Chapter 166: Battling An Immortal
Adonis stood before the Undead Master, his fingers white-knuckled around the hilt of the Chaos Sword.
He looked at the skeletal king, whose golden flames flickered with an unsteady rhythm.
"Answer me, bag of bones," Adonis demanded coldly. "Why did you send those skin-walkers to my kingdom? What was the real agenda behind the imitation of the Beast King?"
"Hehehe!"
The Undead Master threw his head back and cackled,
"You are a simple creature, Dragon King. Your life force is a sun in a world of dim candles. I wanted to feast! I wanted to steal that immense essence and make it my own. Is that not enough of a reason for a god of death?"
Adonis shook his eyes. "You’re lying. A lich as old as you doesn’t risk a direct confrontation with a Dragon King just for a snack. There is something else in this city you’re protecting. Or something you’re trying to summon."
"Think what you wish! It won’t matter once you are part of my collection!"
The Master raised his skeletal hands, and the floor of the Cube erupted. Thousands of bone-spikes shot upward, but Adonis didn’t flinch.
"Millia, stay back! This is going to get messy!" Adonis shouted.
He activated his core trait. "Chaos Physique: Titan Manifestation!"
CRACK! BOOM!
The ceiling of the Golden Cube shattered as Adonis’s body expanded. His muscles swelled, his height tripling and then quadrupling until he stood as a colossal human titan, glowing with an aura of pure destruction.
The golden walls of the sanctuary crumbled like dry biscuits under his sheer mass.
"Sword Art: Chaos Ultima!" Adonis roared.
SHAAAAA-WING!
He swung the massive Chaos Sword in a horizontal arc. The blade cut through the air, annihilating the very fabrics of the city itself.
The shockwave traveled for miles, leveling basalt towers and vaporizing the hordes of undead that had been gathered in the plaza.
The Undead Master was caught in the center of the blast.
His skeletal frame was torn apart, his golden bones turning into shards of light before vanishing into the vacuum created by the strike.
For a heartbeat, there was silence. The City of Death was in ruins, a smoking crater where the sanctuary once stood.
"Is it over?" Millia called out from the distance, her voice sounding strangely tinny.
"It should be," Adonis muttered, shrinking back to his normal size.
"Hahahaha! Foolish! Utterly foolish!"
The voice came from everywhere. In the center of the crater, the shards of light began to pull together, stitching themselves back into the form of the Undered Master. He stood there, completely unscathed, an arrogant smirk visible on his skull.
"I am the Master of the Necro-Lands! I am immortal! Undying! As long as the concept of death exists, I cannot be erased!" the Master boasted.
Adonis spat on the ground. "You don’t know who are you dealing with. I’m the creator. Immortality is just a fancy word for a hidden health bar. Every code has a bug, and every spell has a tether. I’ll find yours."
"Hehe, try it, dragon king."
The battle resumed with even greater ferocity.
Adonis charged, his sword clashing against the Master’s spectral scythe.
CLANG! CLANG! BOOM!
Each collision sent shockwaves that shattered the remaining foundations of the city.
Adonis was moving faster than the eye could see, his strikes fueled by a rage that shouldn’t have been possible.
"Why won’t you die?" Adonis growled, delivering a kick that sent the Master flying through a stone wall.
Bang!
"Because I am the world!" the Master replied, rising instantly.
Adonis paused, wiping blood from his lip. He looked toward Millia to check her safety, but all of a suddne his heart stopped. In the distance, Millia was standing still, but her image was flickering. Her body would jitter for a fraction of a second, revealing a grid of blue light underneath, before returning to normal.
It looked exactly like a glitch in a poorly rendered video game.
Bzzzt. Bzzzt.
Adonis looked at the sky. The dark clouds were repeating the same lightning pattern every ten seconds. He looked at the rubble at his feet; the stones were identical in shape and texture, copy-pasted across the terrain.
"No," Adonis whispered, his blood turning to ice. "This can’t be."
He remembered the feeling of breaking the Mirror of Regret. He remembered the emotional triumph. But it felt too perfect. It felt like a narrative beat he had written himself to satisfy his own ego.
"Millia!" he screamed.
The figure of Millia turned to him, but her face didn’t move. Her mouth stayed closed while her voice echoed in his head:
"What is wrong, husband? Why are you stopping? Kill him for us."
Bzzzt. Her arm clipped through her torso for a split second.
Adonis turned his gaze back to the Undead Master, who was standing still now, watching him with a blank, hollow expression. The Master wasn’t even breathing anymore. He was a static asset.
"Damn it! How can I fall for this? I never left the Mirror," Adonis realized, his voice trembling with a terrifying mixture of horror and fury. "I didn’t break the illusion. You just gave me a version of the illusion where I thought I won because that’s what my heart craved most."
The realization hit him like a physical blow.
The "Chaos Ultima," the "Titan Manifestation," the "Rebel Undead"—it was all a script generated by the Cube to keep his mind occupied while it slowly drained his essence.
"You dared..." Adonis growled like a enraged beast. "You dared to use my own desires to leash me?"
His rage boiled over, but it wasn’t the heroic rage of a Dragon King. It was the cold, calculated fury of the game creator.
He looked at the sky, at the very "code" of the dream.
"I am the one who writes the endings! If this is a dream, then I am the nightmare that wakes you up!"
He gripped the Chaos Sword, but instead of swinging it at the Master, he turned the blade toward his own chest.
"Adonis, no!" the fake Millia shrieked, her image still glitching violently.
"Shut up, you’re not her!" Adonis roared.
He didn’t stab himself of course. He plunged the sword into the "ground" and twisted it, not using mana, but using the raw, unfiltered authority of his soul to command the reality to cease.
"DELETE!"
The world around him began to deconstruct. The City of Death, the Master, and the fake Millia began to unravel into long strings of binary and black smoke.
The illusion fought back, trying to pull him into a new dream of a different life, but Adonis held firm.
"You think the same trick would work twice?" he sneered, eyes cold. "I’m coming for you."