The marble table that had formed the center of their spiritual council just moments ago hadn’t simply broken. The thousand-year-old stone fractured into millions of floating shards, dematerializing into shimmering dust within a single heartbeat. The golden, liquid mist of torn primal magic drifted aimlessly through the void of the Spirit Realm, slowly dissolving against the black horizon.
The pressure exerted by the five entities was so crushing that the atmosphere in the spirit world seemed to solidify on the spot. It felt as though the air had turned into liquid, boiling lead pounding against their physical and spiritual chests.
Silarias and Nyx stood shoulder to shoulder on the mirror-smooth floor of energy stretching out beneath their boots like a black ocean. High in the blood-red sky hung two overarching moons, casting a fiery glare over the battlefield. Before them, Odr, Frey, Freya, Lucifer, and Bansadarius let their auras pulse. Swirls of golden, purple, and red light erupted from the mirror floor.
The divine presence of the five entities slammed into the dimension with a continuous physical shockwave. Yet Silarias looked at them with a remarkably dry, unbothered expression. He raised a single eyebrow, let his tense shoulders drop casually, and spoke in a cold, almost bored teenage tone.
“Uh… so this is basically just like the Spirit Realm,” Silarias began, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his combat tunic while tilting his head sideways. “Bit unfair both ways, isn’t it? We can’t even really show how much we’ve grown on the outside here.”
Nyx nodded slowly beside him. Her royal, proud composure betrayed not a single trace of doubt or fear, but her eyes gleamed with a sharp, analytical gaze, registering every microscopic muscle twitch from the gods.
“Precisely,” Nyx added in a cold, measured voice. “You’re playing a home game in this dimension. We’re fighting spiritual projections of ancient gods and legends here. What real combat value does this actually prove?”
Silarias made a quick, nonchalant gesture with his right hand toward the floating void around them, adding with a confident, almost provocative smirk: “Besides… if this is purely spiritual space, doesn’t that mean we can just do and be whatever we think up on our end too? We can simply bend the rules of reality here to our own will!”
Lucifer, leaning back on his throne of shadows in the middle of the divine circle with crossed arms, locked eyes with him from the void. He spoke directly in a soothing, ice-cold tone, tempering the surging energy around them with a lazy, commanding wave of his dark hand.
“Whoa, whoa… dial it back, Liberator,” Lucifer said with a sharp, haughty smirk that scraped like gravel across a tombstone. “Yes, this is the spirit world, but there are still rock-hard, ruthless restrictions in place. You can’t just manifest whatever your teenage brain guesses up on the fly. The boundaries of your soul and the Seals of your Vessel still dictate absolute law. You really can’t just do anything here. Make no mistake about that.”
Odr, Frey, and Freya exchanged glances for a fraction of a second. The brief silence that followed was abruptly shattered when Frey threw his head far back and burst into loud, booming laughter. Freya let out a sharp, amused laugh, and Odr shook his massive head with a slow chuckle. Across the void, Lucifer and Bansadarius joined in on the laughter. The deep, echoing sound rolled like a heavy thunderclap across the spiritual dimension, vibrating the mirror floor.
“What are you even talking about?!” Frey shouted with a wide, booming laugh, planting his hands firmly on his hips as he leaned forward. “Yeah, where did you even get that idea?! And besides… I do think it’s unfair, but even with all your grown powers… haha! We’re not who we are for nothing!”
The open, arrogant taunting from the legends struck Silarias like a spark in a powder keg. The feigned calm on his face evaporated within a single heartbeat. His teeth gritted with a crack, the blue and gold-orange veins along his neck flared intensely, and adrenaline surged like liquid fire through his bloodstream. Even in this spirit world, his muscles coiled so tight his joints popped audibly.
Do they seriously think we’re still those small, clueless outcasts from the academy gate?! raged through Silarias’ mind at lightning speed. Even after all the brutal battles, facing Abaddon, and surviving the trial of the Hellverse, these spirits still treat me like a child. I’m not letting any god, legend, or Infernal treat me like a worthless pawn on their chessboard ever again!
“Unfair?!” Silarias snarled, taking an aggressive step forward with a hard stomp. The gold-orange energy of his Bansaday release was already leaking down his forearms. “I’ll show you what’s unfair! I’m breaking…”
Before he completely lost control of himself, he felt an ice-cold, unyielding pressure around his right hand. Nyx had grabbed his hand, squeezing her fingers around his with absolute conviction and strength. The direct physical touch cut through his rising rage like a razor-sharp ice blade.
