Chapter 360: Static Shock
I paused, hand still raised, letting the battlefield tremble around me. Enemy attacks faltered. Fireballs exploded mid-air. Walls crumbled as raw Essence unraveled their foundations. Panic rippled through the Holt soldiers.
I closed my eyes and felt the surge of lightning in the air. A memory flickered: Arkas, his lightning trident flashing above the storm, power crackling in every strike. A thought struck me clearly: I want to do that too.
I opened my eyes and planted my feet in the cracked ground. Silence fell, as if the world waited. I activated my Domain once more. The air around me shivered, runes spreading out in tiny ripples. Essence lines glowed faintly in sight only I could perceive.
A low hum built within my chest.
I connected with the natural Essence from the ground, from the broken stones, from the scattered corpses, and from the charged air above. I felt the power of thunder, untamed, raw, and electric.
Then I breathed out, and lightning erupted.
It surged along my skin, sparkling across my arms and legs in brilliant veins of violet-white light. My hair lifted, strands glowing, each moving like a living thread of current. My pants rippled as if caught in a windstorm.
I had shrouded myself completely in lightning.
I took a step forward. The ground cracked where I placed my foot, each stone splintering into glowing fragments. My vision sharpened and I could see the currents of energy radiating outward from me, the small arcs of lightning connecting to distant walls and enemy weapons, dragging bits of energy from them like sparks drawn to a magnet.
Then I moved.
I burst forward. Instantly, I was sprinting across the battlefield, faster than any master’s eye could follow. Lightning screamed around me like nature’s rage. The dust kicked up in blasts behind me, obscuring soldiers and swirling like mini tornadoes.
My first target: a group of Holt Masters on the flank, raising a new firestorm of flames. I veered toward them.
My fist shot forward, cloaked in a gauntlet of violet-blue lightning, thumb wrapped in arcs of current. I closed the distance in a heartbeat. They barely had time to widen their eyes.
Boom!!!
My punch landed on a blond soldier’s chest, armor disintegrating. His body ignited with light from inside, opening him from collarbone to waist. He collapsed in a heap of steaming bone and blood.
The entire group staggered. Their formation shattered. Some fled; others tried to fight back, but their spells fizzled before release, snapped apart by the storm of thunder.
I spun again, faster now, curving around a collapsed tower. Lightning coursed over the stone, turning it into shards of electrified rubble that flew outward like fireworks.
I charged straight at another Master’s shield barrier. Essence whined as the bolt formed in front of me. I planted a palm onto the shield.
Lightning snapped through the barrier, then shattered it outright, spreading a ripple of failures down the line. The soldiers behind it fell like dominoes, some fried instantly, others blown backward by the ensuing blast.
I didn’t pause. My speed increased with each attack. Light bent around me, creating afterimages. A second swept past an ice-wielding Master, I gripped the shaft of his staff with a lightning-made gauntlet, wrenched it free, and pulled him off balance and then flung him like a ragdoll across the square.
His staff shattered against another soldier. I wheeled in midair and delivered a double kick, each foot ablaze with crushing force, into two shield bearers. Shields cracked. Bones burst. They collapsed inwards, non-responsive.
In every direction, enemy soldiers collapsed with cracks of the earth and sparks aflame.
I dropped into a cluster of Masters mid-formation, fire, water, and earth spells half-formed in their hands. They didn’t even have time to react. One blink, and I was there. My fist blurred, striking the first square in the chest. His ribs caved in with a crack, lightning bursting out of his back.
The second turned his head. My elbow crushed his jaw, and his skull snapped sideways with a wet crunch.
I spun, planted a foot into the third’s stomach. His body folded in half, launched backward like a ragdoll. The fourth raised his hands to cast, but my palm struck his face before the glow of Essence even left his fingertips. His head snapped back and didn’t come down whole.
One after another, six, seven, eight, I moved through them like a phantom wrapped in lightning. Their bodies broke before their eyes could widen. Bones shattered. Essence spells fizzled as their soldiers fell mid-cast.
