Chapter 503: The Heavens Shall Fall (XLIV)

The domain unfolded like the birth of a dying universe.

CKROOOOOM!

What had begun as a subtle warping of the arena’s white stone exploded outward in a cataclysm of inverted reality.

The floor beneath my boots rippled, then shattered into fractal patterns where light and shadow devoured each other.

Sections of the arena blazed white-hot, not with heat but with pure, annihilating radiance that burned the soul rather than flesh.

Adjacent patches collapsed into absolute voids, blacker than any abyss, where even sound seemed to fall forever.

The walls of the coliseum twisted upward, reforming into towering spires of crystalline light fused with obsidian darkness, each one pulsing in perfect opposition.

My own shadow stretched across the ground, then snapped back and tried to strangle me before I slashed it apart with the Midnight Sword.

The blade cut true, but the domain drank the motion, slowing my arm mid-swing as if gravity itself had doubled.

Seraphiel hovered at the center of it all, no longer merely a hybrid god. She had become the Eclipse incarnate.

Her six wings, now fully restored and twice their former span, burned with coronal fire that was somehow both blinding and pitch black.

Her mismatched eyes had merged into a single swirling vortex of gold and void, staring down at me like twin singularities.

Golden blood no longer dripped from her wounds; instead, the domain itself sealed them instantly, feeding her power back in an endless loop.

She didn’t need to speak.

The air around her did it for her as countless whispers of oblivion braided into a single, crushing pressure that slammed into my divine core like a hammer made of every mistake I’d ever survived.

I tried to move, trying to close the distance, to use the Heaven Swallowing Sword’s nullification before the domain could fully lock in.

My legs pushed off the fracturing stone, my swords raised in the exact cross-guard I’d perfected.

But the domain answered first.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A wave of searing light-void rolled over me like a tidal wave of broken physics.

It didn’t hit my body… it rewrote the space I occupied.

My forward momentum reversed without warning.

One second, I was lunging forward, and the next, I was stumbling backward, my boots skidding as if the arena had flipped its polarity.

The Midnight Sword swung on pure reflex, its edge slicing the wave apart… only for the severed halves to reform behind me and crash into my spine.

Pain detonated through every nerve.

“Kurghh… fucking hell…”

I tasted fresh black blood before I even hit the ground.

Seraphiel didn’t give me the courtesy of a pause.

She descended like judgment itself, one hand extended.

Fwooom!

A lance of pure Eclipse, half holy spear, half devouring maw, formed in her grip and fired.

Just instant death screaming toward my chest.

I rolled to the right, barely avoiding it.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The lance gouged a canyon through the stone where I’d been, then curved mid-flight because the domain bent trajectories at will.

It clipped my left shoulder, and the Heaven Swallowing Sword screamed in protest as the Eclipse energy tried to nullify me.

The sword drank desperately, pulling the foreign authority into its hungry core, but the reversed chaos flow in my veins turned the effort into torture.

Splurt!

Veins burst inside my chest as more blood sprayed across my chin.

I forced myself upright anyway and met her next attack with both blades crossed.

She was already there… without making a single sound.

One moment, she was ten meters away, the next inside my guard, elbow driving into my sternum with the force of a collapsing star.

THUUUUUUMP—————————!!!!

My ribs cracked audibly.

The impact lifted me off the ground and hurled me across the transformed arena.

“ARGHHHHHHHH!”

I slammed into one of the new spires, the crystalline structure wrapping shadowy tendrils around my arms and legs like living restraints.

The Midnight Sword sliced them free in a single blurred arc, but the Heaven Swallowing Sword was sluggish now, its nullification fighting the domain’s constant pressure instead of Seraphiel herself.

She followed before I could plant my feet.

FWOOOOOOOM!

A barrage of Eclipse orbs, each one a miniature big bang of opposing forces, detonated around me in a perfect sphere.

I spun through them on instinct, in a basic pattern, cut, nullify, redirect, and counter.

It should have worked… and it would have worked against any other opponent.

But the domain was inside the equations now.

Every slash I made fed energy back into Seraphiel.

Every nullification I attempted only made the Eclipse burn brighter, because my own reversed chaos flow turned my swords’ powers against me.

The Heaven Swallowing Sword’s hunger backlashed, sending spikes of agony through my core.

The Midnight Sword’s perfect edge dulled, as the domain declared that nothing could remain sharp in the presence of perfect balance between all and nothing.

Thud!

I was able to land a hit anyway, mainly because of my pure stubbornness.

Swish!

A low sweep of the Midnight Sword caught her ankle as she blurred past, severing the divine tendon there.

Splat!

Golden-not-golden blood sprayed, and for a second, her perfect descent faltered.

“Pfftt… pwahahahahhaaa!” She laughed loudly at my actions.

But once she stopped, her face turned cold as her hand closed into a fist.

Fwooooooom!

The entire domain contracted.

The spires leaned inward, the floor heaved upward, and the air itself became a vise of light and dark.

I felt my divine core stutter harder than ever before, reversed chaos flow now amplified by the Eclipse, circulating so violently that black blood poured from my eyes, ears, and nose.

“Fucking hell..”

My swords grew surprisingly heavy… definitely not because of the weight, but from whatever pressure the domain was giving.

Seraphiel appeared in front of me again, too fast for thought.

Thwamp!

Her palm slammed into my chest, fingers splayed.

Light and void poured directly into my body, bypassing armor, skin, bone… straight into the fracturing core.

I tried to swing the Heaven Swallowing Sword.

