Black swarm surged toward Alustus with lethal precision. Thousands of jet-black feathers launched from Adam’s wings, each one coded with a purpose akin vampiric intent.
Designed to drain blood, inflict permanent damage, and cause enhanced bleeding with even the slightest cut, that only worsen the closer Adam is to the inflicted.
It was one of Adam’s oldest Lore Abilities, primitive in origin, but devastating in practice. And still, one of his most relentlessly effective.
The feathers tracked Alustus mercilessly, moving like a plague of homing blades.
Using heat manipulation Adam made his feathers akin to homing missiles.
Alustus the victim in this tedious assault has no choice but to dodged, of course. But with each passing second, evasion grew harder.
Because Adam never stopped firing.
More feathers sprouted from his wings with each flap, and when they diminish a new pair is made in place of the diminish one.
It was a continuous stream of death, each one locking onto Alustus’s heat signature like living heat-seeking attacks.
They came from above, below, the sides... At this point almost every angle was a kill zone.
Alustus clicked his tongue, still calm, still reading the battlefield.
"So they’re following my body heat... or maybe their pursuit of me is through some supernatural bullshit."
He sighed, and said to himself.
"Tch... Fine then. Let’s try this."
[Force Technique: One With Water]
Without hesitation, Alustus dove, straight down into the ocean with astonishing speed, cutting through the surface and descending into the depths far beyond what any normal creature could survive.
The feathers followed, relentless even underwater, sensing his residual heat.
But Alustus had a plan.
At 5000 meters deep, his body began to dissolve, molecularly merging with the sea. His consciousness expanded, his form diffusing into the surrounding water, a true fusion of spirit, body, and environment.
His monster energy spread wide, saturating the deep. It was a technique only possible because of his status, as King of the Sidhe, a peak A-Rank existence, as such he has more than enough energy to rival a planet’s core.
This ability would tear apart a lesser being in seconds. But Alustus was no ordinary monster.
He kept his energy focused, restricting his awareness to a precise control radius. It was just enough.
He had become the ocean.
The black feathers, unable to distinguish heat from water, lost their lock-on and disintegrated into the void, their purpose erased.
High above, Adam hovered in the clouds, scanning the ocean surface, until he heard it.
A sudden eruption tore the sea apart, a jet of water launching toward him with impossible speed, sharp enough to carve through diamond, fast enough to shatter sound a hundred times over.
He twisted his small body just in time, barely dodging.
Towering pillars of pressure-forged water erupted from the ocean, each thicker and wider than the largest man made bridge.
Each one a spear of elemental force. They came faster, thicker, like the ocean itself had turned against him.
Adam grunted, flaring his wings wide.
Flying alone wasn’t enough to evade them.
He had to chain teleportation with aerial maneuvering, weaving through an uncountable barrage of water strikes that tried to drag him down like relentless oceanic javelins.
The sky and sea had become a battlefield.
And neither was safe.
Water kept erupting with unstoppable force.
The sea itself had become a weapon of mass destruction, endless towers of liquid devastation stretching out as far as the eye could see.
All across the sky, flashes of green light blurred in rapid bursts, Adam teleporting again and again, using Memory Points to dodge the colossal water jets that chased him like divine spears.
Each one packed enough force to annihilate him if it landed even partially.
He was fast, but this wasn’t sustainable.
As Adam adapted, dodged, and danced through the storm, Alustus evolved alongside him, adjusting his attacks, learning his patterns, waiting for an opening.
Then, Alustus invoked a deeper technique.
[Anti-Energy Technique: Anti-Momentum]
Alustus tapped into the Sidhe’s natural affinity for Anti-Energy, a force not of creation, but of reversal. A power that nullified laws, inverted logic, and rewrote cause and effect.
Where normal energy obeyed rules, Anti-Energy deleted them.
In that moment, Alustus didn’t just launch an attack.
He changed the rules of movement itself.
The concept of "forward" became "backward."
And momentum itself was rewritten, collapsing all velocity into stillness into the finite area of his 300 meters of his glare, forcing anything in motion to turn against itself.
Even the air warped around him, and Adam, still mid-teleport, felt it too.
Something was extremely wrong.
A black lightning strike came from nowhere.
It didn’t just hit Adam, it erased his movement, canceling his momentum, stripping him of motion, ripping him out of existence for a fraction of a second.
His form hung suspended...paused.
And in that instant, one of the towering oceanic jets surged up from below and slammed into him head-on.
The impact was devastating.
