CHAPTER 472

BREAKING THE CHAINS (V)

A blinding white light flashed across the palpable darkness of the high-skies. It cut straight through, like a knife through a sheet of paper, splicing open the voids of beyond, sucking away the darkness until only the night's sky and the massive gash of void existed. Right after it, fervent, crimson flames roared out madly, burning at the white light, causing a world-shaking explosion, resulting in billions of sparks to fly off like wood splinters, raining down upon the earth.

Two blurred figures dashed out of the explosive concoction, one draped in holy white, the other in beautiful flames, both wholly alight.

Lino spun midway through his fall, four pairs of wings unfurling behind his back, white light folding over his shoulders as he darted back toward Ashtar. The latter blurred once more in ever-consuming flames, pillars shooting out from down below like sky-bearing columns, surrounding him in a halo of light. Two swords appeared in his hands, both eerily coated in shadows and flames, a tinge of Chaos juxtaposed at the center of each.

He crossed both swords in front of his chest, slashing outwardly as an x-shaped, thick assortment of a variety of flames bundled together, flying forth. The more distance they covered the larger they got, reaching the size of a small hill just before meeting Lino's blade. The latter swung it upwardly, the holy blade crying out in a low screech, ethereal, white light pulsating off of the sharp edge, blasting at the convergence of the flames.

Another explosion shook the Realms of Hell, the shockwave breaking past the speed of sound, collapsing the high-towering mountains in the surrounding area. The sounds, however, seemed to have been swallowed by the void temporarily before being unleashed; both Lino’s and Ashtar’s ears immediately began to bleed as they lost luster in their cheeks.

Lino crashed into the empty flatland below, cruising back for miles on end, forming a human-sized canal that stretched away from the massive crater. Getting up, his figure once more dashed forth, dyed in thick, red blood, muddied in black soot and gray ash. The feathered wings behind him, all eight holistically-white, fluttered, stirring the winds of nothing into existence, propelling him forth.

On the other end, from the rubble and debris, a pillar of startling, black flames sprouted out, at first straight, suddenly collapsing into a conical shape before flattening out into a ring that fell toward the earth. Alarmed, Lino came to a screeching halt, bringing the Edge up to his head, bending forth slightly, pressing the dull end of the blade with his palm.

“,” he exclaimed rapidly. “Everlasting, Ever-born, Ever-fleeting – 49th Form – Undying Will!!”

A trace of primordial lifted itself off his body, away from his Soul, coating his outer shell in a thin layer of black sheen. Just then, the fury-driven, ring-shaped black flames descended upon him, consuming everything around and about. The ensuing explosion drifted apart the land, uprooting the layers of dirt that hadn't been touched since their inception, seemingly thwarting the entire reality upside-down.

Amidst the upward-rocketing debris, the rubble, the splinters of rock and bones of the long-buried, a figure coated in white flashed, cutting through the remnants of black flames and through the debris, digging its way out of the encirclement, arriving in front of Ashtar within the blink of an eye.

Ear-deafening, metallic clash resulted in yet another blast, one so ripped from reality that it formed a temporary singularity, sucking away everything – be it Qi or Laws that govern them. Both Lino and Ashtar barely managed to free themselves from the collapse, shot backward like the cannonballs, the trails of white and fiery visible like a curving line across the sky lining up with the ground at its end.

Two explosions resulted in yet another upward rain of rock, ash, and soot, boring holes in Hell, each larger and deeper than the previous. This time around, however, it took both a second to recover. Lino was breathing rapidly, his face covered in dirt and dried blood. The scar over his left eye pulsated fiercely, causing a strange, numbing sensation to overwhelm him for a moment. Undaunted, however, he gripped the Edge tightly, channeling Chaotic Qi within him like crazy, causing a swirl akin to a singularity within his Soul. His entire body erupted into a mixture of black and white shadows, his right eye turning blindingly white, so much so it began spitting out transparent, veiled, white smoke from its edges.

Ashtar found himself in a similar situation, his pale-skinned body growing several shades darker due to the dirt and blood. His being shuddered momentarily, flames, akin to the first sparks that kindle into a fire, belting out of his entire being, turning him into a fiery Demon more so than a humanoid-looking creature. A pair of crimson eyes, however, remained central, surrounded by cascading flames of all colors, much like the Great Lake.

Both figures sped out suddenly, bolting over toward one another at speeds that had long since surpassed the one of light; their crash, once more, broke down the reality, forming hundreds of ripples across the spacetime, a whole lot of which resulted in outright tears, glances at the void of the cosmos. Storms pierced out, consuming the living and the dead, the ever-tearing winds blowing through the Hell’s landscape.

