Chapter 582 - Absolute Candidate

Ruby is just as I remember her. She looks barely out of her twenties, with long red hair and yellow eyes marked by a complex pattern. Her skin is slightly paler than usual, and she wears clothing similar to what Absolute Lissandra of the 2nd floor used to wear, sleek, suit-like attire that might suit a man more than a woman. Like all the avatars I've seen, she shows no emotion. There's simply no life behind those eyes.

The moment both of us appear, my eyes activate to their utmost, and I trigger all my passives and prepare my defenses against someone 50 levels lower than me.

Absolute Candidate Ruby moves first even as I set up my defenses. She manipulates her mana with incredible ease, and her skill activates before I can grasp its structure, seemingly further powering the domain she deployed. That domain pressures against me, greedily pressing against my mana and taking it away from me.

It stops only when my own [Mana Domain] seeps past the borders of my skin and Mana Wavelength Tyrant activates, claiming the surrounding mana as mine. But the pull remains, ready to take my mana the moment my concentration slips.

My mana surges as the unseen attack hits my barrier, shattering it in an instant. It slices into the side of my neck, nearly severing my head.

Ruby herself vanishes from where she stood.

I track the leftover mana to locate her and succeed in following its trail. However, she isn’t there. It’s a fake signature meant to confuse me and so are the other ones she created.

Without any warning, something hits me from the left, fully breaking even my now layered barrier and sending me rolling to the ground.

I use Wraith Step a few times and try to rely on my mana senses again, but I quickly realize a field surrounds me, spreading a jamming effect meant to throw them off. It feels like trying to find a feather lost in a hurricane.

Switching to kinetic and thermal senses, I move across the battleground, doing my best to dodge her attacks until I finally pinpoint her location. My Ley Lines spread through the area, and [Eclipse] erupts, pushing against the field and draining the color from everything nearby. I reach out to teleport to her, but all the Ley Lines are ripped apart as if they were fuses set on fire.

Ruby, standing a mile away at the top of a hill, creates a huge number of mana projectiles and shoots them in front of her. The air itself in front of them weaves and twists and the projectiles teleport through and materialize about an arm’s length in front of me.

[Eclipse] hums with the mana powering it, and I barely manage to tear through the swarm of projectiles. With great effort, I expand it as far as I can, finally breaking the field surrounding the area.

I boost myself high into the air and then further boost myself to fly toward where Ruby is.

She takes a step and disappears, reappearing two miles away.

I locate her immediately because she has a huge amount of mana gathering over a lifted hand. Flying in that direction, I observe the structure and prepare my countermeasures. Instead of Ley Lines, I create a set of marks on my mana projectiles and shoot them in all directions.

But even now, I don’t have enough time. Ruby finishes her attack at blinding speed and waves her hand.

And nothing happens for a few seconds.

During that pause, I reach her and she doesn’t move away, likely to prevent overuse of her skill to prevent me from understanding her method.

I radiate more mana from my body as Mana Wavelength Tyrant presses the area, turning mana particles within under my control. My heart thumps, strengthening my body and gathering kinetic energy for a possible escape.

I weave an [Empyrean Lance] and shoot it ahead while deploying [Eclipse] in her direction.

Even so, she allows it to proceed.

Just before my lance would pierce her head, she activates her skill; the space in front of her wavers, and my lance appears at my back, flying at the same speed and nearly pierces me.

I barely dodge it, and then the skill she used earlier reactivates. The remnants of her field in the distance change and implode on themselves, creating an audible pop and an immense pull that uproots trees, destroys the nearby hill and even affects the two of us from a mile away along with everything around.

It creates a small dark center around which the space itself seems unstable.

With all my strength, I push against it and teleport away, but the teleportation is disrupted. Its landing point is forced into the center of the collapsed field.

I force my mind into overdrive, and my mana bursts out. At the cost of damage to my heart and brain, I manage to shift the direction of the teleport mid-cast.

Even then, Ruby is already there, waiting for me.

Up close, a barrage of projectiles slams into the barrier I create, dissolving into mana particles as I disrupt them.

She gathers the particles and moves them like drifting sand caught in a storm, sending them crashing against my barrier in steady waves. They swirl and grind away at it until I release a powerful burst of kinetic energy to force them back.

