Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 698: Last Assault (2/2)

He did not come alone.

He came on the Doom Stallion.

It descended out of the red sky like a piece of the sky itself coming loose, a vast dark steed wreathed in crimson fire, its hooves striking nothing and cracking the air anyway, and on its back rode the Doom Monarch, and the moment he appeared, the world began to change.

That was the thing about the Doom Monarch that no announcement had prepared anyone for. He did not simply fight. The world bent around him. Where he rode, the land reshaped itself, the sky reshaped itself, reality itself flexed to match his will. The broken coast behind the combined force rose into jagged mountains. The red sky folded into a dome of crimson fire. The ground beneath the battle became something that was not ground, a shifting surface of his own making, and the entire war was suddenly being fought inside a world the Doom Monarch was building around them as they fought.

The four X-rank holders rose to meet him.

Almond went first, and he went with everything.

His Grimblades poured out, hundreds of them, the full Exalted arsenal he had spent the entire event refining. The seven Spirit Lords rose with him and opened their domains. And he had equipped himself, every X-rank holder had, with gear built from the Tier-100 systems, the boost they needed to fight something on the Doom Monarch’s level. The Grimblades carried Tier-100 edges now. The Spirit Lord domains were layered with Tier-100 reinforcement. Almond was not the man who had arrived in this world months ago. He was something the event had forged.

He stacked his blades into a convergence and brought it down on the Doom Stallion.

The Stallion reared, and the world reshaped to block the strike, a wall of crimson mountain rising between the convergence and the steed. The convergence cut through the mountain anyway, Grim Severam denying the reshaped reality the right to hold itself together, and struck the Stallion across the flank.

The Stallion screamed, and the sky answered, and the Doom Monarch struck back.

His attack was not a weapon. It was a decree. The reshaped world simply decided that the combined force should not exist where it stood, and reality began to fold them out of it.

Rudra met the decree with Absolute Breaker.

He drove his fist into the folding reality itself, and Absolute Breaker revoked it, the Doom Monarch’s reshaping unmade at the point of Rudra’s strike. For an instant, the two forces met, the Monarch’s power to remake the world against Rudra’s power to revoke it, and the world held still between them, undecided.

Lily broke the deadlock.

The Wheel of Achromatic Shade turned, and it stole the one thing the Doom Monarch relied on. It stole his reshaping. Not all of it, the Monarch was far too strong for that, but enough, a piece of the world-bending power pulled out of him and banned, and for a moment the Doom Monarch could not reshape as freely as he had, and the folding reality faltered.

In that faltering, Ainen struck.

His origin flame had been waiting for this. All event, it had absorbed everything it burned, and now he turned it on the Doom Stallion and let it learn. The flame caught the Stallion’s crimson fire and absorbed it, and birthed a new flame that burned the Stallion with its own power, and the Doom Stallion, which had never been hurt by fire because fire was part of what it was, burned.

The combined force surged into the opening the four X-rank holders had made.

Marcus drove his shield into the Stallion’s leg and held it. Maya’s ice spread up the wound Ainen’s flame had opened. Silvester and Hiroshi crossed their blades through the Stallion’s flank. Natalia’s spheres found the Doom Monarch’s blind spots and fired into them. The Spirit Lords and Dreadling Monarchs swarmed the Stallion from every side. The Suryax King’s solar light, the Stormlord’s storm, the Crystal Sage’s precision, the Dawn Matriarch’s dawn, all five Tier-100 systems poured into the Doom Monarch and his Stallion at once.

The reshaped world shook.

The Doom Monarch fought back with everything he had, and everything he had was enormous. He reshaped faster than Lily could steal, struck harder than Rudra could revoke, and the combined force took losses, real ones, soldiers and constructs torn out of existence by a decree they could not block.

And Almond brought them back.

Even now, even here, the golden threads of his Oblivion deck spread across the battlefield, and the soldiers the Doom Monarch unmade reassembled, and the constructs he erased returned, and the combined force did not break because it could not be made to stay broken. The Doom Monarch’s greatest weapon was his ability to remove things from existence, and Almond’s deck answered it with the one thing that could, the ability to put them back.

The Monarch could not solve it. Just as the Executioners could not solve it. He removed, and Almond restored, and every moment the Monarch spent unmaking the same forces twice was a moment the combined force spent hurting him.

Lily stole more of his reshaping. Rudra revoked more of his decrees. Ainen’s flame burned hotter, having learned the Stallion’s fire completely now. And Almond stacked the largest convergence he had ever built, every Exalted Grimblade he held, all of it folding into a single descending strike, layered with Tier-100 power, carrying Grim Severam at its heart.

"Now," Rudra said, and drove his fist into the Doom Stallion’s chest, and Absolute Breaker revoked its heart.

The Stallion faltered.

Ainen’s flame poured into the revoked wound and burned the Stallion from the inside.

Lily stole the last of the reshaping the Monarch was holding, and the world he had built around them stopped building, and for one moment the Doom Monarch sat exposed on a faltering steed in a world that no longer bent to him.

Almond brought the convergence down.

It came through the red sky like the event itself passing judgment, hundreds of Exalted Grimblades fused into one strike, Grim Severam denying the Doom Monarch every chance to reshape it away, Tier-100 power driving it through everything the Monarch threw up to stop it.

It struck the Doom Stallion first, and the Stallion came apart, the vast dark steed that had carried the end of the world dissolving into crimson embers that scattered across the faltering sky.

And then it struck the Doom Monarch.

The convergence drove down through him, and the reshaped world came apart with him, the crimson dome and the jagged mountains and the shifting ground all dissolving as the will that had been holding them together was severed. The Doom Monarch, who had bent reality itself, who had terrorized this world for longer than anyone could remember, who had nearly ended five kingdoms and then nearly ended four, came apart under the combined strength of a kingdom that had arrived as strangers and built itself into the thing that could end him.

The light of the strike faded.

The reshaped world dissolved back into ordinary land and ordinary sky.

And where the Doom Monarch had been, there was nothing left at all.