Chapter 157: The Living Gazer

Luna moved through the chaos like she had no interest in touching any of it. Her twin radiant threads were already out and spinning.

"You haven’t been the only one grinding Isabella~" she said in the most cheerful tone imaginable.

Leon and Arvendis took the direct approach. Neither of them bothered cutting anything. Leon coated himself in dense layers of mana meanwhile Arvendis used Rai, which walked through the vines letting them shatter against their skin.

BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Leon slid back three meters from the accumulated force and dug his heels into the sand. "These things hit like siege engines!"

Arvendis deflected a root the size of a horse with his forearm.

The arena was chaos in the best possible sense. Crimson arcs from Theodore’s sword. Golden vortex from Luna’s threads. The sustained thunderous pressure of Rai-Kin meeting thick ancient wood over and over. In the stands several weaker students had gone to one knee without deciding to.

"I can’t even track them..."

"They’re not human. They cannot be human."

"Look at that pressure! How are we even breathing?!"

Isabella raised both hands higher. Her golden eyes went sharp with actual intent. "You’ve all improved. None of you walked directly into my binding traps this time."

Luna giggled. "Show-off."

Theodore wiped his face. "Stop flexing Isabella!"

"Flexing?"

BOOOOOOM.

The mana around her doubled. The ground cracked down to its foundation and vines the size of cathedral pillars tore up from the depths. Ancient-grade. The kind that made the earlier ones look like weeds. The air pressure from the eruption knocked Theodore and Luna both into defensive formation immediately.

"She’s going for real!" Theodore gripped his sword with both hands.

"Combine with me!" Luna commanded. Her threads spun up into a massive golden vortex.

"NOW!" Isabella threw both hands forward and the apocalyptic wave of ancient roots surged across the arena.

The crowd held its breath.

SHING.

One sound. Impossibly quiet given everything else happening.

Time stopped for one half of a second.

A line of pitch-black and blood-red light crossed the entire arena floor horizontally.

SLASH!!!!!!

The shockwave hit everything at once.

The entire forest of ancient vines was cut in half. Cleanly severed in a single straight horizontal line as if a god had dragged a blade across a table. Thousands of roots and branches and wooden tendrils all fell at the same moment in opposite directions and collapsed into a mountain of dead splinters.

Isabella’s golden eyes went to their maximum width. "What..."

The black-red arc didn’t stop there. It passed right beside her close enough that she felt it move the air next to her ear and kept going and hit the forty-foot granite wall at the edge of the arena.

BOOOOOOOOOOM.

The wall opened like paper. A fifty-foot fissure torn clean through ancient stone. The slash continued out the back of the arena and kept rising into the open sky until it split the clouds and finally dissolved somewhere high above the city.

Complete silence settled over the area.

A hundred thousand people and not one sound.

Slowly every eye in the colosseum and on the arena floor turned toward the same point.

Alden stood near the arena edge, holding a weapon that nobody in the room had ever seen before in their lives.

Dark crimson metal that was almost black and leaked living dark smoke around his arm and across his hand. And along the flat of the blade from hilt to tip were dozens of eyes. Blood-red eyes embedded in the steel and every single one of them was moving. Twitching, Blinking, Rolling to look in different directions. Several were looking at the crowd right now and the crowd was looking back and not one person in those stands wanted to be the one those eyes were focused on.

A terrified murmur started spreading from the lower seats upward.

"What is that sword?!"

"He cut through Isabella’s entire domain in one hit?!"

"The eyes are looking at us. They’re LOOKING AT US."

Alden raised the blade slightly and watched the crimson eyes on the flat of the steel track the movement simultaneously. He flexed his grip and felt the immense hungry energy of the weapon humming through his hand.

Against Aurora the gap in their levels had been too wide for this to mean much. But Aurora was Stage VIII. Against anything below that this blade was something else entirely.

Isabella turned toward him. Her composure was gone in a way he had never seen from her before. She was staring at the Living Gazer with something in her eyes that was between calculation and genuine alarm.

’What kind of weapon is that,’ she was clearly thinking. ’And how did one swing erase everything I just built.’

The vines began growing back slowly from the ground around her feet. She straightened. Her golden eyes refocused.

The challenge came back into her expression. Sharp and real and genuinely interested now in a way the earlier warmth hadn’t been.

"That was quite the entrance Alden." Her voice had an edge it usually didn’t carry. "I didn’t expect anyone to erase my domain in a single swing."

She raised one hand. The wood-element mana around her condensed into hyper-pressurized spears and the density of them was significantly higher than anything she had been using in the earlier exchanges.

The familiar confident dangerous smile returned to her face. The one that said she was done warming up.

"Let’s see how you handle deep layers of my magic."

________________

Author’s Note:

Damn... a new month already?

I swear it still feels like yesterday that I was begging you guys for a Castle. XD

But wait...

YOU GUYS DIDN’T COMPLETE THE GOAL. ARGH!!

The goal was normally 2 Castles for 50 Chapters in exchange for 1 Privilege Coin.

And this time you guys didn’t even fulfill that!

So I’m not going to show kindness and give away the Chapters.

THIS TIME, YOU GET PUNISHED.

Forget those Chapters. MUHAHAHA!

Although... I won’t lie the fact that I got 1 Castle from Midnight really motivated me. Seriously, thank you, buddy. :)

I hope I get more from you. XD

And I also got a lot more comments from many other readers this time, so please keep commenting and making me laugh while I read through them. Your comments genuinely make my day.

Anyway...

THE OFFER IS STILL ON!

You guys can still gift a Castle and take away Chapters REAL QUICK.

Yeah, I’m kind enough to keep the offer going.

I’m not even increasing the requirement:

2 Castles OR 1 Spaceship → Take away another 25 Privilege Chapters!

That makes 50 Chapters total if you hit the goal.

So... what are you waiting for?

Feed the author and take his Chapters lol.

Anyway, thank you all for reading, and I’ll see you in the next Chapter!

Cyaa!