Chapter 182: A Planet's Price
From the cold, sterile safety of their spaceship in high orbit, the group watched the confrontation on Thal'Ryn's surface unfold on the main viewscreen. It was a silent, horrifying ballet of destruction.
Below, Anne was no longer a woman. She was a marionette of the Red Diamond Crown, her movements a blur of unnatural speed and ferocity. From her back, grotesque, whip-like tentacles of solidified crimson energy lashed out, each strike carving canyons into the planet's bluish soil and vaporizing entire groves of violet trees.
Kai moved against her like a tempest, his sword, Luminis Aquae, a sliver of pure, cutting light. He was a master of his craft, his swordsmanship a fluid, deadly art. He didn't just block the tentacles; he deflected them, his blade moving in precise, economical arcs that sent the crushing energy lashes harmlessly into the landscape, sending plumes of earth and rock a mile into the air. Snow, his bonded beast, was a whirlwind of fang and frost, lunging at Anne's flanks, his powerful swipes and bursts of freezing breath forcing the corrupted woman to divide her attention, creating the openings Kai needed.
But for every masterful parry, two more tentacles would sprout. For every frozen patch Snow created, the crown's energy would pulse, melting the ice and driving Anne forward with renewed fury.
"You cannot have it!" Anne's voice echoed, a distorted chorus of her own and the crown's hunger. A tentacle, thicker than the others, slammed down like a god's hammer.
Kai met it not with a dodge, but with a counter. He planted his feet, and the very atmosphere around him shimmered. From the rivers and lakes they had admired days before, a colossal pillar of water, wide as a skyscraper, erupted from the planet's surface and shot towards the tentacle. The impact wasn't a splash; it was a continent-shaking BOOM that sent a visible shockwave rippling across the hemisphere. The force was equivalent to a 10-point earthquake; mountainsides sheared off, and vast plains of amber and violet flora were instantly flattened into a swirling cloud of dust and debris.
Yet, when the water fell back as torrential rain, Anne stood unharmed, protected by a dome of crimson light.
Kai's face, visible on the viewscreen for a moment, was set in a grimace of intense focus. He was losing, and he knew it. He was a water user on a planet that was mostly land, fighting a parasite drawing power from a seemingly infinite source.
With a roar of effort that seemed to draw the very breath from the planet, Kai raised his sword to the sky. From the world's single, vast ocean, a portion of water so immense it was visible from space began to move. He wasn't summoning a wave; he was commanding the ocean itself. A literal chunk of the sea, holding entire marine ecosystems within it, rose into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun. It was a weapon of absolute, continental-level annihilation.
He brought it down upon Anne.
The impact was silent from space, but the effect was cataclysmic. A new, temporary sea was born in the heart of the continent. The geography of Thal'Ryn was permanently rewritten in an instant.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the churning, settling water.
Then, a spike of crimson light pierced the new sea's center. Anne emerged, hovering in the air, the tentacles now forming a monstrous, six-winged appendage behind her. She was barely scratched.
The effort had cost Kai dearly. He and Snow now stood with their backs against the shattered trunk of one of the planet's last remaining violet trees, both breathing in ragged, exhausted heaves. Kai's sword arm trembled with fatigue, and Snow's majestic white fur was matted with mud and streaks of energy-burn. They had thrown everything they had, reshaped a continent in their battle, and it hadn't been enough. The parasitic crown was too powerful.
On the ship, Dr. Voss whispered, his voice breaking, "My god... what have I done?"
On the spaceship's bridge, a suffocating silence had fallen, broken only by the frantic beeping of sensors tracking the cataclysm below. They watched, hearts in their throats, as Kai and Snow, backed against the shattered remains of a once-majestic violet tree, faced the hovering, monstrous form of Anne. The continent they had just seen reshaped by a chunk of ocean was now a steaming, devastated plain, and it hadn't been enough.
"He's... he's losing," Lisa whispered, the words tasting like ash. Her mind, trained in finance and logistics, reeled. She had studied the Hunter classifications in school—Planetary, Stellar, Galactic—but they were abstract terms, grades on a data-slate. Seeing a Planetary-tier Hunter in action was not about controlled power; it was about watching a living being wield the force of natural disasters. The sheer, terrifying scale of it made her feel infinitesimally small.
Kai's body trembled with exhaustion. His clothes were torn, his face smeared with grime and a thin trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead. He glanced at Snow. The magnificent white tiger was in worse condition, his fur matted, one of his powerful legs held at an awkward angle, a deep gash across his flank still sizzling with residual crimson energy. A low, pained growl rumbled in Snow's chest. He had given everything.
With a look of profound regret and resolve, Kai raised a hand. A soft, blue light enveloped Snow, and in the next instant, the great beast vanished, returned to the pocket dimension where he could rest and recover. Kai was now alone.
Anne, or the entity controlling her, let out a distorted laugh that crackled across the ruined landscape. "Your companion abandons you. Your power is spent. The Crown is mine. Her life is mine." The crimson tentacles writhed, gathering energy for a final, obliterating strike.
It was in that moment of absolute despair, as the last of his water-based energy flickered and died around him, A wisp of red energy, not the parasitic crimson of the crown, but a vibrant, blazing, sun-hot scarlet, flickered around his clenched fist. Then another. Like embers stirred by a sudden wind, the red flames erupted, not from around him, but from his very skin.
On the bridge, Dr. Voss and Lisa jolted as the main viewscreen filled with a blinding white flash before dissolving into static.
"What happened?!" Voss yelled, surging from his chair.
Lisa stared at the blank screen, a cold dread filling her. "Kai!"
The security chief's fingers flew over his console. "The energy surge from the planet's surface, Sir! It's off the scales! It wasn't an explosion from the enemy... it came from him. The feedback fried all our remote drone cameras. We've lost visual!"
"Get it back! Use the ship's long-range telescopic arrays! I need to see what's happening down there!" Voss commanded, his voice frantic.
Through all this chaos, one person remained unnervingly calm: Moon. He stood with his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the static-filled screen, a knowing, almost resigned look in his eyes. He had watched his brother fight with the grace of water and the skill of a master swordsman. He had watched him lose.
But he also knew that when Kai's refined techniques and controlled power failed, when his back was truly against the wall, the chains would come off. The calm, calculating Hunter would step aside, and something far more primal would take his place.
'You pushed him too far,' Moon thought, a silent message to the entity below. 'If you thought that was his full power... you were only seeing the surface. Now, you get to meet the Monkey King.'
To be continued…