Chapter 223: looking up at the sky

High above the clouds, within the silent, crystalline halls of the Obelisk, a single word echoed through the void.

"Now."

In the mountain pass below, the Gatekeeper pulled a heavy, celestial lever carved from raw spatial stone. The ancient mechanism groaned under the force, runes along its surface flaring briefly with cold blue light as the lever locked into place.

THUM-THUM!

Before the echo of the Inquisitors’ breaking armor could even clear the gorge, two blinding, light-blue beams of sheer divine displacement descended directly from the sky. They struck Elena and Vetra with zero warning, zero chant time, and zero cast signature. The beams cut through the overcast air like solid pillars of pure force, their edges sharp enough to part the mountain wind itself.

The beams didn’t crush; they gripped. Invisible pressure coiled around the two women, locking their limbs and lifting them from the stone as though the sky itself had claimed them.

Vince’s eyes widened. In a fraction of a millisecond—faster than light, faster than thought—he triggered a raw burst of transcendent movement. The ground beneath his boots didn’t just crack; it vaporized in a white-hot flash, stone turning to superheated dust as he launched himself toward them, his hand outstretched, his fingers missing Elena’s sleeve by less than a millimeter.

ZIP!

Space folded inward with a violent, sickening pop. Elena’s terrified gasp and Vetra’s instinctively raised blade vanished into the sky, pulled upward into the clouds at an impossible velocity. The air where they had stood collapsed in on itself with a sharp, final sound.

The light-blue beams snapped shut. The sky sealed, leaving only a faint residual shimmer that faded within heartbeats.

Vince landed softly on the gravel where they had been standing a second prior. His hand remained outstretched, his fingers curling slowly into the empty, cold mountain air. Fine dust settled around his boots. The silence that followed was absolute.

Silence fell over the gorge—not the silent vacuum of a spatial spell, but a suffocating, unnatural quiet that pressed against the ears and made every distant rockfall sound unnaturally loud.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

Heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoed from every corner of the mountain pass. The sheer rock faces on either side split open with grinding cracks, stone plates grinding aside as if on hidden rails. Out from the shadows poured a massive, silver phalanx. Two hundred Iron Inquisitors lined up in rigid formation, their ten-foot golden halberds raised in perfect unison, their featureless visors glowing with a harsh, red extermination light that locked squarely onto Vince. The red glow reflected off the polished silver of their armor, casting long, unnatural shadows across the pass.

Vince... Barnaby’s voice chimed in his head. She dropped down beside his shoulder, her usual playful smirk completely gone as she looked at the clenching white of his knuckles. Vince, listen to me. That was a high-tier Gatekeeper lever. They used the Inquisitors as a focal decoy to track the girls’ new mana signatures. Don’t lose control now—if you breach your threshold, you’ll destabilize the local ley-lines and lose their track completely. Take a breath and let’s—

Vince didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at her.

He simply exhaled. The breath left him in a slow, controlled stream that carried a faint shimmer of heat.

The delicate, surgical 5% micro-precision threshold didn’t just break; it shattered. Something vast and restrained finally slipped its leash.

He didn’t draw Executioner’s Edge. He didn’t construct a complex Mirage Matrix. He merely stepped forward.

BOOM!

A wave of pure, unadulterated divine gravity slammed down onto the gorge. The force didn’t just push the air away; it crushed the localized atmospheric pressure into a dense, dark purple shockwave that expanded in a three-hundred-yard circle. The ground trembled. Loose stones leaped upward before slamming back down. The shockwave rolled outward like a visible wall of compressed force, warping the air itself into rippling heat haze.

The front three rows of Iron Inquisitors—fifty elite celestial knights clad in "indestructible" law-iron—were instantly flattened. Their heavy armor didn’t bend; it imploded into thin silver disks under the sheer, brutal weight of his aura, the metal crumpling inward with sharp, metallic shrieks. Their golden halberds snapped like brittle twigs, the broken shafts scattering across the stone in glittering arcs.

The remaining Inquisitors attempted to raise a joint Absolute Law Array, a massive golden barrier spanning the width of the pass. Intricate runes flared across its surface as the barrier solidified, glowing with the combined authority of nearly a hundred elite enforcers.

Vince raised his right hand and casually swung his arm horizontally.

An arc of dense, golden-purple force sliced through the air. The "impenetrable" collective law-array didn’t even offer resistance. The beam cleaved straight through the golden barrier, through sixty-foot granite cliffs, and through eighty armored Inquisitors at once. The mountain walls on either side groaned before collapsing into thousands of tons of falling debris, completely erased by the raw trajectory of the swing. Dust and shattered stone billowed upward in a rolling cloud. Molten edges glowed briefly where the force had cut clean through solid rock.

Vince didn’t run. He walked.

Every step he took sent seismic ripples through the stone. Cracks spiderwebbed outward from each footfall. Inquisitors rushed him from behind, their halberds glowing with lethal spatial runes that distorted the air around their blades. Without even turning around, Vince flexed his left hand into a fist.

The space behind him compressed into a singular point of infinite density. The air folded violently inward, dragging forty Inquisitors into a central vortex with bone-cracking force. A moment later the vortex detonated into a shower of pulverized silver metal and scattered law-runes that glittered like dying sparks as they fell.

It wasn’t a fight. It was a methodical, terrifying dismantling. He moved through two hundred elite upper-realm enforcers like an iron plow through wet soil. No chants, no named techniques—just pure, crushing authority used like a blunt sledgehammer. Armor crumpled. Halberds shattered. Bodies vanished beneath waves of compressed force or were simply erased along the path of his casual swings. The air itself grew thick with the smell of scorched metal and ozone.

Barnaby didn’t try to speak again.

She floated motionless in mid-air above the swirling dust, her translucent silk dress fluttering in the superheated gale winds generated by his movement. Her golden eyes were fixed on Vince, watching him with a quiet, eerie stillness—like a spectator watching the sands run out on a timer that had finally reached zero.

Within less than sixty seconds, the army was gone.

Where a heavily fortified celestial checkpoint had once stood, there was now only a smooth, glassed-over crater spanning the entire mountain pass. The surrounding cliffs were sliced cleanly, their molten stone dripping down into smoking pools that hissed and glowed in the dim light. Two hundred Iron Inquisitors had been reduced to fine, silver dust settling slowly over the ruined earth like metallic snowfall.

Vince stood in the exact center of the devastation.

His dark coat hung still around his legs. His hands were lowered at his sides, his chest rising and falling in slow, heavy cycles. The ground beneath him had fused into blackened glass that still radiated residual heat.

A thin, visible trail of white heat and steam vented steadily from the side of his mouth, his amethyst eyes burning with a cold, terrifying light as he raised his head toward the overcast sky.