Space itself tore, silent but for the faint ripples of its distortion. Wang Yu's neck split in an instant. The cut was absolute: bone severed, flesh parted, and every structure at the site of the spatial fissure divided cleanly in two. His head hadn't yet fallen, but his body and soul had already been neatly cut in half.

And yet, even with his head nearly severed and neck cleanly broken, Wang Yu did not stop moving. At the very moment Ethan Harris's warped sword descended, Wang Yu's thunder-wreathed fist drove forward to meet him.

Ethan's brows creased. He discarded the mangled blade without hesitation. Fighting spirit condensed in his hands, solidifying into a second sword of pure energy. He swept it upward to meet the incoming blow. The gathered force scattered, dividing into thousands of infinitesimal points that distributed evenly across Wang Yu's fist, dissolving the strike as though it had never existed.

But though the punch was deflected, the seventh-tier lightning spell coiled around his arm was not so easily denied. It tore through the air unhindered, a spear of light that shot straight toward Ethan's face.

A flick of the swordsman's fingers caused the blade to tremble.

The lightning veered mid-flight, seized by an invisible force, and coiled back upon itself, wrapping around Ethan's own sword and turning it into a conduit.

He swung again. The blade, now clad in lightning, slashed toward Wang Yu from point-blank range. The latter had yet to even draw back his punch. In speed, Ethan was his superior.

Wang Yu's right fist was still extended, but his left came crashing down from above, striking the oncoming slash head-on. In the instant the edge split his skin, the high-energy blood surging through his body detonated—a raw, concussive blast colliding with Ethan's guiding, rapid strike.

Shockwaves burst outward. Both men staggered back. The cutting force was devoured by the explosion of blood, and the lightning entwined upon the blade was shredded to nothing by the power of the Chariot.

"...Interesting. You're a fine opponent."

Ethan's tone was almost amused. He shifted his stance, raising both hands to grip his sword, arms bent, blade angled forward. This was a fencer's thrusting pose. His gaze was fixed unerringly on Wang Yu's throat.

There was no wound there now, only smooth, unbroken skin as if his neck had never been touched. Had Ethan not been absolutely certain that his previous strike had severed it, he might have believed the decapitation a mere hallucination.

"..."

Wang Yu said nothing. His face was expressionless and unreadable.

Ethan, however, was beginning to understand. Whatever this thing before him was, its resemblance to a human was merely superficial. To be beheaded, cleaved in half, organs destroyed, and still remain standing? No human being could manage such a feat.

The body retained a human form, but that was merely habit: a familiar shell. He had reforged it into a weapon, one he could manipulate and optimize as instinctively as flexing a muscle. In truth, human combat techniques were poorly suited against a creature like this.

"Come, then!"

Perhaps seized by genuine excitement, Ethan gave a warning before his next strike. His sword quivered. In the next heartbeat, he was gone. Only a blur remained, charging straight toward Wang Yu like a thunderbolt.

The Chariot's power could read every motion. Wang Yu raised a fist for a short-range burst at maximum output. At such proximity, he could still match Ethan's speed.

But Ethan's vibrating sword gave rise to a strange effect. Just before reaching Wang Yu's strike zone, countless fine cracks appeared in space. Ethan's form flickered, shifted, and changed direction without decelerating, his blade grazing past Wang Yu's fist before surging ahead in a blinding straight thrust.

The sword, imbued with fighting spirit, possessed incredible destructive might. The sudden change of direction left Wang Yu unable to dodge. The blade pierced his right chest, splitting his ribs and plunging deep into his organs.

A heartbeat later, the power gathered on the edge exploded in a storm of multidirectional cuts within his body.

Flesh and viscera tore apart, pulverized from within. And yet, even with half his torso shredded to pulp, Wang Yu did not stop moving.

The bloodpool within him surged to life.

The missing flesh was replaced instantly. High-energy blood, transmuted by Blood Tempest and Material Shaping, hardened and reshaped his body anew.

His left hand clamped down upon the blade impaled through his chest. The sword slowed. A counter-surge of fighting spirit erupted from his grip, detonating the weapon from within. The explosion was absorbed, the damage suppressed by the torrent of blood that flooded to reinforce his frame.

"...I wonder what your weakness is," Ethan murmured, faint excitement creeping into his tone.

The destroyed sword dispersed, but another was already condensing in his hands. That brief interval, however, was all the time Wang Yu needed.

Half the bloodpool vanished in an instant. All around them, blood materialized from nothing, forming a vast crimson cube that swallowed both combatants whole.

The world shifted. The battlefield became Wang Yu's domain. Every droplet within the sea of blood was an extension of his will. Now, like Ethan, he could attack from any direction—but unlike Ethan, he also possessed the Chariot's power to sense every movement within this space.

Ethan's expression sharpened. The fight had fully awakened his fighting spirit. It had been too long since he'd fought in earnest. Skill could be refined endlessly, but instinct dulled without bloodshed—and now, through this escalating storm, he was remembering what it meant to fight.

His sword whirled. Even submerged in viscous blood, his movements did not slow. Each thrust struck with unerring precision, sending shockwaves rippling through the red fluid.

From every direction, Wang Yu's transformed blood launched attacks: blades, spikes, strangling whips of crimson. But Ethan's counterstrikes came faster still. Every hidden attack was predicted and cleaved apart. He could sense them all.

Within the whirlpool of his fighting spirit, a phantom eye had formed, the knight's secret art Mind's Eye. Like Wang Yu's own techniques, it was a pseudopotential, conferring upon Ethan a mind sharpened to perceive and categorize the data all around him.