I charge at her but she teleports away again, and I track her more quickly, covering the remaining distance with Wraith Dance. My barrage of projectiles fires at her along with two tricolored orbs, yet once again the air in front of her waves, and all of them reappear at my back. Even now, I cannot grasp the skill she employs.

Protected by my barrier, I launch myself away from the explosion and soar high into the air. As I rise, I extend more Ley Lines across the area, firing projectiles marked for teleportation.

For a moment, I look toward the area where she collapsed that field. A mile of forest is totally destroyed, with no tree left standing and no hill untouched.

Ruby gives me no time to rest, keeping up the pressure with skills that activate almost instantly, paired with the constant, shifting flow of her mana. Her eyes study me just as I study her, and she counters with an ease that can only come from thousands upon thousands of hours of practice.

Her projectiles shatter my barrier, a disruption wave hits me, and I am certain that without my passive and skills, she would have completely disrupted my mana or taken it away.

Each attack is fast, precise, and hits with force. No matter how much mana I pour into defense, she keeps pushing me back, causing serious problems while using only a fraction of what I'm spending.

I pull all my mana back into my body and send some of it through my heart to convert it into kinetic energy. At the same time, I allow the seal around the Ignition Heart to lift slightly, and golden flames begin to surround me. They crash out from my body, from the exhaust nodes on my palms, soles, and the one on my back. These flames gather under my control, forming a circle of rotating fire behind me.

Ruby moves again to put distance between us, but I continue to track her even as she sets up fake signatures to misdirect me. It is something she weaves in a second, yet each of these signatures is more accurate than anything the twins together are currently able to perform.

I catch up to her, launching a laser-like stream of flames in her direction.

A single pale blue barrier forms in front of her, and the flame stream stops against it. I maintain the flame and continue to increase its output; the point of contact causes the barrier to heat up, turning from pale blue to light red as the heat spreads outward. Yet, that feeble looking barrier still holds.

I let the mana in my crown destabilize, and a disruptive attack explodes into the area, breaking the barrier as the stream of flames continues toward her head. But once the main force of the disruptive attack fades, she weaves another barrier that stops the flame in the same manner.

I repeat the process, and so does she. A few barriers finally break, even as she continues refining them while I focus on my own disruption. The flame now stops just a palm’s thickness away from her forehead. Nevertheless, she continues building up another skill in the background, and so do I.

This time, I do not disrupt the barrier. Instead, I release all the flames I had been collecting and move them around me as they shoot out in waves toward her, turning trees to ash and the ground to lava.

Ruby then disappears through her teleportation, but this time I track it and look up, finding her standing high in the air.

After all that preparation, a single mana projectile floats over the palm of her hand as she lifts it high. A transparent pale blue lance she shoots toward me. It glitters in the air as it heads down, gradually increasing in speed.

The mana I had gathered inside my body compresses and seeps out, touching my [Mana Crown] which turns black and immediately demands all my effort to regain control. I shape more of that mana into a black orb and shoot it ahead in the path of the pale blue lance.

The world quiets and the colors lose their vibrancy as the lance reaches the orb.

The lance cuts through it with ease at first. It nearly escapes the pull of the orb before the orb begins to tear apart. But the black mana left behind swirls and consumes. It spins, and its pull drags on the pale blue lance, slowing it down until it stops completely. Blue particles peel away, drawn into the orb until the lance breaks apart entirely.

The black orb expands, growing to the size of my fist, constantly compressing and expanding as if it is fighting to devour that mana.

Behind me, Ruby appears and the palm of her hand moves to strike my back.

Tearing my muscles to move faster, I react by coating the palm of my hand with black mana to meet her blow. That black mana absorbs the deadly attack she hurls at me but even so the bones in my hand crack and some of the attack pierces into my body.

She tries to teleport away, but I empower [Eclipse] with black mana, fully draining the colors from the area in an instant.

For the first time, her teleportation fails. Using kinetic energy, I launch an attack at a speed I’m sure would catch even Tacita off guard.

But Ruby reacts in time and ducks with a swiftness I never thought she possessed. She uses her mana to strengthen her body with such precision that I start to wonder if facing her at close range would be even more dangerous. But I can see the cost, tears in her skin, and the twitching of torn muscles.

