Chapter 450: Strength of the First Primord (2)

Saint Realm beings are referred to as mortal gods, and the current scene was a perfect depiction of what true Saints could do. The stories about how Saint Realm beings could level cities, empires, and even a planet regardless of protection were proven right now with Leon’s attack.

The title of mortal gods was poetic, dramatic, and a little self-aggrandizing, yet it fit like destiny’s own crown.

His latest attack ripped through the landscape in a sweeping arc of annihilation. Stone vaporized. Forests folded like paper swallowed by a furnace and disappeared. The wind froze, the sky froze. Even time ceased. The avatar above behind him also moved, leveling mountains and landscapes.

Ice and snow weren’t just solid anymore. They weren’t even cold in a way the mind could frame. They were liquid, air, conceptual… states of existence pulled apart and rearranged by a Saint’s tantrum. Leon wasn’t wielding elements; he was stitching and unstitching the rules that defined those elements.

And Ethan, the focus of that attack… brilliant, terrifying Ethan… was nowhere near matching this.

The gap between them was a canyon carved out by eras of power. Leon’s presence pressed down like an avalanche of collapsing realities, while Ethan’s partial Primord form flickered under the pressure, valiantly holding shape like a candle facing a hurricane born from a star.

Leon moved.

Not fast. Not slow. He simply was, and the world displaced itself to keep up. A massive palm… his real one and the colossal translucent avatar behind him, swung down. Ethan raised his arms to block, channeling every affinity he had, psychic threads blazing, earth coiling under his skin, blood magic burning bright.

The blow still folded him in half.

He slammed into the ground, punching through the crust, through the mantle, through layers of this dimension that had never seen light. The earth parted around him in a howl of molten orange, and the shockwave above ground uprooted entire mountain ranges like weeds yanked by an impatient gardener.

Ethan burst back into the sky, gasping, silver-gold eyes sharp but strained. Blood leaked from his mouth in shimmering droplets that evaporated before hitting the ground. He didn’t even have time to stabilize.

Leon was already there.

A kick… clean, elegant, absolute… caught Ethan in the ribs. The sound was sickening. Bones reinforced by Saint power cracked like thin ice. Ethan shot sideways, ricocheting across the sky, each impact with the air itself creating thunderous booms.

Leon didn’t chase.

He arrived.

A knee sank into Ethan’s back, driving him downward again. Ethan tried to twist, tried to manipulate force, gravity, momentum… Stagnation Field, Mark of Serenity… nothing worked.

Mystic Control flickered, managing to redirect a fraction of the blow, but a fraction wasn’t enough.

He cratered into the ground with a blast so deep the land simply gave up and sank, forming a caldera wide enough to brith a lake.

Leon hovered above, expression feral and ecstatic. The avatar behind him raised its arms, each holding a different form of conceptual ice; one freezing space, and one freezing thought and potential energy itself. The crooked smile on its featureless face seemed to widen as the energy around it reached unseen levels.

Ethan staggered out of the smoke. His golden eye was dimmer than the silver as he had used Eye of Truth to the limit to dodge most of the attack when Mystic Control failed. His body trembled from exhaustion and overuse of power. Partial Primord form seemed to crack along the edges like a sculpture under too much heat.

Leon didn’t wait.

He descended with a speed that bent every law Ethan understood. The avatar punched. Leon punched. The world split.

Ethan blocked the first hit.

The second hit crushed his guard.

The third hit turned the landscape behind him into icy glass.

The tenth hit sent him skidding across the world like a meteor that forgot how to burn.

He finally slid to a stop, coughing up streaks of gold and silver essence. Leon’s voice rumbled across the horizon, cold enough to kill anything living that heard it.

“You are not my equal. You are not even close.”

Ethan pushed a hand into the shattered earth, trying to stand, shaking, hunched, battered in every way a Saint could be battered. He held his right hand, which was dangling at a weird angle, and twisted it into place.

He rose. Barely. Brokenly. Stubbornly.

Leon appeared before him again, already lifting another strike… one that promised to finish what he started.

