Rivers of the Night

Chapter 865: Release

“No, no,” Ancestor Sacharro laughed, his scythe cutting across the skies in wild arcs as he fought against the twin swinging great swordstaffs of Ancestor Tatsuya. “We shouldn’t target the kids, no?”

Ryu’s gaze was ice-cold, blazing with a hidden fury beneath.

He took a step forward, time bending around him.

Dyon’s grin only widened, fluttering black butterflies with golden specks on their wings appearing around him as he almost carelessly stepped through time as well, meeting Ryu’s blade in the proper frame.

They rebounded against one another and slid back.

Almost instantly, they charged once more, their echoing clashes reverberating across the Heavens.

“You don’t even need your name up there anymore. Let’s just let the future generation do their thing, hm? How about it? Maybe we just might have a third in our little group.”

Ryu didn’t reply.

Using tricks and skills never worked in their battles. They had counters, and counters to those counters. It was a waste of time and effort.

When they fought, the only thing they needed was their outrageous amounts of qi and their ferocity.

But right now… Dyon was well and truly pissing him off.

In the face of Ryu’s fury, though, Dyon only laughed more heartily.

“Ryu, buddy, pal. You wrote that name when you hadn’t even reached the peak of your cultivation path yet. What’s there to be angry about? I’ll never understand why you care so much about a little name.”

Ryu stopped moving.

They both knew that this alone wasn’t enough to save Existence. Releasing Karma like that would, at best, add to the chaos. Things would get far worse before they got better.

Existence was still in fight-or-flight. If one Nightingale Clan had led to so much chaos already, what else would Existence cook up while it still thought it was fighting off infections?

The more energy Existence used up trying to weed out the problems, the faster it would accelerate toward its Heat Death.

As much as it seemed selfish to try and keep the Karma for themselves, this was the only way to maintain balance in the short term.

Releasing that Karma now was like giving a runaway car more gas.

But the biggest problem Ryu had with this wasn’t the Karma, or even the fact that his name was crossed off. It was that during this period, it would be inadvisable for him or Dyon to do anything.

With this much Karma flying about, any action they took as the two strongest existences across Time and Space would cause too much of it to surge back toward them.

At that point, the situation would not only become unbalanced once again, it would become even more unbalanced than before.

Ryu couldn’t stand the idea of having to sit on his hands and do nothing as the only solution to keeping his family alive. He would have preferred to find a way to defeat Dyon and then find another solution.

But Dyon wasn’t an easy opponent to face. They had been probing each other for thousands of years, and neither had managed to find a real gap in the other’s defenses. Even if they went all out, the battle would probably end with both of them burning their life forces to nothing.

Ryu was insistent on fixing this problem himself, but this bastard Dyon wanted his daughter to experience life outside of the shelter of his umbrella.

That was literally it. If not for this, Ryu felt like he could have found a solution literal generations ago.

And now it was already too late to go back.

Dyon smiled, seeing Ryu’s stance. “As eternal as we are, even we won’t be around forever—”

“Speak for yourself.”

“—sometimes you have to learn to trust others,” Dyon continued as though he hadn’t heard Ryu at all.

Ryu looked down through the chaotic clouds as though he could pierce through the universe itself to see the very ends of Existence.

Dyon grinned. “He’s pretty good, huh?”

“Don’t you have sons of your own?”

Dyon waved a hand. “All useless, none as good as my little girl.”

Ryu shook his head. They said fathers always treated their daughters better; it seemed that was the case.

And somehow Dyon had the luck that his potential son-in-law was birthed from his daughter in the only non-incestuous way possible. No wonder he was beaming. It was probably the only way he’d be happy for Alauna to get married.

Ryu sneered. “Well, your ‘son-in-law’ only wants to take your daughter’s head. Maybe it will be entertaining to watch that.”

Dyon’s face stiffened, and then a flicker of rage passed through his eyes.

“I wonder, would your daughter still be as cute with her head rolling?”

Dyon vanished, and Ryu had already swung his blades.

If he wasn’t going to get past Dyon, he was going to piss him off just the same as he was.

…

Theron’s roars tore at what was left of his own ears, his eyes blacking out before he even finished the strike.

He was stripped of his hearing and his sight; he couldn’t even taste the wind on his lips anymore.

But it didn’t matter.

All he cared about was cutting that name down.

His strike transcended the bounds of time and space and tore forward, appearing before the stone monument in an instant, moving so fast that it was already beyond it in a single blink.

And then the monument released one more tremble that shook it to its very core.

Chi.

Chips and cut pieces were torn from the rock, and then the entire top of it was split from the rest of its body.

The top of the stone monument and the bottom separated, a small gap forming as the former leapt upward and then collapsed down.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Theron collapsed to the ground, his body a riddled mess of broken bones, his eyes barely able to see anything other than splotches of color and darkness.

But he felt better than he ever had before.