(IC) Chapter 338 - My Will

The waves synced to his rhythm.

Light bent and fractured, pulled into the flow of his path like a river dragged by its own current.

And his sword—ripped the tide.

The arc carved clean, his domain forcing open the path, polarity shattering, the Overseer’s waves unable to pierce a medium already rewritten under his will, fueled by the sparks tearing out of him.

For the first time, the Overseer’s gaze shifted. For the first time, confidence faltered. For the first time, a phenomenon stood before it that millennia of conquest and buried knowledge had never prepared it for.

It stepped back. Sparks flared along its body, lightning tearing the air raw. The obsidian staff rose, and the two great spheres detached, floating wide at its flanks, bolts lashing between them in violent arcs.

Alonso steadied his breath. Instinct screamed to rush, to strike now—but he strangled the urge, forcing stillness into his muscles. His pulse hammered, each beat pressing against the weight in his chest as his eyes fixed, unblinking, on it.

The two spheres drifted apart, arcs leaping between them in violent snaps. Each bolt cracked the air like cannon fire, pressure waves booming outward as if the air itself were tearing. Opposite charges—polarised, locked in attraction.

His gaze sharpened. He recognised the principle instantly. A living Van de Graaff, a charged dipole stretched wide, lightning clawing at the gap.

The Overseer thrust its staff forward.

The spheres hurtled outward, the current between them flaring white-hot, searching for the shortest path to complete its circuit—through him.

For an instant the storm swallowed the crown of the Pyramid. Bolts split the air, space itself howling as if ripped in two.

He moved before it closed. Stance shifted pre-emptively, weight driven low, swords angled out. His breath tore sharp in his lungs as his body slid past the invisible line—one misstep from death.

The lightning detonated behind him, cracking stone apart where his body should have been.

He had shifted barely more than a couple of inches clear, and still the pull reached for him. Without the Path of Shards bending the field, twisting the vectors into his own flow, the arc would have dragged him back despite the distance—ripping him apart in its current.

Obsidian shards rained from the blast, smoke spiralling upward in violent coils.

He exhaled once, sparks still flashing along his blade, and lifted his gaze back to the Overseer. The glint in its eyes sharpened.

The Empress’ staff rose, shock gathering at the burning sun mounted on its crown, fuelled by the Heart of Sparks. Two tails shifted, charges rippling within them, while the twin spheres spun back into play, crackling arcs tracing lines to pin him from both sides.

His pulse steadied by will alone. The patterns unfolded in his mind—precise, merciless, yet edged with the heat of danger.

Six tails.

The staff.

The spheres.

The pressure of its field.

The Heart of Sparks.

The Storm Domain itself.

Variables aligned in a web of multidimensional vectors. Thousands of outcomes collapsed into one truth.

The dipole roared. Lightning arcs hunted. Tails spat projectiles wreathed in charge, supersonic death threading a net too tight for escape. Stone split apart as everything converged, a storm of light and thunder smashing the point where he had stood.

But stood no longer.

His form blurred, a ghost refracted through bending light, driven by a flow that matched the current itself. The net cracked against his domain, waves breaking against an unseen tide. He slipped past, a streak of sparks and metal, and reappeared behind the Overseer—blades already raised to strike.

The creature flared, every spark in its body burning, reaction forced to its peak. The staff swung up in defence—

And met nothing.

Only an afterimage. Another fracture in the river of light.

SCRCHSSHH!

The sound tore through the storm. Silence followed in its wake.

The Empress’ staff floated in the air, still clutched by a severed hand.

The hand dropped. Sparks burst from the stump, the Overseer’s bellow rolling across the crown of the Pyramid like thunder given form.

Yet he was already moving. He had never stopped.

Speed tore the air open, blurring the horizon. Dawn broke against his frame, rays scattering into fractured rainbows as light bent around him. The wind howled, dragged into vortices by the pressure of his flow, each step cracking stone, each swing carrying the weight of an unseen tide.

The current hid him.

The current carried him.

The current became him.

Every shift of his form left mirages—delayed apparitions, feints woven from refraction and speed. Every strike came true. Through the narrowest gaps, past the smallest flaws, carving lines no eye could predict.

Metal sang. Sparks raged. The Path of Shards flared.

