Chapter 491. The Artifact Is Eating Itself

Chapter 491: 491. The Artifact Is Eating Itself

The explosion was not a sound so much as it was a physical violation. The black sphere of necrotic energy detonated with a wet, tearing shriek, SKREEEE BOOM, and caught William and Kaela dead center.

The force was absolute, a wall of crushing darkness that tore them off their feet.

William felt his ribs groan under the pressure before he was hurled backward like a ragdoll. He hit the ground hard, tumbling across the debris, but instinct took over.

He rolled with the impact, muscles screaming as he scraped against stone, coming up on one knee while Aetherion remained locked in his white knuckled grip. His vision swam with purple spots, the copper taste of blood flooding his mouth.

A few yards away, Kaela was thrown like a projectile. She skidded across the cracked marble, her boots sparking against the stone before she slammed into a fallen pillar.

CRUNCH.

The impact knocked the wind from her lungs in a painful wheeze, but she forced herself up, catching her weight on one gauntleted palm, her knuckles bleeding where the metal had scraped raw.

For one heartbeat, the world went silent. Through the smoke and the swirling magical residue, their eyes met across the devastated courtyard.

No words were needed. In that single, charged instant of eye contact, a new strategy crystallized a desperate, synchronized gambit born from months of shared survival.

Across the carnage, Alden was unraveling. His breathing came in ragged, wet gasps, each one rattling in his chest.

His violet eyes darted between them with the frantic energy of a cornered rat. He knew he couldn’t win a war of attrition against two people who refused to break.

He abandoned brute force for something far more insidious.

"You think... you’ve won?" Alden hissed, his voice cracking as the corruption surged. "You know nothing of power!"

Black ichor began to seep from his own shadow, peeling away from his silhouette like living tar. Three shapes coalesced, then five, then seven.

Each one was a perfect, terrifying mirror of Alden, with the same murderous violet gaze and the same hunched, predatory stance. The clones scattered in every direction with unnatural speed, their boots making no sound as they charged toward the two exhausted fighters from every conceivable angle.

To any other warrior, it would have been a death sentence, a dozen lethal threats closing in simultaneously.

’Think, William... Don’t trust your eyes.’

’Trust the world.’

William closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, shutting out the visual chaos. He remembered Selena’s voice echoing in his mind: ’The air never lies, William. Even magic has to displace something.’

He focused on the currents, feeling for the minute pressure of displaced air, the subtle warmth of body heat, and the specific disturbance in the wind that only a living heart could create.

"Kaela, left!" William bellowed.

The command tore from his throat as he lunged forward, his blade whistling through the air to intercept two of the false copies.

SHHH FWOOMP.

His steel passed through them like smoke; they dissolved into meaningless darkness without offering even the slightest resistance. "The real one’s coming from your left, low!"

Kaela didn’t waste a second questioning him. She trusted him more than she trusted her own senses.

She pivoted hard on her heel, her muscles coiled like a spring, and drove a single, crushing punch into the shadow stepping out from the peripheral darkness.

THWACK CRUNCH.

This time, there was no smoke. Her fist connected with something solid, something that bled.

Alden’s true form staggered backward as the Tempest Fang ring connected with his sternum, sending a shockwave of pain through his corrupted frame.

He let out a pained, startled gasp, blood spraying from his mouth as the remaining decoys shattered like glass and faded uselessly into the air.

The courtyard fell quiet again, save for Alden’s labored, broken breathing as he struggled to remain upright, clutching his shattered ribs.

William didn’t rush. He began a slow, deliberate stroll toward the stumbling prince, Aetherion resting with deceptive ease in his grip. His expression was one of cold, clinical amusement.

"Clever trick, Alden," William said, his voice carrying across the rubble with terrifying calm. "Genuinely... If I were fighting someone who couldn’t feel the difference between real wind and empty air, that might have actually worked."

Alden was unraveling, his mind fracturing alongside his body. In a desperate bid to regain control, he attempted the same shadow trick twice more in rapid succession.

The darkness seemed to vomit itself from his pores—six copies this time, then eight, a writhing tide of identical dark silhouettes flooding the courtyard.

They moved with a nauseating synchronization, a chorus of phantom footsteps that should have been impossible to decipher.

But William was no longer fighting a man; he was fighting the air itself.

Each time the shadows coalesced, William closed his eyes for the barest fraction of a second. He retreated inward, letting the visual noise fade until all that remained was the tactile reality of the wind.

He searched for the one disturbance that carried weight, the one shadow that displaced oxygen rather than simply occupying space.

"Right side, low," William commanded, his voice flat, utterly unbothered.

WHOOSH.

Kaela didn’t need to ask. She pivoted, her boot grinding against a piece of rubble as she launched herself into the path of the true Alden.

Her fist connected with his exposed hip with a wet, sickening THUD. Alden let out a strangled shriek as his pelvis buckled, his body jerking sideways before he could even raise his guard.

"Behind you, same height as before," William said again.

He didn’t even bother to look up. His focus was downward, his attention seemingly fixed on the blade of Aetherion as he casually wiped a smear of oily, black residue from the silver steel.

CRACK.

Kaela’s elbow came around like a piston, catching Alden square in the back of the skull. The sound was unmistakable: the wet slap of flesh against bone followed by the grinding noise of a vertebra protesting an impossible angle.

Alden went down hard, sprawling face first into the jagged, cracked stone with a pathetic groan.

"You could try something that isn’t a cheap parlor trick," William suggested mildly, his tone almost conversational.

He watched as Alden dragged himself upright again, each movement seeming to cost him a piece of his soul. Blood now trickled freely from a split lip, carving crimson paths through the grime on Alden’s face, while a fresh gash above his eyebrow wept crimson onto his cheek.

"I’m starting to feel a little insulted on your behalf."

"Your father spent decades planning all of this, and this is the best you managed to bring to the actual fight... It’s disappointing."

The insult stung worse than the broken ribs. Alden’s violet eyes burned with a humiliated fire, but his power was failing him.

The dark energy that had once wrapped around his body like a second skin had begun to flicker and sputter, pulsing unevenly like a flame starved of oxygen.

The black veins crawling across his neck no longer moved with hungry confidence; they twitched spasmodically, revealing patches of pale, sickly skin beneath.

William glanced toward Kaela, his eyes sharp and analytical despite the sweat streaming down his temple.

"The artifact is eating itself," he murmured between exchanges, his voice low enough that only she could hear. "Whatever that thing is feeding him, his own body wasn’t built to carry it for long."

"The corruption is turning inward. We just need to outlast it."

Kaela gritted her teeth, her knuckles white as she clenched her fists.

"I can outlast anything," she spat back.

But even as she said it, her own breathing betrayed her; it was ragged and uneven, each inhalation a conscious struggle against the exhaustion threatening to collapse her lungs.

Her arms trembled faintly, the muscles screaming from the accumulated strain of every devastating strike she had landed.

They stood there for a heartbeat, two warriors on the edge of collapse, watching a dying prince drown in his own borrowed power.