My arm moved in slow motion, as if underwater in molten lead.

Grip…

She easily caught the blade bare-handed.

The sword screamed, trying to devour her divinity, but the Eclipse simply fed it more power than it could swallow.

Cracks spiderwebbed across the Heaven Swallowing Sword’s edge for the first time in its existence.

“Tsk…!”

Fwish!

I drove my knee upward, but she dodged… and kneed even harder.

“Kurghh!”

A splut of mouth escaped my lips.

I gritted my teeth and tried to headbutt her, just for her to headbutt me back, her forehead reinforced by the domain until it felt like colliding with the birth of a galaxy.

Stars burst behind my eyes.

She grabbed my throat with one hand and lifted me effortlessly off the ground.

The other hand plucked the Midnight Sword from my weakening grip as if I were a child.

The sword… the sharpest thing in existence, didn’t even nick her skin; the domain had already decided it wouldn’t.

She tossed it aside like scrap.

The Heaven Swallowing Sword followed a second later, clattering uselessly across the warped stone.

“K-kurghh…”

Black blood poured from my mouth in thick ropes, spattering her perfect face. She didn’t even blink at this.

Grip…!!!

She squeezed my throat tightly, causing my vision to tunnel.

The reversed chaos flow inside me screamed in final protest, tearing my core apart from the inside while the domain held me suspended like a specimen on display.

“Kwaarfguhhh…”

I couldn’t speak.

Couldn’t summon a single technique.

Couldn’t even curse her properly.

My combat experience, my swords, my will… everything that had carried me through four impossible victories…. meant nothing against the full power of her domain.

So…

Is this going to be my end?

My mind gradually became empty.

Well… so many reincarnations and I wasn’t even able to complete my revenge. My friends and family are also going to die because of me.

Luna…

I’m really sorry.

I wasn’t able to fulfill our promise to live a happy ever after.

“…”

Freeezee…

…Who am I kidding?

There’s no fucking way that I’ll die in a place like this.

If my fucking chaos flow is reversing, then even if I fucking explode, I won’t fucking lose a battle against this bitch.

“Gritt…”

“You’re resisting? How futile…” Seraphiel smiled brightly, as if satisfied by the fact that I was trying to live.

Her grip instantly tightened around my throat, her Eclipse-wreathed fingers sinking deeper into divine flesh that should have been unbreakable.

And so, I started racking my brain.

I tried to relive everything that I passed through… until a memory of one of my past reincarnations appeared.

It was from a reincarnation where I had joined Olivia’s faction and entered their Divine Library.

There was a book of the “beginning”.

And there… one passage burned brightest now, glowing behind my eyes like it had been waiting for this exact moment of desperation.

In the beginning, there was only Chaos

.

It wasn’t order or creation or any of the pretty authorities the so-called gods liked to wave around like trophies.

Chaos was the first.

The primordial soup from which everything fucking spawned.

Stars, realms, gods, concepts…. every single one of them had been ripped out of that endless, roiling void and given shape.

Light and Darkness?

They were just the first two children that crawled out of the womb, screaming and fighting each other ever since.

Every authority that existed, every domain, every law, every spark of divinity, was literally carved from Chaos.

And me?

I was one of the only beings left who could actually use chaos energy.

Not channel it through some polished Authority of Ice or Ruin or whatever pretty wrapper I’d wrapped around it.

I’d absorbed authorities before… stolen them, broken them down, made them mine.

The Heaven Swallowing Sword proved it every time it devoured divinity and spat out nothing but fuel.

If every authority was born from Chaos… then Chaos itself had to be the root authority.

The original.

The one that could rewrite the fucking rules.

My reversed flow wasn’t a death sentence.

It was a goddamn invitation.

The realization hit like a supernova detonating inside my skull.

My fractured divine core, bleeding chaos backward through every vein, suddenly understood.

The backward circulation wasn’t damaged.

It was Chaos trying to reset itself, trying to force me to stop fighting the current and become the current.

Light and Darkness were just echoes.

Seraphiel’s perfect little Eclipse domain?

It was merely a fancy cage built from stolen scraps of the very thing pumping through my body right now.

I could use every authority I’d ever absorbed because they all traced back to the same source…

…Which means that…

I CAN ALSO USE THE AUTHORITY OF CHAOS!

“Keke~”

A ragged laugh tore out of my throat, blood and all. It sounded broken, but it was the first sound I’d made in what felt like eternity.

“Still defiant? Even now?” Seraphiel’s vortex eyes narrowed.

Her domain contracted harder, trying to crush the last spark out of me.

The spires leaned in like executioner’s blades.

The floor rippled upward, wrapping my legs in living shadows that burned and froze at the same time.

My core screamed in protest, but this time, I didn’t fight the reversal.

I leaned into it.

Fwoosh…!

Chaos energy surged, not the stuttering, damaged trickle I’d been using, but the original flood.

The backward flow snapped like a rubber band, reversing direction so violently that every vein in my body ignited with white-hot power.

Black blood reversed course mid-drip, sucking back into my wounds and sealing them shut in threads of pure entropy.

The domain’s pressure hit a wall of pure nothingness and shattered against it.

My hand shot up, gripping her forearm tightly.

THUUUUUUUUUUUMP—————————!!!!

The air between us suddenly warped.

Seraphiel’s eyes widened for the first time since she’d activated the Eclipse.

Crack…!

Because the domain, the perfect balance of light and dark that she had woven into reality itself, began to unravel at the edges.

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