Chapter 595: Consequences
The two raised their weapons at the same instant.
Samuel’s samurai brought its blade down.
Ace’s assassin released the daggers.
The samurai’s cut fell like a mountain descending toward the arena floor. The blade traced a line of concentrated red-gold flame that spanned hundreds of meters from tip to hilt, its edge burning bright enough to momentarily feel like a miniature son.
The assassin’s nine daggers released from his hands and mouth. Each blade streaked forward as a beam of dark crimson light, threading through the air in independent trajectories that all converged on the descending samurai from every angle at once.
The daggers wove and curved. They braided themselves around each other in beautiful arrays.
The two attacks met in the arena’s center.
For a fraction of a second, nothing seemed to happen.
The samurai’s blade pressed downward. The nine daggers wove upward. The forces balanced at the exact instant of impact, and the space between them ignited.
BOOM!
The detonation happened across an entire kilometer of atmosphere simultaneously. Red-gold flame and dark crimson energy tore across each other in overlapping bursts of energy that stripped the air itself apart.
The arena’s overhead sky vanished behind a sheet of shifting color that no ordinary Evolver had ever seen before.
The dome broke within the first second of detonation.
The barrier cracked from the impact point outward in a spider web of failing runes. The combined damage of Samuel and Ace’s attacks was orders of magnitude beyond what the dome had been rated to contain.
After breaking the dome, the shock wave did not stop, continuing outwards, spreading across the surrounding region.
The remaining Evolvers who couldn’t make it out in time due to injuries, or exhaustion, died in the first two seconds.
Their bodies had no defense against the pressure that swept across the venue. The lucky ones went limp before the shockwave reached them, their nervous systems shutting down under the aura alone.
Their bodies were carried off across the rubble by the concussion wave and scattered across the ruined arena floor. The unlucky ones were still conscious when the shockwave hit them. Their bodies came apart in silence. They had no time to cry out in pain as the pressure simply erased them.
Buildings across the arena’s outer sections collapsed one after another.
The tournament’s entire venue walls collapsed.
The arena stopped being an arena.
It became rubble.
Not a single structure remained upright inside the venue’s footprint.
The seating tiers were flattened, the service corridors were caved in. The competitor holding areas were buried beneath their own collapsed ceilings. Everything that had been built on that plot of land was reduced to a level, smoking field of broken stone in the span of a few seconds.
Samuel and Ace were the two people the attacks had been directed at, but neither of them had aimed the strikes at each other in isolation. The techniques had released enough energy to level everything in the surrounding. Even the Ascenders standing outside the direct impact vector had to raise their own defenses.
Tom’s golden fire flared around his body in a protective shell. The heat pressed inward against him, forcing him to channel more mana into the barrier. His expression was dark. He wasn’t afraid, but he was annoyed.
’Reckless bastards... using their strongest attacks. I could understand Ace since destruction is one of his goal... but Samuel...’
Farid’s face was set in the same disapproving line. He said nothing, but every second of maintaining the barrier drained him of energy he had been planning to use for the actual fight.
Sierra shot five arrows around her, each imbued with an element. They formed a beautiful barrier of the five elements around her body that protected her from the impact.
Klein was doing the same on the opposite side.
Outside the collapsed dome, the shockwave kept rolling.
The dark organization’s ambush teams that had been holding positions around the venue, the ones who had been waiting to catch fleeing competitors like the one that Moon encountered, found themselves suddenly exposed to a wave they hadn’t prepared for.
The weak Evolvers were killed by flying debris. Chunks of concrete the size of trucks tumbled through the surrounding streets, crushing anyone caught in the wrong alley. Others were killed by the shockwave itself.
The shockwave receded.
The two figures above the arena dissolved back into their owners. The sky above the venue, or what had been the venue, was smeared with residual color that would likely last for days.
Samuel stood in a wide crater at what had been the arena’s center.
Ace stood in his own crater, fifty meters away.
Neither of them had moved from where they had cast their attacks.
Both of them were significantly worse for it.
Ace’s aura had dropped considerably.
The presence that had radiated off him moments earlier that had staggered every fighter within the arena, was diminished now.
His robes hung in tatters across his body.
Multiple massive gashes spread across his torso and arms. The cuts were deep enough that his flesh was visible beneath the parted fabric, and blood ran freely from a dozen wounds along his ribs, his shoulders, and his hip.
One of the strikes had caught him across the collarbone at an angle that suggested it had come close to opening his throat. Another had opened his side in a diagonal line that ran nearly from his sternum to his lower back.
His breathing was ragged.
His face still carried a small smile, but the smile was strained now.
He raised one of his daggers.
Slowly.
His arm trembled slightly during the motion.
Meanwhile... Samuel was worse.
Where Ace had taken cuts across his body, Samuel had lost his left leg entirely.
One of Ace’s daggers had slipped past Samuel’s defense in the final fraction of the exchange. The strike had come at an angle Samuel hadn’t fully accounted for, and his last-second attempt to dodge had only redirected the impact from his chest to his hip. The dagger had punched through his upper thigh, tearing through muscle and femur alike, and continued its motion clean through the joint.
His leg had come off at mid-thigh.