Chapter 1341: The Color of Collision

The others stared at her, confused, then looked back up at the blood-red Voruun in the air.

Only Ethan nodded immediately.

He’d already been gathering power in his palm. The light compressed as his fingers curled, condensing into a dense, tightly packed sphere of energy. Locking onto Voruun—still pinned by the waterspout—Ethan lifted his hand and threw the energy ball.

At the same moment, Voruun finally spread every tentacle wide.

The tentacles wrapped around his body wrenched themselves out of the waterspout by force and lashed toward the sea sphere. They pushed forward against the spinning current, and every whip-like swing shook loose sheets of spray.

The newly reinforced blue shield took the first round head-on.

A tentacle slammed into the barrier. Blue light rippled outward, and the hairline cracks stretched fast. A second tentacle cracked in from the side, striking the edge—tilting the whole barrier. After the third hit, the fractures finally connected, webbing across the entire sea sphere.

The shield shattered.

As shards of blue light scattered, Seraphina had already spread her wings. She swept beneath the breaking sea sphere, caught everyone on her broad dragon back, and with a heavy beat of her wings carried them higher into the sky.

With the waterspout no longer supporting him, Voruun started to fall.

Namyanna lifted a hand and called the sea up.

A flood of water rose with her motion, gathering ahead into a long, expanding channel that reached into the air. Frost energy streamed from her palm into the surface. Wherever it touched, the rushing water froze instantly, forming a slanted ice track suspended in midair.

She stepped onto the tilted ice and shot forward.

The trident—already back in her hand—was tucked low at her side. She pressed the tip against the ice like a brake, using it to control her speed and angle. The metal point scraped along the track, throwing up a sparkling spray of ice grit.

While she slid through the air, Namyanna raised her free hand.

An ice-blue stream kept pouring from her palm, tracing a clean line above the track as it chased the falling Voruun.

The waterspout had carried Voruun upward, and the spinning seawater had soaked him from head to toe. Namyanna’s cold followed right on its heels. Frost crawled along every tentacle, sealing the suckers first, then coating the skin, then locking his huge body into one solid block of ice.

Voruun tried to move. All that came from inside the ice were a few muffled cracking sounds.

He had no room left to thrash—only gravity, dragging him down.

The massive ice chunk trailed freezing mist as it plunged toward the sea.

Splash!

Voruun slammed into the water, the impact punching a deep crater into the surface. Seawater surged up and rolled back in a tall ring of spray. Namyanna snapped her fingers closed, and the spreading cold caught the wave crest—freezing every drop that had been flung into the air.

The spray held its shape above the sea like a frozen crown. Inside it came a heavy, grinding sound. A moment later, a gigantic floe—Voruun sealed inside—rose from below, shouldering aside broken ice shards as it pushed up into view.

Everyone in the sky gathered in, peering down at the red Voruun trapped in ice, thinking through what to do with him next.

A sharp tearing sound cut through the air without warning—right between them.

They all heard it.

None of them saw where it came from.

By the time they snapped their heads toward the noise, a bullet with no visible trail had already crossed the sky and struck the giant floe head-on.

The ice split from the center.

One crack cleaved through the entire block—then a dense network of fractures erupted outward. The ice casing around Voruun collapsed in a roar, exploding into chunks of every size. The pieces—and his body with them—dropped back into the sea.

Ethan didn’t waste a second hunting the shooter.

He raised both hands. White energy flowed out of his palms and closed around them fast, forming a complete protective barrier.

The moment the shield rose, the wind noise outside dropped away. Ethan stared at the spot where Voruun had fallen, his brow tightening by the second.

"He must’ve paid some kind of price. Like burning his own soul, and then—"

He didn’t finish.

They didn’t need him to.

Below, the sea surface tore open again under whipping tentacles. Namyanna was still lower than the rest, darting again and again to avoid strikes dropping from above. She quickly realized those tentacles were thicker than before, and the water-walls they raked up were wider, heavier.

Voruun had grown bigger again.

And this time, the expansion was obscene. Just the part above the surface filled a huge stretch of ocean, and a few fully extended tentacles could reach from the sea straight up into the high air.

One tentacle burst through the spray and curled toward Seraphina.

Seraphina barely twisted her body—too late. The tentacle chased up from below, looped around her belly and one wing, and cinched tight, binding her massive dragon frame.

Everyone on her back lurched, losing their footing.

Seraphina didn’t wrestle it.

She spread her claws. Primordial Death Energy gathered in her palm, a deep, heavy force compressing inward until it formed a twisting sphere that looked like the air itself couldn’t decide how to exist around it.

