Chapter 1213: Corrosion Eats Thunder
Catheryn lifted her hand and hurled the energy sphere with vicious force.
It shot straight up and met the falling black tide head-on. The instant the two slammed together, the abyss’s lighting was ripped into chaos. The black corrosive power ground inward, trying to crush and swallow everything. Catheryn’s energy detonated outward from the sphere’s core. At the same point in space, the two sides chewed, tore, and compressed against each other in a brutal stalemate.
Boom!
The shockwave swept the area clean, blasting everything nearby into fragments. The canyon walls cracked under the impact. Huge slabs of rock broke loose and fell—only to be pulverized into dust before they even hit the ground. The earth itself split outward from the collision point, fractures racing all the way to the feet of Emerald Castle’s frontline and forcing soldiers to brace hard just to keep from being thrown off their stance.
At first glance, the two looked evenly matched.
But Ethan spotted the problem almost immediately.
Catheryn’s arm dipped slightly under the backlash. The power around her—normally savage but steady—stuttered into a brief instability. She’d only just broken her seal. Her rage hadn’t cooled. And before this, she’d spent power back-to-back—wiping out her wardens, then crushing the Mournvale Abyss army’s line.
Only now did the weakness show.
The middle-aged man didn’t give a single step.
Catheryn, on the other hand, took that recoil like a weight landing on her lungs—her aura sinking for an instant.
Anyone with eyes could see it. The clash hadn’t decided a winner on the spot, but Catheryn had already fallen behind. Ethan’s brow pulled tighter, his gaze flicking from Catheryn to the man across from them.
If this kept going, Catheryn was going to get hurt.
At this point, Ethan couldn’t afford to hold back.
He stepped forward. Every ounce of energy in his body detonated outward. Transparent lightning surged from within him, coiling around his arms, shoulders, and chest, then spearing up into the sky. The air above the abyss was torn open by electric light. Power gathered between heaven and earth, condensing into a massive energy sphere overhead.
Inside that sphere, transparent lightning crisscrossed in violent layers, flaring bright enough to bleach the sky white. Each arc cut through the corrosive haze like a blade, carving out brief, clean gaps. Behind Ethan, Emerald Castle soldiers looked up at the forming power, and the tightness in their chests eased—just a little—like they’d remembered how to breathe.
Ethan thrust his hand forward.
The enormous lightning sphere surged down the line, crashing toward the middle-aged man on a dead-straight path. Wherever it passed, the air shrieked as arcs ripped it apart. Loose rock was tugged into the air by the pull of the charge, then shattered into tiny fragments by the lightning backlash. The transparent lightning hidden inside was tyrannical—outside this place, it could have destroyed an entire world.
The middle-aged man didn’t show even a hint of fear.
He only raised his palm—almost lazily.
Mournvale Abyss’s unique corrosive power erupted from his hand. It condensed into a black energy screen in front of him, then expanded outward to meet the lightning sphere head-on. The moment transparent lightning struck corrosion, arcs detonated like mad, and the glare briefly swallowed the man’s figure whole.
But the black screen didn’t break.
Corrosion crawled along the lightning arcs and invaded inward, gnawing at the outer layer of the sphere. The once-ferocious transparent lightning was crushed into snapping fragments. Cracks split the sphere’s surface, the energy inside beginning to run wild.
In the blink of an eye, the lightning sphere—strong enough to rip open heaven and earth—was shattered completely by black power.
The leftover corrosive force rode the explosion’s backlash and surged back toward Ethan.
Ethan threw his arm up to block, but the power still grazed his shoulder. It slipped past the edge of his protective energy and slammed into flesh. The moment it touched him, it burrowed inward like black flame. Skin and muscle on his shoulder shrank fast. A wide patch lost its blood color, turning dry and dark.
Pain dropped Ethan’s breath straight into his gut.
He didn’t keep forcing it. He staggered back several steps. Each footfall sent fine cracks spidering across the rock beneath him. Only after he retreated beyond the densest reach of the corrosion did he manage to stabilize, gritting his teeth as he forcibly suppressed the invasive agony eating at his shoulder.
He couldn’t keep trading blows head-on.
The canyon’s energies had reached an extreme. Corrosion spread outward without pause. Catheryn’s remaining power churned across the battlefield. And new forces were being born between collisions, filling in the gaps each impact carved out. The entire abyss was stuffed full of violent aura. The rock walls groaned with heavy tremors, like they might collapse at any moment.
Ethan drew a hard breath and forced his power up again.
Energy spilled out of him and climbed toward the sky, forming more and more energy spheres overhead. One. Two. A dozen. Dozens.
Transparent lightning leapt between them, stitching the entire sky into a net of electric light. It lit the abyss and illuminated the corrosive tide rolling under the middle-aged man’s feet.
Ethan didn’t stop.
The spheres pressed forward one after another. Transparent lightning rained down, striking the region where the man stood. Every sphere that dropped dragged a blinding tail of light behind it and detonated on the edge of the corrosive field, blasting ring after ring of shockwaves outward.
It didn’t matter.
Ethan’s power was still too small here. Those lightning spheres never even truly reached the man. They were intercepted—gnawed apart—swallowed by corrosion. Occasionally a stray bolt slipped through the outer layer, but it only burst into a brief spark against the black surface, doing no real damage.
Meanwhile, Ethan’s body kept getting eaten.
The withered patch on his shoulder disrupted his power flow. Every time energy passed through that region, it was forcibly weakened. The glow of his transparent lightning began to waver, no longer as stable as before. He could feel his strength dropping... while the middle-aged man remained where he was, not moving his feet a single inch.
Watching from Emerald Castle’s ranks, more and more soldiers’ faces tightened.
They saw Ethan strike again and again. They saw the sky covered in lightning. They also saw attacks that would’ve crushed ordinary enemies vanish layer by layer into that man’s corrosion. Fear didn’t explode immediately—but it seeped into the formation like cold water, dragging everyone’s breathing heavier and heavier.
Then Seraphine arrived.
She didn’t waste words.
Holy power erupted from her. White light spread from beneath her feet, then surged upward, relighting the area that corrosion had dimmed. The power rose, gathered, and solidified in the air—forming a massive projection.
The moment it appeared, overwhelming sanctity expanded outward.
A deep rumbling rolled through the sky, like countless muffled thunders churning behind clouds. Sacred light covered the upper air, and the violent pressure pushed down across the battlefield, carving open a cleared zone even through the surrounding turbulence.
Ethan used that brief opening to steady his breath.
He didn’t keep forcing a frontal assault. Instead, he immediately reached out, grabbed Catheryn, and pulled her back. The two of them crossed trembling ground, dodging the most chaotic shockwaves as they retreated toward the rear of Emerald Castle’s formation.
Only after Ethan dragged Catheryn into a safer area did he finally stop.
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