Chapter 87: Anyone else want the Thunder Wings?
Laira watched Brakk charge toward her.
She didn’t raise a shield.
She didn’t dodge either.
Her left wing trembled.
Hundreds of feathers that had formed the lightning net immediately returned, reassembling along the dragon wing. Thunder Flame: Heavens’ Ruin coated each feather, forming an extended cutting edge from the wingtip.
Brakk brought the war axe down.
Laira swept her wing across.
Clang!
The war axe stopped in midair.
A crack appeared across the blade.
Brakk’s eyes went wide.
Thunder Flame pierced through the beast hide, transmitting directly into the array inscriptions inside the war axe. Every magic symbol went dark at once.
Crack!
The war axe split in two.
The Thunder-Iron wing didn’t stop.
It cleaved through the chest armor on Brakk’s body.
Thunder Flame poured into the wound, burning the energy inside his Heavenly Gate and seizing up his entire body.
Brakk fell.
Boom!
His body smashed a large crater into the stone floor.
He wasn’t dead yet.
One hand braced against the ground as he tried to stand. Gold-rank tier 9 energy kept surging outward, trying to force the Thunder Flame from his body.
But he had been fighting for nearly twelve hours.
His right shoulder was wounded.
Both hands had been destroyed by lightning multiple times.
The energy in his Heavenly Gate was down to almost nothing.
Thunder Flame didn’t burn flesh first. It latched onto the energy inside, so every time Brakk circulated his power, the fire spread further.
Laira landed in front of him.
Brakk raised his head, eyes full of burst blood vessels.
"I’m Gold-rank tier 9. You’re only Silver..."
Laira didn’t let him finish.
She raised her hand.
A bolt of Thunder Flame shot straight into the chest that had already been torn open by the Thunder-Iron wing.
Boom!
Every trace of energy around Brakk went out.
His body collapsed into the crater, motionless.
Laira didn’t look again. She beat her wings and immediately returned to the sky.
On the other side of the battlefield, Ethan wasn’t standing still controlling the net either.
He pulled a hundred feathers back to his left hand.
The metal feathers stacked onto the Primordial Armor, extending into a silver-purple blade.
The Thunder Wing beat downward.
Ethan vanished.
An Elf who had just tried to restart an array only saw a flash of electricity beside him. By the time he turned his head, the Thunder-Iron blade had already severed the staff in his hand.
Ethan didn’t kill him.
A pommel strike to the chest sent the Elf flying out of the array, unconscious.
He vanished again.
The second junction was destroyed.
The third.
Every time Ethan appeared, an array or a weapon was severed. The Eye of Truth showed him exactly where to strike, but the speed, defense, and power all came from the Thunder Wings and the Primordial Armor.
The remaining Elves couldn’t keep up.
All they saw were arcs of electricity appearing endlessly around their formation.
One person went down.
Then the second.
In less than a minute, the entire array network had been destroyed by Ethan.
Aldren stood amid the wreckage, his face drained white.
Brakk was dead.
The retrieval puppets were nearly all destroyed.
Fewer than five Elves could still fight.
He had no more chances.
Aldren immediately activated a teleportation skill.
A green circle of light appeared beneath his feet.
But just as his body was about to disappear, a Thunder-Iron Feather had already embedded itself at the destination on the far side of the room.
Lightning erupted.
The space that had just opened was instantly shattered.
Aldren was knocked out of the teleportation ring.
He turned to look at Ethan.
The Thunder Wing behind Ethan’s back was still fully spread. His eyes were looking straight at Aldren.
"You can see the destination?"
Ethan didn’t answer.
Aldren activated teleportation a second time.
The destination changed.
Another feather was already there waiting.
A third time.
Still a feather waiting.
Every point he could teleport to had already been seen by the Eye of Truth.
Aldren looked up.
The Thunder Flame Sky Net still hung overhead.
The lightning around him was slowly tightening, cutting off every escape route one by one.
Fear finally appeared on the male Elf’s face.
He immediately changed his tone.
