"Good."

Catching his sword mid-strike before it could cleave through Wang Yu's skull, Ethan let out a shout—not of anger, but of admiration. There was genuine delight in his voice, the thrill of finding an opponent worth the effort.

Wang Yu's foot, wreathed in Cursed Fire, stamped against the ground. The instant it struck, the earth exploded beneath him. A trail of blinding flame flared in his wake, twisting the air into shimmering heatwaves as he launched himself bodily at Ethan Harris.

Ethan's longsword slashed downward. His potential, Raincaller, divided that single strike into countless fragments neatly arrayed along Wang Yu's path, half forming razor-sharp edges, the other half applying force in precise patterns to divert his charge.

"!"

Wang Yu's heel shattered the ground, the recoil coursing through his leg and into his right fist. The flaming punch tore through the air, detonating like a cannon blast beneath Ethan's chin. The sonic shock alone could have leveled a building.

Ethan reacted by instinct. His left hand, already poised, formed a sword and sliced through space itself, dragging his body backward by more than ten meters. The upward blow missed him by a hair's breadth, but the wave of pressure tousled his hair and whipped his cloak back. For the first time, surprise flickered in his eyes. What had just happened?

He had no time to think. Wang Yu, body ablaze and Bloodburn Drive roaring at full output, was already upon him again. The more life-force he consumed, the hotter the Cursed Fire burned. It shifted from ghostly green to blood-red, and then into a nearly transparent azure flame. Even without moving, Wang Yu's presence alone was enough to melt the ground and turn it into flowing magma.

The blazing flames transformed every ounce of energy into raw strength. His void engine drew that power through every fiber of his being, refining, amplifying, and accelerating his body with every passing heartbeat.

He grew stronger the longer he fought. His bloodpool still brimmed with reserves to feed his burning drive. More crucially, Ethan's attacks seemed to lose their edge: his once-lethal strikes now barely left a mark.

Before Ethan could adjust, the blue radiance filled his vision. Wang Yu's fingers closed into a bladelike hand that sliced upward in a single, devastating arc. Fighting spirit erupted from his arm, fused with the azure flame, and became a blade of heat and pressure that screamed toward Ethan. It was Wang Yu's first use of external fighting-spirit projection, a blow of terrifying force.

Ethan's focus sharpened to a razor's edge. He didn't panic. His fighting spirit spiked, overloading his body to the point of self-harm. The temporary surge boosted his speed enough to intercept the blow, his sword stabbing forward in a blinding motion.

The thrust carried more than mere force. It bent the rules of space itself, just as when he'd once drawn lightning onto his blade. The thrust pierced through the flaming arc, tearing through Wang Yu's projected blade and striking him square in the chest.

Then came the same sound that wasn't quite a sound, the same emptiness as when Wang Yu had blocked Ethan's dimensional slash to the head. The blow had landed true, but the moment a golden light flared across Wang Yu's chest, all meaning and momentum vanished.

Expressionless, Wang Yu drove his knee upward. The motion shattered the longsword braced against his chest. In the same breath, he twisted his body and fully extended his raised leg, snapping a brutal kick straight toward Ethan's skull.

"Nullified?"

Ethan swung desperately with the blade of his left hand, but Wang Yu's amplified strength—already monstrous, now climbing into unimaginable territory—crushed the counterblow. His kick broke through the defense as if it were glass. With no chance to evade, Ethan took the strike head-on.

The impact split his skull. Blood and fragments sprayed through the air. The violent kick had obliterated his head outright—only for his body to blur, becoming translucent and ethereal. His ruined head reformed in an instant.

Wang Yu threw a follow-up punch, but it passed cleanly through the fading image. His fist hit nothing. A heartbeat later, Ethan's intact form reappeared a short distance away, calm once more, meeting Wang Yu's narrowed eyes.

"Impressive," Ethan said with genuine awe. "That was my only life-saving technique. How did you manage to ignore my attacks entirely?"

He summoned a sword of fighting spirit again, and this time, it came in a pair. He held the familiar longsword in his right and a shorter blade in his left. The twin weapons gleamed as he raised them toward his silent opponent.

"......"

Wang Yu didn't answer. He simply gathered power. "A life-saving artifact?" he mused to himself. Those were rare indeed.

"If you won't tell me," Ethan said with a faint smile, "then I'll just have to test whether I can cut through that unbreakable defense of yours."

Regret tinged his tone, but battle-lust soon drowned it out. All legendary knights had at least a single ultimate skill.

Ethan hadn't specialized in such techniques, but that didn't mean he couldn't use them. He forced his body into a state of overdrive, burning his own flesh for strength, trading pain for power. His fighting spirit surged to its peak.

They charged simultaneously. The impact came the very next instant. Wang Yu's flaming fist met Ethan's blade; his other hand parried the shortsword. They clashed at a pace no human eye could follow, fists and blades colliding in a storm of steel and flame. The surrounding terrain disintegrated under the strain of their rapid, continuous exchange.

For a fleeting moment, their physical might was equal, but Ethan's technique far surpassed Wang Yu's raw ferocity. In one narrow opening, he slipped past Wang Yu's guard, the short sword carving space itself as it flashed behind him.

