Chapter 72 72: Decisive Kill
"Lucia—"
Up on the high viewing pavilion, Malenia let out a sharp cry of raw surprise, her small hands catching her throat as she immediately began to cough with violent, bone-racking intensity.
Miquella rushed to anchor her shifting torso, his palms gently patting the silks of her back as his cognitive processors desperately strained to extract his nearly depleted internal Treasury. He channeled a low-frequency Golden Prayer to forcefully damp the increasingly volatile, radioactive surge of the Scarlet Rot coiling within her marrow.
The little girl's originally clear, deep pupils were now crisscrossed with a dense grid of fine, scarlet blood vessels. She coughed until her pale features were entirely bankrupt of oxygen before her breathing finally stabilized against her brother's chest.
"The parameters of that child's condition are dangerously degraded," a cool voice suddenly cut through their circle from the flank—a fraction of genuine, hidden concern woven beneath its default frost. "Your un-fused grace no longer possesses the structural voltage required to suppress the decay within her flesh."
Miquella turned his gold head to monitor the speaker. It was Princess Ranni, whose posture until this watch had been as cold and un-approachable as carved mountain ice. He paused, his lips moving to formulate a response, but his internal lexicon was entirely bankrupt of defensive syntax.
"Why does your line not execute an immediate retreat to your estate?" Ranni murmured, her brow furrowing slightly behind her fur collar. "Lucia has already stepped into the breach to absorb this entire crossfire for your house. Whether your vanguards maintain a vigil on this platform or retreat behind your walls, the final arithmetic of the ledger will not alter its course."
She shifted her visor to track the blood-soaked youth floating within the churn of the distant basin. "Moreover... his defense is on the precipice of absolute liquidation. He is about to lose."
"He will not lose!"
Malenia's head snapped upward at the insult, her blood-flecked pupils locking into Ranni's gaze without yielding a single millimeter of territorial space. Her small, trembling hand gripped the edge of the mahogany table with white-knuckled velocity as she turned a desperate, pleading face toward her twin. "Malenia refuses the pillows, brother. Lucia will undeniably claim the victory!"
Miquella looked down into his sister's desperate features, a soft, helpless sigh escaping his lips. He reached out to smooth her copper hair, his voice dropping into a gentle, un-yielding murmur. "Our boots will not clear the platform, little one. We shall remain anchored to this stone and witness Lucia close the ledger of this match."
In the darkest basements of his analytical engine, the young prince understood that his personal miracles were currently useless against her internal regression; even returning to the pristine clean of the Haligtree gardens would yield zero structural relief. Perhaps it was only after the Eternal Queen returned from her pilgrimage—guiding Malenia's frame into the absolute core of the Erdtree's inner chamber, where their twin divine lineages could jointly tie her metabolism to the un-filtered frequency of the Elden Ring—that her systemic collapse could be temporarily granted a defensive ceiling.
Princess Ranni let out a quiet, fragile sigh, monitoring the stubborn, burning heat lighting the little girl's eyes. She turned her torso away from their bench, leaving a solitary remark trailing behind her blue cloak. "If her internal metrics descend into a secondary crisis later... my office can attempt an intervention. The Snow Sorcery hand-delivered to my memory by the Old Witch might possess the freezing characteristics required to damp the fire."
Miquella voiced his gratitude to her retreating shoulder, but Ranni offered zero verbal feedback. She marched straight to the absolute edge of the granite platform, leaning her silver-plated forearms against the iron railing to pin her focus to the aquatic arena below.
Down within the spray, she watched the lacerated, blood-drenched dragon youth struggle back to his feet, his gauntlets casually patting the lake dust from his chest plates before re-locking his fingers to the hilts of his rapier and scale blade.
"The ledger shared zero data with your house," she whispered to the wind, her eyes momentarily distracted as she monitored the solitary, un-yielding figure standing upon the water. "Why has your steel committed its mass to such a degree of structural ruin?"
"The display is sufficient, Lucia," Radahn spoke across the waves, his voice booming across the basin as his face conformed to a deep, un-varnished martial respect. "To have forced my blades to execute these metrics... your performance is already exceptionally remarkable. It is simply a chronological deficit; your system has logged too brief a cultivation cycle. If your engine possessed three more winters of non-stop drilling, my cleavers might lack the margin to claim this match."
"Banish the executive summary," Lucia chuckled, a low, bloody wheeze bubbling through his throat as his teeth bared against his visor. "Your blades haven't locked the victory slot yet!"
Radahn calculated the phrase was nothing more than the stubborn, emotional resistance of a generational genius refusing to admit his parameters had been cleared. He shook his massive red head, his muscles tightening as he prepared to deliver a systematic, final offensive to close the book—but the next microsecond, his tactical processors violently locked.
