Chapter 565: Ren’s Final Blade [Bonus - ]

Chapter 565: Ren’s Final Blade [Bonus Chapter]

Down in the canyon, Ren’s face split into a bloody triumphant sneer.

"CAN YOU SEE THEM?! CAN YOU READ THE VOID, LORD VESPERA?!"

Kara stopped retreating as her boots dug into the dirt, grinding her momentum to a halt.

"I don’t need to see the void," Kara’s voice rang out.

Within her eyes, the moisture channels pulsed with azure intensity.

The Rip-Current Perception didn’t look for the invisible steel... It looked at Ren’s hands.

It read the tension in the flexor tendons of his wrist and it read the micro-shift in the alignment of his metacarpals too.

She could sense space since she had started learning it from Thor and even used it but it was a whole lot of stress and burned a lot of mana... This was much better.

Every time his muscles coiled to release the spatial vibration, the blue current lines mapped the exact angle of the blade three fractions of a second before the cut was born.

’Three cuts high... One cut low and two seconds of recovery between the spatial pulses.’

Kara caught the rhythm.

CLANG!

Her blade blurred forward, intercepting an invisible slash four inches from her throat with the impact rang out like a church bell.

CLANG! CLANG!

Two more unseen strikes were batted aside with effortless precision as the sparks detonated in empty air, illuminating the invisible seams of the spatial vibration.

Ren’s sneer froze and his pupils contracted in horror.

"No..." Ren stammered with his arms trembling violently as he tried to reverse the momentum. "That’s... that’s impossible..."

"Your rhythm is predictable," Kara said, stepping straight into his guard. "Three heavy swings, a pause to breathe through your punctured lung, and a low sweep to cover your retreat... You’ve been doing the exact same sequence since the first clash on the ridge."

WHAM!

Kara’s forehead drove forward in a brutal headbutt straight into the bridge of Ren’s nose.

CRUNCH!

Blood exploded across both their faces.

Ren stumbled backward with his vision flashing white and his grip on the katana nearly slipping as his brain rattled against his skull.

"Gah—!"

He fell back five paces with his breath coming in dry strangulated sobs and his body trembling so violently that he could barely keep his knees from buckling.

Every single technique had failed.

...The Lightning Sword had been slapped away like a toy... The Twin Heavens had been shattered into scrap... The Void-Severing Mirage had been read like a children’s picture book...

He was standing on the edge of the grave with his core flickering like a dying candle and his body screaming for unconsciousness.

Yet... there was one more.

The fourth and final style.

The forbidden technique of House Minamoto... an art that demanded the caster burn their own life-force to ignite their soul pathways.

Ren slowly lifted his head.

The blood running from his shattered nose and split forehead covered his face in a grotesque crimson mask, but his eyes burned with a terrifying luminescence.

"If I die here..." Ren whispered, his voice shaking with mad poetry, "...then let my soul become the blade that cuts the sky."

’Truly they do sound like cultivators...’

The entire Wastezone seemed to violently contract as Ren’s Purple Core cracked.

A pillar of pitch-black and violet lightning erupted from his sternum, roaring two hundred feet into the bruised clouds as the violence of the ascension blew the surrounding boulders into dust, melting the sand within thirty yards into bubbling black glass.

"Minamoto Ultimate Secret Art... Fourth Style... Falling Heaven, Severed God!"

The entire sky above the canyon turned purple as Ren held his katana with both hands, lifting the steel high above his head.

The blade was no longer metal... it had become a colossal, eighty-foot-tall lance of concentrated screaming lightning that warped the dimensional fabric around its edges.

It was an attack capable of leveling what he wanted... An attack that poured twenty-two years of obsession, pain, and blood into a single stroke.

"LORD VESPERA!" Ren screamed, his vocal cords tearing and vomiting blood with every syllable! "WITNESS THE STRONGEST SWORD OF SHOGYA!"

He brought the lightning blade down with everything his existence possessed.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!

The sky split and the canyon floor cleaved in two as Kara stood beneath the falling cataclysm.

’Are we in an anime...? How did he randomly manage to get enough power to do this?’

However she didn’t run as she lowered her blade until the matte-gray steel pointed toward the earth and her Second Phase Gold Core finally glowed.

’Mine won’t be as action-packed as this but I guess I can release as much power as I can...’

The water in the air didn’t vaporize under the lightning as it submitted to Kara’s will instead.

