Chapter 126: The Last Clash
The world cracked at the edges.
Lan lunged forward, Devil’s Lie cleaving through the air, its rusted surface humming with Sword Intent sharp enough to shear a mountain’s bones. But Karahad moved with inevitability — calm, measured, every gesture drawn from a discipline honed on slaughtered beasts.
He did not dodge so much as allow the blade to miss, tilting his body at a fraction that denied violence its triumph.
Then his hand lifted, palm open, and the night itself seemed to hush.
"Third Breath," Karahad whispered.
The air shivered. Lan felt the world bend. Not his flesh — his thread. A cold, merciless pull gripped the very cord of his existence. Karahad’s fingers curled slightly, and suddenly it was as though invisible hooks were dragging at his soul, tugging it toward dissolution.
Lan twisted away, but even the nearness of Karahad’s strike left him staggering. His vision blurred, the marrow in his bones hollowed, the edges of his being fraying as if some unseen hand was erasing him.
It was not a strike of body. It was severance.
Karahad advanced, each step measured, precise. His eyes glowed with the serenity of a man accustomed to ending dynasties.
Lan spat blood onto the earth, forcing his body to remain upright. He felt the tug at his essence, that thin rope between life and the void fraying strand by strand. He inhaled sharply, forced his Qi to swell against the pull, and raised Devil’s Lie once more.
The world shifted again.
Karahad extended both arms outward, fingers splaying. Shadows erupted from him in waves, smothering everything.
"Endless Night."
The stars winked out. The moon was swallowed whole. The battlefield vanished into a suffocating black, absolute and depthless. It was not the blindness of closed eyes, nor the veil of storm clouds. It was annihilation of light, a suffocation of existence.
Lan was suddenly alone in a void without horizon, without ground, without sky. His footing felt fragile, unreal, as if one wrong step would send him tumbling into eternity. His breath echoed too loudly, and even his heartbeat felt muted, stifled by Karahad’s abyss.
Sight failed him. So did sound, and even the air’s whisper against his skin. All narrowed, strangled, until the world itself existed only as Karahad’s presence — that steady, merciless pull at his soul.
Lan’s grip tightened around Devil’s Lie. His lungs burned. A lesser man would already be broken.
"No." His voice cracked the silence like flint on steel. "Not that easily."
His Qi roared to life.
From beneath his feet, rivers of crimson surged outward. A tide of blood-energy writhed like serpents, splitting the nothingness with a color more primal than flame.
Blood Domain: Flowing Death.
The void trembled. Crimson currents carved lines of defiance through Karahad’s abyss, rivers tearing across the battlefield like arteries of a world that refused to die.
Everything within a hundred meters bent to Lan’s will — soil, bone, lingering breath — all drawn into the coursing torrent of inevitable death.
Figures that weren’t there seemed to scream in the tide. The ground, unseen, nonetheless convulsed beneath the weight of his domain.
For a moment, the suffocating night was pierced by the brutal certainty of Lan’s path: all who entered would die.
But Karahad only exhaled, his face unreadable.
"Impressive," he murmured. "But inevitability... is a fragile concept."
His right hand rose, and shadows coiled tighter around his form, no longer consuming but eroding. The blood rivers buckled, their surfaces eaten by an unseen force. Crimson waves collapsed into fragments, dissolving into nothing as if history itself was being rewritten.
Shadow Law.
Lan’s domain shuddered. The rivers thinned, splintered, and began to fade. His Flowing Death, a tide of certainty, was unraveling under the simple decree of another: inevitability could be denied.
Lan’s chest heaved. His veins burned as if his own blood had turned against him. He forced more Qi into the domain, but the shadows gnawed at every drop, each pulse weaker than the last.
Then Karahad moved. A flick of his wrist, a brush of his foot across nothing, and wounds blossomed across Lan’s body. Lines of shadow carved through flesh and bone with surgical precision. Blood sprayed, only to be swallowed by the night.
Lan staggered, coughing crimson. Devil’s Lie trembled in his grip, the sword’s flickering aura weakening beneath the strain of Karahad’s relentless dismantling.
His domain cracked again. The rivers thinned to streams, streams to trickles, until they sputtered out against the abyss.
For the second time since his rebirth, Lan felt his footing slip toward defeat.
---
From the distant and shattered edges of the battlefield, whispers spread like fire through dry grass.
Solaris soldiers huddled in clusters, their eyes wide as they stared into the collapsing night. Some clutched their heads, unable to comprehend the clash unraveling the world before them.
