NOVEL NEXT Chapter 125: God damn it
And for the first time in the match, dark energy bloomed around the black mecha like storm clouds drawn from the abyss. It was thick, potent, suffocating. The kind of energy that ended nations, not just battles.
Damien exhaled lightly, his gaze steady as his own aura responded.
Death energy curled upward like frost smoke. Cold, clean, and absolute. But beneath it, subtle and nearly imperceptible… a ripple of something older. Slower. Temporal threads wound deep into the weave.
"Sure, old man," Damien said with a lopsided grin. "If that's your final wish, I'll grant it."
The energy between them surged.
And all across the arena, even the air felt like it stopped breathing.
And in that moment, they moved.
At the same time.
Damien's hands tightened on the controls. The cold hum in his chest deepened.
The shadows around his mech thickened. The air thinned.
His death energy surged outward, not as a blast, but as a suffocating wave of inevitability. It didn't roar. It whispered.
And the Dark Asura answered.
Its dark energy surged like a rupture in the world. The ground cracked under its feet. Black lightning shot up its armor. Its reactor roared as it unleashed the full density of its stored destruction.
Dark energy and death energy clashed in a collision that transcended sound.
They didn't explode.
They erased each other.
At the center of the impact, silence bloomed like a flower of void.
Damien's thoughts sharpened. He saw it clearly now. The Dark Asura's power was immense, but uncontrolled. It was raw, chaotic, tearing at everything it touched. It was like using a tidal wave to swat a fly.
His power was smaller.
Tighter.
But every strand of death energy moved with purpose. Every wisp curled with focus. It was the difference between a storm and a scalpel.
The collision was perfectly matched.
Quantity against quality.
Density versus purity.
And for the first time in the entire match.
It was a draw.
Then something unexpected happened.
From the far edge of the arena, Colonel Xue Lingtian, forgotten by the crowd, by the commentators, even by herself, pressed her trigger.
Her reactor had been charging slowly, feeding off a backup circuit she had never intended to use.
The beam rifle, primed with mana and outrage, unleashed a focused burst of energy that ripped across the battlefield like a cannon fired from heaven.
A humongous, blinding blast.
It hit both mechas squarely, neither at full defense, both already depleted.
The impact wasn't graceful.
It wasn't clever.
It was just massive.
The shockwave leveled half the arena. Both mechas were engulfed in the blast, consumed in a bloom of light and smoke.
And then…
Silence.
Not from awe.
From pure, unadulterated confusion.
In the audience, mouths hung open.
The crowd stared.
One guy dropped his duck bun.
Commentators Grumpy Bear and Sleepy Smile were frozen mid-sentence.
Sleepy Smile blinked slowly. "Was that… did she just…?"
Grumpy Bear stood up in his seat. "She nuked the both of them! She nuked the final fight!"
In the military VIP box, the generals were wide-eyed.
General Hong Fei leaned forward. "Did… did she just…?"
General Riki whispered, "She… won the final fight?"
In the simulation pods, the final scores hadn't even loaded.
Colonel Xue Lingtian stared at her blinking control panel.
"…Huh?" she muttered.
Even she didn't know why she had fired.
The audience sat in stunned silence.
The most legendary fight in BGA history had just ended with a completely accidental kill steal.
And nobody knew what the hell to do next.
The silence lingered for a full ten seconds before the entire Battle Gods Arena exploded in noise.
Gasps. Cries. Laughter.
One guy in the front row shouted, "SHE LIT THEM UP LIKE A NEW YEAR'S FIREWORK!"
Another clutched his head and groaned, "My whole $10,355 bet.. Gone! That was my son's college fees!"
A third just stood there, open-mouthed, holding his broken glow stick like it had betrayed him.
Grumpy Bear finally found his voice. "I… I can't believe it! The Dark Asura actually lost… to a nuke fired by a support mecha! This… Is this counted as a win? I mean, anybody can win with a nuke... "
Sleepy Smile's eyes were still wide. "I… I think this is the first time in BGA history that the winner doesn't even know how they won. Look at her face. She's as surprised as we are."
Grumpy Bear banged the desk and howled. "She was supposed to support! That was the instruction! Vary your tempo, stay out of the way! And instead she deleted the goddamn battlefield!"
Up in the military VIP box, the old generals were frozen.
General Hong Fei leaned forward with glassy eyes. "Where is the battlefield? Is this Sim Pod broken? Or have my eyes finally stopped working?"
"She killed Damien… She killed Damien…" General Riki whispered, sounding betrayed. "The boy. The boy she was supposed to support… God damn Northern Army Corps!! I'll go and give that little Zhen a beating later on!"
General Liang had his head in his hands. "We had front row seats to the most beautiful duel of our lifetime and she accidentally kill-stole it with a long-range mana nuke."
Damien's sim pod finally hissed open.
He stepped out slowly, blinking.
He rubbed his face once. Then twice. Then looked around at the chaos in the arena with a long, long sigh.
"Well," he muttered, "there goes my one million bucks."
Fatty ran up, wheezing from excitement. "Boss! Are you okay?! That was amazing! That fight with that black mecha was incredible! But what the hell happened at the end? Did you lose?"
Damien tilted his head. "I didn't win. That's for sure."
It was the third day, and his break from Pearl was coming to an end.
He thought back to the auction house. The time-energy orb. The short sword he'd snagged. And the huge load of loot Fatty had gathered from the poor Qian Yuze who had unwittingly bought him Sheila Shadowbane's prized daggers.
He cracked his neck and exhaled.
"Still worth it," he said.
And then, as if fate hated his moment of peace, his brain reminded him of something very important.
The loan.
From Sheila Shadowbane.
One million dollars.
"...Goddammit." he groaned.