In an instant, it traced slashing lines across Wang Yu's back, neck, brow, and flank, each stroke a rip in the fabric of the air itself.

Yet the string of nonexistent sounds made it clear how utterly futile Ethan's attacks were. Just as Wang Yu had decided from the outset, he had cast aside all defense. All he needed now was offense. Defense was Avia's domain.

Yes: the one manipulating the power of the golden light at that moment was none other than the young woman suspended in the void. It was also why she had refrained from casting any attack spells in aid of Wang Yu throughout the battle.

From the very start, the Perfect Fractal lens above his right eye, small and unassuming, had been working ceaselessly to record every scrap of data from Ethan's attacks. The name Perfect Fractal meant exactly that: the ability to fracture and decompose all things. When paired with the Chariot's "scanner," seeing through Ethan's lightning-fast strikes was child's play.

The golden light was Wang Yu's strongest defensive technique. In his own hands, however, it could never keep pace with the tempo of Ethan's slashes. But entrusted to Avia, the outcome was completely different.

Avia had linked the Perfect Fractal lens directly to the Tree of the Night, turning that divine tree whose computational might defied comprehension into a supercomputer focused on analyzing the data her lens collected.

The power of the Chariot gathered the precursor ripples of Ethan's attacks and passed them into the Perfect Fractal lens. The spell, in turn, combined that data with its own algorithms and delivered the equations to the Tree of the Night. The Tree computed the result—where to trigger the golden light—and Avia, wielding the Chariot's authority, enacted it upon Wang Yu's body. Thus was born the impregnable fortress that now stood before Ethan.

Every strike could be foreseen before it even formed in full. Ethan's swordsmanship could no longer touch him. Attack was all that mattered now—Wang Yu could press forward, heedless of the enemy's futile blows.

Ethan's latest strike was once again parried. Wang Yu seized the opening. His left fist drove forward, high-energy blood surging with raw might to explode the very air itself. The blast flung Ethan backward in a shockwave that tore at the space between them; he skidded for dozens of meters before regaining his balance.

"Forgive the impertinence," said Ethan, spitting a thread of blood as he cast aside his broken shortsword and gripped his long blade of fighting spirit in both hands. "Would you grant me a chance to see whether my full strength can pierce your defense?"

"..."

Wang Yu said nothing. He simply bent his knees, his entire body coiling like a spring as he gathered power into his right fist. It was a clear, deliberate gesture—a signal of challenge, not yet an attack.

Ethan's expression brightened, a serious look flickering across his face. "A worthy foe," he murmured. "And my thanks for the honor."

He understood Wang Yu's intent perfectly: Wang Yu would meet Ethan's strongest strike with his own. It was an offer Ethan could not, and would not, refuse.

But how could he break that impossible defense, that golden barrier which nullified even the feedback of contact itself? Space? No—the golden radiance even deflected spatial ruptures. Then what remained...?

"Perhaps this is it."

As memories of years of sword practice flashed before his eyes, enlightenment bloomed in Ethan's mind. The greatest source of destruction was not the rending of space itself, but the power that caused space to rend. And where did that power come from? The answer was clear: from his sword. From himself.

A shadowy substance crept along the edge of his blade, staining the steel black as the void. It was a power he had never before touched, a new ability, a new realm, awakened only in that instant of understanding. His sword seemed to vanish, its darkness indistinguishable from the emptiness around it.

"Come then!" Ethan whispered, exhilarated by the revelation. "This blade shall sever—"

He never finished the sentence. In the next instant, everything before his eyes dissolved into nothingness. His every sense was extinguished in a single heartbeat. When his legendary will tore free of that divine darkness imposed by the power of the night, it was already too late. Only the void remained. He was dead.

The Cursed Fire burned ever fiercer as it devoured vitality. With each color shift, its blaze advanced by a stage, each exponentially stronger than the last.

During the charge-up phase, Wang Yu's bloodpool had been halved, leaving him with roughly seventy-five percent of his blood by volume. By the time he finished charging up his ultimate attack, his Cursed Fire, now azure, had burned that down to fifty percent.

The flames transformed once again, turning pure and colorless. In that single instant, every last drop of blood was consumed. His strength reached a peak beyond all mortal limit.

His charge forward became indistinguishable from teleportation. Ethan never had the chance to unleash his final strike. Wang Yu vanished—and reappeared seventeen kilometers away, his fist having already fallen. Everything along the path, including the Sword Saint Ethan Harris, was reduced to drifting ash.

A moment later came the delayed sound, an eerie, resonant hum echoing over the landscape. The devastation wrought by that unmeasurable blow became clear: there were two vast craters each rimmed with molten rock, the start and end points of the strike. Between them stretched a monstrous trench, ten meters wide, several deep, and seventeen kilometers long, carved clean through the earth.

As for Ethan Harris, Wang Yu could tell the man had been a true martial fanatic. Even at the start, the Sword Saint hadn't fought him seriously.

But so what? Did he think Wang Yu would grant him another chance? An enemy was an enemy. There was no such thing as a "respectable" foe.