“Easy now…” Nyx spoke calmly and grounded, without taking her sharp eyes off the laughing gods for even a millisecond. “Vulkan was worse, and you handled him too…”
The cool, unwavering voice of Nyx brought the storm raging in his mind to an instant halt. Silarias took a deep, shuddering breath, felt the familiar, firm grip of her palm, and cooled off within a fraction of a second. The blind fury yielded to a razor-sharp, dangerous focus. He glanced sideways at her sharp, royal profile.
“Remember the food?” Silarias asked suddenly with a small, sideways nod of his head.
Nyx looked at him briefly, her dark eyes searching the shadows of the dimension for a split second. “Yeah?”
Silarias said no more. A dark, almost maniacal smirk broke across his face. With a sharp, ruthless motion, he snapped the fingers of his free hand.
The reality of the Spirit Realm responded instantly to his authority. The mirror-smooth, dark floor of energy began to warp, wave, and collapse. Twisting roots of ancient magical energy erupted upward from the depths. On the left side of the arena, a hollow stone chest covered in glowing dark runes rose from the ground, hitting the mirror floor with a dull thud that sent shockwaves through space.
Odr, Frey, and Freya craned their necks, staring with raised eyebrows and furrowed brows at the massive stone object that had just materialized out of nowhere. But before they could utter a word, they felt the ground beneath their own heavy boots shake violently.
In the corner where Silarias and Nyx stood, the energy floor tore wide open with a deafening crack. An ancient trunk shot upward from the depths. Silarias and Nyx were lifted high into the air on the thick, surging branches. An echoing, distorted laugh from the two of them rolled across the field as they rose higher and higher, carried by the magical growth of the wood. Their voices no longer sounded like two teenagers, but like a harmony of cosmic rulers.
Within seconds, the tree reached full maturity. A gigantic cherry blossom tree towered far above the entire battlefield. The branches exploded into millions of pink cherry blossoms. The petals detached in masses, swirling across the arena in a storm, shimmering beneath the red light of the twin moons hanging in the background sky.
Frey, Freya, Odr, Lucifer, and Bansadarius all looked up at the floating blossom storm simultaneously, letting out a long, deep sigh.
“So much for measuring the strength of our young leaders…” Frey muttered with a faint, resigned smile on his face. “We hyped them up a bit too much… we really should have known.”
The playful moment vanished in an instant. The laughter on the faces of the spirits faded. The legends began preparing for battle one by one, and the atmosphere shifted into pure escalation.
Frey was the first to switch into his combat state. His form altered within a second into that of a classic Norse warrior. Thick, raw steel armor plates covered his muscular chest, and a radiant shield vibrated with defensive runic magic in his left hand.
Beside him, Freya made her shift. She entered a streamlined Norse warrior mode. Her light armor fitted seamlessly around her athletic body, and her right hand gripped a long, sharp spear crackling with lightning and elemental energy.
Odr grabbed his oak staff, tossing it high into the air with a graceful sweep, letting it spin three times before catching it right at its center of gravity. The moment his fingers touched the wood, he transformed into a classic Norse staff warrior, draped in a deep-blue cloak infused with ancient frequencies.
Bansadarius burst into a loud, booming laugh on his end. “Hahaha… Vessel… Vessel… Vessel, oh Vessel, ahahaha!”
The lion warrior tensed his back and unleashed a brutal lion’s roar. With every second the roar resonated through the dimension, his body warped. He grew broader, more muscular, and more imposing, until a hybrid lion berserker stood there with a fiery mane and claws like broadswords. He locked eyes with Lucifer with a maniacal glint.
“Welcome to the real work!” Bansadarius roared.
Lucifer looked at him, letting out a low, dark chuckle. His body began to warp with a cracking sound. He leaned slightly forward, and six majestic, snow-white angel wings erupted from his back. In the background, a divine, heavenly sound of harp music and angelic choirs swelled. Lucifer wrapped his wings around his body, intense beams of light piercing through the feathers.
Yet at the absolute climax, the divine sound was brutally shattered. A harsh, deafening shriek tore the harp music apart. The atmosphere inverted completely.
The snow-white feathers on his wings burned away to black ash within a millisecond. His wings morphed into pitch-black demon wings that swallowed the surrounding light. His body expanded, his muscles hardened, and two curved horns thrust upward from his forehead. The music flipped entirely into a dark frequency. The moment his black wings snapped wide open again, he stood there in his full, cruel Satan Mode. His eye sockets were pitch-black, save for two fierce, red glowing irises burning with original sin.
