Chapter 95: A Suicide Attack With No Warning

Aden’s eyes remained emotionless as those words reached his ears. There was no need wasting time wondering what suicidal attack he might have decided to unleash. After all, he could simply nullify it like he’d always done.

“Don’t waste your life on something as meaningless defeating me,” he muttered as he picked up a piece of rock and watched it disintegrate into nothingness.

A dry, raspy laughter left the Leader’s lips, his head hung low as he shook in grim excitement at Aden’s words.

“That’s the most words you’ve said since we began this assault,” the man pointed, a crazed smile forming on his lips. “Is that fear I sense?”

Aden didn’t respond. Instead, he began calm, controlled steps to the side of the Arena. There was supposed to be an encirclement meant to restrict his movement in that direction, but they were all dead.

The Leader’s eyes didn’t leave him all this while. His irises carried the frenzied, uncontrolled blaze akin to a prey staring down the face of death.

A cold wind blew from nowhere, causing his hair to blow backwards. “Your words have no effect on me,” Aden whispered as he stared at the cracked dome of the Arena with a serene expression.

“But that doesn’t make it less of the truth. Does it?”

The abrupt halt of Aden’s heel against the cracked stone echoed in the empty Arena as he turned towards his enemies, his eyes locking with each Water-specialists before resting on the Leader’s once more.

“I believe I’ve given you enough time to prepare.”

Those words sounded less than a question and more a statement. There was no room for denial, doubt, or even surprise for anyone present in that room, nor did anyone show it.

The Leader nodded, and on cue, the rest of the warriors assembled next to him and interlocked arms with the Leader with practiced movements with impenetrable expressions that projected the vision of bravery to any onlooker, but Aden knew better.

They were scared.

And despite the strange joy that welled within him at their despair, a strange sense of discomfort lay underneath the ecstasy.

“Before you begin. I want you to understand that whatever plan you have fashioned against me cannot and will not have any effect on me.”

The Leader licked his lips to wipe off the droplets of cold sweat that had formed at the nook of his lips. “Who decided that?”

As those words left his lips, the air in the Pit immediately grew hot and began to hum with a frequency that vibrated through Aden’s marrow.

Bits and pieces of knowledge from the battle manuals he studied told him this wasn’t a standard elemental release.

The Tetrarchy weren’t merely linking their Resonance, they were collapsing their life forces into a Singularity of Nature.

“Failure is never an option,” the Leader hissed, his eyes turning a milky, translucent white as his nervous system began to fry from the inside out.

The three remaining water-specialists forfeited using the liquid abundant in the atmosphere and offered their own blood as a medium. The water turned a violent, bruised purple as it began to spin around the group, faster and faster, until it became a High-PressureVortex that cut and eroded the very space it occupied.

Aden watched in fascination as the lethal alignment of his destruction unfolded before him. There was no fear of death beneath those eyes, his lips opened to say something, but the ringing frequency drowned his voice.

The Leader’s chest plate shattered outward as the Resonance Heart in his chest reached its terminal limit.

“DEATH IS THE BEGINNING OF LIFE!”

In a flash that turned the world white, the attack detonated.

It was too fast. The Void—usually a vacuum that swallowed everything—was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of energy being forced into it. It was like trying to swallow an ocean through a straw.

The Steam-Pressure Wave hit Aden first. The force behind it was so strong, it attempted to strip the skin from his bones. He attempted to coat his body in Void and risk the attack destroying him for that split second of vulnerability, but for some strange reason, he couldn’t.

Aden’s eyes widened as the violet light consumed his vision. He felt a sensation he hadn’t experienced since the battle with Elara: Resistance.

The blast threw him backward. His heels gouged deep trenches into the stone floor as he tried to remain upright. The absolute-zero cold he had been maintaining was vaporized in an instant, replaced by a heat so intense it began to melt his marrow through sheer proximity.

A grunt of genuine pain escaped his lips as a shard of the Leader’s shattered armor, propelled by the explosion and coated in pressurized water, bypassed his distorted space and buried itself in his shoulder.

The explosion expanded, a dome of violet and white light that leveled the stadium’s lower tiers and turned the sand into a sea of bubbling, red-hot glass.

When the light finally died, the Pit was a silent, steaming crater.

The Tetrarchy was gone. Not a single fragment of bone or armor remained of the hunters.

In the center of the smoldering glass, Aden remained.

He was on one knee, his head bowed. His tattered cloak was gone, leaving his torso bare and scored with jagged, glowing red lines where the thermal shock had bypassed his defenses. The shard was still buried in his shoulder, the blood hissing as it evaporated against the heat of the metal.

Aden didn’t move for a long moment. Then, his fingers gripped the shard in his shoulder. With a wet, metallic shink, he pulled it out and tossed it onto the glowing glass sand.

A low, dry chuckle vibrated in his chest.

“That was extremely painful?” Aden whispered, looking up.

His eyes were no longer just blue, and they weren’t just obsidian. A hairline crack of brilliant, violet light—the same color as the hunters’ suicide attack—now ran through his pupils.

Somehow, someway, Aden tanked the hit and grafted a piece of their desperation into his own soul.

He looked toward the Platinum Tier. The reinforced glass had finally shattered under the pressure wave, leaving the boxes open to the toxic, heated air of the Pit.

Aden’s gaze locked onto the central suite.

“I’m coming up,” he said.

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