"Brat?" Adrian muttered back.
There were very few things Adrian had come to actively dislike during his rapid ascent through the universe, and being treated as a child was quickly rising to the top of that list. Yes, by the cosmic standards of this vast universe, he was young. Even accounting for all the time dilation he had endured, he had not even lived for a thousand years. He was, in many ways, still growing, still learning, and still adapting every single day to the depths of the universe.
The literal meaning of someone calling him a child did not truly bother him. Hestia had called him an idiot and a child more than once in her exasperation. Even the Void Emperor had referred to him as a 'kid'. But no matter what words they used, the intentions behind them were what truly mattered. Their words carried a sense of familiarity, exasperation, or a cosmic paternalism that lacked any real malice.
But against Navira, it held an entirely different meaning. She looked down upon him. She looked at him as though he were nothing more than a sheltered, arrogant nuisance who had stumbled out of a minor galaxy and dared to play the hero in a realm he did not understand. To her, he was just a spoiled brat demanding a toy that did not belong to him.
The white-grey energy sword, which had been embedded deep within the fractured pavement of the plaza, began to hum. Slowly, it lifted from the ruined ground and floated through the air, drifting smoothly past the unconscious bodies of the four Astral Stage elders until the hilt settled into Adrian's outstretched hand.
Adrian's fingers closed around it. He looked at the glowing blade for a moment, and then slowly shook his head.
"I'm tired of proving myself to others," Adrian said.
Words were useless. In a universe built on the bones of the weak, only actions spoke loud enough to be heard.
Without another word, Adrian disappeared.
The very next instant, he materialized directly in front of Navira, the white-grey blade of his Source sword already descending in a blinding arc aimed at her neck. And in the same breath, deep within his consciousness, Adrian reached for the diagram that his Source Eyes had imprinted into his mind only minutes ago. The structure of Navira's willforce technique sat there in perfect clarity, every thread of it mapped, every rhythm of its formation recorded.
Knowing a technique and wielding it, however, were two entirely different things.
Adrian pushed his willforce into the imprinted shape, and the vast ocean of his willforce responded like a river being forced through the eye of a needle. The energy resisted the unfamiliar structure. It wanted to surge, to crash, to crush, not to be woven. Where Navira's needles had manifested in their thousands within a single flicker of thought, Adrian managed to shape barely a few dozen, their forms trembling and uneven, several of them dissolving back into raw intent before they even finished forming.
Still, they flew.
Navira had already thrown her body backward through the air, twisting elegantly beneath the arc of the descending Source sword. But mid-dodge, her pupils contracted into slits. Her perception registered the swarm of half-formed intent streaking toward her mind.
"What??" Navira thought, a flash of genuine shock cracking through her composed facade.
It was her own willforce technique. Crude, malformed, embarrassingly executed, but unmistakably hers, the same needle structure her lineage had refined over countless generations, now flying back at her from the mind of a stranger who had witnessed it once.
Navira stopped her physical movement. One could never physically evade a willforce attack; no matter where the body moved, the strike targeted the consciousness directly.
With a single pulse of thought, she expelled a surge of her own willforce and wove it into a dense wall of intent before herself. Adrian's trembling needles struck the barrier and shattered instantly, dissolving into harmless sparks.
Blocking it had cost her nothing. Yet her mind was reeling as she stabilized in the air, her golden aura flickering with something that was no longer contempt.
"He copied it," she thought, staring at the figure hovering across from her. "He watched it once, took the strike directly into his mind, and copied it."
The execution was pathetic, the work of a complete novice fumbling through his very first attempt. But that was precisely what made it terrifying. Willforce techniques were one of the most jealously guarded inheritances in the universe, structures refined across millions of years and passed only to chosen successors.
It was also similar to authority techniques; one could not simply observe it and steal it. Everything happens inside one's mind, and the other party cannot dissect it. And yet this brat had reconstructed the skeleton of her technique from a single glance.
Navira forced the unease down. Her nerves were already frayed to the breaking point by the premonition of the ancient entity that had shattered her divination array, an existence that could descend upon her spire at any moment. The last thing her sect could afford right now was a full-scale death match against an Anchor Stage being, bleeding her time, her strength, and her Hub while an unfathomable predator circled somewhere in the dark of fate.
"I do not know what sect, lineage, or hidden faction you hail from, outsider," Navira said, her voice regaining its serene, commanding cadence. "But do not play games with me. Drop the arrogant facade. Tell me what it is you actually need, and perhaps we can resolve this without tearing my Hub apart."
Adrian lowered his sword slightly, the white-grey light washing over his unremarkable, altered features.
"My demands are simple," Adrian replied. "I want the Elyrians. Stop everything you are doing to them. Disassemble your refinement factories, break their chains, and let them walk free."
