Chapter 277: Ascendence
The wind sweeping across the floating mountain of Hubin was cold, carrying the scent of strange, glowing purple flora.
“Welcome home, little brother,” the masked youth chuckled. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Hide’s eyes narrowed. Every muscle in his body coiled like a spring.
“Don’t call me that,” He said, his voice a growl. “You are not my brother. And this isn’t my home.”
Behind the porcelain mask, Rosh tilted his head, letting out an amused, mocking sigh.
“Still clinging to that pathetic human delusion?” Rosh drawled, taking a slow step down the stone steps. “I was told you know the truth of what you are, you don’t? Yet you still pretend you belong down in the mud with those fragile insects?”
Hide didn’t care about the philosophy. His True Sight swept over the masked figure and behind him. The massive stone gates could not be peered through for some reason.
“You couldn’t open it,” Hide realized coldly, his gaze dropping to the tarnished silver band on his own finger. “You haven’t been waiting for me, but for me to bring the ring.”
“That old bastard hid it too well,” Rosh hissed, his taloned fingers twitching at his sides. “Our father locked the Ascension Crystal and gave the ring to that woman before she fled to Earth. I hunted her contacts, and I watched you from the shadows. Every trap I laid—you just kept crawling out alive, growing stronger like a cockroach.”
Hide’s jaw clenched so hard his molars ground together.
All of the things that had ever happened with him, led back to the monster standing thirty paces away.
“You’re the one who murdered my mom,” Hide whispered, black draconic scales creeping up his neck. “And you opened the gates. People died because of you, people that cared for me.”
“I did what I had to!” Rosh snapped, his voice echoing with sudden, venomous fury. “And today, I finish what I started. Hand over the ring, Hide. With the Boundary Pusher, I will shatter the ceiling of this rotten world. I won’t have to kneel to Odo, or… or that arrogant bitch ever again!”
“If you want the ring,” Hide said, drawing the katana from its scabbard with a sharp, metallic ring, “come take it from my corpse.”
Rosh raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.
Space around Hide collapsed.
There was no projectile and no travel time. The area occupying Hide’s torso twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, attempting to cut apart his ribcage from his spine.
Before the spatial torsion could bite into flesh, Hide’s newly acquired S-Rank skill flared to life.
Reflective Severance!
A ripple of dark mana burst from Hide’s skin, inverting the spatial plane around his body. The spatial twist bounced off the inverted boundary and detonated harmlessly against the stone pillars to his left, slicing three ancient columns cleanly in half.
Rosh’s head jerked back slightly behind his mask. “You deflected a direct spatial tear?”
Hide didn’t waste breath answering.
SONIC FLIGHT!
BOOM!
Drawing upon Petra’s ability, Hide pushed ahead, leaving a crater in stone, where he had stood. He materialized directly in front of Rosh’s chest, swinging the dark-coated katana in a horizontal strike.
SWIK!
The blade sliced straight through Rosh’s neck—only for Rosh’s body to sink into a black dimensional rift that opened vertically in the air a microsecond before impact.
Directly behind Hide’s blind spot, another rift tore open.
Rosh stepped out, his human disguise dissolving completely into his true Void-born form—a towering, shifting silhouette of darkness and cold cosmic starlight, his hands morphed into razor-sharp void talons.
“Too slow!” Rosh roared, driving his talons straight toward the back of Hide’s heart.
WHOOSH!
A towering geyser of dark mana erupted from Hide’s back.
Zenith materialized in a fraction of a heartbeat. The seven-meter executioner phantom swung its colossal obsidian greatsword, intercepting Rosh’s talons head-on.
KRA-CLANG!
The shockwave ripped up the stones across a hundred yards. Zenith was forced back two steps, deep spatial gashes carved into its shadowy armor, while Petra shrieked from above, diving down at supersonic speed to rake its talons across Rosh’s head.
“Cheap puppets!” Rosh snarled.
He wept his left arm upward. Dozens of miniature black spatial gates snapped open and shut around Petra and Zenith like iron jaws, tearing off one of Petra’s wings and severing Zenith’s left arm at the elbow.
Hide instantly recalled both damaged phantoms back into his core before Rosh could destroy their anchors, using the half-second opening they had bought him, he used mana press accompanied by Abyssal will.
HUMMM—!
A hundred-meter dome of suffocating dark authority snapped over the promenade. The gravity inside the zone multiplied tenfold, causing the stone beneath Rosh’s feet to buckle and crack. Simultaneously, Hide seized complete command over the ambient dark mana of Hubin.
In the empty air above them, thousands of vitrified, black weapons condensed
“Fall,” Hide commanded coldly.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
The endless armory rained down at supersonic speed, accompanied by a roaring tidal wave of Abyssal HellFlame that surged from Hide’s blade, turning the entire mountain peak into a furnace of black-and-crimson annihilation.
Trapped beneath the crushing gravity of Mana Press, Rosh could not blink away in time.
“DAMN YOU!” Rosh bellowed, his starry irises flaring with rage.