The deep lacerations piercing Lucia's left shoulder and right rib cage were actively mutating. Under the un-blinking watch of his visor, the demigod flesh was re-knitting its fibers with visible, accelerating velocity, returning to a pristine, un-marked state within the span of a handful of breaths.
Concurrently, a surging, thunderous roar of primordial vital energy faintly emanated from deep within the dragon youth's chest—as if a thousand massive, alchemical bells were violently resonating behind his ribs, casting a terrifying, monumental aura straight into the clouds!
He vented a long, steaming cloud of hot air into the frost. Shimmering, silver-white scales—bright as packed frost and un-flecked snow—exploded from beneath his skin, systematically incinerating his ruined court silks as the draconic morphology cascaded across his entire frame. Majestic, pearl-tinted dragon horns and a heavy bone-armor mask wove across his facial symmetry, forming a fierce, breathtakingly beautiful mask of war. Behind his shoulders, four elegantly curved, silver-white draconic wings violently unfurled, streams of pure Golden Order Blessing flowing like liquid starlight between the feathers.
Lucia had forced his biological metrics to the absolute boundary of Semi-Dragonization.
At this watch, every millimeter of his physical mass was cast from the un-yielding density of cosmic metal and ancient stone. Every bulging muscle group exuded a primitive, wild, pre-crusade frequency—the absolute, sovereign power belonging strictly to the Ancient Dragon Sovereigns, to the first true Kings of the material continent!
BOOM—
Radahn violently charged forward, his cleavers cutting the lake in two, and Lucia matched the velocity, launching his semi-dragonized mass into a counter-charge with the Godskin Stitcher and the Dragon-Scale Blade locked in an aggressive cross-stance. He felt a sudden, primitive restriction choking his throat; his jaws parted to vent his fury, but what escaped his teeth wasn't a mortal scream—it was a terrifying True Dragon Roar that shook the wilderness for miles!
An absolute, tectonic explosion rattled the bedrock of the entire basin. The exact millisecond the four distinct lines of steel collided, a cataclysmic kinetic shockwave detonated outward from their blades, the atmospheric displacement transmuting the lake surface into a vertical, towering water curtain sixty feet high, while millions of ancient trees lining the banks were violently snapped at the roots by the air pressure!
The two demigod titans wielded their armaments with the absolute maximum threshold of their physical statistics. The continuous, ear-shattering clash of their metal assaulted the clearing like a localized hurricane, forcing the outrider knights watching from the ridges to frantically cover their ears against the vibration.
The sheer momentum generated by their unrestricted systems had long since over-scoped the definitions of a restricted demigod duel; it carried the physical weight of a thousand heavy cavalry squadrons colliding at full sprint across an open plain. Crescent sword energy condensed from active internal magic and brilliant vacuum lines saturated with red Dragon Lightning intertwined across the spray, looking like an apocalyptic thunderstorm detonating within the basements of the sky!
Lucia thrust the Godskin Stitcher forward with the entire mass of his weight, the needle-sharp celadon tip tearing through the gale with a high-pitched, screaming neurological shriek. Every water droplet suspended in the air was instantly drawn into the vacuum slipstream of the rapier, rapidly condensing into millions of microscopic Aqueous Needles that shot through the fog like iron grapeshot.
Radahn braced his stance upon the liquid, hoisting his right cleaver horizontally to absorb the ballistic stream across the broad, heavy flat of the steel. Concurrently, the edge of the greatsword clutched within his left gauntlet flared with an intense, brilliant azure starlight radiance. A monumental, ten-foot extension of pure crystallized magic power violently grew from the tip of the blade as he brought the mass down in a sweeping, reverse arc targeting Lucia's flank.
Carian Greatsword!
This magical sword form comprised the absolute masterpiece of the Carian Spellblade aristocracy—a perfect, mathematical integration of astral sorcery and heavy, master-level martial arts. The phantom blade, assembled from un-fused cosmic mana, possessed a structural sharpness that completely outclassed any forge-born alloy on the continent. The ancient legends whispered that the sword masters who deeply processed this specific art could utilize the edge of the Carian Greatsword to physically slice rapidly approaching tracking glintblades into harmless dust mid-flight.
Having logged the tactical lesson from the Carian Retaliation loop, Lucia's engine recognized that Radahn had systematically integrated a massive library of Carian sorceries directly into his physical sword combinations. Consequently, his processors maintained a high-alert watch against this secondary blade. He immediately poured a massive torrent of his ancestral Faith into the Dragon-Scale Blade, unleashing a localized, crackling wall of dark red lightning that violently annihilated the azure starlight the microsecond their metrics collided.
