Chapter : 937
It was a brilliant, desperate move, but Kael was prepared. He had seen her earth-based tactics. With a powerful beat of his wings, he arrested his dive just inches from the trap, hovering in the air with a mocking laugh. “No more tricks, witch!” he snarled, adjusting his aim for a strike from above.
While Kael engaged Habiba, Jager and his spirit moved on Ken. There was no finesse, no cunning feint. This was an execution. Kroth charged, a battering ram of iron scales and insatiable hunger, its massive jaws gaping wide. Jager followed in its wake, his one good hand wielding a long, wicked-looking knife, ready to exploit the opening his spirit created.
Ken did not retreat. He did not try to outmaneuver the beast. He met the charge head-on. His body, stripped of its divine armor, was still a weapon of terrifying potency. He roared, a sound of pure, primal defiance, and his fists became blurs of motion. He was no longer a demon lord, but a cornered berserker, his every blow a testament to a lifetime of brutal, unforgiving combat.
He met the alligator’s charge with a punch that seemed to buckle the very air. The impact sent a shockwave through the clearing, but the King-Rank spirit, fueled by its master’s will, barely flinched. Its jaws snapped shut, missing Ken’s torso by a hair's breadth as he twisted away. In that same instant, Jager was there, his knife flashing in the purple light, aimed for Ken’s throat.
Ken was forced into a desperate, defensive dance. He was fighting a two-front war, his fists against the overwhelming mass of the alligator, his senses screaming to track the faster, more lethal threat of the master. He landed a crushing blow on Kroth’s snout, staggering the beast, but the opening allowed Jager to slash a deep, bleeding gash across his back. He spun, his elbow catching Jager in the ribs with enough force to crack bone, but the alligator’s tail, a massive, scythe-like appendage, slammed into his legs, sending him stumbling.
He was being overwhelmed. His strength was immense, but it was finite. He was one man against a monster and its master, and he was losing.
Habiba’s situation was just as dire. Trapped in a stalemate, with Kael hovering just out of her reach, she was forced to play a desperate game of area denial, creating small pockets of quicksand and erupting sharp stone spikes to keep him at bay. But each use of her Void power was a drain on her already depleted reserves. Her movements were becoming slower, her defenses more frantic. Kael toyed with her, launching shallow, probing dives, forcing her to expend her energy, waiting for the inevitable moment when she would falter.
That moment came. After erecting a particularly large barrier of stone, she swayed, a wave of dizziness washing over her. Her concentration flickered for a single, fatal instant.
Kael saw it. With a triumphant roar, he dove, his lance no longer a probe but a killing strike. The stone barrier she had just created was her undoing; it blocked her line of retreat. She was trapped.
She raised her scimitar, a final, defiant gesture against the descending angel of death. It was a beautiful, hopeless act of courage.
Inside the carriage, Lloyd watched the two brutal ballets reach their grim conclusions. He saw Ken, bleeding from a dozen wounds, being systematically broken down by the combined might of Jager and his beast. He saw Habiba, her energy spent, about to be impaled. The time for observation was over. The time for calculation was past.
Amina, her face a pale mask of controlled horror, was tracing frantic, glowing runes in the air, her mind racing to find a flaw, a weakness, a resonance frequency in the purple barrier that she could exploit. “It’s a closed system,” she finally whispered, her voice tight with a frustration that bordered on despair. “Perfectly stable. I can’t break it from the outside. There are no external weaknesses.”
“Good,” Lloyd said, his voice a chilling, absolute calm that cut through her rising panic. “Because the weakness was never on the outside.”
He closed his eyes. The chaotic, violent world of the clearing vanished, replaced by the sleek, star-filled interface of his System. His mind, a blur of cold, dispassionate calculation, flew through his mental inventory. He had known this was a possibility. A contingency. The assassins were professionals, and professionals always have a trump card. He had, therefore, prepared one of his own.
