Chapter 361: Consumed by Hatred
The Shard of Omniscience shuddered, a conduit torn open between its infinite power and the hollow cavern of my soul. I groaned as mana suffused every fiber of my being, but the searing agony did little to fill the emptiness within me. More, I needed more. Anything to drown out the horrors of this world, to destroy the king who had taken everything I loved.
And so, even as the pain made me stagger and shudder in agony, I drank from the shard’s well. The influx of mana manifested in my aura, buffeting the air around me in a veritable windstorm. It picked at my clothes and tugged my hair out in long, crimson waves. The power grew as my soul reached its breaking point, and the vortex pushed back even Korra, who was frantically calling my name. Her words disappeared in the solemn emptiness within me, lost before I had a chance to truly hear them.
"This is madness," Alverin said, his voice equally distant to me, though I heard it because my attention was focused solely on him
The king’s arm blurred as he drew his sword and released a sixth-level magical technique in one smooth motion. An arc of light leaped from the blade and cut toward me, seeming to sever the air itself.
Someone shouted out in warning, but I paid it no heed. The moment his hand moved, I’d already embraced the entirety of the Oracle of Eternity and slipped behind the curtains of fate. The stars thickened and the threads of fate became manifest, and the arc of light slowed until it practically crawled to a stop just feet from my chest. Luxxa and Korra, the two closest to me, had both lunged forward to intercept it, and now hung motionless in the air. Their faces were frozen in expressions of fear, both knowing they were already too slow to save me.
With the unyielding flow of mana, I wove a sixth-circle array, a shield against the enemy. "Mirror Sphere," I murmured, and a glistening silver shield surrounded me.
As it resolved, the spell moved through the threads of mana connecting my soul to the others in the Nexus. The process was normally instantaneous, but with the world at a standstill, the wave of mana traveling through the Nexus moved like a bead of dew dripping down the strands of a spiderweb. Slowly, similar bubbles manifested around the bodies of my allies, a final gift to prepare them for the coming storm. I could do nothing for those of the Last Light Company that wasn’t tied to the Nexus, not because I lacked the mana to add them in, but because my attention had again fixated wholly on the source of my pain. They would have to fend for themselves."
Alverin. A demon clothed in human flesh.
His frozen visage was locked in a stare of cruelty and lust, sending a shiver down my spine. He will pay for what he has done, for all the hurt, suffering, and betrayal. The frozen impassionate ice in my chest thawed, letting a flicker of rage burn once more.