Chapter 296: To Althea’s Horror

The Cruor Mortis…

The same sword Elias had used against the Archon of Aethelos, the Queen Monarch, Undying Flame.

It groaned against the air, filling the surroundings with an intense aura of death.

Every onlooker — Malakor, Althea, and the Ossuarists watching from the fortress — were all white-faced as Elias brought the sword up for a slash. Even Preceptor Odette had stiffened warily. She had become acutely aware of every of Elias’ movements, visibly tracking him as she kept the Husk busy while his strike came.

With a strained look on his face, as if simply keeping the sword controlled was a herculean task on its own, he dropped the sword in a slash.

Noiselessly, the strike descended, bearing down on the Husk, and only the Husk in the blink of an eye.

Odette dropped like lead, descending rapidly with her gaze still locked on the Husk above, watching as Elias’ strike landed.

For the first time, the Husk roared. Shriek-like creaking noises came out of its throat, filled with utter unwillingness and defiance.

It met the strike head on, knowing fully well there was no way to escape. That single strike carried the heavy weight of restriction along with the natural might of the vicious sword. Elias was no longer holding back. He’d thrown all sense of standard protocol out the window. He was now openly using his restriction magic without any inhibitions.

The air was locked in place. Space itself was locked in place. Everything for tens of meters surrounding the Husk was still as glass… frozen like ice.

It was blatantly visible. Even the lowest Adept ranked Ossuarist at the fortress could see it, not to talk of the Caretakers. Everyone besides Althea was rooted in shock, flabbergasted by what they were seeing.

What sort of magic was this?

The strike descended, and a resounding crack pierced the air. The sound alone was terrible and mighty enough that weaker Ossuarists found their ears bleeding immediately.

A shockwave spread from the point of impact, emanating spatial tremors and pulses that sent weaker onlookers unconscious.

Malakor’s beast went tumbling for several meters, swaying muddleheaded from the shock waves.

Althea and Malakor held on tightly… or rather, Althea did. Malakor could only hold on with what little strength was left in him. He had been affected just as much as his beast.

In fact, despite his peak Grade 2 Master rank, it was a surprise he’d been able to last as long as he had. This was a battle involving an Ossuarist of supreme strength. One with an extremely dense soul. The kind of havoc he could wreak with his magic was several magnitudes higher than the threshold of what an Arcanist like Malakor could endure. His soul simply lacked the strength and density to withstand such emanations.

Even weaker Ossuarists had gone unconscious, people with soul densities that were naturally higher than his, which only went to show how much his Grade 2 Master rank could help him surpass limitations…

But still, this was as far as he could go.

Althea took control of the situation, grabbing onto the Feraxian Lord as his consciousness finally gave out. His head hung limply and his grip on the mane of his tamed beast slackened.

Althea quickly grabbed him by the arm, keeping him from being flung away as his beast spiralled down to the ground.

It felt its master go unconscious from their link and let out a sorrowful cry, fighting a battle of its own to stay awake.

Althea yelled urging words over the wind, trying to keep the beast awake just enough that it maintained some semblance of flight close enough to the ground to prevent her from turning into paste.

The ground drew nearer as the beast fought to keep afloat, spiralling for the most part and trying to fly for the rest.

One thousand meters…

Seven hundred meters…

Althea’s grip on Malakor tightened. His weight was dead against her, full and unresisting. She could feel the beast’s wingbeats becoming increasingly erratic beneath them, each one weaker than the last.

Five hundred…

Four hundred…

Three…

Just as they were about to reach the two hundred meter mark, the beast gave out.

Its feathery, feline body lost all form of control and started to free fall.

Althea’s gaze firmed, and decisively, she leapt off the beast with Malakor in her arms.

She used the creature’s body as a boost to speed up and angle her jump. She rocketed toward the ground at a trajectory bound for a skim. Though with the speed at which she was moving, ending up as a splatter seemed more certain than any chance of survival.

But there wasn’t a single trace of fear or trepidation in Althea’s eyes. They were wide open as she sped toward the ground from two hundred meters high, leaving a trial of tears from the dust and particles peppering them.

The wind was deafening. The ground filled her entire field of vision. She could see individual blades of scorched grass, individual patches of churned earth from the battle’s destruction. That was how close she was. That was how fast she was moving…

Then with a sudden burst, right at the moment before impact, perfectly timed, she roared, willing her order fragment into action like she’d never had.

“Order Edict: Dead Momentum!!”

A sharp pang of pain pierced her head and her soul trembled as she forced her intention into reality.

Perhaps it was because of the high pressure situation. Perhaps it was because it was a new, rapidly improvised spell she’d never attempted before…

But what happened next shocked her to her core.

Reality obeyed her Order Edict. And despite the speed at which she was moving, her body stilled in the air right before she hit the ground. All momentum she carried died entirely. She did not slow down gradually in any form. She did not skid, or stumble, or move forward past the point at which she had spoken the edict…

Reality had bent to her will, bending physics by touching core laws of reality itself…

But all of that reality-bending… All of that momentum killing did not pass across to Malakor.

Because of how reality-defying that seemingly simple spell was: to kill momentum entirely, the spell effect had been localized to her being entirely.

Malakor had stopped as abruptly as she had. He had gone from nearly 200km/hr speeds to zero in zero second…

And Althea truly saw for the first time just how fragile a human body was when it tried to defy physical laws it wasn’t meant to.

Because the spell was localized only to her own cells, the massive kinetic energy stored in Malakor’s body had nowhere to go. He did not merely die. He underwent a violent metamorphosis that bypassed the traditional stages of trauma.

In the microsecond his momentum hit the wall of her stilled arms, his biology failed completely. His bones shattered into fine powder and his organs ruptured into paste simultaneously… but the process didn’t stop at physical destruction.

The sheer friction of his atoms trying to move forward while she remained an immovable object triggered a chemical chain reaction. His blood and marrow boiled instantly, turning into a pressurized slurry that vaporized through his skin.

Then, chemistry gave way to pure physics. The remaining kinetic energy converted into a blinding flash of thermal radiation as his mass literally flash-turned into energy.

Althea felt a sudden, scorching wave of heat wash over her face. There was a wet, heavy thud against her chest — the sound of what remained of his liquefied body mass hitting her robes — and then a bright flash of white light.

In less than a second, Malakor’s body dematerialized entirely. He simply turned into a spray of red paste and a lingering flash of heat that vanished into the air.

Althea stood perfectly still, two centimeters from the ground, suspended by her own edict. The waves from the battle above her still raged. The hot mist that had been Lord Malakor just a second ago drifted past her face. The proud Feraxian Lord had metamorphosed rapidly from biology to chemistry to physics in the span of a second… simply because of a decision she’d made.

She stood there for a long moment.

Then she lowered herself the remaining two centimeters to the ground, and immediately went to her knees, her breath coming out in rapid gasps as she stared at her hands.

They were shaking.

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