Chapter : 938
During his days in Zakaria, while publicly playing the part of the humble doctor, he had spent his nights in the time-dilated Soul Farm, not just training, but investing. He had poured the immense profits from his AURA empire, the gold converted into a steady, flowing river of System Coins, into diversifying his arsenal. He knew his two Trans-cended spirits were his greatest strength, but they were also a known quantity, a power that a sufficiently prepared enemy might find a way to counter. So he had purchased something new. Something different. Something… conceptual.
His will focused on two, dormant, and previously un-activated icons in his spirit roster. Two Commander-Rank spirit cores he had acquired directly from the System Shop, chosen not for their raw power, but for their unique, paradigm-shifting abilities. They were specialized tools, purchased at great expense for a moment just like this. A moment where the enemy believed they had seen all his cards and had him in a perfect, inescapable checkmate.
He was not gambling. He was not praying. He was deploying a pre-planned, strategic counter-measure.
[COMMANDER-RANK SPIRIT CORE 1: ‘ECHO’ - ACTIVATING]
[COMMANDER-RANK SPIRIT CORE 2: ‘ABYSS’ - ACTIVATING]
[SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE]
A new, bizarre energy signature, something alien and unclassifiable, erupted from the carriage. Jager, who was about to deliver a final, gloating monologue to the battered Ken, froze. Kael, his lance inches from Habiba’s throat, faltered, his head snapping towards the source of the impossible new power.
The Commander’s counter--attack had just begun.
The eruption of new spiritual energy was not a cataclysm like the summoning of Iffrit or the merge with Fang Fairy. It was something far stranger, more insidious. It was a discordant note in the symphony of the Soul Catcher’s oppressive hum, a ripple of pure, untamed potential in the sterile, controlled environment of the cage. Jager’s mind, which had been savoring the imminent, brutal victory, was thrown into a state of chaotic confusion.
“What is this?” he hissed, his gaze locked on the carriage. “IImpossible! This kid has two more spirits? This is the first time I've ever seen someone with four spirits.”
His arrogant certainty, the very foundation of his perfect trap, was cracking. He was a master of the rules, and someone had just, with contemptuous ease, broken them.
From the open door of the carriage, two new forms emerged, materializing into the purple-tinged air. They were unlike any spirits Jager had ever seen or read about in the forbidden texts.
The first was a being of pure, shimmering paradox. It was semi-corporeal, a fluidic, ever-shifting entity of silver light and deep, velvety shadow. It had no discernible shape, no limbs, no face. It was a living question mark, a formless being of infinite potential, and it drifted from the carriage with an unnerving, silent grace. This was the Doppelganger.
The second was a creature of raw, brutal, and focused purpose. It was a ten-foot-long Great White Shark, but it was not made of flesh and blood. It was composed of swirling, hyper-pressurized water, its form a vortex of contained hydrodynamic force. Its skin was a constant, roiling current, and its eyes were two pits of cold, black, absolute nothingness. This was a predator, a concept of oceanic death given form.
The two new spirits flanked Lloyd, who stood calmly in the carriage doorway, his expression one of detached, almost academic, interest. He was a scientist who had just introduced two new, highly reactive chemicals into a volatile experiment and was waiting to observe the results.
Jager and Kael were frozen, their minds struggling to process the impossible reality before them. It was not just that their enemy had summoned spirits; it was the nature of them. They were Commander Ranked, raw, their auras a chaotic blend of nascent power that did not conform to the established hierarchy of Ascension or Transcendence.
Lloyd did not give them time to think. He gave a single, silent, mental command.
Then, in a move of such breathtaking, insane audacity that it shattered the last vestiges of Jager’s composure, Lloyd’s own body dissolved. He did not explode into light or shadow. He simply came apart, his physical form breaking down into a torrent of swirling, azure-colored water. The torrent flowed forward, not touching the ground, and merged seamlessly with the White Shark spirit.