Novel Full Chapter 938: Final Round
Chapter 938: Final Round
The lightning descended in a single column and went straight down her throat.
Without any of the explosive scattering that had characterized Michael’s own tribulation, where strikes had detonated against him and sent energy tearing outward across the field in every direction from him tanking the lightning with his body, Lily simply swallowed it.
The effect on the surrounding area was minimal to the point of being almost unremarkable.
The ground beneath Lily’s feet cracked slightly from the weight of what had passed through her, and a faint smell of ozone spread across the clearing.
That was all.
Michael’s eyelids twitched.
It seemed like the last time Lily devoured his lightning she had grown a bit stronger. He had cleared two kilometres of forest for this, and the first round had not even scorched the earth.
Seemingly angered by the undead’s audacity, the second round began to form above.
However, whether it was the second round or the fifth, Lily handled all of it. Each strike descended with more intensity than the last, the tribulation pressing harder with each successive round. Lily swallowed every single one.
What made it more remarkable was what was happening on the inside. Michael could feel it through their connection. The lightning she devoured was not simply being absorbed and neutralized. She was using it. Each round that passed through her was being broken down and fed back into her body, the raw elemental energy of a tribulation being converted into something that strengthened and repaired her simultaneously.
By the fifth round, Michael could already feel that she was meaningfully stronger than she had been when she first appeared. The clearing around her remained largely intact. A few additional cracks in the ground. The faint persistent smell of ozone. Nothing that could reasonably be called destruction.
The sixth round changed that.
What descended was not comparable to anything that had come before it. The columns of lightning were visibly thicker, the pressure carrying outward in a wave that Michael felt as a chill even from his position well beyond the clearing’s edge.
He thought briefly about how he would have fared against a sixth round before his Advancement. Then he stopped himself. If the fifth round had left him nearly dead, the sixth would have simply finished the job. There was nothing to calculate there.
What made him narrow his eyes now was the nature of the sixth strike itself. By that round the lightning had crossed just over the boundary of Rank 3 and was touching Rank 4.
And it came in six columns.
Lily caught all of them with her mouth as she had caught everything else, but this time her body shook with the impact and the surroundings were not spared.
The seventh followed quickly, as if the tribulation had decided patience was no longer warranted. It struck before the energy of the sixth had fully settled inside her. To combat the raging energy tearing through her from within, Lily instinctively expanded, shifting into her titan form. The ground beneath her feet collapsed inward under the weight of the transformation, a wide circular depression forming around her as she rose.
Thirty meters. Forty. She stabilized somewhere above that and held.
The eighth round followed.
At this point the clearing that had survived the first five rounds largely intact was no longer intact. The ground fractured in radiating lines. A section of the remaining earth near the center was simply gone, compressed into something that was neither soil nor stone.
Lily’s massive form bore visible injuries across her torso and arms, deep fractures in her outer layer where the lightning had torn through rather than been swallowed, gray and blackened tissue at the edges. The wounds showed faint signs of healing, but the pace was too slow to matter between rounds.
Lily was still standing regardless.
Michael watched from beyond the perimeter, his expression anxious but attentive.
His heart ached at Lily’s state, but he knew it couldn’t be helped. If a lightning tribulation were easy, it would not be what it was, and it would not carry the weight of the heavens’ acknowledgment. The difficulty was the point. The damage was the point. The fact that one survived it was what gave it meaning.
Neither of them paid much attention to the ruined surroundings. The ninth round was already forming above.
The final round.
Michael’s gaze moved upward to the storm still churning overhead, dense and dark and heavier than it had been at any point in the night.
He exhaled slowly. "This is it. I hope you survive, Lily."
He meant it. Though his journey as a supernatural had been short by most measures, many of the undead who had carried him to where he now stood had been with him from the very beginning. Lily was among the first.
Whether what he felt was attachment, or reluctance to lose something he had invested so much in, or simply the desire to grow stronger alongside her rather than without her, Michael genuinely wanted her to pass this final round.
The final round did not build the way the others had. There was no gradual gathering, no visible compression of clouds into a tighter formation.
It simply arrived.
A single column of lightning descended from the storm above with a flash that turned the entire clearing white for one complete moment, a light so total that it swallowed all distinction between ground and sky and forest and left nothing but itself.
Michael instinctively moved back further. The pressure wave that preceded the actual strike reached him before the sound did, pushing against his body with enough force to make him shift his footing in midair. Even from the increased distance, he could feel the residual energy pressing against his skin.
The lightning completely enveloped Lily. From his position he could see almost nothing of her within it.
Michael stood there and waited, his attention fixed entirely on his connection with her.
The seconds stretched. Then the column began to dim, contracting inward before fading away entirely.