I could feel it clearly now. This was no longer a commander observing a threat from a distance.
This was a hunter locking onto prey.
Crimson mist still clung faintly to my body, rising and falling with my breath. The Executor’s Halo pressed outward, subtle but firm, forcing the surrounding laws to align around me whether they wanted to or not. The space between us felt tight, stretched thin like a wire about to snap.
Below, the armies collided again. Demons roared and charged. Phantoms descended. Deathmist flooded the battlefield in thick waves. But none of it mattered in that instant.
Only the Eternal did.
The Eternal did not move to stop the armies or even Saleos who had rushed past both of us toward the core layer.
Instead, he lifted one hand slowly, almost casually, as if testing the flow of space in the void.
The moment he did, something felt wrong.
The Essence around me thinned.
It did not dispersed or was disrupted. It was being taken away.
I felt it like a sudden pressure drop, like air vanishing from a sealed chamber. The void that had been rich with energy moments ago began to feel hollow. The Essence flow stuttered, then slowed, as if the world itself was no longer feeding it.
Runes appeared.
They emerged calmly, one after another, forming intricate circular patterns in the void. Pale, clean symbols, sharp and precise, rotating slowly as they expanded outward from the Eternal.
My eyes narrowed.
The space around me dimmed as the Essence was drawn away in vast waves. It did not rush toward him violently. It flowed, guided, obedient. Wherever the runes passed, Essence condensed, compressed tighter and tighter until it collapsed inward.
Floating spheres began to form.
Perfectly round. Smooth. Each one glowing faintly as Essence was sealed inside, locked so completely that not a single thread leaked back into the void. They hovered around the Eternal like a constellation, orbiting him in slow, deliberate paths.
I activated Right to Insight.
The world shifted instantly. Layers peeled back. Laws revealed themselves beneath appearances. I followed the flow of Essence, traced the runes’ structure, and watched how they interacted with reality.
Law of Sealing.
Not crude suppression. Not brute-force negation. This was refinement taken to its extreme. He was not destroying Essence. He was concentrating it to the highest possible degree and then sealing it away, cutting it off from the battlefield entirely.
My surroundings grew quiet.
The void around me felt empty, starved. Any normal being would have been crippled already.
We hovered high above the second defense layer, far enough that the clash of armies below felt distant, muffled by scale and space. Broken structures glowed faintly beneath us, and far beyond that, the tower stood unmoving, its presence heavy even without motion.
The Eternal faced me calmly.
He did not float like a warrior ready to strike, nor did he adopt any stance of defense. He simply existed there, ash-gray skin smooth and matte, white hair combed neatly to one side as if he were attending a formal gathering rather than a battlefield. His clothes clung to his thin, athletic frame, dark fabric traced with small, glowing runes that pulsed slowly.
Around him, several circular spheres of condensed and sealed Essence rotated in wide, slow arcs. They were not wild or unstable. They were precise. Each one was perfectly shaped, perfectly balanced, sealed so tightly that not a single thread leaked out.
He was waiting.
I exhaled slowly and centered myself.
If he thought stripping the void of Essence would stop me, then this was the moment to test that belief. I turned inward, toward the generator core within me. Violet Essence surged up in response, rich and dense, flowing through my channels with a familiar weight. It did not care that the void was empty. It existed because I existed.
The Eternal’s head tilted almost imperceptibly as the color bloomed around me.
I moved.
Space folded, and I flashed forward in an instant, crossing the distance between us before most beings could even register motion. The void screamed faintly as displacement snapped shut behind me. Essence churned harder, flooding into my arm, compressing as I drew it all toward my fist. I clenched my hand tight, and a concentrated spinning core of violet Essence formed just in front of my knuckles.
I drove my fist forward, straight toward his chest.
For the first time, the Eternal’s expression shifted.
It was surprise, brief and controlled. His eyes focused fully on the violet glow inches from his body. There was no time for him to step away, no time to summon a counterattack. My fist closed the remaining distance in a fraction of a second.
And then it stopped.
My arm trembled as if it had struck an invisible wall made of absolute stillness. The Essence core screamed under the pressure, its rotation destabilizing as it pressed against something I could not see. I pushed harder, forcing more power forward, veins standing out along my arm, but the distance between my knuckles and his chest did not change.
Not even by a hair.
The Eternal looked down at my fist, then back up at my face.
"A new Essence?" he said calmly.
My eyes narrowed as my mind raced.
I did not feel resistance in the normal sense. There was no opposing force pushing back against me. Instead, it felt as if he simply was not there, as if the space he occupied had been removed from interaction entirely. I shifted my perception.
And then I saw it.
He had sealed himself.
Not with barriers or shields, but by locking the space he occupied away from the rest of reality. His position existed, but it was isolated, folded inward, untouchable unless one could directly break or override the sealing law itself. I was not striking him. I was striking the absence of him.
Before I could adjust, the sealed Essence spheres around him reacted.
They moved.
The circular balls of condensed Essence accelerated sharply, their smooth rotation snapping into violent trajectories. They crossed the space between us in an instant, converging around me from multiple angles. I twisted, pulling back my arm and flaring my Essence defensively.
They detonated.
BOOM!!
Sealing laws unfolded outward as the spheres burst, releasing compressed force and vacuum-like pressure that slammed into my body from all sides. Space buckled violently, folding and snapping as if trying to collapse in on itself.
My Essence flared instinctively, violet light tearing through the pressure, but the impact still sent me hurtling backward, tumbling through the void until I forced space to stabilize around me. I skidded to a halt far above the second layer, Essence burning hot as I reasserted control over my position.
Across from me, the Eternal remained exactly where he had been.
His head lifted slightly, eyes locked onto mine once more.