CHAPTER 492: WAR OF THRONES

Kaelith’s blade sang downward, cleaving through arcs of thunder and echo—but Leon did not meet it directly.

Instead, the Fifth Pulse flexed.

Fracture Requiem twisted the rhythm of that sovereign strike, breaking it into three overlapping impacts—the first crashing against Leon’s raised guard, the second scattering like dust into the arena floor, the third vanishing mid-swing, stolen into silence.

Kaelith’s brow arched—not in shock, but in delight.

Leon didn’t waste the stolen beat. His own counterstrike lanced forward, Abyss Mana sharpened into a spiral spear. It thrust not for Kaelith’s chest, but for the resonance in his Core—where the rhythm of a Throne faltered by the smallest fraction.

The Sovereign twisted, war-glaive intercepting, sparks fountaining in a storm of gold and void.

And yet the spear still kissed through the defense, grazing Kaelith’s side. A streak of Sovereign ichor burned into the air before evaporating in a flare of heat.

The crowd gasped. Not because Kaelith bled—Sovereigns had bled before. But because the Echo-Breaker had bent his rhythm.

Kaelith laughed, throwing his head back even as fire hissed from his wound."Good. GOOD!" His Core blazed brighter, dragging the air into a sovereign tide. "You think you’ve stolen my step? Then watch how a Throne takes it BACK."

The arena tilted.

Stone and horizon skewed, folding toward Kaelith like a drawn bowstring. His Sovereign Core wasn’t just radiating—it was commanding

. Time and pace were seized, forced to march in perfect lockstep with his decree.

Every fracture Leon had woven began to strain, their spirals trembling on the edge of collapse.

And still, Leon’s gaze did not waver. His body shook, his veins burned, but his breath fell steady.

"You’ll find..." He pressed his hand to the ground, Fifth Pulse unraveling into countless spirals that rooted deep into the arena’s foundation. "...I don’t return pace."

He looked up, eyes blazing with fractured light."I rewrite it."

The floor itself cracked into spiraling seams—like the arena had become a shattered clock, its hands no longer Kaelith’s to command.

Their next clash would not just decide who struck harder.

It would decide whose tempo the world obeyed.

The tempo split.

Kaelith surged forward, war-glaive painting arcs of molten gold across the air. Each swing carried not just weight, but command—a decree that the world must fall in line with his Sovereign rhythm.

Leon moved to meet it, but not in obedience. His spirals of Fracture Requiem wove around the decree, snapping the rhythm into shards. Each step Kaelith took forward became three: one true, one fractured, one false. Each slash came in layers—one biting steel, one fading shadow, one exploding dust.

The duel became impossible to follow.

Even the Thrones watching from the Obsidian gallery leaned forward, brows knit, because the fight had abandoned mortal sequence. It was no longer strike and parry—it was tempo and fracture, symphony against requiem.

Kaelith laughed in the storm, his voice booming over the clash.

"Yes! Break it! Split it! Shatter my decree—if you can!"

He pivoted, glaive sweeping in a circle that forced the fractured timelines to collapse into a single beat. For a moment, all the false echoes Leon had carved bled away, compressed under Kaelith’s Sovereign unity.

The golden blade screamed downward.

Leon’s arm trembled as he caught it with a fractured shield of Abyss Mana and Shell Reverb. The shield cracked instantly, pressure gnawing into his bones. Blood sprayed from his shoulder, but his lips curled into a sharp grin.

"Unity..." he hissed through clenched teeth, "...still cracks."

With a twist of his palm, the Fifth Pulse detonated.

The golden decree split into seven spirals of broken tempo, each one scattering Kaelith’s force into a different beat of the world. The glaive strike that should have split Leon in half instead fractured outward—one breaking stone, one dissolving into sparks, one vanishing into silence, one burying itself harmlessly in the fractured clock-floor.

Kaelith’s Core flared in answer. His Sovereign presence did not dim—if anything, it grew heavier, like a star bending space. "Good. But every fracture makes your body bleed faster, Echo-Breaker."

Leon staggered, coughing crimson into the spirals at his feet. His arms shook. His breathing rasped. But his gaze never left Kaelith’s.

And then...

He smiled.

Not the grin of defiance. Not the smirk of arrogance. But the cold, sharp smile of someone who had already seen the ending.

"Then bleed with me."

His Core pulsed once—fractures blooming like cracks in glass. The tempo of the arena itself buckled.

The collapse began slowly—like the ticking of a clock being pulled apart gear by gear.

Every fracture Leon wove did not vanish. They clung to the air, weaving a dissonant lattice across the arena. Every decree Kaelith issued through his Sovereign glaive tried to bind those fractures back into a singular law—but the bindings frayed, bent, screamed under the strain.

The two forces fed each other.

Fracture demanded division.

Sovereignty demanded unity.

The arena shuddered as if caught between two heartbeats.

Kaelith’s Core pulsed, and his war-glaive became a golden sun, blazing so fiercely that the very air warped into molten light. "Enough, Echo-Breaker!" he thundered. "No more games—bend, or break!"

He hurled the glaive forward, not as a weapon, but as a decree. The golden arc wasn’t a strike. It was a verdict.

Everything it touched unified.

The fractured floor stitched itself back into a singular path. The shattered echoes of Leon’s body fused into one, forcing him into place. Even his own heartbeat stuttered, bound by Kaelith’s rhythm.

Leon froze. His blood roared in his ears, his lungs locked tight. His body screamed against the imposed law. For one razor moment, he was no longer Leon the Flamebreaker. He was just flesh, caught in Sovereign decree.

And then—

"Fracture... Requiem."

The words weren’t shouted. They were breathed. Whispered. Spoken into the marrow of existence.

His Core detonated.

The fractures he had left scattered across the arena didn’t vanish—they answered. Every false beat, every broken tempo, every snapped decree surged back into motion.

The arena howled as Kaelith’s unity cracked. The floor split into seven diverging paths again. The golden sun dimmed, its perfect circle split by jagged fractures of void. Even the decree that held Leon’s body shattered—and he moved.

He stepped forward, bleeding, broken, yet untamed.

Kaelith’s eyes widened—not in fear, but in exultation. "Yes! Push it to the end!"

Their Cores flared—one golden, one abyssal fracture. The arena was no longer an arena. It became a battlefield of laws, of symphonies colliding.

Every strike now was not blade to blade, but Core to Core.

Every clash rewrote the rhythm of existence.

Sparks of fractured void and molten decree rained down, tearing the arena apart, bending the air into impossible spirals.

And both men—one Sovereign, one Flamebreaker—charged, shouting their laws into the collapse.