Before their eyes, Ash's silhouette rippled like heat haze over a corpse. Shoulders broadened, jaw squared, hair bleached from midnight to aged silver streaked with royal gold. The beautiful devil melted away and King Alaric, the man every kingdom had mocked for two centuries stood in his place.
The transformation was so complete that even Seris, who had seen nearly every illusion and shapeshift trick in her three hundred years of war. She felt her battle instincts register nothing but the genuine, pathetic king.
Only the weight behind those borrowed eyes betrayed the lie; they were too sharp, too hungry, too alive, glinting like black diamonds set in a corpse's face. Ash rolled the new, heavier shoulders once, flexed fingers now heavy with Alaric's gaudy rings of ruby and tarnished gold, and the corner of his mouth curled in a private, vicious smirk.
'Perfect Disguise is such a convenient little talent.' He thought to himself.
They stepped into the coliseum's blinding light.
A million voices crashed over them like a tidal wave, then fractured into stunned silence the instant the western gate revealed only three figures. Ash, wearing Alaric's face, he walked to the dead center of the vast circular arena, hands clasped behind his back, crimson-and-white cloak snapping in the furnace wind. Thalion and Seris took positions five paces behind, expressions carved from ice and curiosity.
Above, the floating announcement crystals boomed, voice amplified by ancient arrays:
"WAGER OF TERRITORY AND TREASURY.
RULES ARE LAW.
AND THE ONLY RULE IS.... KILLING BEING PERMITTED.
LAST SIDE STANDING CLAIMS FIFTY PERCENT OF THE LOSER'S LANDS AND VAULTS.
BEGIN!"
However, before anyone could even make move. Ash lifted one hand from behind his back in a lazy manner.
Before the echo had even begun to fade, Ash lifted one hand from behind his back in a languid, almost bored gesture, palm open as if requesting silence at a banquet. "Ahem," he rasped in Alaric's rough, wine-thick voice, head tilting upward toward the floating announcer shielded behind layers of reinforced crystal.
"Instead of fifty percent, I say we do Ninety percent." As he said this, he truly tried to hide the smile threatening to creep onto his face.
'Haha, I'm totally scamming these ants.' As he thought this his eyes were already sliding across the Thalor formation, measuring, discarding, cataloguing. Nothing worth more than a heartbeat of attention… except two.
Darius Vale and Lysara Vale, the twin pillars of Thalor's military might, both sitting at the absolute peak of A-rank, twenty thousand EL each, the only two heartbeats in the entire hundred that made something inside Ash stir with the faintest promise of sport.
Laughter detonated from the stands. King Thalor himself stepped forward beyond the barrier, trident planted like a declaration of war, sea-green braids swinging as he threw his head back and roared with mirth. "Ninety? You truly are the fool they say, Alaric. I accept."
The crystals flared a deeper crimson, sealing the amendment in letters of fire across the sky.
The moment he accepted he stepped behind the barrier as well as his 100 participants went forward.
The crystals above flared blood-red.
WAGER AMENDED – 90 % TERRITORY AND TREASURY
NO SURRENDER. NO MERCY.
Ash inclined his head with theatrical grace, the very picture of a gracious host offering tea to guests he already planned to poison.
"Thalion, Seris… just enjoy the show," he murmured, voice soft enough that only they heard the promise beneath the words. "If you blink, you might miss it."
The eastern gate exploded.
One hundred peak human cultivators moved as a single organism forged for slaughter.
Fifty of them surged forward in perfect formation, boots cratering the sand into glass with every impact, weapons igniting in solar fire and storm-lightning. Thirty more kicked off the ground and soared, elemental auras blooming into blazing crimson wings, coiling violet lightning spears, and blades of wind so sharp they screamed as they cut the air itself.
The remaining twenty planted their feet and wove sigils in perfect synchrony molten-gold arrays unfolding overhead like blooming flowers of death, obsidian chains thick as ship anchors lashing downward in a cage meant to bind gods.
