NOVEL NEXT Chapter 64: Survival... Victory... Breakthrough!
The Tier 5 lunged, its spines fanning outward in a deadly halo.
Every movement it made seemed to twist the world itself—distance stretched and collapsed without warning, angles bent in impossible ways.
The battlefield no longer obeyed normal rules.
Aleron didn't retreat. He launched forward as well, claws and molten armor blazing in the distorted light.
The moment his fist swung, the space between them compressed—what should have been five meters of distance became half a meter in the blink of an eye.
His knuckles slammed into the abomination's plated chest with bone-cracking force.
The armor buckled inward, molten cracks running across its surface.
But before he could follow through, the air around his arm froze again.
Localized stasis—just like the wound earlier.
The abomination moved to take his head while his arm was locked.
No.
Aleron willed his molten armor to erupt outward, the metal expanding in a shockwave from the point of contact. The stasis shattered like brittle glass, his arm jerking free. He ducked under the killing blow, spun, and lashed his tail at its knees.
The Tier 5 jumped—no, not jumped—shifted upward, space folding it a body-length above where it had been.
Its claws sliced downward. The air hissed, black cracks spiderwebbing in the wake of each slash.
Aleron caught one with his forearm, molten metal layering thick to take the blow. Another tore across his ribs, shredding three scales clean away.
Too close.
He spread his wings and leapt back, molten spikes firing from his hands in rapid succession.
The abomination swatted them aside or erased them before they could touch it.
Every attack he launched became a test—how much could the Erasure affect? Could it delete molten metal mid-flight? Could it delete air pressure from his strikes? Could it—
The answer came fast.
One of his molten lances detonated prematurely, erased in the middle of its explosion. The shockwave simply ceased to exist beyond a certain radius.
This is… inconvenient.
Aleron's lips curled into a thin, humorless smile. His claws flexed.
It was time to test something else.
He surged forward again, wings propelling him at supersonic speed. His fist swung—not toward the abomination's body, but toward the ground at its feet. The molten energy exploded upward in a rising wall, forcing the Tier 5 to shift sideways.
The moment it did, Aleron was there—half a meter away, claws slashing for its exposed flank.
The Erasure flared—his claw vanished up to the elbow.
He didn't hesitate. His other hand shot forward, gripping the creature's throat while his molten armor surged to reinforce the stump of his erased arm. He slammed the abomination into the ground with enough force to crater the battlefield.
The shock tore through the warped air, rattling distant mountains.
The Tier 5 twisted, spines stabbing upward in a lethal bloom.
Aleron jumped back, but one spine grazed his wing membrane—half the span vanished instantly, as if bitten out by an invisible mouth.
He landed hard, wings flexing in pain. His breathing had deepened—not from exhaustion, but from the sheer calculation the fight demanded.
Every second was a gamble. A misjudged step, a swing too wide, a wrong prediction—and he'd lose a limb permanently.
The abomination rose again, no longer untouched. A hairline fracture ran along its jaw where his earlier strike had landed. It reached up, slowly, deliberately, and reset the joint with a click. The golden veins in its armor flared hotter, flooding the ground beneath it with shimmering distortions.
The world tilted.
Aleron's eyes narrowed.
The battlefield was shrinking.
The space around them was collapsing inward, pulling the ground, the corpses, even the air toward the abomination's center.
He dug his claws into the molten ground, resisting the drag.
So it can manipulate macro-scale space as well…
The corpses of the fallen Tier 4s began to unravel mid-pull, their remains erased before they even touched the Tier 5. The debris didn't shatter or crush—it simply ceased.
Aleron's mind sharpened into killing focus.
If it pulled him into that point, there would be nothing left.
He launched himself skyward, wings beating hard against the growing suction. The abomination's spines tracked him instantly, firing upward in spiraling arcs. He twisted between them, but one clipped his hip, erasing a coin-sized chunk of flesh. Pain flared white-hot.
Enough.
He drew on Veldora and Ashkar's merged strength, flooding his body with Origin energy until his scales blazed brighter than molten steel. The ground beneath him melted in wide streaks as he dove straight down, punching through the collapsing zone before it could finish closing.
The abomination raised its claws to meet him.
The impact was like thunder cracking inside the earth.
Molten energy erupted in a dome-shaped blast, forcing the space-warping field to momentarily skip. The abomination skidded back, its armor cracking along the torso.
Aleron pressed the advantage, slamming claw after claw, wing after wing, tail after tail into it. Each blow met resistance—sometimes physical, sometimes the strange warping drag of space—but his strikes kept landing, breaking plates, tearing into the golden-veined flesh beneath.
One final hook sent the Tier 5 stumbling, its stance faltering for the first time.
It roared—a deep, resonant sound that didn't belong in any normal throat. The golden veins blazed, every spine locking into a forward-facing position.
The Erasure flared—not as beams or blades this time, but as a sphere.
Aleron's eyes widened. It wasn't attacking him directly—it was erasing everything in a radius.
The air, the molten ground, even the light dimmed inside the growing black sphere.
He had seconds.
He flung molten chains outward—not to trap the abomination, but to anchor himself beyond the sphere's edge. His body shot sideways just as the sphere stabilized, passing within inches of his tail.
Everything inside vanished. Not destroyed. Erased.
Even the smell of blood was gone.
The Tier 5 stepped forward, sphere still active, advancing like a moving event horizon.
Aleron's claws clenched.
If it could maintain that… the battlefield would be gone in minutes.
He needed to end this.
He rushed forward, weaving molten spikes in an erratic pattern, forcing the abomination to expend its precision Erasure on multiple fronts. It handled the first few easily, deleting them with casual efficiency—but that was the point. Each deletion drained the faint golden glow fractionally, and Aleron was watching closely.
Then—there.
A slight hitch in its movement, the smallest delay in spine retraction.
Aleron's molten armor pulsed once, then exploded outward—not in an attack, but in a detonation. The molten shards scattered in a wide arc, not aimed at the abomination but at the ground behind it.
The shards erupted upward into massive jagged walls, hemming it in from the rear.
The abomination turned its Erasure backward to clear them.
Aleron was already there.
He slammed into its chest, claws ripping through the cracked armor and burying into the golden-veined flesh beneath. The abomination's pale eyes widened—not in fear, but in recognition of imminent death.
It tried to fold space between them.
Aleron didn't let go.
He roared, channeling molten energy directly into the creature's core. The golden veins writhed, flashing erratically, the Erasure field flickering like a dying flame.
With one final twist of his claws, he tore its chest open.
The golden light bled away. The space distortions unraveled.
The Tier 5 collapsed, its body hitting the molten ground with a soundless thud—already starting to dissolve into the ichor-black sludge of all abominations.
The battlefield fell silent again.
Aleron stood over the corpse, breathing hard, molten armor dimming slowly. His right arm still ached where the Erasure had taken part of it—painful, but regenerable. The missing chunk of wing would take longer.
His eyes lingered on the corpse.
Tier 5. Origin Ability.
He hadn't thought abominations capable of such things.
His lips pressed into a hard line.
If there was one… there might be more.
And next time, he couldn't rely on surprise.