My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!-Chapter 74: Two fingers… two fingers

However, it still forced itself up, weakly standing on its feet.

The black smoke around its body wavered uncontrollably, thinning in some places and bunching into dense knots in others.

It was a pathetic sight, a broken entity trying to reclaim its dignity, but the desperation in its movements was clear.

A long black sword began to form in its hands.

The weapon coalesced from the smoke around its body, a blade of solid shadow that seemed to swallow the light around it.

It gripped the hilt with both hands, its smoky fingers trembling as it raised the blade at Noah.

"Just die... just die!" it shouted.

It was the scream of someone who knew they were outmatched but refused to accept the end.

The figure poured every remaining ounce of its power into the blade, causing the black smoke to swirl around the steel in a violent, hungry vortex.

It raised the sword high above its head.

"Shadow Cleave!" it shrieked, swinging the blade down with all the power it could muster.

As the sword cut through the air, a powerful crescent aura made up of dense, oily black smoke shot forward.

It tore across the distance between them, looking like a shark fin cutting through the surface of the sea.

The attack glided through the ground as if the earth were nothing but water, not ripping up even a chunk of the earth.

It was a spell designed to bypass shields and armor alike, striking directly at the essence of the target.

Nonetheless, Noah did not flinch.

The golden gloves on his hands began to glow brightly, and he stretched a hand towards the incoming slash.

As soon as the black crescent got close, Noah moved with a speed that the eye could barely track, catching the edge of the slash aura with just two fingers.

Swoosh!

A strong gust of wind exploded from the point of contact.

The force of the impact sent a shockwave through the air, fluttering Noah’s clothes, but his arm did not budge an inch.

The huge slash that previously seemed unstoppable had been brought to a complete stop, trapped between Noah’s thumb and forefinger.

Noah looked at the captured energy for a brief second.

Then, he snipped his fingers slightly.

A sharp, metallic crack echoed across the plain, as the slash aura shattered into two halves.

Before the fragments could even hit the ground, they began to fray and dissolve, disintegrating into thin air until not a single trace of the black smoke remained.

The smoky figure collapsed mentally at that point.

It fell onto its knees, its head hung low, its body sagging as the last of its strength left it. It began to mutter to itself, the words stumbling out in a dazed, repetitive loop.

"That was my strongest attack..." it whispered. "And he... and he... snapped it with two fingers... two fingers... two fingers..."

The words became a mantra of despair, as the figure slowly dissolved into a broken shell with zero hopes of even winning this fight.

It felt like it was trapped in a living nightmare.

This was an entity that had always been the apex predator.

It had spent a lifetime overwhelming its opponents with ease, using its shadow powers to slip through defenses and end lives before the victims even knew they were in danger. It was a master of the dark, a being to be feared.

Now, it was rendered completely helpless.

Against this person, all of its training, and all of its unique powers given to it by the shadow element were reduced to nothing.

It felt like an ant trying to topple a mountain, or a candle trying to burn the sun.

At first it had felt no fear when he saw Noah, even though the latter was emanating the aura of an Arch magus.

This confidence was born from the fact that it had already killed an arch magus, and quite easily at that.

The magus’s attacks couldn’t even reach him, only phasing through its body like he was air.

Against a normal magus, the shadow element was untouchable.

Fire would pass through it without leaving a burn, and even blades would simply slip through it.

It was, after all, a shadow.

Shadows had no mass or matter, so it couldn’t be touched, talkless of being hurt. Or so it had thought, until it met Noah.

In the span of a few minutes, every law of magic it understood had been dismantled by the man standing before it.

Noah stood in silence, his gaze drifting over the broken figure.

’Shadow...’ Noah thought, glancing down at the smoky figure again.

He had been having his suspicious before, but the black smoke surrounding it was actually the shadow element.

It was still collapsed on the ground, its form sagging with a profound sense of defeat. It seemed to have zero will to live left.

The pride that had allowed it to face an arch magjs without fear had been stripped away, replaced by the hollow realization that it was nothing more than a plaything in the hands of a superior being.

Normally, it would have sunk into the ground as it had done before, trying to escape.

But after what had happened the last time it tried to do that, it didn’t dare try it again.

The memory of being violently hauled back to the surface by the golden wave was still fresh in its mind.

It knew now that there was no corner of the world, light or dark, where Noah could not reach it, so it simply stayed there and accepted its fate.

Noah’s voice broke the silence.

"I have a lot of questions for you," he said. "But first, I want to see your face under that shadow,"

Noah stretched out his hand toward the figure.

Suddenly, the ground beneath the smoky entity began to pulse with a familiar, radiant light.

Five golden arms, constructed of pure and solid mana, rose up from the frozen earth.

They moved quickly, surrounding the figure before it could even think to react.

The smoky figure shivered as the golden hands made contact with it, effortlessly lifting its body from the ground.

A pair of hands gripped its smoky wrists, pulling them out to the sides. Another pair locked around its legs, keeping them suspended in the air. The last hand reached up and wrapped firmly around its neck, tilting its head back.

Strangely enough, the creature didn’t feel any pain this time, and it couldn’t help but feel a little relief at that.

It truly didn’t want to experience that pain it had felt before ever again. That sensation of the shadow around it being destroyed bit by bit was a horror that surpassed the fear of death itself.

As long as the gold was not burning it, the creature was content to be a prisoner.

The hands carried the figure through the air.

It was moved toward Noah like a rat being presented on a platter, its body held rigid and defenseless.

The smoky figure looked down at the man who held its life in his grasp, its form trembling in the golden light.

As they drew closer, the golden gloves on Noah’s hands began to glow again.