The instant Ethan felt the power riding on that enormous figure in the distance, his eyes went wide.
The battlefield had only just been cleared. Dreadok's lingering fire-aspect energy still hung in the air, mixed with the scorched bite of places Ethan's translucent lightning had burned through everything. But the moment that presence pressed in from afar, it bulldozed all of it aside. Even the thunder net above the city was forced downward, sinking like the sky itself had gained weight.
Ethan hadn't expected something like this to show up now—something this strong.
He didn't dare slack off for even a second. He snapped his palm up, drawing translucent lightning, violet runes, golden energy, and the last traces of Infernal Primordial Power inside him into a single point. The forces compressed again and again in his hand until they finally formed a massive golden sphere.
Danger rolled inside it like a living storm. At the very center, pure Infernal Primordial Power pulsed—violent, concentrated, ready to detonate.
Ethan shoved forward.
The golden sphere tore through the sky, dragging a heavy trail of light as it slammed toward the onrushing giant.
The giant glanced down at it.
No panic. Not even caution.
He simply raised a palm and gave the air a light, dismissive swat.
Boom!
The golden sphere was shattered in midair. The outer runes collapsed first. Then the translucent lightning was shaken apart. Even the Infernal Primordial Power at the core was crushed by a larger force, bursting into countless motes that splashed in every direction.
On the city wall, Korvath's face drained.
He'd watched Ethan kill Dreadok. He'd watched Emerald Castle grind an invading army into nothing. But now—Ethan's all-out strike had been scattered with a casual lift of a hand.
This wasn't a normal strong enemy.
After smashing the golden sphere, blue light gathered in the giant's palm, quickly condensing into a new blue energy orb. He loosened his fingers, and the orb dropped from high above.
It didn't fall particularly fast.
But every inch it descended, the sky rippled in rings, like reality was being pressed down. The weight of it was obscene—like an entire world was falling on their heads, bringing pressure you couldn't dodge and couldn't talk your way out of.
Ethan's brows knit tight as he stabilized himself.
His violet wings flared wide. Golden runes on the wing surfaces blazed to life. With a hard beat, a surge of rune power poured from behind him, weaving overhead—twisting, rotating, gathering—until it formed a gigantic phantom phoenix.
The phoenix spread its wings. Purple-and-gold flame-light ignited along its feathers and it charged straight into the falling blue orb.
Bang!
The phoenix phantom braced and held it—stopping the orb by force.
But before Ethan could push it back for good, the giant crossed the distance in a single step through midair, arriving right in front of the phoenix projection.
He drove a punch down.
Hummm! Hummm! Hummm!
The phoenix phantom didn't shatter on the spot, but cracks instantly webbed across its wings, its chest, its neck. Blue energy wormed into every fracture, tearing at the rune structure like it was trying to rip it apart from the inside.
Ethan's gut sank.
The giant's power output was terrifying—and mixed into it was this world's core Primordial Force. It wasn't brute strength. It was suppression, the kind that dragged on the foundations of heaven and earth themselves. If the giant fully cut loose, the city, the spatial passage, even the mineral resources they'd just hauled back could get swallowed up in the fallout.
Ethan took one step back and pulled out a white energy core.
A composite core he'd built on purpose.
Just one was enough to destroy a small world.
He didn't explain. He didn't hesitate. He threw it.
At the same time, the phoenix phantom finally gave out under the giant's pressure and was smashed into fragments. Violet runes burst into drifting light-dust across the sky—and under that brief cover of glittering debris, the white core slipped right up to the giant's front.
The giant lifted a hand and caught it.
The next instant, the white core detonated.
A horrific blast expanded out from his palm, first blowing a wide chunk of space into black nothingness—then snapping back inward like a closing jaw, swallowing his entire hand. Flesh, bone, and energy structure ruptured together. Blue light and white flame sprayed outward in a violent fountain.
"AAAGH!"
A shriek tore across the sky.
The giant stumbled back several steps, each one crushing apart huge swaths of cloud. Blue energy poured from the stump of his arm, but almost immediately, Primordial Force surged into the wound, forcibly rebuilding flesh and bone, trying to restore the hand that had just been blasted off.
"I never thought," the giant growled down at Ethan, voice loaded with rage, "there'd be someone here who could actually hurt me."
His gaze burned.
"But you'll pay for everything you've done."
He roared, and his power swept out again.
This time, what burst forth wasn't only blue Primordial Force.
Threaded through it was a thick, unmistakable aura from The Infernal Abyss—dark, heavy, and wrong in a way that made the air itself feel like it wanted to crawl away.
Ethan's gaze sharpened.
He hadn't expected the giant to carry The Infernal Abyss energy too. Morgrath. The minotaur. The blond man. And now this giant.
This world clearly had deep ties to the Infernal Abyss. Otherwise, there was no way so many beings capable of wielding Infernal Primordial Power would keep showing up back-to-back.
But this wasn't the time to dig into it.
Ethan flipped his hand and pulled out more than a dozen white energy cores, then hurled them all at once.
The giant had learned his lesson. This time, he didn't reach out to grab them.
His severed arm was still regenerating. With his remaining hand, he pressed forward—and a massive energy barrier instantly condensed around him. Blue Primordial Force, Infernal Abyss aura, and the world's core power layered together into a thick, heavy bulwark that wrapped him from the front, shielding his entire body.
The dozen-plus white cores slammed into the barrier.
When the first one exploded, the surface of the shield only shook violently.
When the second detonated, cracks appeared in the blue wall.
By the third, fourth, and fifth explosions, those cracks spread fast, linking together—until a breach finally ripped open across the barrier's surface.
The giant's expression changed.
Then the remaining cores all detonated at the same time.
Rumble—!
The energy barrier was blown into fragments. One of the white cores punched straight through the shattered defense and smashed into the giant's chest.
Violent force erupted at the impact point. White flame-light spread outward from his chest, blasting his massive body backward again and again. A deep crater was torn into his torso.
Ethan didn't let him breathe.
He became translucent lightning and shot through the blast aftershock, driving straight at the giant's chest. Lightning raged around both of Ethan's arms—every strike that landed tore open fresh fractures across the giant's body. Behind him, the violet wings kept beating, forcing wave after wave of rune power down into the wound.
Before long, the giant looked like he'd been blown apart from the inside.
But he still didn't fall.
He controlled a dense, overflowing Primordial Core power—enough to constantly pull in the surrounding forces of heaven and earth and repair himself. The moment the hole in his chest widened, nearby blue energy surged in to patch it. The moment an arm was shredded by translucent lightning, new flesh crawled out of the stump in the very next breath.
Ethan realized it quickly: if he couldn't reduce the giant to minced meat before the regeneration caught up, he might not be able to kill him at all.
And then—
A strange figure appeared in the sky not far away.
It came in too fast, like a black meteor wrapped in spatial turbulence. Ethan barely sensed it before it slammed in from the side and crashed into the giant's body.
The giant's enormous frame locked up.
In the next instant, his flesh, bones, energy channels—and even the Primordial Core power he was using to regenerate—began to melt.
The body that had still been fighting to rebuild itself collapsed in seconds, dissolving into a flowing, shapeless liquid, suspended in the shattered sky.