Rosh tore open a massive, fifty-meter spatial rift directly above his head—connecting the sky of Hubin to the bottom of a deep ocean trench on Rilth—and dumped millions of liters of seawater and spatial blades upward to clash with Hide’s barrage.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The Abyssal HellFlame evaporated the ocean water without leaving a single wisp of steam, devouring the spatial blades whole. Hundreds of Hide’s dark mana lances punched through Rosh’s defenses, grazing his shoulders, piercing his thigh.
Yet Rosh didn’t go down.
Driven into a corner, the Overlord of Space unleashed all he had.
“IF I CAN’T HAVE IT, I’LL RIP IT OUT OF YOUR CHEST JUST LIKE LAST TIME!” Rosh shrieked, ripping the dark lances from his flesh as crimson blood poured from his wounds.
Rosh clapped both hands together.
The entire spatial fabric around the Vault fractured into a thousand shifting geometric cubes. Space began to fold inward from all six directions simultaneously—a inescapable spatial grinder!
Sharp, invisible spatial edges sliced through Hide’s jacket and cut deep across his cheeks, arms, and chest, cracking his Abyssal Scale Carapace. Blood sprayed from Hide’s frame as the collapsing space squeezed him from every angle.
But they were currently inside a dome created by Hide’s abyssal Will. Everything inside would follow his command.
The crushing spatial cubes around Hide suddenly froze.
Hide’s glowing blue eyes locked onto Rosh through the fractured glass of reality.
“You talk too much,” Hide rasped, blood dripping down his chin.
ZAP!
He stepped directly through Rosh’s own spatial authority, walking across the severed dimensions as if they were flat stone.
Rosh’s starry eyes widened in mind-numbing terror as Hide materialized less than six inches from his face, completely bypassing his ultimate defense.
“How—?!” Rosh gasped.
Hide didn’t give him a second breath.
Coating the katana in a condensed, blinding layer of Abyssal HellFlame and dark mana, Hide drove the blade forward with both hands.
CRACK—SHIK!
The porcelain mask shattered into halves, falling away to reveal a pale, blood-streaked face identical to Hide’s own. At the exact same moment, the katana punched straight through the center of Rosh’s chest, piercing his core.
“Guh—!”
Rosh froze, a mouthful of blood spilling over his lips. His talons clawed weakly at Hide’s shoulders, his fingernails scraping harmlessly against Hide’s black scales.
“I… I am the firstborn…” Rosh choked out, his eyes trembling with disbelief, humiliation, and raging hatred as the black flames began consuming his core. “I was chosen by the gods… why would you…”
Hide stared into his brother’s face, feeling zero pity, hesitation or remorse.
“Die,” He said flatly.
The fire devoured Rosh’s spatial core completely. Rosh’s body stiffened, the cosmic starlight in his eyes flickering out as his physical vessel turned into brittle, blackened ash that crumbled away into the mountain wind.
[Unknown Entity — Eliminated]
[Primordial Authority over Space has been Gained]
Hide stood alone before the Vault doors, breathing heavily as the draconic scales slowly receded. He flicked the ash from his blade and sheathed the katana at his waist.
The monster who had haunted his life was gone.
But before Hide could even catch his breath, the sky above Hubin darkened violently. Massive tremors rippled through the dimensional fabric.
Hide didn’t waste a single second.
He went through the doors of the Pyramid and inside the palace of Roshhide and looked around with his True Sight.
It didn’t take him long to find the Vault of Hubin. It was behind a pedastal with a small door. Stepping up to the central pedestal, he pulled the tarnished silver ring from his finger—the ring his mother had entrusted to Ren Sihue, and that Risa had died to pass on to him—and pressed it firmly into the circular depression in the stone.
CLACK—HURRRRR!
The ancient runes ignited with blinding silver light. With a deep, earth-shaking groan, the small stone door opened for the first time in nearly two decades.
Inside the quiet, circular chamber, floating above a pedestal of white stone, was a radiant, multifaceted diamond-like crystal that pulsed with an unearthly, prismatic aura.
The Ascension Crystal. The Boundary Pusher.
Hide walked forward and wrapped his blood-stained hand directly around the crystal.
CRACK!
The moment his skin touched the surface, the crystal dissolved into light, surging straight through his palm and into his Core.
Before his eyes, the translucent blue screen of the Universal Adaptation System flared with blinding, golden cosmic brilliance:
[Artifact Detected: The Ascension Crystal]
[Assimilating Primordial Authority over Darkness…]
[Assimilating Primordial Authority over Space…]
[Merging Authority over Space and Authority over Darkness…]
[Initiating Final Evolution…]
A pillar of void and dazzling starlight erupted from Hide’s body, piercing straight through the roof of the Vault and splitting the clouds of Hubin in half.
The ceiling of S-Rank—the absolute limit of mortal beings was breached. His core expanded into an bottomless well of power.
[Evolution Complete!]
[Class & Talent Rank Increased: S-Rank → SSS-Rank!]
[You have transcended the Mortal Plane.]