Novel Full Chapter 400: Not Even Close!
He tried again.
The aura rose, wider than before, denser, the new ceiling of it something that should have been impossible an hour ago, and he drove it inward, wrapping it around the walls of his mind with everything he had. Every layer. Every technique he’d developed across years of pushing his body past the limits it was supposed to have.
SHATTER!
The collapse was identical. NoNo resistance. Just the same clean, contemptuous demolition, like a hand brushing dust off a surface it had already decided was clean.
He tasted blood again.
The same corner of his mouth. He caught it with the back of his hand before it could reach his chin and kept walking, kept his face forward, kept his stride even. Beside him, Lily had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was watching him without watching him, her eyes ahead, her attention entirely on him. He knew that silence. Had grown up with it.
’Heal.’
The mana cost hit him like a wall. His vision blurred at the edges for a half-second before it corrected, the system working through the damage, layer by layer, rebuilding what had been broken in ways that shouldn’t have been breakable. He had infinite mana but the pain. He had to endure before he’s fully healed was unimaginable…
And when it finished, the aura that came back was larger again. Denser again. The ceiling had moved.
The premonition in his chest said it didn’t lessen even with that….
’Why the fuck can’t I gain immunity to this!’ He gritted this teeth and tried to wrap his mind again.
SHATTER!
This time his knees tried to buckle. He caught it, barely, the correction so small that from the outside it probably looked like a stumble on uneven ground, and kept moving. The blood came faster this time. He pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and swallowed it.
’Heal!’
Climbing. Always climbing. The aura after this heal felt like it could crack the sky if he let it expand freely. It felt like something that should have made him untouchable.
He wrapped it around his mind.
SHATTER!
He stopped pretending he had a strategy. There was no strategy. On front of such absolute power nothing he tried seemed to work… Even trying to link up to the enemies body and attack it with heal through the attacking force that destroyed his mind didn’t seem to work… He was easily cut off each time…
At his current level, even Vaelith will suffer greatly if he was to use such a method against it, but the being he was against was just too powerful and the mad thing was that all this was happening inside Velmora which was Vaelith’s Domain, but Vaelith’s main and part of its consciousness merged with Bruce’s system haven’t even noticed this yet… This was something that left Bruce greatly alarmed…
The being wasn’t responding to what he built, it was responding to the fact that he was building.
The moment his aura moved to protect his mind, it was already over. The gap between what he was becoming and what this being already was remained exactly what it had been at the start. Constant. Unchanging. Like trying to chase a horizon.
The worst part wasn’t the pain.
The worst part was that he understood what was happening. His heal was doing exactly what it always did, adapting, overcoming, rising past whatever had broken him. Every shatter was feeding it. Every collapse was instruction. His aura was genuinely growing, genuinely becoming something that, by any reasonable measure, should have been extraordinary.
But it was never enough. No matter how he grew, it still looked like he was trying to overcome a chasm..
I was not even close. Not even in the direction of close.
’Heal!’
“Brother.”
Not a question this time. Her voice had changed, lower, quieter, the kind of quiet that meant she had already moved past confusion and was working very hard not to say the thing she actually wanted to say.
“I’m fine, Lily.”
“You stumbled.”
“Uneven ground.”
A pause. “You don’t stumble on uneven ground brother…”
He didn’t answer that. He kept walking, eyes ahead, posture as easy as he could make it. In his periphery he could see her watching him with the expression she’d worn when they were children and she’d known he was lying but hadn’t yet decided whether to push. She’d always known. Even then. He’d never been as good at hiding things from her as he’d believed.
’Shatter!’
The damage hit somewhere deeper this time, not just his aura’s root but something adjacent to it, something that made his ears ring for three full seconds. He breathed through it. He kept his face forward. He did not reach up to wipe his mouth fast enough.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
“Again.”
“Lily,”
“That’s three times.” Her voice cracked at the edges. Not breaking, Lily didn’t break, had never broken, but the pressure behind her words was something he felt in his chest more than he heard with his ears. “That’s three times in the last few minutes and you keep telling me you’re fine and you keep bleeding and you won’t tell me what’s happening…”
“I can heal it.” He said it quietly. Steadily. The truest thing he could offer her. “Whatever’s happening, Lily, I can heal it. You know that.”
She did know that. He watched her reach for it, watched the knowledge move through her face, the way she pulled it toward herself like something to hold onto. Her jaw set. She was starting to feel alarmed, she knows her brother was invincible but didn’t know what going on and really hoped that nothing bad was happening to her brother…
’Heal!’
The aura came back larger than it had ever been. He could feel it pressing at the edges of things, vast and restless, a scope of power that would have seemed cosmically absurd to him a year ago. It rose and rose and he held it there, this impossible thing his own suffering had built, and he tried, one more time, with full knowledge of how it would end, to turn it inward.
SHATTER!
His vision whited out.
He was still walking when it came back. He didn’t know how. Muscle memory, probably, or something more stubborn than memory. His body moving because stopping was worse. Lily’s hand had found his arm, not grabbing, just present, fingers light against his sleeve, and he understood that she was not consoling herself anymore. She was steadying him.
He let her. Just for a moment.
The blood on his chin he didn’t bother to hide this time.
’Heal.’
And when his mind cleared enough to think, through the mana drain that now felt like pulling himself across gravel on his hands, through the ringing, through the pressure in his chest that hadn’t left since this started, the clarity that arrived wasn’t strategic.
It was simply the recognition that this being had been watching every single attempt. Had watched him build and break and rebuild, over and over, with the patience of something that found the whole exercise faintly interesting. Not threatening. Not impressive. It was treating him as a child’s play… The way something vast might watch something small work very hard at something pointless.
It was toying with him.
The thought arrived with a fury he didn’t let anywhere near his face.
’Who are you,’ he thought, and this time he didn’t bother to make it a question. ’And what do you want.’
The response came like it always did, instant, unhurried, slipping through the walls of his mind as though they weren’t there, because to this being, they weren’t.
<Who am I? You know who I am, Bruce Ackerman. As for what I want, let’s just say it aligns with what you want.>
He held himself very still inside.
He wanted, badly, to curse this being. Wanted to tear through every piece of restrained composure he had managed to maintain across the last however-many minutes of being systematically broken and rebuilt and broken again, and just let the fury out in one long, unfiltered torrent. He was aware, with a cold remove, that the being would hear every word of it before he’d finished forming the first syllable. That it would probably find that interesting too.
He swallowed it.
The composure cost him something. He could feel where it was coming from.
’You know who I am.’
He turned the sentence over. Not an answer. A redirect. Something designed to feel like information while giving him exactly nothing, or worse, designed to make him question what he already knew, to pry at the edges of his certainty and see what came loose. It had the texture of someone who had done this before. Many times. To many people who had been, in their moment, just as certain they were the exception.
Such a dumb question!
If he knew who this being was, would he have asked in the first place?!