Lucifer bared his sharp teeth in a ruthless grin. “Time to play, haha… FREEDOM!”
BOOM!
Before he could finish his sentence, the silence was violently shattered. The stone chest on the side of the arena began to vibrate intensely. The stone runes lit up brightly, and a pulse-pounding battle beat blasted out of the chest across the arena. Heavy bass and rhythms thundered through the floor, making the cherry blossom petals dance to the track.
The five legends looked up toward the crown of the cherry blossom tree at the same time. They could already hear it coming.
The surging, heavy bass of the combat music thundered out of the rune-covered stone chest with physical frequency. The soundwaves were so powerful they drew circular ripples across the black energy floor, forcing millions of floating pink cherry blossom petals to vibrate in synchronous rhythm through the air. The five legends stood arrayed in their full combat stances, their eyes locked upward at the towering canopy of the cherry blossom tree dominating the spirit world.
The sky above them tore wide open with a ripping sound.
Silarias and Nyx didn’t simply shoot downward; they transformed the entire descent into a visual escalation of absolute magical dominance. Like two unleashed projectiles, they dove straight out of the highest branches of the tree, cutting over the field. Golden-yellow sunbeams and black, ice-cold shadows crossed each other at sound-barrier-shattering speeds. Silarias flashed in and out of reality on the left with flickering solar flares scorching the air, while Nyx shot down on the right as a stream of silver moon-shadows. They flashed crosswise between each other time and time again, their trajectories so tightly aligned they missed each other by a hair, moving perfectly in sync to the heavy beat of the battle music.
The visual impact of their transformed states was breathtaking.
Silarias had grown noticeably broader and more muscular in this form, straining his baggy battle armor tight across his frame and outlining every muscle fiber. Around his shoulders, a black lion’s mane raged like a living shadow of Bansaday, flaring in time with his breathing. Two robust, black horns thrust menacingly upward from his hair, saturated with dark energy. His gaze carried the ruthless aura of an apex predator blended with the gravity of a fallen god. His pupils were narrowed into a sharp, vertical amber lion slit. Deep within that predatory slit cut the dark brand of Lucifer’s Curse: a broken silver star that swallowed and distorted the surrounding light. And as his biological regeneration kicked in silently in the background, the hereditary traits of the Hydra triggered; fine, tentacle-like rings around that lion slit split and pulsed like living tissue, locking motionless onto his prey.
Let them laugh, raged deep within Silarias’ mind while adrenaline thudded through his veins. They think they can still test us like we’re kids playing with wooden sticks. They have no idea what we’ve been through, what we had to break just to stand here. We’re not just going to show them how we’ve grown; we’re going to crush the pride of these gods on the spot!
Beside him, Nyx embodied cosmic void and darkness. Silver void energy spewed from her eye sockets like a churning sea of fire. Her irises had turned into the emptiness of night, where the original sin of the Moon Queen burned like a silver crescent moon slowly orbiting her pupil. Deeper within that silver glow lived the ancient blood of the Time Keepers; microscopic, mathematical clock lines and ticking gear patterns lit up, moving in sync with the heartbeat of the dimension. At the center of that cosmic clockwork floated six brightly glowing silver dots in a tight, closed circle—the heavy mark of the Seals that kept her powers chained. At the outer edges of her irises, the Ice Anting formed a sharp frost ring that fractured the silver light like a frozen prism. Around her head floated a massive mane of long, silver hair flaring like the tail of a comet, while black, spherical ice constructs of compressed void energy orbited her like mini planets, freezing the space around her.
My powers are still chained by these six Seals, Nyx analyzed icily in her own thoughts, her gaze dissecting the legends’ battle array in a fraction of a millisecond. But even with these limitations, the original sin of my mother and the blood of the Time Keepers are more than enough to dictate this battlefield. They underestimate the synergy between Silarias and me. They’re going to feel how the void swallows everything.
BOOM!
The two teenagers slammed down like a double meteor right in the center of the five legends. The shockwave of the impact blew the cherry blossom petals into millions of shreds, shattered the air barriers, and drove meter-high ripples across the black energy floor.
The arena turned into a chaotic tempest of fists, spears, swords, and flying magical shockwaves. The surging beat from the chest pushed the combat pace to insane levels, but the legends hadn’t come simply to flex their muscles. The combat frequencies served as the direct channel to ram the promised, ancient truths raw into the consciousness of the two teenagers.