Navira stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she let out a sharp, incredulous laugh that echoed across the ruined plaza.
"You truly are a sheltered fool," Navira spat, her eyes blazing like twin suns. "Do you even understand what you are demanding? The Elyrians are the foundation of my sect's wealth. Their blood fuels our pills, our trade routes, our standing across a dozen galaxies. You are asking me to liquidate my own sect with my own hands."
She raised her hand, and her expression twisted into a mask of pure hatred. "If you want them to walk free, then it will happen over my dead body!"
The moment the words left her lips, Navira's ultimate-tier divine concept erupted. A blinding golden domain exploded outward from her body, and the weight of ninety percent authority pressed down upon the Inner Continent, grinding the shattered pavement into fine dust and making the artificial sky tremble.
"Then so be it," Adrian said coldly.
His Source domain erupted in tandem. The white-grey essence flooded the plaza like a rising tide, locked deliberately at ninety percent authority to match her output without revealing even a sliver of his full capacity.
The two ultimate-tier domains collided.
Reality groaned as the two opposing wills fought for dominance over the fabric of existence. The authority within the plaza split evenly down the middle, forty-five percent bending to Navira's golden fate, forty-five percent answering to Adrian's white-grey light, and the final ten percent clutched stubbornly by reality itself.
Navira dashed toward Adrian, a slim golden blade materializing in her grip, her figure trailing streaks of molten light as she closed the distance. Their swords met, and the shockwave of the impact tore through the ruined plaza, flattening what few structures still stood at its edge.
But the blades were only the surface of the battle. The true war raged in the invisible realm of consciousness.
Navira's eyes flared, and a relentless barrage of refined willforce techniques poured from her mind. Spiraling drills of condensed intent bored toward Adrian's consciousness. Waves of crushing mental pressure rolled over him in rhythmic pulses, timed precisely to the beats of their sword exchanges, each one designed to make his authority stutter at the exact moment her blade came for his throat.
Adrian met the assault head-on, and for the first time, he felt the difference between himself and someone who had truly mastered the Anchor stage
His Source Eyes burned with radiance, tracking every structure she deployed. He watched her intent gather, weave, and launch, and the diagrams stacked themselves inside his consciousness one after another. Following the imprinted pattern of her defense, he pulled his willforce up into a wall of his own the instant her next volley of needles came screaming in.
The wall formed. It was denser than anything Navira could ever hope to raise. But its weave was loose, its threads uneven, full of microscopic gaps that no trained eye could miss.
Her needles found every single one of them.
A handful of the strikes slipped cleanly through the flaws in his barrier and buried themselves into his consciousness. Searing pain detonated behind Adrian's eyes, white-hot lines dragging through his mind like heated wire. His vision fractured for a heartbeat, and a thin stream of blood ran from his nose, painting a dark line down to his jaw.
The sheer density of his Anchor-stage mind was the only thing that kept the damage from spreading. The needles that had pierced through sank into the depths of his willforce ocean and drowned there, their structures crushed by the ambient weight of his intent before they could shred anything vital. A merely awakened Astral being would have already been reduced to a drooling puppet.
Adrian planted his foot against the empty air, arrested his backward slide, and wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.
Across from him, Navira slowly tilted her head, and for the first time since the battle began, a cold smile touched her lips. "I don't know what method you are using to observe my willforce techniques and replicate them," Navira said, golden light beginning to coil and condense around her in slow, deliberate spirals. "But imitation has a price. Allow me to collect it."
…
Far below and far away, across the separated continents of the Providence Hub, everything had come to a standstill.
On the Outer Commercial Continents, millions of wandering cultivators stood frozen in the streets, their haggling and boasting forgotten, their heads tilted upward toward the distant Inner Continents. Two colossal pillars of light, one a majestic, imperious gold and the other a strange, indifferent white-grey, clawed at each other across the horizon, and every pulse of their collision sent visible ripples washing through the Hub's artificial sky.
"Two Astral domains…" a scarred mercenary whispered, "Inside the Hub. Someone is fighting the Ethereal Providence Sect inside their own Hub."
Within the Verdant Crucible, the golden-skinned attendant stood at the shop's entrance, his elongated, ring-pierced ears trembling as he stared at the white-grey radiance staining the distant sky.
And within the golden spire itself, alarm formations shrieked through every corridor. Rule Stage disciples burst from their cultivation chambers and surged toward the Inner Continents, only to slam into the outer edge of the overlapping domains as though striking a wall of solid metal. The pressure leaking from the battle alone drove the weakest of them to their knees, blood dripping from their eyes as they stared helplessly into the storm where their Sect Leader fought.
None of them could take another step forward.
The heart of the Providence Hub had become a place where only sovereigns could breathe.