NOVEL NEXT Chapter 254: Absence
No shield in his current arsenal would deflect it, no clever tactic would bend it aside. It did not care for shadow or silence or speed. If that light touched him directly, there would be no staggering, no glorious stand, no dramatic wound to rise from later.
If it touched him… he would cease.
His body would disintegrate.
His core would be unraveled.
His soul would be burned from the weave of fate itself.
He would die.
The radiant dome around Wu Jinhai grew, twisting and expanding like a sun preparing to be born. The terrain beneath him turned translucent, then cracked. The corpses Damien had just slain, whether enemy or resurrected puppet, vaporized without a sound.
The battlefield, moments ago dominated by Damien's overwhelming slaughter, now quaked under the pressure of this new energy. The golden platform's edges flaked and splintered, unable to contain what had been unleashed.
Damien stood still.
Because now the real fight had begun.
The battlefield was no longer a battlefield. It had become a crucible.
The divine light pouring from Wu Jinhai's body bathed the entire sky in an oppressive radiance, turning the golden platform into a glowing altar of destruction. Reality twisted at the edges of that light, lines of fate trembled, time bent subtly with every pulse, and the scent of ozone and scorched energy flooded the air.
Damien's breath burned in his lungs. His spear of eternal storm hummed furiously in his hand, eager, alive, defiant. The golden path of slaughter had vanished, drowned beneath a blinding sea of divine brilliance. There was no guiding thread now. Only instinct.
Only war.
He did not hesitate.
Damien surged forward, lightning surging through his limbs, time folding to his movement. His spear blurred, snapping toward Wu Jinhai's heart with a flicker of space-bound acceleration, and behind it trailed a storm of elemental death, death that warped light, tore sound, slowed motion.
The spear struck.
A ringing note split the air, crystalline and endless. Light clashed with annihilation. Sparks of time and space hissed and cracked where the energies met. The spear scraped across Wu Jinhai's divine barrier and was deflected, the recoil sending tremors up Damien's arms that shattered bone and pulped muscle instantly.
He forced his body to knit itself mid-motion, the silver-grade flesh quivering under the strain as he pressed forward.
"Soul Flicker," Damien growled.
From the corpses of the Celestial Blaze elites he had personally slain just moments ago, fragments of intent surged into being. A dozen echoes of death, the final moves of proud warriors facing defeat, sprang forward.
Flame, blade, willpower. Not life. Not undeath. Only the final conviction of the dying, woven together through the razor edge of Damien's command.
They struck in unison.
Blades cut low, flames slammed from behind, burning fists launched from above.
Wu Jinhai's divine light flared once.
The Soul Flickers were vaporized.
Completely.
No impact. No explosion. Just disappearance, as if they had never existed at all.
Damien spun to the side, narrowly dodging a lance of radiant energy that seared past him, cutting a clean line across the battlefield. The heat of it blistered the side of his face. He gritted his teeth and twisted his spear again, shaping the energy into a chain, firing it forward in a spiral of deathlight and compressed space.
Wu Jinhai laughed.
The chain slammed into his chest and shattered.
"Is this all?" he called out, voice thunderous. "This is your power? This is the man who slaughtered my sect? I feel insulted."
Damien ignored him, slamming his foot into the ground, shattering the platform beneath him, launching upward with a flurry of strikes that tore across the air in arcs of fused element.
Deathlight carved across the battlefield, devouring oxygen and silence alike, while time-twisted spears blinked in and out of the timeline to attack from impossible angles.
He landed a blow, just one.
It grazed Wu Jinhai's cheek.
And that was when it changed.
Wu Jinhai's eyes narrowed, his expression twisting into cold fury. "You dare scar me?"
He raised both hands and gathered divine light into a core above his palm. It expanded, coalesced, and then exploded forward in a wave of absolute annihilation. Damien threw up a barrier of compressed space and infused it with the deathlight mantle.
The light broke through.
The impact hurled Damien backward across the battlefield, his body tumbling end over end like a meteor losing a fight with gravity. His spine cracked. His ribs fractured. His left arm bent at an angle no joint should allow. His internal organs spasmed, writhing under the pressure of divine light eating at the edges of his defenses.
He hit the far edge of the floating platform, carving a crater into its surface.
He gasped for breath. Blood spilled from his lips. His body trembled as it tried to rebuild itself, slower this time. The light had reached too deep. His silver-grade flesh was burning from the inside.
He tried to rise.
Wu Jinhai appeared in front of him, hovering in the air, radiant and cold. "Stay down, bastard. I am going to flay your flesh from your bones."
Damien raised one shaking hand and snapped his fingers.
"Tch." Wu Jinhai scoffed. "Do you still have tricks left, worm?"
The temporal tether activated.
From the pocket between moments, Damien summoned a mass of shimmering golden figures, the very warriors he had slain before, pulled from the moment just before their deaths. Not undead. Not puppets.
Themselves.
Temporarily resurrected in their peak state.
They roared.
And charged.
Wu Jinhai's aura exploded again.
The divine light rippled outward in a concentric pulse of incinerating brilliance, expanding not just through space, but through energy itself. It was not heat. It was not force. It was a declaration.
A command written in the language of creation that simply stated: you do not belong.
The moment it passed through the resurrected Celestial Blaze elites, Damien's trump card, they vanished.
Not slain. Not overwhelmed.
Erased.
Their death echoes didn't even linger. The carefully summoned temporal fragments disintegrated without resistance, their spiritual imprints shredded into meaningless particles of light. No ashes remained. No weapons clattered to the floor. Just silence. Just absence.