After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 76: What The Actual F-

The sky at that altitude was a different country entirely, and Aidan understood the difference within his first three seconds inside it.

Up here, the air itself had stopped behaving. Clouds boiled and froze mid-shape around every clash, torn apart by shockwaves and stitched back together by pressure a heartbeat later. Lightning that wasn’t his own crawled sideways between combatants instead of falling, and the cold burned worse than fire, a thin, screaming chill that chewed through Arthur’s armor plating like it was cloth.

He threw everything he had at the nearest Terror on his way up, lightning and metal and a full-force swing of Blazing Point Fang, the blade trailing its tunnel of white fire straight into the beast’s flank.

It shrugged the whole combination off like weather.

The scorch mark it left behind was already closing by the time Aidan finished the swing, scales built to shrug off Divine-rank retaliation treating his best trick like an insect bite.

’Right.’ He pulled the next strike he’d been about to throw. ’That chasm they warned me about isn’t a saying. It’s a fact of physics, and physics doesn’t care how proud I am of my sword.’

He couldn’t hurt these things. Not directly, not yet, not with anything he currently owned.

So he stopped trying to hurt them and started trying to be annoying instead.

He darted in close to a Terror harrying Ordun Kessa, a stern, grey-scaled Divine-rank veteran wielding a spear of condensed starlight, its edge humming a note Aidan felt in his back teeth from thirty meters away.

The Terror’s claw swept past him by a margin so thin it should have been impossible.

It should have been. Aidan felt Jovan’s presence humming quietly from inside his summoning space, unseen by anyone, threads of drained misfortune slipping loose to settle over every attack aimed his way. Not luck given to him. Luck taken from the beast trying to kill him, one grain at a time, just enough to turn a killing blow into a graze that any Legendary-rank body could survive.

"Focus on me for a second, ugly," Aidan called, ducking under the Terror’s jaw and slapping a burst of lightning across its eye for no real damage and maximum irritation.

The Terror’s head snapped toward him, exactly as intended, spectral fury rolling off it in waves that flattened the clouds beneath them.

Ordun’s spear found its exposed flank in the half-second that bought.

The starlight blade drove in deep, and the Terror shrieked, a sound like a mountain range grinding apart, thrashing hard enough to throw off both of them.

"Small," the old Divine-rank Hunter rumbled, resetting his stance, sweat cutting clean lines through the ash on his face. "But useful."

"I’ll take useful."

He kept at it, weaving between three different engagements over the next hour, never landing a real wound of his own, always landing exactly where a Terror’s attention needed pulling. He learned the rhythm of it fast, baiting a lunge here, stealing a glance there, reading the beasts the same way he’d once read a nervous boy’s opening stance, except now the stakes were measured in continents instead of contribution points.

Kyrsa Wren caught his eye once between exchanges, her silver rings thinner and dimmer than they’d been that morning, chains flickering where they should have burned solid.

"You’re fast for something without the rank to back it," she called over the roar of a passing shockwave.

"I borrow a lot," Aidan called back. "Don’t ask what from."

She laughed, short and startled, before diving back into her own fight.

Then, for one long, screaming minute, it actually worked.

Three Hunters converged on a single staggering Terror while Aidan danced through its blind spots, drawing its claws away from every opening the moment they threatened to close. Ordun’s spear opened the first true wound, a second Hunter’s molten chain wrapped and burned through half its throat, and a final combined strike split its skull down the center in a spray of white light.

The beast came apart into drifting ash, motes scattering across the frozen upper sky like the world’s saddest snowfall.

[One Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

A ragged cheer went up across the battered defenders, thin and exhausted but unmistakably real, voices cracking with relief they hadn’t let themselves feel in hours.

It lasted exactly as long as it took for the next disaster to arrive.

Two Terrors rounded on a lone Hunter near the Tear’s edge, a broad-shouldered man who’d been fighting since the alarm first sounded, his armor already scorched black across one whole side. He raised a shield of braided light just in time to catch the first strike, and it held, barely, the impact ringing out like a struck bell across the entire battlefield.

