Chapter 85: Guardian Duel Stage (6)

The golden holographic interface hovering above the vast, polished black expanse of the Battlefield Realm chimed with a sharp, resonant frequency. The massive digital timer reset itself with absolute, uncaring precision.

Leon stood at the southern edge of the two-hundred-yard silver ring, his breathing slow and entirely controlled. His SSS+ Aura of the Undying was actively scrubbing the cognitive fatigue from his neural pathways, continuously regenerating the microscopic tears in his brain tissue caused by processing the terrifying speed of the previous two rounds. ℯℯ𝑙.

He looked across the arena. The Silent Aegis, the Level 245 Dimensional Guardian, stood in the exact center. The pale stone knight had reset to its flawless, mathematically perfect neutral guard, its massive stone greatsword resting lightly against the indestructible floor. It showed no signs of impatience, no signs of fatigue. It was a perfectly coded entity of war.

"Round one taught me that I cannot out-speed your base attributes," Leon spoke aloud, his voice carrying easily across the silent, frictionless expanse. "Round two taught me that relying on static area-denial simply gives your kinematic algorithm a reliable environmental hazard to exploit. You are a perfect machine."

Leon dismissed the Blade of the Dragon God into his spatial inventory. He didn’t summon the void-daggers either. He stood completely empty-handed, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck.

"But perfection has a fundamental flaw," Leon continued, his dual-colored eyes—one icy blue, the other burning gold—locking onto the featureless stone helm of the Guardian. "A perfect algorithm will always, without fail, choose the most mathematically efficient path to its target. You don’t make mistakes. You don’t take sub-optimal routes. And because you always choose the optimal path... you are entirely, predictably bound by your own flawless logic."

Leon raised his right hand, his fingers twitching as he tapped into his boundless mana. "Let’s see how your Level 245 logic handles a localized reality distortion."

The golden numbers above them ticked down.

[BEGIN]

Leon didn’t dash forward. He didn’t cast a defensive tempest. He immediately slammed his palms together and unleashed the ultimate evolution of his domain.

"Sovereign’s Eclipse!"

This was not the Transcendent-tier smokescreen of absolute darkness he had used in the previous rounds. This was the Primordial grade.

A shockwave of profound, absolute nothingness erupted from Leon’s core. It didn’t just blanket the arena in darkness; it fundamentally severed the two-hundred-yard silver ring from the physical laws of the Abyssal Fracture. The sky vanished. The black stone floor vanished.

Leon and the Silent Aegis were suddenly suspended in a self-contained pocket dimension—an endless, starry cosmos where the very concepts of up, down, left, and right ceased to exist.

Inside the Primordial Eclipse, Leon dictated the fundamental laws of spatial orientation and gravity.

The Guardian instantly registered the environmental shift. The Level 245 entity didn’t hesitate. It initiated a high-speed, direct-line assault, aiming to cross the void and strike Leon before he could establish a tactical advantage.

"Down," Leon commanded simply.

He didn’t move a muscle, but he mentally shifted the gravitational vector of the entire pocket dimension by ninety degrees.

The Guardian, moving at speeds exceeding the sound barrier, was suddenly subjected to a catastrophic shift in physics. The "floor" it was pushing off of was suddenly a sheer wall, and gravity was aggressively pulling it laterally into the starry abyss.

For the first time in three rounds, the Silent Aegis stumbled.

The stone knight’s kinematic algorithm, which relied on the consistent friction of the arena floor, was momentarily scrambled by the absolute absence of a fixed Z-axis.

Leon didn’t wait for the entity to recalculate. He utilized the zero-cooldown capability of his domain to trigger Abyssal Stride (Divine), teleporting perfectly into the Guardian’s altered trajectory.

Because Leon controlled the gravity, he oriented himself perfectly. He materialized above the falling knight, channeled Grave-Crusher into his bare fists to exponentially multiply their kinetic mass, and delivered a rapid, three-hit combination directly against the Guardian’s stone breastplate.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 3]

[The Silent Aegis: 0]

"I control the board now," Leon stated, instantly triggering Phantom Shift to drop his physical mass to zero just as the Guardian reflexively swung its stone greatsword in a wide, retaliatory arc.

The massive blade passed harmlessly through Leon’s intangible torso.

The moment the blade cleared his hit-box, Leon shifted the gravity again, violently reversing it entirely.

The Guardian was yanked upward into the void. But this time, the Level 245 entity adapted. It didn’t attempt to fight the shifting gravity. It used the massive surface area of its stone greatsword like a rudder in the air, dynamically twisting its body to align its boots with the new gravitational pull.

"You adapt fast," Leon noted, his SSS-Rank Origin Eyes flaring as they tracked the dense, pulsing mana pathways within the Guardian’s stone body.

Leon’s SSS-Rank Supreme Comprehension went into overdrive. He wasn’t watching the Guardian’s physical movements; he was watching the micro-fluctuations in its mana core that telegraphed the muscular intent milliseconds before the physical action occurred.

Leon calculated the exact vector of the Guardian’s next approach. The knight would use the new gravitational pull to slingshot itself toward Leon’s left flank, executing a rapid, multi-hit thrust sequence.

Leon didn’t move to block the left flank. Instead, he raised his hand and cast Arcane Requiem (Mythril) directly into the empty space on his left.

A localized pillar of intense black decay and erratic blue lightning erupted in the void, hanging perfectly suspended in the air.

A microsecond later, the Guardian launched itself, following the exact optimal path Leon had predicted. But as it reached the midpoint of its sprint, its sensors registered the lethal hit-box of the Arcane Requiem blocking its intended route.

The Guardian’s perfect algorithm instantly aborted the left-flank approach. To avoid taking guaranteed damage from the magical pillar, the algorithm calculated the next most mathematically efficient route: a sharp, forty-five-degree upward vault to clear the magic and strike Leon from above.

"Got you," Leon sneered.