Chapter 1088 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Back to the Future - 2
Chapter 1088: Chapter 1088 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Back to the Future - 2
A few steps ahead of him, Liora, still gripping Ren’s hand tightly as they climbed, turned her head.
The deafening crash of combat echoed down the stairwell, violently severing the conversation before anyone could say a single word about Luna.
Sirius didn’t flinch. He recognized the brutal, percussive rhythm immediately... It was the unmistakable sound of a high-tier brawl, the kind of noise any seasoned fighter knew in their bones without needing to see the details.
Operating on decades of deeply ingrained muscle memory, he instantly expanded his mana perception. What he felt rolling down from the upper chamber made him sprint faster.
It was an absolutely massive display of power. It felt dangerously close to the output of his own peak fusion, but the flow was completely wrong.
It was volatile and erratic...
It possessed the chaotic, shrieking signature of two very different amounts of power flow being pushed together by sheer, brute force, rather than naturally harmonizing.
Even worse than his High Silver and Gold dissonance.
They breached the seventh chamber.
There, positioned at the bottleneck where the stairs connected to the sixth floor, a lone Tamer was holding the line. She was battling a writhing, pitch-black mass that was desperately trying to squeeze its way down the narrow shaft.
It was Lin.
Her back was to them, her feet practically nailed to the stone floor. She held the most immovably solid martial stance Sirius had seen and she was unleashing a relentless, blinding storm of kicks. Fire and wind mana bled together upon impact, superheating the air until the friction generated violent arcs of electricity that snapped off every strike.
Her legs moved with a terrifying speed and ferocity, they blurred into near-invisibility, creating the visual illusion of a massive, twin-bladed fan spinning out of control. But instead of just rotating, it was constantly pushing the blades forward, projecting a ceaseless, explosive shockwave of concussive force directly up the stairs.
She wasn’t gaining a single inch of ground.
But she was holding the chokepoint. And for her, stalling the enemy was the only victory that mattered.
Ren didn’t wait. He surged past Sirius, instantly throwing himself between Lin and the creeping dark artifacts above, physically shielding her from whatever ancient nightmare was trying to push through.
Seeing him, Lin finally dropped her guard.
She severed her fusion and the relief was immediate and physically devastating. Stripped of the magical reinforcement that had been propping her up past her biological limits, her legs gave out. She violently stumbled forward, her knees buckling.
But she didn’t fall... The dense, iron-corded muscle built from many years of grueling physical training caught her. In less than a second, she locked her joints, snapping back into her perfectly rigid, signature posture. The bone-deep exhaustion was undeniably there, but she buried it beneath a wall of pure willpower that had been forged long before she ever contracted a second beast.
Sirius stepped up beside the young man he still didn’t recognize, ready to lend his power to the fight.
As he moved, he caught a glimpse of Lin in his peripheral vision.
He recognized her instantly, it was effortless as she was an Ashenway branch he often saw near Selphira in their youth. Lin hadn’t aged with the dramatic, unrecognizable shifts of a teenager entering adulthood. She possessed almost the exact same face, the exact same unyielding posture, the exact same presence Sirius remembered from before the day he was frozen.
Something tight and anxious in his chest suddenly loosened a bit. Seeing her was a silent, profound confirmation that the world he had just woken up in still held anchors he knew.
Lin caught his gaze. Her eyes swept over his fluid, unhindered movements and she realized in a fraction of a second that Ren had successfully pulled off the impossible.
She didn’t cheer...
She merely offered a small, brief smirk, the quiet satisfaction of a soldier confirming a mission accomplished.
But there was no time for reunions. A suffocating wave of pressure violently dragged their attention back to the stairwell.
Ren triggered his fusion.
The Hydra and the Wolverine... Gold 2 and Gold 3.
The two massive systems violently slammed into the physical space in Ren’s body at the exact same moment. The resulting shockwave of displaced air was so intense it physically forced everyone in the room, including Sirius, to whip their heads toward the source.
Sirius felt the sheer magnitude of the power before his brain could fully process the reality of it.
This was almost a kid... Eighteen years old, maybe nineteen at most. Yet he was casually radiating an aura that completely eclipsed the absolute maximum output Sirius could generate at his absolute peak.
And the kid was doing it without straining.
He wielded this god-like jade colored energy with the terrifying nonchalance of someone merely operating at their standard, everyday baseline. The energy was flawlessly, impossibly stable.
Sirius didn’t even have time to ask a question.
Ren unleashed a combined blast of absolute light and devouring darkness spiraling directly up the stairs.
Sirius watched the spell’s trajectory with wide eyes. As an elite, he recognized the terrifying mastery behind the strike instantly. It wasn’t just raw, blind destruction, no, the control was perfect.
His best signature attack, yet he couldn’t do it at that level.
The spell carried a lethal potency and a microscopic precision that could only be forged through thousands of hours of desperate, bleeding practice. It was a flawless integration of two opposing forces woven into a single, devastating motion, something that fundamentally shouldn’t be possible for someone so young.
A monster of pure talent.
Even amidst the screaming urgency of their impending deaths, Sirius felt a profound, overwhelming surge of respect.
The blast slammed into the artifact.
The entire atmosphere shuddered. Smoke and blinding residual mana flooded the corridor. But as the dust violently cleared... the horror was still there.
It was completely intact.
The massive, black limbs simply reoriented themselves against the stone stair and resumed their agonizing crawl forward. It possessed the cold, unstoppable persistence of an object entirely devoid of the concept of self-preservation.
It didn’t care about damage or pain. It only cared about reaching them.