A tail fell, severed clean. Another split, sparks bleeding as it crashed against the Sun Pyramid’s crown. A thrust pierced armour, fracturing it in jagged lines across the Overseer’s chest. Another slash tore through its shoulder—light bursting as fragments of obsidian rained down.

The Overseer reeled. More tails lashed, more storms crackled, but every counter struck only illusions. Every block caught only ghosts. His flow denied them all.

The earth shook with the force. Dust swirled into choking clouds, driven by gales that carried each blow far and wide. Heat rolled off his movement, searing his skin, breath tearing through his lungs as dawn itself seemed to answer his momentum.

He struck again. And again. And again.

The Overseer staggered, drowned beneath the tide. Every spark it summoned was swept away, every thunderous strike dragged under.

Like an ocean swallowing stone, his path gave it no escape.

It sank.

Dragged into the depthless pull of a current it could not resist.

His form moved—inevitable, unstoppable—through a sequence already set. Every variable, every weapon, every domain the Overseer had revealed was locked into his vision, collapsed into certainty. If it had no new cards to play…

Then the outcome had been sealed from his first strike.

The flow carried him forward. Suspended fragments of shattered stone and broken armour hung in the air, frozen by static, glinting like stars caught in a storm. The spheres still spun, arcs still cracked, projectiles still tore from its tails—yet all of it lay inside his field, every line already mapped, every trajectory already accounted for.

And then—something shifted.

The Overseer yanked the spheres back, sparks detonating in a halo around its body. The blast ripped the air raw, static rolling in a violent shock that shoved his flow aside for the briefest instant. The creature used it—launched skyward, battered frame streaking upward in a blur, a trail of blood and lightning marking its ascent.

His step faltered, just for a heartbeat. Air was not earth. Movement above, in open sky, lacked anchor.

Two hundred metres up, the Overseer halted. Hovering. Its silhouette burned against the breaking dawn.

Not fleeing. Not retreating. Waiting.

Taunting.

His eyes narrowed. His mind raced. Is it stalling? Buying time? Are other Overseers coming?

Wariness gnawed at him, every instant a dance on the very edge. A drop of sweat trickled down his forehead, his body still marked by shallow cuts that were only just knitting closed.

He steadied his pulse—then felt it and reacted in an instant.

Crack.

A line ripped past his cheek, too fast for sound to follow. A sniper’s shot.

Crack. Crack.

Another. Then another. Trails of light and sound converged from every direction. From the city’s walls, the Warden snipers had opened fire, their shots cutting the air with supersonic screams, their angles precise, lethal. And below, through the smoke and fractured stone, the melee Wardens advanced—shadows moving, blades raised, eyes burning with the same inhuman spark.

Still, he did not panic. His mind stayed cool, anchored by the certainty that he could not—and would not—make mistakes.

Weight shifted. Stance flowed. Each round bent aside by a fraction, the Path of Shards tugging vectors, sliding trajectories off their mark. Sparks hissed across his skin as bullets tore the air around him, each near miss deflected into nothing.

His breath came ragged, chest burning, yet the grin still cut across his face.

“So you finally called in the cavalry, huh?”

His lips curled into a thin line, the edge of a grin beneath the blood and sparks.

“Alright then…”

The blade lifted. Pulse steady. The hum of the universe threading through him as dawn flared brighter.

“…I guess I should do the same too.”

His right arm rose high. Swords level, edges gleaming. Two fingers cut the air in a sharp ‘V’.

Less than a heartbeat later—

It began.

Booms thundered from the sky. Snipers atop the city walls vanished in plumes of fire and shattered stone.

A blur cut down from the heavens, streaking from the hidden platform that lingered above the Ajnal capital. Armour flashed. A Zhanmadao longblade traced arcs of sparks. In a breath it reached the walls, cleaving through Warden lines, motion too fast for the eye to follow.

Then—impact.

A meteor struck the Pyramid’s steps, the detonation shaking Ka’tumal to its foundations. Dust and obsidian shards ripped outward in a storm.

At the crater’s heart, sparks surged. Wardens rushing up the incline froze mid-strike—their blades wrenched sideways by a pull they could not resist. Metal, chitin, and claw all dragged toward a single, immovable point.

