Chapter 114: Eren Vs Aden (2)

The red pillar of energy slammed into Aden’s chest with the force of a falling boulder, a concussive roar that should have shattered his ribs and sent him flying into the jagged stone ruins behind them. Instead, the crimson tide met an invisible, absolute wall. The energy didn’t just stop; it folded, wrapping around Aden’s form like water hitting a boulder, dissipating into the grey silt at his feet without leaving a single mark on his cloak.

Aden didn’t even flinch. He didn’t brace himself or shift his weight. He simply stood there, his sapphire eyes drifting shut as he exhaled a long, slow breath.

For Eren, the sight was infuriating. He had poured every ounce of his searing Expansion Ache into that strike, expecting at least a grunt of effort from the man standing before him. To see Aden treat his ultimate effort like a mild breeze was a sting to his pride that burned hotter than the Resonance in his veins.

Again, Eren roared. He lunged forward, his fists becoming blurred streaks of carmine light. Each strike was a hammer blow, aimed at Aden’s jaw, his solar plexus, his throat. But as his knuckles were inches away from contact, they hit a strange, vibrating layer of space. It felt like punching a mountain made of silk—firm, unyielding, yet strangely hollow.

Aden was utilizing a passive application of the Harmonic Realm: State of Equilibrium. By synchronizing his internal energy with the vibrations of the world around him, he had turned the very air into an extension of his defense. Every strike Eren threw was being neutralized before it could even register as a physical threat.

Eren’s eyes glowed with a feral, desperate light. If direct force wouldn’t work, he would change the variables. He spun on his heel, his boots digging into the scorched earth, and swung a low kick that sent a crescent wave of red energy slicing through the dirt. As the dust rose, obscuring the field, Eren vanished into the haze.

From the shadows of the grey mist, he moved. He wasn’t just a boy anymore; he was a flickering spark in a dark room. He used the fallen stone pillars as springboards, leaping from the ruins with a speed that would have been invisible to a lower-ranked cultivator. He struck from the left, then the right, then from above, dropping down with a heel-drop that carried the weight of his entire raging core.

Clang.

The sound wasn’t that of flesh on flesh, but of metal on crystal. Aden hadn’t moved a muscle. He remained in the center of the crater, his eyes still closed, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. In his mind, he wasn’t looking at Eren with his eyes; he was seeing him through the fluctuations of the environment.

He could feel the way the air displaced when Eren jumped. He could sense the heat signature of the boy’s blood as it pumped at a frantic pace. He analyzed the trajectory of every limb, noting the microscopic hitches in Eren’s form—the way his left shoulder dipped slightly before a heavy punch, the way his breathing hitched when he moved too fast.

’You’re over-extending,’ Aden thought silently, his mind a calm lake amidst Eren’s storm. ’You’re fighting the world, not me.’

Eren was panting now, the heat radiating from his skin so intense that the mist around them had turned to steam. The ground beneath him was cracked and blackened, a testament to the sheer volume of energy he was leaking. He was annoyed—violently so. Every time he thought he found a gap, every time he tried to use the terrain to mask his approach, Aden was already there, or rather, the space Aden occupied was simply unreachable.

Eren grabbed a jagged piece of a fallen pillar, a slab of stone the size of a shield, and infused it with his Resonance until it glowed like a coal. With a guttural scream, he hurled it. The stone whistled through the air, glowing brighter as it neared Aden’s head.

Aden’s eyes remained closed. At the last possible millisecond, the air in front of his face rippled. The massive stone slab hit the invisible barrier and disintegrated into fine gray sand, falling harmlessly over Aden’s shoulders like a shroud of dust.

’This isn’t enough,’ Eren thought, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. ’He’s not even looking at me.’

The boy’s frustration began to boil over, merging with the pressure of the impending breakthrough. He stopped his frantic movements and stood ten paces away, his chest heaving. His red irises were bleeding into the whites of his eyes, a sign that the Resonance was no longer just flowing through his meridians, it was starting to saturate his very cells.

He crouched low, his fingers clawing into the dry earth. He didn’t just want to hit Aden anymore. He wanted to move him. He wanted to prove that he existed, that his power wasn’t just a toy for him to play with.

The ground began to tremble. Not from an earthquake, but from the sheer vibration of Eren’s core reaching its limit. He began to draw the energy back in, compressing the raging flood into a single, dense point within his solar plexus. The air around him grew cold as he sucked the heat from the environment to fuel his final gambit.

Aden’s eyebrows twitched. He felt the shift. The Anvil was finally starting to feel the heat of the Hammer.

Eren didn’t scream this time. He moved in total silence. The distance between them vanished in a heartbeat. He didn’t aim for a punch or a kick. He threw his entire weight forward, his hands outstretched, aiming to grab Aden’s cloak, to find purchase, to find any piece of reality he could hold onto.

