At his words, Eletantron's expression twisted violently. The tension, stretched thin like a thread on the verge of snapping, finally shattered.
His aura detonated like a nuclear blast, an explosion of black energy that surged across the battlefield, swallowing the land in oppressive pressure. The skies dimmed. The air groaned.
"You dare deceive the Alliance?" Eletantron's voice thundered. "I'll show you the consequences of your defiance!"
The air warped around him. Space trembled.
And then, millions of spatial blades tore into existence, black and jagged, each one humming with reality-severing intent.
They blotted out the sun, forming a dome of death above Atticus.
With a single gesture, Eletantron unleashed them.
Blades screamed through the air like razors carving the wind, velocity so sharp it tore through sound.
The paragons' eyes widened, expressions contorting in disbelief.
To think Eletantron would suddenly attack Atticus…
But as they turned to him, they saw it. Atticus's eyes remained calm. Like still water before a tempest.
A single thought, and then, a pulse.
Black crimson energy erupted from him like a wave of annihilation, meeting the oncoming storm. The instant they touched, the spatial blades disintegrated, erased utterly, atom by atom, as if they had never existed at all.
Eletantron's pupils contracted. Shock slammed into him like a hammer. His spatial blades had been disintegrated by a single pulse!?
His gaze dropped, to see Atticus unsheathing his katana slowly, the sharp scrape of metal against scabbard echoing across the battlefield that had turned as silent as a grave.
His exosuit jutted out from his chest, snapping outward in segments that surged across his body, locking into place. A crimson-purple shroud flared over his face, flickering like living flame.
And then came the killing intent.
Dense, suffocating, monstrous. It crashed onto the battlefield, drowning everything beneath its weight.
Atticus spoke no words.
He didn't need to.
He already had. His earlier words had been a warning. A gift. A chance for survival for the paragons. But they'd chosen to ignore it.
Now, there would be no more words.
Only action.
Atticus moved.
A blur. A crack. A sonic boom.
In an instant, he was upon Eletantron. His katana descended, nay, it collapsed. Like a star imploding into a blade, dragging the world's breath with it.
Pressure spiked. Gravity twisted. And for a heartbeat, the battlefield felt hollow, like everything had been pulled into the edge of that strike, into something too vast, too final to resist.
Eletantron's eyes exploded wide, an enormous cloud of fear slamming into him. His hands shot upward, freezing the space in front of him in a culmination of spatial barriers stacked upon each other, thick enough to block paragons.
Dark crimson met black.
The collision birthed an explosion of titanic proportions. Light erupted, blinding, scorching the sky and shaking the land.
Zenon's eyes widened, along with the other paragons. In an instant, they sprang into action, throwing up barriers, shielding their apexes and recruits from the devastating shockwave.
But while chaos rippled across the field, Eletantron faced something worse.
Inside the blinding blast, inside that storm of force, he was fighting another battle entirely.
His barriers were collapsing.
Layer after layer shattered, space itself fleeing under the weight of Atticus's swing. His katana kept descending, cutting through every defense Eletantron summoned.
In a flicker, it was there, in front of his bulging eyes, a katana falling like judgment itself.
Time slowed to a crawl.
His mind raced. He couldn't believe it. Couldn't grasp it. His reality warped under the sheer pressure of it all.
Death had never felt so close before… so final.
But then, reality slammed into him like the weight of a planet. He didn't want to die.
Eletantron's eyes sharpened. A cloak of space wrapped around him, twisting, snapping, and then, he vanished, the blade missing by a hair's breadth.
He reappeared in the distance, gasping, only to witness the aftermath.
The ground had been split open, a jagged chasm carved deep into the earth, molten energy bubbling at its core.
The sky above had been ripped apart, light and shadow swirling in chaotic halos. The air still screamed from the strike, echoes of destruction vibrating in the bones of everyone present.
The glow of it, the raw, seething shadow-crimson light, reflected on the faces of the recruits and paragons, each of them frozen in place, eyes wide, jaws slack.
Silence.
Silence… before it shattered.
"You—!"
Azrakan's voice thundered across the battlefield, snapping every single person out of their reverie.
His aura erupted and space convulsed, warped, twisted, then collapsed violently, detonating in a cacophony of shockwaves that tore through the air toward Atticus.
But the crimson-purple shroud on Atticus's face only flared, brighter, wilder, dancing in the wind.
And then, his aura exploded.
Not a surge. Not a release.
It was like something ancient had stirred, like a god exhaling for the first time in centuries.
A wave of force erupted from him, as though a star had gone supernova.
The paragons felt it instantly. All of them.
Their hearts skipped. Their heads recoiled.
So much power… it was terrifying.
The moment it burst forth, Azrakan's spatial explosions disintegrated, erased mid-flight like fragile illusions caught in a cosmic storm.
Then, Atticus's voice came.
"Endless Blade."
A flash of dark crimson, and then the sky cracked.
There was no source. No motion. No form.
Just slashes. As though the heavens themselves had been split open, cracks tearing across the sky, each one birthing a blade.
Countless dark crimson slashes.
Uncountable. Unrelenting. Millions.
They descended like death incarnate, blotting out the sky, a rain of devastation that twisted the wind and warped space with every swing.
Azrakan's heart thundered in his chest.
Panic surged through him. His arms moved in a blur, spatial shields layered upon spatial shields, air compressed into diamond-hard barriers.
But the slashes came.
And they tore through everything.
Shields shattered. Layers disintegrated. Defenses melted like a hot knife through tofu.
Nothing held.
As the final layer collapsed, a spatial cloak enveloped Azrakan and he vanished just in time.
He reappeared far off in the distance, gasping, his body tense, heart pounding in his ears.
Behind him was the aftermath.
The ground had been carved beyond recognition, a landscape of scorched scars and shattered terrain.
Chasms stretched for miles, debris still falling from the sky. The clouds had vanished, cut clean from the sky, like someone had erased a piece of the world.
And then… silence.
A silence so heavy, so oppressive, it was like inception, buried in the marrow of every soul present.
Tension snapped tight, drawn to the extremes.
Paragons' eyes locked. Minds swirled. Auras erupted.
And then, chaos erupted.