She turned her body and slammed the Primordial Death Energy straight into the tentacle wrapped around her.

There was no explosion.

The moment that power touched the tentacle, the contact zone lost all color. Flesh, suckers, and even the seawater clinging to it vanished together. The tentacle—still coiled tight—was severed cleanly at the middle.

The remaining Primordial Death Energy didn’t stop. It crawled down the severed end, spreading along the tentacle below. That dark force ate everything it touched, pushing toward Voruun in the sea.

Voruun felt it instantly.

He didn’t try to retract the tentacle. Instead, he lifted a different one and chopped down hard at the corroding section. The part covered by Primordial Death Energy separated completely, fell into the sea—

and kept vanishing.

The cut hadn’t even finished bleeding before the flesh started to grow outward.

A new tentacle pushed out of the wound—first a thin, trembling bud of meat, then thickening, lengthening at a terrifying pace. In only a short moment, a full tentacle had regrown... and it smashed down again toward Namyanna.

Boom!

Namyanna raised her trident and met it head-on. The impact ran through the weapon and into both her arms. The seawater around them was shoved outward by the collision, leaving a brief circular depression like the sea had been punched flat.

The tentacle didn’t recoil.

It pressed down the shaft and shoved toward her.

Namyanna tightened both hands around the grip and twisted her wrists together. The trident spun at high speed in her palms, the three blades blurring into a ring of ice-blue light—like a drill-bit top chewing forward.

The spinning tip bit into the tentacle’s surface, tearing through the outer flesh, then boring deeper. Shredded meat and seawater flung outward in a messy spiral, and a tunnel quickly opened through the tentacle from front to back.

That was when the frost energy stored at the trident’s tip finally released.

Ice-blue power burst from inside the tunnel and spread outward, racing through every seam and gap in the flesh. Voruun didn’t even have time to pull the tentacle back—ice was already swelling from within, freezing the entire limb solid in a blink.

Namyanna yanked her trident free. The frozen tentacle lost support and slammed stiffly onto the surface.

She’d barely pulled her weapon back in when the water behind her shifted wrong—another tentacle swept in from her blind spot.

She twisted aside. The tip brushed her clothes, then smashed into the sea with a heavy crack.

Namyanna used the impact to slide forward, then whipped her trident. Cold flared off the blades and condensed around her into a hemispherical ice shield.

More tentacles followed, striking the shield in rapid succession. Cracks formed across the ice, but it didn’t collapse immediately.

Namyanna looked down into the depths. She gripped her trident with both hands, aimed for the darkness—

and hurled it.

The trident punched through the water and shot into the deep, slicing down through dim layers toward the seabed. Namyanna dove after it, her body becoming a streak wrapped in cold light as she slipped between tentacles and sank into the ocean’s depths.

In the sea, Namyanna was in her element.

She landed on the seafloor and lifted a hand, taking control of the surrounding current. The water at her feet retreated outward as a small bubble formed. She pulled every last trace of seawater out of it until what remained inside wasn’t water at all—

it was vacuum.

She held the bubble’s boundary steady, then used the surrounding water to brace it. Currents pressed in from all directions, but the vacuum didn’t rupture. Under her control, it stayed intact.

The small vacuum bubble lifted off the seabed and rose along a straight path, drifting up toward Voruun near the surface.

Up in the sky, the others watched Namyanna dive, then noticed the strange movement in the water below Voruun. They guessed her plan almost immediately.

No one chased her down.

Instead, each of them began condensing energy spheres and attacking from different angles, lighting up the air with dense bursts to draw Voruun’s attention away.

Kaelira was the first to shove her energy ball forward.

After it left her palm, it didn’t fly straight at Voruun. It dove steeply downward instead. As it passed through the area where Seraphina’s Primordial Death Energy still lingered, the two forces collided—both not fully dispersed yet.

Kaelira’s power wasn’t swallowed.

The two energy cores shook violently on impact. Their edges crushed against each other... then started to fuse. Different colors twisted together, and the energy ball swelled larger.

Just as the fusion began to stabilize, Ataneya’s Infernal energy sphere came in from the side.

Three forces slammed together in midair.

The collision point bulged outward. Cracks split across the surface of the combined ball, and light sprayed from the fractures, sweeping through the clouds. The air itself got shoved into visible rings of ripples.

After a brief, violent struggle, the three powers didn’t explode.

They compressed inward—hard—

and fused into a single pink energy sphere.

This wasn’t one person’s attack anymore.

The pink sphere started out moving slowly, its surface rolling with restless, turbulent power. Before it even reached the sea, the water beneath it couldn’t withstand the pressure and began to pull back from the surface, retreating outward in a widening ring.