Within the storm of gold and white-grey, Navira moved.
The coiling spirals of light around her burst apart, and a fresh barrage of willforce needles erupted toward Adrian's mind, thousands of them, glittering across his perception like a field of falling stars. Adrian's willforce was already surging upward to form his crude, heavy wall against it.
That was exactly what she wanted.
Hidden within the glittering storm, woven so tightly into the needles' formation rhythm that it wore their shape like a second skin, a single spiraling drill of condensed intent revolved silently toward him. It carried no presence of its own. Every rotation of its structure was tucked perfectly into the noise of the barrage, invisible even to eyes that could see willforce, unless one already knew to look for it.
The needles struck Adrian's wall and shattered against its brute density, thousands of sparks scattering across the invisible realm. For a fraction of a second, Adrian felt the flicker of satisfaction that came from a defense finally holding.
Then the drill hit.
It slipped through a seam in his loose weave and bored directly into his consciousness, spinning, grinding, tearing through the layers of his mind. Agony, unlike anything he had felt, ripped a soundless scream through his skull. His Mana Sea lurched, its flow stuttering violently; the ambient space that had been bending obediently around his body flickered out of his grasp entirely.
And Navira's slim golden sword was already there.
Deep within Adrian's mind, the golden dot pulsed once, and his perception exploded outward, stretching the collapsing moment thin. He saw the blade sliding toward his heart with perfect clarity, saw every degree of its angle, every ripple of golden essence along its edge. But his body, cut off from his stuttering mana and lagging behind his fractured focus, could not fully answer him. He wrenched his torso aside on raw physical instinct alone.
SHLIK!
The golden blade opened a deep, searing line across his left shoulder and chest, biting through robe and flesh before tearing free. Blood sprayed across the white-grey light of his own domain.
Adrian was hurled backward through the air, crashing through the remains of a collapsed tower before stopping himself amid the raining debris. He hung there for a moment, one hand pressed against the wound, blood running freely between his fingers and down the front of his robes.
"That is the price," Navira said, flicking his blood from her blade with a graceful turn of her wrist. "You should truly have a powerful background behind you, should you not? They spoiled you to the point of teaching you some method to copy another person's willforce technique, and yet you openly display it before your enemy. I have never seen such an ignorant fool in my life."
"Since they failed to teach you properly, take this lesson from me. You stole only the shape of my technique, but a shape is not a skill. You are raw ore pretending to be a forged blade, and every gap in your pretense is a doorway for me to walk through."
Adrian slowly raised his head.
Navira's lecture died in her throat. The brat was smiling. Blood streaked his jaw, his shoulder hung ruined, his mind still visibly trembled from the drill she had buried in it, and the fool was smiling at her with a fierce, blazing gleam in his eyes.
"So that is how willforce techniques are layered," Adrian thought, his mind replaying the attack over and over, peeling the deception apart thread by thread. "The barrage is not the weapon. The barrage is the rhythm that hides the weapon. She matched the drill's rotation to the needles' formation cadence so it would drown inside their signature…"
The diagram of it settled into his mind beside the others, and his ocean of willforce shifted just slightly closer to something that obeyed.
"Again," Adrian said quietly, raising his sword.
They collided once more, and the Inner Continent broke a little further beneath them.
The exchanges blurred into a brutal rhythm. Navira's techniques came in endless variations, crushing pressures, threaded lances, walls that counterattacked, feints layered inside feints, the accumulated craft of millions of years poured out without reservation. And Adrian bled for every lesson. A lance grazed his consciousness and left his ears ringing for ten full exchanges. A second hidden drill nearly found his mind again and was crushed at the last instant by sheer, desperate density. His body accumulated shallow wounds wherever his stuttering focus lagged behind her blade.
But with every exchange, his walls knit tighter.
The first wall she had shattered like wet paper. The wall he raised now held for a full heartbeat before cracking, its threads visibly cleaner, its gaps fewer. His needles no longer trembled apart mid-formation; they flew in disciplined dozens, each volley more coherent than the last. He was digesting her assault, in real time, in the middle of a death match, at a speed that should not have been possible for any living being.
"What is this monster?" Navira thought, and this time the unease refused to be buried. "Techniques my ancestors bled for across a hundred generations, and he is rebuilding them between sword strikes. At this rate, in another hundred exchanges, he will…"
She severed the thought and pressed harder, golden light howling. Whatever he was becoming, he was not there yet, and she intended to kill him long before he arrived.
…
At the shattered edge of the overlapping domains, where the pressure of the two sovereigns thinned just enough for lesser beings to survive, Tenyz dragged himself out of the rubble.
His shoulders burned where the shadow guard's daggers had torn them. His chest ached where the outsider's willforce had nearly crushed his consciousness into darkness. But what churned coldest inside him was not pain. It was the question that had reignited the moment that white-grey sword split the sky.