Ethan's mastery, honed over centuries, far outstripped Wang Yu's. His Mind's Eye swept the field, feeding endless streams of data into his brain. It was not omniscience like what the Chariot conferred, but paired with Ethan's natural senses and experience, it was more than enough to predict and counter every attack around him.

He held his breath. His muscles tensed. Then, he launched one sweeping slash.

The colossal blade of fighting spirit tore through the sea of blood, cleaving every direction at once. It collided head-on with Wang Yu, who surged toward him through the crimson tide. The blood ahead of the slash hardened in layers, forming wall after wall of solidified fluid, but Ethan's destructive power was monstrous. Even among legends, few could rival the sheer force he commanded.

The walls shattered instantly. The slash roared onward, nearly cleaving the entire cube of blood in two. And yet it wasn't over. The instant the blade's arc reached the edge of the sea of blood, it disintegrated, splintering into countless miniature slashes, each infused with Ethan's potential, Raincaller.

The strikes fell layer upon layer, skin and flesh flaying away in seconds until stark white bone gleamed through from head to toe. Even his face—eyes, ears, nose, and mouth—was not spared, leaving him a grotesque blur of blood and ruin.

"Impressive regeneration," Ethan murmured, watching as the barrage shredded Wang Yu's body to ribbons. "But in the end, pure destruction is always the simpler path, isn't it?"

He raised his blade again. Space itself began to tear. Yet just then, a faint, almost imperceptible pain stirred within his body. Nothing lethal to a legendary knight, of course, but it was enough to make his movements seize for the briefest instant.

And in that instant, every drop of blood in the air detonated at once. The catastrophic shockwave swallowed both combatants. Countless surging streams of high-energy blood ignited together, colliding and compounding in a chain of overlapping explosions that grew exponentially stronger.

The earth split apart. A vast crater ripped outward for hundreds of meters. The shockwave punched straight through the clouds above. Even the distant cursebinding spire, kilometers away, trembled from the force.

Poison. That was Wang Yu 's other skill: he was an herbalist. As his strength grew, so too had his mastery over the Chariot's power, both in precision and control, allowing him to manipulate the very structure of matter and craft toxins of terrifying potency by hand.

One such creation had been within the sea of blood, a poison he called Annihilation. Colorless, odorless, and utterly insidious, once it entered an organism's body, it would attack cellular structure in ways even Wang Yu himself didn't fully understand.

Its rarest trait was that it worked even on legendary knights, who were otherwise nearly immune to all toxins. It bypassed their natural defenses by mimicking oxygen itself, slipping past every instinctive safeguard before unleashing its devastation.

Ordinarily, its indiscriminate nature would be a flaw, but Wang Yu's Chariot power turned that into perfection. From the moment the sea of blood had descended, Annihilation had been mixed into it. When Ethan's slashes tore the blood apart, the vaporized toxin seeped into him with every breath, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. That was why Wang Yu hadn't detonated the sea immediately. Now was that moment.

Wang Yu was hurled from the explosion, boots skidding half a step before he came to a stop. His body was a mess of mangled cuts, yet the wounds were already knitting shut. He was seven, eight parts healed in the blink of an eye. Immersed in his own blood, his body regenerated several times faster than usual. The damage simply couldn't keep up.

But Ethan Harris still wasn't dead. The earth-shaking blast hadn't killed him. In that crucial instant, he had formed his unarmed hand into a sword and unleashed a single slash. The power blossomed around him, transmuting into a storm of blades that served as a shield to absorb the worst of the detonation.

Recovering from the toxin's momentary numbness, he swung his sword arm once more. The blow tore through space, dragging him clear of the explosion's core. He emerged nearly unscathed. The only damage came from the trace of Annihilation still working through his body.

"A clever trick," Ethan said, spitting a mouthful of boiling crimson blood onto the ground. "But it ends here."

He exhaled, purging the poison from his veins along with the harm it had wrought. Then, smiling faintly, he lifted both hands, left fingers joined like a blade, right hand gripping his sword.

The fight had stirred something long dormant in him—not satisfaction, but interest, the rare kind sparked by novelty. Ethan Harris was a master of art and discipline, always composed, always untouchable. Wang Yu, by contrast, fought like a street brawler. He was chaotic and unrefined, and would use whatever worked. It was crude, reckless, and undeniably effective.

But only to a point. His thrill of fighting rekindled, Ethan began to draw on the full extent of his power.

The rain hidden within his aura merged with his secret arts as it locked onto Wang Yu's soul. His regeneration was formidable. So be it. He would strike at the source, severing the soul that commanded the flesh.

Power gathered on the blade in his right hand, while his left slashed down. Space ripped open. His figure vanished into the fractured void, flickering through broken dimensions faster than sight could follow.

In the blink of an eye, he stood before Wang Yu. The sword in his right hand flared to a blinding brilliance as it fell.

Wang Yu blocked with crossed arms, but the slash shattered his defenses, shearing through flesh and bone alike. The diagonal slash cut his right shoulder all the way down to the left side of his waist, a blow of pure destruction that obliterated all defense.

Before Wang Yu could even will his body to move, Ethan's left hand swept across his head. The spatial blade pierced through his skull—harder than even starsteel—and sliced into the brain that housed his mind.

With a sound that did not exist, the rift in space froze mid-slice. Upon Wang Yu's skull glimmered a golden mark, perfectly matching Ethan Harris's own spatial cut. Where they met, the effect dissolved away. The power Wang Yu had yet to use, his golden light of invulnerability, had finally manifested.

"Deconstruction complete," came Avia's soft, smiling voice in his mind.

"Mm."

Wang Yu inclined his head faintly. Flames erupted across his body as Cursed Fire ignited once more. Ever since reclaiming his dominion over the void, he had regained that power. He activated his Bloodburn Drive.

From that moment on, defense was no longer necessary.