The second strike came from an angle the shield didn’t cover.

It hit him like a falling star, a full Divine-rank claw driven with everything the beast had left, and his body left the sky in a broken, tumbling arc, shield shattering into dying sparks, armor caving inward at the ribs. Blood trailed behind him in a long dark smear against the clouds, bright red against grey, visible from every corner of the battlefield.

He hit the ground below hard enough to crater it, and did not move again.

The sky went silent for a heartbeat that lasted much too long.

Aidan felt it before he heard it, the shift running through every remaining Hunter around him, exhaustion curdling fast into something rawer. Not panic. Something worse than panic. The quiet, resigned certainty of people who understood exactly what they were and weren’t capable of anymore, and had decided to keep fighting regardless.

"Formation’s thinning," someone called out, voice tight and controlled in a way that took real effort. "Hold the line. Nobody breaks."

"Nobody’s asking to," Ordun answered, spear arm trembling just slightly as he leveled it again. "We finish this, or we die trying. Those were always the two options."

’They know they might die up here.’ Aidan watched that spear arm shake, just once, just barely, and hated how familiar the sight was. ’And not one of them is leaving. Because if these things get past this sky, it isn’t just them who dies.’

Something old in his chest answered that despair before his mind caught up to it.

He had felt this exact flavor of helplessness before, a billion years of it, pressed down and endured and buried so deep he’d almost convinced himself it couldn’t surface anymore. Watching it bloom fresh in strangers who deserved better lit something under his ribs that had nothing left to do with patience.

’No,’ he thought, and for once he didn’t tell it to be easy. ’Not this time. Not while I can do something about it.’

The crimson-gold border woke up around him without being asked, and this time he didn’t hold it back at all.

He let the anger rise the way he’d let it rise once before, on a frozen tomb, in front of a dragon that had eaten three hundred and seventy-six better attempts than his own. Except this time there was no system to clamp it down, no secured space threatened by his output, nothing standing between what he felt and what he could do with it.

The translated fury poured up through every aspect he owned at once, and the sky around him answered it.

Wind screamed inward toward him from every direction, clouds collapsing into a slow, spiraling wall as his pressure reshaped the air itself. Lightning that had been crawling sideways between other fighters bent, one thread at a time, toward the growing storm gathering around his fist. His stats didn’t just rise. They tore straight through the ceiling that separated Legendary from Divine, if only for as long as the rage held its shape, and every Hunter nearby felt the floor of the sky shift under that presence.

Wind and Spin and Lightning and Burst folded together around his outstretched fist, a churning knot of crimson-gold light that grew denser with every heartbeat, and this time it wasn’t a fist he threw.

He compressed it further, past a fist, past a point, into something smaller than a fingertip, spinning fast enough to scream, dragging the surrounding storm down into itself until the air for a hundred meters around him fell utterly, unnaturally still.

’Wrathspiral Lance,’ he named it, in the half-second it took to level his arm.

He fired.

The beam crossed the sky faster than sound, a thread of pure crimson-gold violence trailing a spiral of collapsing wind behind it, and it speared straight through the head of the Terror closing on Ordun’s blind side. It punched a hole clean through skull and spectral flesh both, the exit wound blooming into a brief, silent flower of white light before the whole beast simply stopped being held together.

The Terror folded out of the air mid-lunge, dead before its own momentum finished carrying it forward, and its enormous body scattered into drifting ash that the wind carried off toward the horizon.

[One Divine-rank Terror eliminated.]

The silence that followed was total.

Every Hunter still standing in that sky turned to look at where the shot had come from, Kyrsa’s silver rings frozen mid-spin, Ordun’s spear lowered without him seeming to notice he’d lowered it.

Aidan hung there in the ruined, storm-torn air, crimson-gold light whirling off him in slow, restless whips that traced lazy arcs against the clouds, aura pressing outward in waves that made even Divine-rank presences beside him feel suddenly, distinctly secondary.

Nobody said a single word. But their eyes all told the same thing.

What the actual f-