Chapter : 637

The thing that pulsed on the scorched earth was a violation of natural law. It was an unfinished blasphemy, a creature that defied every known category of existence. It had the formless, gelatinous quality of a colossal slime, easily ten feet in diameter, but it was not translucent or mundane. Its color was the absolute black of a starless, moonless midnight, a void that seemed to absorb the very light around it, creating a pocket of profound darkness in the bright afternoon sun.

It had no limbs to strike with, no eyes to see with, no mouth to roar with. It was simply a heaving, amorphous mass of living shadow, its surface rippling and shuddering with a silent, malevolent energy. It was a primal, unfinished horror, a creature that had been torn from the Abyss before it was fully formed, a nightmare given substance.

Yet, despite its utter lack of discernible features, the spiritual pressure it radiated was immense. It was a force far more potent and terrifying than the Curse Knight in his armored form had ever been. The debilitating curse aura that had once been a tactical weapon had now been concentrated and amplified into a palpable wave of pure, negative energy. It was a suffocating presence, a psychic miasma that promised not just weariness or despair, but utter, soul-crushing nullification. It was an aura of anti-life, a field of entropy that sought to break down and consume all other forms of energy.

Lloyd felt the change in the battlefield instantly. His connection to Iffrit, the psychic conduit through which he channeled the demon’s boundless fire, suddenly felt strained and sluggish. It was as if the very air between them had become a thick, viscous medium, a spiritual tar that resisted his will. This new, formless creature was a walking dead-magic zone, and it was actively corroding the very fabric of his power.

From across the garden, Princess Isabella let out a sharp, pained gasp and sank to one knee, her face paling dramatically. The vibrant spirit energy that had sustained her through her own duel was being actively leeched away by the creature’s presence. “What… what is that thing?” she breathed, her question a whisper of pure, unadulterated horror. Even from a hundred meters away, the creature’s aura was sapping the very life force from her and her guards.

“Fall back! All of you, fall back now!” Captain Eva roared, her voice sharp with urgent command. She shoved a faltering student behind her, creating a human shield with her own body. “Form a defensive perimeter around the students! Do not, under any circumstances, engage that… that thing!” She was a veteran of a hundred battles, but her instincts screamed at her that to get any closer to that creature was to have her soul scoured from her body.

Lloyd’s mind, the cold, pragmatic mind of the Major General, processed the new threat with the speed of a supercomputer.

Threat entity reclassified. Previous opponent: Ascended-level warrior with a focused, debilitating curse. New opponent: Unidentified Abyssal entity. Projected power level: Peak Ascended, possibly touching the threshold of Transcended. Primary abilities: Area-of-effect spiritual corrosion, high resistance to conventional energy forms. Physical structure is diffuse, making single-target kinetic or piercing attacks likely ineffective. Weakness: Unknown. Presumed weakness: Conceptual opposition. Annihilation-class energy required.

The calculation was instant. The decision was absolute. He could not afford a prolonged battle of attrition against a being that fed on energy. This thing had to be erased. It had to be removed from existence, quickly and completely, before its corrosive aura could do permanent, irreparable damage to the onlookers or the very soul of the Academy grounds.

He took a half-step back, creating a crucial few meters of space between himself and the formless demon. He did not need to speak a command. He simply projected his will, a silent, absolute order, through his psychic bond with his spirit partner.

Iffrit. Full power. Annihilate it.

The demon king of fire, Iffrit, who had been watching the transformation with a silent, burning contempt, needed no further prompting. The creature before him was an affront to his very nature. It was a being of cold, empty shadow, the absolute antithesis of his own glorious, roaring, life-affirming fire. With a deep, subsonic rumble that was felt in the bones of every living thing in the garden, Iffrit acted.

He did not charge. He did not swing his sword. He simply plunged the glowing, molten tip of his colossal, twelve-foot zanbatō into the scorched earth before him.

The effect was immediate, and it was cataclysmic.

Chapter : 638

The ground around the amorphous, black demon erupted. It was not a conventional explosion of fire and shrapnel. It was a silent, rising tide of pure, crimson flame. It was not a fireball or a jet of fire that could be dodged or blocked; it was a mountain of fire, a solid, roaring, three-dimensional pillar of absolute annihilation that burst from the underworld to utterly consume the creature. The formless demon was instantly engulfed in a swirling, inescapable vortex of incandescent plasma, a self-contained, miniature sun that turned the Academy garden into a scene from the deepest, most terrifying pits of hell.

The heat was so intense that the ancient stone wall behind the inferno began to glow, bubble, and melt like wax. The very air crackled and warped with the thermal stress. The onlookers cried out, shielding their eyes from the blinding, terrifyingly beautiful spectacle of pure destruction.

But from within the very heart of the fiery mountain, the damned soul of the Curse Knight fought back.

The pillar of annihilating fire raged, a silent, swirling vortex of impossible heat. It was a power that should have erased anything from existence in a heartbeat. And yet, the formless black demon, the final, blasphemous incarnation of the Curse Knight, endured. It was being consumed, its shadowy mass boiling and hissing as it was unmade by Iffrit’s conceptual flames, but it was not yet destroyed.

In its final moments, it gathered every last shred of its power, the concentrated essence of the knight’s sacrificed soul and the abyssal curse that had defined him, into a single, desperate point of retaliation. A final act of defiance from beyond the grave.

From the heart of the inferno, a sphere of energy shot forth. It was a projectile of pure despair, a swirling vortex of the abyssal black of the curse and the ethereal, sorrowful blue of a lost and broken human spirit. It screamed through the superheated air, a missile of concentrated negative energy aimed directly at the White Mask.

Lloyd watched it come, his masked face impassive, unreadable. He could have dodged. A simple sidestep would have been enough. He could have had Iffrit intercept it with another wave of fire. But to do so would have been to grant the creature a final, small victory. It would have been an admission that its final, desperate act was a genuine threat to him. He would not give it that dignity. He would meet its ultimate attack with his own, and he would demonstrate the uncrossable gulf that lay between them.

He raised his own fiery broadsword, the blade a conduit of Iffrit’s immense power. He did not attempt to match the complexity of the demon’s attack. He met its despair with pure, simple, overwhelming force. He channeled a fraction of Iffrit’s power, a small taste of the inferno that his spirit was currently unleashing upon the world. A swirling ball of crimson fire, so dense and so compact it looked like a miniature sun, formed at the tip of his blade.

With a smooth, effortless, and almost casual motion, he swung his sword forward. He did not hurl the fireball as a projectile. Instead, he unleashed it as a wave of pure, concussive, annihilating heat.

The blue-black sphere of despair met the crimson wave of destruction in mid-air.

The result was not a grand explosion of light and sound. There was no deafening boom that shook the Academy to its foundations. There was only a single, sharp, tearing sound, like the fabric of reality itself being ripped in two. For a fraction of a second, a perfect, shimmering sphere of absolute nothingness appeared where the two opposing energies had collided. It was a hole in the world, a momentary vacuum where both powers had utterly, completely, and perfectly cancelled each other out. And then, just as quickly, it was gone.

Lloyd stood, his sword still humming with a universe of contained power. The creature’s final, desperate attack had been negated, erased from existence as if it had never been fired at all.

And the mountain of fire that was Iffrit’s primary attack continued to burn, its purpose singular, its fury absolute.

After ten long, roaring seconds that felt like an eternity, Iffrit withdrew the tip of his zanbatō from the ground. The inferno vanished as quickly and as silently as it had appeared. The blinding crimson light receded, the impossible heat dissipated, and the world returned to a semblance of normalcy.

Where the formless, black demon had been, there was now… nothing.