Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 869: World splitter

The words landed like a physical blow, far heavier than any metal-encased fist Arthur had thrown.

Lucy’s eyes widened, her pupils shrinking to tiny pinpricks. The world around her seemed to freeze for a fraction of a second, the roar of the falling stone fading into a dull, distant hum.

’Empty.’

’There is nothing left to fix.’

The hope that had driven her across the galaxy, the desperate, clawing belief that she could force this ancient monster to restore her brother’s warmth, fractured into a thousand jagged pieces inside her chest.

"No," she whispered.

"Yes!" Arthur roared, seeing the crack in her spirit and seizing it with absolute, predatory instinct.

His shadow manipulation flared. A dark, shadowy blade erupted from his elbow, heavily coated in dark chi, and he drove it backward, impaling Lucy through her left shoulder, punching clean through her armor and flesh.

"AAAAAHHHH!" Lucy screamed in pain.

Arthur kicked her in the stomach with a dark-chi-reinforced boot, sending her flying away from him as they both slammed into the subterranean floor of the stronghold.

BOOM!

They hit the deep underground vault floor separate from each other, surrounded by the mountain of rubble that had just fallen from the upper levels. Dust, thick and choking, filled the cavernous lower chamber, illuminated only by the flickering amber light of broken beast-core lanterns along the subterranean walls and the erratic blue hum of Valor, which lay embedded in the stone ten feet away from Lucy.

Lucy lay in a crater of shattered stone, clutching her bleeding left shoulder. Dark chi lingered in the wound, burning her flesh, preventing her natural Grey vitality from sealing the tear quickly.

She coughed violently, blood staining the stone beneath her face. Her chest heaved, her heart pounding like a trapped bird against her ribs.

Across the ruined vault, fifty yards away, Arthur pushed himself up from a pile of stone.

He looked worse than before. His dark tunic was shredded, exposing his ribs, which looked like dry branches under paper skin. One of his skeletal arms hung slightly limp, the bones cracked from her mid-air collision. Blood trickled down his chin, thick and dark, but the reddish-white dark chi around his body was still pulsing, heavy, stubborn, and refusing to die.

He stepped over a pile of broken masonry, walking slowly toward her, his yellowed eyes fixed on her prone figure.

"You brought a storm," Arthur said softly, his dry voice cutting through the settling dust. "You brought your anger, your brother’s weapon, your righteous indignation, and for what? To learn that the world does not bend to a child’s tears."

He stopped ten feet from her, raising his right hand. Metal from the surrounding rubble began to shift, liquefying under his dark chi before solidifying into a massive, jagged spear of dark iron, its tip floating inches above her head.

"You will die here, Lucy Grey," Arthur said, his ancient arrogance settling back over his face like an iron mask. "And your brother will die in his box. And the Greys will become nothing more than a Chapter in the history I write."

Lucy lay on the cold stone, looking up at the dark spear hovering above her face.

Her left shoulder burned with a blinding, agony-filled heat. Her lungs felt like they were full of glass. The dark chi was heavy, pressing down on her, telling her to stop, telling her that it was over, that Lucas was gone, that there was nothing left to fight for.

Then she looked at Valor.

The axe lay embedded in the stone, its blue-green light dimming slightly, as if waiting.

She remembered being told how Lucas was holding that same axe in the asteroid fields. She remembered the sheer, ridiculous, unbroken scale of him, how he had built a reactor inside a rock, smashed through space, and laughed in the face of impossible odds. Lucas never fought because the math favored him. He didn’t fight because the odds were clean.

He fought because he was a Grey. And Greys did not yield to monsters.

Even if Arthur was right, even if One had emptied him, she was still here. She was still breathing.

A slow, terrifying change came over Lucy’s face.

The grief in her eyes died, replaced by something far darker, far colder, and infinitely more dangerous. The desperation vanished, leaving behind only an absolute, unadulterated desire to destroy the thing standing in front of her.

"You’re right," Lucy whispered, her voice barely audible above the quiet hum of the underground vault.

Arthur paused, his brow furrowing slightly. "What?"

Lucy raised her right hand, her fingers reaching toward Valor.

"You’re right," she said again, her voice rising, growing stronger, harder, until it vibrated through the stone floor beneath them. "I came here for a miracle. I came here like a child asking a monster to be kind."

She gripped the haft of Valor.

BOOM!

A violent, blinding pulse of cyan-colored lightning exploded from the axe, far brighter than anything she had generated before. The raw voltage didn’t just light up the underground vault, it shattered the dark iron spear hovering above her head into dust before it could drop.

Lucy stood up.

She didn’t rise slowly. She stood up with a violent, snapping speed, her body completely covered in a dense, blinding aura of blue-green electricity that surged so hot it instantly cauterized the wound on her left shoulder, burning away the lingering dark chi in a cloud of white steam.

Her eyes were no longer glowing, they were pure, solid, blinding white light.

The storm engine inside Valor opened up entirely. Above the stronghold, the atmospheric tempest answered, a massive column of lightning punching straight through the holes in the roof, down through the shattered floors, and slamming directly into the head of the axe in her hands.

The entire subterranean vault began to vibrate. The walls cracked. The massive foundation stones of Arthur’s stronghold began to shift and grind against each other.

Arthur’s eyes widened, a genuine flicker of alarm crossing his gaunt face for the first time in the fight.

"What are you doing?" Arthur shouted, stepping back as the sheer electrical pressure in the room began to strip the flesh from his fingertips. "You are overloading the axe. You will collapse the entire fortress on top of us both."

Lucy looked at him through the blinding light of her power. She raised Valor, the blade burning with a charge so absolute, so insanely concentrated, that the air around it was turning to liquid glass.

"I don’t care about the fortress," Lucy said, her voice sounding like two thunderclaps grinding together. "I don’t care about your ancient history. And I don’t care about your three bloodlines."

She took a step forward, the floor melting beneath her boots.

"If I can’t fix my brother," Lucy roared, "I will use his weapon to erase everything you ever built."

She brought Valor up over her head, channeling the entire ambient charge of the planetary storm into a single, absurd, localized point of energy.

Arthur realized in a split second that she wasn’t trying to duel him anymore. She was executing a total, catastrophic demolition of the entire geographic structure.

"Insolent child!" Arthur roared, throwing both hands forward, pooling every drop of dark chi, blood, metal, and shadow he possessed into a massive, multi-layered barrier in front of his body.

Lucy didn’t swing at his barrier.

She drove Valor directly into the absolute core of the stronghold’s subterranean foundation bed.

"I call this one...World-Splitter"

BOOM!

The sound was not a sound. It was an absolute, instantaneous erasure of audio, replaced by a kinetic force so massive that the entire central tower of Arthur’s stronghold, a structure standing a thousand feet tall and weighing millions of tons, simply ceased to have a base.

The localized energy release detonated the tectonic plate beneath the fortress.

A blinding dome of cyan and white light expanded outward from the vault floor, consuming stone, iron, shadow, and dark chi in a microsecond. The deep structural pillars disintegrated into atomic dust.

The ceiling collapsed entirely. The walls burst outward into the courtyard, sending a shockwave that flattened three surrounding battlements and threw hundreds of fighting soldiers, Grey, Purge, and Harbinger alike, off their feet across a two-mile radius.

The entire central structure imploded inward, collapsing into a massive, burning crater of white-hot molten stone and shattered foundation, swallowed whole by the very storm Lucy had called down from the sky.

*****

[More Chapters to follow in a few hours]