Read Novel Full Chapter 456: SOVEREIGNS’ BATTLE
Chapter 456: SOVEREIGNS’ BATTLE
"I don’t think it’s me you care about," Aaron answered smoothly, smile widening just enough to flash teeth.
"What you actually care about is who I’m connected with."
[Can you stop rage baiting him? You don’t have your Immortality and can be killed by him at any moment from now.]
The System’s warning exploded across Aaron’s inner vision in urgent, flashing crimson text, practically vibrating with digital panic.
Red alerts stacked frantically one after another; probability matrices spun wildly, casualty projections screamed red, threat-level indicators pegged at maximum.
The AI sounded like it was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
How was this human still smirking?
How was his heart rate so steady?
How was adrenaline not flooding his system in terror?
Standing this close to Zeus should have triggered every survival instinct humanity had ever evolved, yet Aaron looked like he was enjoying a casual chat over drinks.
"You. What do you know about Dracula?" Lucifer asked, materializing silently behind Zeus’s right shoulder in a ripple of dark wings and colder shadow.
His voice was velvet-smooth, cultured, almost polite, but the smile plastered across his face never once reached those bottomless black eyes flecked with dying-star red.
They studied Aaron with the clinical detachment of a butcher deciding which cut to take first.
The air around Lucifer carried the faint scent of brimstone and old parchment; his presence felt like a blade pressed lightly against the throat, promising pain without ever quite drawing blood.
"You all should chill out," Aaron said lightly, raising both hands in exaggerated placation.
"Ladies and gentlemen... may I present to you the once strongest being in the universe. Dracula."
He stretched one arm backward in a theatrical, almost mocking flourish, pointing behind him with casual confidence.
The instant the final syllable left his lips, Aaron void-stepped.
Space folded around him like wet silk tearing.
One heartbeat he stood in the kill-zone directly before Zeus; the next he reappeared miles away on a shattered granite ridge overlooking the devastated battlefield.
Wind howled past his ears from the displacement; his cloak snapped behind him like a living thing.
Lucky timing.
A lightning bolt, thicker than the trunk of an ancient redwood, white-hot at its core, slammed into the exact spot he had occupied a fraction of a second earlier.
The strike was apocalyptic in scale and sound.
The domain vaporized instantly in a blinding white sphere of superheated plasma.
Rock liquefied and sprayed outward in molten parabolic arcs that glowed brighter than the sun for several seconds.
The geography itself ceased to exist, hundreds of meters of terrain erased into a glowing, glass-lined crater whose edges dripped magma like slow tears.
The shockwave rolled outward in visible, concentric ripples of compressed air, flattening every surviving tree, hurling boulders like pebbles, and scouring the landscape clean down to bedrock.
"Tch. Take it easy," Aaron called, still smiling as he raised one hand and wove a fresh isolation barrier around himself, space folding into a shimmering, translucent cocoon.
A vertical rift tore open in the air before him, jagged edges flickering with hungry void-black energy.
From within stepped a figure that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
Pale skin the color of fresh-fallen snow under moonlight.
Long dark hair that moved with liquid grace, even in the howling wind. Crimson eyes that glowed with the quiet, unhurried certainty of something ancient and utterly inevitable.
A black cloak flowed around him like spilled ink given elegant form, timeless, regal, perfectly suited to the lord of eternal night.
"Dracula," Zeus said, voice dropping to something dangerously low and intimate. "You really are back."
"Of course," Dracula replied, tone calm, aristocratic, almost bored. "I wasn’t going to stay down for too long."
He began walking forward, slow, deliberate steps that made no sound despite the cracked, uneven earth beneath his boots.
The air around him grew colder with every stride, carrying the faint, intoxicating scent of old blood, winter roses long dead, and something darker, something that whispered of centuries spent in coffins and forgotten crypts.
With the absolute calmness of still, bottomless water, Dracula continued until he stood directly in front of Zeus, close enough that the lightning arcing wildly around the god-king reflected crimson in his irises, close enough that the heat of divine wrath met the chill of eternal night.
"Zeus," he said softly, almost fondly.
"It’s been a while since I last saw you."
"Shut up," Zeus snarled, "and go back the same way you came!"
His arm moved.
The motion was so fast it should have been invisible to any mortal sense.
Even Aaron, miles away, felt his breath catch in his throat.
His mystic eyes, capable of dissecting attacks in microseconds, was able to track the swing.
But reacting to the attack?
Aaron was confident that was impossible for him to do.
The fist blurred into a streak of divine violence aimed to obliterate Dracula’s head from existence in a single, catastrophic instant.
Air itself screamed as it was displaced.
"That’s quite the rude way to welcome me back, isn’t it?" Dracula asked mildly.
His own hand rose, casual, almost lazy, and caught Zeus’s fist mid-strike with perfect, effortless precision.
Boom!
The collision birthed a sound louder and deeper than thunder, primal, bone-rattling, world-shaking.
A shockwave exploded outward in a perfect, spherical wall of force, visible as a shimmering distortion that tore trees from roots, vaporized stone, and hurled hurricane-force winds across the landscape in every direction.
The sky itself seemed to ripple and groan under the pressure.
"This can’t be good," Aaron muttered under his breath, eyes narrowing.
He opened a rift to the sanctuary without a heartbeat’s hesitation, instinct and cold caution overriding everything else.
He stepped through just as the shockwave reached him.
Lucky for him.
The isolated space he had so carefully woven around himself shattered like cheap glass under the onslaught.
Cracks raced across the invisible barrier in fractal patterns, then the entire construct collapsed inward with a tortured scream of reality tearing.
The domain that had once contained the entire tournament crumbled completely, ground folding in on itself, sky fracturing into jagged shards, everything folding into violent, chaotic entropy.
Back at the epicenter, Zeus slowly lowered his arm, muscles still corded with power.
"You haven’t gone rusty," he said, the words carrying a grudging respect that sounded almost painful to force past his teeth.
"You, on the other hand, disappoint me," Dracula replied, voice still perfectly even, perfectly calm.
He clenched his fist, slowly, deliberately.
Then he struck.
The punch moved faster than Zeus’s had, fast enough to make the god-king’s earlier attack look like languid slow-motion footage played at half speed.
Air compressed into visible shock cones around the fist; reality itself seemed to bend and warp away from the blow in protest.
The motion was clean, economical, inevitable.
The strike connected cleanly with Zeus’s chin.
A second, even louder detonation rolled outward, deafening, apocalyptic.
Zeus’s head snapped sideways with brutal force; his massive body lifted clean off the ground and hurtled through the air like a cannon-shot projectile, trailing dying sparks of lightning that flickered and guttered out in his wake.