Bansadarius turned on Nyx with a brutal swipe of his claws. The air tore open in five parallel trenches under his raw lion strength. Nyx avoided the razor-sharp vacuum waves effortlessly by drifting backward with an ice-cold shadow step, instantly launching a black, compressed void orb from her floating ice constructs straight at him.
“Listen well, daughter of the night!” Bansadarius roared with a voice that cracked the mirror floor to its core, swatting the void orb aside with his bare claw and absorbing the explosion. “You wonder where your bloodline actually originates?! Your mother, Abysia… she was no simple queen of a lost realm! She was one of the very first generations of entities born directly from the Big Bang itself! When I roamed the worlds freely as the original Bansadarius, our paths crossed! We were brothers-in-arms! She lived her entire existence under constant suppression, alongside me, fighting against a universal order that sought to erase and chain us!”
Nyx’s gaze froze for a fraction of a second. The wild words penetrated to the deepest core of her soul, making her heart skip a beat.
My mother… born from the Big Bang itself?! thought Nyx, a wave of shock and realization cutting through her. She wasn’t a victim of fate; she was a primal concept of creation fighting beside the original lion warrior! That’s why I carry this weight, that’s why the void responds to my will!
Her combat instincts immediately overruled the emotion. With an ice-cold flick of her wrist, she manifested a thick ice barrier of void energy to keep the charging lion berserker at bay, as the frost ring in her eyes burned brighter.
On the other side of the battlefield, Lucifer crossed his dark energies with Silarias’ Bansaday claws. The impact of their clash burned holes into the fabric of the Spirit Realm, completely blasting away the energy floor beneath their boots in a cloud of black and golden particles.
“And you, Liberator!” Lucifer roared, catching Silarias’ release and shoving his physical mass back with power, his black demon wings snapping wide behind him. “You want to know why my Curse eats so deep and seamlessly into your soul?! Your mother… she was the previous bearer of my Curse! A dark entity of death and a mortal vessel who found each other, intertwined in a deadly dance where one could not exist without the darkness of the other! She carried the exact same crushing burden of absolute freedom that you feel on your shoulders right now!”
Silarias clenched his teeth so hard he tasted copper in his mouth. The raw revelation struck harder at his mind than the physical blows of the fallen angel.
My mother… thought Silarias, images of an unknown past flashing through his mind. She went through this exact hell. She carried the same Curse, bound to the spirit of death itself, feeling the same irresistible urge to liberate everything and everyone. I’m no accident. I am the continuation of her will!
The veins on his forehead throbbed violently with suppressed emotion, and the amber lion slit in his eyes flickered dangerously from the massive discharge of power surging through his body.
In the middle of the chaos of flying magic and explosions, Lucifer recovered his posture. He leaned back slowly in his Satan Mode, letting his demon wings hang loosely, baring his sharp teeth in a broad grin.
Without hesitating for even a microsecond, Silarias shot straight through the rising smoke cloud and the explosion of energy. He flashed like a blinding golden-black beam of light directly between Freya and Odr. The physical impact of his trajectory slammed into the two Norse gods with immense force. With a heavy bang, Freya and Odr were launched backward, tumbling across the mirror floor for hundreds of meters through the arena while sparks erupted from the ground.
He looked sideways at Nyx, who landed right in front of him on the mirror floor, her silver hair flaring around her head.
“So… like I was saying,” Lucifer spoke in a surprisingly dry, relaxed tone, casually dropping his claws and smothering the surging magic around him. “At least you listen. This isn’t to kill you or anything, you need to gain information so we’re not going all out either… Don’t worry about it.”
BANG!
Lucifer hadn’t even finished his reassuring sentence when the atmosphere of the Spirit Realm was violently ripped to shreds by an explosion of divine wrath.
From the distance, Odr and Freya came leaping back across the broken mirror floor at sound-barrier-shattering speeds. The sudden launch Silarias had dealt them had completely shattered their divine pride and ancient egos. Their eyes were wide with shock, humiliation, and fury. Their divine auras exploded in a purple and golden-white light that shook the spirit world to its very foundation, turning the sky blood-red.
“EVERYTHING WE’VE GOT, NOW!!” Odr and Freya roared in unison, completely out of their minds with rage, as their weapons burst into a divine light that illuminated the entire arena in a blinding glare.