Chapter 48: End of Two Guilds, Cocoon Cracks
[Congratulations, you have acquired an Epic-rank Armor—Thunder Buster Chainmail.]
’Epic-rank....tsk.’ Aidan clicked his tongue.
Then, he suddenly got an idea.
’Wait, if everything with power can turn into a power bond, then two compatible power bonds can combine as well, right?’
He decided to try it. The gem he had acquired before was able to fuse with one of the bonds, turning Blood Hunter Knuckle Dusters into Netheraxin Blood Hunter Knuckle Dusters, granting two additional aspects, and increase its attribute boost.
Using his talent actively, he turned Thunder Buster Chainmail into a power bond first.
And then combined it into Blitzer Burst power bond.
[Fusion commensing...]
’It worked?’ Aidan blinked.
[Fusion successful. Power Bond has successfully transformed.]
[Power Bond: Thunder Blitz Lord]
-Power: 27,490
-Bond Level: F
-Attributes:
—> +100% Omni-Movement Speed.
—> +100% Attack Speed.
-Aspects:
—> Lightning (100%)
—> Metal (100%)
—> Burst (100%)
—> Electromagnatism (100%)
’Lighting and Metal are energy. Burst is ethereal activity. Electromagnatism...don’t tell me I got it all? Attraction disappeared because I got Electromagnatism.’
Aidan’s eyes flickered with currents.
Electromagnatism’s core foundation was Attraction and Repulsion.
He could feel it, and understand it now that this aspect of Electromagnatism bonded with him.
’Powerful. This is utterly powerful.’
First, Aidan tried the waves.
His eyes glinted with electrones generated by his Mana, through the use of Electromagnatic aspect, accelerating them just enough to create X-rays.
A faint crimson-blue sheen in his eyes generated.
He saw through walls, greenary, and everything before looking at Jovan who was floating ten meters off the ground.
A special barrier was also placed by him, covering 1000 meters radius around the mansion to make sure once incoming enemies entered inside, nothing and no one could go out.
Through the walls, through a thousand meters of night, Aidan watched them come.
X-ray sight painted the world in crimson-blue glass. Trees became smoke. The mansion became a suggestion.
And on the far road, a river of heat signatures poured toward the barrier in disciplined ranks.
’Two families,’ Aidan mused, currents flickering in his eyes. ’And they brought everything.’
He counted fast. Dozens of SSS-rank silhouettes. A cluster of Epic-rank cores burning brighter than the rest.
Two of those cores blazed hottest. The patriarchs.
Right as the front rank touched the property line, Aidan called out without turning from the window.
"Jovan. Make sure their bodies are intact. They are Arthur’s food."
Outside, ten meters up, Jovan paused with his hands in his pockets.
"Intact." He sighed like a man handed a chore. "You know that’s the hard way for me, right?"
"That’s why I’m asking you and not the dragon." Aidan grinned. "Have fun. Stay tidy."
Jovan rolled his neck, the black spots on his face catching the moonlight.
"No corrosion, then," he murmured. "No unmaking. Just the quiet stuff."
The convoy stopped at the edge of the property.
Patriarch Fening stepped out first, green hair lifting in a wind that wasn’t there, green flame curling off his shoulders.
Behind him, the Windwell family’s elites fanned into a wedge. Behind them, Brimlock’s bearded patriarch and his own bloodthirsty pack.
"That’s the place." Fening’s eyes went bloodshot as he stared at the lone figure hanging in the air. "You. Did you kill my son?"
Jovan tilted his head, considering the question like a man asked the time.
"I don’t know your son," he said mildly. "But I’m fairly sure you’re all going to sleep here. Does that count?"
Brimlock barked a laugh, beard bristling. "One brat? Playing at Divine airs?" He raised a fist wrapped in grinding stone. "Take him."
The barrier answered first.
A dome of pale light snapped shut over the entire estate, a thousand meters across, sealing every last one of them inside with the smiling boy.
The wind died. The night went quiet. And every Hunter in that field felt it at once, the simple truth that nothing here was leaving.
"A trap," Fening hissed. "So what. We outnumber him fifty to one."
"Numbers." Jovan drew one hand from his pocket and turned his palm to the sky. "You’ll want more than that."
The night bent.
A veil of soft black light unrolled across the whole sealed field, thin as silk, and settled over every Hunter like a shadow given weight.
Inside it, fortune quietly turned its back on them. And life, just as quietly, began to leak.
The first spearman lunged, and his legs simply gave.
Not cut. Not struck. His luck to keep standing had run dry, and he folded into the grass whole and still, as if sleep had reached up and taken him.
