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The ground trembled as Asher's crash landed to the ground beside the glistening stream not far from the shattered remnants of his once-protected mansion leaving a cracked trail of Asher's body print on the ground. Water trickled calmly, as if ignorant of the chaos that loomed above it. He could hear the birds in the trees—strangely calm, as though nature itself was holding its breath. Across from him stood Korrin, sharp-eyed and unnervingly calm, the assassin's black robes fluttering in the evening breeze like shadows given form.
"I don't want to fight you," Korrin said, his voice oddly devoid of malice. "Lay down the Queen and the Princess, and I'll disappear from your life forever. Keep the egg too, if you like.I don't need it and I'll even let you live."
Asher's crimson gaze narrowed. His body was still crackling faintly with residual magic energy, his muscles tense. "Then you don't know me well enough," he said slowly, voice low with restrained fury. "You'll have to go through me before you touch them."
"You are starting to sound like father " Korrin said make Asher's face look more furious as he said.
"I am nothing like m..."
Korrin's mouth twitched—almost a smile. But before another word passed, the world froze.
Time stopped.
Even the ripples in the stream halted mid-motion. Leaves suspended in the air like ornaments. Guards mid-run toward the mansion were now statues, their expressions frozen in panic. A mother reaching for her child in the village square just a mile away now hovered inches from contact, unmoving.
Only Korrin remained.
He exhaled, relaxed his posture, and vanished into a blur.
He moved like a whisper of wind—untouchable, invisible to even magic. First, he blinked into the stream's forested banks as he walked on top, brushing aside brambles and trees as he examined hollow logs and burrows. He phased into the kitchens, scanned beneath cabinets and flour sacks, overturned pots, and tossed open pantries. In the mansion's toilets and bathtubs, he ran gloved fingers along the tiles, searching for illusionary veils. He phased into the parlors, searching across crystal chandeliers, gazing under every table and behind every curtain. Then he moved to the dungeons, where blood still dripped from the walls of recent fights.As he saw the blinding lights which a boy emited but he didn't care he only searched for the queen and princess but___.
Nothing.
He stepped into the Forest of Abyss, a cursed land bordering the territory, full of illusions and whispers. Korrin moved swiftly, his time-locked world preventing even the spirits within from reacting. He passed through spirit-guarded caves, hollow trunks, cursed shrines, all vibrating with latent magical protection. Still nothing.
He checked the market, passing between frozen shoppers—fruit caught mid-fall, flames in stalls paused like paintings. He darted through churches, where priests remained mid-prayer with their hands stretched to the crying audience that where halted, candles burning but unmoving. Children's homes, abandoned cellars, blacksmith forges, stable haylofts, underground passageways—he examined everything. Even the droplets of sweat hanging mid-air from exhausted laborers were combed through with the precisionas Korrin passed.
Not even Selena's illusion magic could hide a soul from Korrin's omnipresent senses… except, she had.
He returned to the stream. Right to the spot where he'd left.
Time resumed.
A ripple finished. A leaf dropped. A wind blew. Asher's sentence ended.
"Nothing like my father and like I said You'll go through me before you touch them."
Korrin's eye twitched. Just barely.
Deep within Asher's subconscious, his inner demon trembled. Not from rage. But fear.
"What's wrong?" Asher asked it from his mind.
"I__I FELT HIM ..." the demon muttered in its deep demonic tongue. "I felt Korrin… everywhere. In the shadows of the stream. In the ovens. In the eyes of statues. His magic signature touched every particle of this place."
"What do you mean, everywhere?"
"I MEAN," the demon hissed, ""THAT HE WAS EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. I'VE NEVER FELT ANYTHING LIKE IT BEFORE"
That meant only one thing.
"Selena… actually did it," Asher though aloud. "She hid them well."
Korrin couldn't find them. Even with time magic.
Asher turned back to the demon. "Are you afraid?"
"YES..." it admitted."LISTEN TO ME THIS TIME,ASHER.LET ME TOTALLY FREE.I CAN GIVE YOU THE POWER TO NOT JUST FIGHT, BUT COMSUME ___MEMORIES,SENSES, WILLPOWER..."
But Asher cut it off. "Just give me power. Nothing more."
"TCH..I WARNED YOU"
A burst of demonic energy surged into him. Asher's aura erupted—so fierce and dense that trees around him began to wilt, and the stream bubbled unnaturally. His eyes glowed crimson red like coals forged in fury.
He moved first. The ground exploded beneath him as he launched toward Korrin with a speed that blurred the wind.
Korrin didn't flinch.