Millions of gallons of atmospheric moisture condensed in a microsecond, wrapping around Kara’s void-blade in a spiraling roaring drill of deep heavy-water that turned as black as the deep ocean trenches.

"Tidal-Blade Arts... First Style... Severing Horizon!"

Kara swung upward.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The collision crated several shockwaves across the entire southern hemisphere of Sector Forty-Four as the eighty-foot lightning blade struck the heavy-water crescent!

For one agonizing fraction of a second, the two forces hung suspended in mid-air with the desperate burning life-force of a young prodigy clashing against the ocean of a monster.

Then... the lightning broke as the heavy-water wave tore through the black lightning like a cleaver through paper.

The concussive shockwave blasted upward into the clouds, blowing a two-mile-wide hole straight through the purple sky, while the downward backwash drove Ren Minamoto’s katana from his hands, shattering the steel into a hundred glowing smoking fragments that rained down across the desert floor.

SHATTER!

The storm died instantly and the dust settled too as Ren Minamoto stood in the center of the smoking glass crater.

His hands were empty as his arms hung limply at his sides with the skin blackened and burned down to the meat while his white haori completely incinerated away.

He stared at his empty trembling palms.

Then...

THUD!

His knees gave out beneath him.

Ren hit the scorched glass with his hands resting on his thighs and his head hanging low between his shoulders.

A strange wet sound broke from his throat.

Hiccup!

Ren froze.

Another sound followed.

A tight choked gasp that tore through his broken chest, followed by a hot salty drop of liquid that fell from his chin, splattering against the black glass between his knees.

Drip!

Ren blinked, staring at the wet drop in uncomprehending bewilderment.

’What... what is this...?’

He reached up with a trembling, blackened finger, touching the wet trail running down his cheek.

Tears... that was what it was, Ren Minamoto was crying... He had never cried in his entire conscious existence.

Not when the midwives struck him at birth, not when his father drove wooden bokkens into his ribs until he coughed blood at six years old and not when his flesh was cleaved to the bone during the island trials at fourteen.

He had been taught that tears were the ultimate failure which was the mark of a broken spirit and a pathetic disgusting display of weakness.

And now, on a live international broadcast feed with over 1.4 billion people watching across nine continents...

He was sobbing like a terrified, abandoned child.

"I... I..." Ren choked, his shoulders heaving as the tears poured freely down his bloody face and his voice cracked into a high-pitched pathetic wail. "Why... why can’t I... why wasn’t it enough...?"

He looked up, his tear-filled eyes meeting Kara’s unblinking violet gaze.

"I gave everything..." Ren wept with his hands clawing at the glass. "Twenty years... every day... I cut until my hands bled... I never slept... I never lived... and I couldn’t even make you draw your second arm..."

Kara stood five paces away with her single arm hanging loose at her side and the blade resting point-down in the dirt but she didn’t laugh and she didn’t deliver a cruel cutting one-liner either.

She stood in silence, letting the young swordsman weep.

Kara let him sit in the dirt and bleed out every ounce of repressed, suffocating grief that twenty years of conditioning had beaten into his marrow.

She knew what bad parenting looked like since she had seen enough broken children in her past life to recognize a boy who had been forged into a weapon before he ever had the chance to be a human being.

’Ah... all nobles are bad parents, huh?’

For two full minutes, the only sound in the canyon was Ren’s raw weeping.

Finally, when the sobs began to subside into shuddering, exhausted hiccups...

Kara took two slow steps forward.

"You fought well, Ren." Kara said softly and Ren’s tear-stained face lifted slightly.

WHAM!

Kara’s heavy combat boot buried itself directly into Ren’s solar plexus with concussive force.

"GAH!"

Ren coughed out a geyser of blood with his eyes rolling back into his skull as the kick blasted him thirty yards backward across the crater.

SKID-CRASH!

He hit the base of the canyon wall, slumping sideways into the rubble beside his brother, completely unconscious.

WHOOSH!

The emergency transponders pinned to Ren and Fang’s collars flared with blinding light as the spatial extraction runes ignited in unison.

In two towering pillars of pure white luminescence, the bodies of the Shogya twins dissolved into thousands of shimmering motes of light, surging into the upper clouds as the World Council’s recovery relays tore them out of the Sovereign Realm.

The United Hegemony of Shogya was officially wiped from the board and silence returned to the canyon.

