Chapter 253: Beyond the Safety Limit
The red warning text flashed across Lucien’s vision, casting a harsh glare over the ruined courtyard.
[Warning: Divine Judgement can destroy the Demon Lord’s vessel.]
[The core binding it to the Abyss will survive.]
Lucien read the prompt as golden force poured into his empty channels. The skill had a strict one-month cooldown. If he pulled the trigger now and only destroyed the physical manifestation, the entity would simply rebuild itself using the open dimensional rift. He would not get a second chance.
He needed enough raw power to erase the twenty-meter vessel and burn through the dimensional core anchoring it to the Abyss.
Lucien wrapped the Rosary’s chain around his wrist and reached for the Divine Force pouring from the artifact. Instead of allowing the energy to circulate naturally through the Sanctuary, he compressed its output directly into Divine Judgement.
The System reacted immediately.
[Warning: External Divine Force detected.]
[Divine Judgement is limited to the user’s natural Divine Mana capacity.]
[Forcing additional output will damage the user’s mana pathways.]
Lucien tightened his fist around the silver cross. "Remove the limit."
[Permanent mana-pathway damage is highly probable.]
[Proceed?]
"Yes."
The air pressure in the courtyard inverted.
The Demon Lord paused mid-stride. Its abyssal instincts recognized the sudden, catastrophic shift in the ambient mana. It didn’t look at Lucien; it looked up at the pitch-black sky.
The entity abandoned its slow, deliberate advance. It dropped the rusted halberd, pivoted, and lunged toward the edge of the fifty-meter boundary, desperately trying to escape the locked targeting radius.
Its damaged foot came down on the wedge of bedrock Lucien had raised with his final Crown command. The unstable stone collapsed beneath its massive weight. The Calamity stumbled, its remaining leg sinking knee-deep into the broken courtyard.
One second.
That was all Lucien needed.
"Judgement."
A vast circle of white-gold light ignited beneath the pitch-black dome, directly above the crater.
A pillar of divine radiance crashed down from the glowing circle.
It was powerful enough to bleach every shadow from the courtyard, bathing the ruined campus in an overwhelming, absolute brilliance. The surviving gargoyles and shadow stalkers caught in the periphery didn’t burn—they simply ceased to exist.
The wounded cadets huddled behind Lucien’s stone barricades shielded their eyes. The holy light passed through the cadets without harming them.
Inside the pillar, the Demon Lord shrieked.
The sound wasn’t physical; it was a psychic shockwave of pure agony that shook the damaged faculty buildings to their foundations.
The blinding strike stripped away the starlight-forged armor like wet paper. The Demon Lord’s left arm, shoulder, and half of its twenty-meter torso vanished into ash. For a fraction of a second, what remained beneath the Calamity’s armor was exposed.
Buried inside the Demon Lord’s chest was a jagged mass of rotating black crystal. But the object was only partially present in the courtyard. Half of it remained submerged inside the dimensional tear, connected to the vessel through a cluster of thick, corrupted tendrils.
That was why the standard Divine Judgement would fail. It could erase everything inside the Academy, but the deepest part of the core still existed beyond the boundary of the mortal plane.
Lucien tightened his grip around the Rosary and forced more Divine Force into the descending pillar.
The white-gold light followed the corrupted tendrils toward the open rift.
His damaged mana pathways violently ruptured under the pressure. It felt like swallowing ground glass. Blood ran freely from his nose and ears, staining the front of his Shadow-Weave Suit as his internal circuits began to tear themselves apart.
The Demon Lord reacted immediately. Its remaining hand tore into its own chest and ripped the exposed portion of the black crystal free. The corrupted tendrils snapped backward, forcefully dragging the core toward the safety of the rift.
The pillar followed, burning through the first layer of crystal before Lucien’s ruptured pathways finally failed and severed the connection.
The white-gold light vanished, leaving the center of the existing crater bleached white and smoking.
Lucien pitched forward and barely caught himself with one blood-slick hand.
Lucien’s chest seized. He tried to breathe, but no air entered his lungs. He choked, vomiting a heavy stream of blood onto the cobblestones. The golden sanctuary radiating from the Rosary stuttered and shrank, the artifact recognizing its wielder’s failing consciousness.
A ragged breath finally tore into Lucien’s lungs. It felt like inhaling broken metal, but it kept him conscious.
In the center of the ruined courtyard, the Demon Lord remained standing.
Behind the bedrock barricade, Kael forced his head up. The restorative mist Ariana had thrown had stopped the worst of his bleeding, but his sword arm still refused to move.
Ariana stumbled toward Lucien, only for the returning gravitational pressure to drive her back to one knee. The glass of her spectacles cracked further. The Rosary’s light was fading with him, and she couldn’t cross the distance.
Bordon tried to rise using the rebar as a crutch. His damaged leg immediately folded beneath his immense weight. Mariella caught his shoulder, struggling under his bulk, before he fell across the unconscious Princess Celestia.
No one left in the courtyard could stop the Demon Lord.
Lucien was still the only person capable of firing.
The Demon Lord made no attempt to regrow its missing limbs. Its remaining hand immediately reached toward the rift.
It drew all the residual corrupted mana from the open gate and compressed it into a single point hovering above its palm. The dark energy condensed, forming a pitch-black sphere of pure, unstable annihilation.
It meant to take the entire Academy with it.
The black sphere continued to swell. Cracks spread through the air around it, the ambient light warping and bending toward the gravitational singularity forming in the demon’s hand.
The black sphere continued to swell. Cracks spread through the air around it, and even the surrounding light bent toward the darkness in the Demon Lord’s hand.
Lucien raised the Lumeveil Enforcer with a shaking, blood-slick hand and pulled at the remnants of his mana.
Nothing answered.
The ethereal runes along the revolver’s barrel flickered once and died. Its Phantom Cylinder could not form a bullet without mana.
Lucien pulled the trigger anyway.
Click.
Before the entity could release the spell, a sharp, deafening CRACK echoed above them.
Lucien looked up.
The pitch-black dome sealing the Academy from the Capital suddenly splintered.
A bullet skipped across its curved surface, striking the barrier once, twice, then a third time without losing speed. Each impact landed precisely on a point where several streams of dark mana converged.
White fractures raced between the damaged points, spider-webbing across the entire sky.
A second gunshot echoed from somewhere beyond the dome. Another bullet struck the barrier and abruptly changed direction in mid-air.
Lucien recognized the technique.
Ricochet.
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