Chapter 479: The Heavens Shall Fall (XX)

The boundary between the two domains held steady for a handful of seconds before Emyria decided to move.

She stepped across the line without hesitation, pushing her authority directly into mine with the kind of intent that did not search for openings or weaknesses, but instead chose to force a path through sheer pressure.

Crack…!

The moment she crossed, the air itself distorted around her, a visible shimmer forming where her creation authority met the silence and ground against it.

She managed three steps before the cost began to show.

I could see it in the tightening of her expression, in the way her authority struggled to behave the way it should inside a space that resisted its existence.

The further she pushed into my domain, the more effort it demanded from her to maintain even the baseline of what she had been doing outside.

And yet she did not slow down, did not hesitate, which told me more clearly than anything else how much she had left to spend and how willing she was to burn through all of it.

I met her halfway.

Fwip!

Midnight moved first, rising into a controlled diagonal strike aimed at her leading arm, forcing her to respond immediately.

She brought her forearm up to meet it, a creation bracer already formed and hardened before she crossed the boundary, and the impact rang out sharply, the sound cutting through a space that had been defined by its absence.

She answered at once.

A compact creation lance formed in her free hand and drove forward at my throat with almost no warning.

I dropped under the line of it, closing the distance further instead of retreating, and drove my shoulder into her guard to disrupt the space she needed to form anything larger.

She adapted in the same motion.

Her weight shifted, her stance pivoting as she redirected my forward momentum, turning the force of my movement against me.

I felt the shift too late to fully stop it, my own motion carrying me through as she rotated around my right side, her elbow coming down toward the back of my neck with precise timing.

Thump!

It landed cleanly.

The impact burst across my vision in a flash of white, and my balance broke for a moment as I stumbled forward.

I forced myself to recover before falling, turning the stumble into movement, pushing off the ground, and opening distance between us before she could follow through with anything immediate.

She did not wait.

Around her, six lances formed at once, each one angled to cut off a different path, a pattern too precise to be spontaneous.

She had planned this exchange long before stepping into my domain, and now she executed it without hesitation.

I read most of them.

Four I moved through, slipping between their trajectories with narrow margins.

The fifth caught my side.

The impact tore a long line across my ribs, the cut opening instantly, blood spreading warm across my side before I had even finished processing the hit.

Clang!

The sixth, I met with the Heavenly Swallowing Sword, the blade stripping away the authority that gave it weight, leaving only the physical form, which I deflected into the ground, where it buried itself.

“Ghh!!”

She did not let the opening pass.

Emyria closed the distance again, her movements tightening into a rhythm that forced both of my blades into constant defense.

Every motion she made demanded a response, her strikes alternating in a way that left no room for counterattacks, her focus absolute as she pressed forward.

She was damned skilled.

Even inside my domain, even with her authority suppressed, she moved with a level of precision that made every exchange feel heavy, and I felt that weight building with each impact I absorbed to maintain my position.

On the fifth sequence, she slipped inside Midnight’s guard.

Her palm drove into my chest at close range, creating authority compressed tightly into the strike, dense enough to carry force even under suppression.

“Kugh!”

The impact forced me back several steps, the pain sharp and immediate as blood from my side flicked outward with the motion, scattering into the still air in small, suspended drops before gravity reclaimed them.

She came again.

I chose not to fully block the next strike, taking it along my forearm instead and using the contact to pull her slightly off balance.

The moment her center shifted, I drove Midnight across her shoulder in a controlled diagonal cut.

The blade broke through her defense.

Splat!

A clean line opened across her shoulder, blood surfacing immediately, bright against the pale of her hair as it scattered outward in fine droplets.

“A-ah…”

Her breathing changed, but she forced it down.

Unfortunately, I did not give her time to recover from it.

Fwip!

Midnight followed with a horizontal sweep that drove her guard upward, forcing both arms to commit, and in the same motion, the Heavenly Swallowing Sword thrust forward toward her midsection.

She twisted aside, avoiding the direct hit, but the blade still grazed along her side, opening another line of red across her uniform.

Splurt!

She stepped back.

I followed.

I did not allow distance to return.

My strikes stayed tight and controlled, keeping her occupied, forcing her to defend while the second blade waited for the moment her guard would falter.

Her authority surged in response, pushing harder against the suppression of my domain, and small formations began to break through, vines erupting near my feet, lances forming above my shoulders.

Rustle!

I cut the vines away, but one of the lances struck my upper back, the force spinning me partway around and opening another wound that joined the others.

She moved into that motion without hesitation.

Her hand drove forward toward my face, the compact lance technique she had been refining throughout the match condensed at her fingertips.

I leaned back, but not far enough to avoid it entirely.

The strike glanced across my cheekbone, splitting the skin and sending blood down the side of my face.

