A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 6725

Hum...

A faint, mournful vibration traveled up through the hilt of the Celestial Emperor's Sovereign Blade and straight into Aureon Suncrest's soul.

This was not ordinary resonance from an artifact.

It was the cry of a divine weapon meeting something that naturally suppressed its very foundation.

The ancient celestial sigils buried deep inside the blade seemed to recoil on instinct. Their golden light convulsed, scattering and twisting away from the gray chaotic force closing in along Jared's sword.

"What?!"

Aureon's dark-gold pupils contracted.

He had wielded the Sovereign Blade for ten thousand years. With it, he had crushed countless secret realms in the Lower Realm and fought enemies from beyond ordinary domains.

Never once had he felt fear from the weapon itself.

The instant that shock entered his mind, Aureon forced it down.

His wrist snapped around. The Sovereign Blade came back across his body in a horizontal guard as golden divine radiance flooded the sword and layered barrier after barrier over its surface.

Jared's eyes, by contrast, were perfectly clear.

From the moment he launched this attack, his true target had never been Aureon's body.

He wanted the weapon.

If he could cripple the artifact Aureon depended on, he might sever the medium through which the Celestial Emperor resonated with the Divine Realm.

Clang!

The impact cracked across Black Abyss Valley.

The metallic note was so sharp and sustained that the surrounding cultivators' ears rang and their souls went numb.

A circular shock wave exploded from the crossing swords. Dust rose in a wall and swallowed half the sky.

Gray chaotic force poured from the Dragonslayer Sword into the point of contact.

It behaved like countless thin black serpents, slipping past the divine barriers on the Sovereign Blade and drilling directly into the weapon. They ignored the layers Aureon had raised for protection and burrowed into the artifact's own foundation instead.

The gilded sigils that had shone so brilliantly dimmed the instant the chaotic force touched them. Their sacred glow did not merely weaken; the patterns themselves twisted out of shape, blinking on and off like sparks caught in a gale.

Then small cracking sounds began inside the blade.

They were quiet, but to Aureon they were more terrifying than thunder.

He could feel the soul-link between himself and the Sovereign Blade being torn apart strand by strand.

At that exact moment, Gwendolyn's attack arrived.

The massive crystalline spike struck Aureon square in the chest.

Forced to divide his attention, he hurriedly gathered divine power before him and formed a thick, rounded golden shield.

The ice spike shattered against it.

Ice-blue crystals burst through the air and froze the earth wherever they landed.

But the true force hidden inside the attack did not stop at the shield.

Extreme cold seeped through minute gaps in the golden barrier, found the meridians in Aureon's sword arm, and climbed them in reverse.

Frost spread over his right hand in a thin white film.

The cold sank through skin and tendon into the meridians beneath. His blood slowed, and the divine power that should have rushed freely through the arm began to drag as though forced through ice.

His fingers stiffened around the hilt, and his grip suddenly lost a full third of its strength.

"Now!" Jared shouted.

His breathing was ragged and his chest burned from the backlash of forcing too much power through his nearly exhausted meridians.

Violet had been waiting for precisely this opening.

She vanished.

Purple radiance surged around her and every trace of defense disappeared from her stance. She became a streak of violet light crossing the battlefield, striking at the instant Aureon was forced to block Jared, endure Gwendolyn's ice, and recover his balance at the same time.

The Violet Abyss Immortal Sword drew every trace of its radiance inward until nothing leaked from the blade.

No grand aura.

No dazzling sword wave.

No warning cry from the weapon.

Violet compressed the entire strike into one silent point, so fast that light itself seemed to fall behind. The blade simply appeared at Aureon's throat with terrifying precision.

It passed straight through.

Hot, viscous golden blood sprayed across the charred stone and hissed where it landed.

Aureon's body went rigid.

Shock and fury filled his widened eyes.

For the moment, the battle stopped.

The killing pressure that had held the valley taut finally eased.

All three of them exhaled at almost the same time.

Gwendolyn's shoulders sagged.

Her breathing had become harsh and uneven. The overdrawn Ice Goddess power was already biting back through her meridians, filling her limbs with a deep, bone-numbing ache.

Exhaustion dulled her ice-blue eyes beneath a gray-white film of fatigue. Her long lashes drooped. Sweat had soaked the hair at her temples and slid slowly down her pale jaw, while the backlash made every bone and joint in her body feel numb and painfully cold.

Even so, when she looked at the ice coffin, the corner of her mouth lifted faintly.

The pressure of the endless fight had finally loosened, if only a little.

Jared returned the Dragonslayer Sword to its sheath and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.

A long tear ran along the side of his gray robe where one of Aureon's stray divine sword waves had cut him earlier. Beneath it, the flesh had split open and dark-red blood seeped from the wound.

Fortunately, neither his core nor his cultivation foundation had been damaged.

The repeated use of spatial law and chaotic force was another matter.

His meridians throbbed in waves from the strain of forcing power through them again and again, and his core was nearly empty. The wound itself was not fatal, but one more exchange at the same intensity could easily turn the internal damage into something far worse.

Violet leaned on the Violet Abyss Immortal Sword with its tip resting against the stone.

Her breathing had steadied somewhat, but the concern between her brows had not eased.

Her fingers still held the hilt tightly.

Seventeen kills.

Every one of them had consumed part of her core immortal resonance. She looked like the victor, yet in truth she was almost completely spent.

Gwendolyn stared at the frozen corpse.

"If we cut off every trace of life like this... it should stop him from coming back, right?"

Uncertainty crept into her voice despite her effort to hide it.

"Even if something from the celestials tries to pull him back, it shouldn't be able to penetrate an ice seal this complete."

Freezing was one of her strongest core techniques.

But after seeing too many supposedly decisive methods fail, even she no longer sounded convinced.