Fifteen meters.
Ten.
Five.
Meteors of compressed flame and lightning fell in an apocalyptic rain.
Chains howled.
The air itself burned.
Ash smiled with Alaric's mouth and spoke a single sentence that tasted like the end of the world.
|Absolute Null Zone|
There was no flash, no roar, no warning tremor.
Mana simply ceased to exist within a two million, five hundred-thousand-kilometer sphere, that was centered on Ash's heart.
The sky went dark as every elemental light guttered out at once.
Crimson meteors turned to harmless stone mid-descent and shattered across the sand.
Lightning spears became dead metal and clattered uselessly.
Golden arrays collapsed into glittering dust that the wind swept away like funeral ash.
Obsidian chains disintegrated into black snow.
Warriors who had been soaring thirty meters high dropped while screaming. Every enchanted shield, sword, and piece of armor forged with even a single drop of mana reverted to ordinary iron and split along hairline fractures older than the kingdoms watching. A hundred peak cultivators became a hundred ordinary mortals armed with nothing but panic and dull steel.
Ash drew the scrap sword from his ring, just a plain, nicked, cheap-looking steel, one of a thousand forgotten relics from the Seraphiel proving grounds and he took one leisurely step forward.
The massacre began.
He walked through the front line the way a hurricane walks through paper houses. The sword moved in lazy, almost gentle arcs no wasted motion, no flourish... Every arc ended a life. A left slash opened six throats at once; arterial spray painted the sand in perfect scarlet fans.
A rightward flick caved in chests, ribs exploding outward in wet red bouquets. A single spinning cut sent three heads tumbling through the air in eerie unison, spinning like crimson moons before they landed with soft, wet thuds.
A casual downward stroke split a man from crown to groin; the halves peeled apart with a sound like wet parchment tearing, intestines spilling across the sand before the body even realized it was dead.
Blood fell in sheets thick enough to drum on the ground.
Limbs cartwheeled lazily through the air, trailing red ribbons.
Bodies dropped in pieces so fast the sand never had time to drink, it simply turned to dark, glistening mud beneath a carpet of meat and bone.
No screams could be heard at all.
The Null Zone devoured sound the same way it devoured mana; the only noises were the wet whisper of steel through flesh, the soft thud of severed parts hitting sand, and the faint, rhythmic drip of blood from Ash's lazily swinging blade.
Four seconds.
Ninety-eight corpses.
The coliseum that was a roaring beast moments ago became a tomb so silent the wind itself seemed afraid to move. A million cultivators sat frozen, mouths open, laughter strangled dead in their throats.
Seris, three centuries of war etched into every line of her soul, felt her stomach lurch so violently she tasted iron. Her crimson cloak trembled though no wind touched it, as if the fabric itself recoiled from what it had witnessed.
Thalion's glasses slid a fraction down his nose; for the first time in six hundred years the near-omniscient strategist had no prediction, no quip, no words at all only the faintest tremor in the hand that rose to push the lenses back into place.
In the center of the red ruin, only two figures still stood.
Darius Vale, twin tower-shields cracked and useless at his feet, skin the color of old ash, eyes wide and unseeing.
Lysara Vale, white hair plastered to her cheeks with someone else's blood, hands frozen in the half-finished sigil of a talent that no longer existed, lips parted in a silent scream that would never come.
Ghosts staring across a sea of their own dead at a devil wearing a dead king's smile.
Ash flicked the sword once. Sound rushed back into the world like a dam breaking. A single drop of blood spun lazily through the air, hung suspended for a heartbeat, then landed on the sand at his feet with a soft, deliberate plink.
He lifted Alaric's bloodied and borrowed face toward the royal viewing box where King Thalor stood pale as bone.
"Shall we continue?" he asked pleasantly, voice light, as if inquiring about the weather.
[+4,900 EL]
[Current EL - Rank A (12,932.5)