Morvane was furious beyond reason.
Blood-red power surged through him in waves. At the center of his chest, a red light began to pulse—flashing again and again like a warning beacon. That energy slammed into the white-lightning restraints inside him, over and over, like it was seconds from detonating.
At the same time, Lopsy and the Treant had already closed in on Ethan.
Only a few meters left.
That kind of distance meant nothing.
What actually mattered was the danger underfoot—the roots creeping in.
Ethan dipped his chin, sensing the layers of earth.
"Three attacks."
He lifted his gaze to the two of them.
"You’re really giving me the VIP treatment."
He stopped waiting.
The white energy sphere he’d been hiding behind his hand—he drove it straight into his own body. Lightning threaded up his arm into his chest, then spread through every limb.
His body began to break apart from the edges.
Lopsy’s jagged sword and the Treant’s wooden drill hit at the same time, but Ethan was already gone. In his place, only a slow drift of black grains floated down between them.
At that exact moment, the underground roots burst through the mud.
They surged upward, closing in—
—and grabbed nothing but empty air.
Once he’d shifted into that black-grain state, Ethan let go of Morvane’s control.
The resistance inside the king was getting stronger by the second. If Ethan kept forcing the connection, he might leave himself open to something worse.
Get out first.
Find another opening later.
Black grains swirled around Lopsy and the Treant. Ethan watched them freeze there, momentarily stranded without a target, and for some reason, he almost laughed.
But he didn’t waste time.
The energy inside him was still compressing. White lightning hid among the black grains, squeezing tighter toward the center.
If he could blast both of them away in a single shot, the result would be... satisfying.
With Ethan’s grip gone, Morvane finally took his body back.
He hovered in the air for a beat, testing his arms and legs, then feeling out the extra power left inside him.
Swallowing Ethan’s energy sphere had come with a price—his body had been Ethan’s for a short time.
But the payoff wasn’t just raw strength.
The white lightning lingering in Morvane’s body had let him brush against something else: a razor-thin trace of theft and control.
It was pathetically small.
Not even close to what Ethan could do when he used it for real.
But for Morvane...
it was enough.
He lowered his head.
The greatsword that had fallen ahead of him answered his call, lifting off the ground and sliding back into his hand like it had never left.
Lopsy and the Treant noticed the change, too.
They didn’t know Ethan had released him—only that the king had raised his blade again. Instinctively, both of them backed off.
Lopsy tightened her grip on the broken sword.
The Treant drew its roots in close, bracing them in front of its body.
They stared at Morvane, tense, ready for him to swing at them again.
Morvane straightened.
The longsword in his hand suddenly shattered into countless tiny fragments. Then scarlet energy streamed between his fingers, gathering those pieces back together.
A blood-red longsword took shape in his grip.
At the same time, the power expanding inside him blew his upper clothes apart.
Fabric burst outward in two ragged halves.
In the center of his chest, a massive blood-red eye was exposed.
It turned slowly... then locked onto the distant barrier, the one buried under a writhing ring of souls.
Morvane lifted the blood sword.
Its tip pointed toward the battlefield ahead.
"What are you hesitating for?"
His voice made Lopsy and the Treant flinch hard.
"Move."
"Or do you want to get killed again?"
That was when they finally understood—Morvane was back.
The stone that had been crushing their hearts dropped away all at once.
Lopsy wiped the tears off her face. The stitched eye went cold again. The Treant pulled its roots back from its guard position and turned toward where Ethan had vanished.
And right then, a white energy sphere flew in from behind.
Dense lightning crawled all over its surface. The violent force ripped through the blood rain and black fog in its path, screaming straight for the three of them.
Lopsy and the Treant felt the pressure on their backs at the same time.
Lopsy snapped her scissor fragments outward, forming a metal shield.
The Treant raised both arms; branches wove together in a tight lattice, building a second layer—a wall of wood.
Two defenses, stacked in front of Morvane.
But Morvane didn’t step behind them.
He rested the blood sword on his shoulder and turned to face the incoming sphere.
Then he swung.
The blade cut sideways off his shoulder in a clean, brutal arc.
A blood-red sword wave leapt over Lopsy and the Treant’s shields and struck the white energy sphere head-on.
Ssshhk!
The sphere split neatly down the middle.
The lightning inside lost stability instantly, breaking into two snarling masses that shot left and right, slamming into the distant forest. White light flashed between dead trees, followed by two dull, heavy explosions.
Morvane didn’t even glance at the blasts.
That blood-red eye stayed fixed on the empty patch of ground ahead.
"You think if you hide, I can’t see you?"
He tilted his head slightly, his tone pure mockery.
"Why don’t you come out and take a look at me?"
"You were clinging to me so hard a second ago. Now you’re shy?"
Morvane watched the area as if someone was standing right there.
The blood-red longsword slid off his shoulder.
He tightened his grip, rose straight into the air, then rotated the blade downward and slammed it toward the ground.
In his black-grain form, Ethan watched all of it with a helpless kind of annoyance.
Morvane seriously thought he could see him?
He was just—
A violent sense of danger suddenly crushed into Ethan’s awareness.
Morvane, who’d been falling at a distance, was already above the black grains somehow.
The blood sword pointed at the densest cluster.
He has to move. Now.
Ethan fired the newly condensed energy sphere forward.
The moment it left, the recoil kicked like a cannon, blasting the nearby black grains backward. The grains snapped together again, and Ethan was forced out of the grain-state, his full body re-forming at a distance.
The blood sword came down.
Boom!
The ground split open into a deep trench. Mud, dead bone, and thick roots all flipped up and rolled away to either side.
Ethan hovered in the air farther off, staring coldly at Morvane standing in the center of the gash.
Morvane lifted his head.
When he saw Ethan again, he slung the blood sword back onto his shoulder, smiling faintly as he started walking forward, one step at a time.
The distance between them shrank.
And the unease in Ethan’s chest only swelled.
He needed to keep backing up.
He started to move—
—and his feet didn’t respond.
Then his hands.
Then everything.
His limbs went dead, completely disconnected from his will. Ethan could only hang there, rigid, watching Morvane close in.
The white lightning Ethan had threaded into Morvane had given him a brief ability to control the king.
But Morvane had stolen a sliver of that same nature from it.
And now the king was using it on Ethan.
Morvane stopped right in front of him.
The sword strike Ethan expected never came.
Instead, a cold hand rose and stroked Ethan’s face.
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