"He came for the Elyrians," Tenyz thought, his gaze crawling across the ruined plaza to where the princess and the shadow guard huddled, battered and bleeding, at the periphery of the storm. "An outsider with an ultimate-tier divine concept and Anchor-stage consciousness descends from nowhere, and his first and only demand is the freedom of livestock? No one fights a Major Sect for slaves. There should be a reason!"
He could not attack the outsider. He could not even breathe near that battlefield. But the Elyrians were right there, wounded and exhausted.
If he captured them alive, he could tear the truth from their fate strings at last.
Tenyz's broken body straightened, golden essence flooding his limbs as he blurred across the periphery of the battlefield. Xeolze sensed him a fraction of a second too late. The shadow guard shoved Mariska behind himself and brought his twin daggers up, but his torn shoulder screamed, his depleted willforce guttered, and Tenyz's slim sword was already slashing through the air.
CLANG! CLANG! SLASH!
Every parry Xeolze attempted was pre-read and punished. Fresh wounds opened across his arms and thigh, and within moments the shadow guard was driven to one knee, his daggers trembling, his blood pooling against the shattered pavement. Behind him, Mariska forced her broken body upright, one wing hanging shattered at her back, and dragged her sword into a guard she could barely hold.
Yet even then, even now, her eyes kept betraying her, dragging her gaze back toward the storm of gold and white-grey raging above the plaza.
"Who is he?" Mariska thought, her heart hammering against her fractured ribs. She watched the stranger bleed, stagger, and then surge back in with that impossible fire in his eyes, matching Navira, the Navira, the monster her entire civilization had hidden from for millions of years, blow for blow and thought for thought. He was wounded and was outmatched in battle. But he was not retreating. He fought for her people. For strangers he had never met. In all her millions of years, no one outside her own blood had ever bled for the Elyrians.
Tenyz's mocking voice dragged her back to the earth.
"Eyes on your own death, little bird," Tenyz sneered, kicking Xeolze's guard apart and raising his slim sword high above the shadow guard's exposed neck. "Your savior is busy dying. Now, you will come with me quietly, or you will carry his head as luggage."
The blade began to fall.
…
Within the storm, Adrian's perception caught the flicker of movement at the edge of his domain, and a single glance told him what was going on there.
His mind ran the calculation in the space between two sword strikes. For now, this battle was of purely willforce techniques and simple physical attacks. Soon, this battle would escalate, Navira could begin to use more powerful willforce attacks, and show her full physical strength, ultimate-level divine spells, and authority techniques. Adrian would also be forced to use his Source Form to handle such a battle. At that time, this would be a true, unrestrained death match.
But the collateral force of it would erase this entire hub and everything living on it long before either of them fell. Mariska and Xeolze would not survive the next three seconds, let alone the crossfire of the entire battle.
"Prolonging this puts them at risk," Adrian concluded, even as a thought of regret slid through him. "For now, I am not strong enough to put down Navira easily."
Adrian abruptly pulled his sword back, shattering the lock between their blades.
Navira's eyes flashed with killing intent at the opening, her willforce already condensing into a concentrated lance aimed at his retreating mind. But before the intent could even finish forming, Adrian vanished from the heart of her domain.
Tenyz's sword, which was descending toward Xeolze's neck, stopped.
The blade's edge hung frozen in the air, caught between the thumb and forefinger of a bloodstained hand. Tenyz's gaze crawled up the arm, up the torn, blood-soaked white-grey robes.
"You…" Tenyz choked. He wrenched at his sword with every fiber of his Astral-stage strength. It did not move a hair's breadth.
With a casual flick of two fingers, Adrian shattered the blade. The eruption of force slammed into Tenyz's chest like a falling star, and the young master of the Ethereal Providence Sect was launched backward through the air like a broken ragdoll, blood spraying from his mouth as his body tore through three consecutive buildings before disappearing into the rubble of a fourth.
"TENYZ!!"
Navira's scream cracked the sky. She was already streaking across the battlefield, her golden domain howling around her like a dying sun, her blade raised for a strike carrying every drop of her fury.
Adrian did not even turn to face her. His Source essence flowed outward, wrapping gently around the exhausted, bleeding forms of Mariska and Xeolze, lifting them from the ruined ground.
Mariska stared up at the stranger's blood-streaked face, a thousand questions burning through the fog of her pain, and managed only one.
"Who… are you?"
"We are leaving," was all Adrian said.
Space folded obediently beneath his command. The three of them vanished from the heart of the Providence Hub, and Navira's blazing strike cleaved through nothing but empty air, its shockwave flattening a square kilometer of ruins in a single heartbeat.
Silence fell over the Inner Continent.
Across the distant Outer Continents, millions of cultivators stood staring at the flickering sky where two suns had warred, none of them yet able to name what they had witnessed.