Chapter 233: How Are You Supposed to Fight Someone with Cheats?
Inside his body, the pair of Seals of Enlightenment that had been running steadily all this time suddenly released a soundless roar.
Their rotation speed surged severalfold, then dozens of times over. No longer gentle pumps, they became two frenzied springs of Mana, drawing in, converting, and erupting outward with violent force.
Boom!
An indescribably vast power was awakened and drawn forth as though from the void itself, exploding outward with the twin seals as its core.
It was not a stream.
It was a tsunami. A volcanic eruption.
A torrent of Mana—pure, condensed, and carrying a strange pulse of life—instantly washed away every trace of blockage, exhaustion, and pain within Ryan’s body.
A dried riverbed was filled by a raging flood.
Cracked land was soaked by sweet rain.
A dying flame was fanned into life by a hurricane.
“Ugh!” Ryan let out a muffled groan despite himself. His power surged so violently that his body felt as though it were about to split apart.
An invisible ring of Mana rippled outward from him, and even the air warped.
Parker’s thrusting sword, which had come within less than three inches of Ryan’s throat, seemed to collide with a wall of unimaginable toughness and could advance no farther.
The icy-blue Mana on the blade churned violently, already showing signs of collapse.
“What?!” The savage grin on Parker’s face froze and twisted into horror.
He felt as though his sword had been thrust into solidified, viscous energy.
What made his soul tremble even more was that the Mana fluctuation radiating from Ryan was rising at a crazed pace unlike anything before.
That crushing pressure made his breathing falter, and even the hand gripping his sword began to tremble.
Ryan slowly lifted his head.
The eyes that had once been a quiet gray-blue now seemed to burn with furnaces in their depths.
An indescribable transformation was taking place.
The gray-blue base of his eyes receded like a tide, rapidly overtaken by a blazing crimson-gold color that seemed to contain the purest origin of energy itself—majestic, burning, and supreme.
That crimson-gold was not entirely stable. Around its edges and deep within his pupils, faint traces of gray-blue still remained, as though resisting, or perhaps struggling to adapt and fuse.
In the end, his eyes settled into a strange color dominated by crimson-gold, with only a faint remnant of gray-blue still lingering in the deepest part of the pupils.
That change in his eyes brought with it an utterly different elevation in temperament.
The calm that had once defined him was replaced by something colder, more detached, as though he now bore some vast will that transcended the individual, merely reflecting with indifferent stillness the slaughter and insignificance before him.
The wound in his calf, torn open by the Shadow Tentacle, was washed by that surging Mana, which was so abundant it was nearly spilling out of him. The muscle fibers wriggled and knit together as though alive, while the skin closed and regrew at a speed visible to the naked eye, leaving behind only a faint red line—then even that line disappeared.
He did not look at Parker’s face, twisted by terror.
It was as though Parker had already become dust unworthy of his attention.
And at the very instant his eyes fully transformed into crimson-gold, a strange resonance suddenly arose between him and the Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss in his hand.
The earlier sense of incompatibility, the obstruction in Mana conduction, vanished in an instant like ice and snow beneath the sun.
The longsword seemed to awaken from slumber. Sensing the vast and pure new power within its wielder, it let out a delighted hum.
The blade’s deep azure color remained cold as ever, but the frost-Mana structure within it—once stable to the point of rejection—had now become astonishingly docile and hungry. Of its own accord, it entered into perfect resonance and fusion with the new Mana surging through Ryan, tinged with that crimson-gold undertone.
Ryan no longer needed to laboriously pour Mana into it or forcefully guide it.
The sword had already become one of the finest extensions of his power.
What was stranger still was that Ryan could clearly feel that, at this moment, the sword seemed to possess some property that could devour or neutralize outside Mana.
Interesting. It seemed that the true potential of this sword could only be awakened by a matching power.
He no longer needed to attach extra Mana to the blade. The sword’s own bitterly cold aura intertwined with the authority radiating naturally from the vast power in his body, forming a unique field around him.
He looked at Parker, whose face had gone deathly pale and who had instinctively taken half a step back. Then he swept his gaze across Vincent and the others, who had all slowed, thrown into uncertainty by the sudden change on this side of the battlefield. At last, his eyes returned to Parker’s face.
“Just now,” Ryan said, “what was it you were saying?”
Before the words had even fully fallen, his figure blurred.
There was no sonic boom tearing through the air, no trailing afterimage, not even the faintest breeze stirred by his movement. To everyone watching, he had merely flickered, like a brief ripple across still water, and already appeared less than a meter from Parker’s side.
That kind of movement defied reason. It was fast to the point of seeming like a blink.
Sensing death, Parker’s beast-like instincts and years of battle-forged reflexes forcibly crushed down his fear. Somehow, he exploded with every ounce of his potential, letting out a desperate low roar from his throat as he madly poured icy-blue Mana into his broken sword and slashed sideways with all his strength.
That strike held nothing back.
The sharp sword wind tore the air apart and swept up a spray of ice crystals, intent on forcing Ryan back.
Ryan merely lifted Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss in a casual upward block.
Clang!
A crisp ring of colliding steel.
Yet the expected clash of Mana and shower of ice fragments never came.
The surging icy-blue Mana on Parker’s blade vanished the instant it touched Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss.
It dissolved soundlessly, annihilated like thin mist beneath a blazing sun.
As though it had never existed at all.
All that remained was a broken, dim, ordinary sword, stripped of its magical radiance, colliding helplessly with the azure blade.
The horror on Parker’s face instantly turned to blank disbelief.
The frost Mana he had built his name upon... was gone?
And in that instant of rigidity brought on by the failure of his Mana—
Ryan turned his wrist.
Frostbite Dragon’s Kiss slid down along the length of Parker’s broken sword, and the cold tip of the blade touched his throat with the softness of a lover’s whisper.
There was no dazzling magical glow attached to it.
Only the ultimate chill carried by the blade itself, and the pressure of death that came from Ryan’s detached gaze.
“No... im...” Parker’s eyes bulged horribly from suffocation and terror. The last word was trapped in his constricting throat and crumbled into broken breath.
The blade’s tip rested against the skin of Parker’s throat, not yet piercing it, but the destructive energy condensed to the extreme was already making the flesh there burn with agony. The cold of death froze his blood and his thoughts in an instant.
Thk.
The low sound of steel entering flesh.
The azure tip of the sword emerged from the back of Parker’s neck, carrying with it a string of blood droplets that rapidly froze into dark-red crystals.
Parker—one of the Second Prince’s most notorious subordinates, an Imperial genius magic swordsman upon whom so many hopes had once been placed—convulsed violently once.
All the light in his eyes went out like candle flames snuffed by the wind, dimming and fading until nothing remained but dead ash.
Ryan drew back his sword.
Parker’s head flew up, his face frozen in the very height of terror and unwillingness. His headless body swayed once, then collapsed face-first onto the ground. Only a small amount of blood seeped from the wound at his throat before the lingering cold sealed it shut.
Silence.
A deathly, scalp-prickling silence, as thick and suffocating as the heaviest ink, instantly swallowed the entire vast and dark nest.
Because what had just happened before their eyes had already passed beyond the limits of understanding.
This was not mere superiority of technique. Nor was it simply a difference in strength.
It was... the overturning of the rules themselves.
Parker and the others each had their own specialties, but at the end of the day, the foundation of all their combat was magic.
If the Mana they relied on to survive, to fight, and to take pride in themselves had become a ridiculous joke before that strange sword and those detached crimson-gold eyes—
Then what meaning did victory or defeat in battle still have?
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