A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5945

Whum!

Energy snapped into the waiting formation; the Nine Heavens Sword Array awoke like a celestial beast stretching, every rune on the pavilion blades burning silver.

Nine hundred flying swords wove a lattice a league wide, and inside that lattice sword-light condensed into a hard, silver rain that poured toward the ranks of the Ninefold Nether Palace.

"Petty tricks." Morven’s laugh held no warmth.

He flung out a robed arm. "Nether Styx Formation—rise."

Three thousand disciples knelt in perfect unison, seals flashing between their fingers as black miasma coiled upward.

Above them a titanic onyx palace took shape in the clouds, its gates yawning open to vomit a tide of wailing specters that slammed headlong into the falling swords.

Steel hissed against ectoplasmic flesh—each impact a spray of light and shadow.

Explosions rolled across the firmament in ragged succession, louder than thunder, too many to count.

Swordlight sparked in Oswald’s pupils, sharp enough to cut breath. Space folded over him. In the same heartbeat he vanished.

Cold wind slapped his cheeks when reality snapped open again—this time only ten paces before Morven’s armored war cart.

"Morven, take my strike!" Oswald’s roar hammered the frozen air.

He swung the iron sword in a bare, horizontal arc—no flourish, no mercy, only the terrifying purity of blade and will fused as one.

For an instant he felt nothing of himself; steel thought for him, hunted for him.

Across the blood-slicked cart, Morven’s pitch-black irises narrowed. The corpse-thin lord slowly unfolded from his throne.

One skeletal finger lifted, drifting through empty air as though outlining a doorway only he could see.

"Nether Styx Finger." The murmur sounded like soil falling on a coffin lid.

Blade met bone.

All that existed between them was intent—his burning, the other’s abyssal.

The sky forgot how to breathe; nothing moved, not even dust.

Edge and fingertip touched.

No ring of metal, no burst of force—only a hair-thin black seam silently spreading, carving the heavens apart.

One breath. Two. Three.

Boom!

The universe remembered its voice and screamed it.

A shockwave detonated outward, using their locked wills as its fuse.

The blast punched him back. Wind howled past as he tumbled a hundred paces before catching himself.

The iron sword quivered in his grip, a hair-thin crack crawling along its face like frost.

Copper tasted sweet at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes burned brighter.

"High Immortal, fourth level—so that’s all you’ve got!"

Morven’s stare cut colder than his magic, yet disbelief flickered in that darkness.

He had expected Oswald to break, not bend.

Oswald felt Jared’s earlier words echo between his ribs—steady the heart, let the blade listen.

That counsel now roared through every tendon; not even Morven’s abyss could drown it.

"Sword masters—always a nuisance." Morven’s voice was ice grinding on stone.

The words had not finished falling before Oswald lunged back into the storm, cracked sword screaming for blood.

They tore across the sky, his silver arcs clashing against coils of black miasma.

Each collision fractured another shard of firmament, starlight bleeding through the wounds.

Oswald flung every secret he had into the blade—and still it begged for more.

He felt the hot pull in his chest; sacred blood ignited, scent of iron turning sweet and dizzying.

Reason whispered that his body would soon fail, but despair was quieter than duty.

If he held anything back, Morven would erase him in three strokes.

A flicker below drew his eye—sparks blooming across the Five-Element Sect’s valley.

At the center of the range, Aurelian anchored the peaks while five elders guarded the flanks and three thousand disciples held their posts.

"Five-Element Heaven-Sealing Barrier, rise!"

His fingers locked into the final seal; the tendons in his wrists burned with the strain. He forced the word out, a command more felt than heard, vibrating in his chest like iron struck.

"Enact!" The five elders answered in unison, their voices overlapping until the single syllable thundered against the inside of his skull.

A low tremor rolled up through the soles of his boots as three thousand six hundred embedded origin stones flared at once, their light stabbing upward through the earth’s crust.

From each summit a different hue erupted—gold, green, indigo, crimson, umber—five spears of light spearing into the clouds before knitting together into a single, towering shell that curved over the entire range.

Pressure thickened inside the barrier; every subtle current of the elemental laws suddenly roared like a river at floodstage.

Beyond the shimmering shell, enemy cultivators who relied on foreign arts reeled; dark vapor around them stuttered, their silhouettes wobbling as if pinned to invisible weights.

Inside, his own disciples moved like trout in spring melt, their spells swelling with a strength that made the air ring.

Every collision shot a concussion downward, splintering the ridgelines like dried timber.

While their fury rattled the clouds, Jared kept still.

He stood at the razor edge of Gold Peak, eyes shut, spine loose, as though he were letting some unseen clock finish its count.

Heat prickled along the five-colored sigil stamped across the back of his right hand.

Deep inside his core, the Origin Star wheeled faster and faster, a silent forge at full bellows.

Jared let his mind stretch outward, following every restless current the battle had birthed.

He tasted sparks of fury, coils of hunger, and the raw iron note of pain circling the field.

Somewhere beneath the roar, a single joint in the chaos clicked into place, waiting to be broken.

The word surfaced, solid and cold: Now.

His eyes snapped open.

Five hues whirled across the irises, braided themselves together, then collapsed into a single veil of storm-gray.

And he saw.

The puppet driving Blaine back jerked in hard, mechanical rhythms.

Before each lunge, a pinprick twitch in its aura betrayed the angle of the blow.

Elsewhere Morven's poison-dark art slithered around Oswald's blinding sword light.

The blade still scorched the shadows, but Jared felt its heat gutter; ten strikes more and it would fail.

Gerald's Earthfire roared bright, yet Malcolm's reincarnation haze crept endlessly back, like tide swallowing a torch.

Time, Jared sensed, would bleed the elder dry.

Below, the Five-Element Barrier crumpled at its edges under the pounding of those ancient monsters—Witherbone, Bloodsea, and their kin.

A few more breaths and cracks would spider all the way through.

On the surface the battle felt even, yet every thread Jared followed ended in the same chill: his side was slipping.

Something had to snap before the next heartbeat.

The first link to shatter was the puppet.

Jared moved.

One step, and his body blurred into a smear of stormy light, shooting straight for the circle where Blaine wrestled the puppet.