Chapter 1082: Angel of Death
What Raven became defied every known standard of Essence manifestation. It was like a vision torn from the heart of the sun—blinding, immaculate, and terrible in its perfection. Four vast wings, each feather tipped in molten gold, spread wide enough to eclipse the sky.
Her form was lithe yet sculpted with divine precision, clad not in armor but in a seamless fusion of flesh and celestial metal that radiated both grace and finality.
Her head was crowned with a halo of living light, faceless yet impossibly present, with an eye of pure radiance set into her chest—watching, judging, knowing.
Golden talons curled at the ends of her hands and feet, each one sharp enough to carve the very air, while a crescent-shaped blade of light curved from the tip of her tail, swaying like the pendulum of some heavenly executioner.
All of them, especially Eli, stared in awe. She didn’t look like an Essence Manifestation.
And if this was indeed her Essence Manifestation, Eli was inclined to deduce that she was no human. Because this was a very strange thing to be.
Still, he couldn’t open his mouth to say anything. Right now, Raven was radiating pure power—the kind that sets Paragons apart from one another.
Eli wasn’t small-minded and wouldn’t do something as childish as comparing himself. But she was strong, and he knew it.
Most especially, he appreciated the help she was about to bring to the battlefield.
From the eye on her chest, a ball of pure light began to form, then condensed into a tiny speck with staggering pressure.
The air went silent for a moment, everything drowned by the echo of the Leviathan’s titanic steps. Then the light screamed.
A beam of light fired from Raven’s eye, flashed across the air, and clashed against the leftward ridges.
But it didn’t stop there. More beams of light continued to fire in that direction; golden swords carved from light appeared and flew toward those ridges, bombarding with every ounce of force they could gather.
Seeing Raven bombarding the ridges, Eli shouted, the wind carrying his voice:
"Don’t stop! Back her up with everything you can muster!"
Jeci tried her best again, this time forcing herself to increase the area, casting an invisible dome capable of sealing one’s ability toward the sky.
She just had to be careful.
Her power affected humans more than it did monsters, but she was positive that she could weaken the Leviathan in some way.
If it had been a Destroyer, perhaps she would have had more luck, but a Leviathan was simply too ambitious a target for her.
Thalen resumed his assault, this time tripling his rain of arrows. He simply fired them into the sky, and they poured directly onto the leftward ridges.
Lynus also pushed past his limit and manifested three seething pots of mercury, working toward the fourth with blood trickling from one nostril.
All of them bombarded the monster again, following the vicious damage of Raven’s beams.
This time, the sky didn’t just shudder—it fractured.
The combined assault smashed against the Leviathan’s ridges, detonating with a concussive roar that rippled across the dry plain and the frozen wasteland beyond. Chunks of essence-charged air collapsed inward before bursting outward again, shredding the clouds into ribbons.
For a heartbeat, the world seemed to pause.
A deep, metallic groan rolled from the Skyrender’s spine, like a mountain bending under impossible strain. One of the leftward ridges cracked—not shattering, but splitting just enough for a jagged seam of blinding light to leak through. The flare illuminated the battlefield in surreal white-blue, searing their retinas even through the frostbitten haze.
Eli’s breath caught.
"That’s it! Keep hitting the same spot!"
But before anyone could launch a follow-up, the Leviathan moved.
It didn’t lash out—not directly. Instead, its entire body flexed, and the air itself howled. The fractured ridge pulsed, then the Skyrender lowered its head.
The temperature plummeted in an instant. Moisture in the air crystallized mid-fall, forming jagged shards that hovered in place. The ridges flared—and all at once, those suspended shards accelerated outward, each moving at impossible speed.
The sky became a storm of crystal shrapnel.
Raven threw up a wall of petals, weaving them into a dome of light that strained under the onslaught. Every impact rang like a church bell through her bones.
Eli’s lightning whipped into coiling barriers, shattering a dozen spears before they could reach Lynus. Jeci’s invisible dome splintered in three places, forcing her to reinforce it mid-breath.
Still, the sheer pressure pushed them backward. The ground cracked under their feet, sliding toward the Leviathan as if drawn into its gravity.
Then...
A colossal plume of frost erupted behind them, a geyser of glacial wind so cold it froze the motion of falling debris. A moment passed, and all of them—even the Leviathan—seemed to pause.
Then someone flew straight into the air, racing toward them with tremendous speed.
Eli frowned slightly.
"Isn’t that...?"
"Sage Rian..."
Thalen finished.
He flew straight over them—their heads followed in silence—and crashed directly into the center of the Leviathan’s skull.
The entire world quaked first.
Then it shuddered violently, as if the moons that hung in the night sky had come crashing to the earth with the force and fury of a meteor.
Then came another violent tremor that felt like the world itself was tearing apart. Following that, a magnificent scene unfolded before their eyes, leaving their mouths agape.
Eli spread his wings in the air for stability with Thalen above him, Jeci clinging to the ground trying to survive the earthquake since she couldn’t fly, and Lynus staring with a pale and disbelieving expression etched across his face.
Raven had no face, so it was impossible to read her expression. But all of them were frozen, motionless—which spoke volumes about the momentary shock gripping them as they watched the creature that had refused to budge an inch regardless of how many attacks they’d hurled at it now stagger backward, lose its footing, and slowly crumble to the ground from its collision with Rian.