Chapter 290: Mavuika's Final Strike
The shadow of death descended upon Lumine in an instant.
However, it was the combat instincts honed through countless brushes with oblivion that saved her. In the sliver of a second before the dark red, flaming sword could cleave her in two, there was no time for thought; her body simply moved.
'Retract!'
She forcibly aborted the energy extraction from the abyssal core, her power shifting in a desperate, instinctive pivot. The devouring power of her Ethereal Space flared to life—no longer siphoning, but directly consuming.
With a wrenching tear, the vast, still-pulsating abyssal core was ripped from Baqunava's remains and swallowed whole into the depths of her personal dimension.
In the same fluid motion, Lumine spun with blinding speed, swinging the Prototype Rancour across her body to intercept the lethal sneak attack.
"CLANG—!!!!!!!!!"
The dark red, flaming sword crashed violently against her blade. The shriek of tortured metal was so piercing it felt as if it would shatter the eardrums of everyone on the battlefield.
A hurried block could never hope to fully dissipate the terrifying power behind Gosoythoth's premeditated, all-or-nothing strike. An irresistible force surged through the Prototype Rancour, and a bone-jarring shockwave slammed up Lumine's arms, threatening to shatter them from the inside out. Her massive, empowered form couldn't stabilize; she was flung backward like a boulder launched from a catapult.
"Lumine!" Stelle's eyes widened with fury, a raw cry tearing from her throat. Her own colossal figure lunged forward, arms outstretched, catching the airborne Lumine just in time.
The immense inertia sent them both skidding back for hundreds of meters, their feet plowing two deep, steaming furrows into the scorched earth before they finally ground to a halt.
A coppery sweetness flooded Lumine's throat. A thin trickle of blood escaped the corner of her mouth, a clear sign of the internal injuries she had sustained from the impact.
Across the battlefield, Gosoythoth did not pursue.
Its burning pupils swept coldly over Lumine and Stelle. Its other, free dragon claw shot out like lightning, seizing the massive remains of Baqunava on the ground—a husk that had lost its core but still retained its formidable structure. Abyss energy surged around the corpse as the creature attempted to drag it into a shimmering portal for recovery.
Even without its core, Baqunava's shell, forged from rule-level immortality, was an very useful prize—a precious research material and a potential weapon prototype.
"Don't even think about it!"
From the heavens above, Mavuika's voice boomed, laced with more anger and resolute finality than he had shown throughout the entire battle. The power he had been accumulating for so long had finally reached its absolute peak; he could wait no longer.
"By the five hundred years of Natlan's vigil! By the faith of our people! By the sacred inheritance of the Pyro God, Haborym—here, I end the darkness!"
He gripped the hilt of Incandescent Thousand Suns with both hands. The sword's radiance was now beyond description, a miniature sun in his grasp. He poured every ounce of his strength, the collective hope of Natlan, and five centuries of perseverance and sacrifice into this single, definitive strike.
Then, toward the trembling Abyssal Entity in the sky, he thrust the sword of fate with all his might.
"YAAAA—HAH!!!"
There was no devastating explosion, no total storm of energy.
The moment the sword's tip lunged forward, all color and sound seemed to drain from the world. All that remained was a stream of blazing white light—so pure and condensed it seemed to transcend energy itself, carrying the absolute will of "Expulsion," "Purification," and "Termination."
It was not merely power; it was the manifestation of a fundamental rule, the final judgment issued by the very land of Natlan against its invaders.
Gosoythoth's reaction was impossibly swift. The instant it felt the lethal threat, even as it was dragging Baqunava's remains into the portal, it abandoned any thought of attack or recovery.
Its massive half-body retracted through the portal at a speed that defied physical laws, positioning itself to block the path to the Abyssal Entity.
It succeeded. In the final moment, its body stood between the blazing white light and the true heart of the invasion.
But that was all it accomplished.
This strike from Mavuika, which held the entirety of Natlan's will, possessed a power far beyond what the creature could withstand—a power that touched the very rules of existence.
The moment the blazing white light made contact with Gosoythoth, there was no struggle, no stalemate. It was like sunlight dispersing the morning mist, an unstoppable and absolute erasure.
Gosoythoth's indestructible, pitch-black bone armor, its flesh brimming with vast abyssal power, the filthy flaming sword it had condensed—all of it dissolved like an illusory bubble before the stream of light representing Natlan's final will. It was instantly disintegrated, annihilated.
A brief, shrill soul-scream, filled with disbelief and eternal agony, echoed across the planes of existence as the claw it had raised to block was utterly reduced to nothingness.
The light did not pause. After annihilating half of Gosoythoth, its momentum remained utterly undiminished as it struck the trembling, shrinking Abyssal Entity behind it.
The Abyssal Entity let out one last, desperate, space-warping shriek. It mobilized every ounce of power it could muster—the abyss energy that had not yet fully saturated Natlan, the corrosive auras scattered across the battlefield, and even its own essence of existence—forging it all into an impossibly thick shield before it.
"BUZZ—!"
The light collided with the shield, producing a dull, grinding roar, as if two worlds were crashing into each other.
The stalemate lasted for only a fleeting moment.
"Crack..."
Fissures of pure light spread across the shield of darkness.
Then, it shattered completely.
The blazing white light, the ultimate spear of judgment, pierced fiercely and irrevocably into the core of the Abyssal Entity—the very source of the calamity.
There was no explosion, only the most thorough and silent "annihilation."
The darkness that had shrouded Natlan's sky, the entity that had brought countless eons of suffering and destruction, was like a snowflake cast into a furnace. It rapidly melted, dissolved, and finally vanished completely into nothingness, leaving not a single trace that it had ever existed.
Simultaneously, with the annihilation of the Abyssal Entity itself, every remaining Abyss monster on Natlan's soil, every uncleared remnant of the Abyssal Tumor Stones, and every wisp of corrosive energy permeating the air lost its source. Like tributaries cut off from their river, they all lost their activity at the same instant, crumbling into black ash and scattering on the wind.
The dark purple canopy that had covered Natlan for so long receded like an ebbing tide.
Long-awaited, warm sunlight pierced through the newly purified sky without hindrance, shining once again upon the battle-scarred yet resilient land of Natlan.
However, the anomaly in the sky had not entirely ended.
Mavuika's all-out strike was simply too powerful. Not only did it annihilate the Abyssal Entity, but its residual force had torn through the very fabric of the sky itself.
Where the Abyssal Entity had once loomed, a massive, jagged spatial rift now hung in the air.
Through that rift, one could no longer see Teyvat's familiar azure sky. Instead, there was only the cold, silent, star-speckled, pitch-black depth of outer space.
The rift, like a scar upon the heavens, silently testified to the terrifying power of the final blow, while simultaneously heralding new, unknown concerns for the world below.
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