Chapter 93: The King's Privilege! (Patreon)

Little Guang's figure turned into a streak of orange-white light, charging straight into Avarus's gaping belly.

Wise stood off to the side, watching it all with perfect clarity.

The instant the three Ether longswords touched the fissure in its belly, the silver-white light along their blades suddenly contracted — not snuffing out, but compressing all the physical-type Ether energy down to a single point at the very tip of the blades.

The extreme energy density warped the space around the blades visibly, like a sheet of glass softened by fire. The next instant, the blades plunged into the wound Wise had torn open.

With no carapace to protect it and no Miasmic Shield to block them, all three longswords drove solidly into Avarus's exposed core tissue.

"Roooar—!!!"

Avarus's roar changed pitch instantly. Gone was the low, oppressive growl from before — this was a cracked, shrill scream, like the dying wail of a beast with its tail pinned underfoot.

Its single horn thrashed wildly side to side, its limbs clawed at the ground in a frenzy, and its massive body writhed violently like a fish nailed to a cutting board.

Wise saw the look on Little Guang's face.

She hung suspended inside the fissure of Avarus's belly, both hands clamped white-knuckled around the sword hilts, driving all three longswords deeper and deeper. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, her brow knotted tight, every muscle in her body strung taut.

She was giving everything she had, just like him.

The Ether energy in the three longswords detonated inside Avarus's body.

It wasn't a single blast — it was a chain reaction. The physical-type Ether energy spread outward from the point of contact, like a red-hot iron dropped into water, igniting the Ether energy inside Avarus's body.

Dark red energy surged outward all at once — from the fissure in its belly, the wound in its back, every seam in its carapace.

Then the explosion came.

Wise's scalp prickled.

With Avarus's belly as its center, a massive sphere of energy burst open, expanding explosively right at the point where the three of them stood.

It expanded so fast that before Wise's brain could even issue the command to run, the shockwave was already upon him.

The heat arrived first. Wise's skin felt the searing burn a fraction of a second before the shockwave even hit, as if someone were aiming a blowtorch straight at his face.

Then came the light. The dark red glow lit up the entire plaza as bright as day — no, brighter than day. Wise's optic nerves overloaded in that instant, leaving nothing before his eyes but blinding white — the energy density so extreme it swallowed even the color itself.

The shockwave followed right behind.

The sensation in that instant was hard to describe. It wasn't like being struck by something — it was as if the entire world had been slapped down by some invisible giant hand.

The air compressed into a solid wall, driving forward at hundreds of meters per second, sweeping every scrap of rubble, twisted metal, and shattered carapace across the plaza up into the sky.

Wise's body lost all control in midair. The wind pressure tore at his clothes until they snapped and flapped violently, and his whole body was swept up like a falling leaf caught in the shockwave, tumbling backward through the air.

But that didn't stop him.

In the instant before the explosion — no, in the fraction of a second when Little Guang's swords had just pierced Avarus's core and the chain reaction had begun expanding but hadn't yet fully erupted — Wise's Ether ability had already triggered.

Dimensional Detachment. His fingertips had just managed to brush against Little Guang's wrist.

The instant of contact, space itself was stripped away.

Wise and Little Guang vanished from in front of Avarus's belly fissure at the same moment.

The next instant, they reappeared at the edge of the plaza — roughly forty meters from the center of the blast.

But forty meters wasn't enough.

The shockwave still caught up with them. A wave of dark red energy crashed over them like a tsunami, hurling both of them off the ground.

Wise's back slammed hard into a broken metal pillar. A dull ache shot through his spine, and his insides felt like they'd been squeezed in a fist and let go. A rush of coppery sweetness surged up his throat, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed it back.

Little Guang was sent tumbling head over heels by the shockwave, rolling several times before finally slamming to a stop against a half-collapsed wall.

Out in the plaza, dark red energy was still pouring outward. The spot where Avarus had been was now completely swallowed by a sphere of light more than twenty meters across. Its surface churned ceaselessly, like a cauldron of boiling molten iron, with arcs of energy occasionally lashing out from its surface and striking the plaza floor, burning fist-sized craters into the carapace-covered ground.

Wave after wave of heat pushed outward.

Wise leaned against the metal pillar, gasping for breath. Every inhale felt like his lungs were filling with scalding air, dry and raw.

