Chapter 27: Kill You

Sebastian could tell something was off with Nathan's state and probed carefully: "You're at peak condition right now—no day like today. Let's have you go into the Between and fetch that thing today!"

All those days of special training and fighting hadn't just honed Nathan's combat skills and his command of vitae—they'd tempered his temperament into something deep and still too. He asked, flat and calm: "What exactly is this thing you want me to fetch? You've kept it hush-hush this long—surely you can tell me now?"

Sebastian was quite pleased with that reaction. "I need a plant called the Phantomveil Vine! It's a required ingredient for a spell I'm practicing."

Nathan stayed quiet a good while, then suddenly flashed a toothy grin. "Actually... that can wait. I've got something else that's super urgent."

Sebastian blinked. "And what would that be?"

Nathan spoke very slowly, as if chewing over every single word before letting it out, and said, dead serious: "I want to know! Now that my... strength has grown this much... could I... kill you?"

He meant it, too!

He kept pushing his vitae higher. The emerald vitae given off by the Comet-Gem Mantis bared its edge to the fullest, piercing out through his skin—the aura he radiated had grown at least five or six times more forceful.

Sebastian let out a wry laugh. "You think you can kill me?"

Nathan gave a sly heh-heh and answered with action: a Sun-Pinning Hammer, hardest and fiercest of the forms, blasted straight at Sebastian's face.

Sebastian pressed down lightly in the air, totally unbothered, and laughed: "Forgot, did you? The Comet-Gem Mantis is a war-beast I raised personally." The phantom of the Comet-Gem Mantis snapped rigid—and Nathan's own movement froze with it, as if he'd been paralyzed on the spot.

Sebastian gave an easy shrug and gave Nathan a long, amused look.

A strange little smile crept onto Nathan's face. He gave a low shout—and the Comet-Gem Mantis's phantom suddenly shattered. The punch still thundered out, but the vitae behind it had flipped to the deepest pure black, not a trace of emerald edge left.

Sebastian had never dreamed the boy could break through the Comet-Gem Mantis's vitae lock. Caught flat-footed, he twisted aside in a hurry—but having lost the initiative, he took Nathan's fist across the belly.

The punch didn't carry much power—Sebastian didn't feel so much as a twinge of injury. But when he saw the excited grin creeping onto Nathan's mouth, his "heart" sank. And that was a heart-sinking in the most literal sense—because he felt something extra sitting in his stomach, and a pain like being torn open.

Sebastian's face went instantly, exceptionally ugly, and he said in a low bark: "What did you put inside my body?"

Nathan heh-hehed. "Nothing much. Just a rock, that's all."

Sebastian said, half-smiling, half not: "You take me for one of those trash bloodborn beasts?" He barked out one sharp shout; his muscles squirmed, and his lower belly tore itself open in a bloody gash, squeezing out a fist-sized stone.

Sebastian casually crushed the stone to powder and said, cool as you please: "Whenever I feel like it, forcing out whatever you slip inside me is child's play. Since you're itching to die, I'll oblige—have a taste of my black beetles."

Sebastian swept both arms, and two banks of black cloud came flying out!

Both clouds were built of countless black beetles, wings droning buzz-buzz-buzz, and they merged into a black curtain crashing down over Nathan.

Nathan's heart gave a small plunge—he hadn't expected Sebastian to force the stone out of his belly either. He thought fast: "Black-light vitae can't stop these black beetles at all! These bloodborn insects are born devourers of spiritual essence, freaky as hell. Might as well go all in against him." Mind made up, he flung his whole body at Sebastian, flat-out ignoring the beetle threat.

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Sebastian clucked his tongue twice, almost complimentary: "To think you'd make a burn-the-boats call like that—real courage. But what you maybe don't know is that my ascendant-path martial arts rank even above my war-beast raising."

Sebastian slapped out a casual palm, and within that little stretch of space, layered palm-forces bloomed one on top of another. All he had to do was hold Nathan up for a single instant, and the beetle swarm would chew any enemy to confetti.

Sebastian absolutely did not believe Nathan had what it took to withstand his black beetles; deep down he was still rather sorry his plan had collapsed at the finish line.

At this razor's-edge moment, the Titan Godslayer Canon's power flooded Nathan's whole body, and he threw the most tyrannical form of all—the Star-Swallowing Form!

He'd only just mastered the Star-Swallowing Form and never once tested its power, but during his vitae resonance he'd glimpsed the form's secret. This form of the Titan Godslayer Canon was like a stellar black hole born inside the body, able to devour anything—but devouring wasn't the Star-Swallowing Form's greatest secret. That was—assimilation!

Nathan knew Sebastian's black beetles were savage and vicious, but the truth was he hadn't been awakened long and didn't have many tricks for facing an enemy. Nothing left but to roll the dice—drive the Star-Swallowing Form and bet his life on it!

The Star-Swallowing Form spun up, and eight streams of black-light vitae broke out of his body, writhing and twisting like monstrous pythons, instantly generating a vast, oceanic devouring force.

Sebastian's palm-force collided with the Star-Swallowing Form, and he instantly felt his spiritual essence leaking out of him at a crazy rate. Startled, he twisted and lashed out with a braced kick that caught Nathan square in the chest, booting the fiercely lunging boy clean off his feet.

The exchange was quick as a hawk on a startled hare—over in a flash. Aided by the Comet-Gem Mantis, Nathan had mastered the Comet-Gem Mantis Style—but in the end he was no match for a man who'd drilled ascendant-path martial arts since childhood, and he lost the beat in his responses. The Star-Swallowing Form had won him a brief edge, but the kick sent him flying before the form's follow-through power could even come out to play.

Still in midair, Nathan got blanketed, densely packed, by the black beetles. Scalp crawling, he still fought to claw life out of death—black-light vitae flooding every limb and bone of his body, pushing the Star-Swallowing Form's power to its absolute limit.

The black beetles frenziedly gnawed at Nathan's body, a relentless skritch-skritch of mandibles in his ears, gruesome to the extreme!

Sebastian relaxed a little, half-regretful: "How does this kid know a power-devouring method? He only just awakened his bloodline—no way he could've learned anything like it from anyone. Did he awaken an inborn lineage inheritance? The black beetles are merciless beyond words. Even if I wanted to spare you now, it's probably too late."

Just as Sebastian moved to call the beetles back, alarm bells went off—a whole chunk of the black beetles had gone dark to his senses. His reactions were lightning fast: one beckon, and the black beetles tore off Nathan and shot into the air—but close to thirty percent of them no longer answered his summons at all, vanishing one after another into the black-light vitae shielding Nathan's body.

Nathan let out a weird heh-heh-heh of a laugh and stood back up. His clothes were shredded and he looked a total wreck, but an intensely dangerous aura was rolling out of his body.