Read Novel Full Chapter 763: Dangerous Battle
Chapter 763: Dangerous Battle
The silver dome lifted, and the banquet hall Rudra and Ainen had just left kept going.
It kept going in every direction. Long tables stretched off into gold haze on all sides, each one set for a feast that had no end and no beginning, dish after dish steaming under a sky made of chandelier light instead of stars.
"Well," Ainen said, turning a slow circle. "I’ve died and gone to a kitchen."
"Don’t tempt it," Rudra said. "This place has rules like every other one. We just haven’t found them yet."
They found the first rule the way they found most things, by watching what tried to kill them.
A roast the size of a wagon rose off its platter three tables down, wood-carved bones cracking into a shape that stood on four legs and turned two smoldering eye-sockets on the pair of them.
"Course guardian," Ainen said, already moving. "Every proper feast has a running order. Soup, then roast, then something sweet to finish. I’d guess this whole hall follows the same shape."
"Then the coin’s at the end of the meal," Rudra said.
"The coin’s dessert," Ainen said, and grinned despite the roast-beast’s charge shaking the table beneath them. "I like this dimension already."
Rudra met the charge with the flat calm of a man who had stopped a leviathan with his bare will, and spent the Unmoved Current on the beast’s driving legs, freezing its next stride mid-motion. Ainen’s blade came around a half breath later, carrying the last stubborn edge of the Grand Table, and the essence of the beast’s own basting sauce turned traitor in his hand, dissolving the wooden bones from the inside before the thing ever finished falling.
They walked through course after course after that, a soup-guardian of boiling broth that Rudra simply denied all momentum until it curdled solid, a swarm of pastry-things that Ainen disassembled by convincing their sugar-crust it wanted to be sauce instead.
The final room held no guardian at all. Only a single dessert plate, and a coin sitting bright and small at its center, waiting the way every coin in this event seemed to wait, patient and unbothered by the blood it had already cost other people.
"Dessert," Ainen said, lifting it with something close to reverence. "Told you."
"You did," Rudra admitted. "One down."
---
Almond and Lily found their second door in a gallery of shattered statues, and this time the trigger wasn’t hidden nearly as well as the teacup had been.
A single unbroken statue stood among a hundred ruined ones, and the moment Almond’s hand closed around its outstretched stone palm, the gallery folded away and dropped them both into open sky.
They landed on a floating ruin, broken stone platforms hanging suspended over a void with no visible bottom, storm clouds churning between them and throwing off arcs of raw lightning that struck without warning or pattern.
Two others had already landed nearby, and one look told Almond exactly why this dimension had been waiting for people stronger than the last one.
Both rivals wore the unmistakable, quiet weight of Ultimate Cards worn into their very stance, the kind of certainty that only came from having already survived something that should have killed them.
"An armored one, and an archer," Lily said, reading them the way she read everything. "This won’t be easy."
"Good," Almond said, and meant it.
---
The knight came first, and he did not bother with words.
He crossed three platforms in two strides, greatsword trailing a hum of stored force that had clearly been building since the moment he arrived, and brought it down on Almond in a single overhead strike meant to end the fight before it started.
Almond caught it on crossed Grimblades, and the shock of the impact ran up both arms like a struck bell.
The knight’s armor flared gold along every seam.
"Careful," Lily called. "That armor’s drinking the hit."
She was right. The force of Almond’s own block fed straight back into the knight’s plating, and his next swing came in faster and harder than the first, powered in part by the very defense Almond had used against him.
Almond gave ground fast, reading the pattern even as he retreated. The armor didn’t just absorb. It stored, and released, and every exchange handed the knight more than it took.
"Don’t block him straight on," he called to Lily. "Redirect. Never meet it head first."
The archer answered before Lily could reply, three arrows loosing at once from somewhere across the ruin, and each one split apart mid-flight into a spreading fan of smaller shards, all of them curving unnaturally to converge on Lily from three different angles.
Lily’s whip lashed out in a wide arc, silence trailing off the tip, and where the silence touched the incoming shards, their guiding hum simply cut out, sending most of them tumbling harmlessly into the void.
Most. Not all.
One shard clipped her shoulder before the silence caught it, and she staggered back with a sharp hiss, blood welling bright against her sleeve.
"First blood," the archer called, cold and satisfied, already nocking a second volley.
"Only the first," Lily said through her teeth, and did not slow down.
---
The fight scattered across the broken platforms after that, lightning arcing overhead in patterns nobody could predict, and both sides found out fast exactly how far they’d have to push to survive this dimension at all.
