Chapter 447: A Battle of Paths

The contrast between the two battles was stark enough to make entire continents shiver.

Trevor and Lamair’s clash with Tyrant had been savage, yes, violent, destructive, impressive. But compared to what was unfolding now… it might as well have been two children snapping branches in a forest while a cosmic hurricane raged elsewhere.

Ethan and Leon weren’t fighting with spells. They weren’t fighting with affinities. They were fighting with what they fundamentally were. Their cores, Primord and Fae, were smashing against each other like ancient concepts trying to overwrite existence.

The sheer force of it was so overwhelming that Zark had been forced to step in. With a twist of his authority, he carved out half of Debranlith from the equation, shielding it in a temporal fold. Without that intervention, there wouldn’t have been anything left but drifting debris and a historical footnote saying “This place used to exist.”

The world itself had ceased to be a battlefield. The battlefield was a void of broken rules, where creation and dissolution pulsed like two lungs breathing against one another. The ground, the sky, even the idea of distance had lost their meaning.

And right in the middle of that impossibility, Ethan felt something stir.

Power.

Not new power… old power. His power. Fractured, sealed, stripped away… now trickling back as if the universe had decided he’d earned a refund through sheer struggle. He didn’t need months or years. Not here. Not in a battle that shook his identity loose and reforged it with every passing moment.

His body reflected the awakening.

Dark golden stripes cut across his face like marks of divine predation. His hands weren’t hands anymore; they were hybrid paws, bear-like in their density, tiger-like in their lethal precision. Silvery-white fur streaked with gold wrapped around his torso in a pattern that was almost ceremonial, yet brutally natural. His feet were no longer human, now powerful claws built for gripping earth, stone, or the flesh of gods.

And on his forehead, the three interlocking golden rings, his symbol, shifted. The shape broke, bent, and rose. It hardened into the sleek silhouette of a crown, like it belonged to the first beast who decided the world needed a ruler.

Leon transformed in kind. Gone was his shadow-drenched, monstrous visage. His wings expanded with noble symmetry, his form sharpening into something regal, ethereal, terrifying in its elegance. If Ethan was the ascendant king of beasts, Leon was the heir of twilight courts, sadistic grace bound in orderless beauty.

Their roars, one primal and thunderous, one melodic and distorted, crashed into each other like colliding universes.

This wasn’t a fight for dominance.

It was a fight to see whose existence demanded more from reality.

And the ruins of the world around them trembled, waiting to see which core, Primord or Fae, would refuse to break.

Reality strained like an overworked drumhead as Ethan and Leon closed the distance again. Their steps made no sound—sound had given up on existing here—but the ripples of their movement cracked through layers of unseen dimensions like shattering glass.

Ethan’s eyes burned with a deep, ancient calm. Leon’s eyes shimmered with a beautifully deranged hunger.

Then they moved.

Leon struck first, his wings folding into blades of jagged entropy as he spun through the void, laughing with a lilting echo that made even the broken space tremble.

Chaos Path: Shatterweave Spiral.

The attack didn’t just aim to cut Ethan; it aimed to carve through Ethan’s continuity, to unravel the order that defined him.

Ethan’s response came with a cold stillness.

No roar. No shout.

Just a gesture.

His right paw traced a sigil that shuddered with pristine symmetry, a glyph that felt carved out of ancient law.

Order Path: Axiom Seal.

It locked space momentarily, stopping Leon’s spiral mid-arc. For a heartbeat, Leon froze like he’d been caught inside a perfect, crystalline cage.

Then the cage cracked. Chaos hated being contained.

Leon smirked and exploded outward, tearing through the Axiom Seal with swirling, jagged tendrils of pitch-black mist. They whipped outward like the hands of a malicious god.

Dread Path: Twilight Maw.

The tendrils screamed, not physically, but emotionally. Everything they touched recoiled, even the leftover fragments of reality. They aimed for Ethan’s chest, his back, his crown, trying to sink fear into his very core.

Ethan didn’t move back.

He stepped forward.

Silvery-white fur ignited with runes, circular, spiraling, glowing with the hidden logic of forgotten heavens.

Mysticism Path: Veil of the First Riddle.

The tendrils of dread slammed into the shimmering veil and were swallowed whole, converted into harmless motes that drifted like sparks off a grinding wheel.

Leon snarled in delight.

“Delicious,” he whispered, voice like cracking ice and velvet shadows. “Show me more, Ethan. Show me the beast that unravels laws.”

Ethan’s crown flared with a deep golden blaze, and his muscles tensed, not with rage, but with purpose. His next strike wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t grand.

He simply raised his arm and punched.

Reality bowed around the motion.

Order Path: Imperial Vector.

The punch didn’t hit Leon physically; it hit his trajectory, rewriting where he was supposed to be. Leon was hurled sideways by pure inevitability, smashing through layers of floating spatial shards like a meteor skipping across the surface of a lake.

He recovered mid-flight, wings bursting with chaotic brilliance, feathers transforming into knives of starlit void. He unleashed them in a fan of collapsing probabilities.

Chaos Path: Paradox Bloom.

The knives appeared in front of Ethan, behind him, inside the spaces he hadn’t stepped into yet. Perfect chaos trying to overwrite the flow of Order.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. His golden stripes pulsed.

For the first time, he spoke.

“Enough.”

The crown burned brighter as three glowing rings reappeared behind him, rotating slowly like the gears of some celestial engine. The rings channeled into his claws, bending the currents of rules and riddles together.

Order–Mysticism Fusion Art: Sovereign Enigma Rend.

He slashed once.

Just once.

The slash didn’t cut Leon.

It cut the space where Leon’s chaos could manifest.

Half of the Paradox Bloom flickered out of existence. The other half folded into harmless spirals and drifted away like dying fireflies.

Leon landed on a fragment of broken sky, chest heaving, tongue running across his lips. His aura darkened, twisted, surged.

“I’m not done,” he whispered. The void trembled.

Ethan lowered himself into a stance, fur bristling with light that seemed both holy and unknowable.

“Neither am I.”

Their cores pulsed.

Primord and Fae.

Order and Chaos.

Mysticism and Dread.

And the next collision promised to be the one that decided who bent and who broke.

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