Asher's right hand snapped forward, wrapped in gravitational force shaped like a compressed void—like an inverted chain—striking Korrin at an angle. Korrin deflected with a single flick of his dagger, slicing the chain in one clean motion. But Asher's left hand summoned another: a rotating gravitational disc that pulsed like a dying star. He slammed it downward—
Korrin slid backward using a short-range shadow dash, but still the force from the impact cracked the earth beneath him.
The stream now roared, agitated by the clash of powers.
Korrin's eyes narrowed. "You've gotten faster.Guess you are not just slacking off in dad's mansion"
"I'm not done."
Asher spun, slamming both feet into the ground. Gravitational pillars of earth rose— forming diamond-shaped chains of compressed matter—twisting like serpents and slamming toward Korrin from all directions.
But Korrin was already gone.
He emerged from Asher's shadow—behind him.
A dagger aimed straight at Asher's spine.
The blow should've been fatal.
But—clang—the dagger shattered on impact.
Korrin dashed forward, his figure phasing from one shadow to another like a mirage of death, and emerged from behind Asher's back, with another dagger raised high. With the velocity of a thunderclap and the precision of a venomous serpent, he stabbed toward Asher's spine again . But just before the blade could pierce flesh—crack—it shattered like glass.
Korrin's eyes widened in disbelief. The hilt in his hand trembled as he stared at the fragments of what was once a dagger forged from shadow essence and cursed silver. Asher hadn't moved—but the space around and air around his body had compressed so densely that the molecular tension shattered the weapon before contact. Gravity itself wrapped around Asher's body like a divine armor.
Before Korrin could retreat, Asher spun with a fierce, fluid motion his diamond chain swong like flashes of light. The air warped with the motion. Korrin instinctively lunched his entire body backward like a cannonball, smashing through three thick mansion walls and finally crashing into the stone barrier outside the courtyard. An instictive defencive move caused boom echoed throughout the territory as masonry exploded, sending debris into the air like shrapnel.
But Korrin didn't lie still for long.
He phased through the dust cloud, covered in dirt but smiling. "That power… you're starting to get interesting."
Asher didn't reply.
His eyes— deep red—His hair floated in the air unnaturally, reacting to the gravitational distortion surrounding him. A pulse of pressure rippled outward from his feet, and the very fabric of reality began to tremble.
The ground beneath him cracked.
The trees bent away.
The sky dimmed—though it was still midday.
Then came the sound: like the tearing of an ancient scroll.
Reality ripped open behind Asher.
A swirling mass of darkness and distorted light spiraled into being. It was a miniature black hole, its gravitational pull so immense that light itself bent around it. The stream nearby turned upward unnaturally, spiraling into the black mass like tendrils of water being sucked into a vortex.
The collapse of space was instant.
Stones flew.
The air roared.
Even the mansion windows shattered from the gravitational resonance.
Korrin's eyes flared. "You maniac—do you want to destroy your entire land?"
But Asher didn't respond with words. His mind calm like he had everything under control as his outstretched hand clenched into a fist, and the black hole trembled, expanding like a heart about to beat. It pulsed with energy that could unmake the physical world.
Korrin's instincts screamed. He hurled his broken dagger away and sliced through the air with his shadow-enhanced gauntlet. "Shadow Step: Temporal Phase!" he shouted.
In a blur, he slipped through a shadow portal, aiming to leap away before the gravitational hell consumed him.
But Asher was waiting.
"Collapse."
With that one command, the black hole imploded, creating an explosion of reality so raw, so pure, that time itself seemed to rupture. The sky flickered between day and night. The ground bent upward, only to ripple like water. Sound vanished, then came back in one crashing wave.
The explosion was unlike any ordinary detonation—it was reality unraveling and repairing itself all at once.
A shockwave rippled across the territory. Civilians, soldiers, even assassins all stopped what they were doing and turned toward the mansion. Trees bent sideways. Birds in the sky were knocked off balance. The stream reversed its flow for a heartbeat before stabilizing.
Inside the explosion, Asher hovered midair, arms outstretched. His gravitational armor cracked, pieces of light and pressure swirling around him like broken satellites. He was panting heavily, his skin steaming, but still standing.His shadow armor half destroyed, blood leaking from his mouth, cuts scattered across his body. Yet his grin had not faded.
"You almost killed us both," Korrin said. Then suddenly blurred again, this time moving faster—he used Shadow Swimming across broken shadows midair, chaining his teleportations. Asher's enhanced vision barely he had to create more gap between him and Korrin.
Asher flew backward through the air, arms stretching wide as gravity encircled his entire body. With a sharp pulse of energy, he manipulated space itself—his gravitational magic compressing, folding, and bending the fabric of reality. A sphere began forming between his palms, distorting the light around it. The air twisted, bent, then shattered as if glass had been broken in the void.