His right arm had gone completely limp, his meridians hollow and empty — he couldn't sense even a trace of Ether fluctuation in it. The backlash from forcibly tearing open Avarus's Miasmic Shield on its back had been far worse than he'd expected — not something you could just call "heavy drain." It was a brief, total paralysis of the Ether circuits throughout his entire right arm.

"Little Guang." His voice came out so hoarse it barely sounded like his own.

"...Wise." Little Guang's voice came from three meters away.

She sat half-upright against the wall, both hands braced against the ground, the Azure Empyrean Sword Casket hanging crooked at her side, its pale cyan patterns dimmed to almost nothing.

"Can you still move?"

"Barely... I'm okay."

Little Guang pushed off the wall and got to her feet. Her movements were stiff, and her left leg visibly hitched as she stood, but she steadied quickly. She wiped the back of her hand across her lips — a trace of blood came away on it.

Neither of them spoke again.

They watched the sphere of light.

After about fifteen seconds of expansion, it began to slow. The churning surface gradually settled, and its brightness began fading too, shifting slowly from deep red toward a duller, darker tone.

The sphere started to shrink, like a lamp being slowly dimmed.

The air over the plaza finally stopped churning. The rubble and carapace fragments the shockwave had thrown skyward began drifting back down, pattering against the ground with soft crackling sounds. Dust mixed with Ether particles, forming a thick gray haze that blanketed the center of the plaza completely.

Wise narrowed his eyes, peering through the haze toward the center. He couldn't make out anything. The dust was too thick, and the dark red light filtering through it showed only a hazy wash of color — like looking at a dying lamp through a pane of frosted glass.

One minute. Two minutes.

The haze began to clear. A gust of wind blew in from somewhere, pushing the thickest layer of gray fog off to one side.

Wise's gaze cut through the thinning dust, and at last he could make out the scene at the center of the plaza.

Avarus lay there, fallen.

Its massive body sprawled at the very center of the plaza, its limbs splayed out at unnatural angles, like a beetle flipped onto its back. Its single horn pointed off to one side, the dark red patterns across its surface all gone dark, leaving only a dull, ashen carapace underneath.

The fissure in its belly had closed completely. That gaping "mouth" from before was now shut tight, its surface even covered with a layer of newly grown carapace, as if it were healing itself. But the healing was slow — a clear color difference showed between the new carapace and the old, like a series of ugly scars.

Most crucially of all — Wise couldn't sense its Ether fluctuation anymore.

That overwhelming, crushingly oppressive outpouring of Ether from before had vanished completely. Avarus looked like a machine with its power cut, lying there in silence, giving off no energy signature at all.

Little Guang saw it too.

Her droopy ears, which had been pressed flat against her head, slowly perked up, the little cowlick on top giving a gentle sway along with them. She turned her head to look at Wise, a cautious, disbelieving joy shining in her ruby-red eyes.

"Wise..." Her voice was soft, as if she were afraid of waking something. "Its Ether... it's stopped."

Wise nodded.

He'd felt it too. It was true — Avarus's Ether fluctuation had vanished. Like a pool of stirred, muddy water settling back down, its surface returning to stillness. The Ether concentration saturating the whole plaza was dropping fast too, and that needling, skin-prickling sensation was completely gone now.

"Did we... win?"

Little Guang turned to look at him, her eyes lighting up. The corners of her mouth curved upward slightly, a look of victorious joy spreading across her face.

Wise's lips parted.

He should have answered her right then, but for some reason, an odd sense of wrongness kept needling at his nerves.

What was it he'd forgotten?

Avarus had fallen, its Ether fluctuation had vanished, its Domain had dissolved. By every observable measure, this King-class Ethereal had lost all combat capability.

But something was off. Some piece of information he'd overlooked, something he'd heard at some point, was pounding away at his consciousness, deep in the back of his mind — like someone slamming a fist on a table inside his skull.

What was wrong?

What was wrong?

Little Guang was still watching him, waiting for his answer. Her eyes shone, a smile touched her lips, and her droopy ears tilted forward slightly — the habitual little gesture she made whenever she was hoping for good news.

Wise's brow slowly furrowed. Something's wrong. The way Avarus had fallen was too "quiet."

