Chapter 579: The Canvas Has Been Completed
Tom’s flames still pushed him back. Farid’s elements still cut off every retreat angle. Baaron was fighting with the fury of a cornered animal, and it wasn’t enough.
Nobody was coming for him.
The master he had been serving, the figure he had trusted absolutely to win this battle, wasn’t answering his calls of help.
Baaron was panicking beyond reason. Moon could see it from a hundred meters away. His stance had lost its shape.
His swings had lost their control. He was cycling through desperate strikes at Tom, then at Farid, then at Tom again, hoping one of them would land badly enough to give him a window of escape.
Tom was having the time of his life.
His grin hadn’t dimmed at all. His golden gloves still flared brightly, he still had plenty left in the tank. He was walking Baaron toward his death at a pace that must have felt agonizing to the man trying to survive it.
Moon watched it all.
Then his eyes drifted to Ace.
Ace was completely unbothered.
His fight with Alaric hadn’t shifted by a single degree. His posture was the same. His breathing was the same. His smile was the same. The Ascender was dying just hundreds of meters away, screaming for help that wasn’t coming, and Ace’s face carried no reaction whatsoever.
No disappointment or urgency to how to save the situation.
He wasn’t watching Baaron.
He wasn’t listening for the master’s response.
He was just fighting Alaric.
He knew Baaron was going to die. He already knew the operation Moon had been watching was going to end exactly the way it was ending, with the dark organization’s second Ascender dying, their reinforcements falling, and the battlefield settling into a decisive Association victory.
He knew all of it.
And it didn’t matter.
Because whatever the dark organization had actually come here to accomplish, it wasn’t any of the things they had appeared to be trying to accomplish.
Suddenly, the missing puzzle landed in place.
"What if..."
Baaron dying wasn’t a failure. Ian dying wasn’t a failure. The reinforcements being ground to dust wasn’t a failure.
Moon’s heart sank.
"Shit."
At that moment, the lead Moon had been reaching for finally arrived.
The picture he had been trying to paint finally grew into shape all at once.
The low life gains from every kill. The dark organization’s fighters being pre-drained before they arrived.
Moon had been reading it as a defensive measure. A way to reduce what the Association gained from the battle.
That had felt off the entire time, because it was too small an objective for the scale of the operation. The organization could always kill Association members later and recover whatever lives they lost. It wasn’t the kind of goal you built such a large scale operation around.
And he was right because it wasn’t the goal.
The drained lives weren’t gone. Life pools didn’t just disappear. They had been transferred somewhere.
They were accumulating...
Every fighter the organization had committed to this battle had been walking around with their normal life pool.
But when it mattered, the vast majority was siphoned to whoever controlled the drain.
Their master.
The master had been quietly accumulating an enormous stockpile of lives for so long, using their own subordinates as containers to move the resource as they pleased.
And every time one of those subordinates died in this battle, most of their lives would get transferred somewhere else.
When the Association killed those fighters, the Association got the leftover fragments. Small returns. The dregs at the bottom of the barrel. Which meant every kill on the Association’s side was, essentially, an efficiency gain for the master’s plan. Every enemy the Association killed wasn’t actually destroying their plan.
Nothing meaningful was being lost to the master, but rather his goal was being fulfilled.
All while the master had spent months accumulating a life pool that would put an Ascender’s total lifetime accumulation to shame.
Moon’s mind raced through the possibilities. The stockpile could feed an evolution. Or it could be the ammunition for a single, catastrophic move. Something that required an enormous life cost to execute, one that no ordinary Ascender could afford without spending decades building up the reserves.
Just like his Life Burn, the master could have a similar skill.
It could also fuel a breakthrough.
Moon’s stomach dropped.
The master hadn’t come here to win the battle.
The master had come here to gain and spend the stockpile to reach his goal.
Moon’s eyes snapped toward Klein.
The traitor Ascender was still locked in his exchange with Sierra across the western section of the arena. His stance was defensive. His eyes focused and his breathing uninterrupted.
The man should have been panicking since their plan had failed catastrophically.
The organization he had been silently serving for years was losing on every measurable front. Any rational Ascender in his position should have been fighting desperately, either to escape or to inflict as much damage as possible before being taken down, just like Baaron.
But Klein wasn’t fighting desperately. He was fighting patiently, without over exerting himself.
He was buying time.
His eyes flicked briefly toward Baaron’s engagement, and his face was filled with panic and fear. Just like Ian had been before his death.
He doesn’t know what’s coming.
Moon’s gaze whipped back to Tom.
The old fox was committed to his strike. His golden gloves were flaring bright as he closed the distance for the first time since the fight between himself and Baaron began.
The old fox had found his chance and he wasn’t going to miss it.
His footwork had shifted into the aggressive close-in pattern Moon had seen him use only a handful of times all fight. Farid’s elemental arrays were already forming around Baaron’s position, cutting off every escape angle.
Tom’s fist drove forward in a killing punch.
Moon’s mouth opened.
"NO! DON’T KILL HIM!" Moon’s voice tore across the arena, amplified by mana, hoping to reach Tom in time.