“Tsk!”

Her other hand followed immediately.

I caught her wrist and held it firmly.

For a brief moment, we stood there within the stillness of my domain, her wrist in my grip, her face close enough that I could see the details in her expression clearly.

We were both bleeding and staring at each other, the silence around us pressing in like something held and waiting.

Her eyes searched mine.

“You… how did you get so strong that quickly? You got into the Divine Realm less than two years ago, and yet…”

She bit her lip as she stared at me.

“You’re already in a pair with me.”

At those words, my lips curled up slighly, almost in a mocking smirk.

“Well.. some people are more talented than others…”

At those words, her eyes narrowed as she held my gaze for a second longer, then pulled her wrist free and stepped back.

Her arms opened wide.

FWOOOOOM!

The authority surged out of her in a full release, not shaped into a single attack but spread across everything at once, her domain pushing outward in every direction, driving itself against the boundaries of mine with everything she had left.

The silence resisted.

For several seconds, it held, pushing back against the pressure, the two forces grinding against each other hard enough that the arena itself began to fail under the strain.

The walls cracked further, the structure groaning as if it might give way.

Above us, the observation tiers shook, dust falling from the ceiling, distant voices rising in alarm, though the boundary between the domains reduced them to muffled shapes without meaning.

Then her domain forced a breach.

Not a full collapse, but enough.

Creation authority surged through the opening, flooding into the space of silence and immediately reasserting itself.

Growth returned in an instant, vines spreading across the broken platform, lances forming faster than I could track them individually.

The first impacts landed before I could fully adjust.

Two strikes hit almost together, one along my side, the other at my hip, both carrying the full weight of her authority now that the suppression had been broken.

The force drove me to one knee.

Fucking hell…

These girls really liked me on my knees or something… ugh.

Click!

Around me, the Domain of Silence flickered, fragmented but still present in the immediate space around my body, even as her creation filled everything beyond it.

Emyria stood at a distance, her arms still extended, her domain expanding through the breach, her wounds bleeding freely without acknowledgment.

She looked at me.

“Unfortunately for you… You’ve only been here for less than two years, and that isn’t enough to beat me. But don’t worry, you’ve already proven enough.”

I lowered my gaze briefly, watching the blood fall from my face to the shattered stone below, feeling the instability in my domain as it fractured further under the pressure.

The balance had shifted.

Maintaining it no longer gave me enough in return.

…Alright.

I rose to my feet, slowly and deliberately, the decision settling fully into place.

The Domain of Silence collapsed inward at once, retracting back into me as the quiet vanished in a sudden rush.

Sound returned all at once, the noise of the arena flooding back in, the cracking stone, the shifting debris, the distant voices all arriving together after the long absence.

Her domain filled the entire space without resistance.

She saw me let it go, and her expression changed in suspicion.

Then, I raised the Heavenly Swallowing Sword.

I was thinking of hiding my sword art as much as possible, but well…

That won’t be possible.

“Fuuuu…”

My stance shifted into the form of the sixth movement, the blade angled upward and behind me, my body turning slightly as the edge caught the light along its full length.

She understood instantly that I was preparting a huge attack.

Her domain surged in response, everything she had driving toward me at once, vines, lances, compressed masses converging from every direction.

I spoke quietly.

“Moonlit Ice Lotus Sword Art…”

The sword moved in a flash as I suddenly jumped into the air.

『 Sixth Move! (✯ Moonlight Descent ✯) 』

It was not speed that defined the motion, but certainty, the arc descending with a finality that carried through everything in its path.

Pale light followed the edge, extending beyond the physical length of the blade, and the authority within it did not focus on a single attack or construct, but on the foundation beneath all of it.

The arc was completed shortly after, as I now stood right behind her.

For a moment, nothing changed…

“Fuuu… haa…”

I breathed heavily, and then I snapped my fingers.

CRACK!

And in that instant, her domain lifelessly came apart.

Not piece by piece, but all at once from within, every structure losing the divine force that sustained it.

Vines fell lifeless, the lances dropped without weight.

Growth halted mid-formation as the entire system unraveled, dissolving into faint particles of light that drifted downward across the arena.

The trail of light left by the strike lingered briefly in the air.

Then it faded, causing a silence to fall in the arena.

The arena stood broken, the walls cracked, the platform reduced to debris, the remnants of her creations scattered across the ground, already losing what little vitality remained.

At the center of it, Emyria stood still.

Her arms lowered.

Her golden eyes were wide as she looked at the space where her domain had existed only moments before.

Her lips parted slightly, as if she had something to say, but something was holding her back from saying it.

I slowly turned around and looked down at her, blood slipping past my lips, flowing to my chin before falling onto the ground.

“…You lost.”

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