Chapter 196: Mirage Collapsing

Evren stepped back, pointing the razor-sharp tip of the cleaver straight at their chests as he asked. "Who are you?"

Blue lightning danced along the edge of his blade, buzzing loud and angry in the quiet air.

He kept the blade leveled straight at their chests without blinking and a hard expression.

Amber’s wide brown eyes blinked with hurt shock, and she took a small step backward, holding her hands out in front of her. "Evren, what are you doing?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly. "Why are you pointing your sword at us? It’s me, Amber! What did we do wrong?"

Beside her, Zephyra looked at him with an equally troubled frown.

"Master, please lower your weapon," she pleaded smoothly. "Did the void pressure get to your head? We just fought those beasts for you on the ridge. Why are you attacking us?"

Evren didn’t lower the blade an inch. A cold smile touched the corner of his mouth.

"You almost had me fooled," he said in a flat tone. "You got their faces right, and you even got their weapons right. But you don’t know a damn thing about who they actually are."

Amber tilted her head slightly, her brows furrowed. "Evren, what are you talking about?"

"Amber Sterling would never turn her back on the city," Evren said, tightening his knuckles around the hilt. "She bled on the front lines to defend innocent people, and she honors her family’s legacy with every breath. She would die before telling me to let the capital burn."

He shifted his gaze toward Zephyra.

"And Zephyra would never call Walter and his men useless dead weight," Evren continued. "She watched me pour millions of dollars and rare elixirs into healing them. She respects every drop of blood those shield-bearers shed."

The two women froze. Their pleasant, concerned expressions didn’t shift, but their eyes turned colder than stone.

"On top of that," Evren added quietly, "our mental bond is completely dead. You’re just hollow puppets."

Before either of them could speak another word, Evren triggered his Gravity Domain.

BOOM!

A fifty-meter ring of crushing downward force slammed onto the stone ridge with the sound of a thunderclap.

The bedrock beneath their boots cracked instantly, spider-webbing into deep fissures under the sudden, immense weight.

Under the crushing pressure, the pleasant masks on the two women’s faces tore apart.

Their lips pulled back into grotesque, ear-to-ear grins, revealing rows of black needles instead of teeth. Their skin turned an ashen gray, splitting open like dry paper as bubbling black-and-purple void resin spilled out from underneath.

The fake Amber let out a deafening screech that vibrated through the stone.

Six jagged, insectoid blade-wings tore through the back of her jacket, dripping with corrosive purple slime.

Beside her, the fake Zephyra’s arms elongated by three feet, her fingers fusing into curved, razor-sharp shadow scythes that scraped violently against the bedrock.

"Die!" a distorted, overlapping dual voice hissed from their throats.

Despite the heavy gravity dragging at their bodies, both creatures lunged forward at the same time.

The fake Amber launched herself twenty feet into the air. Her six insectoid wings snapped forward, firing a dense volley of hardened void spikes straight down at Evren’s head.

Evren planted his boots firmly into the fractured rock. He swung the wide flat of the Frost-Bane Cleaver in a tight overhead arc, swatting half the incoming spikes out of the air with deafening metallic clangs.

The remaining spikes struck his shoulders and chest, but his reinforced body density deflected the sharp points, leaving only shallow tears in his jacket.

Before Evren could reset his footing, the fake Zephyra melted into a puddle of dark slime on the ground, bypassing his reach entirely.

A split-second later, she shot up directly behind his back, her two long shadow scythes whistling toward his neck from both sides in a decapitation clamp.

Evren’s Kinetic Flow flashed warning red across his vision.

Without turning around, he leaned forward by half an inch, letting the whistling blades graze the air right above his collar. In the same motion, he kicked his right heel backward, catching the creature squarely in the chest.

CRACK!

The monster’s chest caved in, and it skidded fifty feet backward across the broken stone, leaving a dark streak of corrosive purple blood.

Yet, as soon as the creature stopped sliding, the dent in its chest bubbled violently. Thick void resin surged into the wound, knitting the fractured ribs and torn tissue back together in less than two seconds.

Evren narrowed his eyes.

’Physical cuts and blunt strikes won’t kill them,’ he realized quickly. ’Their bodies are made of living void resin. As long as this space feeds them energy, they’ll just keep regenerating.’