Kara let out a long exhale through her nose, shaking the residual numbness from her right wrist.

She dismissed the blade back into her personal storage with a hum of gray light, then reached up, carefully adjusting the bridge of her wire-rimmed glasses.

She looked around the vast scorched crater, assessing the shattered stone and vitrified glass.

’Good swordsmen,’ Silas thought, rolling his right shoulder until the joint popped with a dull thud. ’Both of them... If they survive the core backlash from today, they’ll be terrifying monsters in ten years.’

She paused, her brow furrowing slightly as her gaze swept across the empty horizons of the Wastezone.

’But that aside...’

Silas frowned.

’...where the hell is Alexander?’

She closed her eyes, expanding her sensory perimeter across a four-mile radius.

...Nothing.

The Crown Prince’s oppressive arrogant mana signature was completely absent from his senses.

For a man who had publicly demanded Star-Iron Suppression Rings just to prove he could butcher her at an equal core stage, he was suspiciously quiet.

"Cowardly little prick," Kara muttered under her breath. "Probably hiding in the high crags waiting for the sudden-death compression."

She looked over toward a massive flat-topped granite boulder that had survived the lightning bombardment.

The stone was smooth, sun-warmed, and shaded from the harsh glare of the upper rift.

"Whatever," Kara sighed, walking toward the rock with heavy, dragging steps. "I’ll find him when the time comes."

She hopped up onto the flat boulder, brushed a few loose pebbles off the surface, and sprawled out on her back with a long groan of exhaustion.

Kara crossed her legs, resting her single right hand behind her head, staring up at the purple clouds.

"After I rest for ten minutes..." Kara mumbled to herself with her eyelids fluttering half-shut.

Silas let out a soft self-deprecating grunt.

’Turning into a woman makes me absurdly lazy for some reason,’ Silas mused, feeling the warm desert breeze ruffle his dark bangs. ’Or does this disguise have a distinct irritating personality of its own that amplifies every time I slip into her skin...? First the craving for sweets and wine, now the urge to take a nap in the middle of an active war zone. How ridiculous.’

Within thirty seconds, her breathing slowed to a soft one, completely unbothered by the fact that elite nobles were still hunting each other across the sector.

Miles to the east, deep within the shifting yellow ocean of the Great Dunes...

The air was suffocatingly hot, thick with the dry choking reek of fine silica.

Two figures moved through the crests of the sand with their silhouettes completely invisible to mundane eyes.

From head to toe, Prince Tariq Al-Mansur and Lady Safira were encased in dense shifting mantles of yellow quartz sand that matched the exact coloration and temperature of the surrounding dunes.

The sand clung to their skin, their bronze scale-mail, and their weapons like living chitin, masking their heat signatures and dampening their mana pathways to microscopic whispers.

Beneath the sand-shroud, Tariq crawled along the crest of a ninety-foot dune, his liquid-gold eyes scanning the shimmering heat haze of the salt flats below.

Every three paces, he dipped his fingers into the dune, injecting tiny hair-thin filaments of earth mana into the silica beneath them.

Deep beneath the surface, thirty interconnected Sand-Viper Snares were already primed and waiting... quicksand sinkholes packed with compressed quartz spikes that would swallow and impale any squad attempting to cross this part.

"The perimeter is set," Safira whispered, her voice carrying the dry hiss of sliding sand.

She knelt beside him, her curved khopesh resting across her thighs and her serpent-silk robes blending seamlessly with the ridge.

"If the Albion duelists push through this ravine, the sinkhole will snap their femurs before they can draw their rapiers."

Tariq nodded, his jaw set in a cold brutal grimace.

"And if House Bloom tries to flank through the low flats," Tariq added, his eyes narrowing, "the quartz spikes will pierce their boots and we don’t engage in fair duels... We let the desert drink their blood, we harvest their transponder badges, and we secure the eastern point."

Safira paused, her kohl-lined eyes shifting toward the far western mountains where the thunderous booms of Kara’s clashes had just died down.

A faint uneasy tremor touched her voice.

"And... what about Kara White?" Safira asked quietly. "What do we do if the Lord of Blessed Land turns toward the dunes?"

Tariq froze.

...

[Author’s Note]

Thanks for the castle and the support too! Every single bit matters... Phew~ Let’s get more GT! Also make sure to join the Discord.

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m