A shield. Vast. Towering.

Behind it, a giant. Muscles like hewn stone, frame braced in defiance.

Their weapons clanged against his wall of steel—only for their own momentum to betray them. Magnetic force twisted. Charges roared. Lightning coursed through his Storm Domain, veins burning bright as he drew it all down through his legs, his waist, his arms—

And unleashed it.

The hammer fell like the collapse of a world.

The shockwave tore everything in its path apart. Wardens burst into fragments of chitin, scale, and flesh, their bodies hurled across the imperial avenue like meteors streaking trails of blood and rubble in their wake.

Only then did the hammer still. Smoke curled from its head.

Imani exhaled, slow, steady. His gaze lifted toward the crown of the Pyramid.

A nod.

“We got it from here. Finish it off.”

High above, Alonso answered with the faintest tilt of his blade. The shots aimed his way slowed, heartbeat by heartbeat. Not a single Warden had breached the ascent.

His gaze rose. Locked on the Overseer—still suspended, still waiting. Cold reptilian eyes burning with calm that unsettled even him.

Thoughts raced. Counters. Variables. Every path where ruin struck first.

And then—he moved.

His foot drove into the fractured crown of the Sun Pyramid—stone screamed, cracked apart beneath the force—and he launched skyward.

The Path of Shards carried him, bending the field to his will. Instead of losing speed to gravity, he drew more with every metre, momentum compounding until his form blurred. Light bent around him. Dawn itself fractured, his body blinking in and out of sight, the air cracking from the sheer pressure of his ascent.

His swords arched. The strike already written.

But the Overseer finally moved.

One sphere shot down. The other, up.

The gap charged.

The voltage spiked—air splitting apart as particles ionised, repelled, collided in frenzied chaos. Sparks burst like shrapnel across the sky. The hum deepened, low at first, then rising sharp, splitting into a shriek that set teeth on edge. Clouds rippled, the heavens trembling with it.

His pupils contracted. Recognition struck like a hammer blow.

Chest pounding, nerves ablaze, he threw his body deeper into Dual Overdrive. Fire surged through his veins, reflexes screaming as flesh clawed at the edge of its own limits.

The stars within him flared. His path roared. Galaxies spun in miniature inside the void of his being—gravitational tides binding, folding, pulling him whole. His blades burned bright, and with them—

He carved.

A river split open in the sky.

The sum of all he was—his step, his blades, his will—etched into the firmament itself.

He rose. A ray of defiance ripped from earth, a strike flung upward against the heavens themselves.

And then it came.

From the marrow of the storm. From the bones of creation. From the fury that had birthed gods and ended kings—

The birth of destruction.

Lightning.

A storm’s verdict. A god’s judgment. The world’s sentence in fire.

His swords were already moving. His will against the sky. His path against the world’s decree.

A river of everything he was, and everything he would ever be.

His heart roared—

Shatter!

Metal struck storm.

Lightning bent—split. Shards refracted into paths not its own, dragged into channels carved by his domain.

The heavens screamed. Bolts cracked and flung wide, ripped into alien routes he had written into existence.

He had done it.

He had cut lightning itself… into a path of shards.

The fire inside him burned deeper. His form blurred, the very sky fracturing around the Overseer as heaven itself broke upon his will.

Its eyes constricted, sparks flaring wild as it clawed at the remnants of its strength.

But all around it floated broken shards of light—each a blade, each a vision. Hundreds. Thousands. Every one a truth or a lie. An outcome to be, or an outcome denied.

His will thundered, silent but deafening, across the fracture.

My path lies in the shatters of time. I was. I am. I will be. My steps walk the unseen. My strikes fall from realities only I can see.

Through my blade it will end.

A blade that bends reality. A strike unseen.

Amidst my Path of Shards—

Born from shadow, made real—

The sword that never was…

No-Strike.

And then—silence.

The storm hushed. The sky stilled.

The crackle of sparks bled away to nothing as the spheres fell, lifeless, clattering against the fractured crown of the Sun Pyramid. Their charge gone. Their master’s grip severed.

For that day, as the sun rose, light spilled unchallenged across Ka’tumal.

The millennial existence—

One of the eternal guardians of its race—

The Third Overseer…

Fell headless from the sky above.