Chapter 119: Varanus VS Damascus [4]
The dark, conceptual voids where Damascus’s shoulders used to be flared with a violent, bruised-purple light.
’It’s fine! He’s just a Fake with some trick!’ Damascus screamed internally, desperately feeding his shrinking reserves of Divine Essence into his shattered upper torso.
In a flash of blinding purple divine fire, raw flesh, muscle, and bone knitted back together at an impossible speed.
His arms fully regenerated in less than a second.
Forcing down the primal dread gnawing at his core, Damascus re-ignited his resolve.
He was a True God of the Death Faction! He had survived countless life threatening schemes.
He would not be intimidated by an incomplete anomaly!
"Die!" Damascus bellowed, his voice carrying the authority of an absolute decree.
He launched himself forward.
The spatial acceleration was so profound that physical reality couldn’t keep up—the atmosphere tore open, creating a massive vacuum behind him.
Damascus was restricted to ten percent of his true power, but that ten percent held the physical weight, sheer velocity, and overwhelming essence of a god.
Roy’s physical baseline, though far surpassing a mortal Martial Supreme, was instantly put to the ultimate test.
BOOM!
They collided in mid-air. Roy intercepted Damascus’s down-sweeping blow, but the raw speed and brute force of the True God shattered Roy’s balance.
Roy’s heels plowed through the melting obsidian floor, forced backward as Damascus unleashed a relentless barrage of divine martial strikes.
Left hook.
Straight right.
Knee to the ribs.
Every single hit landed with the force of an exploding star.
Roy blocked, parried, and struck back, but he was constantly on the back foot, his body staggering under the sheer disparity in raw physical specs.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The destruction of Norona City went from catastrophic to absolute.
The violent shockwaves of their clash tore through the already ruined infrastructure, grinding stone, metal, and soil into fine atomic ash.
The heat generated by their divine auras burned the very air away, turning the ruined metropolis into an inferno of crimson and bruised-purple energy.
Yet, there were no mortal screams to accompany the apocalypse.
Miles away, the armies of Varania were in a mad, desperate sprint across the scorching sands of the Hudeii Desert.
High Priest Croak led the vanguard, carrying the unconscious human knight-priest Hector over his shoulder like a sack of grain, while Alisa, Trojan, Brenda, and Manuses flanked the retreating ranks, relentlessly pushing the soldiers past their physical limits.
They were running for their lives, but their eyes kept darting back.
At the heavily fortified entrance of the Kingdom of Varania, the Dukes stood atop the high outer walls, keeping watch.
Their faces were deathly pale, their lips drawn into tight, solemn lines.
Their hands gripped the stone ramparts so tightly that their knuckles turned white.
Even from this massive distance, the world was ending.
The serene blue desert sky had bled into a terrifying, swirling sea of deep crimson and toxic purple.
Thunderless flashes of divine light illuminated the horizon, and the physical earth beneath the kingdom’s massive gates shook with a low, continuous rumble.
The sheer, oppressive pressure of the Divine Essence drifting across the desert made the air feel thick, heavy, and difficult to breathe.
"What in the heavens... is happening out there?" High Priest Croak whispered, his voice trembling as he stared into the chaotic, crimson expanse.
They didn’t know the full truth of True Gods and False Gods.
But their beast instincts screamed the same terrifying reality:
The God of Varania was fighting a monster, and the desert was burning because of it.
**
High above the burning ruins of Norona City, the upper atmosphere fractured.
Damascus caught Roy clean under the chin with an upward, divine-infused strike.
The force was so immense it shattered the cloud line, launching Roy’s golden-haired frame thousands of meters straight up into the stratosphere.
Without giving his opponent a single millisecond to recover, Damascus ignited his Divine Essence.
He ascended like a streak of purple lightning, flying with absolute precision through the atmospheric vacuum.
The air screamed as he closed the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat.
Hovering directly above the ascending False God, Damascus pulled his right fist back, his golden eyes blazing with cruel triumph.
He aimed to drive Roy straight back into the crust of the desert with enough force to completely crush his divine core.
He threw the punch.
Suddenly, Roy’s pale, gold-flecked irises flickered.
There was no sudden surge of divine essence..
There was no visible movement.
But in that exact microsecond, every single cosmic instinct inside Damascus’s soul screamed in pure, absolute panic.
It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced since his mortal days—the cold, icy grip of immediate execution.
Obeying pure survival instinct over divine pride, Damascus forcefully aborted his strike mid-motion.
He detonated a sphere of raw energy behind himself, violently bouncing backward through space to put fifty meters between them.
He landed heavily on a floating chunk of scorched bedrock, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped beast.
"What...?" Damascus rasped, his voice shaking.
Tink.
A microscopic drop of luminous golden blood trickled down his collarbone.
Damascus slowly reached up, his fingers touching his neck.
A fine, razor-thin cut had opened cleanly across his throat.
It hadn’t severed his windpipe, but it was precise, deep, and impossibly sharp.
He stared at his bloodied fingers in utter disbelief.
He had no idea what had just happened.
He hadn’t seen a blade, felt an energy wave, or detected a domain expansion.
One second he was about to deliver a fatal blow, and the next, space itself had been quietly, invisibly severed right where his throat had been a millisecond prior.
Cold sweat broke out across Damascus’s forehead, washing away the last remnants of his arrogance.
He didn’t know what kind of monstrous authority lay hidden beneath the title of Ruler of Beasts, but his divine mind instantly processed the terrifying truth:
If he had hesitated for even a fraction of a second...
If he hadn’t bounced back the exact moment Roy’s eyes flickered...
His head would have been cleanly severed from his vessel, ending his descent right then and there.