There were no witnesses to their battle; rather, there could be no witnesses. There was not a living soul anywhere near them, as all that approached had died from the sheer pressure. The two existed, effectively, in a self-contained vacuum – one of their make and creation, yet also one so distant neither could quite recognize the reality of it.

Lino quickly figured out that the two were managing to shake and break the Laws which governed the reality; the sheer amount of energy the two managed to unleash within the contained space and limited time caused several Laws to simply cease existing – space, for instance, was dead. There was neither its realization nor its concept; not the projection nor the Law. They fought in a vacuum, one that tore away at their minds, bodies, and souls consistently.

Though the Laws of Hell tried to recover the spacetime around them, the recovery stood no chance of catching up to the speed of the tearing.

The two, however, had no time to care for any of it. Lino swung the Edge in a full arc, causing Ashtar to cross his blades over his chest to block the attack, replying immediately with a dual, upward slice toward Lino’s waist. The latter slithered forward, using his breastplate to endure the brunt of the impact, causing his organs to jumble around, shaken, while he thrust the Edge from above, piercing Ashtar’s left-side shoulder all the way through. The blood sizzled as he groaned in pain, kicking Lino’s stomach and shoving him away.

Lino spun rapidly, slicing away with the Edge over a hundred times at that moment, sending countless, whizzing arrays of light that tore open more space around the high-skies. Ashtar bolted back, swinging his dual-blades rapidly in response, sending out jets of fire to match the arrays, causing one explosion after another to echo, bubbling inside the small concentration of space till it couldn’t take it any longer.

A cataclysmic explosion shook the heaven and the earth, tearing open the entire visible spectrum of the sky, the sound of the tearing cloth ripping through the world, as the earth beneath clashed against the resonating shockwaves and winds that caused a world-ending rapture to ensue. Fires and magma sprayed out from beneath the dry ash, turning into the ever-spitting pillars of flame that soon began devouring the entire landscape below, transforming it into one massive sea of fire.

The massive eruption shot both Lino and Ashtar back once more, former’s armor effectively melted an inch away from beyond the repair before he quickly took it off, bearing the brunt with his own body. It reddened rapidly, causing him to groan lowly in pain, gritting his teeth.

Ashtar’s fire-coated body was extinguished, bearing the brunt of the savage winds, thousands of cuts appearing everywhere, bleeding profusely. The two traveled backward for tens of miles before barely managing to stabilize.

Lino’s breathing was shallow and rapid, his hovering body hunched forward, entirely doused in crimson-red blood. Shadows and fleeting light draped over him like fumes from the exhaust, both there and not, Qi within and without maddened and chaotic, barely contained. Even with his insane Vitality, he was still barely hanging on, recovering as quickly as humanly possible.

“… fuckin’ hell,” he mumbled dispiritedly, sighing bitterly. “Warm-up? Fuck that. This wasn’t a warm-up…” he endured the pain as he straightened, taking a deep breath that caused his lungs to burn and scorch, barely managing to endure it without screaming out.

He glanced around, about and above, shocked by what he was witnessing; a maelstrom at the center of the sky above burned away at the reality, black-belted lightning flashing around rapidly and frequently. It tore away at the pre-existing gashes, sucking away the membrane of spacetime, growing ever-so-larger by a second, seemingly ready to swallow the entire world. Unless they stopped now and worked on fixing it, Lino realized, the entire Hell would eventually collapse, disappear form the nightly sky of Noterra.

Shuddering at the thought, his eyes quickly found Ashtar. He was doused in smoke and embers, his body similarly wounded. However, in that crimson pair, he saw no desire to stop. He didn't care, Lino realized, whether Hell existed afterward or not. Whether it collapsed or survived. In those eyes, he saw the reflection of his own primordial desire – to fight, to conquer, to endure, to overcome, to be crowned.

A grin stretched out on Ashtar’s face, one wide and full of excitement, as he spread his arms out, gathering Qi and converting it to Devil Qi at speeds even Lino couldn’t match.

“—perfect, perfect!!” he cried out in excitement. “This is what I’ve longed, what I’ve desired, what I’ve wanted all these eons! We are the Cradle of End, Lyonel! We are the realization of myths! The subjects of the never-believed stories!”

“…” Lino frowned, uncertain as to what Ashtar was alluding to exactly.

“Two souls entwined in the Cyclic Dance, the Beginning and the End,” Lino’s heart trembled all of a sudden as his eyes widened; something terribly familiar began accumulating inside Ashtar’s soul. “The First… and the Last!!" twenty-one pairs of wings suddenly sprung out from Ashtar’s back, all feathered, all ebony-black in their dye. “The Cause and the Effect, eternally strung along the river of time…” Lino froze as he watched swirls of Chaos entwine aplenty, burning in crystal-red, folding over the black feathers. Impossible!!