Chapter 85: The Falling Star

Lightning split the distance, violent and white-hot.

Barnabas moved with terrifying speed, tearing through the endless expanse of the floating islands.

Each massive chunk of earth spanned three hundred meters across, floating islands of soil and stone that blurred past his peripheral vision as he leaped from one edge to the next.

He couldn’t fly—not truly—but as a Saint, his velocity defied ordinary human limits, a streak of raw momentum crashing through the upper air.

Up ahead, he locked eyes on the descending catastrophe. Max was already glowing, caught in the terrifying embrace of the light.

Barnabas pushed his legs harder, every muscle screaming against the gravity of the descent, but a cold realization gripped his chest: I’m not going to make it.

The condensed sun struck.

There was no sound—only a sudden, total erasure. Max’s skin blistered, charred, and burned away down to the bone in the blink of an eye, his entire body reduced to nothing more than scattering ash before the heat could even register as pain.

Yet the falling star did not stop. It carved deeper, plummeting downward with vicious acceleration, tearing straight through the heart of the floating islands. Whole landmasses were punched through, leaving smoking, perfectly round craters in their wake, while others instantly caught fire, blossoming into roaring infernos of orange and black.

Barnabas hit the limit of his leap, his boots slamming against a fracturing ledge. He didn’t hesitate. With a roar that tore from his throat, he hauled back his arm and summoned his weapon.

His giant hammer materialized in his grip, its handle woven from pure, crackling flames. He hurled himself upward, meeting the descending sun head-on.

The collision was cataclysmic.

Saint Barnabas and the blazing star locked in a violent tug-of-war, shockwaves rippling across the sky and shattering the air pressure for miles. The sun’s intensity pressed down with crushing weight, trying to beat him into the earth. But because Barnabas possessed a natural affinity for flames and the hardened soul title of a Fire Saint, the baseline heat barely registered against his skin.

The danger wasn’t just the warmth. This condensed ball of light-fire had been forged by an Indigo-Class Calamity Dark One. The sheer aura radiating from the core felt like a relentless electric shock, snapping jagged, lightning-like ribbons of fire across the open sky.

Down on the base islands below, people stopped fighting, their heads snapping upward. To those still stranded near the breach, it looked like the absolute end of the world. Even Orson, seasoned and dangerous, felt a cold knot of shock twist in his gut at the sheer, suffocating wave of heat radiating from high above.

The temperature was climbing by the second, baking the air dry. Standing at the edge of the second island, Orson knew everyone currently locked in combat down on the ground must be staring up at the strange, terrifying phenomenon—watching as a lone, blazing war in the heavens threatened to swallow the sky.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Jagged ribbons of lightning-fire fractured the atmosphere in blinding, electric arcs, snapping violently around the descending sun as it ground down against Saint Barnabas. The sheer kinetic force of a Saint driving his hammer upward to shove a falling star backward locked them into a brutal, screaming deadlock.

Barnabas bared his teeth, muscles cording violently in his neck and shoulders as he strained against the crushing weight. He pushed. He poured every ounce of his soul-forged strength into the hammer, trying to force the blazing sphere back into the sky.

Nothing.

The star didn’t budge an inch. It was a terrifying, frozen stalemate hanging high above the world, while the edges of the sun bled fierce, volatile energy—radiating waves of lightning-fire that hissed and cracked through the empty air like whips of pure plasma.

This deadlock has to end.

Barnabas knew brute force alone wasn’t going to turn the tide. With the sun refusing to yield to the hammer’s leverage, he ripped his left hand free from the haft and condensed every shred of his volatile inner flames directly into his fist, packing heat so dense it rippled the air.

Bang.

He slammed his blazing fist straight into the head of the hammer.

The resulting shockwave shrieked outward, violently jolting the massive sphere of light upward and backward by a fraction of a meter. It was a staggering blow, but it still wasn’t enough to break the momentum.

Down below, the rest of the contractors were scattered across the lower platforms. Expecting any of them to fly up and reach this altitude to help was a complete pipe dream. Yet Barnabas refused to give up, planting his boots firmly as he leaned his entire weight into the resistance.

Underneath him, the floating island was disintegrating into fine grey dust. Half of its ancient stone structure, ancient trees, and soil were already burning away into nothingness, stripped to their atoms by the ambient radiation. Worse still, the sheer downward vector of the collision had destabilized the landmass entirely—the massive island was beginning to plummet out of the sky.

Because Barnabas lacked the flight capabilities of higher ranks, he had no choice but to use the crumbling, vanishing island as his final stepping stone to anchor his stance against the falling star.

Now, there was nowhere left to retreat. The entire surface of the island had transformed into a boiling, chaotic sea of liquid fire and spitting lava, casting a blinding, hellish glow across the sky as Barnabas stood his ground alone against the sun.

This was supposed to be routine.

For a seasoned Saint like Barnabas, wiping out an attack from a Dark One matching his own rank should have been a manageable trial, a straightforward execution of power. But the true terror wasn’t just the sheer kinetic mass of the descending star—it was the suffocating, predatory aura radiating from the core.

It felt alive.

The sun pressed against him with a malignant hunger, consciously trying to swallow his consciousness, scour his soul, and digest him into the roaring inferno. Barnabas fought back with every ounce of his remaining will, muscles straining past their absolute breaking point, but he could feel the cold, horrifying certainty of losing ground.

Beneath his boots, the last remains of the floating island completely shattered, giving way under the unimaginable heat and pressure.

There was nothing left to stand on. With a sickening shudder, the crumbling remnants of the landmass dissolved beneath them, and Saint Barnabas, locked in his burning war with the stolen sun, plummeted downward together.