He reached deep into the Frost-Bane Cleaver’s hilt and channeled his mana directly into the blade’s embedded core.

The Level 45 Glacial Wyvern Dual Frost Core flared to life.

A layer of thick, crackling blue ice swept across the steel edge, dropping the ambient temperature by forty degrees in a fraction of a second. Thick plumes of white frost rolled off the blade and cascaded onto the stone floor.

Both creatures hissed violently, clearly recoiling from the bitter, sub-zero chill.

"Let’s see you knit this back together," Evren muttered under his breath.

He triggered Umbral Blink.

FZZT!

Evren vanished into a shadow fold and reappeared directly above the winged monster.

The fake Amber shrieked, whipping three insectoid wings upward to impale his abdomen.

Evren didn’t dodge. He brought the Frost-Bane Cleaver down in a vicious, two-handed vertical chop.

CLANG-SHATTER!

The sub-zero edge bit through the creature’s carapace like glass. The moment the steel connected, the Glacial Wyvern core released a blinding shockwave of cryogenic frost. The cold was so intense that the boiling purple resin inside the monster’s veins froze solid before it could leak out.

The creature’s three wings turned into brittle blue crystal. With a single flick of Evren’s wrist, the frozen appendages snapped off and shattered into fine powder against the rocks.

The creature wailed in agony, thrashing on the ground as the frost spread rapidly through its torso, freezing its vital organs solid.

Behind him, the scythe-armed creature lunged again, determined to skewer his spine while his back was turned.

Evren didn’t even look back.

He pumped maximum mana into his Gravity Domain, focusing every ounce of downward pressure onto a ten-foot circle right behind him.

BOOM!

The second monster’s legs buckled with a sickening snap. The creature hit the rock face-first, pinned flat to the floor under tons of invisible weight, its jaws snapping helplessly inches from Evren’s boots.

Evren spun around on his heel, reversing his grip on the heavy cleaver, and unleashing the full fury of Heavenly Lightning alongside it.

Blinding blue electrical arcs wrapped around the frozen steel blade, hissing violently against the frost.

Evren drove the point of the sword straight through the pinned monster’s skull and deep into the bedrock below.

The dual blast of sub-zero ice and high-voltage lightning exploded inside the creature’s head.

The frost instantly crystallized every drop of void fluid in its body, and the lightning shattered the brittle husk into a thousand gray chunks. Within seconds, the frozen fragments dissolved into wisps of gray ash, leaving behind a dull purple mana crystal.

The winged creature on the ridge let out one final, gurgling wheeze as the frost completely consumed its chest.

Evren stepped over to it, raised his boot, and crushed its frozen skull beneath his heel.

The body collapsed into ash with a dry hiss.

As the second creature died, a strange, high-pitched ringing filled Evren’s ears.

The jagged crystals along the path began to flicker erratically, like a television losing its signal. The dark sky overhead cracked, peeling away in jagged digital artifacts.

A cold, familiar robotic chime echoed directly in Evren’s mind:

[WARNING: SSS-RANK VOID STASIS MIRAGE COLLAPSING...]

[PURGING ILLUSION PROTOCOL IN 3...]

[2...]

[1...]

CRACK!

The entire world shattered like a pane of thin, frosted glass.

Evren gasped for breath as a sharp chill hit his face, and his lungs burned as if he hadn’t drawn actual oxygen in hours.

His eyes snapped wide open, but everything spun in blurry, nauseating circles.

A huge wave of vertigo washed over him. His ears rang with static, and his thoughts felt sluggish, like trying to push through wet cement. He instinctively tried to plant his feet and brace for another attack, expecting the familiar, hard bite of bedrock against his boots.

There was nothing.

No solid ground. No stone ridge. No weight under his heels.

As his vision slowly swam back into focus and the blur cleared from his eyes, the cold reality hit him.

He wasn’t standing on a stone bridge. He wasn’t on a crystal ridge.

He was hanging twenty feet in the air, his arms, legs, and torso wrapped tightly inside a thick, suffocating cocoon of translucent purple resin, dangling helplessly over a massive, pitch-black abyss.