidden card that could shove the situation this far. That last strike had clearly put him ahead—yet after Azrakar’s rebirth, not only had he recovered, he’d become even more dangerous.
Ethan didn’t wait.
He flipped his hand and yanked out more than a dozen energy orbs. Transparent lightning wrapped each one like living chains. Then he swung his arm and hurled all of them at Azrakar.
Shk!
Shk!
Shk!
The orbs screamed through the sky from different angles, sealing Azrakar’s front, back, left, and right. Every sphere held violently compressed power. Long trails of lightning scarred their flight paths, and wherever they passed, the air split into thin black fracture-lines—as if space itself was being sliced open.