Chapter 272: The Tower Explodes

Swef Ashi held the massive bone cleaver with both hands, his knuckles turning pale gray against his dark, calcified skin. His chest heaved violently, the black, necrotic fluid dripping from his split jaw sizzling as it splattered onto the scorched earth.

He looked at Silas- at the six colossal, pink-and-gold wings fanning out with a divine, effortless grace- and every century of dominance he had built inside Cansita screamed at him to run, but an ancient SS-Rank leader could not run.

The shame of retreating from a boy, a human pig destined for the slaughter, was a fate worse than death in the eyes of his race.

"Do not mock me, brat!" Swef bellowed, his voice echoing like grinding tectonic plates. "I am Swef Ashi! I have devoured whole tribes! I have digested S-Rank cores before your bloodline even drew its first breath!"

Silas tilted his head, floating a mere few inches off the ground. The divine entity controlling his frame placed a pale, delicate finger against his cheek, tapping it in mock contemplation. His glowing pink eyes, lined with luminescent solar gold, sparkled with an innocent, terrifying amusement.

"Hmm? Did you say something?" Silas giggled softly, the sound tinkling like crystal chimes through the quieted clearing.

"I’m sorry, tusk-face, I was admiring how pretty my wings look against this gloomy sky. You talk so much, but you just stand there trembling. Are your big, scary legs broken?"

The insult landed like a physical blow to Swef’s monolithic pride.

"DIE!" Swef’s mind snapped.

The absolute, unbridled wrath of a cornered, ancient cannibal detonated within his core. His SS-Rank aura expanded in a violent, pitch-black pillar of necrotic flame, scorching the earth for hundreds of yards in every direction.

His muscle fibers bulged to twice their normal density, ripping open his own skin as raw, suicidal energy surged into his limbs. He didn’t care about strategy anymore. He didn’t care about experience. He wanted to crush this mocking, divine nightmare into red paste.

Swef launched himself forward, smashing through the sound barrier so violently that the shockwave flattened the surrounding forest into splinters. He swung the colossal bone cleaver with every ounce of kinetic force his body could physically generate, targeting Silas’s slender neck in an executioner’s arc capable of cleaving a mountain range in two.

Silas didn’t dodge. He didn’t even raise a weapon.

He only stood there, smiling cutely, as the massive cleaver slammed directly into his neck.

CLANG!

A deafening ring reverberated across the landscape, but the blade didn’t cut flesh. It didn’t even draw a single drop of blood. The edge of the bone cleaver shattered into millions of bone fragments upon impact with Silas’s smooth, pale skin, as if a glass toy had been struck against absolute adamantine.

Swef’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. The kinetic recoil traveled back up his arms, shattering the bones in his wrists and ripping the flesh off his forearms in a gory burst.

"W-What...?"

"Oh, dear. You broke your little toy," Silas pouted, resting a hand over his mouth as he let out another soft, melodic laugh. "Hehe... ehehe. Was that your strongest swing? That was almost cute!"

Swef screamed in pure, unadulterated fury. "I’LL TEAR YOU APART WITH MY TEETH!"

Driven entirely by blind rage, Swef unhinged his jaw to its absolute limit, plunging his rows of lamprey teeth toward Silas’s face to devour his head whole.

Silas casually reached out, extending two fingers, and caught Swef’s lower jaw with his thumb and forefinger. With an effortless flick of his wrist, Silas repelled the massive, ten-foot-tall monster back fifty yards, sending Swef tumbling head-over-heels across the dirt like a ragdoll.

Swef hit the ground hard, rolling to a stop before struggling back to his knees. His wrists were mangled, his jaw hung loosely from the flick, and his breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.

For the first time in thousands of years, the supreme cannibal felt something he had forgotten existed: total, utter helplessness.

Silas hovered higher into the air, his six massive pink wings flapping once with a rhythmic, hypnotic beauty. Pink feathers drifted downward, turning into specks of warm light as they touched the soil.

"Hmm... you know," Silas murmured, his voice echoing simultaneously in the minds of everyone on the battlefield and every citizen watching through the scrying screens in New Liberty, "it’s been so long since I used threads. Silas loves his daggers, but... let’s see how this feels."

Silas raised his right arm toward the sky, his fingers spreading wide.

[Cupid’s Divine Heartweaver Synthesis - Ultimate Thread Domain]

The ambient mana of the entire realm gasped.

Every single line of fate, every strand of spatial energy, and every drop of ambient atmospheric mana within miles suddenly coalesced above Silas’s palm. Thousands of microscopic, glowing pink-and-gold threads shot out from his fingertips, interweaving at speeds beyond human comprehension.

