Novel Full Chapter 1507 Fighting a Chosen
Chapter 1507 Fighting a Chosen
The two lunatics met the Arch Priestess at the same time from opposite angles, and for a brief, violent stretch of seconds, the cathedral steps became a place where miracles collided.
Black Fang reached her first.
The katana came in low, a sweeping cut aimed at the priestess’s leading knee. Velara saw it coming. Her staff moved to intercept, golden light already gathering at the gemstone.
She was too slow.
The violet blade passed through both legs below the knee with the ease of a razor through parchment. The cut was so clean that Velara’s body didn’t register it immediately. Her mouth opened to form a spell. Her weight shifted forward onto legs that were no longer connected to her feet.
Then Black Fang reversed the blade and drove it upward toward her throat.
“[Sacred Ward]!”
The spell left her lips in the same breath as the scream. A ring of golden light erupted from her staff and expanded outward in a disc that caught the killing strike and threw it wide. Black Fang’s katana screeched against the holy energy and was deflected left. The assassin rolled with it, turning the deflection into momentum, rushing back to her feet.
Velara’s severed legs hit the stone.
The stumps should have followed. Her body should have crumpled, should have pitched forward onto the steps in a spray of arterial blood and ended the fight then and there.
The cathedral disagreed.
Golden light surged from the open doors behind her and flooded into the wounds. Bone regrew. Muscle knitted. Skin sealed over the stumps and kept going, pushing downward, rebuilding what the katana had taken in a cascade of warm light that smelled faintly of incense and old stone.
Within two heartbeats, the Arch Priestess stood on new legs.
The severed limbs on the ground dissolved into motes of golden light and drifted back into Velara’s body. Every trace of the wound vanished. Even her robes had mended, the fabric whole where the blade had passed through
But Velara faltered.
Her right knee buckled. She caught herself on the staff, jaw clenched, and a web of darkened veins spread visibly beneath the fresh skin of her calves. Black Fang’s venom. The violet poison had entered her blood the instant the blade made contact, and the cathedral’s healing had rebuilt the legs around it.
The priestess looked down at the discoloration crawling up her shins.
Her face went pale.
“[Mending Li-]”
Quinlan was already there.
He’d held back after recovering from the priestess’s attack. Having realized the mighty enemy he was facing, he refused to make another hasty mistake.
As such, he watched Black Fang’s exchange with the cold patience of a man who understood that the first seconds of a fight against an unknown enemy were worth more than any attack he could throw.
And the information was worth the wait.
‘She healed severed limbs in seconds. Black Fang cut her legs clean off and the cathedral just… rebuilt them.’
But the venom had slowed her. The priestess was faltering, fumbling for a healing spell.
‘If I let her recover, Black Fang’s masterful hit was for nothing.’
Lightning flooded his legs. The distance shrank fast.
‘If we keep landing single cuts, she’ll keep regenerating before we can kill her. One wound at a time won’t overwhelm whatever the cathedral is feeding her.’
He adjusted his grip on the saber.
‘So what happens if the damage isn’t in one place?’
Lightning carried him the last ten meters in a blink. He came in from the right, saber already mid-swing, and the Flame Stance roared through his arm as the blade arced toward Velara’s raised staff.
But as he swung, he did something he’d never done before.
He compressed his magic away from his body.
He’d compressed before. The barrier punch had been compression taken to its absolute extreme, every joule of lightning forced into a single fingertip and detonated on contact. But that had been internal. Energy contained within his own body, channeled through his own pathways, discharged through his own flesh.
This time, he pushed it out.
Every scrap of fire mana he could pull from his reserves in the span of a single heartbeat, he forced through his palm, through the grip, and into the saber’s edge. Out of his body and into steel. Mana flowing through a medium that had no pathways, no channels, no biological architecture to guide it.
The steel drank it in. The blade’s temperature climbed past red, past white, into a state where the metal itself became a boundary between fuel and detonation.
The Abyssal Genesis Physique held the channels open. Compressing mana inside the body was one thing. The pathways existed for that. Forcing it outward into an object that had no business holding that kind of energy required a stability his old body could never have maintained. The connection between his hand and the blade would have ruptured. The mana would have discharged into his arm instead of the steel.
His new body held the bridge.
The saber connected with Velara’s staff.
The compressed flame detonated.
Fire erupted from the blade in a violent burst that expanded outward in every direction at once, engulfing the Arch Priestess from crown to sole in a sphere of roaring heat. Her robes, her skin, her hair, the air around her, all of it ignited in the same instant.
Head to toe. Every inch of her.
Velara shrieked.
Black Fang was already exploding back into the fray.
The Venomborne Terror had read the instant Quinlan’s blade made contact. The detonation, the fire, the priestess’s scream. A window measured in fractions of a second where the target was blinded and burning.
She dove straight through the flames.
Quinlan’s fire engulfed her as she passed through it. Her robes caught. Her skin blistered where the clothes burned away. However, she didn’t slow down or adjust her trajectory by a single degree. The katana led and the woman followed, a violet streak punching through a wall of orange heat with the single-minded lethality of a woman who had decided that this was the kill and everything else, including her own body, was an acceptable cost.
The blade aimed for the base of Velara’s skull.
“[AEGIS OF PURITY]!”
The scream tore from a throat that was still burning.
Light erupted from Velara’s body. A dome of white-gold energy expanded outward from her core in a single explosive pulse, blinding in its intensity, fueled by every prayer that had ever been spoken within these walls.
Black Fang’s katana struck the dome and stopped dead.
The impact rejected her. The dome expanded with the force of a battering ram and hurled Black Fang backward through the air. Quinlan caught the edge of the same pulse and felt his boots leave the stone.
Wind answered before he finished the thought.
A wall of compressed air erupted behind Black Fang’s trajectory, catching her mid-flight and bleeding the momentum before she could crater into the street. A second gust wrapped around his own body and arrested his spin, turning what should have been a bone-breaking collision with a stone pillar into a hard slide that ended with his boots carving grooves in the cobblestone.
Black Fang landed on her feet fifteen meters from the steps. Her robes were smoking if not outright disintegrated and her skin burned, yet her eyes hadn’t left Velara for a single instant.
Quinlan steadied himself and spat blood. The wind had softened the hit, but the Aegis still carried enough force to rattle his skeleton through the cushion.
On the cathedral steps, the dome contracted.
It pulled inward, collapsing back into Velara’s body, and as it did, it took everything with it. The flames on her skin winked out. The burns beneath them smoothed and vanished. The blisters healed. The charred remnants of her robes dissolved into motes of golden light, and new ones formed in their place, woven from the same radiance that powered the dome, white and gold and pristine, materializing around her body like they’d never been cloth at all.
Even her hair reformed. Every strand restored, falling into place around a face that no longer bore a single mark.
The venom went with the rest. The dark veins in her legs, the violet discoloration creeping toward her knees, all of it was scoured from her blood by the purification and expelled as a faint haze of purple mist that the golden light ate before it reached the ground.
Velara stood at the top of the cathedral steps.
Untouched. Pristine. Breathing hard, her mana visibly lower than before, the golden light behind her dimmer by another shade.
But whole.
Completely, infuriatingly whole.
Black Fang looked at Quinlan.
Quinlan looked back.
A beat passed between them. Two people who had thrown everything they had at an enemy and watched her stand back up like nothing happened, arriving at the same conclusion in the same moment.
They nodded.