His bone exoskeleton shattered instantly, the armor breaking apart in jagged chunks.
The water didn’t stop, it tore through him, pulverizing his body, reducing flesh and bone to meat slurry under the unrelenting force.
He had never known pain .
His heightened awareness, so fine-tuned it let him sense every individual cells, becoming a curse itself.
Every nerve screamed.
Every fragment of his body suffered in stereo, multiplied a million times, choir of agony from all directions.
Seconds later, all that remained was a floating puddle of gore.
And even that, swept away, and dissolved into the sea.
The water went still.
Washed away from existence completely.
From the depths, Alustus emerged, his body reforming from the sea, particle by particle, until his full physical form stood once again in the open air.
"Tsk... that was way more effort than I bargained for."
He hovered there, breathing heavily as the last of the waves settled beneath him.
"System, status. How much energy did that technique burn through? My body feels kind of stiff right now."
[Report: From initial engagement to current state, you have expended 49% of your total Monster Energy reserves]
"Tch... nearly half? That bastard made me burn through nearly half my total reserve... just to kill him?"
"Whatever. At least it is over. That freak is fina...
A sudden tremor cracked the sky.
Taking Alustus by suprise, as he looked up, and then....
A bolt of Veracious Lightning slammed down from above, striking Alustus with pinpoint force. His body seized up as raw reality-tearing power spread across his flesh, erasing it atom by atom.
Using a surge of his own energy, he managed to purge the effect, but it came at a heavy cost, another deep bite into his dwindling reserves.
Smoke curled from Alustus’s ruined flesh.
Half his face was gone. One eye had melted from its socket, and yet the other burned with raw, focused hatred.
He looked up, and froze.
Hovering in the sky, surrounded by dark smoke, was a glowing, violet-colored heart.
The core of Adam’s existence.
It pulsed steadily. The very thing that hit him.
Each beat echoed like a war drum.
Badump! Badump !Badump!
The pressure it radiated was immense.
"A piece of him... survived!?"
Alustus roared, his voice cracking with disbelief.
Then, before his very eyes, the ocean responded, rising upward, enveloping the floating heart like reverent hands.
Water took shape forming arms, legs, and a torso, as it began to rebuild Adam’s frame piece by piece.
Muscle, bone, and skin.
And in mere seconds, where nothing had remained but mere monsterous looking heart, Adam stood once again, fully regenerated from the rising ocean waters alone.
He looked down on Alustus from where he flew.
Adam’s blades began to cool, the heat draining from them rapidly until frost crept along their edges.
They shimmered now, frigid, white-blue, in color, their cold state super cooling the air around them.
Alustus took notice, looking up at Adam in annoyance, and shrugged.
"Tch... looks like I really do need to get him away from this damn ocean."
He glanced around, calculating.
"The bastard is fast. Those black, angelic wings let him maneuver like a goddamn fighter jet... slippery little fucker."
He clicked his tongue.
"The question is: how?"
Then his eyes narrowed, and he sighed, clearly annoyed, quickly coming to a conclusion as to what he must do here to win once and for all.
"I can’t believe I am going to waste something on a guy like him. I was saving it for... well, someone else. But whatever. They will fall into place soon enough, like the two before him."
High above, Adam floated silently, staring down with unreadable intensity.
Neither moved to harm the other in this moment.
Then Adam called out, voice ringing clear through the charged air.
"Had enough yet, fairy?"
Alustus’s brow twitched as he responds.
"I am a fucking Sidhe, not a fairy."
Adam laughed lightly.
As he responds back saying.
"You look like one. That is close enough for me to make me call you that."
"Says the guy copying my whole flow."
Adam grinned beneath his helmet.
"Hate the player, not the game."
Then his voice shifted, darker and more serious.
"It doesn’t matter what trash talk you throw at me. Dead is dead. And after this...? You’re done."
"Not even an Apostle would survive what is coming next."
Adam tilted his head slightly, curious, as to why he said that, but he soon find out why.
Because in the next moment, Alustus open a portal that led to a small personal pocket dimension.
As he reached into a crackling tear in reality, his hand disappearing into a swirling watery dimensional rift, and pulled out something that made Adam’s eyes widen.
A black-and-red, glowing triangular artifact, it look no larger than a Doritos.
But even before he could speak... The system suddenly began to warned him.
His system’s voice rang out in his head, harsh and immediate.
『Master...RUNNN!! Base on the information in the Archive...that object is currently ranked as an Anti-World Weapon』