They braided together, tightening, hyper-condensing, and expanding until a single, monumental spear hovered above his head. It was colossal- easily three hundred meters long- woven entirely from infinitely dense, shimmering pink thread.

Its surface pulsed with an iridescent, solar light so bright that it completely erased the shadows of the realm, casting a blinding, ethereal radiance over the broken clearing.

Behind him, the Valecrest members collapsed onto their stomachs, unable to even lift their heads under the pure, weightless pressure.

"Is he... is he going to throw that?" Damien choked out, his face buried in the dirt, his body shaking uncontrollably.

"That thing... it’s not normal mana," Peter whispered, his voice trembling with awe and terror. "It feels like... the pillar of creation itself..."

Chloe, Anna, Gromda, and Echidna watched from behind Silas, protected by a gentle, soothing warmth that radiated from his wings. Anna wept silently, clutching her hands against her chest as she gazed at the divine form of her lover. Echidna’s eyes glowed with absolute, unyielding devotion, her previous doubts completely vaporized by the magnificent display before them.

Swef Ashi looked up at the colossal thread spear hovering in the sky, and the ancient SS-Rank leader stopped screaming. He stopped raging and simply stared, his crimson eyes dulling as his mind finally accepted the absolute impossibility of his existence compared to the being floating before him.

"What... are you?" Swef rasped through his broken jaw.

Silas looked down at him with a sweet, innocent grin. "Just a boy who loves his family."

Silas pulled his arm back, his six wings snapping forward to build momentum.

"Up we go~!" Silas chimed playfully.

He threw the colossal thread spear.

He didn’t aim it at Swef. He aimed it straight into the sky- straight toward the ceiling of the ancient Tower that bound their world. The spear tore through the atmosphere in a fraction of a millisecond. There was no delayed shockwave; the sheer conceptual density of the weapon ignored air resistance entirely.

It pierced through the clouds, through the spatial barriers, and slammed directly into the core structural bedrock of the Tower. For one second, absolute silence reigned over the world.

Then, reality cracked.

A blinding, pink-gold fracture appeared in the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon. The spatial fabric holding the multi-layered Tower together dissolved like wet paper. The immense, ancient structures of the floating castle, the trial grounds, and the dimensional walls began to shatter, bursting outward in a cataclysmic, world-ending chain reaction.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The Tower exploded.

Mountains crumbled into dust. The sky shattered into millions of glowing spatial shards, collapsing the entire artificial dimension inward. Across the various floors of the Tower, thousands of inhabitants, test-seekers, and trapped creatures screamed in terror as their world disintegrated around them, facing instant, inevitable erasure in the cosmic void.

"Ah, wait, can’t let innocent people die," Silas said cutely, winking at the sky.

With a gentle snap of his pale fingers, Silas unleashed his power across the entire exploding dimension.

[Cupid Trait: Universal Sanctuary Barrier - Active]

Millions of soft, translucent pink bubbles manifested instantaneously across every collapsing floor of the Tower.

One massive, crystalline pink barrier wrapped around Chloe, Anna, Gromda, Echidna, and the entire Valecrest team, completely neutralizing the falling debris and spatial void crushing around them. Simultaneously, individual pink mana barriers enclosed every single innocent inhabitant, student, and stray creature across the entire exploding realm.

The cataclysmic explosion of the ancient Tower- a structure that had stood for millennia- was turned into a magnificent, harmless firework display of pink and gold energy. Floating islands shattered and vanished into the void, but not a single innocent life inside the barriers felt even a tremor of force.

Swef Ashi, wrapped in his own small, impenetrable pink barrier, floated helplessly in the void alongside Silas. The ancient cannibal leader watched as his entire domain, his army, and the ancient Tower itself were erased from existence in a matter of seconds- all because a divine entity wanted to test a thread spear.

The floating, shattered ruins slowly drifted into the open, real-world sky above New Liberty.

Across the city, millions of citizens stood on their balconies, streets, and rooftops, staring up at the sky in absolute, stunned silence. The scrying screens were dead, replaced by the real-life sight of the shattered sky above their heads.

There, suspended in the center of the vast, open atmosphere, was Silas.

His six colossal wings of divine pink feathers expanded to their full, magnificent breadth, blotting out the sun and casting a brilliant, warm rose-gold glow over the entire city of New Liberty.

Below him, his team and lovers floated safely within their protective barriers, completely unharmed, while Swef Ashi hung suspended in the air before him like a helpless, broken doll.

Silas turned his head toward Swef, his glowing pink eyes curving into sweet, crescent moons as he giggled once more.

"Now then, tusk-face," Silas whispered softly, his voice carrying effortlessly to every ear in the city below. "It’s just you and me."