Chaos Heir

Chapter 1393: Sharper

George only needed one glance to understand the chain of command there.

The video of Khan and Liiza’s battle against the two alien scouts the Niqols had shared gave George plenty of clues he could search for to understand who the leader was.

However, thoughts and clues were superfluous. Even an idiot with no heightened senses or reliable perception would understand who was in charge of the attack.

The sitting alien stood at the relative center of the cloud’s main body, seemingly highlighting his superior status. He also had an additional horn compared to the other two humanoid companions, and his scarlet eyes betrayed deep awareness, intelligence, and pride.

Of course, George could also rely on his senses there, but they ended up worsening his first meeting with the Scarlet Eyes’ forces instead of providing beneficial, additional clues.

The three male humanoid figures clearly were evolved warriors, but their aura featured stark differences.

The two one-horned aliens with entirely black eyes were undeniably powerful. They seemed to share a connection with the surrounding smoke and the creatures leading its expansion, wielding a denser version of that energy.

Instead, the red-eyed alien was on a different level altogether. George felt small and weak just by looking at him, and his inspection stopped there since his senses failed to pierce that impossibly heavy and breathtaking presence.

The alien’s profound scarlet gaze also enhanced those effects. Now that George had attracted his attention, he could feel his existence shrinking by the second, dispersed by an ethereal, invisible influence all his sharpness couldn’t hope to oppose.

Still, despite George’s perception failing to pierce through that superior existence, he could study its effects and learn what it meant for the cloud as a whole, especially since the other two evolved warriors showed a similar pattern.

The red-eyed superior existence felt connected to the two one-horned aliens, just like the latter were with the cloud. That battle formation had the sitting leader at its center for reasons that went beyond superficial authority. It seemed the cloud as a whole needed that key figure to exist and expand.

It was like an array or a hive with progressively denser energy toward its center, or node. The leader wielded a truer version of the True Chaos, while the bloated-backed creatures only carried its thinner and weaker leftovers.

George also guessed that the bloated-backed creatures couldn’t produce that energy. Their hideous physical feature carried and spread it, but George couldn’t spot or sense anything similar to a mana core in the severed corpses along the way.

The video of Khan and Liiza’s battle helped that guess. Their two opponents had wielded that troublesome energy but had gained access to something stronger only after they tore away their horns.

The smoke the two scouts gained hadn’t been limitless, either. They had specific reserves of that energy, which Khan had forced them to deplete after achieving his enlightenment.

Piece by piece, George’s understanding of that universal threat deepened. Despite mostly being guesses, what George had learnt was already worth reporting back for, but his goal there didn’t involve those practices.

’Kill the boss,’ George thought, closing his eyes to steady his mind. ’Stop the attack.’

George’s existence had kept shrinking under the alien leader’s gaze. The silver aura around his figure had grown dimmer, allowing the surrounding, flickering smoke to advance, slowly overtaking him.

George knew he couldn’t overpower that suffocating presence. He lacked the status or strength to do so. Yet, a sword didn’t lift things or push them away. A blade only existed to cut.

Pressure could break or make people, crushing or forging them into something stronger. Blades were no different. External factors could dull their edges or help sharpen them if the correct procedure was applied.

George couldn’t overpower the suffocating presence and couldn’t stop its annihilating influence. However, he could force his existence to shrink and condense, thinning it with the help of that external pressure, using that adverse force to shed away his impurities, smoothening his dull spots to create a sharper version of himself.

The silver membrane dimmed even more as George relaxed his arms, making it and the sword he wielded rest over his side. His presence waned, stopping opposing the surrounding smoke, which advanced until it submerged him.

George disappeared, only leaving his dwindling presence as proof of his existence. Yet, that energy was about to vanish, too, devoured by the surrounding flickering energy.

Nevertheless, when George’s existence looked ready to vanish for good, a whistling noise filled the area. The smoke that had filled the vast street also split open in eight different spots, which advanced through that black sea to reach the nearby buildings.

Some black waterfalls had fallen from Aynor’s tall buildings, but they also split open, and the same went for the metal surfaces under them. The eight trails of that invisible but sharp force advanced unhindered through energy or matter, severing anything on their path.

The black, gaseous waters that had submerged George dispersed alongside those new cavities, vanishing in the air and revealing their surroundings.

The street became visible again, as well as George. His eyes were still closed. He had yet to raise his sword, but his figure shone with piercing silver light, being brighter than anything he had wielded previously.

George slowly opened his eyes as chunks of the nearby buildings freed themselves of the black waterfalls, only to detach themselves from their main structures to crash onto the streets below. His invisible attack had severed them from side to side, but that brief rain of large debris couldn’t steal his attention from the sitting alien high on the defensive wall.

George even lifted his chin in pride, silently showing the sitting alien his new immunity to his suffocating presence and challenging him to step forward.

Yet, the sitting alien didn’t share George’s interest. He lifted his scarlet eyes, pointing them at the city as a whole, ignoring George, indifferent to his newfound strength.

George did his best not to take that lack of interest as an insult, planning to recapture it with his sword. Still, it turned out that the enemy deemed his performance a stronger reaction. It simply didn’t come from George’s target.

The taller and burlier of the two aliens hovering at their leader’s sides turned toward George and began to descend toward the city. His long black cape didn’t stop fluttering even after he landed on the street, and his seemingly empty eyes focused on George’s sword before he stretched his right arm.

Black smoke came out of the alien’s palm, solidifying and taking a specific shape that put a derisive smirk on George’s face.

"And here I was worried about how to beat you guys," George exclaimed as the smoke in the alien’s palm turned into a darker-than-black longsword. "I appreciate you making it easy for me to show off."