The man beside him tried to shout a warning and found no breath waiting in his chest.
He sat down against a comrade, eyes fluttering, and did not get up. Not a mark on him.
"Formation!" a captain roared. "Hold the line, brace your cores!"
They braced.
It changed nothing.
Down the wedge they dropped, one after another, dozens of hardened Hunters lowered gently out of the world by a run of luck that had nowhere left to go.
No blood. No wounds. Just bodies laid out in the dark like a field gone to sleep mid-step.
Fening’s patience shattered.
Green flame roared up his arms and became a serpent forty meters long, jaws wide, and it lunged for the floating boy with a grieving father’s fury.
Jovan raised one finger and touched the fire.
The serpent lost heart. It guttered, thinned, and unwound into harmless smoke a meter from his face, its fortune to burn simply spent.
’Using Colored King Black’s powers with Star of Miss Fortune is quite scary...’ Jovan felt scared as he was in full focus to control his powers, especially the Cursed Vessel: Colored King Black. If it triggered Star of Miss Fortunately badly, he could straight up lose, summon a Terror King, and put this entire realm at risk.
"That was my life’s technique," Fening whispered, staring at his empty hands.
"It was very impressive," Jovan agreed kindly. "It just wasn’t lucky."
Brimlock saw the shape of it then, the way a drowning man sees the shore he’ll never reach.
"TOGETHER!" he bellowed, stone fists smashing forward with every scrap of his Epic-rank power. "EVERYTHING, ALL AT ONCE!"
It was, in fairness, the correct call.
Fening threw his greatest spiral inferno. Brimlock hurled a mountain’s worth of compressed rock. Their surviving experts poured their whole strength into one converging storm.
For an instant the sky inside the dome was fire and stone and light, all of it aimed at one slim boy with his hands in his pockets.
Jovan looked up at it and sighed like a tired uncle.
"Diana," he murmured. "If you would."
White light bloomed from his armor.
It did not strike the storm. It refused it.
The inferno lost its heat. The mountain lost its weight. The techniques hung in the air, robbed of the good fortune they needed to exist, and then they were simply gone, unspent, harming no one.
The field went silent.
Every attacker stood there empty-handed, their power poured out and wasted, their luck a dry well.
...
Jovan drifted down through the pale glow, boots finding the grass without a sound.
He walked between the standing patriarchs, unhurried, and laid a fingertip against each of their chests.
"Sleep," he said.
Green flame went out. The bearded fury went slack.
Both patriarchs sank to their knees, then to the earth, whole and unbroken, faces oddly peaceful for men who had come here to kill.
Around them, the last of the standing Hunters folded too, the black veil drawing the final breaths out gentle as a tide going out.
In under a minute, the entire assault of two families lay across ten acres, every body intact, not a wound among them.
Jovan straightened, dusted his hands, and let his armor dim.
"Tidy," he said to no one, faintly pleased with himself. "There. Tidy."
...
A hundred kilometers away, on a hill, the Devil Prince did not breathe for a long moment.
Ouja Sinclair had come to watch two families die. He had expected his target to bare his teeth, leak a talent, hand him a clue.
Instead he had felt a thousand-meter dome swallow two guilds’ worth of Hunters, and then go quiet, with no power signature crossing its wall at all.
’No blast. No blood. No leak.’ His red eyes were very wide. ’They didn’t even fight. They just stopped.’
He looked at the Divine-rank artifact humming uselessly at his belt.
’Two of them, at least. A hidden master, and something else. Something that kills a field without spilling a drop.’
The Devil Prince rose slowly from his chair and did not take a single step closer.
’Well,’ he decided. ’I suppose I’d have to make contact with Garen. One look, and we will share a truth.’
One look, one inspection.
The rule of Transcendent Players--They cannot inspect each other, but can inspect all and everything else.
He melted into the dark and was gone with anticipation.
...
Inside the mansion, the slot machine finally clunked to a stop.
"[Congratulations. You have acquired a Legendary-rank Gauntlet.]"
"Now that’s more like it." Aidan grinned, then glanced toward the window. "Jovan done?"
"Very done." Tom stretched on his shoulder, tail flicking. "Whole yard full of nice fresh sleepers. Not a scratch. He’s insufferably proud of it."
A low, rolling rumble answered from Aidan, the sound of something enormous shifting in its shell.
The cocoon cracked wider.
Aidan’s grin sharpened. "And there’s the dragon. Perfect timing, buddy."
He rose and stretched, looking out over a field of intact bodies gone silver in the moonlight.
"Dinner’s served."
