Chapter 204: War of Attrition
Garrett climbed out from behind his shattered pillar, blood running down his arm as he smiled.
"Nice work."
His voice carried genuine respect.
Then movement came the crater.
Vasek rose.
His body was a ruin. Burns covered every visible inch — third-degree, charring, some areas still smoking. His clothes had been incinerated entirely, leaving him naked from the waist up. His hair was gone, replaced by a scorched scalp that wept fluid. Blood dripped from a dozen places where the lightning had punched through fire-weakened flesh and cauterized the wounds shut.
He looked miserable.
His eyes were something else entirely.
"I didn’t want to use this against a bunch of children." His voice was hoarse, crackling like burning paper. "But you give me no choice."
He reached into the wreckage beside him — a small pouch that had somehow survived the crater — and produced a jade pill bottle. The pill inside glowed with soft green light. Heaven Grade. Without hesitation, Vasek swallowed it.
The effect was immediate.
Green light spread beneath his burned skin like water soaking into sand. The charred flesh began knitting — regenerating, replacing ruined tissue with new growth at a visible rate. In seconds, the worst burns faded from blackened meat to angry red scars.
Garrett attacked.
His blades came in low and fast — a diagonal rising slash aimed at Vasek’s exposed ribs. The Old Wolf was pressing the advantage while the syndicate boss was recovering.
Vasek’s hand moved.
WHAM.
Fire fist met twin blades. The impact sent shockwaves through the air — boom — and Garrett was thrown backward, feet skidding across the crater’s edge, arms numb from the vibration.
Vasek produced a second pill. This one was red, smaller, pulsing with internal energy that made the air around it shimmer.
Kael’s Spirit Eyes flared.
Heaven Grade cultivation booster. Forces the user’s cultivation toward the absolute limit of their current realm for a short duration. Blacklash: catastrophic mana depletion, meridian damage, potential realm collapse after expiration.
"Stop him!" Kael shouted.
He fired three Falling Star slashes in rapid succession — slash, slash, slash — the diagonal strikes screaming through the air toward Vasek’s hand.
Too late.
Vasek swallowed the red pill.
His aura exploded.
The Rank 9 pressure that had been imposing suddenly doubled — shooting past the peak of Mana Heart and into territory that didn’t belong to that realm at all. Heat radiated from his body in visible waves.
Quasi-Spirit Soul.
Vasek rose into the air.
Fire erupted beneath his feet. His eyes, already burning from the pill’s side effects, locked onto Kael with homicidal focus.
He launched himself.
Rank 9 fast was manageable. Quasi-Spirit Soul fast was something else entirely. Vasek crossed the distance between them in a time frame that Kael’s Thunder God-enhanced perception barely registered — a blur of fire and flesh that appeared in front of him and then struck.
Fire blast. Point blank. Directly to Kael’s face.
WHOOOOOM.
Kael’s world became heat and pain.
The impact launched him backward — ragdolling, his body tumbling end over end through the air before slamming into a stone wall with a sound like a breaking mountain. CRASH. The wall shattered. Kael went through it and crashed into the building behind it, coming to rest against a support beam that cracked under the impact.
Third-degree burns across his cheeks, forehead, and jaw. Skin blackened and peeling. Blood and blister fluid ran down his neck.
The pain was extraordinary.
Garrett—
"Kael!" Garrett’s voice, distant, panicked.
—Aria—
Light and shadow flared as Aria and Ruby engaged Vasek from opposite sides. Garrett joined a second later, wind around his blades as he drove toward the syndicate boss from the flank.
But it wasn’t enough.
Vasek’s fire-coated fist met Garrett’s blades and sent the Old Wolf spinning through the air — whump. Aria’s shadow tendrils wrapped around his arm, and he burned them away with a flex of mana — fizzle, crackle. Ruby’s water dragon surged toward his back, and he turned and obliterated it with a single fire blast — whoosh, BOOM.
The trio regrouped, breathing hard. Burns on all of them.
Kael pushed himself upright against the support beam. His face throbbed with agony. The burns were already healing — Void Body Refinement accelerated recovery — but slowly.
System.
[Healing Pill (Earth Grade) — 500 SP]
Purchase.
Confirmed. 500 SP deducted.
A pill appeared in his hand. He swallowed it. Warmth flooded through his body, accelerating cellular regeneration. The burns on his face knitted faster.
"Fuck it."
Kael walked toward the fight.
The pain in his face was a distant throb beneath the healing pill’s numbing effect. His mana reserves sat at just 63%— the Thunder God technique had been expensive plus he hadn’t stop to recover his mana since the beginning of this mission, but his Transcendent Core was already recovering.
The trio were being overwhelmed.
Garrett deflected a fire fist with a wind barrier — crack — but the shockwave sent him stumbling. Aria’s shadow clones distracted Vasek for two seconds before being incinerated. Ruby’s misdirection created an opening that Garrett nearly exploited before Vasek’s fire cloak expanded and forced them all back.
Kael reached the edge of the battle and formed the mudra.
Both fists interlocking. Fingers threading together in a pattern.