A mature-stage King-class that had lived three years, wiped out a three-hundred-strong investigation team, and mastered its Domain to a razor's edge — there was no way it would just go down this quietly.

When that Lord-class had been killed earlier, its core collapse had come with a violent release of energy — its entire body had dissolved into fading light within two seconds.

But Avarus?

It had simply fallen. No collapse, no energy release. Its core was still there — Wise could feel it — faint, but there was still an extremely faint trace of energy flowing inside Avarus's body.

It wasn't dead. It was—

He suddenly remembered.

Once, while swapping combat notes with Seth, Harumasa, and Billy, Big Bro Harumasa had once mentioned, almost offhandedly—

"As the dividing line for high-threat Ethereals, King-class Ethereals differ from every tier before them in one major way beyond the Domain — they all have a second phase."

"Every King-class, once pushed to the brink of death, undergoes a rebirth. All the Ether energy stored in its body gets released in an instant, reshaping its body and resetting its Domain. The process is brief, but the energy released—"

"—will far exceed what it had before."

A chill shot across Wise's scalp. He spun around.

"Little Guang, don't—"

He didn't get to finish.

Behind him, Avarus moved.

Not a physical movement — an energy one. An Ether fluctuation burst out from Avarus's collapsed body without any warning.

The fluctuation came too suddenly. One second there was dead silence; the next, a flood. Like someone had blown open a dam on a dried riverbed — three years of stored energy pouring out in an instant.

Dark red light surged out from the cracks in Avarus's carapace. This wasn't the slow seep of dark red from before — this was blinding, searing, dark red light with real physical force behind it. Within a single second, its brightness had already surpassed the peak from the earlier explosion, lighting the entire plaza up bright as day.

"Every King-class Ethereal—" Wise's voice was nearly swallowed by the roar of energy, but he shouted it out anyway—"they all have a second phase!!!"

Too late. The instant the dark red energy exploded across Avarus's body, a brand-new Domain barrier began expanding outward from it at the center, racing out in every direction at blinding speed. Far faster than the first time — deploying the Domain the first time had taken nearly ten seconds, but this time it took less than one.

By the time the barrier swept past where Wise and Little Guang stood, neither of them had even finished raising a hand. The dark red light swallowed their vision completely.

The instant they entered the Domain, that familiar, nauseating sensation of Miasma corrosion swept over them again.

Fiercer, more intense, more direct than the first time — nausea, dizziness, static flickering across his vision, distorted hearing, numbness spreading through his limbs — all the symptoms erupted at once, in the same instant, their intensity a full tier or more beyond the first time.

Wise's knees buckled, nearly dropping him to the ground. He braced his right hand against his knee, his nails digging into the fabric of his pants. His stomach churned violently, a mouthful of bile rising to his throat before he forced it back down. The scene before his eyes flickered wildly, black one moment, white the next, static snow crackling densely in between.

Little Guang was in worse shape.

She'd only been back on her feet for a few minutes, not yet fully recovered from the earlier impact. That all-out strike with the three longswords had left her Ether circuits in a state of severe disarray — not a matter of "heavy drain," but the circuits themselves misfiring erratically, energy careening chaotically through her meridians with no pattern at all.

Now, crushed under the Miasma Domain on top of that, the disordered circuits and the corrosive Miasma compounded each other, the damage worsening exponentially.

Her body was trembling. A numbness spread from her fingertips through her wrists, forearms, and shoulders toward her core, leaving her barely able to grip anything at all.

The patterns on the Azure Empyrean Sword Casket went completely dark, and it slipped from her grasp, falling to the ground.

"Little Guang!"

Wise was shouting. His own voice reached his ears distorted, as if muffled through a layer of water.

"I'm... here..."

Little Guang's voice came from his right, broken and halting, a ragged breath wedged between every word.

Wise forced himself to lift his head, peering through the murky dark red haze of his vision toward the center of the plaza.

Avarus was standing back up.

Its body was reshaping itself. The wounds Wise had torn open, the core region Little Guang had run through — they were healing at a speed visible to the naked eye. New carapace spread outward from the edges of the wounds, covering over every damaged spot.

Even the carapace's color had changed — no longer the dark red from before, but a deeper hue, almost black-red.