The battlefield became a blur of broken soldiers, flickering Essence trails, and cracking thunder. My breath came deep but steady, body unhurried, even as I performed this dance of destruction.
Lightning surged through my veins like a flood. The battlefield bent around me, the air pulsing with static. I opened my hands, and arcs of lightning shot upward from my palms—twisting, spiraling, howling with power. I brought my arms down, and two massive hammers of pure thunder formed in my grip.
They weren’t made of metal, these were forged from condensed Essence, wrapped in lightning, crackling violently. The heads of the hammers pulsed, glowing with deadly rhythm. The handles hissed with raw power, humming in my hands as if eager for the next blow.
And then I moved.
The first step cracked the stone beneath me. The second one shattered it. By the third, I was already among them.
I slammed the left hammer down. The ground imploded, sinking into itself with a blast that sent a dozen Holt soldiers flying into the air.
BOOM!!!
Their bodies spun, bones crunching on impact. Some didn’t even get the chance to scream.
I spun, swinging both hammers wide. The storm followed. Thunder exploded outward with each arc, smashing through essence shields, breaking barriers, sending Masters tumbling in every direction.
Three came at me with blades drawn—fire dancing along the edge of one, frost curling around the second, and wind howling around the third. They coordinated their strikes with trained precision.
It didn’t matter.
I brought the right hammer down on the first. He vanished under the blow, his Essence armor snapping like brittle glass. A shockwave burst out from the impact, knocking the other two off their feet before they reached me.
They never got back up.
I jumped, hammers spinning beside me, and came down into another squad of Masters. Both weapons hit the ground with a sound like the sky cracking open. The earth split, deep trenches forming from the force, swallowing those too slow to run. Thunder rolled, deafening and wide.
Bodies were flung in every direction.
I rushed forward again, dragging one hammer across the stone behind me, carving a line that glowed white-hot with friction and lightning. I brought it around and smashed it into a group of defenders trying to form a barrier.
The barrier shattered like paper.
The men behind it? Gone. Some were incinerated instantly, others flung far out of formation, twitching with electrical burns. A crater formed where they had stood.
All around me, chaos spread. Holt soldiers screamed orders, tried to regroup, but every time I moved, another formation fell apart.
Another group raised their hands, casting a dome of earth around themselves for defense.
I twirled one hammer, channeled more lightning through it until it glowed white-blue, and hurled it at them like a comet.
The hammer struck the dome and everything inside detonated. The shield crumbled. The men inside were gone, torn apart by the surge of thunder and shrapnel.
I summoned the hammer back to my hand. My eyes swept across the battlefield.
More. There were still more. And I wasn’t finished.
I roared and shot straight up into the sky, lightning trailing behind me like a comet. The thunder in my chest sounded across the battlefield. I lifted both hammers high, violet sparks leaping from my arms as I poured Essence into them, more and more until the storm began to answer.
The hammers trembled, shaking in my hands as lightning bled into their form. And then, they began to merge. Lightning fused into raw power, arcs lashing out in all directions. I gritted my teeth, forcing the Essence deeper, shaping the form tighter.
The sky darkened.
Violet light pulsed from my core as the air itself bent around me. The single massive hammer now floating above me began to grow. Ten meters. Thirty. Seventy. The sky crackled in warning. The clouds turned purple.
By the time it hit three hundred meters tall, thunder boomed loud enough to knock soldiers off their feet.
Below, Holt forces froze—Masters, soldiers, even Grandmasters. Every head tilted up, every body paralyzed by the scale of what they saw. A hammer of pure lightning and Essence, shaped like divine judgment, hovered above me. It crackled like a living thing, veins of violet dancing across its body.
I clenched my hand.
The hammer pulsed once, casting a glow that turned the battlefield into a sea of purple.
And then, I brought it down.
The moment it fell, thunder tore the air apart. The clouds ripped open. Space trembled.
And then came impact.
BOOOMM!!!!!
The hammer smashed into the ground like the hand of a god. A column of lightning burst outward in every direction, ripping through formations, vaporizing shields, reducing soldiers to ash. The shockwave flattened everything.
The battlefield had only one sound now, the endless roar of thunder.