Chapter 178: Imperial Sovereign Severance
The sparks raining down from their initial collision had not even hit the cobblestones before Vince shifted his weight, driving the heavy edge of Executioner’s Edge sideways into Owen’s guard, the motion so fluid it seemed to bend the very air around the blade.
The Duke reacted with terrifying speed, spinning his left cobalt blade along Vince’s crossguard to redirect the kinetic weight while slipping his right blade toward Vince’s ribs, his movements honed by decades of war into something closer to instinct than thought.
KANG! KANG! KANG!
Steel shrieked against steel in a rhythmic, deafening cadence, the sound bouncing off the ruined stone walls until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. They blurred across the ruined plaza, leaving deep, melted furrows in the stone wherever their boots touched down, the ground itself groaning under the pressure of their exchanged blows.
"Tell me something," Vince said, his voice entirely steady despite the blinding speed of their exchanges, as though the duel were nothing more than a mildly interesting conversation. He leaned into a heavy shoulder clash, pushing Owen back three full paces, the Duke’s boots grinding trenches into the cobblestones as he was forced backward. "I met a dragonkin chief who mentioned my family line carries an ancient royal lineage—something tied to the early realm fractures?"
Owen parried a murderous downward sweep with both blades crossed above his head, his teeth bared in a tight, focused scowl, sweat already beading along his brow despite the cool morning air. "Ancient royal lineage?, you?... don’t make me laugh," Owen spat, his cobalt aura flaring to blow back the kinetic pressure around Vince’s sword, the flash of blue light briefly illuminating the hard lines of his face. "What would a dragon kin know about human history. You’re a fool if you even consider the words of an Inferior race."
Vince’s mouth curved into a cold, razor-sharp smile, something dangerous flickering behind his dark eyes—not anger, but a colder, more patient kind of contempt. "I see ...Guess I’ll just have to beat the truth out of you, then."
The atmosphere around the plaza shifted instantly, the temperature seeming to drop as though the world itself sensed the change in Vince’s intent. Vince’s eyes burned with a dark, violet-tinged aura as he unleashed Vector Drive at short range, the air around him warping and folding like heat haze over stone. The ground beneath Owen’s feet buckled as inverted gravitational fields tried to pin him in place, cracks spiderwebbing outward from where his boots met the earth.
Owen, however, proved why he commanded imperial legions. Igniting his mana core, a surge of blue light blooming beneath his skin like a second heartbeat, he executed the Imperial Double-Arc Strike—a legendary dual-sword technique that sliced through space itself. Two crescent waves of dense blue energy sheared through Vince’s vector trap, the air screaming as it split apart, cutting clean through a stone pillar fifty yards behind them, the ancient stonework toppling in a slow, thunderous collapse.
For every explosive kinetic burst Vince threw, Owen countered with flawless, lethal dual-wielding geometry, each parry executed with the precision of a man who had spent a lifetime perfecting the razor’s edge between life and death. To anyone watching, it was a terrifying, dead-even stalemate—two high-tier monsters trading game-ending blows where a single millimeter of error meant instant death, the plaza around them slowly reduced to rubble by the sheer violence of their exchange.
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On the sidelines, Lyrielle gripped her staff tightly, her knuckles white around the wood, her breath catching in her throat as the shockwaves rattled her teeth and sent tremors through the stone beneath her feet. "He’s matching Vince’s speed stroke for stroke..." Her voice was barely audible over the ringing clash of steel, tinged with a worry she couldn’t quite hide.
Beside her, Livia’s six silver-tipped tails swayed lazily through the dust-choked air, utterly unbothered by the violence unfolding before them. A soft, knowing chuckle escaped the Snow-Foxkin’s lips, her amber eyes glinting with quiet amusement.
"Look closer, little elf," Livia purred, her sharp amber eyes narrowing at the clash, missing nothing. "The Duke thinks he’s forcing a draw. But look at the way your young man is receiving those blades."
High above the clouds, hidden within her storm camouflage, Duchess Rosalind was tracking the exact same detail, her expression unreadable behind the swirling mist of her concealment. Her glowing blue eyes mirrored Livia’s realization, narrowing with the sharp focus of someone piecing together a puzzle only she and one other could see.
He isn’t parrying, Rosalind realized, her brow arching in silent fascination, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth despite herself. He’s absorbing it.
Vince wasn’t using raw strength to stop Owen’s swords. Every time Owen’s cobalt blades bit into Executioner’s Edge, Vince shifted the kinetic vector by a fraction of a degree—so small it was nearly imperceptible even to trained eyes—bleeding off forty percent of Owen’s strike energy into the ground while storing the rest in his own core. Owen was throwing maximum-effort, bloodline-tier slashes, sweat and fury etched into every motion, while Vince was casually accumulating potential energy with every block, his expression never once betraying the storm quietly building within him.
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Down in the plaza, Owen stepped back, his chest heaving slightly as sweat glistened on his forehead, trickling down past his temple to drip onto the shattered stone below. He looked at Vince, whose posture remained completely relaxed, his breathing unhurried, as if the last several minutes of lethal combat had cost him nothing at all—a detail that, had Owen paused to truly consider it, might have chilled him far more than it did.
Owen misread the spatial redirection as Vince playing defensive tricks to buy time. A contemptuous grin spread across the Duke’s face, confidence and exhaustion warring in equal measure behind his eyes.
"You’ve got spirit, boy, and your spatial tricks are cute," Owen sneered, raising both cobalt blades high above his head as his aura spiked to a blinding, blinding-white crescendo that cast long, flickering shadows across the ruined plaza. "But you lack the bloodline depth to hold this pace! You’re running out of steam, and I have a war to return to!"
The air pressure in the plaza plunged, pressing down on the onlookers like an invisible hand. Thunder rumbled within the cloudless sky, a sound with no natural source, as Owen ignited his house’s absolute apex technique—Imperial Sovereign Severance.
Dense, crystallized blue aura enveloped both of his swords, extending twenty feet into the air like two pillars of celestial plasma, humming with a power that made the very stones underfoot tremble. The stone floor beneath him dissolved into fine dust under the sheer weight of the mana, swirling upward in slow, glittering eddies.
"Die knowing you couldn’t bridge the gap!... you magic less piece of trash" Owen roared, his voice raw with the full force of his fury and his pride, echoing off the shattered walls of the plaza.
He leaped into the air, his cloak—had he still worn one—would have snapped like a banner in the wind, bringing both massive pillars of imperial light down in a earth-shattering cross-slash aimed directly at Vince’s skull, the sheer scale of the attack threatening to cleave the plaza itself in two.