He began the chant.
"The sky was never meant to be a ceiling; it is a weight waiting to collapse. Your strength is but a fragile fiction, your arrogance but dust drifting in a cosmic press. Fall from your pedestal, break upon the unyielding stone, and learn the true geometry of absolute surrender. Now, kneel before the axis of the world."
"Reality Annex: Bed of the Sunken Horizon."
The world bent.
The horizon line literally curved downward, tilting toward the earth as if gravity itself had changed its mind about which direction was down. The clouds spiraled inward. The sky above the compound darkened to a heavy indigo that pressed against the eyes like physical weight.
The domain covered a 50-meter radius.
Vasek fell to his knees.
THUD.
The quasi-Spirit Soul pressure meant nothing against the gravity domain’s fundamental rule. Six times normal gravity crushed down on his body, forcing him to the ground despite cultivation that should have let him resist. Fire erupted around him in a desperate cloak, fighting the pressure.
The trio staggered as the domain’s initial expansion washed over them — then straightened in confusion as they realized the crushing pressure had missed them entirely but even Kael couldn’t completely excluded them from the domain’s effect but he could minimize it to 2x the pressure.
Kael’s eyes found them.
"What the fuck are you standing there for? Finish him. I can’t do this forever."
Garrett moved first. Aria and Ruby followed.
Then Kael made the binding contract.
I restrict my own mobility within this domain — in exchange for ten times the gravitational pressure on the primary target. All other individuals within the domain are excluded from its effects.
The contract clicked into place. Kael’s legs locked. His body became a fixed point at the domain’s center, unable to move, unable to do anything but maintain the technique.
But Vasek felt the change immediately.
The six-times gravity that had been crushing him doubled. Then doubled again. Gravity pressed down on his body like the weight of a mountain. His fire cloak sputtered, thinned, nearly collapsed under the impossible pressure.
"Aaaargh—!" Vasek’s roar was half rage, half agony. His knees buckled further. His hands slammed into the ground to keep himself from being flattened entirely.
How?! His thoughts raced through the pain. A Rank 1 child is using a Reality Annex? That’s impossible — he shouldn’t have comprehension of this level—
Garrett’s blades came down on his shoulders.
CLANG. CLANG.
The fire cloak absorbed most of the impact, but the gravity was already weakening it. Each strike landed harder than the last because Vasek couldn’t adjust his position to deflect.
Ruby’s water attacks followed — splash, splash — high-pressure jets that slammed into the fire cloak from multiple angles, testing its integrity.
Aria’s shadow tendrils struck from below — schlick, schlick — wrapping around Vasek’s ankles, trying to pull him down, add to the gravitational pressure, find any weakness.
Vasek gritted his teeth. Blood ran from his nose, ears, and eyes — the intense gravity was rupturing capillaries throughout his body. His muscles screamed. His bones creaked. Afterall, he wasn’t a beast to withstand this amount of pressure.
But he was a syndicate boss who had survived Zenthoria for fifteen years. He hadn’t survived by being weak.
He clapped his hands together.
"Embers of the Sovereign’s Hearth."
Fire mana —refined — concentrated into a perfect sphere of thermal energy that expanded to exactly three meters around his body. The sphere wasn’t an attack. It was a bubble. A sanctuary.
A King Grade technique.
The gravitational pressure slammed against the thermal barrier and was deflected. The three-meter radius around Vasek became an island of normal gravity in a sea of crushing weight.
"The demon who gave me this technique said it could resist anything." Vasek thought. "Even a domain."
Garrett attacked the bubble with both blades — clang, clang, clang — and the attacks bounced off like stones off a fortress wall. The thermal barrier absorbed kinetic energy and dissipated it as heat distortion.
Aria launched a concentrated beam of light directly at Vasek’s head. The beam struck the bubble, refracted around its surface, and scattered harmlessly into the mist.
Ruby’s water dragon — crashed into the barrier and evaporated on contact, becoming steam that the bubble’s heat immediately dispersed.
"The weakness," Kael said, his voice carrying across the domain despite his immobility, "is that technique like that requires absolute stillness. If you shake his stance, the bubble shatters."
Vasek’s eyes found Kael through the mist. They burned with fury.
But understanding the weakness and exploiting it were different things.
Garrett, Aria, and Ruby continued their assault. Three-on-one outside the bubble, hammering at Vasek’s defenses from every angle. The syndicate boss’s fire cloak had been replaced by the thermal barrier, but maintaining it under constant attack while simultaneously resisting the intense gravity was burning through his mana reserves at a terrifying rate.
Sweat poured down Vasek’s face. His muscles trembled. The bubble flickered — pulse, pulse — each fluctuation making the trio attack harder, sensing the weakness.
Kael watched and calculated.
His mana reserves were draining but Vasek’s reserves were draining faster.
The thermal bubble was a King Grade technique resisting a domain amplified by a binding contract. The mana cost was astronomical. Every second Vasek maintained it, he was burning through resources that had taken years to accumulate. His very own cultivation.
This was a war of attrition.