Cleaver Of Sin

Chapter 618: Such Power

"Don’t be so guarded, why would I attack you here? Just to show off my power?" Malrik asked rhetorically as he shook his head with a sigh. He had absolutely no reason to attack Asher, who couldn’t even defend against a casual attack from him, even if Asher poured everything he had into his defense without holding anything back.

"Then how will you show me?" Asher asked in confusion as he tilted his head slightly to the side while floating steadily in place.

"Simple, I will show you a battlefield of mine," Malrik replied with a faint yet confident smile resting on his face.

Hearing this, Asher’s eyes immediately flickered with keen interest. His gaze shifted once more towards the devastation below. During his battle with Debro, they had erased about seventy to eighty kilometres with their attacks alone, and then when they both used their Sword Techniques, the damage range had risen to well over a hundred kilometres with terrifying ease.

With these rough measurements in mind, Asher couldn’t help but calculate and speculate what sort of devastation two Crownstar Life Rankers would truly be capable of causing if they fought seriously without restraint. His eyes burned intensely with eagerness, anticipation building rapidly within him, and he immediately turned his gaze back to Malrik. He didn’t need to speak at all, Malrik could already understand exactly what Asher meant with that single, expressive gaze.

With that silent understanding, Malrik placed his hand on Asher’s shoulder once again, cloaking him in his dense crimson-orange Solar Energy, and in that split instant, they vanished as though they had never existed there in the first place. In the very next split second, they reappeared midair, and Asher felt the same strange and indescribable sensation he had experienced when Malrik had first moved or teleported him; he still didn’t know which of the two the man had actually done.

The moment he stabilized himself in the air, Malrik removed his crimson-orange Solar Energy without delay. The instant he did, Asher felt it, heat, unbearable, suffocating, and overwhelmingly immense heat. His lungs seemed to tighten violently as though breathing in this place was against some absolute Law, his skin turned bright red and began to burn gradually yet persistently, injuries appearing across his body, which Virelass healed almost immediately without delay.

Asher immediately cloaked himself in Star Energy in response, but it proved completely useless, whatever force was acting upon him simply bypassed it as though it had never existed at all.

Malrik didn’t react in the slightest, he simply watched his little brother with a calm and knowing smile, as though he had expected this outcome from the very beginning.

Virelass was already healing him continuously, but the more she healed him, the more injuries appeared in an endless and vicious cycle. After a moment of enduring this, Asher simply told Virelass to stop healing him, as they didn’t possess infinite quantities of blood to sustain such a futile exchange. He even forced himself to stop breathing entirely, as his lungs and internal organs felt immense strain with every attempted breath.

He hadn’t even gone down to the battlefield yet, and yet he was already suffering greatly from its mere presence alone. He wasn’t even remotely close to it, he was still thousands of feet high up in the air, far above the battlefield, and yet even then, his skin continued to burn.

Asher’s purple eyes finally tore downward as he finally gazed at the battlefield below. The moment his eyes met the battlefield, he felt as though he had glanced directly at the Sun itself, his eyes instantly grew unbearably hot and irritated as tears began to stream downwards uncontrollably, the white part of his eyes, the sclera, turned a vivid and unnatural bright red from the intense pain and irritation he was currently enduring.

Asher’s heartbeat began to increase rapidly as he continued to stare downward, all around him lay something that destruction itself couldn’t even begin to properly describe. It was simply unfathomable to him, he could vaguely guess that something like a desert was supposed to exist here before, yet what now stood before him was a vast expanse of glassy ground formed entirely from extreme and unimaginable heat that stretched for hundreds of kilometres, if not thousands without end.

The next moment, his purple eyes began to bleed as though the world itself deemed him unworthy, unfit, and far too weak to even glance upon the scars that a battle between gods had carved deeply into reality itself. Seeing Asher bleed directly through his eyes, Malrik finally decided to step in, he placed a hand on Asher’s shoulder once again, healing all of his injuries instantly, then cloaked him once more in his crimson-orange Solar Energy, protecting him from the overwhelming side effects of simply daring to exist anywhere near the battlefield.

Asher heaved a deep sigh of relief, and with that, he slowly floated downwards with controlled and calm ease. He could now breathe properly again, and as Asher’s feet gently touched the glass terrain below, he immediately felt it, it was hot, extremely so, the air itself seemed to burn with intensity. From thousands of meters above the battlefield, he had already been bleeding and unable to breathe, but now, standing directly within the battlefield itself, it felt billions of times worse.

Asher knew with absolute certainty that without Malrik’s crimson-orange Solar Energy shielding him, he would have already died long before he could even hope to stand here. His imagination couldn’t help but run completely wild at the implications, and with the continued aid of Malrik, they arrived at another distant part of the battlefield. This side had transformed into what seemed like a scorched, ever-expansive, and enormous sinkhole that stretched endlessly beyond sight.

Asher didn’t need to be told anything, he could clearly tell that an ocean must have once existed here, yet it had been completely wiped out with ease as though it had never existed at all. At another side, an entire terrain of forest had been erased from the map of Crymora entirely. Asher had long since stopped bothering to measure the distances anymore, everything now stretched into thousands upon thousands of kilometres effortlessly.

’Such power,’ Asher thought to himself, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that humans were capable of possessing such overwhelming and destructive capabilities. Even in the movies he had watched during his past life as Ethan, even the so-called gods within those stories couldn’t cause this level of absolute carnage and devastation.

’How many Crownstar Life Rankers exist within Crymora?’ Asher thought to himself once more. With all of them possessing the power to cause this much destruction so effortlessly, surely the world itself should have already ended by now at their own hands.

Besides, how could a single planet realistically contain such an amount of such ridiculously powerful individuals? Surely Earth itself would have fractured and collapsed under their sheer might alone.

His mind couldn’t help but drift towards Cindralis, she too existed at the Crownstar Life Rank, and Asher couldn’t help but let out another quiet sigh, ’well, in novels, the Principals of any Academy are anything but weak,’ Asher thought to himself with a hint of realization.

’And this was one of the reasons Father, Big Brother, and Cindralis didn’t fight and instead simply settled for compensation without conflict,’ he paused briefly in thought, ’a single exchange of attacks between them could effortlessly wipe out everyone and everything within the Separate Dimension,’ he concluded firmly.

Asher couldn’t help but sigh once again, this overwhelming level of combat power and destructive force felt incomprehensibly distant and far beyond his current reach.

’I wonder who Big Brother fought here,’ he thought to himself deeply, he didn’t just see the lingering residual power from Malrik’s energy alone, he also saw the clear remnants left behind by his opponent, who seemed to possess equal might, as that opponent had also caused their own equally devastating and overwhelming carnage across the battlefield.