Chapter 1102 - Taming the Wall - Excruciating Love - 2
Chapter 1102: Chapter 1102 - Taming the Wall - Excruciating Love - 2
The colossal, mutated maw was closing in, swallowing the light around him.
Sirius rotated his body with every bit of his remaining strength. As he also forced a final, agonizing fusion with his two beasts, violently scraping the absolute bottom of his core to charge one last beam of Light and Darkness.
He emptied his entire system into the attack.
If he could just stagger the Platinum beast, if he could push its colossal mass back down into the sinkhole, Ren would have a chance to survive.
A tiny, microscopic chance, but a real one. The boy could run or he could hide in the overgrowth and wait for the city’s vanguard.
Sirius had to trust that Ren was still conscious inside the shadow-dimension. The Wolverine hadn’t forcefully vomited its passengers onto the shadow space, which meant the boy’s mana was still circulating.
Ren was in there, clinging to consciousness with the exact same infuriating, unbreakable stubbornness Sirius had witnessed in the forest, the same stubbornness that Sirius had seen in him from the first time but hadn’t wanted to admire, the stubbornness of an arrogant child whose entire being refused to accept defeat.
Sirius charged the flickering dual-element ray, dark and white in his hands... And with the fusion power and in the exact same fluid rotation motion, he twisted his torso and violently hurled Ren away from the sinkhole.
He was executing the final, desperate pass. He was the battered quarterback staring down a lethal blitz, hurling the ball toward an endzone he would never get to cross himself. He placed his entire legacy, the fate of the world, and his final sliver of hope into the hands of his ’team’.
He was trusting Ren to win the game he could no longer finish.
The shadow containing Ren sailed through the air, clearing the immediate hole radius.
Sirius was now turned back to face the abyss. The colossal jaws that eclipsed his vision.
He released the shadow and light spiraling ray.
His form was flawless. His execution was exquisite, right down to the very last energy particle. If Sirius Starweaver knew how to do anything, it was how to perfectly control his face and his mana. It was his final, defiant offering to a broken, painful world before leaving it.
But the beam that erupted from his palms was tragically thin.
It was starved of energy. Exhausted.
It almost flickered like a dying candle, completely devoid of the kinetic force required to hope to destroy the armored plating of the nightmare crashing down upon him.
Sirius knew it the exact instant the magic left his hands.
It wasn’t going to do a damn thing.
But suddenly, the terror vanished... It didn’t matter anymore.
The excruciating, years-long pain of living without Lykea, and being unable to enjoy looking at his daughter was finally going to end.
In that suspended, frozen heartbeat between life and the crushing dark of the beast’s maw, Sirius let out a soft sigh.
He finally lowered his mental shields.
He let the memory rise... that specific, radiant memory he had kept buried deeper than any other. The one he never allowed himself to look at, because even a fleeting glimpse would utterly destroy him.
It was an ordinary, sunny afternoon in a world that no longer existed. Lykea and Luna were both hugging him at the exact same time, laughing.
The image bloomed in his mind, vivid and warm. And just as it always did, every single damn time, it broke him.
Tears spilled over his bruised cheeks. He was crying like a ridiculous, sensitive baby, right in the face of a terrifying monster. It was so utterly and completely embarrassing.
Yet his final, fading thought was directed entirely at the boy flying through the air behind him.
’Make her happy,’ Sirius pleaded silently, entirely lacking the breath to speak the words. ’Please survive... You pulled me out of the crystal so you can now find Lykea. And let her hug Luna all she wants. Like his useless father never could...’
The pathetic, exhausted ray of light and dark drifted toward the plunging mutant.
And then, a localized hurricane, a concussive, deafening wall of wind, violently slammed into Sirius’s chest, throwing him backward onto the sky.
In front of him, the pathetic thread of his dying spell abruptly exploded. It expanded dozens of times its original size, transforming from a dying ember into a blinding, roaring pillar of absolute Light and crushing Darkness.
The Platinum mutant was instantly vaporized.
It wasn’t cut, it wasn’t wounded...
Its colossal mass was simply erased from reality in a fraction of a second. The apocalyptic column of dual-energy didn’t even slow down upon impact; it punched straight through the beast and detonated deep within the subterranean chamber below, shaking the very bedrock of the continent.
It was a strike packing ten times the destructive payload Sirius could have generated on his absolute best day. Perhaps even more.
It hadn’t been his spell.
His exhausted, flickering ray had been swallowed whole, absorbed and weaponized by another, vastly superior force, like a single drop of water being devoured by a tidal wave.
Gasping for air, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs, Sirius slowly turned his head.
He looked up.
He searched the sky for the origin of that impossible, god-like energy.
There, silhouetted against the blinding glare of the midday sun, two figures were descending over the clearing. The light was too intense to look at directly, but their auras were clearer than the sun.
One figure was unfurling massive, sprawling wings of pure light. They were so radiantly brilliant that the sun behind them felt like a cheap, dim bulb in comparison. The feathers weren’t made of physical matter, but of solidified, holy brilliance. It was a divine angel, suspended above the scarred earth, descending from the heavens to fix what the corruption had broken.
And drifting down right beside her was the second figure.
It was completely cloaked in a shadow so absolute, so suffocatingly dense, that it didn’t reflect the angel’s light, it violently drank it. From that swirling abyss of darkness radiated an aura infinitely more terrifying than the Platinum beast that had just been erased. As the shadow expanded in Sirius’ mind, it projected a colossal, phantom silhouette.
It was the unmistakable shape of a wolf’s jaws.
The maw wide enough to swallow the entire world and leave it trapped in an endless, starless night.
Suspended in the sky, completely dominating the atmosphere, the two figures looked down at him.