Similar cataclysmic exchanges detonated countless times within the span of a few minutes. Lucia, conformed to his apex semi-dragonized morphology, once again systematically crushed Radahn in raw kinetic power and muscle density, yet his Dexterity remained slightly inferior when tracking the master-level variations of the Carian blade arts. Both demigods exchanged over a thousand full-voltage strikes across the lake surface; though both operators intentionally mis-aligned their terminal tracks to avoid liquidating each other's vital organs, their armor plates were shattered, each sustaining more than a dozen severe lacerations across their frames.
At this exact juncture, the absolute efficiency of the Cradle Blessing re-wrote the rules of the match.
Within the fires of the non-stop melee, Radahn was forced to waste a significant percentage of his active magic power to continuously project temporary light barriers over his leaking veins to freeze his blood loss. Lucia, conversely, completely deleted his injuries from his tactical calculus. He fought with reckless, bloodthirsty disregard for his own skin; a fresh, bone-deep sword laceration would barely register across his armor before the alchemical mending of his blessing had already closed the tissue, restoring his muscles to full compliance within seconds.
Across the clashing iron, Radahn's dark eyes filled with absolute, un-mitigated shock. His archives had always stated that the biological parameters of the Ancient Dragon line far outclassed the other mortal races of the continent, even overriding the skeletal density of the primal Fire Giants—but could the terrifying reality unfolding before his cleavers be explained by basic genetic talent?
This isn't a martial art, his mind roared in fury, this is an absolute, illegal cheat code!
His jaw locked, his teeth grinding together as his engine recognized the terminal arithmetic: if this meat-grinder configuration sustained its current velocity, his own system—carrying vastly more permanent structural trauma and draining its mana to plug the leaks—would gradually run entirely out of gas.
He violently increased his sword speed, his cleavers transforming into a blinding silver blur to seize a microscopic transition opening. With a sudden, explosive output of his remaining physical mass, he unleashed a massive, twin-blade kinetic strike that forcefully blasted Lucia back across the water by more than ten paces!
The immense violence of that separation finally created a momentary operational window. Radahn swiftly slammed his left cleaver back into its leather housing, locking his remaining gauntlets in a two-handed grip around the hilt of his primary sword, hoisting the heavy steel high above his skull.
Monitoring Lucia, who had already flared his silver wings to instantly close the ten-pace gap with terrifying velocity, Radahn systematically unleashed every remaining reserve of internal magic power anchoring his soul, pouring the entire treasury into the cleaver.
CLANG—
A resonant, crystalline sword-note vibrated across the lake as an immense extension of pale blue light grew from the tip of the steel. Within a microsecond, a secondary, deeper resonance rang out from his gauntlets, and the phantom starlight blade multiplied its dimensions, expanding its mass exponentially!
Lucia's silver eyelashes narrowed to razor-thin slits. His meta-knowledge recognized Radahn's signature stance instantly. His hand mirrored the motion, slamming the dragon-scale blade into its housing. His entire internal divine treasury surged, transmuting his marrow into rolling, cataclysmic thunderous energy that rapidly circulated through his body along an ancient, arcane trajectory. Wisps of black-and-red electricity violently flickered between his dragonized claws, the raw energetic density of the power appearing to physically tear microscopic, bleeding cracks into the ambient space itself.
Ten paces was a dead metric—the interval vanished in a fraction of a heartbeat.
Right then, the third and final sword resonance detonated from Radahn's grip. The phantom starlight blade had mutated into a colossal, monolithic azure monument ten meters long. As his massive shoulders swung the hilt, the giant sword slashed down from the heavens with an earth-shattering, apocalyptic momentum!
Lucia let out a long, primitive roar, swinging his dragonized claws upward from his hip in a violent, rising arc. The black-and-red lightning, saturated with millions of destructive, ruinous auras, collided head-on with the descending starlight monument!
At this exact watch along the shores of the capital basin, the premier, apex combat arts belonging to the two greatest heritages of the modern age—the Carian Royal House's Great Carian and Farum Azula's ancient Claw of Ruin—crossed their parameters for the first time in the history of the world.
CRASH—!!!!!
The precise microsecond the roaring torrent of astral magic and ancient divine power collided, an incredibly terrifying, apocalyptic explosion immediately detonated across the clearing. The already turbulent, churning surface of the lake suddenly caved inward by twenty feet, forming a smooth, pressurized aquatic crater, before the liquid rapidly bulged upward into the sky like a massive dome, only to violently explode outward in a cataclysmic shockwave!
The freezing lake water was instantly vaporized by the scattered, high-voltage energy, transmuting into a scorching, high-temperature air current that expanded for hundreds of meters before condensing into a dense, completely opaque blanket of white mist, rendering it entirely impossible for any spectator on the platform to discern which demigod's line had broken in the dark.
Who stands when the mist clears? Does Lucia claim the moral debt from Radagon?
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