"That assassin..." one soldier muttered, voice shaking. "Is unbeatable."
And fear spread.
Among Lan’s men, the silence was heavier still. Venom clenched his jaw, his scarred face tight with disbelief. Garran’s fists flexed, veins bulging, yet even he could not disguise the tremor of unease crawling through him.
Miller, the Fourth Guard, stood stone-faced, but even his iron posture was a mask stretched thin. He alone had followed Lan from boyhood, had seen him rise from broken prince to executioner of kings. But even he could not deny what he now saw — the impossible strain bending his master’s frame.
The tide of morale faltered. The whisper moved from Solaris throats into Ranevian hearts.
The man who felled a king is being bent and broken by another’s will.
And above them all, the void groaned, shadows and blood tearing against each other, reality itself struggling to contain the weight of two calamities.
The clash of steel rang out one last time—sharp, final, like the tolling of a funeral bell.
Devil’s Lie met Karahad’s blade, sparks screaming in the suffocating darkness of Endless Night. For a fleeting heartbeat, Lan thought he had caught the rhythm of Karahad’s assault. He thought he could force an opening.
Then the League’s assassin shifted.
It was nothing extravagant—no surge of mana, no sudden roar of power. Only a subtle turn of the wrist, the faintest twist in the dance of steel.
Yet it was enough.
Devil’s Lie was wrenched from Lan’s hands, ripped away as though the sword itself had chosen to abandon him. The blade clattered somewhere in the void, unseen, unheard, lost.
A hiss of breath escaped him. His fingers curled into emptiness.
Before he could reclaim even a moment of space, shadow poured around his limbs like oil. Chains, black as absence, coiled up his arms and across his chest.
They cinched tight with merciless precision, forcing him down. The ground rose up like an executioner’s block. Dust and shards of broken stone scraped into his bleeding skin as he crashed to his knees.
Karahad stood over him, cold as carved obsidian, his expression devoid of cruelty or triumph. To him, this was not a battle—only a mission reaching its conclusion. He raised his weapon, its tip lingering at Lan’s throat, a single inch from the pulse that still thundered despite his exhaustion.
"The outcome was written the moment I arrived." His voice was not boast but verdict, a shadowed whisper that rang like law. "You have fought well—yet all things end."
The words settled like frost into Lan’s bones.
For a moment, the weight of them pressed heavier than the chains. His body screamed with brokenness—cuts too deep, bones threatening collapse, Qi bleeding from him like water through torn cloth.
Every breath came ragged, laced with iron.
Yet something inside him still defied.
Lan shut his eyes. His chest rose and fell, slow, deliberate. His hand clawed at the ground. And then, with a sound like grinding stone, the chains cracked. Crimson light bled from his skin, searing against shadow.
A guttural roar tore free from his throat as he forced his body upright, muscles tearing in protest, ribs flaring with fire. Shadows shattered around him, dispersing into tatters of void.
He stumbled forward, staggering as though each step drew him deeper into death’s embrace.
But he did not stop.
His fingers closed again on Devil’s Lie. The blade quivered in his grasp, its rusted length flickering faintly as if the weapon itself was straining against the same weight that bore down on its master.
The glow it gave was fragile, almost sorrowful—like a candle refusing to die in a storm.
Lan’s legs trembled. Blood traced his jawline, dripping from his chin into the dust. Still, he raised the sword, though the weight of it felt like a mountain on his shoulders.
Karahad watched, expression unmoved. He did not rush forward, did not interrupt the pathetic struggle. His gaze was a cold study, as though observing a beast refusing to accept the spear through its heart.
"You cannot change the truth," the assassin murmured. "Even the strongest will falls to the knife."
Lan pressed onward. Each step cost him more than he could afford, tearing him further from survival. Yet he advanced, Devil’s Lie gripped tight, its edge trembling in the dark.
The void thickened.
Karahad raised his weapon once more. Shadows unfurled in waves, consuming the ruins, drowning even the memory of stars.
The battlefield became a tomb without walls, every remnant of life strangled beneath the suffocating shroud.
Lan stood at the center of it, broken, swaying, a figure at the edge of collapse.
He had one more card to deal, and if that did not work—he would die here.
He knew it, felt it: there would be no salvation, no miracle waiting to rise from the ashes.
There was only this moment.
Karahad’s eyes glimmered like obsidian catching the faintest trace of light. His blade descended, final as a closing tomb.
His voice followed it, flat and merciless.
"Lanard Solaris... your story ends here."