He collapsed reality—again.
A black hole erupted into existence. Small in size, no larger than a man's chest, but impossibly dense. The ground beneath it cracked. The pressure pulled leaves from distant trees and metal from the soil. Even Korrin, fast as he was, paused in acknowledgment of its danger.
"Asher," the demon inside him warned, "this is the limit. If you go further—"
"I'm not done," Asher muttered, sweat pouring down his face.
Korrin dashed, faster than sound, his body flickering like a blur of shadows. His dagger extended in a reverse grip, he spun mid-air, and with one precise motion, sliced at the edge of the singularity.
The dagger met the edge of the black hole. For a moment, it was like watching a god tear through reality. Sparks of white light burst out—tears in dimension and separating the light spectrum. The dagger shattered into shards of glowing obsidian, but the black hole destabilized. It pulsed, warped—and exploded.
A concussive wave of magical pressure engulfed everything.
The sound was deafening. Trees miles away were uprooted. The soil beneath the battlefield melted into glass. Clouds spiraled outward in a vortex that could be seen across the territory.
Asher tried to shield himself and the mansion, erecting layers of gravitational barriers like domes, each one trembling under the pressure. But it wasn't enough. The force tore through one after the other, like spears through paper.
His feet scraped backward, carving trenches in the ground as his arms crossed before his face. His skin burned under the heat, his bones rattled, his ears rang.
Korrin vanished into shadow swimming, slipping through the earth, using the darkness between molecules as his escape to a distant location and came back after the explosion.
The battlefield was now an open scar. Smoke coiled into the sky like serpents. Lightning flickered above, reacting to the absurd levels of magic still humming in the air. Ash floated gently, like snowflakes.
And just when Asher tried to recover Korrin started landing him hits all around his body So fast that Asher couldn't even react.
"I still... didn't touch him," Asher though to himself; as he felt blood gushing out of his body every single time he was punched by Korrin.
"YOU CAN'T LAND A HIT," the demon agreed inside him. "HIS REACTION SPEED IS INHUMAN.HIS STYLE IS FLUID _____ A PREDITOR BORN IN SHADOW. YOUR DON'T LACK POWER WHAT YOU LACK IS PRESITION"
Asher clenched his fists. "Then what now?"
" YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME IF NOT WE WILL BOTH DIE"
"Fine then what do you want meto do"
"I WANT YOU TO GET A DEOP OF BLOOD FROM KORRIN SO I CAN ABSORB HIS POWER AND MEMORIES "
" But I can't even land an attack on him it will be impossible to get his blood "
The demon was quiet. "THEN WE MOVE TO PLAN B"
Asher's eyes widened as he heard the plan. "You mean—?"
"Yes," the demon said with a sinister laught
Suddenly, Asher's body pulsed with new energy—cold, dense, ancient. His blood shimmered like it carried stars. His aura expanded, swallowing the air around him. It wasn't just power—it was evolution.
Korrin felt it. His brow furrowed as he emerged from the shadows. He flexed his fingers around a new dagger, forged from the remnants of his last. "What are you doing?" he murmured, eyes narrowing.
Then, Asher turned and ran.
Korrin blinked. "Running?"
With a burst of speed, Asher dashed toward the mansion, moving faster than before. Not flying—running. Each step shattered the ground, his body cloaked in a spiraling field of gravity and star-like sparks.
Korrin's eyes widened. "You think you can run?" he roared and vanished in shadow.
"I'll get the queen and princess head," Korrin's voice echoed through the wind. "you can hide but you can't run from me!"
Asher burst into the outer corridor of the mansion. The stone halls shook from the residual battle outside. He could hear fighting in the distant east wing—his recruits holding the line.
But he had one focus.
He skidded to a stop at a central hallway. The moment his boot touched the marble, he pivoted around.When Korrin saw him turn back ; Korrin dashed to him with full speed aiming to stab his heart.
Korrin exploded into view, covering his dagger with powerful shadow energy.
The moment slowed.
Asher's eyes went from red to glowing white—pure light.
Glowing like Cassandra's eyes.
Asher's hand moved faster than it had ever moved before. He caught Korrin's arm mid-strike. The dagger stopped just before it pierced his heart.
Asher's body became light itself. The room dimmed. As Korrin's dagger neared Asher's chest, a single hand snapped forward—lightning-fast.
Caught his wrist.
Snap.
The bones cracked.
"Impossible—!"
WHAM!
Landed Korrin a backhand slap.
Asher's backhand slap hit like a comet, sending Korrin crashing through three marble pillar
Korrin's body launched across the corridor, smashing through two walls, breaking through a column, and slamming into the courtyard wall outside the mansion.