Almond changed his approach entirely, refusing every straight clash the knight offered, sliding his blade along the greatsword’s edge instead of meeting it flat, bleeding off momentum sideways instead of feeding the armor another meal.
It worked, mostly. The knight’s next three swings found nothing but air and cracked stone.
The fourth one didn’t miss.
Almond misjudged the footing on a platform still trembling from a nearby lightning strike, and the greatsword’s flat caught him across the ribs hard enough to lift him off his feet and send him skidding across broken stone.
Pain lit up bright and immediate, and he tasted blood before he’d even finished sliding to a stop.
"Almond!" Lily’s voice cracked across the ruin.
"I’m up," he said, forcing himself back onto his feet through gritted teeth, one hand pressed to ribs that had definitely, unmistakably cracked. "I’m up."
The archer used the opening without mercy, a fresh volley screaming toward him from above, arrows already beginning to split.
Lily crossed the gap between two platforms in a single desperate leap, whip snapping out to intercept the volley before it reached him, and this time the silence caught every shard before it could scatter.
It cost her. She landed hard on a platform edge crumbling under the storm’s weight, and a stray bolt of wild lightning arced down and caught her across the back before she could fully clear it, throwing her forward into a skidding roll that left her gasping.
"That’s two of us bleeding now," she said, pushing herself upright with visible effort. "I don’t love this dimension."
"Then let’s finish it," Almond said.
---
They found their rhythm again the way they always did, not by fighting harder, but by fighting smarter, reading the two rivals the way the cave and the whip had taught them both to read everything.
The knight’s armor drank force. It did not drink patience.
Almond stopped attacking the armor at all. Instead he baited three more overextended swings across three collapsing platforms, letting the knight’s own momentum carry him further out over the void each time, until his last strike missed by inches and left him overbalanced at the very edge of a crumbling ledge.
"Now," Almond said, and drove a Grimblade not at the armor, but at the knight’s own unarmored knee, where nothing stored and nothing forgave.
The knight went down hard, the ledge finally giving way beneath him, and only a desperate grab at a jutting stone spire kept him from the drop entirely.
The archer broke from cover the instant her partner fell, ready to loose a volley that would have ended the fight in Almond’s favor by force alone.
Lily was already there. Her whip caught the bow itself mid-draw, silence swallowing the weapon’s hum whole, and for one full second the archer’s Ultimate Card simply had nothing left to answer with.
That second was enough.
Lily closed the distance and put her whip’s edge against the archer’s throat, close enough that the woman could feel exactly how little space remained between herself and the same fate her arrows had been promising all fight.
"Your bow’s gone quiet," Lily said. "So should you."
The archer’s eyes flicked toward her partner, still hanging by one hand over an endless drop, toward Almond standing over him with a blade that had already found the one place his armor couldn’t protect.
"We withdraw," she said, fast and final. "Both of us. We withdraw."
Gold light took her a heartbeat later, and the knight’s grip on the stone spire dissolved into the same light before his fingers ever gave out entirely.
---
The storm quieted the moment the ruin emptied of everyone but the two of them, lightning easing back into ordinary, distant thunder, and Almond finally allowed himself to sit down hard on the nearest stable stone.
"Ribs," he said, wincing as he probed them carefully. "At least two cracked."
"Shoulder, and my whole back where that lightning caught me." Lily lowered herself beside him with a matching wince. "That’s the first time this event’s actually hurt."
"It won’t be the last," Almond said. "Not if the coins keep getting guarded like that one was."
They sat together a moment longer, bruised and bleeding and entirely unbowed, and looked out at a floating ruin gone calm around them.
The coin sat waiting where the knight had dropped it, small and bright against broken stone, and Almond reached over and picked it up without standing, turning it once in fingers still faintly shaking from the fight.
"Two," he said.
"Ninety-eight to go," Lily said, and this time, despite everything, she managed something close to a smile.
"Sylvia, can you scan us and fix a healing nectar? Work with Lily’s Dread Sovereign, if it’ll have you."
[Sylvia: Right away, Master.]
"I evolved that healer support Sovereign myself, a while back," Lily said, watching a slender construct of light and vine-thread settle in beside Sylvia, already syncing to her work. "We should be patched up quickly."
Vine and light worked together over cracked ribs and lightning-scored skin, and the pain that had followed Almond and Lily off that ruined coliseum began, slowly, to ease.
[Ashkryon: I hate that we are not strong enough to help Master in crucial battles.]
[Galvaren: Same. But what can we do? Tsk.]
[Alfred: Death is permanent in this event. We will not be revived if we die here. Master is making sure none of us die.]
[Nyssara: Sigh.]
[Benedict: At least Sylvia is useful.]