Her red hair floats through the air as she dodges my series of attacks, only to be caught off guard by Needle Point piercing her foot and causing her to stagger.

Even though my [Eclipse], powered by black mana, disrupts all mana outside her body, that monster still manages to form a skin-tight barrier just in time. It holds against the full force of golden flames and a blast of kinetic energy that rips through the forest like a living thing.

Trees are torn from the ground and flung aside like broken spears, their trunks split and scattered through the air. The blast churns up the soil, carving deep gouges into the earth and sending shattered roots and debris flying in every direction. The heat rolls out in waves, warping the air and reducing everything in its path to scorched ruin.

And still, at the heart of it, she stands untouched.

Her body isn’t even damaged or thrown aside, and she moves with incredible speed once more, tearing more of her muscles in the process. She touches my hand before I can react and a pulse travels through my body, disrupting my mana and deactivating all my skills for a moment.

She uses that moment to teleport away, leaving behind a tricolored orb on the verge of destabilization and ready to explode. Something she managed to recreate after seeing me use it just once.

I know that if I let her escape now, it will become far more dangerous. I am certain she will either deploy countermeasures to prevent me from closing in again.

My Mana Wavelength Iris activates to the highest degree. One of my eyes almost popping like a squeezed grape as I read the remnants of her teleport and all the countermeasures or traps she left behind.

I resonate with it and pull as much mana into my body as I can. I break through some of the traps while ignoring others to damage me, trusting I can survive their impact.

I follow through and appear on the other side, the black mana I sent ahead absorbing Ruby's attack. Still, a few projectiles slip through before the black mana can consume them, piercing my body as if my defenses, Mana Wavelength Tyrant, and disruption aren’t even there.

Regardless, I strengthen my body, even as blood spurts from my torn chest and back. I grab that black mana in front of me and form it into a dagger. With all my effort, I stop another one of her teleportations. Even with a 50-level advantage, I have to use the full force of my mana to pull it off.

Then, I drive the black dagger into her arm.

Up close, the pattern in her yellow eyes glows as her face moves slightly closer to mine.

Feeling a sharp pain, I glance down and see her hand coated in pale blue mana piercing through my chest and exiting on the other side. In that same hand, she holds my Ignition Heart, its heat burning her until only the bones of her fingers remain.

But she sends a pulse of mana into the heart and squeezes. It destabilizes as the seals unravel beneath her mana, and a moment later, the heart explodes.

As if in slow motion, I watch the flames surge toward me. A roaring mass of heat and fury, intense enough to erase everything in its path. A force neither of us can survive.

She tries to teleport away, pushing against the black mana to some extent. She nearly activates her skill until I add disruption to the mix, barely managing to stop her.

I strengthen my body with that same black mana, lean back, and then swing forward to smash my forehead against hers, literally exploding her head.

I can only breathe out slowly, feeling my skull crack and blood flow down my forehead as I reach toward the flames erupting from the heart. Even though I know I don’t have a single chance of stopping them, I attempt to do so. With my eyes wide open, I watch as parts of my body gradually vanish in the heat. It does not even burn; there are no ashes at all. It is entirely gone.

The flames burn so intensely that they melt the mana itself.

My [Focus] consolidates and everything else is gone with all my attention driven to that single task.

And for the briefest split of a second, I succeed. The heat and the flames slow down for the shortest moment, and multiple notifications ring in my head just as they did during the fight. For that short, beautiful moment, I think of nothing but that huge ball of thermal energy.

But the moment is gone, and the flames surge to devour me.

"Stop." A single word sounds and the flames halt.

A field forms around me, and the sensation of being completely cut off from the outside world sinks in. Then, in a blink, my body is fully restored. The sealed Ignition Heart is back in my chest, my mana returns, and the area around me repairs itself.

Yet I'm also cut off from the tournament floor, and I’m certain now that no one is watching my challenge anymore.

Ruby’s avatar body, which should have disintegrated into particles the moment I defeated her, stands back up despite being headless. Her head regenerates, just as mine did, and the avatar stays a few steps away.

And that same avatar, meant only to defeat me and never show emotion, smiles.

Then she says, "It is quite rude to headbutt a lady, Nathaniel."

***

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