The beatdown was far from over, and the dimension was already beginning to tear at the seams. A dimension created by an Arbiter, and the strongest one at that, couldn’t hold two Saint Realm beings, showing the insane potential they had. If they were to be in the divine realm, the possibility of them becoming true gods or higher was assured, 100%.

The next exchange was bound to gouge scars into the sky itself, and Ethan’s body might not survive a dozen more seconds of this divine brutality.

Yet something flickered behind Ethan’s eyes… weak, distant, but unmistakably alive.

…

High above the chaos… so high that even Saints would need to look to notice, an enormous orange-scaled dragon hung in the sky like a second sun forgotten by the heavens. Its scales shimmered in molten gradients, each one containing the glow of a volcano’s heart. Lava-like runes pulsed along its spine, and its eyes… its eyes were worlds of their own. Blazing. Ancient. Destructive.

The kind of gaze that could melt cities into paint smears if it blinked too hard. But even that impossible beast, Barki, the Dragon Ruler of Flames, felt tense and helpless.

The air on its back was thick with dread and helplessness, the same that she was feeling.

Pisces was barely holding herself together. Her breath came in shivers. Her fingers trembled at her sides. And her eyes, normally soft, ocean-blue, and steady, were wild.

Completely wild!

“Let me go… let me GO!” she screamed, voice cracking like scorched glass. She wasn’t just about to jump; she was a split-second away from ripping space apart to force her way down… if her strength allowed it. She didn’t care how she would get there.

Lisa had her arms locked around Pisces’s waist, using both strength and a bit of magic to keep her in place.

“If you move again, I will knock you out,” she snapped, but her own voice betrayed her. It shook… not with fear, but with the rage of someone being denied the most basic instinct: protect the person she loves.

And she wasn’t alone.

Every woman on Barki’s back, including Barki herself, was showing signs of breaking. Knuckles white. Teeth gritted. Breath unsteady. Eyes filled with a storm of helpless fury.

Watching Ethan being torn apart… watching him bleed, fall, rise, fall again… was the kind of torture no one had prepared them for. Their power was vast, frightening, and enough to tilt wars. And yet here they were, frozen by a decree delivered by a figure who outranked even Saints.

They could save him.

They wanted to save him.

They were not allowed to save him.

It was punishment dressed as divine law.

For Pisces, the suffering was doubled… no, multiplied. One fighter below was her younger brother, someone she had raised, loved, scolded, and protected. The other was her soulmate, the man whose heartbeat synced with her own. The man who held her at night, made her laugh, made her feel safe and seen.

And now those two were trying to kill each other.

Her body twisted again, and Lisa tightened her grip. “Pisces… stop… please.”

“I can’t!” Pisces broke. Tears finally escaped, streaking down her cheeks. “He’s hurting him! He’s killing him!”

Her voice exploded into a raw wail that shook even the dragon beneath them, who was known to have the strongest of hearts.

The pregnant women in the group suffered the worst. Their emotions were amplified, unstable, vulnerable in ways that made every blow Ethan received feel like it landed on their own bodies.

Harley, nearly full-term, was trembling so violently that flames of stress sparked around her hands. She curled protectively around her stomach, whispering Ethan’s name under her breath in a helpless plea. Each time Leon struck, Harley flinched like she had been hit herself. Every instinct screamed for her to leap to Ethan’s side.

But the decree wrapped around her soul like divine shackles.

Even Asteria, normally the most composed and also the goddess in the group, had her nails digging into her palms so deeply they drew blood.

“I swear…” she muttered through clenched teeth, “…if he dies, I will tear down whatever god delivered that order.”

No one disagreed.

They had rushed here in hopes of assisting Ethan and were met with a decree not to interfere. They didn’t know who or what declared that, but they were so powerful a being that even Asteria, the goddess, couldn’t override their authority.

They were now invisible, helpless…

Just waiting for the moment they were allowed to intervene. Praying they wouldn’t be allowed too late.

The sky trembled again, and far below, Ethan crashed into the ground hard enough to make the dimension quake.

Pisces screamed his name… but it didn’t reach him.

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