Chapter 136: Leon Against Kaelen (5)

Kaelen’s eyes snapped open, glowing with a blinding, blindingly bright mixture of gold and blood-red light. He looked down at Leon, his face twisted into a mask of pure, self-destructive malice, preparing to unleash the entirety of his condensed domain in one final, inescapable wave of absolute annihilation.

The air around the broken Guild Master ceased to exist, replaced instantly by a vacuum of superheated plasma and crushing gravitational force. Kaelen had completely abandoned his physical survival, forcing his stolen Level 73 mana core to consume itself in a runaway chain reaction.

The golden-red ring of the Emperor’s Domain, which usually expanded outward to dominate the battlefield, was now violently imploding into Kaelen’s own chest. The sheer, catastrophic pressure of an entire domain compressing into a single biological vessel was impossible to sustain, and Kaelen knew it. He intended to turn his own body into a localized supernova, taking Leon, Snow, and the entire Azure Scale valley straight to hell with him.

The heat radiating from Kaelen was enough to instantly flash-boil the mud beneath them, turning the cratered clearing into a steaming, sulfuric caldera.

But Leon Wes did not retreat. His SSS-Rank Supreme Comprehension engaged with terrifying efficiency. The world around Leon slowed to a crawl, the blinding light of Kaelen’s self-destruction breaking down into cascading streams of system data, theory, and raw physics. Leon’s dual-colored eyes traced the flow of Kaelen’s collapsing domain, peering directly into the internal structure of the tyrant’s mana core.

Leon instantly recognized the fundamental mechanic of the attack. Kaelen wasn’t just detonating his core; his body could not contain the sheer volume of energy required for a blast of that magnitude without instantly vaporizing before the shockwave could even form.

To bypass his own biological limitations and unleash the domain in full, Kaelen’s suicidal intent was actively tearing open a microscopic spatial rift directly inside his own chest cavity. He was using the rift as a venting chamber, pooling the apocalyptic energy outside of standard reality for a fraction of a microsecond before allowing it to violently burst outward into the physical plane.

It was a brilliant maneuver that would have completely eradicated any standard Steadfast entity caught within its blast radius.

But Leon was not a standard entity. He possessed the exact talent required to dismantle it.

Dimensional Lock, the S-Rank talent, ripped directly from the corpse of the Void God, Erebus, activated instantly.

A profound, heavy pulse of silver-gray light erupted from Leon’s center, instantly expanding to cover a hundred-yard radius. It did not carry any concussive force, nor did it deal any physical damage. Instead, it interacted directly with the underlying code of the world itself. The spatial coordinates within the radius were absolutely frozen.

The fabric of reality turned to indestructible conceptual steel. Teleportation, dimensional phasing, and, most importantly, the opening and expanding of spatial rifts were unequivocally denied by the it’s authority.

Inside Kaelen’s chest, the microscopic spatial rift that was meant to house the explosive compression of his Emperor’s Domain slammed into the Dimensional Lock.

The rift froze. It could not expand. It could not vent into the sub-dimension.

Kaelen’s catastrophic, self-destructive attack stalled in a state of impossible, agonizing suspension. The entirety of his compressed domain was now trapped directly inside his own fragile, physical body, with absolutely nowhere to go.

The blinding, gold and blood-red light radiating from Kaelen flickered, choking on its own fuel.

Kaelen’s expression of triumphant, suicidal malice instantly dissolved into a mask of pure horror. He could feel the apocalyptic energy tearing at his internal organs, the heat boiling his blood within his veins, the gravity attempting to crush his spine from the inside out. He had initiated a self-destruct sequence, and Leon had simply trapped the explosion beneath his skin.

He opened his mouth to scream, but the localized gravity within his own throat crushed his vocal cords.

Leon did not stand back and watch the tyrant burn from the inside. He stepped forward, closing the distance seamlessly. The absolute authority of the Steadfast rank rolled off him in suffocating, invisible waves, pressing the steaming earth completely flat.

He stood directly in front of the paralyzed, agonizingly suspended Kaelen.

Leon raised his right hand, the leather glove slick with the ambient moisture of the ruined waterfall, and placed his palm squarely on the top of Kaelen’s head.

"You wanted to know who is truly all-powerful," Leon said, his voice entirely devoid of mercy, echoing with the cold, mechanical detachment of a god rendering judgment. "You wanted to wield all the power, didn’t you?"

"Then I will give it to you!"

Leon tapped into his SSS-Rank Eternal Mana.

The talent did not just provide a large mana pool; it conceptually tethered Leon’s core to the infinite leylines of the world itself. With this MP’s regeneration, Leon was a conduit for an unending ocean of magical energy. And in that singular microsecond, Leon opened the floodgates, directing a massive, violently pressurized surge of raw Steadfast-tier mana directly down his arm and into Kaelen’s body.

The overwhelming influx of energy was beyond anything a mortal vessel was designed to withstand. Kaelen’s Level 73 mana pathways, forcibly expanded by the cannibalization of his subordinate, were instantly overwhelmed. It was akin to forcing the entire volume of an ocean through a fragile, rusted pipe.

Kaelen’s body violently convulsed. The sheer, overwhelming volume of Leon’s mana slammed into Kaelen’s brain, instantly short-circuiting his neural pathways and violently tearing through his magical circuits. The golden-red light of Kaelen’s trapped domain was entirely swallowed by the blinding brilliance of Leon’s power.

The physical toll was catastrophic. Kaelen’s crimson armor groaned and warped under the sheer internal pressure of the mana overload, the metal glowing white-hot as the internal magic friction skyrocketed. The veins in Kaelen’s neck bulged, turning a sickly, glowing blue before violently rupturing beneath the skin.

Kaelen’s eyes rolled back in his head. The internal structure of his brain was systematically annihilated by the sheer voltage of the mana overload, completely erasing his consciousness, his memories, and his stolen authority in a fraction of a second.

Leon held the connection for exactly three seconds, ensuring the destruction was absolute and irreversible. He had drowned the Emperor in the very power he had so desperately sought to possess.

Leon released his grip, pulling his hand away from Kaelen’s helmet.

Simultaneously, Leon dismissed the Dimensional Lock.

The frozen spatial coordinates instantly resumed their natural flow. But there was no longer an active, willful intent driving Kaelen’s trapped domain. With his brain dead and his mana pathways completely pulverized by the overload, the compressed energy inside Kaelen’s chest lost its structural integrity.

It didn’t detonate outward in a massive explosion. It simply collapsed inward, fizzling out into a pathetic, hissing cloud of dark smoke and ozone.

Kaelen Vance collapsed.