"Ethan, we can negotiate. Fighting over resources inside a ruin is nothing unusual. I know a great deal about the Elves, about other ruins, and about factions operating outside the safe zones. Killing me won’t benefit you as much as keeping me alive."
Ethan descended lower.
His gaze swept over the cracked green stone on Aldren’s forehead, then to the three puppet cores stored inside the Primordial Armor.
"You had twelve hours to leave."
Aldren clenched his fists.
"I can compensate you. Crystals, equipment, cultivation methods, anything..."
A green flame suddenly flared behind him.
Aldren spun around.
Ruo Yan was still standing on the ground, one hand holding her wounded shoulder. Her other hand was connected to the Necromancer by a single silver-white Soul Thread.
The puppet’s broken staff pointed straight at Aldren.
"Soul Flame."
The green fire shot forward.
Aldren immediately raised a barrier, but the Thunder Flame Sky Net had already burned away most of the energy around his body. The membrane had barely formed before the Soul Flame pierced through it.
The fire latched onto Aldren’s arm.
The pain struck his soul directly and broke his concentration.
The teleportation circle beneath his feet went dark.
Ethan beat his wing immediately.
His body became a streak of lightning, piercing across the distance between them.
All fifteen hundred feathers behind him converged at once. They assembled into a long spear on his left arm.
Aldren only had time to lift his head.
The Thunder-Iron spear drove through the green stone on his forehead.
Crack!
The stone shattered.
Every remaining link between Aldren and the puppets and arrays vanished instantly.
Ethan shoved him downward.
Aldren’s body slammed into the stone floor at the dead center of the Thunder Flame Sky Net.
The lines of lightning around him closed in all at once.
Laira flew to the position directly above.
She looked at Aldren struggling to crawl upright, and her hand slowly clenched.
"Thunder Flame: Heavens’ Ruin."
All three thousand feathers lit up at once.
Lightning and red-purple fire rained down.
Boom!
Light swallowed Aldren.
The stone floor shook violently, cracks spreading across the entire room. The flames didn’t spill beyond the net’s perimeter; every ounce of power was compressed into a single zone.
When the light faded, the spot where Aldren had lain was nothing but a crater of stone glowing red-hot.
No energy remained.
No trace of the green stone either.
The surviving Elves dropped their weapons in unison.
The Beastkin group had no intention of fighting either, not after seeing Brakk lying motionless in his crater.
The retrieval puppets that had lost their controller either stopped or turned on the nearest targets, but Korr and the Stoneweavers quickly destroyed the rest.
The battlefield gradually fell quiet.
Three thousand Thunder-Iron Feathers began leaving their positions in the lightning net.
Half flew toward Ethan, reassembling into the purple-silver wing behind his back.
The other half returned to Laira, layering along her left wing.
The two of them still hovered in the air.
Lingering arcs of electricity connected the two halves of the Thunder Wings, so that from below looking up, it appeared as though a single Mythical pair of wings was spread wide across the sky.
Ethan looked down at the battlefield.
No one dared raise a weapon toward him anymore.
Korr stood in the gap the Thunder Flame had never touched. Two Stoneweaver members had died during the battle, and the rest were wounded, but the entire formation still held its order.
He looked at Ethan, then slowly bowed his head.
Not a surrender.
An acknowledgment of the contest’s outcome.
Ruo Yan stood beside the Necromancer. The arrow was still in her left shoulder, but she didn’t tend to the wound right away. Her gaze rested on Ethan and Laira flying above.
Twelve hours ago, those people had looked at the unconscious Ethan and decided he had no more value.
Twelve hours later, not a single one of them dared take another step toward him.
A mechanical voice echoed through the room.
[Contest for the Thunder Wings has concluded.]
[Final owners confirmed.]
[Owner of part one: Ethan Ashford.]
[Owner of part two: Laira.]
[Mythical resonance state has been recorded.]
Ethan slowly swept his gaze across every survivor below.
"Anyone else want the Thunder Wings?"
Not a single person answered.