novelnext Chapter 460: Battle—4
Chapter 460: Battle—4
The cloak was gone.
What remained in its place was a young man—or something wearing the shape of one. Pale as bleached bone, sickly in a way that wasn’t incidental but fundamental, as though whatever process had given him this power had extracted the cost directly from his physical vitality.
Deep black hair hung lank against his forehead. Deep black eyes that absorbed light without returning any of it. Around five feet eight, thin in the way that made his frame look constructed from sharp angles rather than anything organic, every visible line suggesting a body that had been pushed past its natural limits so many times that recovery had stopped being complete.
He looked like a sick child who had been given power that no child’s body was built to contain.
Leon didn’t give him a single moment.
FWOOSH! SLASH! CRACK!
Already moving, already pressing, holy energy sword blazing white-gold and multi-Aura blade screaming with its chaotic intertwined elements as he drove the figure backward with relentless sequential strikes. The thin man defended—barely, desperately—sacrificing wave after wave of his undead horde to buy fractions of seconds.
Dozens of undead are thrown into each attack’s path. Then hundreds. Archon-ranked specimens were mixed deliberately among the mass, creatures that should by any reasonable standard have required coordinated efforts from multiple powerful fighters to bring down.
Leon’s blades went through them like they weren’t there.
SLASH! RIIIP! SLASH! CRACK! BOOM!
One strike per obstacle. One. Each Archon-ranked undead sacrificed as a shield took exactly as long to destroy as the common ones ranked below it, which was no time at all. Leon didn’t slow. Didn’t redirect.
He dismantled them mid-stride, mid-swing, the motion barely registering as an interruption before he continued toward the thin man behind them.
Stalling. All of this is stalling, and you know it.
The indirect benefit cascaded across the broader battlefield in real time. Every Archon-ranked undead Leon destroyed while conducting what could only charitably be called a chase removed it permanently from the fight. Vyra and the dragon were sustaining. The pressure on them diminished in direct proportion to Leon’s casual destruction of what should have been their most dangerous opponents.
His clone was handling the rest.
He was aware of it the way he was aware of his own breathing—a separate thread of consciousness delivering information without demanding focus. The clone had driven itself into the highest-density concentrations of undead and was working through them with the same ruthless efficiency Leon brought to his own combat.
Archon-ranked fell to it just as quickly as they fell to him. The army that had seemed inexhaustible twenty minutes ago was visibly, measurably thinning across every section of the battlefield.
Ira was safe. The clone had confirmed it without ceremony, information delivered as fact rather than report. She’d been coordinating non-combatant evacuation with her squad—exactly the role that suited her—and the clone had positioned itself to ensure her safety without pulling away from the broader work.
Seraphine was managing. The clone threw precisely calibrated elemental projectiles at critical moments when her situation demanded intervention. Not overwhelming involvement—not fighting her battle for her—just creating space when the pressure became genuinely dangerous. Enough. Exactly enough, no more.
Good. All of it is good.
The thin man was failing.
Leon could read it in the degrading quality of each defense—the way his sacrifices came fractionally slower, the way his movements had shed whatever economy they’d started with and become purely reactive, each decision about what to throw into the path of the next attack arriving later than the one before. He was operating on the terminal edge of his available resources, and both of them knew it.
Leon’s eyes moved to the wand.
The first application of Leximancy against this figure should have been lethal. It hadn’t been—partly the thin man’s own resilience, partly that wand. Seven runes had been lit on it at the start of their engagement. Leon had been tracking them with the patient attention he gave to anything that was keeping an opponent alive.
One remained.
A single rune, glowing with desperate insistence while the thin man ground his teeth hard enough that the sound carried across the gap between them.
One intervention left. One. And then nothing between you and whatever comes after that.
The Causality problem arrived in Leon’s awareness like a persistent splinter.
He had killed thousands of undead at this point. Thousands, with Archon ranked among them in numbers that should have generated meaningful returns by any reasonable accounting. He’d been monitoring his Causality reserves since the battle began.
Nothing. Not a single point.
He obliterated another cluster mid-stride—thirty undead in one sweeping motion, four of them Archon-ranked, gone in the time it took to complete the swing—and felt the familiar absence of any notification.
Completely worthless for Causality. Not one point for any of it.
The irritation was genuine. Causality wasn’t abstract currency to him—it was a functional lifeline, the resource that let him access things that raw strength and technique couldn’t provide. He needed it. He needed it specifically for the kind of precarious situation that tended to arrive without warning, and right now his reserves were lower than he wanted them to be.
Fine. Recalibrate.
He landed on what was actually true: the cores. Every undead he destroyed left something behind, and at Archon rank, those somethings were not trivial. His people in the World Fragment—the Pyrans he’d been storing, the others who called that space home—they needed resources for growth. Archon-rank cores would accelerate that growth substantially. He wasn’t going to be selective about elemental compatibility; the volume would handle what efficiency couldn’t.
I’ll be considerably wealthy in materials after this battle ends.
He allowed himself a brief internal exhale at that realization—something approaching relief, or at least the satisfaction of knowing the effort wasn’t completely without return—and then returned his full attention to the thin man, who was running out of time in measurable increments.
The last rune.
Leon saw it in the same moment he made his decision.
FWOOSH!
Void Steps. No warning, no displacement sound, no approach to track. Absence and then presence, his body materializing directly at the thin man’s side with both swords already committed to their trajectories, the attack already in motion before the thin man’s nervous system had finished registering the teleportation.
The thin man felt him arrive.
His black eyes went wide—not with surprise but with the specific expression of someone who has been running a calculation and just received the final answer.
The last rune on the wand flared. A desperate terminal application of whatever protective function those runes had been providing across the entire engagement—buying him the thinnest possible sliver, a single millisecond of spatial resistance, a fraction of a moment that was just barely—
Leon’s Leximancy had already detonated. A fraction of a second earlier, the word released quietly into the immediate space between them.
"FREEZE."
Both forces collided in the air. The thin man’s final rune and Leon’s Leximancy met in the space between intention and execution, two absolute commands competing for the same moment, and for one impossible suspended instant, both combatants occupied a fraction of time that neither of them fully controlled.
Then the thin man’s body began to change.