As he collided with the invisible wall once more, Eren didn’t pull back. He pressed his forehead against the shimmering air, his teeth bared in a snarl. He poured every drop of his crimson energy into that single point of contact, trying to burn a hole through Aden’s State of Equilibrium.

“Move,” Eren hissed through gritted teeth, his skin starting to crack under the strain of the Attuned Realm breakthrough. “Move, damn you!”

Aden finally opened his eyes. The sapphire light within them met the burning red of Eren’s gaze. For a moment, the world stood still. The dust hung suspended in the air, and the humming of the energy reached a pitch that would have deafened a normal man.

Aden saw it then—the spark of a true identity forming within the boy. It wasn’t a refined, scholarly identity. It was something raw, something that thrived on the struggle itself.

“Almost,” Aden whispered, his voice cutting through the roar of the energy like a blade. “Give me more.”

The pressure spiked.

Eren’s fingers clawed at the empty air in front of Aden’s chest, his knuckles turning white as they ground against the invisible barrier. The State of Equilibrium hummed, a low-frequency vibration that rattled Eren’s teeth and sent shocks of feedback into his shoulders. Red lightning began to arc from Eren’s skin, snapping toward the ground and scorching the grey silt into glass.

Aden watched the boy’s struggle through half-lidded eyes. He could feel the heat of Eren’s soul—a furnace that had finally reached its melting point. The boy’s breathing was a jagged, rhythmic rasp, synchronized with the pulsing glow of his core.

Eren dropped his shoulder, leaning his entire body weight into the resistance. He shifted his stance, digging his heels into the cracked earth until the soil climbed over his shins. The crimson energy around him shifted from a mist to a liquid weight, swirling in a violent vortex that began to pull at Aden’s cloak.

The air grew thin. The oxygen was being consumed by the sheer intensity of the friction between their energies. Aden noted the way Eren’s muscles corded and twitched—the boy was pushing past the limits of his physical vessel. Every cell in his body was screaming for the release of the breakthrough, yet he kept the lid on, compressing the power into a tighter and tighter sphere.

Eren’s snarl deepened. He suddenly pulled back an inch, only to slam his palm forward with a concentrated burst of Resonance. The impact sounded like a thunderclap echoing through the wasteland. The ripple of the collision spread outward, flattening the mist for fifty yards in every direction and cracking a nearby stone pillar into dust.

Still, Aden stood like a rooted mountain. He analyzed the flow. He could see the structural integrity of Eren’s meridians bending under the load. The boy’s red irises began to swirl, a sign that his identity was finally forging itself in the heat of this frustration.

“Again,” Aden commanded, his voice a calm anchor in the center of the storm.

Eren didn’t waste breath on a reply. He spun, his movements becoming a blur of desperation and instinct. He struck at the barrier from a dozen different angles in a single second. High, low, a flurry to the center, a sweeping kick to the ankles—every strike carried the momentum of the last, building a chain of kinetic energy that started to make the invisible wall shimmer with a faint, sapphire light.

The ground beneath Aden finally began to give way, a circular crater forming around his boots as the sheer downward pressure of Eren’s aura transferred through the State of Equilibrium. The boy was finally affecting the environment, turning the very gravity of the wasteland into a weapon.

Eren’s vision blurred. The world was nothing but a sea of red and a single, unmoving blue silhouette. He could feel the Attuned Realm threshold right in front of him, a crystalline wall that needed to be shattered. He reached deep into the center of his being, grabbing the very last reserves of his energy—the parts that were usually too volatile to touch.

The temperature in the crater plummeted. Frost started to form on the edges of the scorched glass, a side effect of the massive energy vacuum Eren was creating. He pulled the red lightning back into his right fist, the limb glowing so brightly it looked translucent, the bones visible through the skin.

Aden felt the shift. This was the peak. The boy was no longer just fighting a teacher; he was fighting the concept of being held back.

Eren lunged one last time, his fist a comet of concentrated carmine light. This wasn’t a punch anymore. It was a spear of pure will. As the fist neared Aden’s chest, the State of Equilibrium groaned, the air between them distorting like a broken mirror.

The impact didn’t make a sound. Instead, it produced a shockwave of pure silence that pushed the very atmosphere out of the crater. For a split second, the two of them were frozen in a vacuum, the red glow of Eren’s arm clashing against the sapphire sheen of Aden’s defense.

A hairline fracture appeared in the air.

Aden’s eyes widened slightly. The boy had found a flaw. Not in the technique, but in the moment. Eren had timed the strike to the exact millisecond Aden’s internal energy cycled. It was a feat of pure combat genius, born of sheer, stubborn refusal to lose.

“Now,” Aden whispered. “Let it go.”

The command acted as the final spark. The crystalline wall in Eren’s mind shattered. The red energy that had been compressed into a tiny point suddenly expanded with the force of a supernova. The Hammer finally struck the Anvil with everything it had.

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